Alas, my apologies for my last absence. I got (dis)graced by having a girlfriend for 2 weeks, in which I went away from my computer, until we broke up, due to the fact she was a complete collection of unpleasant mental disorders and jealousy, and she also demanded a lot of my free time and my money, things that are scarce on these wild and uncivilised times (though, at least we remain friends). Then training on my new job struck, and then my own life has been going through a lot of interesting changes which are better off on a different post (or if one day I dare to spill it out). This is the reason why this chapter took too long to properly conclude. It still includes the same humour as always, though.
As a reminder, I'm writing this from the perspective of someone in this timeline who is a bit... nonlinear in his way of thinking. And with a rather unique approach on narrating history.
And now for something completely different, we will now talk about a country that has been ignored in most alternate history tales due to being in South America. Enjoy!
Chapter 9
An Undying Union: Post-independence Gran Colombia
The Flag of Colombia.
Until the Great War. Where the Neo-Bolivarists replaced it for something extremely tacky.
Simón Bolívar barely made it out of Perú in 1826, and this worsened his standing with the few lieutenants that he still had back home, a problem instigated partly by the desire of everyone to stop the war as soon as possible, and the Libertador just going crazy about the Iberia Maldita. Even after being hailed as the Libertador [1] by the men who fought, not out of compensation or glory, but out of personal loyalty to him, he had all sorts of political factions unifying to get him off from power. His failure in Callao when the Platinean troops abandoned the Libertador more or less caused the cancellation of his victory tour throughout all of the newly-liberated Latin America and instead ran off to Bogotá, first by sea, and then by land. He was less than keen to show off the disaster that his expedition was, and more into ruling his newly liberated country with an iron fist.
However, some other military commanders, such as Francisco de Paula Santander, were less than keen of his ruthless methods of keeping order and his constant fear-mongering to keep the Colombian Union under his command. However, things were about to change for good, at least once in the history of the República de la Gran Colombia.
This came to be in September 1828. On the 25th day of this month, a group of armed men, composed of 30 soldiers and at least a dozen more malcontents, and all sympathizers of Santander, broke into Bolivar’s mansion. There was nobody at home who warned the Libertador about the certain death that he was about to get. [2] And while Simón Bolívar fought bravely for his life against all of them, killing two and wounding another one, but a fight using a sword against half a dozen men armed with pistols, clubs and swords is bound to end in death for the recipient of this beating, Bolívar becoming a cross between a pincushion, human target practice, a chopping board and a human piñata. Plus, his personal room got a new paintjob, the colour being Bolivar Red. We must remember that this is not like the story of Samson.
Approximate reconstruction of the place in which Bolívar spent his last hours.
The original site was bombed with rockets from the Brazilian Imperial Armed Forces during the Great War.
However, while this action may have been done on Santander’s orders or not (I don't really know; most discussions on this topic in the Datosphere end up with people banned all over the place, indiscriminate use of image macros, conspiracy theory drivel and rather creative uses of the Spanish language), this man expressed later on his disapproval for the methods and had some of the murderers hanged for the crime of murdering the Libertador. Of course, a savvy head of government knows that it’s a terrible idea to give any kind of incentive or make people think that they can go around murdering their own president and get away with it. Besides, Santander was the President now, and the Federalist faction finally was without any strong opposition. The time to get rid of Bolivar’s fear-mongering against Spain ended, and the time to start fixing up the country began.
First of all, there was the issue the establishment of a federalist constitution in the Gran Colombia. All states had equal rights, which pleased the elites from the eastern part of the country, and made them feel more equal to the central government in Bogotá. And unlike most people may think, the only people who really disliked this were the elites in Bogotá, and quite a few who supported Bolívar.
They also established this memorial sometime after his death.
That sometime being after the end of the Great War, as the original mausoleum was blown up by Peruvian-Brazilian forces.
However, there were people who did stage up some uprisings against Santander, and managed to fail epically. That’s why they are mostly glossed over in most modern Colombian history books and why we won’t talk about them. Or at least not myself.
As a final note, the new constitution of Colombia opened up a new can of worms in regards to how federalism had to be applied. Some viewed it as in the United States, in which the states were bound together by a central authority (which in the case of Colombia, it was in Bogotá), or some other ones viewed it as in the case of the Platinean Federation, which was more confederal in paper and in which the government was highly decentralized. Santander went with the second one, and for quite some time, it worked, until his tenure ended in 1832.
After that, then-president Joaquín Mosquera faced a coup from the general Rafael Urdaneta, with the aim of later on splitting off the provinces of the former Captaincy of Venezuela to himself. While the coup failed, it left in evidence that the confederal laws were not going to keep Colombia united, and if something similar happened during a Spanish invasion, the country would never be able to last; thus, the confederal laws began to be modified slowly to allow a stronger central government while attempting to avoid treading over state laws. Nevertheless, the union endured, and the Spanish Empire attempted to not get destroyed from within. As for Mosquera, as of today, he’s recognized as one of the greatest presidents that Gran Colombia has ever had, and in any Colombian historical forum on the Datosphere [3] will tell you so. Urdaneta is not so lucky, and he is seen now as a rebellious traitor in Colombian historiography, in addition to his less-than-stellar military endeavours during the wars against the Spaniards.
Finally, like the Republicans in Mexico, Colombia had its own fair share of problems with the Bolivaristas, which, as time went by, it became an irredentist, hispanophobic, anti-democratic and militaristic faction within the Colombian political scene, which advocated to a never-ending crusade against the Spanish until they were all kicked out of South America, and then to absorb all of Latin America into a single federal nation, all while perverting the initial ideals that Simón Bolívar fought for. A faction that became the main source of problems to all subsequent governments until they seized power at the end of the Six Year War in 1956, and which during the times they participated in elections, became increasingly violent with every passing year that they weren’t elected. [4]
Thus... this doesn't get dissolved. Do note also that they do not recognize the Spanish dominion of Perú, still claiming that is a repressed republic under Spanish occupation.
Until the Great war, when Colombia lost quite a few territories.
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[1] The title Libertador would later on gain a nastier connotation after the end of the War of the Six Years.
[2] In this timeline, due to the failure of Bolivar’s expedition to Peru, he never meets Manuela Sáenz in Quito, the woman who saved the Libertador’s life in this fatidic day. There were just no military parades to receive Bolivar’s victory, only a bunch of angry landowners that lost sons/fathers/slaves in this bellical quagmire.
[3] In Spanish, it is known as Datósfera. It is this timeline’s equivalent of the Internet.
[4] I think I might have thrown a massive spoiler over here, but alas, this is going to be the most violent period in the history of the Gran Colombia, and one of the most brutal civil wars in this timeline, which will finally spill over the rest of the world in rather unexpected ways.
Until the Great War...