ABSTRACT
For most of the past century, Colombia has been formally identified as a democracy, often in fact as South America's oldest democracy. In Colombia Papua New Guinea and the Caucasus, the ultimate saboteur of national or regional unity and the effective sovereignty of a central government is topography. Although partisanship began to develop in Colombia in the 1830s, the Liberal and Conservative parties did not appear as such until 1848 against and for the government of Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera. The two-party system was so pervasive in Colombia that as late as 1969 a leader of the National Popular Alliance, the only political movement that posed a credible threat to the dominance of the two traditional parties. Over the course of the extended National Front period, the issues and interests that had previously divided Conservatives and Liberals and had even driven them twice to civil war had almost become moot, and on both sides of the partisan divide.
