Thousand Days' War
Colombia's Liberals rose against the Conservative government in October 1899, and the war that followed killed perhaps 100,000 people and cost the country Panama. The Conservatives had governed since 1886 under a centralist constitution that abolished the federal system, restored the Church's position, and made electoral fraud routine. Coffee prices collapsed in 1896, which ruined the Liberal planters and removed the last reason for restraint. The Liberals lost the conventional war quickly. Their army was destroyed at Palonegro in May 1900 in a fortnight of fighting that left thousands of bodies on the field. They then fought a guerrilla war for two more years across the whole country, with irregular bands, forced recruitment down to boys, and reprisals against civilians on both sides — a pattern Colombia repeated in La Violencia and again after 1964. The Conservatives were themselves split, and their own president was overthrown by his vice-president in 1900 for being insufficiently ruthless. The war ended with three treaties in late 1902, the last signed aboard an American warship, the USS Wisconsin, off Panama. That detail is the consequence that mattered. Panama was a Colombian department, the war had been fought hardest there, and the United States wanted a canal. When the Colombian senate rejected the treaty granting the canal zone in 1903, Washington backed a Panamanian secession, kept Colombian troops from landing, and recognised the new republic within days. The canal treaty was signed two weeks later. Colombia was compensated in 1921. Theodore Roosevelt said afterwards that he had taken the isthmus.
- Year: 1899 CE
- Category: Military
