Gran Colombia

It is the great might-have-been of South American independence, and it is usually written as a tragedy of ingratitude — the Liberator repaid with faction, exile and an early grave. The documentary record is more interesting than that. The union was not destroyed by a single betrayal. It was eroded by a fiscal system that never covered its costs, by distances that made Bogotá a foreign capital to Caracas and Quito alike, by a constitution that concentrated power at the centre while leaving the provinces to pay for it, and by the return of peace, which removed the one interest that all its regions shared.

The republic matters for three reasons beyond its own twelve years. It fixed the borders that its successors spent a century fighting over, from the Cauca to the Amazon. It left a common legal and administrative inheritance that Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador all kept, along with the same yellow-blue-red flag. And it created the template for every later attempt at Latin American union, from the Panama Congress of 1826 to the regional organisations of the present day. The name still does political work: "Bolivarian" is a live adjective in Venezuelan politics, and Gran Colombia is invoked whenever someone argues that the fragmentation of Spanish America was a mistake rather than a necessity.

At a glance

Why did Bolívar's march on Bogotá create a new state in 1819?

In February 1819 a congress of the Venezuelan provinces met at Angostura, on the Orinoco, in a city that existed mainly because Bolívar's forces held it. The war in Venezuela had reached a stalemate: the patriots held the eastern plains and the Orinoco, the royalists held the Andes and the coast. Bolívar's opening speech to that congress is a strange document for a soldier to deliver. It proposed a hereditary senate, a "moral power" to police civic virtue, and a constitution modelled partly on Britain, and it warned that the new republics would fail unless they governed themselves with institutions suited to their own history rather than copied from Philadelphia or Paris. "Unidad, unidad, unidad, debe ser nuestra divisa," he told the deputies — unity must be our watchword.

The military logic pointed the same way. Venezuela alone could not be held: its population had been drained by eight years of war, its cattle economy ruined, its elites divided, and its royalist opponents reinforced by llanero cavalry as skilled as the patriot horse. New Granada, by contrast, was weakly garrisoned in 1819 because the viceroy believed the Andes impassable in the rainy season. Bolívar crossed them anyway, with a force that included Venezuelan llaneros, New Granadan veterans, and British, Irish, French and German volunteers who had drifted into the patriot service after the Napoleonic wars. The descent into the Sabana de Bogotá and the battle of Boyacá on 7 August 1819 destroyed the royalist army in New Granada in an afternoon. Three days later Bolívar entered Bogotá.

He had no mandate to annex New Granada. What he had was a congress of Venezuelan provinces, a victorious army, and a thesis he had been arguing since the Carta de Jamaica of 1815: that the scattered Spanish provinces would be picked off one by one unless they combined. On 17 December 1819 the congress at Angostura issued a fundamental law declaring that "the Republics of Venezuela and New Granada are from this day united in one, under the glorious title of República de Colombia". The act created a state with three departments — Venezuela, Cundinamarca (New Granada) and Quito — though Quito was still entirely in royalist hands. Bolívar became president and Francisco Antonio Zea vice-president; Juan Germán Roscio and Francisco de Paula Santander were named vice-presidents of the first two departments, and Quito's post was left empty because there was nothing yet to govern.

What did the Cúcuta constitution of 1821 actually build?

The congress that gave the republic its constitution met at Villa del Rosario de Cúcuta, on the Venezuelan–New Granadan border, from 6 May to October 1821. Fifty-seven deputies attended, all from Venezuela and New Granada; no Ecuadorian was present, which is one reason Ecuadorian regionalism later found the constitution easy to resent. Bolívar was still campaigning in the south. The deputies ratified the union by a law of 12 July, signed the constitution on 30 August, and gave it the executive's assent on 6 October.

What they built was a centralist republic with a four-year presidency, a bicameral congress, departmental intendants appointed from Bogotá, and a restricted franchise. The constitution made Catholicism the religion of the state and did not permit public worship by anyone else — a position that would cause trouble in the ports, where foreign merchants and artisans settled in growing numbers. Bolívar's more exotic proposals from Angostura, the hereditary senate and the moral power, were quietly dropped. What survived was a workmanlike liberal charter of separated powers and enumerated rights, with a strong executive and a unitary state.

