Background
Rafael Reyes was born on 5 December 1850 in Santa Rosa. Boyaca, into a prominent local family.
Rafael Reyes was born on 5 December 1850 in Santa Rosa. Boyaca, into a prominent local family.
In his young manhood, he explored Colombia’s Amazon region with his brothers and established several commercial enterprises along the frontier. In the civil war of 1885, Reyes won distinction on the Conservative side. The following year he took an active role in formulating Colombia’s centralist constitution. When disgruntled Liberals rebelled in 1895, Reyes led government forces in a successful four-month campaign.
With support for his regime crumbling, Reyes resigned and left the country in July 1909. He spent most of the following decade in exile.
Reyes saw his presidential ambition frustrated by political intrigues within the Conservative Party and another Liberal uprising, the War of the Thousand Days.
When it was over, an exhausted party finally accepted him in 1904. He inherited a country in ruins; 100,000 had perished, much of the economy was destroyed, and the United States had successfully detached Panama.
Reyes responded to growing opposition with increasingly dictatorial methods, including creation of a subservient "National Assembly” that effectively overrode Congress. Dissatisfaction over his personalist rule, the terms granted foreign creditors, and what were regarded as unequal treaties over Panama that he negotiated with the United States brought Liberals and Conservatives to form the anti-Reyes Republican Union.
During debates over the Panama treaties, nationalist students led by Enrique Olaya Herrera and encouraged by the Republican Union staged major demonstrations in Bogotá.