Liberal Party

Colombia's Liberal Party was founded in the late 1840s and is one of Latin America's oldest functioning political parties. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Liberal Party was characterized by its positions in favor of decentralized political authority, free trade, and a clear separation between church and state. During the twentieth century, the party began to address the concerns of peasants and the working class, although it continued to be dominated by social and economic elites. In the early twenty-first century the party is a mainstream, center-left political party that is still characterized by patron-client ties in many regions. Since the return to freely contested elections in 1974, the Liberal Party has, for the most part, dominated the political arena. However, it has had difficulty recovering from the widely publicized drug corruption scandal of Liberal President Ernesto Samper (1994–1998), and has lost its longstanding control of both houses of Congress as well as the presidential elections of 1998 (to a Conservative, Andres Pastrana) and 2002 and 2006 (to a dissident Liberal, Alvaro Uribe, running as an independent with Conservative Party support).

See alsoColombia, Political Parties: Radical Olympus .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Archer, Ronald P. "Party Strength and Weakness in Colombia's Besieged Democracy." In Building Democratic Institutions: Party Systems in Latin America, edited by Scott Mainwaring and Timothy R. Scully. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995.

Gutiérrez Sanín, Francisco. "Historias de democratización anómala: El Partido Liberal en el sistema politico colombiano desde el Frente Nacional hasta hoy." In Degradación o cambio: Evolución del sistema politico colombiano, edited by Francisco Gutiérrez Sanín. Bogotá: Grupo Editorial Norma, 2002.

                                      John C. Dugas