Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at Liberalism's achievements and contradictions and analyses its political struggle as one of the ideological sources of violence in nineteenth-century Colombia.

Paper long abstract:

In different ways, Colombian political elites after Independence in 1819, imagined the nation as another New World, a place in which to build a new society. However, reality proved to work against the idealism of the post-independence generation. Thus the social, political and economic contradictions in Colombia during the nineteenth-century (and part of the twentieth-century), can be seen nowhere more clearly than in the struggle of the liberals against tradition and the conservatives during the liberal governments between 1849 and 1885. Indeed, the contradictions of the political landscape were the contradictions of the political parties.This paper looks at the relationship between political ideologies, society and the economy during this period that was marked by the rise and fall of liberal rule. It analyses the role violence played as a social means for political ends.