various characteristics that suit this purpose. They highly affect civilians at the local level,<sup>21</sup> but direct victimization is rare. Instead, the use of explosives and the surprise element makes them visible and generates fear among the wider (local) population.

I define these attacks following the CNMH as ‘ _all indiscriminate attack carried out with explosives, against civilian objectives, in public places, with the aim of causing high lethality and devastation upon the civil population’_ (CNMH 2013, 101). This definition contains the following key elements: 1) the events are indiscriminate rather than directed against a particular target, 2) they are not armed interventions<sup>22</sup> and the use of explosives implies some degree of absence or distance of the perpetrating actor from the scene, 3) the objectives are civilian, not military, 4) they happen in visible and densely populated places rather than in private spaces or remote rural areas, 5) the intent is to affect a large number of people/civil goods to show the perpetrator’s potential power of devastation.<sup>23</sup> It can be argued that these events are more unpredictable than other conflict events such as military attacks or battles. Armed groups use attack like these to generate fear in the civil population by showing their potential power of devastation against random individuals and places. Even in areas where the presence of armed groups is known, there is uncertainty about exactly where and when an attack may take place.

The measure of violence in Camacho (2008) —landmine explosions— may also appear to be fitting, but it is more akin to a victim rather than an event count, as there is almost always a victim who triggers the explosive. There are other issues which make landmine explosions problematic as a measure of a violence shock. The date of occurrence is delayed with respect to when the mine was planted, although this is a minor concern if the interest is in the stress effect. More importantly, minefield are heavily concentrated in a few municipalities and locations are strongly correlated with the conflict intensity and the local presence of armed groups.<sup>24</sup> Finally, although landmine victims are not targeted in advance, they have a specific profile: victims are disproportionately children and people who work as manual eradicators of illicit crops, as well as indigenous people (CNMH and Fundación Prolongar, 2017). Moreover, landmines they are almost exclusively placed in rural areas (98% of them, according to the CNMH and Fundación Prolongar (2017)), which means that their visibility and potential impact is low in urban parts of the country. This means that they can be perceived as less indiscriminate, limiting the fear generated in the wider population as those falling outside of these profiles or living in urban areas may not feel at risk. For these reasons, I prefer violent attacks over landmine explosions as a measure of violence events.

The records of violent attacks for this study come from the compilation by the CNMH for its 2013 report _Basta Ya! Memories of War and Dignity_ . Since these records stop in 2012, I update them until March 2016 going back to the original source, the _Centro de Investigación y Educación_

> 21 Combats or battle deaths measures do not fit the profile of modern armed conflicts, where most of the violence is not the product of military confrontations, rather aims to control population and territory and is targeted towards civilians (Kaldor 2006, 2013).

> 22 These would be attacks against a population, colloquially referred to as guerrilla incursion ( _toma guerrillera_ ).

> 23 This definition shares various components with, for instance, the one used in the United States: ‘Premeditated politically motivated violence perpetrated against non-combatant actors by sub-national groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience’ (U.S. Department of State 1983, in Becker and Rubinstein 2011).

> 24 For instance, there is a strong temporal correlation between landmine explosions and conflict battles, and a geographic correlation with the municipalities where there is a strong offensive against guerrillas or where there are heavy territorial disputes; this is because the logic behind the use of landmines in Colombia is to halt or delay the actions of the military forces against guerrilla groups and to defend territories where armed groups are at risk of losing dominance (CNMH and Fundación Prolongar (2017).

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