Political Centralization and the Church–State Alliance
The Regeneration proposed by Rafael Núñez had much in common with the positivist program of order and progress in evidence elsewhere in Latin America during the late nineteenth century. Núñez was not a military man and avoided overt dictatorship, but he was prepared to make arbitrary arrests or close opposition newspapers when he felt the cause of order required such action. Above all, after declaring the constitution of 1863 null and void, he convoked a national council of delegates to draft a very different replacement, which was formally adopted in 1886 and would last more than 100 years — an exceptionally long life for any Latin American constitution.
It exchanged the ultrafederalism of the 1863 charter for an equally extreme centralism, under which the president named the governors of the departments (as the former federal states were now called), and the governors in turn named all the mayors. Whatever party controlled the national presidency could thus control every departmental and municipal executive position in the country. The departments did have elected assemblies, but with very limited power. Naturally, the country could no longer be called the United States of Colombia but was now once again simply the Republic of Colombia, as it had been in the days of Bolívar.
In addition, the sweeping definitions of individual rights in the old constitution were replaced by carefully restrictive wording in the new. The death penalty, abolished in 1863 as incompatible with the right to life, was reinstituted. Suffrage requirements were unified on a nationwide basis, and literacy was again required for national (not local) elections. The presidential term was lengthened, too, and with immediate reelection permitted. Núñez himself took advantage of these electoral changes to enjoy two more consecutive terms, one by vote of the constitutional convention and the other by popular election. But immediate reelection was subsequently forbidden again and was unavailable to any president until Álvaro Uribe Vélez (president, 2002–6, 2006–10) in 2006.
Although a religious freethinker himself, Núñez was convinced that to put law and order on a sound footing, it was necessary to end the conflict between clergy and anticlericals. In view of the institutional strength of the Roman Catholic Church and its hold on popular sentiment, he saw no way to do this other than by accepting the church’s terms. The resulting religious settlement was contained partly in the new constitution itself and partly in a concordat signed with the Vatican the following year. There was no retreat from religious toleration per se, but the church was compensated for seizure of its properties, religious orders were legal again, and along with the restoration to the church of other miscellaneous privileges, the settlement provided that public education must be conducted in accordance with Roman Catholic doctrine. Divorce, which the Liberals had legalized, naturally was forbidden, and remarriages of divorced persons were retroactively annulled, even though the latter change affected Núñez himself.
As one more step toward the consolidation of order, Núñez hoped to overcome Colombia’s bitter partisan rivalries by combining his Independent Liberals with like-minded Conservatives in a new National Party. In practice, however, many Independents drifted back to the main body of liberalism, incensed not only at the new constitution and religious concordat but at their members’ almost total exclusion from power. They were denied all executive positions, and, thanks to the prevalence of fraud and intimidation, allowed to win the merest handful of seats in deliberative bodies. It was indeed ludicrous that only two Liberals could be found in the House of Representatives (Cámara de Representantes) as of the late 1890s.
For their part, the Nationalists eventually became just another faction of the Conservatives, opposed by the self-styled Historical Conservatives, who tended to regard Núñez and Vice President Miguel Antonio Caro Tovar (acting president, 1894–98), who came to office on Núñez’s death in 1894, as overly harsh politically and guilty of gross economic mismanagement. They complained of monetary inflation resulting from excessive issues of paper money and objected vigorously to an export tax introduced in 1895 on coffee, which was becoming an ever-more important export commodity but was trading in a world market of declining prices.
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