Republic of Colombia

The Republic of Colombia was created by the constitution of 1886, which replaced the Liberal federation of the United States of Colombia set up by the Rionegro constitution of 1863. Under that charter nine sovereign states held most power, and quarrels between them, the Radical Liberals and the Catholic Church produced repeated civil wars. Rafael Núñez of Cartagena, a Liberal who was president in 1880–1882 and again from 1884, promoted a programme he called the Regeneration, aimed at order, central authority and reconciliation with the Church, and drew closer to the Conservatives. When the Radicals rose against him in 1884–1885 and were defeated, Núñez announced that the constitution of 1863 had ceased to exist. A National Council of Delegates, two from each state, drafted a new charter whose principal author was the Conservative scholar Miguel Antonio Caro; it was proclaimed in August 1886. The states became departments under governors appointed by the president, the presidential term was extended from two to six years, Catholicism was declared the religion of the nation, and the death penalty was restored except for political crimes. A concordat with the Holy See in 1887 returned much of the Church’s influence, including a leading role in education. Amended many times, the constitution lasted until 1991, longer than any other in Colombia’s history.

When the republic was founded most of its people, some four million at the census of 1905, lived in the Andean highlands and valleys as farmers, labourers and artisans, and the mountains made transport slow and costly. Coffee transformed the economy. Grown increasingly on small and medium farms in Antioquia, Caldas, the Cauca Valley and Tolima, regions opened by internal colonisation, it became the main export, and production rose from about one million 60-kilogram bags in 1913 to more than six million by 1953. The National Federation of Coffee Growers, founded in 1927, organised marketing, and coffee earnings, together with the 25 million dollars the United States paid in compensation for Panama in the 1920s, financed railways, roads and the first factories, notably the textile mills of Medellín. Bananas grown for the United Fruit Company near Santa Marta, oil from the fields near Barrancabermeja from 1921, and later coal, flowers and gold widened exports, and petroleum eventually became the leading export. The population grew to 48.3 million at the census of 2018, about three quarters of it urban, with Bogotá, Medellín, Cali and Barranquilla the largest cities. Most Colombians are Catholic, and the 2018 census counted about 9 per cent of the population as Afro-Colombian and 4 per cent as Indigenous.

The republic’s first great test was the Thousand Days’ War of 1899–1902, in which Liberal insurgents led by Rafael Uribe Uribe and Benjamín Herrera fought the Conservative-dominated government; the government’s victory at Palonegro in May 1900 was the bloodiest battle, and the war, ended by the treaties of Neerlandia and Wisconsin in 1902, cost an estimated 100,000 lives or more. Rafael Reyes then professionalised the army with Chilean instructors and founded the Military Cadet School in 1907. In 1932–1933 Colombia fought Peru over the Amazon port of Leticia, which it kept after League of Nations mediation, and in 1951–1953 it sent an infantry battalion and frigates to the Korean War. General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla’s coup of June 1953 opened the only period of military rule in the twentieth century. From the 1960s the armed forces fought guerrilla movements, among them the FARC and the ELN, both formed in 1964, and the M-19, whose seizure of the Palace of Justice in November 1985 ended in an army assault that left about a hundred dead. With United States aid under Plan Colombia, about ten billion dollars by 2015, the armed forces grew into some of the largest in the Americas, but the killing of civilians presented as guerrillas, 6,402 cases between 2002 and 2008 according to the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, became their gravest scandal.

Colombia has been governed under two constitutions. Under the charter of 1886, which created a unitary, presidential republic, Conservative-led governments held power until 1930, among them that of Rafael Reyes, whose rule of 1904–1909 his opponents called a dictatorship. A reform of 1910 set a four-year presidential term and banned immediate re-election, and from 1930 to 1946 the Liberals governed; under Alfonso López Pumarejo a reform of 1936 declared that property had a social function, guaranteed the right to strike and allowed the state to intervene in the economy. After the violence that followed 1946 and the coup of 1953, Alberto Lleras Camargo and Laureano Gómez agreed in pacts signed in Spain in 1956 and 1957 on a National Front, approved by a plebiscite on 1 December 1957, the first national vote in which women took part: from 1958 to 1974 the Liberals and Conservatives alternated in the presidency and shared public offices equally. The constitution of 1991, written by an elected assembly in which the demobilised M-19 formed the largest list, defined Colombia as a social state under the rule of law, created the Constitutional Court and the acción de tutela to protect fundamental rights, recognised the country’s ethnic and cultural diversity and decentralised power to 32 departments and the capital district. Immediate presidential re-election, allowed in 2004, was abolished again in 2015.

Colombia’s history has reached well beyond its borders. The secession of Panama in 1903 made possible the Panama Canal, opened in 1914, and left a resentment of the United States that the Thomson–Urrutia Treaty and its payment of 25 million dollars only partly eased. Bogotá hosted the Ninth Pan-American Conference of 1948, which adopted the charter of the Organization of American States, and Colombia was the only South American country to send troops to the Korean War. Gabriel García Márquez, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982, brought the Caribbean coast, and a fictional version of the banana massacre of 1928, to readers worldwide in One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Colombian music, from cumbia and vallenato to modern pop, spread across Latin America and beyond. Colombian coffee, advertised through the figure of Juan Valdez from 1958, became a widely recognised brand. The cocaine trade built by the Medellín and Cali cartels in the 1970s and 1980s made Colombia central to the United States’ war on drugs, and its long conflict displaced millions of people. The Constitutional Court became known for its rulings on social rights, and the 2016 peace agreement with the FARC, with its Special Jurisdiction for Peace and Truth Commission, drew international attention for its approach to transitional justice.

The present state took shape through crisis and reform. In the 1980s and early 1990s drug cartels, guerrillas and paramilitaries challenged it at once: the Medellín cartel of Pablo Escobar waged a bombing campaign and had the presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán killed in 1989, until Escobar was shot dead by police in 1993. The constitution of 1991 renewed the political framework, but the FARC and the ELN kept growing, and peace talks in a demilitarised zone under President Andrés Pastrana collapsed in 2002. Plan Colombia and Álvaro Uribe’s Democratic Security policy of 2002–2010 pushed back the guerrillas, and the paramilitary AUC demobilised between 2003 and 2006. Under Juan Manuel Santos, talks in Havana produced a peace agreement with the FARC, which voters narrowly rejected in October 2016; a revised text was ratified by Congress in November, Santos received the Nobel Peace Prize, and the FARC disarmed in 2017 and became a political party. Colombia joined the OECD in 2020. Gustavo Petro, a former M-19 guerrilla, became the first left-wing president in 2022, and in June 2026 the right-wing lawyer Abelardo de la Espriella won the presidential run-off. Today Colombia, with about 53 million people, is the third most populous country in Latin America and an upper-middle-income economy, though the ELN, former FARC dissidents and drug-trafficking groups remain active.