The literature on violent conflict has found that legislatures influence the processes of political violence. However, these studies disagree on the precise mechanisms through which legislatures affect violent conflicts, and when they operate. Some studies suggest legislature to constrain the government capacity to repress violent non-state actors, while others emphasize their effects to intensify the information asymmetry and commitment problems between the government and non-state actors. It is therefore necessary to conduct case studies to examine the strength of and conditions under which these mechanisms operate. In this paper, we partly rectify these problems, exploring how much legislators discuss violent conflicts, in what manners, and for what purposes, in a semi-democracy. We focus on legislators’ electoral incentives and policy interests, and develop hypotheses. To test the validity of the hypotheses, we conduct a quantitative analysis of speeches by members of the Chamber of Representatives in the Colombian Congress between 2002 and 2006. In this period, President Uribe engaged in peace negotiations with right-wing paramilitary groups called the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, while attempting to repress left-wing guerrillas such as the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia by force. Using legislative records from the plenary sessions of the Chamber, we first run topic models to identify the topics of legislative speeches, and then examine how the prevalence of each topic correlates with the district-level attributes of legislators.