Introduction: The Political Economy of Nineteenth-Century Colombia

In the closed, stratified Colombian society of the last century, economic resources were monopolized by a small upper class interested in preserving its position and generally unable or unwilling to generate new wealth. The lack of new economic opportunities in a stagnant domestic economy made politics an inordinately important avenue for social mobility. Politics and government provided suitable employment in a culture that encouraged training in the traditional professions and reserved highest prestige for accomplishments in the classical skills of rhetoric and polemics. Government offered opportunities for travel and occasion for enrichment through favors and contracts. Control of government was a prize coveted by new, energetic, ambitious men who sought to improve their social position. Groups of men from all classes of society, bound together by traditional patron-client relationships, disputed for control of government with practically every means at their disposal. Once control was achieved, it was guarded with religious exclusivism.

Nineteenth-century Colombian politicians and political commentators recognized and deplored this violent competition for public posts and the perquisites of office and often correlated it with the political instability characteristic of the nineteenth century. One observer, Juan Francisco Ortiz, believed that competition for the limited number of public positions contributed in large part to the political disorders of the post-Independence period, and as early as 1833 future Liberal politicians Lorenzo María Lleras and Florentino González were denouncing "empleo-manía" in the press. At different times during his long, influential career in Colombian politics, Rafael Núñez linked the lack of economic opportunities outside government to political violence. Nearing the end of his first presidential term, Núñez used harsh language to denounce the "uncompromising materialism" that threatened to make politics a "vile business of plunder," nothing more than "naked commercial speculation." As soon as a new chief executive takes office, Núñez exclaimed, he is besieged by an "army of office seekers" and, unable to satisfy them all with public posts and favors, he must watch them swell the ranks of a new and formidable political opposition.

The contemporary who most carefully described the link between a stagnant domestic economy and political turmoil was José María Quijano Wallis, prominent Liberal merchant and politician during the second half of the nineteenth century. Looking back on eighty years of Colombian history from Independence until the end of the War of the Thousand Days, a period marked by seven major civil wars and more than a score of smaller outbreaks of political violence, Quijano Wallis wrote in his memoirs:

The lack of development of our national wealth and the consequent impoverishment of our people, has led the military caudillos, most of the time, to seek their livelihood and personal aggrandizement in the hazards of civil war, or in the intrigue and accommodations of politics. Thus, one can say that in Colombia, the first, if not the only industries of national, popular character, have been civil war and politics.

Accusations that political dissidents, in spite of their elaborate ideological, economic, and administrative reform programs, were really motivated only by their desire for public posts were commonplace in the nineteenth century. Revealingly, one of the most perceptive political commentators of the last third of the nineteenth century did not expressly deny that charge leveled at his party of dissident Conservatives by the Liberal press in 1899. Instead he pleaded that political debate, for the honor of the country, take a higher ground. In the incisive, candid style typical of his writings, Carlos Martínez Silva argued that to believe that the distinguished Conservative dissidents were motivated only by the search for personal improvement would lead to the conclusion that in Colombia all notion of honor and dignity was lost. Use of that line of argument was dangerous, for the weapon cut both ways. Proof could be found in the attitude of the same Liberal press which bitterly censured Liberals who had accepted posts with the present government, accusing them of abandoning their Liberal ideas and principles.

Is there any assurance that if the offers were to multiply, the so-called abdications would not also increase? And if that were so, could not one also come to the conclusion that the Liberals, who complain so of the injustices and iniquities of the government in power, are likewise motivated by an appetite for temporalities.

Many twentieth-century Colombian scholars and politicians, influenced by Colombia's mid-twentieth century experience with political violence, have continued the school of thought sketched by Quijano Wallis, stressing the quest for public posts and the perquisites of office as the motor of Colombian political instability. Historian Fernando Guillén Martínez is the most convincing exponent of this interpretation of Colombian national character and history. Guilléen argues that the Colombian political parties formed out of the desire to compete for control of the "primary employer, the government."

Under the appearance of "profound" ideological differences, those parties grouped people of every social condition and of every professional, political and regional interest into rival hordes. What really united them was not their "statements of principle," but rather the sensation that that amalgam—in each "Party"—strengthened its members in order to dispute with their rivals that inextinguishable treasure that was and continued to be the Government.

While Guillén emphasized the elements of national character involved in the desire to seize and monopolize government, Camilo Torres analyzed the same quest for political spoils from a sociological point of view. In Colombia, he argued, upper-class monopoly of economic and cultural resources had choked off all avenues for social mobility except politics, which was dominated by the two traditional elite-led vertical parties. In this manner Camilo Torres explained the traditional goals expressed by partisans during periods of political violence in spite of the fact that large numbers of the economically...