The same congress legislated at speed and in a reforming mood. It abolished the Inquisition, reorganised the fiscal monopolies, ended a range of Indian tribute payments, declared the slave trade closed, and passed a free-birth law that made the children of enslaved mothers legally free at birth while binding them to their mothers' owners as servants until they came of age. It reorganised the judiciary, opened the ports to foreign shipping, and voted to elect the president and vice-president itself rather than wait for an electoral college, choosing Bolívar and Santander and swearing them in on 3 October 1821.

The result was a state with modern ambitions and colonial finances. The new government inherited the Spanish fiscal system minus its most productive parts: tribute was abolished, the tobacco monopoly was contested, and the alcabala sales tax was unpopular and hard to collect in a country where most exchange happened outside markets. Customs revenue at La Guaira, Cartagena and Guayaquil was the one buoyant source, and it depended on trade that the war had nearly extinguished.

What held the republic together — and what pulled it apart?

Three things held it together. The first was the war: as long as Spanish armies remained, the republic's regions needed each other's soldiers and money. The second was the army itself, which was genuinely continental in composition — Venezuelan cavalry, New Granadan infantry, British and Irish battalions, Ecuadorian recruits — and whose officers had a material interest in a state that paid them. The third was Bolívar's personal authority, which crossed regional lines in a way no institution did.

Against those stood geography. A law of 25 June 1824 divided the territory into twelve departments — Orinoco, Venezuela, Apure and Zulia in the north; Boyacá, Cundinamarca, Magdalena and Cauca in the centre; Istmo, Ecuador, Asuay and Guayaquil in the south — each under an intendant appointed from Bogotá, and each large enough to be a country. Bogotá to Caracas was a thousand kilometres of mountain and llanos as the crow flies, and several weeks' journey in the dry season; Bogotá to Quito was further still, and the route south ran through Pasto, whose population had fought for the crown with a tenacity that cost the patriots years to break. There were no roads to speak of, no internal customs union worth the name, and no merchant class with an interest in the whole. The Diccionario de Historia de Venezuela describes the republic's problem bluntly: three countries with dissimilar populations and economies, and "pocas vías de comunicación" — few lines of communication.

The economies pulled in different directions. Venezuela exported cacao and, increasingly, coffee, to the Caribbean and Europe. New Granada exported gold, tobacco and hides, and its internal market was dominated by textiles from the highland workshops of Socorro and the Cauca valley. Quito's obrajes, the textile mills of the central highlands, were being undersold by cheaper British cloth arriving through Guayaquil, and Ecuadorian taxpayers resented paying for a Peruvian war that had been fought, as they saw it, with their money and their men. Panama lived off the transit trade and had closer commercial ties to Lima and Kingston than to Bogotá.

Two further strains ran through the whole period. The first was race and citizenship: the republic declared legal equality while retaining a social order in which corregidores and parish priests still governed indigenous communities, and in which the free-birth law was resisted by slaveholders in the Cauca and the llanos. The second was the Church. The government claimed the royal patronato over bishoprics as a successor to the crown; Rome refused to concede the right as such, though it consecrated the bishops the government proposed. Every later dispute over tithes, monasteries and education grew from that unresolved claim.

Who was running the country while Bolívar was away?

From 1821 to 1826 the answer was Francisco de Paula Santander, vice-president and acting chief executive, first from Cúcuta and then from Bogotá. Santander was a New Granadan lawyer-soldier, methodical, financially orthodox, and convinced that the republic's survival depended on administration rather than glory. He organised the treasury, founded schools under the Lancastrian system, encouraged foreign immigration and mining investment, tolerated a lively and frequently insolent press, and quarrelled continuously with the Church and with the army over money.

His government also borrowed. In 1824 Colombia contracted a loan in London of £4,750,000, roughly twenty million pesos, floated on the strength of the republic's imagined mineral wealth and the enthusiasm of British investors for Spanish American bonds. The money was meant to fund the southern campaigns and to refinance an earlier loan raised on worse terms. Much of it went to the army, some to current spending, and a good deal to commissions and discounts. When the London house of Goldschmidt, which handled the funds, failed in the opening months of 1826, Colombian credit collapsed and the republic found itself with a debt it could not service and no new source of lending.

