Shortly after his arrival at the port of Barranquilla, on 10 June 1929, the Bolivian ambassador, Alcides Arguedas, found himself immersed in the world of Colombian politics. By dusk, at the end of his stroll around the town, he entered the canteen of his hotel, ‘full of people who commented with passion’ on events in the country as they read the press. Arguedas was impressed by the ‘virulent’ language used by local newspapers against the president of the republic which appeared as a sign of a ‘free country’. Two weeks later, in Bogotá, Argueda's first impressions were reinforced as he became acquainted with journalists and politicians: Colombian politics seemed centred around newspapers, their newsrooms being the gathering places for evening tertulias, attended by politicians of all ‘parties, all opinions and all views’. Accordingly, the press figures prominently in Argueda's valuable memoirs of Colombian politics, culture, and society.Footnote 1 Arguedas's visit coincided with the 1929–30 presidential campaign, and he witnessed the significant role played by the press in bringing down the Conservative regime which had been in power since 1886. ‘At no other age’, a Liberal statesman would later recall, ‘had the opposition press so much influence over public opinion and even over the government itself.’Footnote 2
Such influence, however, was rooted in a long tradition that had its origins – as in much of Hispanic America – in the early days of independence from Spain. This article examines the historical role of the press in Colombia, as a central component of the political system, from its emergence as a national state in 1830 until 1930. As Jeffrey L. Pasley has shown in relation to the experience of the United States during the nineteenth century, ‘newspapers and their editors were purposeful actors in the political process, linking parties, voters, and the government together, and pursuing specific political goals’.Footnote 3 Examining the press's role in electioneering is particularly interesting in seeking to identify the extent to which the press might have encouraged, or discouraged, Colombian democratic developments during the first century of the country's independent existence. In looking at the press's political role, I start from two basic assumptions reviewed alongside the political narrative in this article. The first is that elections during the period under review were meaningful political events; as such, they were more competitive and participatory than most historians have hitherto accepted.Footnote 4 The second is that the Colombian experience was not unique. Wherever electoral competition developed, the role of the press became crucial. Although the article's focus is on Colombia, electoral journalism – like other aspects of the history of elections and democratization – ought to be properly understood in a comparative context.
Despite its historical significance, the Colombian press has not attracted the curiosity it deserves. There are valuable early references,Footnote 5 but modern scholarship was slow to build upon original, stimulating literature, such as David Bushnell's seminal work of the 1950s.Footnote 6 Such relative neglect had echoes in Latin America. Recently, however, there has been increasing interest in the subject, partly stimulated by a flourishing literature on the history of the press and media elsewhere.Footnote 7 Among historians of the region, particular impetus has been provided by a growing concern with culture, as well as by the rediscovery of politics. Renewed scrutiny over the independence period, encouraged, among others, by the late François-Xavier Guerra,Footnote 8 emphasized that independence had gone hand-in-hand with the emergence of public opinion, as a process tied to the development of modern political languages and new forms of socialization, where the press, and the printed word in general, played a prominent role. Interest in the subject has also been stimulated by further attention to the public sphere, citizenship, and civil society.Footnote 9 Recent edited volumes offer evidence of a vigorous research agenda, evaluating many aspects of a promising field.Footnote 10 Colombian historiography lags behind Latin American trends, though there are valuable studies on the press during the independence period, particular newspapers and journalists, the significance of cartoons and cartoonists, and the regional press.Footnote 11 This article offers an innovative contribution to the study of the history of the press in Colombia – and in Latin America more generally – by exploring its essential political role.
By examining over 100 years of the history of the press, this article argues that continuity in change prevailed. It does not deny that there were periods of important transformations, partly conditioned by political developments in which political parties were central though not the only protagonists. After Colombia established itself as an independent state in 1830,Footnote 12 the factions that struggled for power in the next two decades converged around two main parties: Liberal and Conservative. Both parties faced levels of fragmentation that challenged the configuration of a neat bipartisan system, but the Liberal–Conservative dichotomy dominated the long-term politics of Colombia.Footnote 13 The major cleavage between the two parties concerned state–church relations, but they also differed in the prioritization accorded to the values of ‘liberty’ and ‘order’.Footnote 14 The parties' social composition cut across class and ethnic divisions, although after championing the final end of slavery in the 1850s, the Liberals thereafter tended to prevail among the Afro-Colombian population. Liberals also attracted the support of workers in the growing industrial sector in the cities during the first decades of the twentieth century. Partisan disputes led to bitter confrontations that sometimes developed into civil conflict, the War of Thousand Days (1899–1902) being the longest and bloodiest. Despite such extreme violence, emphasized historiographically, Colombian politics developed around elections, which followed an almost uninterrupted, regular calendar from the 1830s.Footnote 15
It was therefore at electoral times when the press manifested itself in a broadly political role. Through its close involvement in electioneering, the press was not only useful in mobilizing voters and indoctrinating partisans, but it also served to spread notions of citizenship and to encourage discussion on matters of public concern, thus playing significant pedagogical and social functions. Before examining in detail the electoral functions of newspapers, and their potential democratic impact, the next section offers a general characterization of the Colombian press during the century following independence, underlining its volatile existence, its national significance despite limited readership levels, and its political nature in the hands of partisan editors.
