A BRIEF HISTORY OF COLOMBIA
71
controlled the ballot box and the presidency. The Liberals would have none of it:
a major civil war broke out in 1899, known as the "War of a Thousand Days."
By this time, widespread cultivation of coffee was slowly improving the
economic situation. The coffee business changed the attitudes of Colombian
investors: it was not only profitable and an ideal crop for mountainous
Colombia, but planters had to wait four to five years for coffee bushes to begin
to produce beans — it forced a capital investment. Huge coffee plantations were
first established in northern Colombia along the Venezuelan border and in the
lower altitudes near Bogotá and in Antioquia. In the region of the Antioquian
colonization, small paisa farmers found coffee to be a particularly lucrative crop-
Colombia's tropical location allows coffee bushes to produce beans twice a year,
providing enough revenue for a small holder to survive. Today this region is
known as the "Eje Cafetero" — the center of coffee production. "Juan Valdez" of
the Colombian Coffee Growers Association is based on fact — although we only
see him and his burro, his entire family was involved in coffee cultivation.
The rise of the coffee economy was a factor in the War of a Thousand Days.
Liberals hoped to find support for their uprising from among Conservative coffee
growers, who were being overly taxed by the government; the rebels were
disappointed when these planters stayed loyal to their own party — Liberal
armies were defeated by 1900. However, a guerrilla war raged on in parts of the
country for two more years, until nearly 100,000 were killed. In 1902, peace
treaties were signed by the leaders of the last Liberal resistance on the
Caribbean coast, and, significantly, in the Department of Panamá.
The United States government, anxious to begin constructing a canal in Panamá,
played a role in negotiating an end to the war in that region. However, when the
Colombian Senate hesitated to approve a canal treaty that was overly generous
to U.S. interests, the U.S. backed a separatist rebellion in Panamá in 1903. The
new Panamanian government immediately approved the canal treaty. Nearly