From New Granada to Independence. The construction of a State on a territory that is difficult to govern.

The political history of Colombia begins long before the creation of the republic. When the first Spanish explorers arrived on the shores of the Caribbean in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, the territory was inhabited by numerous indigenous societies, including the Muisca, Taironas, Quimbayas, and Zenúes, who had developed complex political and economic structures long before the arrival of Europeans.

The exploration of the territory advanced from the coast to the interior. One of the most important expeditions was the one organized in 1536 by Pedro Fernández de Lugo, II Advanced of the Canary Islands, appointed by Charles V governor of Santa Marta. After the sudden death of Fernández de Lugo, the licentiate Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada took command of the expedition. In 1538 he founded the city of Santa Fe, origin of today’s Bogotá, after the conquest of the Muisca highlands. The new town was built around a chapel dedicated to Our Lady of Candelaria, an invocation deeply rooted in the Canary Islands since the end of the fifteenth century. Over the decades, the Spanish Crown consolidated its dominance over a vast region that encompassed not only present-day Colombia, but also the territories of Panama, Venezuela, and Ecuador.

In 1717, the Bourbon monarchy created the Viceroyalty of New Granada, with its capital in Santa Fe de Bogotá. From there, one of the largest and most strategic spaces of the Spanish empire in America was governed. The new administrative entity sought to strengthen the authority of the Crown, improve the defense of the Caribbean and increase the efficiency of the fiscal apparatus in a region whose complex geography made communications and effective control of the territory difficult.

In some ways, the geographical challenges that preoccupied Spanish administrators in the eighteenth century would be the same as those that independent Colombia would have to face during the next two centuries.

The ideas of the Enlightenment, the influence of the Atlantic revolutions and the crisis of the Spanish monarchy caused by the Napoleonic invasion triggered the emancipatory movements at the beginning of the nineteenth century. After years of war, the independence forces led by Simón Bolívar managed to consolidate the rupture with Spain. The victory of Boyacá, in 1819, opened the way to independence and the creation of the Republic of Colombia, later known as Gran Colombia.

However, political independence did not solve the main challenge that would accompany the new country for the next two centuries: the construction of a state capable of effectively exercising its authority over the entire territory. Since then, Colombian political history can be interpreted as a long search for real sovereignty, a task marked by civil wars, ideological conflicts, insurgent movements, criminal organizations, and successive efforts to strengthen national institutions.

Few countries in Latin America have enjoyed institutional continuity comparable to Colombia’s. While much of the continent experienced frequent coups d’état, military juntas, and constitutional ruptures, Colombia maintained remarkable formal stability. However, under this appearance of continuity was a more complex reality: the permanent difficulty of the State to fully exercise its sovereignty over the whole of its territory.

The Colombian paradox

Colombia constitutes one of the greatest political paradoxes of Hispanic America.

Unlike other countries in the region, it did not experience a constant succession of military coups or long periods of dictatorship that repeatedly interrupted the constitutional order. From the nineteenth century to the present day, the country has preserved a remarkable institutional continuity and a deep-rooted civilist tradition. However, this formal stability coexisted with episodes of internal violence of extraordinary intensity.

The explanation lies, to a large extent, in the Colombian geography itself. The three Andean mountain ranges that cross the country from south to north, the extensive Amazon jungles, the eastern plains and the enormous distances between regions historically hindered the effective presence of the central power. While the authorities in Bogotá enacted laws and organized institutions, large areas of the territory remained far from any real state control.

Legal sovereignty existed. Effective sovereignty was much more debatable.

The nineteenth century: a nation in search of itself

The disappearance of Gran Colombia in 1830 was the first great challenge for the new State. The integration project promoted by Simón Bolívar quickly fragmented and gave way to a long period of political instability and institutional uncertainty.

For much of the nineteenth century, Colombian political life was dominated by rivalry between liberals and conservatives. It was not just an electoral or parliamentary dispute. Both parties represented profoundly different conceptions about the organization of the State, the role of the Church, the degree of autonomy of the regions and the economic model that the country should follow.

The tensions led to successive civil wars that weakened institutions and made it difficult to consolidate a stable national authority. The most devastating of all was the Thousand Days War, which took place between 1899 and 1902. The conflict left tens of thousands dead, ruined the national economy and highlighted the difficulties of the state in guaranteeing internal peace.

Barely a year after the end of the war, Colombia suffered a new shock with the separation of Panama in 1903. Beyond the international circumstances surrounding the process, the loss of the isthmus was perceived by broad sectors of Colombian society as a demonstration of the limitations of the State in preserving the integrity of its territory.

Violence: the fracture of the national consensus

If the nineteenth century was marked by civil wars, the middle of the twentieth century was dominated by an even more traumatic conflict.

The assassination of liberal leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, on April 9, 1948, unleashed a wave of riots known as the Bogotazo and opened a stage that Colombian historiography simply calls La Violencia.

For about a decade, the confrontation between liberals and conservatives took on the dimensions of an undeclared civil war. Thousands of people were killed and large rural regions were plunged into a spiral of reprisals, displacements and armed clashes.

