Cardona
MPSA 2004
21
The Liberals remained out of power from 1886 through 1930. When they finally
won a Presidential election in the latter year, the new President, Enrique Olaya Herrera,
displayed definite favoritism in his treatment of the public forces. According even to the
official history of the National Police, by the end of Olaya Herrera’s term in 1934, the
Police was
comprised almost exclusively of personnel affiliated with the governing party, sectarian and ad
hoc, to which was made a superficial effort at educating in a School that the government opened in
December 1930. In this manner the old servants of the [Conservative] hegemony, who were well-
prepared, honest, and effective, were rejected, losing in this fashion the inheritance of their
knowledge, acquired through long years of work and preparation in the School that was founded
in 1919 by president Marco Fidel Suárez. (Echeverri Ossa 1993: 150).
The next two presidents, Alfonso López Pumarejo (1934-1938, 1942-45) and Enrique
Santos (1938-1940) focused their efforts on building up the police force in terms of the
number of agents—the force grew from 2,165 agents in 1935 to 3,775 in 1940 (Museo
Histórico de la Policía)—and in terms of the professional education of the force, with the
creation of the Escuela General Santander in 1937.
Unfortunately, figures are not available for the number of departmental and
municipal police that existed in parallel with the municipal and departmental police
during this period. However, the available historical record does suggest that these
subnational police—under the control of appointed governors and mayors—played an
important role in multiple episodes of regime instability that plagued Colombia in the
1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. The tensions between a relatively professionalized army and a
relatively politicized police first began to play out in the events that surrounded the 1930
transfer of power between Conservatives and Liberals, and continued simmering over the
Convention