[Colombia, Land of El Dorado]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

Published by the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, Commerce Department Building, Washington, D. C.
¡»Ml
ThIRD SOUTH AMERICAN country to join the United Nations, Colombia stands in a strategic position in a global war. Only country on the southern continent to look toward both Pacific and Caribbean, Colombia has been molded as much by her position at the crossroads of the Western World as by the isolation of her inland cities.
Trade of all the Spanish colonies of South America came through her ports in early colonial days, some by ship to the Isthmus of Panama (then part of her territory), some by mule and llama over the old Inca roads through the Andean valleys to the Caribbean port of Cartagena. Later the Isthmus route saw’ periods of decline alternating with feverish activity during the California gold rush, after the opening of the Panama Railroad in 1855 and, again, after the building of the Panama Canal.
Long before Pearl Harbor, Colombia was aware of her strategic importance. As early as 1939 she took steps to eliminate the danger to the Canal inherent in German control of her extensive air system, SCADTA. By the middle of 1940, ownership had been transferred to Colombian and United States interests. Also in 1939, she had granted the United States the right to construct air bases for the defense of the Panama Canal.
On December 8, 1941, Colombia broke relations with Japan and, 11 days later, with Germany and Italy. After two of her ships were sunk by German submarines, she declared,
on November 27, 1943, that a state of belligerency existed between Colombia and Germany. Months earlier her naval and air bases had been thrown open to the exclusive use of the American republics. Colombia’s cooperation in preventing Axis sabotage has been thorough—from guarding communications lines to expelling foreigners found to be spreading anti-democratic propaganda. Her economic facilities, too, were quickly mobilized to get to the United Nations her strategic materials for war—oil, quinine, rubber, platinum, fibres, hides, and foodstuffs;
Although the country was named after him, Columbus himself did not touch on the shores of what is now Colombia. Credit for this goes to Alonso de Ojeda, who had been with Columbus on his second expedition, and to whom was granted the right to conquer this part of the New World. In 1500 Ojeda rounded Cabo de la Vela near the Venezuelan border.
The Indians were hostile and apt with the poison arrow,
so it was not until 1525 that a permanent settlement was made at Santa Marta. Failure of
supply ships to arrive, conflicting ambitions between rival captains, and the difficulty of finding food on the hot, moist coast conspired with the Indians against the conquest. Cartagena itself was founded in 1533 after a battle with Indians reported by the Spaniards to be more warlike than any yet encountered.
“In fact,” says Antonio Vazques de Espinosa, a Carmelite chronicler, “among them was an Indian girl of not over 18 who before they seized and captured her, had killed eight Spaniards with her bow and arrows, and done other marvelous deeds.”
All along the coast the Spaniards had heard the legend of “El Dorado,” the gilded chieftain who once a year covered himself with gold dust and bathed in a lake while attendants cast into the waters ornaments of beaten gold and emeralds. This legend was to cost the lives and fortunes of countless adventurers and
to bring about the settlement of regions which even today defy railroad and highway engineers. Gold was found, but the lake was never identified, and hopeful romanticists still talk of draining Lake Guatavita to recover the treasure believed to lie in its depths.
Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, lawyer and scholar, was sent into the interior to find the mythical lake. His expedition toiled up the Rio Magdalena, struggled through the Eastern
Range of the Andes, encountered and conquered the fatalistic, civilized Chibcha Indians whose legends told of the bearded white one who would one day appear upon a strange animal. After two years of hardships, the 166 tattered and starving survivors of his original band of 800 founded Santa Fe de Bogotá as the capital of New Granada. The “Sacred Faith’’ part of the name disappeared, but the city is still called Bogotá, in honor of the Chibcha chieftain who opposed Quesada. Where the beautiful streets of the modern Colombian capital now stand, Quesada built his city—a church and 12 thatched huts, each named for one of the Apostles.
Historians tell much of the cruelty of the Conquistadores toward the Indians—and often toward rival countrymen— yet they were fantastic in their ability to push into incredibly difficult terrain, which Colombia offers in great variety. Railroad and highway engineers, opening up supposedly
HOW THE AIRPLANE HELPS COLOMBIA
RAILROAD GROWTH IN COLOMBIA
virgin territory, find ruins of their settlements and of the churches built by the equally intrepid missionaries who followed them.
While the coastal cities of Colombia, particularly Cartagena and Santa Marta, knew the bustle of Spain’s colonial trade and were the constant targets of buccaneers who preyed on the shipping of the Spanish Main, transportation difficulties gave to her inland provinces an individual flavor which persists to this day, preserved the purity of her language, and made of Colombia a nation of individualists who take their greatest pleasure in the things of the mind—in philosophical discussions, poetry, and the arts.
