Bolivar and Liberation from Spain: The Historical Development of the Public Servant in Colombia

Abstract

Colombia’s independence reflected an internal struggle between existing interest groups seeking to promote autonomous governments and those that maintained positions granted by the Spanish Crown. This triggered Simon Bolivar’s uprising and further challenged the autonomous management of Gran Colombia (present-day Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, and Venezuela, together with parts of northern Peru, Brazil, Guyana, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua). The complex reality of the territories of Gran Colombia involved the exercise of power and conflict between national and local elites, including violent disputes initiated by the centralist initiatives of the liberator Bolivar that went on to shape the political Constitutions of the nineteenth century across Latin America: Bolívar led the fight for independence in Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela. Like in other parts of Latin America, these bloody power struggles run through Colombian history reconfiguring the Colombian State’s territorial and administrative structures and often undermining the State’s legitimacy during the 200 years of republican history.