121 years ago, the most crucial combat of the first century of the Republic between liberals and conservatives ended in Palonegro.
On May 25, 1900, the battle of Palonegro concluded, the longest and most decisive of the Thousand Day War, the conflict between liberals and conservatives that bloodied Colombia before reaching its first century.
This confrontation, concluded after 15 days of fierce fighting in the Santanderean heaths, near Bucaramanga, altered the course of a contest that at first was adverse to the conservative government of the elderly and weakened president Manuel Antonio Sanclemente, who was overthrown on July 31 of the following year for his vice president, José Manuel Marroquín.
The setback suffered by the liberal revolutionaries there was the beginning of a turn that led them to seek an armistice two years later. In Palonegro a repeated story was repeated at the beginning of our republican life, which García Márquez later recreated by characterizing the prototype of the liberal combatant in the figure of Colonel Aureliano Buendía, who “promoted 32 armed uprisings and lost them all.”
That of the Thousand Days was the largest of those wars, fought in the heat of the passions that confronted the two sides into which Colombians had divided since Independence. It was the struggle of ideas transferred to the battlefields to resolve the fate of the stagnant colonial scaffolding, which subsisted under the protection of Catholic and conservative fundamentalism.
The ‘radical Olympus’
The government of General José Hilario López began to dismantle that scaffolding in the mid-nineteenth century with the abolition of slavery and indigenous reservations, and its task was enthusiastically pursued by a generation of young liberals, among whom Manuel Murillo stood out. Toro, Eustorgio Salgar, Santiago and Felipe Pérez and Felipe Zapata, members of the ‘Radical Olympus’.
The transformation promoted by the radical governments generated constant confrontations with the conservatives, translated into successive armed clashes until the great war of the end of the century. The immediate antecedents of the latter were three shorter conflicts, of which only one favored the liberals: that of 1876, caused by the conservative rebellion against the government of Aquileo Parra, the last of the radical liberals who exercised power under the Constitution of Rionegro of 1863.
The rebellion of 1876 became a holy war when the Catholic Church entered openly to support the conservatives, but it ended with a radical triumph, sealed on May 25, 1877 with the Manizales Agreement.
The other two conflicts prior to the Thousand Days War were generated by liberal uprisings against the hegemony inaugurated by Rafael Núñez in 1880, the first in 1885 and the second in 1895, this time against Núñez’s successor, Miguel Antonio Caro. Both were put down by the government.
Follow the news of El Espectador on Google NewsThe rise of Núñez
In 1878 another liberal, General Julián Trujillo, was elected as Parra’s successor, but the division of his party between radicals and independents favored Núñez, who was among the latter and allied himself with the conservatives in the Regeneration movement to reach the can. In 1880 he won it and exercised it directly or through his addicts until 1894, the year of his death, after replacing the liberal Constitution in 1886 with a conservative one that lasted more than a hundred years.
The rise of Núñez meant the end of the United States of Colombia, the confederation born with the Constitution of Rionegro, and its replacement by the unitary Republic that exists today. It also marked the end of the radical revolution, which had established the separation between Church and State and the broadest freedoms of thought, printing, teaching and teaching known until then. In addition, it was a setback before the Catholic Church, which was recognized as that of Colombia in the Concordat of 1887 and benefited with privileges such as tax exemption, the power to approve teaching texts and the civil validity of Catholic marriage.
The Regeneration regime excluded the Liberal Party from political life to the point of reducing its representation in Congress to a minimum and established a repressive system that El Espectador suffered firsthand with the closure by decree to which it was subjected on July 8 of 1887, four months after starting its circulation, and another suspension on October 27 of the same year, because the government considered it subversive.
The uprising
The excesses of conservative hegemony led the liberals to rise again and when they did, on October 17, 1899, they seemed better prepared. They started on the right foot by defeating the conservative army at the Battle of Peralonso, near Cúcuta, in December 1899.
After this triumph the Liberals became strong in Santander while other uprisings began in Cauca, Boyacá, Magdalena, Tolima and Panama. But several successful government actions neutralized the revolution and isolated its leaders, Generals Benjamin Herrera, Rafael Uribe Uribe, and Gabriel Vargas Santos.
However, General Herrera launched an offensive in Panama and defeated the conservative army in the battle of Aguadulce on February 23, 1901. In the following months the liberals raided Riohacha, Santa Marta, Magangué, the Magdalena River and the Eastern Plains. , with which they prolonged the war, but failed to tip the balance in their favor.
Peace signing
Along with the military setbacks, the Liberals had another reason to end the war: the danger of an intervention by the United States to ensure control of the projected Panama Canal, in which Teodoro Roosevelt expressed great interest after the failure of the French company hired to build it.
When the war broke out, the work was paralyzed by the bankruptcy of the French company. President Marroquín then negotiated its construction with the United States and the issue sparked a national controversy over the US claim to sovereignty over the territory. It was when General Herrera pronounced the famous phrase: “The homeland above the parties.” The conclusion was obvious: peace had to be made.
Consequently, two treaties were signed: the first at the Neerlandia farm, located in the Magdalena banana zone, on October 24, 1902, and the second on November 21, aboard the US battleship USS Wisconsin , docked in the bay. from Panama.
Ironically and tragically, this did not prevent a year later from adding another misfortune to the devastation of the war: the dismemberment of the national territory with the separation of Panama, favored by the intervention of the United States.
Casualties of battle
According to the available historical records, some 2,500 combatants (1,500 Liberals and 1,000 Conservatives) died in the Battle of Palonegro before the Liberals commanded by Generals Vargas Santos and Uribe Uribe abandoned their positions on the hills where they clashed with the Conservative government army. led by General Prospero Pinzón.
The fighting was fought in the middle of intense heat in a front of 26 kilometers of trenches and was characterized by its brutality. Before the battle was over, the stench of the dead invaded the atmosphere and when the fighting stopped the spectacle was bleak. Doctors who tended to the wounded and piled up the dead later made lurid accounts of what they saw.
After the battle, the Liberals lost the initiative, the government resumed Cúcuta and the war of positions was replaced by isolated guerrilla actions by the Liberals in other parts of the national territory that prolonged the conflict, but were not enough to prevent defeat.