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HISTORY From prehistoric times, geography has greatly influenced patterns of human settlement and cultural evolution in what is now Colombia. Bordering on two oceans and occupying the point where the American continents meet, this region was a channel for the movement of peoples and ideas within the hemisphere long before the arrival of Europeans. Running north-south, Colombia’s two major river valleys, the Magdalena and the Cauca, provided a corridor between Central America and the Caribbean, on the one hand, and the interior of South America, on the other. Relics from Colombia’s most famous archaeological site, San Agustín, near the headwaters of the Magdalena River, attest to early mixing of peoples and cultures. The relics from this site include large stone statues of human figures, many with grotesque expressions. Different scholars have linked these figures to cultural influences emanating from the Andes Mountains to the south, the Amazon basin to the east, and even Mesoamerica to the north. Archaeological understanding of San Agustín, like that of much of Colombia’s pre-European past, is limited. But it appears that the site was occupied by a succession of different peoples and served as a cultural center as early as 2,300 years ago.
A variety of linguistically and culturally diverse peoples occupied Colombia at the time of European contact. Their many languages were related to three linguistic families: Arawak, from eastern South America; Carib, from the Caribbean; and Chibcha, from Central America. Peoples who spoke languages from each family lived throughout the region. Hunter-gatherer societies prevailed in the vast, sparsely populated lowlands of eastern Colombia, as well as on the Caribbean and Pacific coasts and in the tropical river valleys of the mountainous west. Some of these societies also engaged in agriculture. These were relatively egalitarian societies, and they fiercely resisted Spanish colonization. In the densely populated temperate highlands of western Colombia, intensive cultivation of corn and potatoes gave rise to complex agricultural societies. Highly stratified and hierarchical, these societies were composed of agricultural workers, skilled artisans, merchants, priests, and warriors. Many of these societies appear to have engaged in frequent warfare with their neighbors, and most seem to have practiced human sacrifice and ritual cannibalism. Their funerary practices, including mummification, reveal great differences in the wealth and power of social groups. Many of these peoples produced exquisite gold artifacts. The most numerous of Colombia’s indigenous peoples were the Chibcha (Muisca), who occupied the high intermontane basins of the easternmost branch of the Andes. Numbering perhaps 1 million people at the time of the Spanish conquest (estimates vary widely), the Chibcha had not evolved a full-fledged state on the order of the Aztec Empire of Mexico or the Inca Empire of Peru. But they were organized in large-scale political confederations, practiced a diverse and highly productive agriculture, and traded pottery, cotton cloth, coca, salt, gold, and emeralds over a wide area. A separate but highly sophisticated branch of Chibcha-speaking people, the Tairona, occupied the lands around the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, a large volcano near the Caribbean coast.
In 1502, on his last voyage to the Americas, explorer Christopher Columbus made contact with Chibcha-speaking people near present-day Santa Marta. Soon Spaniards were raiding Indian villages along the Caribbean coast as far west as present-day Panama in their search for gold and slaves. Rumors of gold in the interior—the famous legends of El Dorado—prompted three separate Spanish expeditions to converge on the eastern highlands in 1538. There the Spaniards founded the settlement of Santa Fe de Bogotá, commonly called Bogotá today. Spain used the settlement as a base from which to expand its control over the region. Although few in number, the Spanish terrified the Indians with their weapons, horses, and attack dogs. They quickly subdued the highlands societies and soon controlled much of the best land. The Spanish baptized captured Indians as Christians and required them to labor for Spanish landlords and pay tribute to the Spanish crown. Contact with Europeans led to a precipitous decline in the population of native peoples. Indians had no immunity to common European diseases such as smallpox, measles, and influenza. In tropical areas, native peoples also succumbed to mosquito-borne diseases like malaria and yellow fever, introduced by Europeans and their African slaves. The Spanish also undermined the indigenous way of life by changing the way Indians lived and worked. The Spanish turned land that Indians had cultivated for food over to Spanish crops such as wheat or to the raising of livestock. They also forced Indians to labor on Spanish estates or in distant mines, disrupting family life and leaving Indian laborers less time to cultivate their own food. The catastrophic decline of the Indian population led to the virtual disappearance of native peoples in the lowlands of the north and west. To replace them, the Spanish soon began to bring in African slaves to work their estates and to labor in the mines of the gold-rich Cordillera Occidental and Cordillera Central of the Andes. In most highland areas, however, especially in the eastern chain of the Andes, the dense Indian populations declined more slowly. Intermarriage between Indians and Europeans resulted in a large and growing population of mestizos, people of mixed Spanish and Indian descent. Indian communities did not completely disappear, but by the 17th century mestizos provided the bulk of agricultural labor. They worked either as tenants or sharecroppers on large estates owned by people of European descent, or as cultivators of small parcels of land they owned themselves. Many mestizos were also laborers and artisans in the towns and cities. Only on the Amazon lowlands of the east did Indian cultures survive the conquest largely untouched.