Beyond the numbers, La Violencia had a fundamental political consequence: it eroded the legitimacy of state institutions in many areas of the country. Where the state was unable to guarantee security, alternative forms of armed organization and local power emerged that would end up playing a decisive role in the decades that followed.

National sovereignty was once again facing its main challenge: the inability to exercise effective and exclusive authority over the entire territory.

The crisis formally ended with the creation of the National Front in 1958, an arrangement by which liberals and conservatives would alternate in power for sixteen years. The pact succeeded in reducing partisan violence, but it also limited the participation of new political forces and left unresolved some of the structural problems fueling the conflict.

Guerrillas, drug trafficking and fragmentation of sovereignty

The aftermath of La Violencia did not disappear with the political agreement that gave rise to the National Front in 1958. Although liberals and conservatives managed to temporarily stabilize the system through the agreed alternation of power, the root causes of the conflict remained latent in large rural areas of the country.

During the 1960s, the main Colombian guerrilla organizations emerged. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN) were born inspired by different revolutionary currents, mainly from the Cuban experience, and found support in regions where the state presence was still weak or insufficient.

For the first time in the history of the republic, the Colombian state faced armed actors who aspired not only to challenge its authority, but to replace it with an alternative political model. The issue was no longer only the maintenance of public order, but the dispute itself for the legitimacy of power.

From the 1970s onwards, an even more complex challenge appeared. The rise of drug trafficking introduced into the equation a new actor endowed with enormous economic resources and the capacity to corrupt institutions, finance armed groups and impose their influence over extensive territories.

The large drug cartels did not necessarily seek the conquest of national political power. Its main objective was to prevent the State from interfering in its activities. However, to achieve this, they developed parallel structures of authority, financing, and coercion that ended up seriously eroding state sovereignty.

The situation reached its peak during the 1980s and 1990s. In certain regions, state authorities, guerrilla organizations, paramilitary groups, and networks linked to drug trafficking coexisted simultaneously. Each exercised varying degrees of control over the population, economic resources, and local security.

From a strictly political perspective, that reality implied a fragmentation of the monopoly of force that constitutes one of the essential elements of any sovereign State.

The 1991 Constitution represented an attempt to modernize institutions and strengthen the democratic legitimacy of the political system. The new constitutional text expanded fundamental rights, strengthened mechanisms for citizen participation and sought to offer an institutional framework capable of integrating a society deeply affected by decades of conflict.

However, the new constitutional architecture, by itself, was not enough to solve the fundamental problem: the existence of large areas where the effective presence of the State was still insufficient.

The 21st century: the recovery of the State

The beginning of the new century marked a significant change in Colombian political evolution.

Governments promoted reforms aimed at strengthening state capacities, professionalizing security forces, and regaining control of regions that had remained under insurgent or criminal influence for decades.

During the first decade of the twenty-first century, especially under the presidency of Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010), the Colombian State promoted a profound policy of institutional strengthening and recovery of territorial control. The increased presence of the security forces in large areas of the country, together with the weakening of the main guerrilla organizations, made it possible to effectively extend the authority of the State where it had been limited for decades. Although that process was involved in intense political and legal debates, it was a turning point in the recovery of effective sovereignty over a large part of the national territory.

The results were not immediate or without controversy, but they allowed for a progressive expansion of the institutional presence in many territories that had historically remained on the margins of the effective action of the State.

The process symbolically culminated in the signing of the 2016 peace accords between the Colombian government and the FARC. It was the most ambitious attempt to date to end one of the most protracted armed conflicts in the contemporary world.

The agreements did not solve all the problems. Armed groups, criminal organizations, and challenges related to drug trafficking persist. However, they constituted a decisive step in consolidating stronger state authority and reducing the political violence that had marked much of the country’s recent history.

For the first time in many decades, the central issue ceased to be the very survival of the State and began to focus on the quality of its institutions and the effectiveness of its territorial presence.

A Lesson in Sovereignty

The Colombian experience offers a lesson that transcends the borders of Latin America.

Sovereignty is often identified with the mere existence of a constitution, institutions or international recognition. However, Colombian history shows that sovereignty is something more complex. It is not enough to proclaim the authority of the State; it is necessary to exercise it effectively.

A State is truly sovereign when it can apply its laws, guarantee the security of its citizens and exercise its essential functions over the whole of its territory without competition from alternative powers.

For more than two centuries, Colombia has pursued precisely that goal. Its political history can be understood as a long struggle to convert the legal sovereignty inherited from independence into an effective sovereignty capable of reaching every corner of the country.

This search has not been exempt from civil wars, ideological conflicts, insurgencies, criminal organizations and deep institutional crises. However, it is also has shown a remarkable capacity for resistance and adaptation.

The Colombian experience reminds us that sovereignty does not consist only in proclaiming the existence of a State, but in the ability to make it present where its citizens live. In this sense, Colombia is not a historical exception, but one of the most illustrative examples of a challenge that has accompanied all nations since their birth.