Bolívar returned from the south in 1826 after five years away, having liberated Quito, Peru and Upper Peru, and found a state that had grown civilian, litigious and suspicious of the army he commanded. The 1825 elections measured the split with unusual clarity. Bolívar took 583 of 609 electoral-college votes for the presidency; Santander won the vice-presidency with 286 votes against 76 for Pedro Briceño Méndez, but received not a single vote in Caracas, Apure, Maracaibo, Coro, Mérida, Margarita or Río Hacha, and was in a minority in Cartagena, Santa Marta, Popayán and Guayaquil. The vice-president was, in effect, a New Granadan choice. Venezuelan officers read the result as a verdict on themselves.

The quarrel that followed was personal and political at once. Santander believed in legality, civilian supremacy and the constitution of 1821; Bolívar had come to believe that the constitution was unworkable and that only a stronger executive could hold the union together. Their differences were sharpened by the Bolivian constitution of 1826, a document Bolívar had drafted for the new republic of Bolivia with a lifelong presidency, an appointed senate and a chamber of censors. When his friends proposed applying it to Colombia, Santander's supporters concluded that the Liberator intended to make himself president for life, and said so in print.

How did Quito and Guayaquil become Colombian?

Guayaquil declared its independence from Spain in October 1820, and immediately faced the question that would define the southern border for a century: whether it belonged to the new Colombia or to Peru. Its merchants traded with Lima and its hinterland looked to Quito; its province had been part of the Presidency of Quito, which had been part of New Granada's viceroyalty until 1803, when the crown transferred it to Lima's jurisdiction for military reasons. Both Bogotá and Lima could cite a Spanish decree.

Bolívar settled the question by force of circumstance rather than law. Sucre, sent south with a Colombian division, fought the campaign of 1822 that ended with the battle of Pichincha on 24 May, on the slopes above Quito, and the surrender of the royalist army in the highlands. Bolívar himself had won a bloody and costly action at Bomboná on 7 April. The Colombian flag went up in Quito, and on 13 July 1822 the province of Guayaquil was incorporated into Colombia, with Bolívar's assurances about its future status left deliberately vague.

Two weeks later Bolívar met José de San Martín at Guayaquil, in the interview that has never been satisfactorily documented because no minute was kept and both men later gave self-serving accounts. San Martín had already liberated Chile and declared Peruvian independence; he wanted Colombian troops for the final campaign in the Andes, and he wanted to know whether Bolívar would serve under him or beside him. He sailed away to retirement in Europe, and Bolívar took charge of the Peruvian war. The consequence for Colombia was a campaign that consumed its treasury, its best regiments and, in the end, its political capital: the army that won Ayacucho in 1824 was largely Colombian, and Peru's debt for those "auxilios" became one of the grievances behind the war of 1828.

Quito's incorporation was never popular with everyone in Quito. The Ecuadorian departments carried a disproportionate share of the cost of the Peruvian campaign, their textile economy was exposed to British imports, and few Ecuadorians held office in the central government. The complaint was not separatism at first, but it prepared the ground for it.

Why did the Panama Congress of 1826 fail to bind the new states?

In December 1824, from Lima, Bolívar issued a circular inviting the Spanish American governments to send plenipotentiaries to Panama. His argument was that the new states needed "a system of guarantees which, in peace and in war, shall be the shield of our new destiny" — a standing assembly that would act as council in crises, interpreter of treaties and arbitrator of disputes. The isthmus was chosen for its geography: "if the world were to choose its capital, the Isthmus of Panama would be marked out for that august destiny," he wrote, with more enthusiasm than accuracy about the climate.

