New Granada: Weak State, Strong Parties, 1832–63
In April 1830, an assembly meeting in Bogotá adopted a new constitution for the Republic of Great Colombia. It bore little resemblance to the one Bolívar drafted for Bolivia, even though he at one time had placed his hopes on this assembly to reform Colombian institutions in line with his ideas. The constitution of 1830 strengthened the executive and increased the presidential term (even if not to life) but was little different in fundamentals from that of 1821, and with the republic already in process of dissolution, it was an exercise in futility. The rump that was left of Great Colombia—present-day Colombia plus Panama—reconstituted itself as the Republic of New Granada (1832–58), and in 1832 it adopted another constitution closely following the 1821 model.
The new charter slightly liberalized the conditions for suffrage and gave the provincial assemblies a limited right to enact ordinances on local affairs. One of its articles abolished the fuero, a royal charter bestowing special judicial privileges on the military. There was no similar action on the ecclesiastical fuero because the clergy was still too powerful to antagonize unnecessarily. But the prestige of the military had suffered in New Granada from overly close association with Venezuelan influence during Bolívar’s Republic of Colombia. In addition, many top officers, being Venezuelan, had gone home after the collapse of the union. The military establishment was thus reduced in size and vulnerable, and its treatment in the first New Granadan constitution was a foretaste of the subordinate role it would continue to play in Colombian history.
The weakness of the military was a characteristic common among Colombian state institutions generally. The country’s broken topography and primitive transportation made it difficult, if not impossible, to assert effective control in outlying areas. No cart roads existed anywhere outside the cities, and regular steam navigation on the Magdalena, the main artery connecting the coast with the interior, did not take hold until the 1840s. Improvements in transport infrastructure—or any ambitious governmental activity—would have cost money, which was not readily available, for the central administration operated on an annual budget of about one and a half pesos (still roughly equivalent to U.S. dollars of the time) per capita. Local governments had even smaller resources.
Fiscal poverty reflected, in turn, the underdeveloped state of the economy, in which the vast majority of the population labored farming crops, raising livestock for domestic consumption, or producing primitive handicrafts. Foreign trade per capita was the lowest among Latin America’s larger countries, and this in itself was a major reason for fiscal poverty because customs duties were the leading source of revenue. New Granada began independent life with a single important export, gold, exactly as in the colonial era, but gold mining employed few people and had few linkages to the rest of the economy. Native, and some foreign, entrepreneurs looked intermittently for other exports that might stimulate wider economic growth, and these efforts led to a succession of speculative booms in tobacco, quinine, and certain lesser commodities. None would have lasting success until the expansion of coffee cultivation at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth; until then, with brief and partial exceptions, stagnation was the rule.
Only limited options were thus available when Santander (president, 1832–37) returned from exile to become the first elected president of New Granada. He was more cautious than in the 1820s in pushing liberal reforms, but he promoted education while holding down military expenditures. At the end of his term, Santander gave evidence of his legalistic bent by accepting the defeat of his chosen candidate and turning the presidency over to José Ignacio de Márquez Barreto (president, 1837–41), a former collaborator whom he now opposed. Most of their differences were minor, but Santander objected to Márquez’s conciliatory gestures toward the former Bolivarian faction, with which he proceeded to share power once in office.
When an assortment of malcontents rose up against Márquez in the so-called War of the Supreme Commanders (1840–42), Santander refused to give his blessing. However, most of his personal followers and the more intransigent liberals did back the uprising, and it became a watershed in the evolution of the Colombian political system. The threat to his government caused Márquez and moderate liberals who shared his views to tighten their alliance with the former Bolivarians, who in return gave crucial military support. Formal Liberal and Conservative parties did not exist until midcentury, but they were present in embryo in the forces arrayed on either side of this first of independent New Granada’s civil wars.
Early conservative leaders, or Ministerials as they were called initially, were slightly more distinguished socially than their adversaries, and each faction was stronger in some regions than others, but there were no significant differences in economic interest or social policy. Neither faction was necessarily averse to economic liberalism. Differences revolved instead around constitutional and ecclesiastical issues. Having won the civil war, the Ministerials in 1843 adopted still another constitution, which strengthened central control over provincial authorities, whereas their opponents increasingly flirted with federalism.
The Ministerials also invited the Jesuits, expelled from the Spanish Empire by Charles III, to return to New Granada, with a view to their playing a key role in secondary education and defending the country’s youth against dangerous new doctrines. In this, they demonstrated their intention to forge a close relationship with the Roman Catholic Church, both from religious conviction and from a belief in its importance as a force for social and political stability. By contrast, their opponents hoped to resume the course of religious reform begun at the Congress of Cúcuta in 1821 and interrupted by Bolívar’s dictatorship.
Unfortunately for the Ministerials, however, in 1849 divisions in their camp allowed the opposition candidate, General José Hilario López Valdéz (president, 1849–53), to triumph. It was during this presidential campaign that the contending factions adopted definitively the terms Liberal and Conservative and that the parties bearing those names can be said to have taken shape.
