Thousand Days’ War: A Visual History

The Thousand Days' War (1899-1902) was a Colombian civil war between the ruling Conservatives and the Liberals, who rose in Santander on 17 October 1899 against a government that had excluded them and debased the currency. After Liberal defeat at Palonegro in May 1900, the largest battle in Colombian history, the war became a guerrilla struggle across the country, with Venezuelan and Ecuadorian help for the Liberals and Panama a major theatre. Exhaustion, coffee prices and disease ended it with the treaties of Neerlandia (October 1902) and Wisconsin (November 1902, signed on a US battleship); about 100,000 died from a population of 4 million. The following year, with Colombia prostrate, Panama seceded with US backing and the canal zone was leased to Washington.

When it was fought: the era ribbon

The bold bar is Thousand Days' War. The lighter bars are empires and wars from the same era and the same part of the world. Click any bar to jump to its page.

Colombian paper money in circulation

The war was financed by the printing press; the peso lost almost all its value.

Timeline of the Thousand Days' War

1. 1899
   Liberal rising in Santander17 October.
2. 1899
   PeralonsoDecember.
3. 1900
   Palonegro; Marroquin's coup
4. 1901
   Guerrilla war; Venezuelan intervention
5. 1902
   Herrera in Panama; treaties of Neerlandia and Wisconsin
6. 1903
   Panama secedes3 November.

Origins

The Conservative Regeneration of Rafael Nunez had centralised Colombia in 1886 and shut Liberals out; a coffee price collapse and rampant printing of paper money in the 1890s brought crisis. Radical Liberals rose in Santander in October 1899, hoping for quick victory; they took Bucaramanga's approaches and won at Peralonso in December, but the Conservatives split their own government in a palace coup, replacing Sanclemente with Marroquin in July 1900.

Palonegro and the guerrilla war

At Palonegro near Bucaramanga in May 1900, 15 days of fighting between about 25,000 men left thousands dead and the Liberal army broken. Uribe Uribe and Herrera turned to guerrilla war; bands fought across Cundinamarca, Tolima and the coast, Venezuela's dictator Castro sent troops, and Herrera's Liberals took most of Panama in 1902 with the gunboat Admiral Padilla. Both sides shot prisoners; disease killed more than bullets; the economy collapsed and the peso became worthless.

Peace and Panama

Uribe Uribe signed peace at the Neerlandia banana estate on 24 October 1902 and Herrera at Panama on the USS Wisconsin on 21 November, with amnesty and promises of reform. The US, negotiating a canal, was rebuffed by Colombia's Senate in 1903; Panama's separatists, encouraged by Washington and Bunau-Varilla, declared independence on 3 November 1903 while US warships blocked Colombian troops. Colombia never fully recovered its two-party unity; Uribe Uribe was assassinated in Bogota in 1914.

The war is the background of Garcia Marquez's Colonel Aureliano Buendia in One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Related empires and wars

Chosen automatically by overlap in time and geography, plus a few hand picked connections.

Empires of the same era and region

• United States (1776 to present)
• Spanish Empire (1492 to 1976)
• Dutch Empire (1602 to 1975)
• Empire of Brazil (1822 to 1889)

Wars of the same era and region

• Colombian War of Independence (1810 to 1825)
• La Violencia (1948 to 1958)
• Colombian conflict (1964 to present)
• Federal War (Venezuela) (1859 to 1863)
• Cuban wars of independence and Spanish-American War (1868 to 1898)
• Paraguayan War (War of the Triple Alliance) (1864 to 1870)

8 surprising things about the Thousand Days' War

1. The war lasted 1,130 days but 'Thousand Days' stuck.
2. The peace of Wisconsin was signed aboard a US battleship in Panama Bay, a sign of who was really in charge of the isthmus.
3. Garcia Marquez's grandfather fought as a Liberal colonel in the war and inspired Colonel Aureliano Buendia.
4. Palonegro is usually described as the bloodiest battle ever fought in Colombia.
5. Rafael Uribe Uribe later joined the government and was axed to death by two workmen on the Capitol steps in 1914.
6. The Colombian peso, worth roughly a US dollar in 1898, fell to about a cent by 1902.
7. Panama's secession gave the US the Canal Zone under a treaty signed by a Frenchman, Bunau-Varilla, who had never lived in Panama.
8. The Liberal general Benjamin Herrera later founded Bogota's Universidad Libre.

Sources

• Thousand Days' War Wikipedia
• War of a Thousand Days Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Colombia: The War of a Thousand Days Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Charles Bergquist, Coffee and Conflict in Colombia 1886-1910 (1978) Duke University Press

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