The History of Colombia

History

By Christopher Minster

Pre-Conquest

The geographical area of present-day Colombia has been inhabited for centuries, since at least 10,000 BC. Various cultures came and went, many of them centered in the Magdalena River valley. At the time of the Spanish conquest, the two most important ethnic groups were the Muisca culture, which was an advanced but small culture near Bogotá, and the Tayrona people on the Caribbean coast. Neither culture was able to hold off the Spanish conquest for long and subsequent revolts by the Tayrona caused the Spanish to almost completely stamp out their culture. The Muisca, in spite of years of repression, have managed to maintain more of their original culture.

The Conquest

When Spanish forces under the command of Sebastián de Benalcázar and Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada arrived in the area in the late 1530’s, the Muisca were feuding.  Rival Zipa and Zaque people were fighting over land and salt mines. Because of this division, the Muisca culture was easily divided and conquered.

The Colonial Era

By 1549, the strategic location of Colombia had been recognized by Spain, and Santa Fe de Bogotá was named an audiencia, which was a certain sort of legal district with a court. It thus became the most important city in the region, which was then referred to as New Granada. New Granada contained Colombia, Venezuela, Panama and part of Ecuador, and was elevated to the status of Viceroyalty in the early eighteenth century. Even when it was raised to the status of Viceroyalty, New Granada was considered something of a backwater in comparison with the wealthier Lima and Mexico City.

Independence

Bogotá was one of the first places in the Americas to declare independence from Spain, in July of 1810. The definitive moment for Colombian independence came in August 1819, when a large force of rebel Colombians and Venezuelans, reinforced by the British Legion of almost 1,000 British and Irish volunteers, clashed with royalist forces at the Battle of Boyacá and defeated them.

Gran Colombia

In 1819, the historic Congress of Angostura established the nation of Gran Colombia, which included all of present-day Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Panama and parts of Brazil, Costa Rica, Peru and Guyana. Gran Colombia was the brainchild of Simón Bolívar, who saw it as the first step to his dream of a united South America that would compete with the United States and Europe as a world power. Unfortunately for Bolívar, difficulty in communication and the petty ambitions of local leaders doomed Gran Colombia from the start. By 1831 it had dissolved into the smaller nations that we see on the map today.

The Republican Era

From 1831 to 1863, the new nation was known as the Republic of New Granada. It changed its name in 1863 to “The United States of Colombia” and in 1886 it changed once again to “The Republic of Colombia,” a name it retains to this day. During the nineteenth century, the citizens of Colombia fractured into two competing ideologies: conservatives and liberals. The conservatives believed in a strong central government, limited voting rights for citizens and strong ties to the Catholic Church. The liberals were just the opposite: they wanted the vote for all citizens, an absolute division between church and state, and stronger regional government. The liberals had strong support from the big coffee ranchers, who favored their looser taxes and controls.

The conflict between conservatives and liberals would become a long-running and violent one. The first Civil War fought between the two factions was the “Thousand Days War” fought in 1899-1902. By some estimates, as many as 100,000 people were killed as liberal and conservative armies fought each other all over the nation. The result was a nominal victory for the conservatives, but in reality the war simply devastated the nation.

The Twentieth Century

In 1902, The United States picked up the Panama Canal project abandoned by the French a few years earlier. When Colombia rejected their terms for future administration of the canal, the United States encouraged wealthy Panamanian families to separate from Colombia…and backed them up with a warship. At that time still reeling from the Thousand Days’ War, Colombia had little choice. Panama formally became independent from Colombia in November 1903, although Colombia did not officially recognize this until 1921.

El Bogotazo

Tensions between conservatives and liberals continued to smolder during the first half of the twentieth century. They erupted once more in 1948, after extremely popular liberal presidential candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was assassinated in Bogotá. Much like other political assassinations like that of John F. Kennedy, conspiracy theories abound as to the architects of the murder. Among the common “culprits” are the CIA, the Soviet Union, the conservatives and even Fidel Castro, who had a meeting scheduled with Gaitán on the day he was killed.

The city, already swollen with impoverished people from the countryside who had come looking for work and saw Gaitán as a savior, went mad. Radio stations urged listeners to take the streets, blaming the conservative Mariano Ospina Pérez government for the murder. The crowd broke into hardware stores and even police stations looking for weapons. Liberal leaders and the conservative government tried to work together to stop the violence, which by then had spread to all of Colombia’s other large cities, but there was nothing they could do. By dawn the city was in ruins, and many institutions and buildings had been burned to the ground. Almost every store in the city had been looted, and informal markets had spring up on the outskirts of the city. All in all, over 3,000 people were killed in the, and it launched the period known as “La Violencia.”

La Violencia

Following the murder of Gaitán and the Bogotazo, Colombia descended even further into chaos. The conservative government clamped down on civil liberties, and every major political entity began forming its own death squads. These squads operated in every city, town and village in Colombia, murdering any and all who disagreed with them. The weapons of choice were clubs, knives and machetes and it was common to find hacked-up bodies in the streets. Institutions such as the press were afraid to speak up against the violence for fear of reprisal, and the church was openly siding with the conservatives, telling followers to kill liberals.

By the time La Violencia came to an end around 1958, anywhere between 180,000 and 300,000 Colombians had been killed. This horrific period closed when a military administration was replaced by a moderate compromise government formed by liberals and conservatives. In a way, Colombia is still suffering the effects of La Violencia: it was during this time that the FARC, an armed insurgency group still operating in Colombia, was formed.

Cocaine

Pablo Escobar was a small-time thug and thief who ruthlessly clawed his way to the top of Colombia’s criminal underworld. He started out in the mid-1970’s and by 1980 he was making millions. In 1982 he was even able to get elected to public office. Most of his money was made shipping cocaine to the United States, where a huge market had spring up. Escobar was head of the Medellín Cartel, which at one time controlled 80% of all the cocaine trade in the world. With his famous policy of “Plata o plomo” (lead or silver, basically either bribery or murder) he brought Colombia’s political system under his control: every judge, journalist or politician was either bought off or killed. By the late 1980’s, his control over the nation was nearly complete and the Medellín Cartel was making billions of dollars.

Eventually international pressure, primarily from the United States, forced Colombia to bring Escobar down. In 1991 he agreed to go to prison, but only if he could build his own. The next year he escaped, fearing extradition to the United States. He was killed in 1993 when he was tracked down by a US-supported Colombian police unit that had been specifically tasked to find him. He was gunned down as he attempted to flee on a rooftop. Even with Escobar gone, the cocaine trade has continued to thrive in Colombia and still makes billions.

The 1990’s to the present

The 1990’s brought about a period of relative peace for Colombia. Many of the smaller rebel groups, including the once-feared M-19, laid down their arms in favor of legal change, although other groups (most notably the FARC) remained. With Escobar dead, the cartels lost a lot of their power and mainly fought among themselves. The era was far from utopian, however, as election fraud and government corruption were still extremely high. Since the late 1990’s, Colombian leaders have been trying to modernize the economy, crush the drug cartels and improve human rights in Colombia. The US has been a vital partner in their efforts, giving billions of aid to help destroy the drug lords and the FARC, who are sometimes one and the same.

Current president Alvaro Uribe is a moderate who has initiated a very hard line against the drug lords and the FARC. Many accuse him of going too far, and trampling basic human rights in his quest to bring down the criminals and rebels. He has certainly been aggressive, ordering a military strike inside of neighboring Ecuador in early 2008 which killed several important FARC leaders but caused an ugly international incident.