68 A BRIEF HISTORY OF COLOMBIA
then south into Peru, leaving his vice president, General Francisco Paula de
Santander, in charge of the Gran Colombian government.
Santander, from the northern New Granadan town of Cúcuta near Venezuela,
had trained as a lawyer in Bogotá; as acting president, he scrupulously followed
the letter of the law. However, he faced the rise of separatist movements in
Venezuela and Ecuador. When Bolívar returned to Bogotá in 1826, he was upset
with the near-dissolution of Gran Colombia, reassumed the presidency, and
eventually established a dictatorship in 1828 — Santander led the opposition.
Since many New Granadan military leaders were captured and executed during
the Spanish reconquista in 1816-1817, most senior army officers were from
Venezuela. After a series of intrigues and revolts, the Venezuelans, including
Bolívar, left Bogotá in 1830; military rule was discredited after that and
university-trained lawyers dominated the government. Since this time, elected
civilians, rather than professional soldiers, have almost exclusively governed
Colombia; military regimes have only ruled briefly (1854, 1861-1863, and 1953-
1958), an atypical record in Latin America.
Elected civilian government, however, did not guarantee peace-political violence
accompanied nearly every electoral contest from the 1840s through the 1950s,
and there were frequent civil wars between the two traditional political parties,
the Liberal and the Conservative. Although these parties emerged in the 1840s,
their origins are somewhat based on the split between Bolívar and Santander,
and each party claimed one or the other as their "spiritual father": the
"Liberator" for the Conservatives, the "Man of Laws" for the Liberals. Beyond
this, there were not many differences: within each party, there were factions
that split over a variety of issues; politicians and supporters in both parties came
from all social classes and engaged in all kinds of economic activities. The most
consistent ideological division between the two parties was related to the
position of the Church in Colombian society, with the Conservatives in support
of a wider role for the clergy and the Liberals in favor of a degree of separation
of Church and state. Well into the 1950s, during the worst of the partisan