Estructuras discursivas

The fundamental division between two parties that came to be known as Liberals and Conservatives emerged during the years from 1826 to the end of the civil war of 1839–1842. Up to this point the developing party division has been depicted more or less as it was seen by many contemporaries, with the critical issue being the attitudes and policies toward the Bolivarians, ex- clusion or conciliation. Twentieth-century interpreters, however, have sought retrospectively to understand the political alignments that emerged by 1842 as an expression of social division. What social features, then, underlay this division?

Conventionally, conservative elites in Spanish America have been iden- tified as landowners, clergy, and military officers, while liberal elites were

considered mostly to be lawyers and merchants. But this simple formula cannot withstand scrutiny; both parties were diverse in social composition and occupation. Many visible conservatives were lawyers and/or merchants, and many liberals were landowners and military officers. There were even some liberal clergy, particularly before 1850. In any case, such categoriza- tions by occupation or economic interest inevitably fail because, through most of the nineteenth century, a single individual in the active political elite was likely to have several occupations—for example, landowner and lawyer or military officer and merchant. And if an individual did not encompass such varied occupations, members of his family probably did.

If the long-conventional scheme pitting conservative landowners, clergy, and military against liberal lawyers and merchants is now recognized as of- fering an inadequate understanding of the socioeconomic bases of political alignments, what alternative formulations may be put in its place? One for- mulation has proposed that conservatives were likely to come from cities that were important administrative centers in the colonial period, while lib- erals hailed from towns that were more marginal in the colonial era but were of growing importance in the republican era. Important cities in the colonial period offered greater access to university education and connections to colo- nial administrators, thus facilitating the entry of youths from these centers into the political elite, in contrast to young men from subsidiary provinces who, as relative outsiders, had a harder time entering the political estab- lishment. Further, some cities that were important in the colonial period suf- fered relative economic decline in the republican era, thus reinforcing their conservative orientation. For New Granada this formulation fits to a degree. Popayán, Cartagena, and Tunja, all important in the colonial period and in relative decline in the early republican era, were predominantly conserva- tive in the first half of the nineteenth century, in contrast with the provinces of el Socorro, Vélez, and Neiva, which were marginal in the colonial era and emerged as centers of liberal strength.

This scheme, however, is inadequate for a number of reasons. It does not account for the conservatism of Antioquia, which, like typically liberal provinces, was not important administratively in the colonial era. Further- more, it does not explain political divisions within regions or even within cities. Several other formulations address these local divisions. One sees de- scendants of colonial administrators, as social and political insiders, de- fending centralized and more authoritarian government, while those of less well-connected families in the same localities tended to be liberals. An al- ternative way of understanding local divisions describes a conservative es- tablishment not in relation to colonial administrative offices but rather with relation to economic power in general and large landholdings in particular. The latter analysis, persuasively applied to Cali, finds that conservatives and liberals in that city had similar kinds of occupations but that conservatives began with better social locations, primarily with regard to family wealth.

ferentiation between a recognized establishment and socially emergent in- dividuals. Men of conservative orientation, in 1839–1840, as well as later in the 1850s, often thought that those who favored a federalist system were men of lesser social position who, being unable to reach high national of- fice, aspired to magnify their power in a smaller theater on the local level. In 1839 General Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera wrote that federalism was supported by those who, having discovered “that the highest positions are reached with difficulty without merit, and without precedents of honor and virtue, want to be leaders in miserable provincial governments.” José Manuel Restrepo also occasionally dismissed rebels as men who were trying to reach too far beyond their social origins or educational attainments. When the Gaitán brothers turned against the government in Febuary 1840, Restrepo explained that “they want to rise to a level beyond what their personal qual- ities and their humble origins permit.” In these quotations, however, it should be noted that “merit” or “personal qualities” are mentioned along with social origins. And, in fact, individuals of provincial, less than aristo- cratic, origins, who were intelligent and well-educated, rose to the top as Bolivarians or, later, as ministeriales or Conservatives. Restrepo himself is a notable case of ascent by a man who became distinctly conservative.

