A Failed Federalist Utopia, 1863–85
During the last stage of the civil war, in 1861, the Liberals changed the name of the country from Granadine Confederation (as in the 1858 constitution) to United States of New Granada (Estados Unidos de Nueva Granada, 1861–63). This action was followed by the adoption, in 1863, of another constitution that restored the name Colombia (more specifically Estados Unidos de Colombia, 1863–86) and took federalism to remarkable extremes. The new charter divided the nation into nine states, which could exercise any functions not expressly reserved to the central authorities.
They could raise their own militias and, if they saw fit, issue their own postage stamps. They alone determined who had the right to vote, and more than half used this authority to retreat from the recent universal male suffrage, which had not worked out wholly to the Liberals’ satisfaction. The constitution could be amended only by unanimous consent of all states. And the national president was elected on a basis of one vote, one state, for a period of only two years with no possibility of immediate reelection. This weakening of the presidential office resulted not just from theoretical considerations but also from the Liberals’ real distrust of their current leader, Mosquera, whose undoubted ability was accompanied by a certain tendency toward megalomania.
The 1863 constitution took individual rights to similar extremes. Now there was no possible limit on the spoken word. In addition to abolishing the death penalty, the constitution guaranteed citizens’ right to bear arms and to practice freedom of religion, at least in principle. However, the Liberals were not quite prepared to leave the Roman Catholic Church to its own devices, and therefore the charter endowed both national and state governments with vague supervisory authority in religious matters. Moreover, Mosquera had not waited for the constitution to be enacted before issuing decrees that yet again expelled the Jesuits, who had returned under Ospina’s presidency, seized most church property, and (with certain exceptions) legally abolished the religious orders of monks and nuns.
The latest burst of anticlericalism was in part to punish the clergy for supporting the Conservatives in the recent civil war. It drove a further wedge of bitterness between the parties, and it consolidated the image of Liberal impiety among the Conservative rank and file. Had elections been free and fair, the Conservatives surely would have returned to power, for without much doubt they were the majority party at the time. Intent on staving off any such disaster, the Liberals engaged in rampant electoral manipulation.
Nevertheless, the opposition was not totally excluded; much of the time it controlled one or two of the states, and it had some share of influence elsewhere by exploiting divisions in the Liberal camp. The ruling Liberals established a somewhat better record as far as basic civil liberties were concerned. And when Mosquera, who was reelected a last time in 1866, showed insufficient respect for constitutional technicalities, the Liberals summarily deposed him in May 1867. The Liberals also made a few attempts to promote social and economic development, despite the constitutional straitjacket in which they had placed the national authorities.
In Colombia, as throughout Latin America, publicists and politicians saw railroad construction as one key requirement. U.S. concessionaires had opened a first rail line, over the Isthmus of Panama, in 1856. In present-day Colombia, the first route was a short line completed in 1871, connecting the river port of Barranquilla with a point on the Caribbean to bypass the treacherous mouth of the Magdalena. Other railroads followed: most were short, supplementing river transport, and built by foreign entrepreneurs in return for subsidies and privileges granted by state or federal governments.
For the federal authorities to be concerned with railroads at all, outside Panama, it was necessary to stretch the constitutional article restricting them to the promotion of interoceanic commerce. But they were well within their rights in 1878 in approving a concession for French interests to construct a canal across Panama, and in 1882 work actually began—which the French never finished.
Another area of earnest but limited accomplishment was education. The present National University of Colombia was founded in 1867. The need was much greater, however, in primary education, where little had been accomplished since the days of Santander; an illiteracy rate of more than 80 percent was an obstacle to almost any aspect of modernization. Accordingly, the Liberals in 1870 adopted a measure declaring primary education free and obligatory, as well as religiously neutral. New normal schools trained the necessary teachers, and experts from Germany imparted the latest pedagogical methods. However, this ambitious program required collaboration—not always forthcoming—between federal and state governments, and adequate resources were unavailable at either level.
Thus, net progress was far from matching the contemporaneous push for popular education in Argentina. And although ecclesiastical backlash was a problem in Argentina also, it was much more severe in Colombia. Even though a provision existed for supplementary religious instruction to be offered by church representatives to children whose parents requested it, much of the clergy and devout Roman Catholic laity saw the Liberals’ education initiative as heretical or worse.
Agitation over public education contributed to the outbreak of a brief but bitter civil war between Conservatives and Liberals in 1876. The government prevailed, but this was only one of an almost constant round of civil conflicts. Most were struggles for the control of particular state governments, pitting Conservatives against Liberals or simply different Liberal factions (with or without Conservative help) against each other; and the national authorities, taking a strict interpretation of states’ rights, usually let the fighting run its course. Few people took part in general, casualties were few, and not much property was destroyed. However, the climate of insecurity clearly worked against the creation of new wealth. The state of public order thus contributed to a growing reaction against the Liberal regime, in which dissident Independent Liberals received support from the Conservatives and in 1880 saw their foremost leader, Rafael Núñez Moledo (president, 1880–82, 1884–86, 1887–88, 1892–94), elected to the presidency.
Núñez received further support from the artisans, to whom he offered and delivered a modest amount of tariff protection. He hoped to increase Colombia’s options by stimulating domestic industry, and he also expanded the government’s economic role through creation of a national bank. But the requirement of unanimity among the states for any amendment of the 1863 constitution thwarted his planned strengthening, or Regeneration, of the nation’s political institutions—as in his slogan “Regeneration or Catastrophe!” After stepping down from the presidency at the end of his two-year term, he returned to office in 1884; and this time he had better luck. The doctrinaire Radical faction of Liberals, fearing he would try to change the constitution illegally, launched a preemptive revolt in 1885 that Núñez crushed, with massive help from the Conservatives. He then felt emboldened to declare that the constitution of 1863 had “ceased to exist.”
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