The
Spanish crown first administered present-day Colombia through
the Audiencia of New Granada, a governing body based in Bogotá
that served as a judicial court and an administrative council.
As part of an effort to improve administrative efficiency, in
1717 Spain created the Viceroyalty of New Granada, which included
present-day Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Panama. A viceroy,
or royal governor, who was usually a member of a high-ranking
Spanish noble family, oversaw the viceroyalty. Throughout the
colonial period, the Viceroyalty of New Granada remained a relatively
poor, unimportant part of the Spanish Empire. The core areas of
the empire were the populous, silver-producing viceroyalties of
New Spain (Mexico) and Peru. Although New Granada was the main
producer of gold in the Americas, the value of the colony’s
gold exports, even at their peak during the 18th century, amounted
to much less than the value of Mexico’s silver exports. People
of means imported luxury goods and some manufactures from Europe,
but for the most part New Granada’s modest economy was self-contained
and self-sufficient.
Troops from the Colombian heartland of New Granada, led by Venezuelan Creole general Simón Bolívar, played a major role in the long struggle from 1808 to 1824 for independence from Spain. A slave owner himself, Bolívar initially found it difficult to rally slaves and Indians to the revolutionary cause, and mestizos always formed the bulk of his armies. After suffering a series of early defeats and witnessing a brutal Spanish reconquest of New Granada, Bolívar’s armies finally defeated Spanish forces in Colombia at the Battle of Boyacá in 1819. See also Latin American Independence. In 1821 Bolívar was elected president of the newly independent Gran Colombia, which included present-day Colombia, Panama, and, after their liberation, Venezuela and Ecuador. Bolívar and other leaders strove mightily to make the new nation prosper. However, the burden of the war, the weakness of the economy, and the sheer difficulty of administering such a vast and poorly integrated territory led to the breakup of the new republic in 1831, when Venezuela and Ecuador each declared their independence.
Even in what was left of Gran Colombia (present-day Colombia and Panama), organization remained problematic. Many political leaders withdrew their support from the increasingly authoritarian leadership of Bolívar and supported Francisco de Paula Santander, the Colombian who had served as Bolívar’s vice president during the war for independence. Regional, class, and ethnic tensions also undermined national unity, while a stagnant economy limited the government’s ability to promote education, improve transport, and maintain public order. A major division within the new nation centered on policy toward the Roman Catholic Church. During the colonial period, the church had grown rich and powerful, controlling much rural and urban property and running most schools. After independence, the church continued to enjoy power and privileges, and efforts to reduce its influence sharply divided Colombians and led to a series of civil wars. By the mid-19th century, the debate around the church had separated Colombians into two antagonistic political parties: Liberals, who sought to curb the church’s influence and divest it of much of its wealth, and Conservatives, who struggled to maintain the church’s privileges. The Liberals’ attacks on the privileges of the Roman Catholic Church formed part of a broader policy of creating unrestricted markets for land and labor. Thus Liberal reformers also passed legislation to abolish slavery, allow Indians to sell their land, and end the state monopoly on the cultivation of tobacco. In order to win support for their reforms, Liberals appealed to the middle and lower classes, especially the artisans of the cities. In the 1850s they took the radical, albeit temporary, step of instituting universal adult male suffrage. Conservatives were backed by much of the upper class but also appealed to the lower classes by pointing to Conservative defense of the church. Conflict between Liberals and Conservatives over these issues resulted in periodic civil wars during the 19th century. Liberals managed to consolidate their control over the national government and push through many of their reforms following a bloody civil war from 1861 to 1863. In 1863 they wrote a constitution that established an extremely decentralized government. During a civil war in 1885, however, Liberal dissidents allied themselves with the Conservatives and captured control of the national government. Under the leadership of dissident Liberal Rafael Núñez and Conservative Miguel Antonio Caro, the victors wrote a new constitution in 1886. The Constitution of 1886, which remained in force until 1991, restored the privileges of the Catholic Church, limited suffrage to adult males who passed the literacy requirement, restricted civil liberties, centralized