Prelude to independence was the invasion of Spain by Napoleon and the placing of his brother, Joseph, on the Spanish throne in 1808. In Bogotá, that summer, Ferdinand was proclaimed King, and the next year a local committee sent a memorandum to Spain containing a threat of separation. In 1811 Cartagena declared her independence, other sections followed suit, but they could not make up their minds to work together. A federation of the United Provinces of New Granada was set up, and in 1814 Simón Bolívar, Venezuelan Liberator, was asked to bring the rest of the departments into the movement. Bolivar’s forces, however, were not strong enough to fight off a Spanish army. By 1816, New Granada was once more under the Spanish flag, and Bolivar had fled to Jamaica. After his later successes in Venezuela,
Flank of San Fernando Fortress in C a r ta le n a Harbor
Bolívar was back in Bogotá with his Army of Liberation in 1819, and at the same time his Revolutionary Congress in Angostura, Venezuela, proclaimed the Republic of Gran Colombia (including Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador), with Bolivar as its head, and the Colombian, Francisco de Paula Santander, as vice president.
Bolivar favored a highly centralized government, Santander a federation of states. Santander won. By the end of 1830 both Venezuela and Ecuador had broken away from Gran Colombia. The Republic of New Granada,
set up in 1831, changed its name in 1863 to the United States of Colombia and later to the Republic of Colombia. The austere Santander, President from 1832 to 1837and a firm believer in democracy, set up the legislative, judicial, financial, and educational systems of the country. As early as 1821 he had said: “Arms have given us independence; laws will give us freedom.’’
Santander’s prophesy was to be fulfilled, but not until the beginning of the twentieth century did Colombia achieve the smooth working of democratic processes which characterizes her today. During the intervening years her democratic “growing pains” were severe, and she was to have as many as 70 civil wars, the last one, “The Thousand Days War,” between 1899 and 1902, being so bloody that Colombians, with typical wry humor, said that “the vultures eat only from captains up.”
In 1903, on the heels of the devastating and sobering “Thousand Days War” came the secession of her Panama territory. A treaty giving the United States the right to con-
Old Church at Popayán,
struct a canal across the Panama Isthmus was signed in Washington by the Colombian Chargé d’Affaires. The Colombian Senate refused to ratify it; Panama declared her independence; United States warships stood by, and the newly formed Panama Senate ratified the treaty.
Colombia’s relations with the United States had been on a traditionally friendly basis since 1822, when Dr. Manuel Torres was the first Minister of any American republic to be received in Washington. The Panama incident led to years of bitterness, only partly assuaged by a treaty in 1914 providing for payment of an indemnity of $25,000,000 and granting Colombia special privileges in the use of the Canal and Panama Railway.
Since 1904 Colombia’s administrations have alternated between the two traditional major political parties—the Conservatives and the Liberals. During the presidency of Rafael Reyes, Conservative elected in 1904, roads and railroads were constructed, and agricultural and commercial enterprises fostered. Further governmental reforms, long advocated by liberal leaders, were initiated when they were elected in 1930. Expansion of the public school system, removal of educational control from the church, wider control of business enterprises (both domestic and foreign), construction of new highways, public health improvements, and new taxation systems resulted.
President Alfonso Lopez, who entered on his second term in 1942, put through several notable social changes in the Colombian Constitution in 1935- Social interests are put above private interests: the state is given power to intervene (even to the extent of expropriation) if both chambers of Congress feel that social duties are not being performed by private enterprise.
Colombia has attracted considerable foreign capital— United States investments alone increased from $4,000,000 in 1904 to $250,000,000 in 1930. The Canal payments and some foreign investments have been used to build highways and railroads, for transportation is Colombia’s key problem. The
advent of commercial aviation was a spectacular event for the Republic, whose geography, beautiful and with almost incredible contrasts, has hemmed the bulk of her people away from each other. A relief map of Colombia shows her three towering segments of the Andes fanning out from her southern borders—her Eastern, Central, and Western Cordilleras— and running north throughout her territory. Between them lie high tablelands, where most of Colombia’s inhabitants live. Her capital, Bogotá, and many of her big cities, are on these tablelands (5,OCX) to 9,000 feet above sea level), where the climate is delightfully cool—at times actually cold.
Railroads and highways have presented stupendous engineering difficulties. For centuries the Magdalena River was the main artery of commerce. Navigable but temperamental, the Magdalena, which flows through the Central Valley toward the Caribbean port of Barranquilla, was an early transportation blessing, but its very existence hampered later development, for the first railroads were built only as feeder lines to the river.
