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Coffee and Conflict in Colombia, 1886-1910

Duke University Press

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 and socially dispossessed classes were armed and participating in politics.

That present-day Colombian elite politicians implicitly have shared the view of their nineteenth-century counterparts that competition for government jobs is the root cause of political strife is obvious from the nature of the plan they devised to end the political strife in 1957. Called the Frente Nacional, that plan provided for the alternation of the Liberal and Conservative parties in the control of the presidency and equal division of all government posts at all levels between the two traditional parties.

Competition for the spoils of government, then, is an interpretation advanced by important nineteenth- as well as twentieth-century observers and participants as the best explanation for Colombian political violence. Especially when couched in the setting of a closed, stratified society of limited economic opportunities, it is a thesis appealing in its simplicity and powerful in its interpretive force. Its major weakness lies in its inability to explain adequately long periods of relative political peace and stability, such as the period 1902 to 1946. Proponents of the competition for spoils thesis also depend on normative cultural explanations of upper-class divisions into opposing parties and factions by stressing the alleged pernicious influence of supposedly Latin defects inherited from the Spaniards. Similarly, they view the elaborate, profoundly different ideologies and programs that articulate upper-class differences as nothing but smokescreens that hide the personal appetite of politicians for public posts and the honors, distinctions, and titles which accompany them.

Quijano Wallis, for example, found the roots of the profound division among Colombians and the "hatred between the parties" in the Guillén Martínez's more extreme argument builds an elaborate case for the Spanish origins of the "psychological disease" of the Colombian body politic—the insatiable thirst for the perquisites of public office. Guillén denounces the "farce" of Colombian politics in which the real motives of members of political groups are disguised in ideological garb. Although he admits at one point the sincerity of many partisans who believe they fight for principles, he admonishes them for their incapacity to discern their unconscious drives.

atavistic sentiment, bequeathed by the Spanish colonizers, who like all Latins, have preoccupied themselves a great deal with principles and theories and political interests, and very little with the real economic concerns and with material progress, which distinguishes the nations of the races which populate the countries of the North in Europe and America.

Close analysis of nineteenth-century Colombian history reveals, however, that the root structure of Colombian political violence was far more complex than the advocates of the quest-for-spoils thesis indicate. Divisions within the upper class and the systematic philosophical and programmatic positions that define them are not merely political manifestations of cultural traits; they reflect diverging economic interests within the upper class as the nineteenth century wore on. Simple competition for control of government was complicated and overlaid by the periodic appearance of new economic opportunities as Colombians responded to the demands for tropical agricultural exports by the industrializing nations of the North Atlantic basin. Colombia experienced these export booms beginning in the 1840's with tobacco, later with cinchona bark and to a lesser degree with indigo, and finally, near the end of the century, with coffee. During the nineteenth century, however, Colombians found that after an initial boom period, when prices were high, they could not compete with other tropical areas once world supply had met demand and prices fell.

Participation in export agriculture drew groups of Colombians more fully into the economic, political, and intellectual currents of the developing West. Direct links with the liberal "leading nations" nurtured a group of upper-class Colombians engaged in exporting primary goods and importing foreign manufactures. These men came to share the values and aspirations of the liberal world view dominant in the industrializing West. The success of export agriculture led to the rise and dominance of the Liberal party in Colombia after 1850. The hegemony of liberal thought and politics characterized the history of the nation during the next quarter century. After 1875, however, export agriculture entered a period of rapid decline, and by the early 1880's the industry was in crisis. In 1885 Liberals lost control of politics to Conservatives, the liberal world view was repudiated, and a conservative political and economic philosophy consistent with Colombia's reversion to a relatively closed agrarian economy became dominant in Colombia.

The success and failure of export agriculture in nineteenth-century Colombia modified and complicated the "politics of scarcity" generally associated with a stagnant, closed domestic economy with limited social mobility. Increased economic power led to growing real political power for certain groups and demands for government policies favorable to their interests and consonant with their values and aspirations. Furthermore, because government derived its main income from custom duties, periods of export boom meant increased government revenues and allowed governments to meet their obligations, expand their activities, and invest, if necessary, in the coercive apparatus needed to preserve their control. Conversely, a decline in the value of the export earnings of an economic sector decreased its relative political weight, called into question its economic and political philosophy, stimulated the demands of other sectors, placed government in severe financial straits, and forced political groups in power to retrench and become more blatantly coercive.

