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Republicanismo y reforma constitucional, 1891–1910
This is a brief political history of a critical period in the formation of the modern state of Colombia. The book, based on the author’s M.A thesis, covers the years from 1891 to 1910, which witnessed the most intense intraelite confrontations in Colombia’s turbulent nineteenth-century history. These two decades were an era of internal divisions within both the Liberal and Conservative parties; bitter struggles over the introduction of constitutional amendments to limit authoritarian practices by the ruling Conservative “nationalist” faction; and a protracted civil war, the War of the Thousand Days (1899–1902). The period closed with both the creation of a short-lived new political party (the Republican Union) headed by elites from Antioquia in the country’s northwest, and the introduction of an important constitutional amendment that democratized and decentralized state administration. To shed light on these nationwide processes, Correa Uribe, who teaches Colombian history at the Universidad de Antioquia in Medellín, explores regional events as they occurred in Antioquia. This region’s elites, he argues, were the leading figures in the final resolution of the deep political crisis experienced at the turn of the twentieth century. They were the “only” ones capable of asserting their economic and political interests over those of elites from other parts of Colombia.
The book develops its argument in three chronologically arranged sections. The first outlines events from 1891 to 1904, the second deals with the period between 1904 and 1908, and the third covers the years from 1908 to 1910. Each section adheres to a traditional event-oriented narrative of political occurrences at both the national and the regional level, using the standard primary sources that political historians tend to rely on: congressional records, public speeches from politicians and state officials, the political [End Page 571] chronicle found in both local and national newspapers, and printed memoirs. The author ably supplements these sources with some private correspondence and a relatively untapped private account, the yet unpublished diary of Gabriel Arango Mejía, a politician and genealogist form Antioquia. Oddly enough, Correa Uribe does not list this source in the book’s final bibliography, nor does he provide any information as to its location. This is but one of the book’s editing problems, which include a number of mistakenly hyphenated words (“caprichosa-mente,” p. 28; “compro-metiendo,” p. 45; “norte-americano,” p. 48) that one should probably blame on the press itself. The author is to blame for other imperfections.
Correa Uribe seems to write for a limited audience made up of Colombian historians or foreign scholars of Colombian history. In fact, his detailed account of the political history of the years from 1891 to 1910 is marred by the assumption of too much background knowledge on the part of his readers. Even experts will have difficulty reading the text, for the author does not provide sufficient data on the social background and significance of at least some of the numerous individuals who parade through the pages of his book, nor does he offer the information required to understand the relative importance of Antioquia as a socioeconomic region within Colombia. Therefore this monograph is valuable for specialists and graduate students working on the specific period and issues it covers. Undergraduate students and the general public will have a hard time making sense of the convoluted events it recounts and keeping up with the many elite individuals active at the time.
Nonetheless, Correa Uribe’s book adds interesting regional data to enrich the still basic accounts of authors like Charles Bergquist and Marco Palacios. In specialized and general monographs alike, both of these authors have dealt with the same general issues and period from a wider national perspective.