History of Latin America
Liberalism's Golden/Gilded Age
Lecture outline
Readings: Jacoby, The Strange Career, Part 2
*********************************************************************
Thanks to Kate Novotny for this article on U.S. 'neocolonial' collecting in Peru
Thanks to Ann Farnsworth-Alvear for the template of Colombian history below:
Another version of rapid economic modernization, international investment,
wars between Liberals and Conservatives, and rising U.S. imperialism during the 19th century.
*********************************************************************
Gran Colombia entered the 19th century with a colonial inheritance of intense socioracial hierarchy, marked regionalism, almost no transportation system, and a rugged geography, see map ---all of which are visible in this color plate from a 19th-century Colombian geographic commission (see Carlos Valencia Editores, En busca de un país: la comisión corográfica (Bogotá: 1984)). It depicts an Arawak man carrying an upper-class traveler through the forests of the Chocó.
Even after steam navigation began on the Magdalena River, it took people 4-6 weeks to travel from the coast to Bogota. At the beginning of the 20c, it was cheaper to transport goods from Liverpool to Medellín than from Medellín to Bogotá. The two cities were not linked by rail until the 1930s.
Only with the advent of the automobile and the airplane did some of the separation between Colombia's three main regions, separated by mountain ranges, begin to be overcome.
The wars that come and go in the lives of the fictional coastal town of Macondo in Gabriel García Márquez's famous novel One Hundred Years of Solitude parallel the nation's violent history, marked by major armed conflicts between the Liberal and Conservative parties: 1839-41,1854,1860-62,1899-1902.
This last conflagration is known as the War of the Thousand Days. The Liberal General Rafael Uribe Uribe led a populist challenge to an elite power-sharing agreement after the war. He lost this last battle, but became a mythical popular hero who nonetheless ended his life fighting for nothing greater than soldiers' pensions -- much like García Márquez's character Col. Aureliano Buendía.
Through the 20th century, photographs from the war kept alive the memories of both heroism (as in the endlessly reproduced portraits of generals) and violence, (as in a photograph, ca. 1903 of a pile of skulls from the small town of Palonegro, where an estimated 2,500 people died).
The war mobilized huge segments of the population. Women who joined in the fighting and followed the armies, known as "las Juanas," can be seen in this 1901 photograph of Conservative volunteers camped beside Bogota's panopticon. Colombia's boy soldiers, who sometimes ran off to join troops that seemed heroic and sometimes were violently conscripted, were the subject of perhaps this single most famous photograph of the war, taken by a foreign journalist in 1902 and published in the Parisian magazine L'illustration.
The photographs in this section are from Carlos Eduardo Jaramillo, "La Guerra de los Mil Días," in A. Tirado, ed. Nueva Historia de Colombia, Vol 3. (Bogotá: Planeta, 1989).
One year after the War of the Thousand Days ended, the United States ratified its interest in the canal zone of Panama, which belonged to Colombia. Panama declared independence under the protection of the US Navy, canal rights were signed over to the US with no native Panamanians present, and the US recognized the new republic in 1903.
Indemnity payments from the U.S. to Colombia were a sore point for years. But in 1914, a fee of 25 million was agreed upon. These indemnity payments helped fund Colombia's economic "dance of the millions" some 30-40 years later than much of the rest of Latin America, based on investment in coffee (controlled mostly by Colombian elites) and bananas (controlled mostly by North American companies).