Colombia's two traditional political parties crystallized in the 1840's and reflected in many respects the dual nature of the Colombian economy. Although systematic work on the early sociology of the parties remains to be done, it is clear that the programs and policies of the Liberal party more closely reflected the interests of exporters of agricultural products and importers of foreign goods. Liberals, for reasons which undoubtedly have to do with their ideological predisposition and economic and social interests inherited from the colonial period, appear to have participated much more fully in the opportunities afforded by export agriculture, although, again, confirmation of this generalization awaits detailed investigation. These Liberals not only produced for export, but became export-import merchants who thrived with the increase in foreign trade fostered by the export economy.

The rise of the Liberal party in the late 1840's, its long period of hegemony in Colombian politics, and its decline and loss of power to the Conservatives after 1880 closely parallel the growth and decline of export agriculture, particularly tobacco, during the same period. Beginning with tentative reforms and meeting stiff resistance in the 1850's, Liberals ultimately succeeded, after the decisive civil war of 1860-1862, in writing their organic Liberal world view into the Constitution of 1863. The hegemony of the Liberals' philosophy and their control of government were not challenged until the last half of the 1870's, when their ideas and policies were subjected to telling criticism and their control of politics confronted serious and ultimately successful challenge. Earnings from tobacco exports fluctuated between 100,000 and 200,000 pesos annually in the mid-1840's. Beginning in the late 1840's, they expanded rapidly to more than five million pesos annually in most years between 1850 and 1875. Tobacco exports began their "definitive decline" after 1876 as importers began to favor the higher, more uniform quality of tobaccos from other tropical regions, and by the mid-1880's tobacco exports had declined to less than half a million pesos.

Other export products rose to ephemeral importance during the period of nineteenth-century Liberal hegemony. The most important of these was quinine, extracted from the forests of Colombia in the form of cinchona bark. Export earnings assumed importance in the 1850's, averaging about half a million pesos annually during that decade, declined somewhat in the 1860's, and then rose to a peak of over five million pesos in the year 1880-81. But the boom in quinine exports came to an abrupt end after that year; the world price of quinine sulphate fell from thirteen shillings an ounce in 1879 to three shillings sixpence in 1883 as high quality cultivated quinine from British and Dutch plantations in the East Indies flooded the market. By 1885 foreign exchange earnings from quinine had declined to virtually nothing.

The success of export agriculture achieved under Liberal aegis strengthened the Liberal party physically and ideologically. At first glance the political impact of the tobacco industry, backbone of the export economy during the third quarter of the nineteenth century, appears to have been slight. Comprising only a tiny fraction of total agricultural production, tobacco was exported and marketed by an oligopoly tied to European commercial houses. The political significance of the tobacco industry stemmed from the fact that it began to produce large amounts of foreign exchange for the first time since Independence and spawned a powerful class of merchants engaged in importing European goods. As these goods moved through the custom houses, they provided government revenues on an unprecedented scale. In the late 1840's and early 1850's, under the aegis of the Liberal party, import-export interests acquired preponderant political power, and the initial success of their laissez-faire economic reforms won approval or acquiescence from upper-class leaders identified with both political parties. But if many Conservatives acquiesced in or supported the passage of narrow economic reforms confined to questions of tariff policy or tobacco monopoly, they opposed Liberal attempts to deal with larger, more fundamental issues of political economy, such as the role of the State and the Church in Colombian society. Imbibing an integral world view which had become dominant in the industrializing nations of the West, Liberals ultimately sought to write into law a philosophy of man and society fundamentally at odds with the structure of the society they lived in—a society their Conservative opponents cherished and fought to maintain.

Surveying their society at mid-century, Colombian Liberals were appalled by the restraints on individual freedom and initiative inherited from the colonial period. The conservative reaction following the civil war of 1839-1841 had eliminated many of the tentative liberal reforms achieved during the government of Francisco de Paula Santander. These included moderate reduction in import and export taxes, measures designed to limit the accumulation of property in mortmain by the Church, and efforts to reduce the role of the Church in education. The conservative Constitution of 1843 provided for centralized government under a strong executive and subsequent policy favored the Church and sought to arrest the spread of liberal ideology. Under the direction of future Conservative president Mariano Ospina Rodríguez, the educational system was reorganized. Liberal texts like those of Jeremy Bentham were banned from the classroom and new courses designed to foster Catholic and conservative thought were instituted.

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Excerpted from Coffee and Conflict in Colombia, 1886-1910 by Charles W. Bergquist. Copyright © 1978 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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