Gran Colombia

Gran Colombia grew out of the wars of independence against Spain in northern South America. After the collapse of the First and Second Venezuelan Republics, Simón Bolívar rebuilt his forces in the Orinoco basin, where the Congress of Angostura gathered in February 1819. In a daring campaign across the flooded llanos and over the Andes he joined the New Granadan patriots under Francisco de Paula Santander and defeated the royalists at the Battle of Boyacá on 7 August 1819, opening the road to Bogotá. On 17 December 1819 the Congress of Angostura passed a Fundamental Law proclaiming the Republic of Colombia, a union of Venezuela, New Granada and the still unconquered Presidency of Quito. Historians later called it Gran Colombia to distinguish it from the modern country. The Congress of Cúcuta adopted a centralist constitution in 1821, electing Bolívar president and Santander vice-president, and in the same year the Battle of Carabobo freed most of Venezuela. Panama declared its independence from Spain in November 1821 and joined the republic of its own accord. Antonio José de Sucre’s victory at the Battle of Pichincha in May 1822 brought in Quito, and Bolívar annexed the port of Guayaquil in July 1822, shortly before meeting José de San Martín there.

The republic had perhaps 2.5 million inhabitants, scattered across very different regions: the cattle plains and cacao estates of Venezuela, the Andean highlands and gold-mining Pacific lowlands of New Granada, the densely indigenous sierra of Quito, and the transit corridor of Panama. Society remained shaped by colonial hierarchy, with a creole elite of landowners and merchants above mestizo and pardo artisans and farmers, indigenous communities and enslaved Africans. War had devastated Venezuela in particular, killing many and scattering its herds. The economy depended on exports of cacao, coffee, tobacco, hides and gold, while poor roads made trade between the regions slow and costly; a journey from Caracas to Bogotá took weeks. Liberal legislators at the Congress of Cúcuta abolished the Indian tribute, ordered communal lands divided, and passed a manumission law in July 1821 under which children born to enslaved mothers would be free, though they owed service to their mothers’ owners until adulthood. The government closed small convents and promoted Lancasterian schools and new colleges, but the Catholic Church kept great influence, and many reforms met resistance. Loans raised in London in 1822 and 1824 paid for the war, but the republic stopped payments in 1826, damaging its credit for decades.

Gran Colombia was born at war, and its army, made up of Venezuelan llaneros, New Granadan recruits and the British Legions of foreign volunteers, was the most experienced in South America. After the Battle of Carabobo in June 1821, Spanish resistance in Venezuela ended with the naval Battle of Lake Maracaibo in July 1823, won by Admiral José Prudencio Padilla, and the surrender of Puerto Cabello in November. In the south, the costly Battle of Bomboná and Sucre’s victory at the Battle of Pichincha in 1822 secured Quito. Colombian troops then carried the war into Peru: Bolívar won the cavalry Battle of Junín in August 1824, and Sucre destroyed the last royalist field army at the Battle of Ayacucho on 9 December 1824, ending Spanish rule in South America. The cost was heavy. Recruitment and requisitions fell hardest on the regions nearest the fronts, and the army consumed most of the budget. Military commanders became powerful regional figures, among them José Antonio Páez in Venezuela and Juan José Flores in Quito. After independence the republic fought Peru in 1828–1829 over Guayaquil and the southern border provinces; Sucre and Flores defeated the Peruvian army at the Battle of Tarqui in February 1829, but the war deepened the strain on a bankrupt state.

The Constitution of Cúcuta of 1821 created a centralised republic with a president and vice-president elected indirectly for four-year terms, a bicameral congress and a judiciary headed by a high court. The territory was divided into departments under intendants, provinces under governors, and cantons, and a law of 1824 redrew the map into twelve departments. Because Bolívar was usually absent on campaign, day-to-day government rested with Vice-President Santander in Bogotá, a careful lawyer who insisted on legality, built up the treasury and schools, and was later remembered as the ‘man of laws’. Centralism suited New Granada better than Venezuela and Quito, whose elites resented decisions taken in distant Bogotá. In 1826 Congress summoned Páez to answer charges of abuse of authority; he refused and launched the rebellion known as La Cosiata in Valencia. Bolívar returned, pardoned Páez and pressed for a stronger executive modelled on his Bolivian constitution, which split him from Santander. The Convention of Ocaña, called in 1828 to reform the constitution, broke up without agreement. Bolívar then assumed dictatorial powers by the Organic Decree of August 1828, survived the September conspiracy against his life, and exiled Santander, who was accused of complicity in it.

Gran Colombia was the military engine of independence in northern and western South America. Its armies and generals freed not only Venezuela, New Granada and Quito but also Peru and Upper Peru, which became Bolivia, and the union gave Bolívar the base for his wider plans. In 1826 he convened the Congress of Panama, the first attempt at a league of Spanish American republics; only Gran Colombia ratified its treaties, but it is often cited as a forerunner of later inter-American cooperation. The United States recognised the republic in 1822, among the first Latin American states it recognised, and Britain concluded a commercial treaty with it in 1825. The republic’s laws on manumission, education and the Church set patterns followed by its successor states, and its divisions between centralists and federalists, and between civilians and military caudillos, shaped their politics for the rest of the century. The memory of the union survives in symbols: the national flags of Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador all descend from the yellow, blue and red tricolour of Francisco de Miranda adopted by the republic. Bolívar’s dream of unity has been invoked repeatedly since, most prominently by Hugo Chávez, who renamed Venezuela the Bolivarian Republic in 1999.

The union broke apart between 1829 and 1831 under the weight of regional resentment, debt, unpaid armies and quarrels over Bolívar’s authority. Reports that Bolívar’s ministers were sounding out European courts about a monarchy to succeed him angered liberals, and in 1829 General José María Córdova rose in revolt in Antioquia and was killed. In November 1829 assemblies in Venezuela, encouraged by Páez, called for separation. The Constituent Congress that met in Bogotá in January 1830, known as the Admirable Congress, drafted a new constitution, but Venezuela had already gone its own way, and its congress at Valencia adopted a separate constitution later that year. Bolívar, ill with tuberculosis, resigned the presidency and left Bogotá in May 1830. In the same month Quito proclaimed the separate State of Ecuador under Juan José Flores, and on 4 June Sucre, Bolívar’s chosen heir, was murdered at Berruecos on his way to Quito. General Rafael Urdaneta seized power in Bogotá in September, hoping to recall Bolívar, but Bolívar died near Santa Marta on 17 December 1830. Urdaneta’s regime collapsed in 1831, and a convention organised the remaining central provinces, including Panama, as the State of New Granada, formally ending the union.