I
The modern history of the press in Colombia had its origins in the period of emancipation.Footnote 16 Between 1810 and 1830, the number of newspapers grew modestly, serving as platforms for different political factions, while encouraging discussions on a wide range of issues as a modern public opinion emerged. None of the titles published during the early independence years survived into the 1830s, and many periodicals were founded without expectation of a long existence. On 10 July 1836, the first issue of El Imperio de los Principios explained its intentions to continue publication only until the incoming president took up his post.Footnote 17 At its launch in 1856, El Artesano announced that it would not be published on a fixed day, since its future was ‘uncertain’, due to the scarcity of ‘intellectual and material resources’.Footnote 18 Around the same time, the French geographer, Elisée Reclus, visited the small town of Ríohacha, where he observed the ‘intermittent’ publication of the liberal newspaper, which ‘like most [in the country], only appear sometimes, and did not have serious existence except at electoral times or during times of great political agitation’.Footnote 19 After the mid-nineteenth century, prospects for some newspapers seemed more promising: El Neogranadino and Diario de Cundinamarca lasted longer than their predecessors but they did not survive permanently. That few survived is, however, a common feature in the history of periodical journalism elsewhere; more often than not it entailed ‘a narrative of dissolutions’, as Walter Caleb described the ‘story of the Mexican press’ by 1920.Footnote 20
A precarious existence partly reflected institutional, cultural, and market circumstances. Some of the ‘constitutive choices’ that Paul Starr identified to explain the ‘first information revolution’ in the United StatesFootnote 21 – including those related to press freedom and the promotion of education – did not develop as strongly, but were a significant presence in the republic's constitutive years. Freedom of the press was one of the principles adopted during the 1810s by the early constitutional movement following independence. The first work published in Colombia by Jeremy Bentham – influential among nineteenth-century liberals – was an article on press freedom, reprinted in La Bagatela in 1811.Footnote 22 Once independence was achieved, a similar tone was set by Francisco de Paula Santander, a Benthamite who, as vice-president during much of the existence of Gran Colombia, respected the constitutional guarantees accorded to the press.Footnote 23 The principle of ‘absolute freedom’ of the press, without responsibilities, was adopted by the federalist constitution of 1863, a regime that lasted until 1885. There were, however, periods and instances of repression, fuelled by partisan struggles whose bitterness was sometimes reflected in arbitrary actions against specific newspapers, such as the closures of El Tradicionista in the 1870s and El Relator in the 1890s. The press also suffered during the various civil wars of the nineteenth century. The governments of the Regeneración (1886–98) – a centralist regime that returned the Conservatives and the Catholic Church to power – and that of General Rafael Reyes (1904–9) attempted to regulate the press, and adopted some repressive measures,Footnote 24 but failed to prevent the development of an opposition press.Footnote 25 Governmental attempts at controlling the press generally subsided after 1910, when a new constitutional amendment facilitated an era of unprecedented political stability.Footnote 26 Indeed, it could be argued that, over the longue dureé, the Colombian press developed in a prevailing atmosphere of freedom of expression.Footnote 27 Foreign observers supplied evidence of a free press in existence, as during the federal period, when the Argentinean Miguel Cané noted in 1881 that ‘freedom of expression’ had ‘no limits’, or during the Conservative hegemony, when the Bolivian, Alcides Arguedas, was so impressed by the level of freedom of Colombian newspapers in 1930.Footnote 28
In contrast to the colonial period, there were significant efforts to improve education during the first decades of independence, particularly at primary level. After an initial expansion, however, school enrolment remained limited until the 1870s, when the government adopted a radical programme of public instruction, whilst there were also initiatives to improve university and technical education.Footnote 29 The overall achievements were, however, unimpressive. By 1900, the proportion of Colombians enrolled in basic education (2·6 per cent) was half the Spanish American average (5·2 per cent). Thereafter, there was, however, a rapid expansion: by 1930 the gap between the Colombian ratio (7·0) and the regional average (9·4) had narrowed.Footnote 30 There are no statistics to estimate literacy movements systematically, but available information indicates that they were low; for example, in 1918, only 32·5 of Colombians over ten years old could read and write. By 1925, however, Colombian literacy rates matched the Spanish American average (48 per cent), although they were lower than in Argentina, Chile, Cuba, or Uruguay.Footnote 31 Such limited advances eased some of the severe educational barriers that newspapers faced in finding a reading public.
Since Colombia remained among the poorest economies of Latin America in 1912, market conditions did not help. The export sector – which had stagnated since independence – experienced several boom cycles following the expansion of tobacco trade in the 1850s, but such cycles proved short-lived and exports stagnated after the 1880s. They gradually recovered as Colombian coffee entered the world market, although coffee exports were only consolidated during the early twentieth century, when the country enjoyed unprecedented levels of sustained economic growth.Footnote 32 The dismal performance of exports affected other areas of an economy that failed to attract significant foreign capital before the 1900s. The domestic market for newspapers was therefore limited, as was the purchasing power of the general population which was not only poor, but relatively small and scattered across a vast, fragmented territory.Footnote 33 Transport was largely underdeveloped. Indeed, transport was a major problem for any newspaper venture, as were deficiencies of the postal service. In 1848, Manuel Ancízar, editor of El Neogranadino, complained about the poor state of delivery, as newspapers reached their destination ‘wet and dirty’, assuming they had not got lost en route.Footnote 34 Newspapers were also at the mercy of unreliable agents, whose delay in remitting payments for subscriptions often prompted the papers' closure.Footnote 35 Moreover, paper and machinery had to be imported, with machinery subject to custom duties, adding further costs, albeit less onerous than the stamp duties sporadically levied in Britain and France. Under such circumstances, it was hard to sustain newspapers financially: indeed, not a single paper seemed to be profitable in the 1870s.Footnote 36 As was common elsewhere in the initial stages of the press, governmental subscriptions, subsidies, and contracts to print official material were crucial financial sources, whilst income from individual subscriptions and commercial advertisements remained meagre. Another source of patronage was the Catholic Church, which often backed Conservative journals.
