Conservatives

The Conservatives are one of the two opposing political sides whose conflict has shaped the country since Independence. In the novel, they appear chiefly as part of a national history of recurring civil wars and as a presence in the social world of the city; the party’s political identity is shown to be less decisive in elite life than lineage, inherited status, and established custom.

Historical Setting

The city’s decline is set against the upheavals that followed Independence from Spain and the abolition of slavery. Its former prosperity had depended in large part on its role as the largest African slave market in the Americas and as the residence of the Viceroys of the New Kingdom of Granada. The remembered grandeur of that colonial order is set beside the ruin of its old families and palaces, suggesting a society whose political transformations did not simply replace its inherited structures.

The Conservatives belong to a long history of conflict with the Liberals. At a luncheon attended by the two sides, the Archbishop describes the gathering as historic: representatives of opposing factions, after years of civil wars, are sitting together with old grievances apparently healed. The occasion follows the election of a Liberal president after forty-five years of Conservative hegemony. The moment signals a change in the balance of political power, though the scene does not present it as a decisive break with the country’s past.

The Luncheon and Party Identity

The apparent reconciliation at the luncheon is complicated by Juvenal Urbino’s view of politics. He considers a Liberal president no different from a Conservative one, except in dress, and refrains from challenging the Archbishop’s celebratory interpretation. In his view, the guests have gathered not because of their political convictions but because their lineage places them above the hazards of politics and the violence of war. The full attendance thus exposes the limits of the luncheon’s symbolism: the factions may sit together, but inherited social rank remains a more durable bond for the city’s elite.

Urbino’s own political position does not fit neatly into either camp. Though regarded as a Liberal and accustomed to voting for Liberal candidates, he acts from tradition more than conviction and describes himself as a pacifist committed to definitive reconciliation between Liberals and Conservatives. His independence leaves each political or religious group suspicious of him: Liberals consider him reactionary, Conservatives regard him as nearly a Mason, and the Masons suspect him of clerical loyalties. His presence at the luncheon therefore helps frame the Conservatives not as one half of a simple ideological contest, but as part of a political order whose affiliations are entangled with class, religion, and family standing.

Public Life and Historical Memory

The novel also sets partisan conflict against civic initiatives and the routines of public culture. Urbino avoids political office despite frequent offers and criticizes physicians who use professional prestige to pursue it. His campaigning for the restoration of the Dramatic Theater brings the city together in a civic undertaking, while the political divisions of the country continue in the background. This contrast makes public improvement appear possible without resolving the larger conflict between Liberals and Conservatives.

As the narrative looks back over time, the city’s political history is woven into memories of colonial wealth, civil wars, and decline. From a balloon, Urbino and Fermina Daza see Cartagena de Indias as a place abandoned during cholera panic, its defenses still standing amid signs of decay. Later, the Magdalena River’s deterioration reveals another cost of the region’s history: forests and animal populations have been depleted by commercial exploitation, while reports of cholera and conflict are obscured by official assurances. These episodes do not assign the damage to the Conservatives alone; instead, they place party politics within a broader history of repeated wars, unequal power, and institutions unable to halt deterioration.

Significance

The Conservatives’ significance lies less in a detailed account of their policies or internal structure than in the political and social pattern they help define. The novel’s scenes of apparent reconciliation reveal how easily a change of party leadership can coexist with enduring hierarchies. The old elite’s lineage survives shifts in government, while civic life and the landscape bear the consequences of longer histories of conflict and extraction. The Conservatives thus stand within a national struggle that the novel presents as recurrent and politically consequential, yet insufficient by itself to remake the society that sustains it.