Centralist Party of Gran Colombia

The Centralist Party was a conservative faction of Gran Colombian politics that existed from 1821 to 1831. The party was led by "the Great Liberator", Simon Bolivar, who supported a stronger presidency. The party was founded at the 1821 Congress of Cucuta, which established a great degree of centralization in the new country; many New Granadan and Venezuelan federalist deputies came to see that centralization was the only way to defeat the Spanish royalists. In 1826, as the war with Spain came to an end, widespread political unrest struck Gran Colombia, as the all-powerful Bolivar wrote a conservative constitution in Bolivia to keep himself in power, and as Jose Antonio Paez's Federalist faction began to skirmish with Bolivar's forces in Venezuela. At the Convention of Ocana in 1828, Bolivar proposed drafting a Gran Colombian constitution similar to the one adopted in Bolivia, as he believed that centralizing power would prevent the separatists from bringing down the union. However, his deputies walked out of the convention rather than agree to a federalist constitution, and he left office in 1830 as the union dissolved. In 1831, Gran Colombia and its parties came to an end.