administration, and greatly strengthened the power of the executive branch. Liberals were denied meaningful representation in the new regime and revolted in 1899. The War of the Thousand Days, as the conflict came to be called, dragged on until 1902 and claimed the lives of perhaps 100,000 Colombians out of a total population of about 4 million. Government forces defeated the Liberals in the war. In the aftermath of the conflict, Panama, with the backing of the U.S. government, seceded from Colombia in 1903. Colombia’s political instability during the 19th century was closely related to economic problems. Gold production, the mainstay of Colombian exports since colonial times, declined after 1810, and gold exports did not regain their value until the 1890s. Exports of other commodities, notably tobacco and cinchona bark (quinine), increased for two decades after 1850, then declined sharply as Colombian growers lost out to more efficient producers elsewhere. High transport costs, a consequence of the nation’s mountainous terrain, limited the competitiveness of Colombian exports. Although steam navigation was established on the Magdalena River in the 1850s, until well into the 20th century mule transport continued to connect river ports with highland areas where most Colombians lived. The few hundred kilometers of railway in the country at the end of the 19th century were divided among short, unconnected lines, few of which extended into the mountains. In 1900 Colombian exports per capita stood at approximately $6, one of the lowest levels in all of Latin America.
Following the loss of Panama, the leaders of the Conservative and Liberal parties joined together to promote exports and maintain social and political stability. Although the Conservative Party dominated Colombian governments until 1930, Liberals participated in them. Economic improvement, especially the rapid growth of coffee exports, aided the bipartisan consensus in Colombia. Coffee had been cultivated for decades in parts of Colombia, but after 1910 production expanded rapidly, especially in the Cordillera Central. Most of Colombia’s coffee was grown by small farmers who owned their own land. Because profits from coffee exports stayed in Colombia and were widely shared, coffee stimulated industrial development, especially the textile industry of Medellín. Foreign investment also increased during these years, especially in banana production on the Caribbean coast and in the oil fields of the central Magdalena River Valley. The country’s economic situation also improved in the 1920s when the United States paid Colombia $25 million to compensate for the loss of Panama. Colombia’s economic growth fostered the development of a fledgling labor movement, and during the 1920s large strikes occurred in the oil and banana industries. Repression of these strikes, especially a massacre of banana workers by the Colombian army in 1928, worked to discredit the Conservative government. The onset of a worldwide economic depression further undermined the Conservatives. In 1930 Conservatives peacefully transferred power to the Liberals, who controlled the Colombian government until 1946. Under the leadership of Alfonso López Pumarejo, who served as president from 1934 to 1938, the Liberals enacted a series of social and economic reforms. In 1936 constitutional amendments gave the government power to regulate privately owned property in the national interest; established the right of workers to strike, subject to legal regulation; removed Roman Catholicism from its position as the official state religion; and shifted control of public education from the Catholic Church to the government. Many Conservatives strongly opposed the Liberal reforms, and they withdrew from participating in the Liberal government. By the end of the 1930s, many moderate Liberals had also withdrawn their support for López’s reforms. Divided over the question of social reform, the Liberals split their votes between two candidates in the presidential election of 1946. Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, a famous criminal lawyer and a masterful orator, challenged the official candidate of the party, Gabriel Turbay. Gaitán was of mixed racial ancestry, and he cast himself as a champion of the dispossessed. He was highly critical of what he called the oligarchy, the elite that dominated the two traditional parties and Colombian society generally. Although Gaitán’s program was vague, he captured the fervent support of many poor and middle-class urban voters. With the Liberal vote split, the Conservative candidate, Mariano Ospina Pérez, won the presidency in 1946. Although Ospina named a bipartisan cabinet, Conservatives in the countryside often sought exclusive control over local government. Tensions between the two parties increased, and violence broke out in many rural areas. Meanwhile, Gaitán emerged as the preeminent leader of the Liberal Party and eloquently denounced the escalating violence.
