The victory of General José Hilario López…

The victory of General José Hilario López and the Liberals can be attributed not just to the failure of government supporters to agree on a candidate but also to their alliance with artisan groups antagonized by the tariff legislation adopted during the administration of the last Ministerial president, Tomas Cipriano de Mosquera y Arboleda (president of New Granada, 1845-49; president of Colombia, 1861-63, 1863-64, 1866-67), which sharply reduces duties on imported manufactures.

The alliance is strictly opportunistic, as Lopez and the Liberal high command are not truly protectionist.

They are lawyers, merchants, and landowners, much like their Conservative counterparts, and they have no stake in domestic manufacturing and in principle favor an opening to foreign trade.

Yet the alliance holds together long enough for the Liberals to enact a sweeping set of reforms.

They again expel the Jesuits, abolish the last vestiges of slavery and the colonial tobacco monopoly, authorize provincial assemblies to divide up Amerindian communal lands into private plots, reduce the standing army to a maximum of fifteen hundred men, and abolish libel laws for the printed (but not yet the spoken) word.