Cardona
MPSA 2004
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1895, and a much more protracted one from 1899-1902. Known as the War of a
Thousand Days, this conflict, which killed anywhere between 20,000 and 100,000 people
(Bergquist 1978: 133-34), represented the definitive defeat of the Liberal Party in its
efforts to seize power by military means.
Designing Solutions to the Problem of Public Order
This decisive trouncing, combined with the loss of Panamá in 1903, led to a key
moment of in the political development of the Colombian republic. Conservative policy-
makers were finally able to reach a set of solutions to the ongoing dilemma of
establishing viable constitutional governance in the wake of the War of a Thousand Days.
This set included two solutions: one political, and one military. The political solution
comprised a power-sharing agreement operationalized in the electoral rule. The treaty
which ended the War of a Thousand Days inculcated the principle of minority
representation, which took the form of a type of proportional representation known as the
incomplete vote (Mazzuca and Robinson 2003). Under this electoral rule, the second-
place party in legislative elections would be entitled to one-third of the available seats,
with the winning party receiving the remaining two-thirds. This agreement guaranteed the
Liberal Party representation in Congress, at a time when in the recent past, the Liberals
had had only one representative in that body. (Díaz 1964: 6).
The other solution that was reached during this period comprised the institutional
design of the public forces, specifically, the creation of distinct institutions of military
education and the systematization of criteria for access to pension and salary benefits.
Both these reforms were carried out under the watch of President Rafael Reyes (1904-
1909), a former combatant in the civil wars of 1885 and 1895 who lived abroad during
Convention