Francisco de Paula Santander
Francisco de Paula Santander was Bolivar's vice-president and then his enemy, the lawyer-general who governed Gran Colombia from Bogota for six years while the Liberator was fighting in Peru, built its treasury, schools and civil administration, led the federalists who called Bolivar's constitution a monarchy under another name, was condemned to death for the plot to kill him in September 1828 and reprieved into exile, and came back in 1832 as the first president of New Granada, the Colombia that survived the union's dissolution. Colombians call him the man of laws, and the two parties that ran the country for a century and a half descend from his quarrel with Bolivar. He was born at Cucuta on the Venezuelan border, was a law student in Bogota when the revolution began in 1810, and fought through the ten years of the war of independence, leading the Casanare division that joined Bolivar's army for the crossing of the Andes and commanding the vanguard at Boyaca in August 1819, the victory that freed New Granada. Bolivar made him vice-president of the new republic in 1821 and left him to run it while he went south to Ecuador and Peru, and Santander ran it as a constitutional state: the budget, the courts, the national university, secular schools, a loan from London that was lost in the crash of 1825, and the congress, which he respected and Bolivar found tiresome. When Bolivar came back in 1826 wanting the life presidency of his Bolivian constitution for Colombia too, the vice-president opposed him, and Bolivar took dictatorial powers in 1828 and abolished the office. On the night of 25 September 1828 conspirators broke into the palace to kill the Liberator, who escaped through a window. Santander, who had known of the plot and not joined it, was tried and sentenced to be shot, and Bolivar commuted it to banishment. He spent four years in Europe and the United States, reading constitutions. Bolivar died in December 1830 and the union broke into Venezuela, Ecuador and New Granada, and the convention of New Granada elected Santander president in his absence; he governed from 1832 to 1837 in the manner of his vice-presidency, founding schools and paying debts, and had the leaders of a conspiracy shot in 1833. He died in Bogota in May 1840 and his followers became the Liberal party.
- Lived: 1792 CE – 1840 CE
- Nationality: Colombian
- Roles: president, general, statesman