The diplomatic groundwork took years. Colombia signed treaties of union, league and confederation with Peru at Lima in July 1822, with Chile in October 1822, with Mexico in October 1823, and with Central America at Bogotá in March 1825. Chile's senate never ratified; Buenos Aires signed only a treaty of friendship and alliance in 1823, with no congress clause. The result was that when the congress opened on 22 June 1826, in the former convent of San Francisco, only four republics were represented: Colombia by Pedro Gual and Pedro Briceño Méndez, Peru by Manuel Lorenzo de Vidaurre and Manuel Pérez de Tudela, Mexico by José Mariano Michelena and José Domínguez Manso, and Central America by Antonio Larrazábal and Pedro Molina. Gual presided by lot. Britain sent Edward Dawkins and the Netherlands sent Jan van Veer as observers. Brazil, Chile and Buenos Aires sent nobody; Bolivia appointed delegates who never arrived; and the United States, which had been invited at Santander's insistence, lost one commissioner, Richard Anderson, to fever on the journey and saw the other, John Sergeant, reach Panama after the sessions had ended.

Three instruments were signed on 15 July 1826: a treaty of union, league and perpetual confederation; a convention fixing each state's contribution of men and ships to a common force; and a declaration that the sessions would resume at Tacubaya in Mexico. The treaty's rhetoric was generous — a perpetual defensive alliance against foreign domination, arbitration of disputes, and a common front against European intervention — and its practical machinery was thin. Nothing obliged a member to accept arbitration, no fund existed to pay for the common army, and the treaty's own ratification clauses meant that it bound only those who ratified. Colombia ratified. The others did not, and the Tacubaya sessions never formally opened.

The congress is often called a failure, and as an institution it was one. As a precedent it was not: this was the first time independent American states had met as equals to discuss common rules, and the practice of inter-American arbitration and conference descends from it, however indirectly. What it could not do was create obligations that the new states were willing to accept. Bolívar's own verdict, in a letter of August 1826 to his ministers in Panama, was that a "federal league" of the whole hemisphere would be "nominal", and that only a military league of Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico against the threat from the north was worth concluding.

Why did Venezuela rise against Bogotá in 1826?

On 30 April 1826 the municipal councils of Valencia and Caracas repudiated the authority of Bogotá and called for Venezuela to be governed from Venezuela. The movement, which its opponents nicknamed La Cosiata — roughly "the crooked affair" — was led by the lawyer Miguel Peña and backed by José Antonio Páez, the llanero general who commanded in the west. It was not a declaration of independence. Its slogans were autonomy, hostility to Santander, and loyalty to Bolívar, whose name the rebels used against the government that governed in his absence.

The grievances were concrete. The exports of Venezuela had collapsed during the war and had not recovered; the province was paying customs duties that went to Bogotá; conscription for the southern campaigns fell heavily on Venezuelan manpower; and the army's arrears of pay were settled in paper and land warrants that officers and soldiers sold cheaply to those with cash. Páez's authority in the llanos rested on his personal following, not on his commission, and Bogotá's attempt to discipline him over the recruitment of militia turned a jurisdictional quarrel into an armed confrontation.

Bolívar returned from Peru, and in Valencia on 4 January 1827 he and Páez embraced in public. The gesture ended the crisis on Bogotá's terms only in appearance: Páez kept his command, Peña was included in the settlement, and the amnesty Bolívar issued effectively recognised that Venezuela could not be governed against its local military chiefs. Bolívar also governed for a few months on extraordinary powers before restoring constitutional forms, but the precedent was worrying in both directions: it showed that the constitution could be suspended when convenient, and that the man who suspended it was the only figure able to put it back.

From 1827 the union's politics polarised into two loose groupings, not yet parties: the bolivarianos, who wanted a stronger executive, a larger army and constitutional reform, and the santanderistas, who defended the constitution of 1821, civilian government and provincial representation. The labels were imprecise and the alignments shifted, but the division was real, and it ran through the congress, the army and the press.

What was decided at Ocaña in 1828?

The constitution of 1821 could not be amended for ten years, so a great convention was due in 1828. Congress called it by law of 7 August 1827 to meet at Ocaña in March; it finally installed on 9 April 1828 in a town chosen for its central position. Its mandate was to revise the constitution. Everyone understood that the real question was whether Bolívar would keep the powers he had exercised in Venezuela and whether the federalist provinces would gain ground against Bogotá.