On April 9, 1948, Gaitán was assassinated outside his law offices in downtown Bogotá. The assassination marked the start of a decade of bloodshed, called La Violencia (the violence), which took the lives of an estimated 180,000 Colombians before it subsided in 1958. The violence was difficult for participants and subsequent observers to fully comprehend. Although it reflected social and economic tensions, it revolved around the partisan political concerns that had divided the two traditional parties since the 19th century. Following the murder of Gaitán, crowds of his supporters took control of downtown Bogotá, burning churches and other symbols of Conservative power and looting many businesses. It was three days before the Colombian army reestablished control of the city. Meanwhile, Liberal partisans deposed government officials in many towns and villages across the country. Government forces quickly reestablished control of urban areas but the Liberal opposition soon organized guerrilla bands in the countryside. Moderate Liberals and Conservatives sought to quell the escalating violence and form an effective bipartisan government following the events of April 1948. However, tension between the parties and the upheaval in the countryside undermined these efforts. Liberal members withdrew from the government and boycotted the presidential elections. The victorious Conservative candidate, Laureano Gómez, took office in 1950. Gómez, the leader of the right wing of the Conservative party, moved vigorously to defeat the Liberal insurrection. His government declared a state of siege and suspended the 1950 session of Congress. In many areas, government police worked closely with paramilitary groups to defeat the Liberal guerrillas and to terrorize the guerrillas’ alleged supporters among the civilian population. Meanwhile, the Liberal Party declared the government illegal soon after Gómez was inaugurated and continued its boycott of elections. In February 1953, right-wing Conservatives proposed a new constitution that many moderates in both parties believed would lead to a totalitarian regime. In June, with backing from these moderates, a military junta overthrew the Conservative government. General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla was named provisional president of the new military regime, and in 1954 a constitutional convention elected him to a four-year term. Ruling by decree, Rojas offered amnesty to Liberals in revolt and initially succeeded in convincing many to lay down their arms. By 1956, however, violence in the countryside was again on the rise, and moderates of both parties were becoming critical of the authoritarian policies of the Rojas regime. In 1957, following strikes and demonstrations against the government, another military coup deposed Rojas. Leaders of the Liberal and Conservative parties then arrived at an agreement to share all government offices equally and alternate the presidency between them for a period of 12 years. This arrangement, known as the National Front, was approved in a plebiscite on December 1, 1957, and early in 1958 it was extended to 16 years.
The National Front effectively brought an end to the large-scale violence that had wracked the country since the late 1940s. Its power-sharing formula eliminated the partisanship between the two traditional parties that destabilized Colombian politics after 1946. The four presidents who served under the National Front (Liberals Alberto Lleras Camargo, 1958-1962, and Carlos Lleras Restrepo, 1966-1970; Conservatives Guillermo León Valencia, 1962-1966, and Misael Pastrana Borrero, 1970-1974) presided over an era of relative political peace. During the 1960s, however, guerrilla groups inspired by the Cuban Revolution appeared in Colombia. These groups sought to transform Colombia’s capitalist society into a socialist one. Small remnants of the guerrillas from the era of La Violencia joined forces with some of these groups, one of which, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias Colombianas (FARC, Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), eventually became a major political force. Throughout the 1960s and the 1970s, however, leftist guerrillas did not pose a significant threat to the government. National Front governments sought to promote national development and political stability by launching modest agrarian reform beginning in 1962 and increasing spending on education, health, and housing. Colombia undertook these initiatives with support from the United States under a program known as the Alliance for Progress. This program sought to undercut the appeal of communism and foster capitalist development and liberal democracy in Latin America. The United States also provided increased military aid to the Colombian government in an effort to eliminate the leftist guerrillas. Critics of the National Front argued that it failed to address the magnitude of the social problems facing the nation. They also claimed that it limited the prospects for third parties, especially those on the left. What is certain is that fewer people voted during the National Front years. Less than one-fifth of those eligible to vote actually cast ballots in the 1970 presidential election, the last held under the rules of the National Front. The low turnout of that year was all the more remarkable because the official candidate, Misael Pastrana Borrero, was almost defeated by Rojas Pinilla running as a dissident Conservative. Supporters of Rojas claimed the election returns were manipulated to defeat their candidate. Some later took up arms against the state under the banner of the Movimiento 19 de Abril (M-19, 19th of April Movement), so named for the date of the 1970 presidential election.
