Volume XIX · 1819 — 1831
A single sovereign republic encompassing modern Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Panama, declared at the Congress of Angostura in 1819, formally constituted at the Congress of Cúcuta in 1821, and dissolved into three successor states between November 1830 and November 1831. Twelve years of post-independence political unity in the northern Andes.
Foreword
The political project of one man — Simón Bolívar — who had spent twenty years fighting for the independence of the Viceroyalty of New Granada from Spain and who believed, on its achievement, that the only durable basis for the new sovereignty was a single large republic.
Bolívar's argument was strategic: the Spanish American territories had been administered, under colonial rule, as a single Viceroyalty; their economies, transport links, military command structures and elite networks were continental rather than provincial; the threat of Spanish reconquest was real and pressing through the 1820s; and the example of the United States — a federal continental republic — was compelling. The Cúcuta constitution of 1821 created a republic of three departments (Venezuela, Cundinamarca, Quito) covering some 2.5 million square kilometres, governed from Bogotá under a centralised presidential constitution. Bolívar himself served as the first president; Francisco de Paula Santander as the first vice-president (and acting executive during Bolívar's many military campaigns).
The project failed for reasons that, in retrospect, were predictable. The country was vast, mountainous, and lacked working internal communications: the journey from Caracas to Quito took six weeks under the best conditions. The regional elites of Caracas, Bogotá and Quito did not share Bolívar's continental imagination — they understood themselves first as Venezuelan, New Granadan, Ecuadorian. Bolívar's centralism collided with Santander's federalism. The 1828 constitutional convention at Ocaña failed to agree on revisions. Bolívar's emergency dictatorship of 1828–30 (Decree of 27 August 1828) alienated even his closest supporters. He resigned in April 1830 and died of tuberculosis in Santa Marta on the 17th of December that year. The republic, by then, was already disintegrating.
This volume traces the country from its formal foundation in 1819 to its dissolution in 1831. We follow Bolívar's campaigns across the Magdalena, the Llanos, the Boyacá plateau, the Pichincha mountains, and Junín. We sit in the Congress of Cúcuta. We visit Bolívar at his San Pedro Alejandrino estate as he dies. And we walk through what is left — substantially, the modern capitals of three independent states.
The Book — eight chapters
After the book — three ways to travel inside Gran Colombia
The Guide
Bogotá's old quarter, the Quinta de Bolívar, Cartagena's walls, Caracas's Panteón Nacional, the Casa Natal in San Mateo, the Boyacá battlefield, Pichincha overlooking Quito, San Pedro Alejandrino in Santa Marta. Ten stops across three modern countries.
The Routes
The Bolivariana Route from Caracas across the Llanos to Bogotá; and the Liberator's South Route from Bogotá through Popayán to Quito, retracing the campaigns of 1822 to Pichincha.
The Errors
Bolívar was not a unitary nationalist. Gran Colombia did not include Peru or Bolivia. The 1828 dictatorship was not a Napoleonic ambition. Eight beliefs about Gran Colombia and the Liberator politely laid to rest.