Bolívar's opening message was an indictment of his own government. "Our government is essentially badly constituted," he told the delegates. He described a country that had "known how to give itself life" and now lay "exanimate"; a public debt that had been under three million before the peace and was now a mass of "shameful debts"; and a nation that had begun to think about its rights rather than its duties. He offered to surrender the presidency and the army command, and asked the convention to reform without regard to his person.

The convention was closely divided, and the bolivarianos soon found themselves outvoted on the key procedural questions. Rather than accept a reform that would have cut the executive down, the santanderista majority and the bolivarian minority manoeuvred until the body could no longer transact business; the santanderistas withdrew on 10 June and the convention collapsed. Contemporary accounts differ on the exact date of dissolution — the Diccionario de Historia de Venezuela gives 10 June in one entry and 11 June in another — but not on the outcome.

The failure of Ocaña handed the initiative to the army. Municipal councils, beginning with Bogotá, petitioned Bolívar to assume supreme authority; he accepted, and on 27 August 1828 issued a decree organising the dictatorship. The decree suppressed the vice-presidency, which removed Santander from office, reorganised the Council of State, and promised a constituent congress within a year. It was, in its own terms, a legal dictatorship: Bolívar governed through decrees but insisted that he held power only until the nation spoke. "Under a dictatorship, who can speak of liberty?" he asked in the proclamation of the same day. "Let us pity one another — the people who obey and the man who commands alone."

Who tried to kill Bolívar in September 1828?

Shortly before midnight on 25 September 1828, a group of civilians and artillery officers forced their way into the palace of San Carlos in Bogotá. The plot had been organised for weeks by a mixture of santanderista intellectuals and dismissed or disgruntled soldiers, including Agustín Horment, Wenceslao Zulaibar, Florentino González, Luis Vargas Tejada, José Félix Merizalde and the Azuero brothers, with Colonel Ramón Guerra, the departmental chief of staff, supplying the passwords, and Commander Pedro Carujo commanding the armed party. The plan was to seize Bolívar, proclaim the constitution, and put Admiral José Prudencio Padilla — then under arrest over earlier disturbances in Cartagena — at the head of a provisional government. Some of the conspirators wanted a trial and exile; Carujo wanted a corpse.

Bolívar was in bed with Manuela Sáenz, who had warned him of the plot and who, when the doors were forced, argued him out of a fight and pushed him towards a window. He jumped, hurt himself, and hid under a bridge over the San Francisco river with his steward until loyal troops secured the city. Sáenz then told the intruders that he was in the council chamber and led them there, giving him the minutes he needed; when they realised the trick, Horment stopped a threat with the words "no hay que matar mujeres". Outside, the president's aide Guillermo Ferguson was shot and sabred by Carujo; the artillery barracks and the Vargas battalion wavered and then stayed loyal. By two in the morning the coup was over. Bolívar later called Sáenz "the liberator of the Liberator", and the phrase stuck.

The repression was severe. Guerra, Padilla, Horment, Zulaibar, Pedro Celestino Azuero and a number of officers and men were tried summarily and executed; Padilla's death, in particular, was remembered as a political murder, above all among the Venezuelan and Afro-Colombian officers who had supplied the republic's navy. Others were imprisoned or pardoned. Santander was tried not for joining the plot but for knowing of it and failing to denounce it; he was sentenced to death, and Bolívar commuted the sentence to exile. He left for Europe, and did not return until Bolívar was dead.

The attempt changed the regime. Bolívar's proclamation of 12 November 1828 announced that clemency had been extended even to his assassins, and in the same breath told Colombians to stop thinking of him for the presidency, because "my enemies will kill the fatherland to take power from me". He was now governing a state in which the vice-presidency had been abolished, the press was muzzled, and the opposition's most respected figure was in exile. The constituent congress he had promised was convoked for January 1830, and the year between was spent, in effect, waiting for it.

Why did Gran Colombia fight Peru in 1828–29?

