The Congress of Cúcuta — meeting at the Templo de San José in the town of Villa del Rosario, on the Venezuelan-New Granadan border, between the 6th of May and the 30th of October 1821 — was the constitutional founding convention of the Republic of Colombia. Its hundred-and-eight-article constitution, adopted on the 30th of August 1821 and ratified on the 12th of October, was the substantive constitutional framework of Gran Colombia for the entire decade of its existence; the 1830 constitutional revision at Bogotá would not survive the dissolution and need not be considered separately. The Cúcuta constitution was a compromise between Bolívar's centralism and the New Granadan federalist tradition: it preserved a unitary republic but allowed substantial departmental administrative autonomy; it created a strong executive but balanced the president with a substantial vice-presidential office; it provided for popular elections under property qualifications; and it confirmed the territorial unification of Venezuela, Cundinamarca, and Quito under a single sovereignty.
The delegates
The Cúcuta Congress was attended by approximately 71 deputies — roughly half from the New Granadan provinces, a quarter from Venezuela, and a quarter delegated for Quito (whose deputies were drawn in some cases from Quiteño émigrés in New Granada, since the province itself was still Spanish-controlled until May 1822). The Venezuelan delegation — dominated by Bolivarian centralists — was led by Pedro Gual and Miguel Peña; the New Granadan delegation — predominantly federalist in instinct but Bolivarian in immediate political loyalty — was led by Francisco Soto and Vicente Azuero; Santander, the vice-president, attended in his executive capacity and substantially shaped the constitutional drafting through his correspondence. Bolívar himself was largely absent — fighting the Carabobo campaign in Venezuela through June and July, returning briefly to address the Congress in late July, then departing for the southern campaigns of Pichincha — but his political authority was the framework within which the constitutional decisions were made.
The constitution
The 1821 constitution organised the Republic of Colombia as a unitary republic of three departments — Venezuela, Cundinamarca, and Quito — each subdivided into provinces, with departmental governors (intendentes) appointed by the president and provincial governors appointed by the departmental governors. The executive comprised a president and vice-president elected to four-year terms; the legislative was a bicameral congress (Senate with two members per province elected for four years, House of Representatives with one member per 30,000 inhabitants elected for four years); the judiciary was an independent supreme court with appellate jurisdiction over the inferior departmental courts. Civic rights — equality before the law, freedom of speech and press subject to "decency", freedom of religion subject to the Catholic state-church, abolition of titles of nobility, abolition of judicial torture — were enumerated in the constitution's preamble and in articles 156–179.
The constitution included substantial transitional provisions concerning slavery: a "free womb" law of 1821 (technically a separate law passed by the Congress, but constitutionally referenced) declared all children of enslaved mothers henceforth free from birth, with the existing enslaved population gradually emancipated over a transition period of indeterminate length. The free-womb law was a substantial compromise between Bolívar's commitment to abolition (made to Pétion in Haiti in 1815) and the political reality that the slaveholding planters of the Cauca valley, the Caribbean coast, and the Maracaibo basin retained substantial economic and political weight in the new republic. The compromise was unstable; full abolition would not be implemented until the 1850s in the successor states.
The election
The Congress, having adopted the constitution, proceeded to the first presidential election under it. Bolívar was elected president with overwhelming support; Santander was elected vice-president. Bolívar accepted the presidency in absentia (he was at Carabobo, then Caracas, then the southern campaign) and indicated that he intended to continue commanding the army of liberation against the remaining Spanish forces in the south, leaving the day-to-day administration of the republic in Santander's hands. The arrangement worked, in practical terms, until 1826. The constitutional theory it represented — a president whose primary function was military command and external relations, with a vice-president as substantive administrative chief executive — was a Bolivarian innovation that proved manageable while Bolívar's military campaigns were ongoing and untenable once they had concluded.
The territorial framework
The Republic of Colombia of October 1821 — the legal entity that the Cúcuta constitution had constituted — comprised approximately 2.5 million square kilometres of territory, an area approximately the size of modern Argentina or roughly five times the area of France. Population, by the best contemporary estimates, was approximately 2.5 million inhabitants, of whom perhaps 60 per cent mestizo or mulatto, 20 per cent white Creole and peninsular, 12 per cent African (mostly enslaved or recently emancipated under the free-womb law), 8 per cent indigenous. The economy was predominantly agricultural — cacao and indigo in the coastal Venezuelan plantations, tobacco and grain in the New Granadan highlands, cinchona-bark and emeralds in the Andes, coffee in the foothills — with substantial cattle-ranching in the Llanos and the Magdalena basin. Mineral wealth was substantial but underdeveloped (the Pasto and Antioquia gold districts, the Tasajera salt mines). Manufacturing was small. The transport infrastructure was minimal: there were no roads in the modern sense between the principal departmental capitals, and travel between Caracas, Bogotá and Quito went predominantly by river-and-mule on six-week journeys.
The republic that Cúcuta constituted was therefore vast, poor, regionally divided, infrastructurally undeveloped, and dependent for its political coherence on the personal authority of Bolívar and the administrative competence of Santander. It would function, in this state, for the better part of a decade. The military operations that completed its territorial integrity, and the diplomatic and cultural achievements of the republican decade, are the next chapter.
End of Chapter IV