Since the end of the National Front and the return of competitive elections in 1974, the two traditional parties have continued to dominate Colombian politics. Six of the eight presidents elected since 1974 were Liberals. In 2002, however, Colombians rejected the official candidate of the Liberal Party, electing Alvaro Uribe Velez as an independent Liberal. All of these governments have had to grapple with the growing power of leftist guerrillas and paramilitary right-wing forces. In addition these governments have tried to stop the illegal drug trade.
Originally
the leftist guerrillas sought to overthrow the government and
create a socialist regime. Over time, however, their goals have
become less clear. The collapse of the Soviet Union (see Union
of Soviet Socialist Republics) in 1991 made socialism less appealing
throughout the world and also eliminated Soviet support for revolutionary
groups in Latin America. In addition, decades of struggle against
the government made insurgency itself a way of life. Revolutionary
groups support themselves through kidnapping, extortion, and income
derived from protecting producers, processors, and traffickers
of illegal drugs. These activities tend to undermine their commitment
to revolutionary ideals and goals. Nevertheless the main guerrilla
groups continue to demand a radical restructuring of Colombia’s
liberal capitalist order. Estimates placed the number of combatants
in the FARC as high as 18,000 men and women in 2001, up from some
4,000 in 1985. The other large guerrilla group active in the country
is the Ejercito de Liberación Nacional (ELN, Army of National
Liberation), estimated to have about 5,000 combatants. Since the
1980s, Colombian governments have simultaneously combated the
guerrillas militarily while trying to negotiate with them to bring
their insurgency to an end. Conservative president Belisario Betancur,
who served from 1982 to 1986, made the first concerted effort
at negotiation and announced a truce with the guerrillas in 1984.
In response, the FARC launched a new political party, the Unión
Popular (UP, Patriotic Union), in 1985 to compete in future elections.
The UP achieved some electoral success in subsequent years, but
the FARC never disarmed. With the formation of the UP, the FARC
pursued power through both military and political means. This
pursuit made the UP especially vulnerable to clandestine right-wing
repression. Many right-wing and centrist forces simply saw the
UP as a front for the FARC guerrillas. In subsequent years, death
squads killed hundreds of UP militants, including the UP presidential
candidates in 1986 and 1990. Betancur’s peace initiatives
suffered another grave blow in November 1985 when M-19 guerrillas
seized the Palace of Justice, the seat of the country’s Supreme
Court, in Bogotá. They took dozens of hostages, and the
Colombian army stormed the Palace. The military assault left more
than 100 people dead, including 11 Supreme Court justices.
Throughout the 1990s, the strength of the leftist guerrillas grew, and the government was unable to defeat them or negotiate their surrender. The situation gave rise to another armed contender in Colombia’s civil war, the paramilitary right. The government initially encouraged the forerunners of some of these paramilitary groups as a way to protect rural communities from the guerrillas. Other paramilitary groups evolved after large landowners, some of them newly rich from the drug trade, hired armed bands to protect them from extortion and kidnapping. The main paramilitary group was the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC, United Self-Defense Groups of Colombia). Paramilitary groups were scattered throughout the country and were especially strong in areas of the southeast, where the FARC was most powerful, and the northwest, where much of ELN’s strength lay. The right-wing paramilitary groups rarely confronted the guerrillas directly. Instead, they sought through terror to deny the guerrillas the support of the civilian population. International human rights organizations blamed paramilitaries for the bulk of human rights violations in Colombia. They also accused elements of the Colombian armed forces of working with paramilitary groups against guerrillas and their alleged sympathizers.
