The Republic of Colombia broke up across 1830 into three successor states — Venezuela, Ecuador, and the rump entity called the Republic of New Granada (renamed Granadine Confederation in 1858, the United States of Colombia in 1863, and the Republic of Colombia in 1886). The three successor states have, with substantial variations in border and constitutional form, been the political units of the northern Spanish South American region for the subsequent 196 years. The persistence of the three-state outcome — the failure of any subsequent reunification attempt, the substantive accommodation of each state's territory to its current borders, the maintenance of distinct national identities centred on Caracas, Quito, and Bogotá — has effectively ratified the dissolution of 1830 as a stable political settlement. Bolívar's continental-federation project, on the longest time-scale, has failed. The smaller-scale national project that succeeded it has, in each of the three states, succeeded.
Venezuela
Venezuela's secession from Gran Colombia, formalised at the Valencia Congress of November 1830 under Páez's political direction, produced a Venezuelan republic whose first half-century was dominated by the figures of Páez and the conservative-and-liberal Caracas elite. The 1830 constitution was federalist in instinct, centralist in administrative practice, and remained in force with revisions until 1857. The Federal War of 1859–63 produced a federalist constitutional restructuring; the long dictatorship of Antonio Guzmán Blanco (1870–1888) produced administrative modernisation, anticlerical reforms, and the consolidation of a centralised state; the twentieth century brought the petroleum economy from the Maracaibo basin (industrial-scale production from 1914), the long dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez (1908–1935), the democratic transitions of 1945 and 1958, the social-democratic period of 1958–1998 under the Acción Democrática and COPEI parties, and the Chávez and Maduro periods from 1998 onwards. The Bolivarian iconography of the Venezuelan state has been almost continuously prominent — the Pantéon Nacional in Caracas, where Bolívar's remains were transferred in 1842, the public-square statues, the school textbooks, the chavista appropriation of Bolivarian symbolism in the post-1998 period — and the political invocation of the Bolivarian inheritance has been a persistent thread of Venezuelan political culture across regimes of dramatically different ideological character.
Ecuador
Ecuador's secession at the Riobamba Congress of May 1830 produced a smaller and politically more fragile state than Venezuela. The country's first half-century was dominated by the rivalry between the conservative Catholic-clerical highland elite (centred on Quito and the Cuenca-Loja southern Andes) and the liberal commercial elite of the Pacific coast (centred on Guayaquil and the cacao-export economy). The long Catholic-conservative dictatorship of Gabriel García Moreno (1860–1875), the Liberal Revolution of 1895 under Eloy Alfaro, the petroleum economy from the 1970s, the dollarisation of 2000, and the Correa and post-Correa periods of the twenty-first century have all left their substantial deposits. Ecuador, perhaps because of its smaller size and more compact internal geography, has produced a more cohesive national identity around its three-region structure (Costa, Sierra, Oriente) than either of its larger neighbours; the Bolivarian-Sucrean inheritance is present (Sucre Square in Quito, the Pichincha-battle memorial, the Sucre currency that preceded the dollar) but is institutionally less prominent than in Venezuela.
New Granada / Colombia
The rump central state — known successively as the Republic of New Granada (1831), the Granadine Confederation (1858), the United States of Colombia (1863), and the Republic of Colombia from 1886 — retained the institutional core of the Bogotá administrative apparatus and the federalist tradition of the New Granadan provinces. The country's nineteenth century was dominated by the conflict between the Liberal Party (federalist, anti-clerical, urban-commercial) and the Conservative Party (centralist, clerical, agrarian-landowning) — a two-party rivalry that produced eight civil wars across the century, culminating in the Thousand Days' War of 1899–1902 (approximately 100,000 deaths) and the Panama secession of 1903 (under United States pressure during the Panama Canal construction). The twentieth century brought La Violencia of 1948–58 (approximately 200,000 deaths in the rural countryside), the National Front coalition government of 1958–74, the rise of the FARC and ELN guerrilla movements from the 1960s, the cartel violence of the 1980s and 1990s, the constitutional reform of 1991, and the long peace process culminating in the 2016 FARC peace agreement. Colombia retains, of the three successor states, the most substantial institutional continuity with the Cúcuta-1821 republican settlement, the most substantial economic development, and the most complicated relationship between formal political institutions and informal violence.
The Bolivarian afterlife
The political invocation of Bolívar in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latin American politics has been substantial and substantively varied. The Cuban revolutionary tradition of the 1950s-60s appropriated him as an anti-imperial precursor (Castro's 1959 Caracas speech at the Bolivarian tomb is a foundational text); the Peruvian APRA party of Haya de la Torre claimed him; the Sandinistas claimed him; the Chávez-Maduro Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela has claimed him most aggressively (the 1999 constitution renamed the state, the school curriculum was substantially rewritten around him, the Bolivarian iconography has been industrialised). The historiographical-academic recovery of Bolívar across the twentieth century has produced both the canonical biographical scholarship (the Madariaga, Masur, Bushnell, Lynch, Arana lineage) and the periodic political appropriations, with each generation of Latin American intellectuals reading Bolívar somewhat differently against the political demands of its own moment. The current consensus, on the most rigorous historical scholarship, is that Bolívar was substantially more complicated than any single political appropriation has acknowledged — a Caribbean Creole liberal aristocrat with a centralising authoritarian streak, whose political project failed in his lifetime and whose constitutional vision proved less durable than his subsequent reputation. The reputation, however, has been the more substantial political fact for almost two hundred years. It will probably continue to be so.
The travel guide to Gran Colombia — the surviving Bolivarian sites in Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador — is the next section of this volume.
End of Chapter VIII · End of Volume XIX