Colombia’s modern political history began in the late 1840s with the delineation of the Liberal and Conservative parties. Gen. Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera, a Conservative, during his first term as president (1845–49) replaced the government monopoly on tobacco sales with a private monopoly and expanded international trade. These changes increased the production and export of tobacco but reduced the tax income of the national government.

In 1849 Gen. José Hilario López, of the radical faction of the Liberal Party, became president. It was his task to implement the reforms passed in 1850, which galvanized political sentiment and divided the country politically and economically for half a century. The guiding principle of the radical Liberals under General López was greater liberty for the people of Colombia. His government ended slavery, ended indigenous people’s communal ownership of land, diverted tax resources from the central to local governments, and eliminated a number of taxes and monopolies held by the central government.

Rather than eliminating the institutional barriers to self-fulfillment by the people, however, the reforms of 1850 tended to eliminate the traditional proscriptions that had stood as safeguards against the exploitation of the poor by the rich. The reforms, despite the liberal rhetoric that accompanied them, legalized—indeed encouraged—a redistribution of landed property and tended to strengthen the position of the wealthy landowners, merchants, and professionals against the mass of poor indigenous people, peasants, and artisans. Since there were only 25,000 enslaved people (in a country of 2,000,000 in 1851), the effects of manumission were small compared with those of the breakdown of the indigenous communal system, which affected a third of the population. The indigenous people were induced to give up their little plots of land and the small amount of independence they enjoyed. Within a few years the ownership of the land of indigenous people was concentrated in a few hands; the indigenous people had become tenants, their land used for grazing cattle.

While class conflict seethed under the surface in Colombian society, the struggle between members and groups within the elite was more open. Two issues in particular divided the upper class: first, whether a centralist or federalist political system would be the best arrangement for Colombia and, second, what role was appropriate for the Roman Catholic Church and particularly for its clerics in Colombian society. Adherents of federalism were strongest in the years between 1863 and 1880, during which time the country was called the United States of Colombia. Subsequent government publications were to refer to that period as the “Epoch of Civil Wars.” In 51 of the 240 months that passed in the 1860s and ’70s, there was some form of civil conflict taking place within the country. The Colombian army was so small that public order could not be maintained.

The power of the anticlerical faction reached a peak in the early 1860s. A revolutionary government headed by Mosquera expropriated church lands in 1861, and a constitution adopted in 1863 guaranteed freedom of religious practice, thus bringing to an end the traditional intimate relationship between church and state in Colombia.

The return of the Conservatives, 1880–1930

Both actions were reversed during the period of Regeneration (1880–95) under Rafael Núñez and the Conservatives who followed him. After further civil conflict in the 1880s, Núñez was able to promulgate a new constitution in 1886, to reestablish relations with the Vatican via the Concordat of 1887, and to promote some internal improvements and industrial development. But the political struggle between Liberals and Conservatives was far from over. Armed civil conflict reached its peak in the War of a Thousand Days (1899–1903). The estimates of the number of deaths in that struggle range from 60,000 to 130,000.

The devastating civil war was followed by the loss of Panama. The Colombian Congress refused an offer from the United States to build a canal across the isthmus, and in 1903 the Panamanians revolted against the government in Bogotá. They negotiated a treaty with the United States that created a Canal Zone 10 miles (16 km) wide under U.S. sovereignty in exchange for an agreement by the United States to build the canal and to provide a regular annual payment to Panama. Although the U.S. government later agreed to pay $25 million to Colombia, the episode embittered Colombian-U.S. relations for many years. (See also Panama: Transcontinental railroad and canal projects.)

Colombia’s internal development quickened after 1905, with coffee exports expanding by nearly 10 percent per year between 1909 and 1928. At the beginning of the 20th century Colombia supplied about 3 percent of world coffee exports; by 1923 its share had risen to nearly 10 percent. In the late 1920s coffee accounted for nearly one-fifth of Colombia’s gross domestic product.