The Urban Reform of Radical Liberalism: Disentailment of Church Property in Bogota, 1861-75

On September 9 of 1861 Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera, provisional president of Colombia, decreed the disentailment of church property. Following this decree, all properties belonging to civilian or ecclesiastic corporations, owned perpetually or indefinitely, were nationalized to be sold to private individuals in public auction. After the suppression of Resguardos in 1850, the privatization of church property became the last step in bringing to an end the old property regime and establishing a universal system of private tenure. This paper analyses the role of the state in the transformation of Bogotá’s property regime and the shift from the relatively fluid legal pluralism of the colonial period in which semi-autonomous legal authorities operated alongside state law, to a system in which a sole legal order, concentrated in the state, became the only viable alternative to protect property. It also discusses how this transition was not limited to complex and uncertain juridical operations, but became an opportunity for diverse actors –entrepreneurs, popular sectors, and even the church— to move through the juridical vacuum and administrative reorganization. This paper allows understanding the difficult and incomplete process of transition between communal and corporate forms of possession to private property, and from colonial legal pluralism to liberal legal monism. But particularly to explore how, in opposing and negotiating the liberal property reform, Bogotá inhabitants attempted, with different levels of success, to retain control over the distribution and definition of what they considered their rights. And in turn, to partially reestablish, what had been for them, the elusive link that predominated in the nineteenth century republican discourse between property and citizenship.