als. Colombia was part of the Republic of New Granada, promulgated in 1810; Venezuela and Ecuador split off in 1830, and Panama in 1903 as part of a civil war fostered by U.S. interest in building a canal across the Panama isthmus. In Colombia, the advent of independence brought two broad philosophical strands of thought about self-rule into conflict. One held that adherence to the principles of Roman Catholicism--long the state religion of Colombia--was the only bulwark against anarchy. The other, inspired by the revolutionary and secular ideals emanating from North America and Europe, advocated a secular state; however, secular factionalism fostered cycles of civil wars, reform, repression, insurgencies, foreign (particularly American) intervention, and persistent power competition between reformist liberal and conservative visions of civil society.
A constitution ratified in 1886 under conservative rule ostensibly functions as the rule of law in present-day Colombia. However, as a practical matter, the constitution has repeatedly been put into the background. Stable, if anti-reform conservative, government seemed possible after World War II, until the assassination in 1948 of a liberal-party candidate, Gaitan, for president and the creation of anti-liberal peasant death squads. For the next ten years, Colombia was marked by La Violencia, the name given to the period in which leftist guerrilla factions, military elites, conservatives, moderate conservatives, and liberals competed for power, leaving many assassinations and rights suppressions in the wake. The creation of the National Front by a military junta in 1957-58 led to a remission of La Violencia, plus liberal and moderate-conservative power sharing and limited economic and land reform related to access to production and export of Colombia's all-important coffee crop. But a legacy of quasi-feudal land distribution, repression of dissent and suppression of reform by both ...