COLOMBIAN POLITICS AND ECONOMY 271
RAFAEL NÚÑEZ,THE “REGENERATION,”AND THE
WAR OF A THOUSAND DAYS, 1880–1903
Núñez began political life as a radical Liberal and
had spent thirteen years in the consular service in
Europe. He returned home in 1875 and was elected
president in 1879, governing with a coalition of
Liberal and Conservative Parties. Elected again in
1884, he swiftly crushed a radical Liberal revolt and
announced that the 1863 constitution had “ceased
to exist.” In 1886 he presented the country with a
new constitution that replaced the sovereign states
with departments headed by governors appointed
by the president, extended the presidential term to
six years, established literacy and property qualifi -
cations for voting for representatives, and provided
for indirect election of senators. Under that consti-
tution, personally or through surrogates, Núñez
ruled Colombia until his death in 1894.
The foundations of Núñez’s authoritarian re-
public were a strong standing army and a national
police force. Earlier regimes had virtually disman-
tled the regular army; private armies, formed by
the great landowners with their tenants and peons,
had fought the revolts and civil wars of the federal
period. The existence of these regional private
armies and militias was incompatible with Núñez’s
unitary project. The 1886 constitution created a
permanent army and reserved to the central gov-
ernment the right to possess arms and ammuni-
tion. The national police, organized in 1891, kept
a watchful eye on political suspects and disrupted
most plots against the government.
Núñez is credited with two major economic
innovations. Claiming that free trade or low tar-
iffs were the cause of economic decadence and
poverty, which had caused civil war, he proposed
to use tariff protection to stimulate the growth of
certain industries. He believed this would create a
new middle class that would form a buffer between
the governing social class and the unlettered mul-
titude. But his implementation of this program was
timid and inconsistent. The new policy succeeded,
however, in providing a modest level of protection
for domestic industry.
Núñez’s other innovation was the creation
in 1881 of a national bank designed to relieve the
fi nancial distress of a government always on the
verge of bankruptcy. The bank had the exclusive
right to issue money; this monopoly enabled the
state to provide for its needs and was managed pru-
dently until 1890. Then its uncontrolled emissions
of paper money caused a galloping infl ation. An
expensive civil war in 1899 provoked the emission
of paper money on such a scale that the printers
could not keep up with the demand, and the coun-
try was fl ooded with millions of pesos of depreci-
ated currency.
The “Regeneration,” as the Núñez era is known,
represented an effort to achieve national unifi cation
from above; it has been compared with Bismarck’s
project for German national unifi cation, a compound
of feudal and capitalist elements. Under Núñez the
conditions for the rise of a modern, capitalist state
began. An important step in this direction was his
creation of a permanent army and the State’s mo-
nopolistic exercise of force. His removal of internal
barriers to trade and his policy of tariff protection,
however modest, contributed to the formation of an
internal market; his national bank, despite its later
scandalous mismanagement, represented an initial
effort to create a national system of credit; and he
gave impulse to the construction of internal im-
provements, especially railroads. Finally, he sought
to give private enterprise access to frontier lands
by formally denying the existence of ethnic Afro-
Colombian and indigenous communities, voiding
their proprietary claims. These policies, combined
with the coffee boom, created national markets in
land, labor, and commodities and contributed to a
growth of capitalism in Colombia.
When he died, corruption, fl agrant rigging of
elections, division over freedom of the press and
electoral reform, and an economic slump caused
by a sharp decline of coffee prices produced a po-
litical crisis, followed by a resort to arms. Confi dent
of victory over a thoroughly unpopular govern-
ment, the Liberals launched a revolt in 1899 that
ushered in the disastrous War of a Thousand Days.
It raged for three years, caused an estimated loss
of 100,000 lives, and created immense material
damage. It ended in a government victory.
During the last third of the nineteenth century,
liberal economic policies shaped the development