The name was older than the country. In the eighteenth century, Venezuelan revolutionary Francisco de Miranda coined an improvised Greek-flavored adjective - *colombiano* - for things pertaining to the Americas under Spanish rule. It derived from the name of Christopher Columbus, whose Latin form *Columbus* became the Neo-Latin *Columbia*. Miranda used it to title an archive of his own revolutionary papers. Bolivar picked up the term and gave it a specific political meaning. When the Congress of Angostura convened in 1819 on the banks of the Orinoco, with Bolivar still in the field fighting royalist armies, it issued the Fundamental Law of the Republic of Colombia. The name had become a country. The Congress of Cucuta in 1821 then wrote the constitution and set the capital.

Gran Colombia's territory loosely matched the old Viceroyalty of New Granada - the Spanish administrative unit that had existed since 1739. The logic of keeping those borders was the Latin legal principle *uti possidetis*: you inherit the boundaries you found. The problem was geography. The new country contained three departments separated by the towering Andes - Cundinamarca (Bogota), Venezuela (Caracas), and Quito. Communication between the capitals took weeks. In 1824, to break up regionalism, Bolivar and the congress redivided the country into twelve smaller departments, each headed by a centrally appointed intendant modeled on the Bourbon administrators of the late colonial period. On paper, this should have produced efficient central control. In practice, it produced a new set of complaints - now about intendants, not about regions.

Two men defined the political struggle. Simon Bolivar was the Liberator - the Venezuelan general who had crossed the Andes twice and won independence on the battlefield. He was now president. Francisco de Paula Santander, his vice president, was a New Granadine lawyer turned soldier who believed firmly in constitutional rule and federalism - a decentralized government answering to the text on the page. Bolivar, as the wars ended and politics took over, pulled in the opposite direction. He wanted stronger executive power. He had just drafted a constitution for Bolivia that concentrated authority in a lifetime presidency, and he wanted something similar for Gran Colombia. Santander did not. By 1825 their disagreement was public. By 1826 it had produced a constitutional crisis.

Venezuela was the first crack. Jose Antonio Paez, the Commandant General of the Venezuela Department - a former llanero cavalry officer who had fought brilliantly in the wars of independence - defied a congressional impeachment order in April 1826. Quito and Guayaquil sent declarations of support. In Venezuela, two assemblies met in November to discuss the future of the region, though neither declared independence. Skirmishes broke out between Paez's supporters and Bolivar's. Bolivar himself rode north with an army, prepared to force the issue. What saved the country - briefly - was an offer of general amnesty in January 1827, along with Bolivar's promise to convene a new constitutional convention ahead of schedule. Paez backed down. The union held.

The Convention of Ocana met in 1828 to write a new constitution. It fell apart within months. Bolivar proposed a version of his Bolivian constitution - strong executive, long terms, centralized power. The delegates rejected it. Pro-Bolivar delegates walked out rather than sign a federalist text. After Ocana, Bolivar simply declared dictatorial powers, believing centralization was the only way to prevent secession. It was not. In September 1828, assassins broke into the presidential palace and tried to kill him - Manuela Saenz, his companion, hid him under a cloak and helped him escape out a window. In 1828 Bolivar declared war on Peru over disputed claims to Jaen and Maynas; the Treaty of Guayaquil ended the conflict the following year. By 1830, the country was unraveling. Ecuador proclaimed its separation in May. Venezuela followed in September. Bolivar resigned and set out for exile, dying of tuberculosis in Santa Marta that December - *Colombia y el Peru!* were among his last recorded words. The federation dissolved formally in 1831.

The three successor states - Venezuela, Ecuador, and the Republic of New Granada - carried forward their shared origin in their flags. All three feature the same horizontal tricolor of yellow, blue, and red that Miranda had first unfurled in 1806. The Republic of New Granada eventually became the Granadine Confederation in 1858, the United States of Colombia in 1863, and the Republic of Colombia in 1886 - the same name Bolivar had used, minus the *Gran*. Panama remained part of Colombia until 1903, when a U.S.-backed independence movement detached it to clear the way for the Panama Canal. The population of Gran Colombia at its founding was 2,583,799 - already lower than the 2.9 million the same territory had held before the wars of independence. Half of that population was indigenous, about 1.2 million people whose lives were made and unmade by boundaries drawn in Angostura and Cucuta. Bolivar's vision of a single Hispanic America failed in his own lifetime. The idea did not. *Reunification of Gran Colombia* remains a live political concept in Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador, even now.