Overview

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Overview

Colombia's party system is the oldest in Latin America. Its two traditional parties, the Liberals and Conservatives, date back to the late 1840s and have controlled national politics until the 1990s, when their electoral dominance subsided notably. In the early twenty-first century, the Colombian party system is in a period of flux; the traditional Liberal and Conservative Parties continue to exist, but they have been challenged by a vibrant democratic left, as well as by more person-alist parties supportive of the highly popular president Alvaro Uribe Vélez (2002–).

Historically, the Liberal and Conservative parties were divided over significant policy issues. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Conservatives favored a strong centralized state in contrast to the Liberals' preference for a federal association of individually powerful states. Conservatives advocated close ties between church and state; the Liberals did not. And Conservatives wanted government involvement in economic policymaking, whereas Liberals championed a nineteenth-century laissez-faire view of the economy. These differences, along with regional rivalries and personal ambitions, characterized party conflict for a century.

While the parties were organizations of notables rather than forces for mass political participation, the leadership built strong support and loyalties that were strengthened by patron-client relationships. Liberal and Conservative leaders generated substantial backing for the succession of civil wars and uprisings that took place in the nineteenth century. The struggle for power was often violent and was only stabilized in the 1880s, when Rafael Núñez Moledo moved toward establishing a strong central government. This arrangement was legitimated by the Constitution of 1886, which drastically reduced the authority of individual states while also recognizing Catholicism as Colombia's official religion. By the time of Núñez's death in 1894, structures had been erected that would strengthen Conservative domination.

Civil strife was by no means ended: There was a brief insurgency in 1895 and then the War of the Thousand Days (1899–1902). Yet Conservative rule continued until 1930, when the Liberals returned to power. Four years later, when the Liberal Alfonso López Pumarejo won the presidency and instituted a number of reforms, the level of partisan debate rose. López and his followers sought an expansion of the state, greater activity in labor and welfare policy, and a redefined relationship with the Catholic Church. He met with fierce opposition from within his own party as well as from the Conservatives. These differences eventually led to a Liberal division in 1946, enabling the Conservatives to regain power under Mariano Ospina Pérez. The next few years saw a progressive deterioration of the party system, fueled by growing violence between Liberals and Conservatives in the countryside. This period of extremely bloody partisan conflict (known in the twenty-first century simply as La Violencia) brought a collapse of the civilian regime and the reluctant intervention by the armed forces in 1953.

Following the collapse of the military regime in 1957, Liberal and Conservative party leaders negotiated a power-sharing arrangement intended to bring an end to partisan violence. The resultant National Front (1958–1974) assured sixteen years during which congressional, ministerial, and other major positions would be divided equally between the Liberal and Conservative parties, while the presidency would alternate between them. These measures guaranteed that third parties were relegated to a minor position in the system, while traditional Conservative and Liberal elites could retain control of public policy.

With the return of competitive elections in 1974, the Liberals proved to be the majority party. From 1974 to 1998, they lost the presidency only once—in 1982 when two Liberal candidates divided the vote—and they consistently maintained control of both houses of Congress. At the same time, amendments to the original National Front provisions adopted in 1968 called for continuing participation in government by both parties, thus ensuring access to bureaucratic posts for the minority Conservative Party.

Meanwhile, the two party organizations had weakened internally, with national leaders increasingly relying upon local and regional bosses for votes and services. Customary elitist control over the traditional parties diminished. National Front rules also discouraged participation in elections, and abstention rates were high. Levels of public cynicism rose, increasing pressure for reforms and political modernization. In 1990, Liberal president César Gaviria Trujillo (1990–1994) backed a movement that eventually led to the new constitution of 1991. The 1991 Constitution weakened traditional party domination, with new electoral regulations sharply limiting the old control mechanisms of local leaders.

Poor governance further undermined two-party dominance after the 1991 Constitution. The Liberal Party suffered a significant blow to its image during the presidency of Ernesto Samper Pizano (1994–1998), who was accused of having accepted several million dollars from the Cali drug cartel to finance his campaign. Although Samper survived two impeachment processes in Congress, the Liberal Party was badly shaken and lost the 1998 presidential election to Conservative Andrés Pastrana Arango (1998–2002). Pastrana, in turn, proved to be highly unpopular when his efforts to achieve peace with the leftist FARC and ELN guerrillas failed utterly. In the 2002 presidential election, the Conservatives declined to run a candidate and the official candidate of the Liberal Party was soundly defeated by the dissident Liberal Alvaro Uribe Vélez. Having broken with the Liberal Party, Uribe governed as an independent; his immense popularity led to his re-election with 62.3 percent of the vote in 2006.

The two-party system was further weakened by a package of constitutional amendments approved in 2003 intended to establish more cohesive and responsible parties. In the 2006 congressional elections, the Liberal and Conservative parties together garnered only 35.3 percent of the seats in the Senate (down from 83.3 percent as recently as 1998) and 38.6 percent of the seats in the Chamber of Representatives (down from 81.4 percent in 1998). A democratic leftist party, the Polo Demo-crático Alternativo (Alternative democratic pole), won 9.8 percent of the seats in the Senate and 4.8 percent in the Chamber, and its presidential candidate came in second with 22.0 percent of the vote, nearly twice the votes of the official Liberal Party candidate. The other two major parties in Congress, Cambio Radical (Radical change) and the Partido Social de Unidad Nacional (National unity social party, known as el Partido de la U), were composed largely of former Liberals and Conservatives who had broken away to support President Uribe. It is unclear whether these parties will continue to exist after Uribe's presidency and, if not, whether their adherents will return to the folds of the Liberal and Conservative parties. The Colombian party system is unstable in the early twenty-first century, but the days of the exclusive two-party system appear to be definitively over.

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.

Dix, Robert H. The Politics of Colombia. New York: Praeger, 1987.

Hartlyn, Jonathan. The Politics of Coalition Rule in Colombia. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Pizarro Leongómez, Eduardo. "La crisis de los partidos y los partidos en la crisis." In Tras las Huellas de la Crisis Política, edited by Francisco Leal Buitrago. Bogotá: Tercer Mundo: FESCOL: Instituto de Estudios Políticos y Relaciones Internacionales (IEPRI), Universidad Nacional, 1996.

Roll, David. Rojo Difuso y Azul Pá lido: Los partidos tradicionales en Colombia: Entre el debilitamiento y la persistencia. Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Facultad de Derecho, Ciencias Políticas y Sociales, 2002.

John D. Martz

John C. Dugas

Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture