Colombian Civil War (Napoleon's World)

The Colombian Civil War refers to a period of general instability in Colombia during the 1910's, in which the reactionary military dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez was pitted against liberal forces led primarily by the writer and orator David Castro. Many cite the popular uprising that forced Gómez and his most loyal divisions into the south in 1915 as the beginning of the civil war, while others cite the 1908 coup that brought Gómez to power in the first place as its beginning. In 1916, Castro was inaugurated as President of Colombia with the support of various democratic forces and after defending the major cities of the center in 1917, Gómez and his army was driven out of its stronghold in Caracas and he was killed in a mutiny of his own officers in January 1918. The end of the war resulted in the Constitution of 1918, which established the modern democratic republic.