La Violencia is incapable of thinking about the diversity of wars and the reasons for conflicts because violence is a terrifying, unpredictable and inevitable thing, while wars can be avoided and depend on political decisions. The media likes to narrate violence, to show death, to turn fear into a story. That is why in the Colombian civil wars, the media produced citizenships of fear through a sensa-tionalist account of destruction and death. This essay documents the genealogy of violence as a field of academic study in Colombia and the ways in which news, media and telenovelas have counted violence. It is argued that the wars in Co-lombia are better narrated in works of fiction than in the news.