The war with Peru had three causes and no clear casus belli. The first was the border. Neither state had inherited a defined frontier: Peru claimed the southern departments that had belonged to the Presidency of Quito, and a bilateral agreement of 1823 reaffirming the old viceregal boundary had left the status of those provinces unresolved. The second was the debt. Peru owed Colombia large sums for the army that had liberated it, and the Colombian treasury, with its London credit gone, pressed hard for payment. The third was Bolivia. Bolívar's constitution and Sucre's presidency gave Lima the impression that Bolivia was a Colombian satellite, and the Peruvian government of José de La Mar meant to end that.

War was declared in 1828, and Peruvian forces moved north into the southern Colombian department of Ecuador, occupying Loja and threatening Cuenca and Guayaquil. Sucre, commanding the Army of the South with a scratch force of Colombian and Ecuadorian troops, fought the decisive engagement at the Portete de Tarqui, near Cuenca, on 27 February 1829. The Colombian account claims a comprehensive victory; the Peruvian account claims the battle was undecided until the armistice. What is not disputed is that the Peruvian advance stopped, that the two armies signed an armistice at Girón the following day, and that La Mar's government fell in Lima soon afterwards, leaving a new Peruvian congress to make peace.

The peace was signed at Guayaquil on 22 September 1829 by Pedro Gual for Colombia and José Larrea y Loredo for Peru, after an earlier armistice concluded at Piura on 10 July. Its terms were conventional — perpetual peace, return of prisoners, reduction of forces on the frontier, free navigation of border rivers — except for two clauses that outlived the republic. Article 5 fixed the boundary as that of the viceroyalties of New Granada and Peru "before their independence", with such minor cessions as the parties might agree; Article 10 provided for a joint commission to liquidate Peru's debt to Colombia. The first clause made the frontier a question of colonial archives, and the second was never properly executed. Both were inherited by Ecuador and Colombia, and the boundary dispute that ran from 1829 to the Protocol of Rio de Janeiro in 1942, and in its final form to the settlement of 1998, is the longest afterlife of Gran Colombia.

Tarqui was a victory that weakened the victors. It confirmed Sucre as one of the most successful soldiers of the independence wars and the most obvious alternative to Bolívar, which made him a threat to everyone with an interest in the succession; it left the southern departments with a heightened sense of their own importance; and it did nothing to solve the fiscal crisis, since the war had been fought on credit and the peace brought no money.

How did the union break up in 1830?

The end came from the periphery inward. In Venezuela, the municipal movement of 1826 had never been reversed, only suspended. In November 1829 a popular assembly at Valencia declared Venezuela separated from Colombia, and Páez, as civil and military chief, called a constituent congress by decree of 13 January 1830. That congress installed at Valencia on 6 May, with 33 deputies present, and spent the next five months drafting a constitution for a sovereign Venezuela, which it approved in September 1830; Páez became the first president. The Venezuelan case was argued in print in terms of misgovernment, fiscal exaction and the right of a province to govern itself.

Quito followed on 13 May 1830, when an assembly of notables in Quito declared the separation of the southern departments and the creation of a state that took the name Ecuador. Its first constitution was promulgated on 23 September 1830, and Juan José Flores, a Venezuelan-born general who had fought in the southern campaigns, became president. Ecuador's separation was less a national awakening than a decision by the Quito elite that a small state, with Flores's army behind it, was preferable to a large one governed from Bogotá and claimed by Lima. Bolívar, by then on his way to the coast, took the news with weary realism: "let the will of the South be done", he wrote to Flores from Barranquilla on 9 November 1830, adding that the new chiefs would be driven out in their turn unless they made themselves another Francia — and that even that would not be enough.

In Bogotá the Constituent Congress — the "Congreso Admirable" — met from 20 January to 11 May 1830. Bolívar resigned the presidency at its opening session; the congress asked him to wait until the new constitution was promulgated, then accepted his resignation on 4 May and elected Joaquín Mosquera president and Domingo Caicedo vice-president. The constitution it produced, promulgated on 29 April, was a compromise that pleased nobody: centralist in structure, but with a weakened executive and a strengthened congress.