Changing institutional, cultural, and market conditions nevertheless combined to provide a basis for sustained development of the newspaper industry during the first decades of the twentieth century, particularly after 1910. This was also a period when the press underwent significant transformations, including importation of new machinery, which modernized the production of newspapers and improved news reporting. As Christopher Abel notes, the prosperity brought about by coffee enabled the press to find more solid financial support in commercial advertisements: ‘for the first time newspapers became important commercial enterprises, and journalism a recognized profession’.Footnote 37 Not all were successful ventures, and the ephemeral existence of most newspapers remained prevalent. But some of today's leading dailies were established at this time: El Tiempo (Bogotá, 1911), El Colombiano (Medellín, 1912), Vanguardia Liberal (Bucaramanga, 1921), and La Patria (Manizales, 1921). The oldest surviving daily, El Espectador, had been founded in Medellín in 1887, but it had an erratic existence before its headquarters moved to Bogotá in 1915.
The fact that most newspapers enjoyed a brief existence should not suggest a lack of effort to develop a periodical press. Indeed, it could be argued that the lack of consolidated journals facilitated new initiatives. The number of titles at any one time was never as large as that of newspapers circulating in Buenos Aires by 1895, when the Argentine capital could boast 143 dailies and magazines.Footnote 38 There was no shortage of newspapers in Colombia: entries of titles in the catalogue of the Biblioteca Nacional's holdings, from the early nineteenth century up to 1935, run into the thousands.Footnote 39 Although it is impossible systematically to trace the movement of newspapers during the century, by 1925 there were at least 280 periodicals circulating in Colombia.Footnote 40 Periods of frantic journalism included the 1870s. In less than two years of existence, El Zipa welcomed the appearance of around forty new periodicals, not only in the capital city of Bogotá, but also in other towns.Footnote 41 The aspiration of all towns was to print their own newspaper.Footnote 42 Provincial capitals counted on several periodicals at any one time: in 1918, six dailies and three smaller newspapers were published in Barranquilla, which was then Colombia's most important port.Footnote 43 Some newspapers gained a national audience, including those established outside Bogotá; another important and long-standing feature of the Colombian press was its decentralized structure.Footnote 44
Circulation figures, where available, were nonetheless limited. Impressed by the development of the European periodical press in the 1870s, Adriano Páez returned to Colombia with the ‘dream’ of printing a daily ‘for the people’ with a circulation of 20,000. After realizing, however, that the average Colombian newspaper would sell just between 500 and 1,000 copies and required official support, Páez established a less ambitious journal – the Revista de Instrucción Pública.Footnote 45 The contrast with Chile and Argentina is revealing, since El Ferrocarril in Santiago printed almost 3,000 copies a day in 1865, whilst in Buenos Aires, La Nación and La Prensa each claimed a daily circulation of 18,000 in 1887.Footnote 46 Although circulation figures thereafter grew in Colombia, they remained relatively low. By 1918, the major dailies in Barranquilla evidently together printed around 6,000 copies.Footnote 47 In his memoirs, Arguedas recorded more impressive press circulation figures in Bogotá in 1930: El Tiempo, from 30,000 to 50,000 copies daily, while another five newspapers together printed over 45,000 copies.Footnote 48
Historians need to think carefully before drawing implications from these circulation figures, since they do not reveal much about the pattern of newspaper readership, their wider audiences, or significance. From the early nineteenth century, some newspapers reached a public beyond their place of publication whilst some managed a ‘national’ scope. In 1836, for example, El Imperio de los Principios received subscriptions from, among other towns, Santa Marta, Ambalema, Purificación, Medellín, Cartagena, Neiva, and Girón.Footnote 49 All newspapers could reach a wider audience via the general practice of reprinting articles from other periodical publications,Footnote 50 and a ‘national’ public could thereby quickly emerge. One single issue of a newspaper could reach a large number of people.Footnote 51 In 1849, El Neogranadino complained about the generalized practice of postmen allowing newspapers to be widely read before being delivered to their final subscribers.Footnote 52 Such anecdotal evidence serves as a cautious reminder when judging the impact of newspapers in countries of scant resources. According to Alberto Lleras Camargo, the impact of newspapers during the early republic was ‘extraordinary and disproportionate’, considering their meagre circulation.Footnote 53 In the 1850s, Reclus had observed that ‘in Ríoacha the liberal newspaper is certainly a fourth power’.Footnote 54
Moreover, newspaper articles were also often reprinted, circulated independently and posted on street corners. Anonymous leaflets added another dimension to the press's social impact. ‘What do those walls not say?’, exclaimed Miguel Cané, observing the number and contents of such leaflets (‘hojas sueltas’) while visiting Bogotá in 1881–2.Footnote 55 There is also plenty of evidence in other countries that newspapers were read aloud; in eighteenth-century England, for example, Frank O'Gorman has observed that press circulation figures were not ‘of critical significance owing to the multiple use made of each copy and the widespread practice of reading aloud’. Whilst the picture for nineteenth-century Latin America remains patchy, reading aloud existed in Mexico as early as 1809. The Venezuelan popular leader of the mid-nineteenth-century federal wars, Ezequiel Zamora, read aloud the liberal press to his followers.Footnote 56 Meanwhile, in nineteenth-century Colombia, La Democracia regularly invited its readers in Cartagena to attend public readings on Sundays, which was a practice encouraged by some city mayors.Footnote 57 Accordingly, those involved in politics were clearly aware of various means through which the printed word could reach a wider audience, including the pulpit.Footnote 58
Whilst not all newspapers were equally significant and their nature and quality often despised by nationals and foreigners alike, observers nevertheless acknowledged the influence that journalists had ‘on both the general and intellectual life of the community’.Footnote 59 The print world in general has, however, failed to attract much attention from modern Colombian historiography, except when journalists were also prominent politicians. Sharp divisions of labour – among publishers, editors, and journalists −barely existed before the second decade of the twentieth century. ‘The “scholar in politics” has been no novelty in Colombia’, Phanor James Eder wrote in 1913.Footnote 60 Men of letters were also notable politicians elsewhere in Latin America, including Domingo Sarmiento and Bartolomé Mitre in Argentina, José Martí in Cuba, or José Battle in Uruguay.Footnote 61 In Colombia, the number of presidents who attained ‘high rank as journalists’ was significant, including Francisco de Paula Santander (1833–7), Mariano Ospina Rodríguez (1857–60), Manuel Murillo Toro (1864–6; 1872–4), Santiago Pérez (1874–6), Rafael Núñez (1880–2; 1884–94), Miguel Antonio Caro (1894–98), José M. Marroquín (1900–4), Carlos E. Restrepo (1910–14), and Marco Fidel Suárez (1918–21). Further down the political hierarchy, some of the most active ‘political journalists’ were appointed as members of the presidential cabinet, or elected to congress, such as José María Samper, who left a vivid account of working as a youth for several papers and helping to establish others, while combining his journalistic duties with public office. Footnote 62 The national prominence of such individuals tends to overshadow those who mixed politics with journalism in the provinces.