Even now, freight which does not travel by air must be loaded and unloaded sometimes as many as 11 times between Barranquilla and Bogota and coffee from remote plantations often has to travel on muleback for weeks before it even can start this complicated journey. Then the sands of the Magdalena shift constantly, and boats often are tied up for days waiting for rains to bring enough water to make further travel along the river possible.
No wonder that Colombia was the first nation in the Western World to develop commercial aviation. Many a far inland region, rich in the produce of the land or the mines, leaped overnight from mule-back, side-wheeler, and canoe to air transport. Started by SCADTA in 1920, and continued by Colombian and United States capital, airlines of the Aerovias Nacionales now cover all the upland territory where population is concentrated. In proportion to her area, Colombia has twice as many air lines as the United States.
Yet the airplane cannot solve all transportation problems. While planes go into the vast low, southern jungles, many products, including strategic rubber and cinchona (quinine), still must take the long river trips, and only a unified system of railroads or highways can make the shipping of coffee easy and fast.
Modernization is following close on the heels of the plane, yet for the tourist there are still many ancient cities, with their colonial cathedrals rich with carvings and murals and their altars encrusted with gold and set with gems. In each province are excellent examples of ec-
COLOMBIA'S EXPORTS, 1940
clesiastical architecture as well as some of the best seventeenth and eighteenth century Creole paintings.
In literature as in art, the classical Spanish tradition has dominated. Nearly every leader of Colombia has been a man of letters, and the saying goes that virtually everyone in Bogotá or Popayán is a poet or a philosopher. Colombians enjoy sports—but even more they enjoy abstract discussions. Two of Colombia’s novelists have been widely read outside the country, Jorge Isaacs, whose “Maria” is one of the most popular of Spanish American works, and José Eustasio Rivera, whose “The Vortex” paints a vivid picture of the beauty and horror of the jungle. The poet, Antonio Nariño, and the scientist, Francisco José de Caldas (collaborator with Baron Alexander von Humboldt), were important figures in the War of Liberation. José Asunción Silva, José Eusebio Caro, and Guillermo Valencia are .among her many poets; José Manuel Marroquin and Miguel Antonio Caro among her prose writers. “The Knight of El Dorado” and “Germans in the Conquest of America”, by the historian, Germán Arciniegas, have appeared recently in English translation.
Founded by a lawyer, Bogotá for centuries has been the gathering place of writers, philosophers, artists, musicians, and scientists. The Dominicans had a chair of arts at Bogotá as early as 1563, and in 1573 they established the Royal and Pontifjcal University of Santo Tomas, from which the present
National University stems. Before the founding of Harvard in 1634, Bogotá had still another university, the Jesuit Javeriana, founded in 1622 and revived in 1931 with faculties of law and engineering. In 1936 the professional schools of the National University, which were scattered over the city, started moving into the new University City, at the edge of Bogota.
To know Bogotá is not necessarily to know Colombia’s other cities. The influence of Spanish social life and French intellectual life are felt throughout the country, but each city has its own individuality. There is the bustle of commercial Medellin, the old-world colonial flavor of Popayán, the blending of the old and new in the port of Barranquilla, and the storied streets and ancient walls of Cartagena.
Popayán seems not only of another country, but of another century, than Medellin. Here the-classical tradition is even stronger than in Bogotá, and Popayán, mother of seven presidents, is a storehouse of colonial architecture. Two decades ago Cali was another such colonial town, with a population of 25,000. The railroad was built to Buenaventura on the Pacific coast, and today Cali is a modern city of 130,000 inhabitants. The growth of Medellin has been almost
COLOMBIA IS AN IMPORTANT PEACE-TIME CUSTOMER OF THE UNITED STATES (1938-1940)
COLOMBIA INCREASES HOME PRODUCTION
as spectacular, the population having trebled since 1900. It is the center of commercial aviation, of trade in coffee and of gold. Her people and those of the department of Antioquia, of which she is the capital, are famous for their bustle and push. Industry and commerce have grown as rapidly as the population, now 155,000.
The ancient ports of Cartagena and Santa Marta have given place in importance to Barranquilla, seven miles from the mouth of the Magdalena. During normal times bananas are shipped from Santa Marta, and Cartagena is still an important port, with 90,000 inhabitants, its storied fortifications eloquent of the days when pirates repeatedly sacked the colonial city which rivaled in grandeur the viceregal capitals of Mexico and Lima. Cartagena was looted by the best of pirates—Robert Baal, Martin Cote, Francis Drake, and Henry Morgan. The booty repaid storming the 40-foot-thick fortifications, for the warehouses of Cartagena were stacked with gold and silver from the mines of Peru and Bolivia.
