Development of the Nation, 1819–1904
The Republic of Colombia founded by Bolívar is referred to retrospectively as “Gran Colombia,” or “Great Colombia,” to distinguish it from the smaller present-day Republic of Colombia. And it took almost four years for all the far-flung lands theoretically included to come under the Colombian flag. Bolívar’s victory at the Battle of Carabobo, on June 24, 1821, delivered Caracas and virtually all the rest of Venezuela into his hands, except for the coastal fortress of Puerto Cabello, which held out another two years. The liberation of New Granada’s Caribbean coast was completed when Cartagena fell to General Mariano Montilla’s army in October 1821. In the following month, the Isthmus of Panama overthrew Spanish authority in a bloodless coup and then joined Colombia, ostensibly of its own volition, although Bolívar was prepared to take it by force if necessary.
Bolívar assigned the task of extending Colombian rule to the Presidency of Quito (present-day Ecuador) to his lieutenant, Antonio José de Sucre, who went initially to the port of Guayaquil, where another local uprising had already deposed the Spanish authorities, and eventually won a decisive victory in the Battle of Pichincha, on the outskirts of Quito itself, in May 1822. The defeated royalist commander quickly surrendered the rest of the presidency to Colombia. The royalist army holding out at Pasto was now in an untenable position and surrendered, too. Guayaquil still posed a problem, for it had been operating as an autonomous city-state since its own rebellion against Spain, but Bolívar had no intention of allowing Quito’s principal outlet to the sea to remain outside Colombia. In July, just days before he met in Guayaquil with the Argentine liberator José de San Martín, who was then serving as protector of Peru, which also had designs on Guayaquil, Bolívar’s followers took control of the port city. A vote on joining Colombia was held, but the result was predetermined.
The creation of Bolívar’s Republic of Colombia was the only instance in which an entire Spanish viceroyalty remained united, even briefly, after independence. This unity resulted in large measure from the particular way in which independence was achieved in northern South America—by forces moving back and forth without regard to former colonial boundaries, under the supreme leadership of a single commander, Bolívar. It also reflected the conviction of Bolívar himself that the union brought together peoples whose sense of common destiny had been heightened in the recent struggle, plus a wealth of resources—the gold of New Granada, the agricultural economy of Venezuela, and the textile workshops of highland Ecuador—that were basically complementary. He likewise felt that only a large nation could gain respect on the world stage.
However, he did not adequately weigh certain problems, of which perhaps most obvious was the lack of an integrated transportation and communication network: it was easier to travel from Caracas to Philadelphia or from Quito to Lima than from either one to Bogotá, which, by its central location, was the inevitable capital of the new nation. Although economies may have been complementary to some extent, interests were not necessarily compatible; the insistent demand of Ecuadorian textile makers for high protective tariffs was not what suited Venezuelan agricultural exporters. Neither did the common experience of Spanish rule and then the fight against it offset the stark social and cultural differences between, for example, the lawyers of Bogotá, the Quechua-speaking Amerindians of highland Ecuador, the pardo and mestizo vaqueros of the Orinoco basin, and the planters of Andean Venezuela.
Nevertheless, in 1821 the young republic held a constituent assembly, known as the Congress of Cúcuta, which duly reaffirmed the union and went on to adopt a highly centralized system of government, under which the entire country was divided into provinces and departments whose heads were named from Bogotá. There were elected provincial assemblies, but with no meaningful power in local affairs. While eschewing federalism, the constitution of 1821 in some other respects revealed the clear influence of the U.S. model and was for the most part a conventionally republican document. It provided for strict separation of powers—too strict, in Bolívar’s view, despite the fact that, like other early Latin American constitutions, it authorized sweeping “extraordinary” prerogatives for the executive to use in cases of emergency.
Socioeconomic restrictions limited the right to vote to at most 10 percent of free adult males, but that was fairly standard procedure at the time. Citizens were guaranteed a list of basic rights that did not include freedom of worship, but neither were non-Roman Catholic faiths expressly forbidden, so that the question of religious toleration was left open to be dealt with later. At the same time, the Congress of Cúcuta itself equipped the new nation with a number of enlightened reforms: slavery was not immediately abolished, but provision was made for its gradual extinction by adopting nationwide the free-birth principle enacted earlier in Antioquia; likewise, Amerindians were relieved of the obligation to pay tribute or perform any kind of involuntary labor. Finally, the same Congress of Cúcuta elected Bolívar president and, because he was Venezuelan, provided regional balance by making the New Granadan Santander vice president.
In addition to acquiring a fine new constitution, the Republic of Colombia was the first Spanish American nation to obtain diplomatic recognition from the United States, in 1822; British recognition followed three years later. In 1824 Colombia even raised a foreign loan on the London market for the extraordinary sum of 30 million pesos (then equivalent to dollars). This consisted in part of mere refinancing of earlier obligations incurred during the independence struggle. It would prove impossible to maintain debt service, but the fact that the loan was even granted, on what for the time were quite favorable terms, attested to the prestige of Bolívar’s creation. Another sign of the Republic of Colombia’s international prestige was the fact that it played host to Bolívar’s Congress of Panama of 1826, which in the end accomplished little but was the first in a long line of Pan-American gatherings.
Yet even before that meeting began, the fragility of the republic’s unity was becoming apparent. The first serious crack came in Venezuela, where many people had been unhappy from the start with formal subjection to authorities in Bogotá, particularly when the head of government turned out to be the New Granadan, Vice President Santander, who became acting chief executive when Bolívar continued personally leading his armies against Spain. Indeed, Bolívar carried the struggle into Peru and stayed there even after the Battle of Ayacucho, won by Sucre in December 1824, put an end to serious royalist resistance.