A growing reputation as a public writer thus usually led to a rising career in politics, rather than vice versa. Manuel Murillo Toro, a school teacher's son in a provincial town, was still a student in 1836 when one of his newspaper articles caught the eye of President Santander, who then offered him a post to start what became a long and distinguished public career.Footnote 63 From the northern port of Santa Marta in the 1850s, Murillo Toro edited a newspaper that gained a national audience, providing a platform to become leader of the Radical movement that launched him to the presidency, first in 1864–6 and for a second term in 1872–4. The prominence reached by such figures tends to be misinterpreted as indicating elitist roots and high social standing, yet some, such as Murillo Toro, came from humble families. Other journalists came from the middle ranks of society and were linked to the liberal professions. Alejandro Luna, for example, was a Conservative and owner and director of Diario Comercial in Barranquilla in 1898; a self-made man who became a notary, his humble house simultaneously served as home, notary office, and headquarters of the Diario Comercial.Footnote 64 Whilst Luna does not seem to have been an exception, it would be erroneous to assume, as the British minister in Bogotá observed in 1912, that most newspapers were edited by ‘obscure politicians’ who were ‘men of little education or distinction’.Footnote 65
Throughout the century, Colombian newspapers remained in national hands, overwhelmingly edited, written, and published by nationals. The few exceptions included El Telegrama in the 1880s, which – although edited and owned by Colombians – received financial support from members of the diplomatic community in Bogotá.Footnote 66 Given its low number of foreign immigrants, Colombia did not develop a foreign language press, or a press targeted at immigrant colonies such as those in MexicoFootnote 67 or Argentina, where there were eighty-four foreign newspapers in 1896.Footnote 68 There were again some exceptions,Footnote 69 whilst Colombian political journalism was not closed to foreigners. Their limited involvement was sometimes significant, as in the case of the writings of the English immigrant, William Wills; or the Echeverría brothers from Venezuela, who joined Samper to establish El Tiempo in support of the Radical cause in 1855. Footnote 70
During the first decades of the republic, newspapers like the Constitucional de Popayán had an open official or semi-official character, with coverage mostly devoted to publishing governmental correspondence or legislation, though they also included ‘non-official’ and ‘variety’ sections with news and opinion articles. Although other journals offered a combination of politics and literature,Footnote 71 it was only after the mid-nineteenth century that El Neo-Granadino pioneered a more expansive menu: ‘commerce, politics, literature, chronicles, varieties, advertisements’, including the section ‘Folletín’, which published serialized novels.Footnote 72 Newspapers aimed at special readerships also emerged. A press to address artisans, for example, developed at least as early as 1838, with the foundation of El Labrador i Artesano. As artisan mobilization intensified in the following decades, peaking from 1849 to 1854, several newspapers were established in their support.Footnote 73 In 1850, the newly founded El Artesano claimed to be ‘backed by artisans; artisans and non artisans write for it’.Footnote 74 A carpenter, José Leocadio Camacho, ‘edited at least five newspapers dedicated to issues of concern to workers’ between 1864 and 1904.Footnote 75 Other specialized audiences were also targeted. In 1858, the first periodical for women was published, the Biblioteca de Señoritas, and the genre flourished between 1870 and 1890.Footnote 76 Newspapers were set up to publicize practical, industrial, and scientific knowledge, such as El Empresario in 1879. The arts also gained a significant voice in 1881 with El Papel Periódico Ilustrado, which modernized the pages of Colombian newspapers with engravings. Forms of specialized journalism expanded, as professional, entrepreneurial, and labour associations developed.
Despite different patterns of development, party politics nevertheless remained the primary motive behind their publication. An ‘independent’ press, which was visible in the US by the end of the nineteenth century, was still largely absent in Colombia by 1930. Some observers, such as Luis Striffler in the 1870s or Phanor J. Eder in the 1910s, were contemptuous of publications that were ‘for the most part ephemeral, dependent on the personality of a single man, and published for the expression merely of his political views’. Of the six dailies published in Barranquilla in 1918, the American vice-consul deemed only La Nación ‘worthy of the name of newspaper’.Footnote 77 Such critics objected to the lack of ‘news’ in papers which were almost exclusively partisan political publications. Indeed, editors generally did not conceal their intentions and the character of most newspapers can be gauged by examining their first issues which explicitly outlined their political purposes in a section invariably entitled ‘Prospecto’.
Thus from the early years of the republic, journalism developed alongside factional and partisan politics. A significant number of newspapers were of a doctrinaire nature, launched to support the political beliefs and partisan spirits which came to divide Colombia over the century. In the pages of El Tradicionista, for example, Miguel Antonio Caro made clear that his new publication in 1871 ought to defend tradition, specially religious unity. Although the Catholic cause was already supported by other newspapers, their reluctance to become involved in politics had prompted Caro to be more proactive.Footnote 78 ‘We must pursue a renewed indoctrination through the press’, Rafael Núñez, leader of the Regeneración regime wrote to his Conservative partner in Antioquia, Marceliano Vélez, on 1 September 1886. A couple of weeks later, Núñez insisted, ‘while here, I write in El Porvenir, explaining … the new political situation. I give utmost importance to the conscientious work of the press.’Footnote 79 The position of Caro and Núñez was replicated by their political opponents. In 1915, Enrique Santos, a Liberal, examined the reasons for his party's electoral defeats. He complained about clerical electioneering and fraud, serious problems for which he offered a remedy: a ‘return to doctrine’. Insisting that it was necessary to ‘teach liberalism’ in Tunja, the provincial capital of largely Conservative Boyacá, Santos thus helped to establish and edit La Linterna, committed to a crusade: ‘the noble and sacred task of restoring liberalism’.Footnote 80
II
Despite initially indicating that they would not ‘adhere to any of the two factions that today exist here to the disgrace’ of the country, many newspapers were soon embroiled in political debates and supported individual candidates at elections.Footnote 81 The very name of some newspapers confirmed their involvement in the electoral process: El Sufragante, published in Cartagena in 1848 and in the 1890s; El Sufragio in Popayán in 1872; El Elector – a name for newspapers in Tumaco in 1878, Popayán in 1882, and Neiva in 1883. Elsewhere the agenda of other papers was often exclusively and explicitly linked to the electoral process. This section explores the electoral role played by the press, after first emphasizing how much journalism intensified during electoral times. It examines the crucial functions that newspapers had in launching candidates, providing them with platforms, serving as party organs, persuading and mobilizing voters, and measuring the state of public opinion. It also explores the extent to which newspapers played a wider democratic role in supporting the suffrage, instructing voters about their rights and duties and, by doing so, forming a long-term citizenship.
As a new election approached, political journalism flourished, particularly during heavily contested presidential campaigns. This was a common feature elsewhere, as in the 1844 presidential election in the US, the 1850 presidential campaign in Peru,Footnote 82 the Chilean elections of 1846 and 1851,Footnote 83 or in Argentina, where Jorge Navarro Viola observed in 1896 that it was a ‘well-known fact that the journalistic movement increases with the proximity of elections’.Footnote 84 The life of Colombian newspapers was likewise largely conditioned by the rhythm of the electoral calendar: ‘the whole nation goes into a fever mood, and then the election becomes the daily struggle in the public papers’.Footnote 85 ‘We are, my brothers, in the electoral period, the time when new newspapers see the light of day’, a Colombian writer sarcastically commented in 1878.Footnote 86 Some newspapers were even published with the sole purpose of making a mockery of the electoral process. Elsewhere ‘periódicos eleccionarios’ were founded with the sole purpose of supporting particular candidates, and were characterized by their immediate demise after campaigns, sometimes re-established at later elections. During the contested presidential election of 1875, for example, at least twenty-two new periodicals were established throughout the country in support of the two major candidates.Footnote 87El Combate, founded to support one of the candidates by a group of university students in Bogotá on 12 February 1875, was a typical ‘periódico eleccionario’, a weekly, whose four pages were almost exclusively devoted to discuss issues related to the campaign. The content of relatively well-established newspapers, such as the Diario de Cundinamarca, also focused primarily on the electoral contest as the campaign took shape.
Whether ‘periódicos eleccionarios’ or more established papers, the most explicit electoral role of all newspapers was to serve as the main conduit to launch candidates and become electoral platforms. Whilst the ‘periódicos eleccionarios’ usually expressed their sympathies at the outset, all followed a similar pattern of open declarations of support to respective candidates, accompanied by justification for their decision, usually comprising a lengthy list of a candidate's credentials and a statement of partisan principles. More than simple endorsements, the proclamación or lanzamiento (the official launching of a candidate by a newspaper) was a significant political event, and signalled the beginning of the respective campaigns. As campaigns evolved, newspapers fed readers with electoral information, propaganda about chosen candidates, and articles discussing issues of partisan and general interest. A brief look at the press during the presidential contest of 1836–7 serves to illustrate the early role of newspapers as electoral platforms. The practice of openly endorsing a particular candidate, such as the statement of the Constitucional de Cundinamarca in favour of General José María Obando's candidacy, was already established in 1836. Following his ‘launching’, the Constitucional regularly published articles highlighting Obando's contributions to the republic, military skills, capacity to guarantee order, past experience as governor, and his lack of fanaticism.Footnote 88 Obando used the press to embrace the liberal cause, oppose the reintegration of Gran Colombia, and promise to encourage popular education and road building. Obando also promised to respect the Catholic faith, but warned that he would not allow church interference with state power. Obando's final declaration that he would follow in the steps of the Santander administration made him an ‘official candidate’ and ultimately harmed his position.Footnote 89 Indeed, throughout the 1836–7 presidential campaign, newspapers on all sides published articles covering a wide range of issues, including education, public order, foreign debt, religion, and the ideas of Jeremy Bentham.Footnote 90
Although, to a casual observer, Colombian elections appeared primarily concerned with personalities, they were also about parties and, like the US experience during the nineteenth century,Footnote 91 newspapers served as organs of the political parties. In this context, the press instated the roles of a party agent, from organizing campaigns to stirring up partisan spirit. Newspaper editors were also directly involved in electioneering. Next to the senators, representatives, and artisans who attended the Liberal convention in 1850 were the editors and redactores of leading papers, who attended not as reporters, but as party activists.Footnote 92 Often, various factions of different parties organized themselves around a periodical publication. ‘Where is the real force of Conservatives in action, capable of forming a respectable party?’, José María Samper asked in 1873, replying ‘That force is in the … militant faction that has as its organs La América in Bogotá, and La Sociedad in Medellín’.Footnote 93 In the 1930 presidential elections, as witnessed by Alcides Arguedas, the party headquarters of Olaya Herrera's campaign were the very premises of El Tiempo, El Espectador, and El Diario Nacional. Similarly, the Conservative newspapers were headquarters of the party's candidates. When Arguedas visited El Nuevo Tiempo, the building ‘was filled with people, and the mariscales [army officers who sympathized with one of the Conservative candidates], parade by the corridors’.Footnote 94 The periodical press therefore not only encouraged, but also organized, partisan activity with the aim of winning elections. Hence it was probably more interested in strengthening extant loyalties than in attracting new ones. Nevertheless, room remained for persuasion, and the votes of the indecisive few could make a difference at the ballot box.
