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A Liberal Profile 53 only a small amount of cotton-a total of fifty bales of five arrobas each-his profits from the venture enabled him to recoup losses suffered during the recent revolution, establish a new firm, and take a trip abroad. Later Parra would become increasingly, though reluctantly, involved in politics despite the demands of his business interests.56 Salvador Camacho Roldan was another influential Liberal who was a businessman as well as a politician. In the 1850s he and his younger brother Jose developed a piece of property they owned in the hot country of Cundinamarca into a valuable hacienda called "Utica," which Salvador still owned in 1891.57 While serving as secretary of finance under Eustorgio Salgar, Salvador encouraged the establishment of the Banco de Bogota, and the firm of Camacho Roldan Hermanos held $2,500 of the bank's stock when it was founded in 1870.58 In 1882 he established a commission house with his sons and others, and in 1890 he founded a bookstore called the Librerfa Colombiana.59 Despite his extensive enterprises, Camacho Roldan described himself in 1884 as a "mere proletarian" who had to earn his own livelihood.60 Although he was a delegate to the Rionegro convention, sat in Congress on several occasions, and served in the cabinet under Presidents Salgar and Trujillo, he never attained the presidency. At the age of sixty-four he delivered an embittered epitaph to his career in politics, to which he said he had devoted forty-three years of his life at considerable financial sacrifice and which he was now determined to quit. Politics, he said, is like an old painted cocotte, "fickle and unfaithful, that demands everything without giving anything in return to those of us who are not ravishers by profession."61 The Liberal elite also included a few men, like Nicolas Pereira Gamba and Miguel Samper, whose business activities overshadowed their political services. In 1852 Pereira Gamba, who was a member of a distinguished Cauca family, established Pereira Gamba and Company, which offered a variety of services ranging from the handling of freight on the Magdalena to the purchase and sale of letters of exchange. By 1872 branches had been opened in Honda, Barranquilla, and New York. In the 1860s he expanded his interests, importing agricultural and industrial machinery, tools, seeds, and other foreign goods which were displayed at his quinta-mode/o, or model farm, at Paiba on the outskirts of Bogota. That this venture was less than a complete success is indicated by the fact that in order to finance a trip abroad in 1871 he was forced to hold a lottery in which the prizes were the machines he had imported earlier but had been unable to sell.62 In Europe Pereira Gamba familiarized himself with recent advances in industrial technology, and in Sweden he studied the problems of railroad construction in mountainous terrain, later being named Swedish consul in Colombia.63 Like Pereira Gamba, Miguel Samper was primarily a businessman rather than a politician. After practicing law briefly in the firm of Ezequiel Rojas, 54 Red Against Blue Samper left Bogota for the Magdalena Valley to engage in commerce and agriculture with his father and his brothers Silvestre, Antonio, and Manuel during the boom years of the 1850s. In 1855 Miguel and his associates paid $47,000 for a plantation called "La Uni6n" near Guaduas, where in a fruitless effort to improve the prevailing system of tobacco cultivation they permitted their tenants to sell their crops on the open market instead of to the landowners as custom dictated. Upon Samper's return to Bogota in 1858, he founded a new firm with Manuel and was later joined by Manuel Ancfzar, who was married to the Sampers' sister Agripina.64 When the Banco de Bogota was organized in 1870, Samper and Company was one of the largest stockholders, with an investment of $10,000, and Miguel was made an officer of the bank.65 Although Samper was a frequent and influential contributor to the Liberal press, he rarely held high public office, no doubt because of his independence of mind and readiness to criticize his fellow Liberals. His nomination to the presidency in 1897 was a tribute to his stature among Liberals and other Colombians, but it was known that he had virtually no chance of ,winning the election. For many nineteenth-century Liberals a career in politics involved not only the quest for public office but also...

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