Venezuelans did have some real grievances, but equally important was the feeling that their present status was a step down from that of the colonial captaincy general, which for most purposes took orders (not necessarily obeyed) directly from Madrid. Thus, when General José Antonio Páez, the leading military figure in Venezuela, was summoned to Bogotá early in 1826 to answer charges against him in the Congress of the Republic (Congreso de la República), he refused to go, and most of Venezuela joined him in defiance. Both Páez and Santander looked for support to Bolívar, still absent in Peru, but he proved less interested in the immediate dispute than in the opportunity that the crisis seemed to offer to revamp Colombian institutions in a form more to his liking.
Bolívar knew that Venezuelan regionalism was not the only problem to be faced. There was similar, if less critical, unrest in Ecuador. The efforts of liberal-minded congressional representatives to subject the military more fully to civilian courts were seen by the latter as an affront. And much of the clergy resented legislation designed to curb church influence, such as measures closing small convents and promoting secular education. As a committed freethinker, Bolívar did not oppose the objectives of these first anticlerical measures, and as one who supported total abolition of slavery, he definitely opposed the campaign of slaveholders to water down the free-birth law passed by the Congress of Cúcuta in 1821.
But he felt that many of the reforms adopted were premature, thus needlessly promoting unrest, and he assigned part of the blame to Vice President Santander, a man who had dropped out of law study to fight for independence but as chief executive surrounded himself with ardent young lawyers as helpers and advisers. What the country needed, in Bolívar’s view, was a stronger executive, a less assertive legislature, and a partial rollback of overhasty reforms. He also hoped to see some form of a new constitution that he had drafted for Bolivia adopted in the Republic of Colombia. Its central feature was a president serving for life and appointing his successor. Some other features were highly liberal, but what attracted attention was the call for a life-term president, who in the Colombian case would obviously be himself.
Bolívar journeyed back from Peru to Colombia in September–November 1826. He found little real support for introducing his constitutional panacea, but he solved the Venezuelan rebellion by meeting with General Páez in Venezuela in January 1827 and pardoning him, as well as by promising to call a convention to reform the existing constitution in some way. That September Bolívar returned to Bogotá and resumed the presidency of Colombia. However, the Congress of Ocaña, which met in April–June 1828, ultimately dissolved with nothing accomplished.
Bolívar then yielded to demands that he assume a personal dictatorship “to save the republic.” It was a mild dictatorship, which had strong support from the military, especially the Venezuelan officers who dominated the upper ranks. He further enjoyed support from the church, which hoped that he would reverse recent anticlerical measures and was not disappointed. Although there was no clear-cut division along social lines, Bolívar’s chief civilian supporters tended to come from long-established, aristocratic families, in effect his own class, whereas more of his opponents represented an emerging upper class of previously peripheral regions, such as Antioquia and eastern New Granada.
Santander, who came from one of those peripheral upper-class families, had since Bolívar’s return aligned himself with the opposition and helped block progovernment initiatives at Ocaña. Once the dictatorship was established, he was given the option of diplomatic exile as minister to the United States, and he accepted, but before he could depart, some of his supporters attempted to assassinate Bolívar. The plot failed, and Santander, although not directly involved, was tried and condemned to death but instead was sent into nondiplomatic exile.
In the aftermath, the dictatorship hardened, but opposition increased, especially when it became known that Bolívar’s ministers were sounding out opinion at home and abroad on the possibility of recruiting a European prince to become king whenever Bolívar died or retired. Bolívar was not a party to the scheme, having gone south from Bogotá in December 1828 to deal with a local uprising and brief conflict with Peru. Yet he was blamed, and the monarchist intrigue caused the greatest backlash of protest in his native Venezuela, where a new revolt began before the end of 1829. This time Venezuela went all the way to secession.
In New Granada (the traditional name for the Colombian provinces carried over from the dissolved United Provinces of New Granada), there was virtually no support for an attempt to retain Venezuela by force. Instead, many New Granadans were happy to see the Venezuelans go. Under these circumstances, the more moderate elements of Bolívar’s party took charge in Bogotá, even admitting some of the recently repressed Santanderistas to a share of power. Bolívar resigned the presidency, intending to go into voluntary exile, but in December 1830, before he could set sail, he died at Santa Marta on the coast. By that time, Ecuador had followed Venezuela’s example to become an independent state.
Many of those who suffered repression during Bolívar’s final dictatorship were slow to forgive, so that the division between his supporters and opponents foreshadowed, at least in part, subsequent party alignments in Colombia. Nevertheless, from his time to the present, virtually all Colombians have accepted his preeminence among the founders of the nation. Political liberals, including in due course the founders of the Liberal Party (PL), deplored most of what Bolívar did in that dictatorship but had no trouble finding things to approve in his earlier words and actions. Conservatives, naturally including founders of the Conservative Party (PC), tended to see the dictatorship as a necessary evil that Bolívar himself regarded as temporary, while emphasizing his consistent support for strong executive power and latter-day rapprochement with the church.
Certain twentieth-century right-wing extremists lauded the dictatorship as a positive good, while present-day leftists claim him as forerunner and assert that they are striving to complete the work that he left unfinished. The leftists point to Bolívar’s condemnation of slavery, rhetorical defense of Amerindian rights, and often keen analysis of social inequality in his statements to argue that he would have carried out a true social revolution if he had not been thwarted by selfish oligarchs, by which they chiefly mean the faction of Santander. Their analysis conveniently ignores the fact that Bolívar retained the support of the very cream of the traditional aristocracy. There is, in any case, a Bolívar for every conceivable ideological taste.
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