The personalities, qualities, and defects of different candidates inevitably received considerable attention during elections. Although some newspapers listed the virtues of all candidates, allowing readers to make up their own minds, such a neutral stance seems to have been exceptional and was not well received by readers.Footnote 95 The virtues of candidates were sometimes described in a colloquial fashion, probably aiming at reaching a wider public.Footnote 96 If a newspaper's own candidates were praised, those from opposing parties were predictably reviled. This could be done colloquially in prose, in verse, or in cartoons. As El Mago criticized the elderly official candidates in 1897:
Even by studying the terms used to describe various candidates, careful readers would soon appreciate the number of issues involved in most presidential campaigns. ‘Everything has been discussed here with … passion’, José Antonio Soffia, the Chilean Minister in Bogotá, observed in 1882, citing a comprehensive agenda:
The most complicated problems in Philosophy, Constitutional Science and Public Law, specially, they have been a thousand times commented upon, analysed … in parliamentary speeches and press articles … in the most advanced manner, thus revealing the particular tendency among these people to study political and philosophical sciences.Footnote 98
These were not academic but partisan debates, where struggles sometimes assumed an extreme form. Debates about the past remained of crucial political significance, and elections provided natural occasions to remember, when the press served as the memory of the parties in conflict.Footnote 99
Newspapers could also gauge the extent of public support for different candidates and parties, as demonstrated again by the presidential election of 1875.Footnote 100 The very endorsement of newspapers indicated support for different candidates: El Combate, for example, listed all the newspapers that had hitherto declared in favour of Rafael Núñez as ‘proof’ of his ‘immense popularity’.Footnote 101 In addition, the press regularly published ‘firmas de adhesión’ (signatures of support) for chosen candidates, whilst there were also many articles from individual authors, outlining reasons for supporting particular candidates. Also common were short messages of ‘adhesiones’, such as that from residents of the Vélez province: ‘We the undersigned will vote and will decidedly work for the candidacy of the citizen Aquileo Parra for the Presidency of the Union’, endorsed by over a hundred names.Footnote 102 Between January and July, the front page of El Republicano was covered with ‘firmas de adhesión’ in support of Parra from towns and villages in Santander, whilst informing readers about ‘firmas de adhesión’ published in other papers. The number of lists was another yardstick of popularity. By June, El Republicano alone had published eighty-eight messages of endorsement for Parra from sixty-seven different towns and villages, which – the journal claimed – contrasted with the nineteen endorsements for Núñez.Footnote 103 Lists of names were also scrutinized by opposing parties. ‘We demonstrate with numbers that the youth … figures within our ranks’, El Combate claimed after publishing some 800 ‘firmas de adhesión’ from university students in Bogotá in favour of the newspaper's candidate.Footnote 104 In Panamá, El Republicano told its readers that, in just twenty-four days, Parra had received 1,839 ‘firmas de adhesión’, while Núñez had only received 1,094, generating a majority of 745 for Parra. Thus, in a practice established from the mid-nineteenth century,Footnote 105 newspaper lists of ‘adhesiones’ played the role of early opinion polls to measure candidates' popularity. For candidates themselves, as Joel Silbey has shown with regards to the American experience, the lack of newspaper endorsement was acknowledged to be a great disadvantage,Footnote 106 and some candidates withdrew from the contest when faced with a poor press reception.