Colombian governments also had to contend with major changes in the national economy. After 1980 Colombia began exporting large amounts of illegal drugs, primarily cocaine. The estimated value of illegal drug exports amounted to almost half the value of Colombia’s legal exports from 1980 to 1995. Earnings from the drug trade helped Colombia avoid the debt crisis that afflicted much of Latin America during the 1980s. But by cheapening the dollar and thereby overvaluing the Colombian peso, the drug trade also undermined the competitiveness of Colombia’s legal exports by making them more expensive than similar exports from other countries. The illegal drug trade led to the growth of an enormously wealthy and powerful criminal establishment centered initially in Medellín and Cali. In the late 1980s, under increasing pressure from the United States, Colombian governments began to crack down on these drug traffickers, threatening to extradite them to the United States, where punishment was both more effective and more severe than in Colombia. In response, the head of the Medellín drug cartel, Pablo Escobar, unleashed a bombing campaign that killed hundreds of civilians in Colombia’s major cities. Drug money was also behind the assassinations of three presidential candidates in 1990. The Constitution of 1991 prohibited extradition, but the Colombian government reinstated it soon thereafter. Escobar was eventually apprehended and killed in 1993. By the late 1990s Colombia’s drug war had shifted toward efforts to eradicate coca, plants that are used to make cocaine, and poppies, flowers that are used to make opium. In 1999 the Colombian government announced Plan Colombia, a program to decrease the cultivation of coca and poppies in areas of southeastern Colombia largely controlled by the FARC. The following year the United States announced that it would give $1.3 billion in aid, primarily for military hardware such as helicopters and planes, to support aerial fumigation of coca and poppy fields. Critics of the plan claimed that the spraying was dangerous to human health and the environment, that the small farmers who grew the coca had no viable economic alternatives, and that the plan’s real purpose was to aid the Colombian military in its battle against the guerrillas. Supporters of Plan Colombia denied these allegations and claimed fumigation would significantly reduce coca cultivation. Early data indicated that Colombian coca production continued to rise.
In the 1990s the Colombian government implemented policies to liberalize trade by cutting tariffs, which had protected domestic industry and agriculture. These policies contributed to the country’s high levels of unemployment. By the end of the 1990s the official unemployment figure in Colombia had reached almost 20 percent, one of the highest levels in Latin America. Unemployment figures began to drop in the early 2000s. The Colombian economy also suffered from insecurity spawned by the country’s violence. With the greatest number of kidnappings in the world and the highest homicide rate in the Americas, Colombia held little attraction for investors. The gravity of the economic situation also contributed to the frequency of common crime and to the pool of potential recruits for guerrilla and paramilitary groups, both of which pay their combatants salaries. Liberal president Alvaro Uribe Velez, inaugurated in 2002, faced formidable challenges. Uribe stepped up the military effort against the leftist guerrillas and pledged to double the size of Colombia’s military and police forces. Like his predecessors, Uribe also pursued negotiations with the guerrillas, and he emphasized the need for international mediation to end the conflict. At Uribe’s request, the United States took a more active role in training and supplying the Colombian military in its war against the guerrillas. By 2003 U.S. forces were also actively involved in protecting Colombia’s northern pipeline. The FARC responded to these initiatives by detonating bombs in Colombia’s cities and targeting U.S. forces directly. By mid-2003 some observers believed that Colombia was on the verge of a full-scale civil war. The government began formal peace talks with the paramilitary AUC in 2004, and the AUC announced that it would disarm several thousand of its members. However, the AUC wanted total amnesty on any charges related to drugs or human-rights violations. The United States sought extradition of a number of AUC leaders for drug trafficking. The outcome of the peace talks remained far from clear. |
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