This article derives from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Bogotá during the social protests that occurred between November 2019 and April 2022. It focuses on understanding the origins and dynamics of the violence employed by the state’s security forces in these instances of collective action. We argue that this violence, primarily exercised by police special units as a repressive apparatus of the state, cannot simply be explained as an undifferentiated form of domination that institutions resort to when their power is weakened. Instead, it refers to cultural meanings that enable, sustain, and validate it as a privileged way to address conflict. We explore this phenomenon through a category that emerged from the field, which underlies how subjects’ bodies were treated and which refers to deeply ingrained social consensuses: obedience by pain. We argue that this category, rooted in Judeo-Christian religious doctrine, operates as a mandate and principle of action of public force whose most obvious expression is material violence, but which simultaneously involves a radical symbolic violence. As an analytical tool, obedience by pain helps us understand processes of production of subjectivity that legitimize the elimination of others, but also those through which possibilities of existence, resistance, and strategies that challenge forms of state authority unfold. The study thus contributes to clarifying, from a political perspective, the rationality on the basis of which violence operates, rather than merely reiterating its immanence in the Colombian context.