Decline of the Conservative Hegemony
The stimulus from loans and indemnity was not evenly spread. Outlying regions felt little impact, and neither was all the money wisely spent. Railroads were pushed through vote-rich Boyacá Department, when there was still no rail link or even a passable highway connection from Bogotá to the nation’s second city, Medellín. Moreover, a good bit of money ended up in the pockets of well-connected businessmen and politicians as fees or contracting profits, giving rise to the inevitable suspicion (as earlier under Reyes) of official corruption, which in turn dimmed the prestige of the Conservative rulers.
A further complication was social and labor unrest, in part a renewal or continuation of the artisans’ struggle during the previous century for job security and benefits. While Suárez was president, a tailors’ demonstration in Bogotá against the importation of military uniforms led to several deaths at the hands of the Presidential Honor Guard in what has been termed a baptism of blood of the Colombian working class. On coffee estates in the upper Magdalena valley, there were also outbreaks as tenants and sharecroppers defied landlords who tried to prevent them from selling on their own account. That struggle was not a serious problem in the chief growing regions, where small proprietors prevailed, but it was a harbinger of future agrarian tensions.
Above all, labor trouble broke out in two rising industries dominated by foreign capital—petroleum and bananas. Tropical Oil Company, a subsidiary of Standard Oil of New Jersey, which obtained concession rights in 1916, faced militant union organization and two massive strikes during the 1920s. Worse still was the banana strike of 1928 against United Fruit, in which soldiers fired on strikers and by official admission killed at least 13 of them.
Colombian governments were not wholly insensitive to social problems, enacting a limited workers’ accident-compensation law and a few similar measures. But these laws were little more than tokenism, and the inability to think of anything better than harsh repression to deal with the banana strike was just one indication of the ruling Conservatives’ lack of fresh ideas. The year after that strike, moreover, brought the first impact of the world economic depression, in the form of falling prices for Colombian exports and the drying up of possible foreign credit sources. With a looming economic crisis added to the accumulation of other problems, the Conservatives themselves were increasingly disheartened. Unable to overcome a deep internal division, they fielded two unsuccessful candidates in the presidential election of 1930, one representing moderate Conservatives and the other reactionary Conservatives. Capitalizing on the Conservative divisions, the Liberals returned to power for the first time in almost half a century.
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