From the early days of the republic therefore, the press was a key player in the electoral processes. Given the centrality of elections to the Colombian political system, this is unsurprising. Since modern democracy became so closely linked to elections, political parties, and public opinion, newspapers could play a wider role in encouraging democratic developments, although this is difficult to assess. Not all newspapers adopted similar stands regarding the suffrage, while partisan polemics could disrupt the constitutional order. Historiographical opinion has tended, correctly, to emphasize the violent characteristics of Colombian politics, since civil wars were a recurrent feature in the nineteenth century. Arguably, the press encouraged such conflicts by adopting a divisive and polarizing language, undermining the electoral process, or openly calling citizens to arms, effectively contributing to insurrections, as has been claimed with regard to the press's role in the collapse of the Mexican government during the presidential election of 1828 or the Chilean civil war of 1851.Footnote 107 Conservative newspapers in Colombia sometimes attacked the Liberal press as members of a ‘godless and demoralizing sect’, while Liberal newspapers disqualified a Conservative press that ‘reappeared with the same virulence, the same lack of good faith, the same exaggerations’.Footnote 108 ‘Conservative newspapers’, the Neogranadino claimed, ‘are talking about arming themselves with daggers to assassinate individually or collectively the friends of the [Liberal] government’.Footnote 109 Controversies among members of the same party could be equally vicious:
El Elector Popular … and El Partido Liberal … are eleccionario newspapers … involved in a pretty and devastating struggle on the pretext of presidential contests … The last issues of those newspapers are written with bile: for God sake, gentlemen, fight if you wish, but since you are both liberals, button your foils so you do not hurt yourselves with violence.Footnote 110
Contemporary foreign observers also deemed newspapers to be ‘written with bile’, as Soffia noted in the 1880s: ‘what distinguishes those discussions is an exaggerated violence of language, mixed with irritating personal attacks’.Footnote 111
Such violent rhetoric, however, should be examined within a wider context, in terms of the press's attitude towards the ballot box, hitherto overlooked in the historiography. The press constantly defended representative forms of government, regularly encouraged readers to vote, published useful information about electoral procedures, and even tried to warn its own partisans to avoid violence. As early as 1836, rhetorical support for the suffrage flourished in the Colombian press: ‘all our fellow citizens [should] not evade the exercise of such a precious right, nor leave the election in the hands of the few’.Footnote 112 From an early date therefore, the press also played a pedagogical role regarding the suffrage and citizenship, as illustrated by the presidential election of 1856.
As the campaign unfolded, El Tiempo, El Artesano, and El Neogranadino celebrated the values of the suffrage and ‘sovereignty of the people’. Election day was eulogized as the ‘great and solemn day of the republic’, and voting was deemed the ‘most patriotic’ act of citizens.Footnote 113 Such democratic propositions were accompanied by publication of electoral legislation. In January 1856, seven months before the elections took place, El Relator printed over ninety articles regulating, among other items, the selection of electoral juries, the formation of electoral registers, and even the shape of the ballot paper.Footnote 114 Addressing partisans and the general voter alike, newspapers invited all men to ‘exercise their constitutional right to vote’.Footnote 115 Responding to calls for electoral abstention, El Artesano told artisans that, ‘if we aim at having guarantees, respect for those of our class, security from persecution … for being democratic artisans, and [if we wish] to approach the first magistrate to express our opinions and aspirations without being despised’, they should vote for the Liberal candidate, Manuel Murillo Toro. On the eve of election day, El Artesano called its readers ‘to leave your homes … leave your workshops, abandon your occupations, abandon everything and run … to deposit your vote … Come with your compañeros … to make sure that your own rights and guarantees are respected.’Footnote 116 Other papers offered additional practical advice. After informing readers that a ‘large number of copies of the new electoral law’ had been sent to the provinces, El Tiempo provided detailed ‘instructions’ to liberal voters: first, it was important to organize groups of citizens who could study the legislation in order to avoid fraud; second, fellow partisans ought to scrutinize the conduct of electoral juries, and examine the electoral register to prevent duplication of voters; third, they should watch the counting of votes; fourth, they should ensure that ballots included candidates' full names and that these should be properly placed in urns. The ‘Instrucción a los sufragantes liberales’ concluded by a calling to artisans to ‘behave with integrity, energy and enthusiasm’; to ‘preserve the peace, whatever the provocations’: ‘let's keep in mind the interests of Democracy and the high duties of the Liberal party; let's march unified to the urns … Victory belong to us.’Footnote 117 Victory, however, went to the opposing Conservative candidate. Electoral defeat – always a test of endurance, for both the parties involved and the democratic institutions they claimed to uphold – was hard to accept. In September, a month after the election, El Neogranadino denounced fraud and clerical interference in order to undermine, rightly or wrongly, the legitimacy of the Conservative victory.Footnote 118 By October, El Tiempo appeared to accept defeat: ‘the colony [in reference to the Conservatives, allegedly the embodiment of the Spanish colonial past] has triumphed. The Curia of Rome has managed to impose its candidate.’ But the paper refrained from calling for a revolution. ‘Under these circumstances’ – it stated – ‘the Liberal party must wait and continue its work against ignorance, its real enemy.’Footnote 119
Despite fuelling partisan conflict, it is thus possible to identify other crucial functions which enabled the press to contribute to the long-term process of democratization. Indeed, some newspapers claimed that one of their main purposes was ‘to propagate and teach among the poorly enlightened classes of our society the principles of a democratic government’.Footnote 120 ‘Take the newspaper to the hut’, José Herrera expressed with naive optimism in 1878, ‘take it to the masses, spread light everywhere, among all classes, through the mud and through the palace; let it serve the rich and the poor, enlighten everyone and let everyone be taught by it, and then we can claim: we have formed a people.’Footnote 121 Although most journals were less interested in ‘forming a people’ than in mobilizing their own partisans, this did not prevent them from instructing followers about their rights and duties. Nor was a confrontational language necessarily an impediment to exalt the suffrage over the use of violence, as shown by El Combate's call to rally its readers to the ballot box:
A decisive commitment to ballots, rather than bullets, emerged following the War of Thousand Days (1898–1902). After the most traumatic civil conflict since independence, a strong desire for conciliation appeared shared by all parties. While civil wars were condemned, values of tolerance and democracy were often praised in the press.Footnote 123 When it was founded in 1911, for example, El Tiempo subscribed to the Unión Republicana, a new party formed by Liberals and Conservatives committed to partisan reconciliation, electoral reform, and social progress, whose leader, Carlos E. Restrepo, had been elected as president the previous year. When the Republicans were defeated in the election of 1914, El Tiempo became the leading opposition newspaper against the Conservative regime which was in power until 1930. In opposition, the paper retained its moderate stance, and criticized the ‘old intransigence’ evident in other publications, Liberal and Conservative alike. ‘The task of the patriotic journalist’, wrote its editor, Eduardo Santos, in 1916, ‘is to repeat incessantly that resorting to brute force is an anachronism.’Footnote 124 As the Unión Republicana disintegrated, El Tiempo sided with the Liberal party in 1921. In election after election, the paper launched successive campaigns against abstention, motivating its fellow Liberals to the polls, to overcome notions that the regime could not be defeated at the ballot box. ‘In Colombia’, the paper stated in 1925, ‘we only have one electoral law which is not favourable to us; but that is the only law we have, and we are forced to make good use of it.’Footnote 125 By then Colombia's most influential and widely read newspaper, El Tiempo was at the forefront of the electoral campaign five years later that brought down the Conservative regime, and became a landmark in the region's democratic history. Although less prominent than El Tiempo, other Colombian newspapers also played a civilizing role and thereby contributed to the formation of an electoral culture required in all modern democratization processes.Footnote 126
III
In 1877, the journalist, Filemón Buitrago, invited José Manuel Marroquín – already a well-known publicist who later became Colombian president – to contribute to his newly established paper El Zipa. Marroquín's first contribution was a cordial letter warning Buitrago of the difficulties in sustaining a purely literary periodical and suggesting that politics was the key to avoid failure. Marroquín recalled previous ‘periódicos literarios’ which enjoyed popularity on account of their political coverage which was an ‘immense advantage’ in a country where ‘nothing happens’. In Marroquín's view, more recent newspapers which claimed ‘not to have any political colour’, contained scarcely anything interesting to read.Footnote 127 Buitrago heeded Marroquín's advice and El Zipa, though mostly devoted to literature, published regular articles on the activities of government and congress, electoral campaigns, and public meetings.
This anecdote underlines the major contention of this article, namely that Colombian newspapers were fundamentally political during this period. If, as Paul Star has suggested, ‘journalistic authority belonged to information in America and to literary distinction in France’,Footnote 128 Colombian journalism was above all tied to the political realm, committed to partisan and doctrinaire causes. Hence Colombian newspapers contributed to party developments; helped to forge social and political identities; connected distant regions of the country; and, overall, they helped to forge a ‘political nation’ – albeit, at times, also a polarized and divided ‘political nation’. Recognizing the significance of these roles is a first step to exploring more fully the ways in which newspapers interacted with politics. Their ‘partisan’ affiliations, for example, should be qualified since being ‘partisan’ did not mean being under party control. ‘There is an enormous difference’, El Tiempo warned in 1930, ‘between a great daily and a political bulletin of a committee or the organ of an electoral campaign’.Footnote 129 Far from being the ‘creatures of political parties’, newspapers and their editors were instrumental in shaping and developing Colombian parties and certainly preceded the establishment of political parties. As Jeffrey L. Pasley has observed with regard to the United States, the Colombian party system was ‘newspaper based’.Footnote 130 However, while in the United States an independent press flourished by the end of the nineteenth century, and newspapers ‘parted ways permanently’ with the ‘old political press’ after 1920, there was still no ‘independent’ press in Colombia by 1930.
Whilst emphasizing continuities over changes, Colombian newspapers also experienced significant transformations still requiring systematic study. The most significant of these changes occured after 1910, when rising coffee exports improved the country's economic prosperity and increased newspapers' financial viability. Material progress now accompanied unprecedented decades of political stability. ‘Today, there are enterprises’, wrote the distinguished writer, Luis Eduardo Nieto Caballero, in 1924. In his view, the ‘atmosphere of insecurity’ that accompanied the civil wars of the nineteenth century had impeded the establishment of the solid newspaper ‘enterprises’ now visible.Footnote 131 Nevertheless the extent to which the language of the newspaper press served to promote the necessary compromise for democratic outcomes or, on the contrary, fuelled civil conflict during the nineteenth century still needs to be properly assessed. By focusing attention on electioneering, however, Colombian newspapers contributed to the diffusion of democratic values and practices. That newspapers acted as agents of electoral mobilization in Britain and the United States is fully recognized. As the history of Latin American elections and democracy increasingly becomes an area of scholarly attention, more attention should be paid to the electoral role of the press. Newspapers are not just sources for a story but, as Guerra suggested, social ‘actors’ in their own right.Footnote 132
At the heart of political journalism was the belief in the existence of a public that needed to be cultivated. Like the editors of the Nouvelles ecclésistiques in eighteenth-century France, Colombian newspaper editors believed in public opinion. ‘Opinion is the queen of this world’ stated El Imperio de los Principios in 1836. As Adriano Páez introduced his new publication: ‘Journalism is the first power of modern times. The press, at the service of opinion, governs the world.’ Even if there was not a contemporary ‘public opinion’ in a modern sense, there were ‘popular opinions’ – to use Arlette Farge's suggestive distinction.Footnote 133 Even in conditions of limited readership, historians need to be more aware of the press's receptivity, the concrete ways newspapers shaped public opinion over time and their capacity to persuade or stimulate debates, specially during elections. In 1930, Alcides Arguedas had no doubts that Colombian journalism was ‘a dominant force in this country and it is supported by a stronger one, that of public opinion’, but the tradition had already been established in the early years of the republic.