The victory of López and the Liberals can be attributed not just to the failure of government supporters to agree on a candidate but also to their alliance with artisan groups antagonized by the tariff legislation adopted during the administration of the last Ministerial president, Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera y Arboleda (president of New Granada, 1845–49; president of Colombia, 1861–63, 1863–64, 1866–67), which sharply reduced duties on imported manufactures. The alliance was strictly opportunistic, as López and the Liberal high command were not truly protectionist.
They were lawyers, merchants, and landowners, much like their Conservative counterparts, and they had no stake in domestic manufacturing and in principle favored an opening to foreign trade. Yet the alliance held together long enough for the Liberals to enact a sweeping set of reforms. They again expelled the Jesuits, abolished the last vestiges of slavery and the colonial tobacco monopoly, authorized provincial assemblies to divide up Amerindian communal lands into private plots, reduced the standing army to a maximum of 1,500 men, and abolished libel laws for the printed (but not yet the spoken) word.
The capstone of this flurry of reforms was the constitution of 1853. It introduced for the first time unqualified freedom of worship and universal male suffrage, although the latter aroused misgivings among many Liberals for fear of clerical influence over the uneducated masses. The new constitution implemented a quasi-federalist system; it reversed the limitations on provincial authority contained in the constitutional reform of 1843, and provincial governors, although still regarded as agents in some sense of the national executive, were henceforth to be elected locally. The Liberal government did not, however, satisfy the protectionist demands of its artisan allies. New tariff legislation brought in a slight increase in import duties, but not enough to make a significant difference. Nor were thwarted protectionists the only source of political discontent.
Conservatives, of course, had been unhappy all along, and in 1851 they launched a foolhardy rebellion. It was suppressed easily, but the more moderate or pragmatic elements of the Liberals were also convinced that ideologues in the Congress and administration were pushing their reform agenda too far and too fast, thereby undermining the foundations of law and order. A good many Liberal military officers took the same view, and on April 17, 1854, one of them, General José María Dionisio Melo y Ortiz, staged a coup d’état. The coup succeeded in overthrowing López’s successor, José María Obando del Campo, who was president for the second time in 1853–54 and another Liberal general. The ousted president had been unhappy with the latest developments but too indecisive to do anything about them.
Melo ruled only about eight months, with the support of one faction of Liberals and of the artisans, who were particularly enthusiastic in his defense. Opposition came in the form of an alliance of Liberal and Conservative leaders, whose banner was the defense of constitutional legality but who at the same time rallied together in fear of the threat to social order posed by Melo’s artisan allies. This partnership of ruling groups against their social inferiors would be cited repeatedly in the future, as a precedent for putative alliances of elite Liberals and Conservatives to thwart social change.
By December 4, 1854, Melo’s mild dictatorship had been defeated. Then, instead of restoring Obando, whom they distrusted, the victors formed a coalition government in which Conservatives increasingly gained the upper hand. When the next presidential election was held in 1856—the first to be decided by universal male suffrage—it was won by a civilian Conservative, Mariano Ospina Rodríguez (president, 1857–61). He defeated both the Liberal Party candidate and former President Mosquera, who renounced his previous associates to run as candidate of an improvised National Party that would soon be absorbed by the Liberal Party.
Official returns in the 1856 election would suggest that 40 percent of adult males participated. Undoubtedly, some of the votes tallied were fraudulent, but the results nevertheless demonstrated the extent to which the population had become aligned with one party or another. In the case of Conservatives, often the local priest recruited his flock on their behalf; or a local potentate of some sort—a leading landowner or a petty official—might recruit for either side. But no matter how initial allegiances took shape, they remained remarkably constant, passed down from generation to generation in such a way that small towns that voted Conservative or Liberal in 1856 were likely to be voting the same way a century later. Inherited party affiliation likewise generally determined on which side one participated or gave passive support in case of civil war. Although the reach of the state was limited, the parties blanketed the country, instilling in their adherents an instinctive loyalty that easily could trump obedience to a government of the opposite persuasion.
The extreme frequency of elections under the 1853 constitution, held at different times for all sorts of local and national offices, contributed to the early consolidation of party affiliations. And although the constitution did not introduce outright federalism, it was soon being amended to transform specific parts of the country into “states” with substantial powers of self-government.
Panama, which had never felt much affinity with the rest of New Granada, was the first to receive such status, but other sections demanded and achieved the same, until in 1858 the ambiguous nature of the country’s administration was tidied up by adoption of the first frankly federalist constitution. It was adopted during the Conservative administration of Ospina, whose party had been gradually warming to the idea of federalism, among other reasons because it seemingly guaranteed the Conservatives control of regions where they were strongest, regardless of who held power in Bogotá.
However, before long the Liberals accused Ospina of failing to faithfully observe the new system and rose up in what would be the nation’s only full-fledged civil war (as distinct from civil or military coup) to succeed in toppling a government. The war lasted from 1859 to 1862, and when it was over the provisional head of state was General Mosquera, now fully transformed into paladin of the Liberal cause.
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