Of the Indians who have been absorbed into Colombia’s population the civilized highland Chibchas are the most important. Still unconquered are the descendants of the Caribs, still primitive, and still skillful with the bow and arrow. Along the hot, steamy coast, Negro remnants of slave days are to be found.
Colombia’s chief export is coffee, grown most successfully on the slopes of the Eastern and Central Cordilleras. A mild bean, known to the coffee trade as “café suave’’ and much prized for mixing with less aromatic coffees, it is sent largely to the United States, in quantities second only to those of Brazil.
Second most important peacetime agricul
tural product for export is the banana, but here, as elsewhere, shipping dislocations have hit the trade. The rich valleys of the Cauca and Magdalena Rivers produce sugar (largely for home consumption as $anela, a semi-refined product), cotton, plantain, tobacco, and cassava. Jungle regions yield cinchona (quinine), balata (for insulating telephone wires), cocoa-nuts, and vegetable ivory for buttons.
Since the war, rubber is again being gathered. The old trails are being reopened from Leticia, on the Amazon. Air communication to this rubber outpost and to others is being improved, and health protection against malaria, yaws, and other tropical diseases is being inaugurated for rubber workers and others getting out strategic materials.
“El Dorado” was not entirely a myth, for from Colombia’s mines comes an average of $15,000,000 worth of gold a year. Modern alluvial mining has been introduced, and the sluice boxes sometimes turn up pieces of ancient jewelry—amulets, scarabs, and tools of solid gold. Much of this gold comes from the Choco, with a mean temperature of 85°, a humidity of 90 percent, and rain nearly every day. Here, too, is found platinum, in the output of which only Canada and Russia exceed Colombia. Platinum was scorned by the old panners, and was often thrown back into the rivers by the Indians, in the hope that it would “ripen” into gold. Colombia is also the world’s chief source of emeralds.
The Conquistadores would be puzzled by the huge oil derricks which dot the regions where once they sought for “El Dorado,” and they would be even more puzzled to
realize that the modern “black gold” export is generally double that of real gold, and that ships for petroleum have priority over those for gold. Most of Colombia’s wells are in steaming lowlands isolated from ports, infested by mosquitos and subject to torrential rains and floods. Supplies coming into the fields must be transshipped a number of times, but the oil itself goes to the coast by pipe-line from two main fields—Barranca Bermeja and Barco.
Salt has always been an important part of Colombia’s trade, even in the days of the Chibchas. Her extensive mines, carved into fantastic white shapes through centuries of workings, are today operated by the government. Manufacturing is largely for home consumption. Medellin turns out shoes, cotton and woolen textiles, candy, soap, and some iron products; Bogotá, sugar, beer, cigars, and men’s clothing.
Since 1931 there has been a revitalization of Colombia’s educational system. In six years her education budget was increased fivefold and, according to law, it has to reach a minimum of 10 percent of the national budget. New and attractive buildings have been built in rural areas, and much attention has been paid to child health, nutrition, and agricultural and technical instruction. While the country has been famous for its higher education, transportation has made the education of her rural children difficult. Better and more intensive training of teachers, establishment of travel
ing libraries, use of radio, motion pictures, and official publications to reach teachers in remote regions, all have contributed toward increasing literacy in Colombia. Primary education has for years been free and is now compulsory.
Workmen’s compensation, group insurance, compulsory vacations, dismissal benefits, and maternity leaves have been introduced, along with the 8-hour day and the 48-hour week. Strikes are legal, but sit-downs and slow-downs are outlawed. Machinery for conciliation has been set up. Membership in unions is increasing, the rise between 1940 and 1942 being from 61,000 members to 102,000.
Under a new economic plan set up by law in March, 1943, Colombia hopes for great economic development. As immediate wartime measures, a Board of Economic Defense is set up to study economic problems and to find methods of financing their solutions. For the long pull, the plan proposes establishment of cooperatives, creation of an office of presidential auditor to secure better and more economical government service, reorganization of the Administration of National Railways and the National Bureau of Transportation and Rates, the possible suspension or modification of the exchange-control system, reorganization of credit systems, and a bond issue of 50,000,000 pesos to stimulate the nationalization of public utilities and of foreign properties. All Axis funds and income from impounded Axis properties will be used to buy the bonds, which means that the Axis nationals themselves will finance the taking over of their properties.