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Chapter 2 “la Mujer reina PerO nO gOBierna,” 1845–1885 The four decades following 1845 witnessed the formation of Colombia’s two dominant political parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives, an opening to the international economy, and a greater familiarity with foreign fashion. The slowly growing population was still strongly rural and self-sufficient, but urban elites increasingly imaged the nation’s future around white and Hispanic ideals. These were decades of great political conflict and civil war, of rebellions, coups, and failed revolutions. The period began with the political presence of Conservative-turned-Liberal Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera and ended with the Liberal-turned-Conservative Rafael Núñez, both leaders switching parties with changing partisan fortunes, both searching for a wider political base from which to govern. It was a time of deep factions within parties and strident political combat over the role and perquisites of the Catholic Church in government and society. Slavery was abolished, indigenous and church lands privatized, federalism and freedom—of trade, expression , religion, the press—flourished, as socialist idealism filled the heads of intellectuals and some urban artisans. It was a time when change confronted continuity, when republicanism and liberalism challenged colonialism and tradition, confrontations and challenges often left incomplete and passed on as a problematic inheritance to twentieth-century Colombians.1 The Conservative and Liberal parties emerged ideologically from the challenges presented by eighteenth-century Enlightenment Europe and out of Colombia’s independence wars with Spain and subsequent civil wars over power. Conservatives generally stressed the need for order and morality in society and government and, therefore, the need for strong church-state ties. Liberals, more the heirs of Enlightenment ideas, stressed liberty and freedom of individuals in modern society and government and, therefore, the need for the separation of church and state. Conservatives tended to favor strong central government, while Liberals preferred that governmental power be limited and dispersed to independent states. Both parties favored international trade as an avenue for Colombia’s future progress and civilization, making economic policy differences difficult to distinguish. Conservatives tended to 32 Of Beasts and Beauty be slightly more socially elite, but both parties were, and still are, run by economic and social elites. Artisans might be ideologically liberal but belong to the Conservative party for religious or commercial reasons; rich merchants might be Liberal because of economic self-interest but still believe that their social inferiors should not vote. Indians tended more toward the Conservative camp because of the Liberal assault on resguardos (communal lands) while Afro-Colombians, particularly in Cauca, identified with the party of abolition, the Liberals. Nonetheless, poor rural voters often adhered to the party of their patrón, typically a big landowner. Regardless of the difficulty of teasing out ideological, class, color, occupational, or personal reasons for partisan membership and fervor, one can point to a key issue that fused religion and politics into one explosive cocktail: the role and prerogatives of the Catholic Church, which Conservatives wanted continued or expanded by close church-state ties, and which Liberals wanted curtailed as evidence that Colombia was a modern state.2 Radical Liberals, the faction most confrontational on the church question , laid the groundwork for many important freedoms but also for huge future headaches. Radical refusal to negotiate with other factions of the Liberal party or with Conservative party or church leaders led to various armed confrontations and the weakening of the Liberal party in general. Liberal economic principles opened room for agricultural and forest product exports and for more and varied imports, but this opening to foreign trade hurt the economic, social, and political interests of an important urban constituency, the artisans. Strongly federalist governments and constitutions weakened intrusions of government into private and public life, but a flourishing arms trade and a weak state combined to fan high levels of political and social violence ; armed urban artisans were overrepresented in the myriad violent conflicts of the era, a reality that began to worry Liberal elites. Although urban Liberals might have some grasp of ideological issues, rural Colombians often found that the Liberals, who first favored a wider electorate, sought to restrict male suffrage once in power for fear of voter manipulation by priests or hacienda owners, while out-of-power Conservatives favored universal male suffrage. Rural folk often chose a partisan side influenced by family, marriage , friendship, and godparents, or out of local rivalries that predated the republic. Even though much of Colombia was only lightly or hardly settled...

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