A murder, a coup and a death completed the collapse. Sucre was shot on 4 June 1830 on the road at Berruecos, in the southern province of Pasto, almost certainly on the orders of political enemies who feared his candidacy; the crime was never satisfactorily solved, and it removed the one figure who might have held the south. In September, General Rafael Urdaneta seized power in Bogotá in Bolívar's name and tried to restore the union by force. He failed, and resigned in April 1831. Bolívar, meanwhile, had left Bogotá for the coast, and died at San Pedro Alejandrino, near Santa Marta, on 17 December 1830, aged 47. Ten days before, he had issued a last proclamation to the peoples of Colombia: "If my death contributes to the end of factions and the consolidation of the Union, I shall go down to the grave in peace."

The formal end came in 1831, when a convention met at Granada in November, declared the union at an end, and gave the remnant the name Estado de la Nueva Granada. Its constitution, dated 1 March 1832, created a republic with a four-year presidency and a franchise restricted by property, literacy and status; Santander returned from exile and became its first president. The new state kept most of Gran Colombia's laws, its army, its debt and its flags, but not its ambitions.

What did the dissolution of 1831 leave behind?

The most tangible legacy was financial. The foreign debt contracted in London in the 1820s, together with the arrears of internal loans and salaries, had to be divided among three successor states that had no money. A commission attempted an apportionment in the 1830s, and the resulting shares — the precise percentages were argued over for decades — tied Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador into a common creditors' queue in London. Successive Colombian governments spent much of the nineteenth century servicing a debt contracted by a state that no longer existed, and Venezuela's arrears, tangled up with the Guyana boundary, fed into the crisis with Britain in the 1890s.

The legal legacy was more durable. Gran Colombia's statutes, its military ordinances, its customs schedules and its land legislation were inherited wholesale, and its departmental boundaries became, with small adjustments, the provincial boundaries of three republics. The Colombia that emerged after 1886, the Venezuela that Páez and his successors built, and the Ecuador of Flores and García Moreno all governed with institutions that had been designed in Bogotá in the 1820s. So did the Church: the patronato dispute that Bolívar's government opened with Rome in 1824 was still being litigated by Ecuador and Colombia in the twentieth century.

The political legacy is the one that matters most to historians, and it is contested. David Bushnell, the historian most closely associated with the subject, put the emphasis on structural fragility: distances, poor transport, the absence of economic ties, and the sheer difficulty of governing four regions from one capital. Venezuelan historiography has tended to place the fiscal collapse and the London loan failure at the centre, reading the union as an arrangement that took more from the provinces than it gave. Bolívar's own explanation, offered at Ocaña, was constitutional: the government had been "essentially badly constituted", copying foreign models that did not fit. Rebecca Earle's study of the collapse of royal government in New Granada approaches the question from the other end, arguing that the royalists did as much as the patriots to destroy the viceroyalty; on that reading the republic's difficulties begin in the war that made it, not in the constitution it adopted.

None of these explanations is exclusive, and the honest conclusion is that the union failed for a combination of reasons that no single reform could have addressed. What is not credible is the version in which a handful of traitors destroyed a working state. The state never worked well enough to be destroyed by treachery; it was, from 1821, a government that spent more than it raised, promised more than it could deliver, and depended for its existence on a war that ended.

Common myths about Gran Colombia

Timeline of Gran Colombia

What the map shows next

At 1822 on the map the republic is a coastal and Andean patchwork: the Venezuelan llanos, the New Granadan highlands and the newly annexed province of Guayaquil, with the Isthmus attached and the Amazon interior claimed but not governed. By 1825 on the map the twelve departments of 1824 are in place, and the outline is the one the republic's officials would have recognised — a state with two sea coasts, one capital and no roads between them.

Then the map and the history part company. At 1830 on the map the outline still shows the whole republic, although Venezuela and Quito had declared themselves separate that year, and it holds the same shape at 1833 on the map, two years after the union's formal end, because the border dataset keeps the Gran Colombian outline until the successor states are drawn in their own right. Read the last years of the range as a portrait of a state that had already gone: the Peruvian boundary settled at Guayaquil in 1829 survived it, and the Isthmus of Panama stayed attached to Bogotá for another seventy years.