A New Age Of Peace And Coffee, 1904–30
General Rafael Reyes Prieto (president, 1904–9) became the leader of a country that had just gone through a ruinous civil war and humiliating loss of territory. A highly pragmatic Conservative, he accepted the main lines of Núñez’s political and religious settlement. However, recognizing the pressing need to conciliate the defeated Liberals, Reyes proceeded to anger hard-line members of his own party by taking Liberals into his administration and revamping the electoral system to guarantee the opposition a reasonable number of seats in Congress, department assemblies, and municipal councils.
To do so, in 1905 he arbitrarily dissolved the overwhelmingly Conservative Congress and convoked in its place a national assembly, which voted to extend his presidential term from six years to 10. Reyes was also quite prepared to take high-handed measures against his critics, and there were leaders in both parties who either never supported him or ultimately turned against him. Nevertheless, the Reyes presidency inaugurated a period of general internal peace, broken by sporadic bursts of political violence mainly in the backcountry and at election time. This period lasted until 1930 and offers one argument against the notion that a propensity to violence is a defining trait of the Colombian national character.
Reyes had other accomplishments. He introduced a military reform designed to professionalize the armed forces and take them out of politics, importing a Chilean training mission to pass on lessons the Chileans had learned from similar German missions. To place Colombian finances on a solid footing, he made a settlement with foreign creditors over debts that had fallen into arrears and replaced depreciated pesos with sound new currency at a ratio of 100:1. He sponsored tariff legislation that gave more effective protection to manufacturing industries than Núñez had offered; one beneficiary was the nascent textile industry of Medellín. Not least, he energetically promoted more railroad construction and other public works.
The scope of Reyes’s achievements was still limited, of course, by sheer lack of resources. During his presidency, the railroad network increased from 561 to 901 kilometers, which in percentage terms was a sharp increase, but unimpressive for a country of Colombia’s size. In addition, public works contracts and other public programs gave rise to serious allegations, whether well-founded or not, of official corruption. Because the dominant sectors of Colombian society had always been wary of anything approaching one-man rule, if only because it limited their own opportunities for status and influence, the authoritarian tendencies that Reyes undoubtedly displayed were a further reason for the growth of opposition. What brought matters to a head in 1909 and induced him to step down, however, was a wave of indignation set off by his failed attempt to restore normal relations with the United States, through a treaty that provided a modest indemnity for Colombia while requiring Colombia to recognize the independence of its lost territory. Public opinion, at least in the major cities, was not yet ready for this step.
The fall of Reyes was triggered, in part, by street protests in Bogotá, but Congress chose an interim successor, after whom presidents were again chosen by regular elections. Until 1930, they were still Conservatives—even one who ran as a Republican with wide Liberal support—so that the entire era has come to be known as the Conservative Hegemony. Elections were not wholly free and fair, but neither were they a mere farce. Public order suffered minor disruptions here and there, yet no one tried to overthrow the government by revolution. Memory of the War of the Thousand Days was one reason for such forbearance. Another was the fact that, thanks to Reyes’s reforms, opposition Liberals and dissident Conservatives could always count on some share of representation; indeed, much of the time, as under Reyes, members of both parties held administrative positions. Even so, political affairs only went so smoothly because the economy performed in such a way as to give ambitious individuals something else to think about and to relieve, slightly, the government’s chronic penury.
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