In some other cases, the differentiation between establishment and so- cially emergent is described more specifically in terms of cities. Francisco Soto of Pamplona, like José Manuel Restrepo of Antioquia, was a provincial who rose through merit. Born in San José de Cúcuta, he studied law in Santafé de Bogotá in the late colonial period with the leading lights of the time (Camilo Torres, Frutos Joaquín Gutiérrez). Although he became an im- portant minister, legislator, and jurist, he nonetheless resented the haughti- ness of men from established colonial centers. In July 1831, Soto ascribed the political reaction under Urdaneta, in part, to “the exalted aristocracy of some sons of Bogotá, Pamplona, Tunja and other towns who dreamed of mar- quessates and earldoms.” A few months later he blamed Popayán’s threat to join Ecuador on that city’s “aristocrats (because they do exist in New Granada).” And he complained of the tendency of Bogotanos “to suppose themselves infallible, and for that reason to disregard the ideas of those of us who live in the provinces.”

The division between provincials and established people in the colonial centers may be seen in the development of a heated political conflict over higher education policy that emerged in the 1830s and 1840s. During the late colonial period, the route to government appointments for criollos predom- inantly lay in the study of law at Bogotá’s two colegios—San Bartolomé or Nuestra Señora del Rosario. With the effective independence of New Granada after 1821, the new government sought to make secondary educa- tion more widely available by founding provincial colegios. During the 1820s, furthermore, the government responded to provincial desires by per- mitting the study of law at these establishments, thus facilitating the entry of provincial youths into political careers and government positions. In 1826,

however, a reaction began, and authorities in Bogotá, in the name of stan- dards, began to try to restrict legal and other professional instruction to the three universities established in the chief centers of the colonial aristocracy (Bogotá, Cartagena, and Popayán). This effort reached its culmination un- der the ministerial governments of 1837–1845. In the aftermath of the civil war of 1839–1842, the ministerials tended to blame political disorder on a supposed superabundance of university-educated lawyers. The ministerials in the early 1840s claimed that young lawyers, because they were under- employed, turned to political careers, and the pursuit of their ambitions fu- eled the country’s political upheavals.

While the ministerials saw more restricted access to higher education as necessary to public order, the policy was perceived by gentry in lesser provincial towns as a deliberate attempt to frustrate the careers of their sons. The policy provoked so much resistance that the government of General Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera (1845–1849) softened the restrictions on pro- fessional education in the provinces. After the election of Liberal General José Hilario López in 1849, the Liberals, many from modest provincial back- grounds, moved in 1850 to demolish the whole system of centralized con- trol of higher education.

Conflicts over higher education policies from 1821 through 1850 thus seem to illustrate a contest for power between descendants of the colonial aristocracy in Bogotá, Cartagena, and Popayán on the one hand and men of lesser provincial origins on the other. But the same issue also points to the need to modify and complicate this interpretation of Colombian politics in the period when the two traditional parties began to emerge (1827–1842). First, not all of those who supported a strong central government (includ- ing centralized control of education) were descendants of the colonial aris- tocracy in Bogotá, Cartagena, and Popayán. José Manuel Restrepo, born in the town of Envigado in Antioquia but sent to be educated in Santafé de Bo- gotá at the Colegio de San Bartolomé (1799–1806), was not a son of the colo- nial bureaucracy. Yet as secretary of the interior (1821–1830), with other cabinet members of more clearly aristocratic origins, he supported Bolívar’s dictatorship of 1828 and was one of the chief proponents of the monarchy project of 1829. Restrepo also was the architect of the more centralized and restrictive higher education policy in 1826 and one of its principal advocates in the 1830s and 1840s.

Mariano Ospina Rodríguez, the dominant force in the centralizing re- action that occurred after the civil war of 1839–1842, also was a provincial not connected to the colonial aristocracy. Born in Guasca, a small farming town north of Bogotá, to a family with middling landholdings, Ospina came to the capital to study at the Colegio de San Bartolomé. As a university stu- dent he was a Santanderista liberal and indeed took part in the conspiracy against Bolívar in September 1828. When the conspiracy failed, Ospina es- caped to Antioquia, where, because of his evident capability, he soon emerged as a political leader in the province, in the process seemingly as-

similating its predominantly conservative values. After the civil war of 1839–1842, Ospina as secretary of the interior (1841–1845) championed bring- ing the Jesuits back to the country and inserting them into secondary edu- cation. Ospina also was the most vigorous and visible champion of restricting professional education to the three universities in Bogotá, Cartagena, and Popayán. He also pushed for a constitutional reform that would strengthen the hand of the government; the resulting constitution of 1843 was percep- tibly more centralist, giving more power to the executive and reducing that of the Congress and provincial legislatures. Subsequently Ospina became the dominant figure in the Conservative Party.

The cases of José Manuel Restrepo and Mariano Ospina Rodríguez il- lustrate the point that some of those who founded the political group that came to be known, after 1848, as the Conservative Party had provincial ori- gins that were sociologically similar to those of the men who founded the Liberal Party. Further, since neither Restrepo nor Ospina nor others in the ranks of the moderates and ministeriales came from families with colonial bureaucratic traditions, they could hardly be viewed as acting to defend pre- existing political privilege. Their predominant concern was preserving po- litical and social order.

Desire for order surely was the most important factor drawing the elites of Antioquia into an identification with political conservatism. Antioquia as a region had no important administrative centers in the colonial era and thus in many ways corresponded to the sociological makeup of the largely lib- eral province of el Socorro. Indeed, from the 1820s through the 1850s, some towns in Antioquia, among them Rionegro and Santa Fe de Antioquia, were identified with liberalism. However, from the 1830s onward Antioquia as a whole increasingly became a bastion of conservatism. Presumably the cap- ital accumulation generated by gold mining and commerce based on gold exports encouraged the development of a regional upper class that for the most part gave a very high priority to social order and the security of prop- erty rather than to the pursuit of political ambitions, which tended to find expression in civil war. The religious piety of the Antioqueño poor further provided a social base for elite conservatism in the region.

Intraregional conflicts also played an important part in the development of partisan political identities. In the northern provinces, the towns of el So- corro and San Gil developed antagonistic partisan identities in part because of their competition to dominate Socorro province and its financial and eco- nomic resources. Similarly, in Antioquia the growing dominance of political conservatives in Medellin may have encouraged some of the elite in its com- mercial rival, Rionegro, to adopt a liberal party identity. Neighboring Marinilla, a smaller rival of liberal Rionegro, in turn became a conservative town. On the Caribbean coast, the ports of Santa Marta and, even more, Sa- banilla-Barranquilla in the early republican era emerged as liberal chal- lengers to the established but declining port of Cartagena.

not divide clearly over economic policy. Although elite economic ideas and policies varied over time, from the early 1830s until 1880 they tended to move within an overall bipartisan consensus—leaning toward protection- ism in the early 1830s but evolving toward free trade from the late 1840s until 1880. On the subject of political organization, those in the Santander stream (usually known as liberals) after 1837 tended to be more sympathetic to more regional autonomy, while their conservative rivals favored a more centralist structure. But on the question of federalism versus centralism, both parties changed their views opportunistically, and on this subject also there was often an elite consensus, albeit one that changed over time.

The two parties most consistently divided on attitudes toward the power and influence of the Church, most clearly after the civil war of 1839–1842. Liberals, while often Catholic in belief and practice, generally thought that the Church as an institution was too powerful and tended to restrain eco- nomic productivity and public enlightenment. Most political conservatives, by contrast, came to believe that the Church must play a central role in pre- serving the social and moral order; accordingly, they were willing to con- cede to the clergy a tutorial role in educating the young and guiding poor, less educated people. Political conservatives also viewed the Church as a political ally and as an instrument for mobilizing support for conservative causes. The influence of the clergy on the population at large tended to give conservatives an important advantage in their competition with liberals, whose notions, often imported from abroad, were likely to be incompre- hensible and threatening to their less educated compatriots. The Church- related political and ideological differences between conservatives and lib- erals, already evident in a muffled way in the late 1830s, became sharp and strident in the 1850s and 1860s.

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