Colombia is a unitary presidential republic governed under the Constitution of 1991. The President is both head of state and head of government. Since 7 August 2026 that has been Abelardo de la Espriella, with José Manuel Restrepo as Vice President. Presidents serve a single four-year term with no re-election. Laws are made by a two-chamber Congress, elected in March 2026, made up of a 103-member Senate and a 183-member Chamber of Representatives. Courts are headed by the Supreme Court of Justice, the Council of State and the Constitutional Court. The country is divided into 32 departments and the Capital District of Bogotá, each with an elected governor or mayor. The 1991 charter is Colombia's latest of many. Each was written to end a war, a dictatorship or a breakdown of order, so the present system makes most sense read in order of when its parts were built.
1810–1831: The Cry of Independence and Gran Colombia
On 20 July 1810 the cabildo, or town council, of Santa Fe de Bogotá broke with Spanish authority. No single national government followed. Instead, provinces set up their own juntas and charters. Cundinamarca promulgated a constitution in April 1811, modelled on the United States Constitution but keeping the absent Ferdinand VII as a constitutional monarch. On 27 November 1811 a congress issued the Act of Federation of the United Provinces of New Granada. Centralist Cundinamarca under Antonio Nariño refused to join and fought the federalists, whose congress Camilo Torres presided over from 1812 to 1814. Spanish forces under Pablo Morillo retook Santa Fe on 6 May 1816, and Torres, by then President of the United Provinces, was executed by firing squad that October.
Independence was won on the battlefield in 1819. The Battle of Boyacá destroyed the royalist army in central New Granada, and Viceroy Juan de Sámano fled the capital. Later that year the Congress of Angostura proclaimed the Republic of Colombia, which historians call Gran Colombia. It took in present-day Colombia, Panama, Venezuela and mainland Ecuador. Its constitution was approved at the Congress of Cúcuta on 30 August 1821, with 10 chapters and 91 articles. Simón Bolívar became President and Francisco de Paula Santander Vice President. The union could not hold: federalists and centralists fell out and the regions pulled apart. Bolívar resigned in 1830, and by 1831 Venezuela, Ecuador and New Granada had become separate states.
1831–1885: New Granada and the Rionegro Federation
For half a century the new state swung between central and regional rule. New Granada rewrote its constitution in 1843 and again in 1853, each time shifting the balance between Bogotá and the provinces. By the late 1850s the country had become the Granadine Confederation. Attempts by Conservative governments to centralise it set off the civil war of 1860 to 1862. The Liberal general Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera defeated President Bartolomé Calvo and took power.
The Liberals then wrote the most decentralised constitution in Colombian history. Promulgated at Rionegro, Antioquia, on 8 May 1863, it created the United States of Colombia, a federation of nine "sovereign states". The president served only two years, could not be immediately re-elected and was chosen by the states. Mosquera was chosen as its first president on 12 May. Church property was seized and the Church's legal privileges cut back, which deepened the split with Conservatives. The period that followed, known as the Radical Olympus, saw repeated local wars.
1886–1910: Núñez's Constitution, the Thousand Days' War and Panama
After another civil war in 1884–85, President Rafael Núñez led a coalition of moderate Liberals and Conservatives in a programme he called the Regeneration. A Constituent Assembly of 18 delegates, two from each of the nine states, wrote the Constitution of 1886. It renamed the country the Republic of Colombia and turned the states into departments under governors the president appointed. It lengthened the presidential term to six years, with the president chosen by Congress, and limited the vote in national elections to literate men aged 21 or over. Catholicism became the official religion, confirmed by a concordat with the Vatican in 1887. This was the longest-lasting constitution in Colombian history, in force for 105 years.
Centralism under one dominant party left the Liberals shut out. The Thousand Days' War, fought between Liberals and the government from 17 October 1899 to 21 November 1902, left the country exhausted. On 3 November 1903 Panama declared independence with United States backing, after Colombia's Congress had rejected the Hay–Herrán canal treaty. The United States was the first country to recognise Panama, which then signed a treaty giving the US the right to build the canal. A 1910 amendment abolished the death penalty and gave the Supreme Court of Justice the power to strike down unconstitutional laws, which it kept for the next 81 years.
1948–1974: La Violencia, Rojas Pinilla and the National Front
On 9 April 1948 the Liberal leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, the front-runner for the 1949 presidential election, was shot dead in central Bogotá. The rioting that followed, the Bogotazo, began La Violencia, a decade of rural warfare between Conservative and Liberal supporters. It is estimated to have killed at least 200,000 people. In June 1953 General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla overthrew President Laureano Gómez. He ruled as a military dictator until May 1957, a period in which the vote was extended to women.
The two traditional parties then agreed to stop fighting over the state by sharing it. A national plebiscite in 1957 approved the National Front. From 1958 to 1974 the presidency alternated between the parties for four terms. Alberto Lleras Camargo (Liberal) was followed by Guillermo León Valencia (Conservative), Carlos Lleras Restrepo (Liberal) and Misael Pastrana Borrero (Conservative). Cabinet and civil-service posts were split equally. The deal gradually ended the partisan killing, but it shut out other parties, and new guerrilla movements grew out of the dissatisfaction from the 1960s. Power-sharing faded only slowly: in 1986 Virgilio Barco formed the first single-party Liberal government since the Front.
1986–1991: Elected Mayors, the Seventh Ballot and a Constituent Assembly
A 1986 amendment let voters elect their mayors directly for the first time; they had previously been appointed by departmental governors. The violence of the drug cartels, guerrillas and paramilitaries kept growing all the same. On 18 August 1989 the Liberal presidential favourite Luis Carlos Galán was assassinated in Soacha. Avianca Flight 203 was bombed in the air on 27 November, and a bomb at the DAS security headquarters on 6 December killed about 70 people. Two more presidential candidates, Bernardo Jaramillo and Carlos Pizarro, were murdered in 1990. The 1886 constitution allowed only Congress to amend it, and Congress had failed to reform itself.
University students in Bogotá found a way round the deadlock. For the March 1990 elections they promoted the séptima papeleta, an unofficial seventh ballot paper calling for a constituent assembly. More than 2.2 million people cast it. President Virgilio Barco then ordered an official count of the question at the May 1990 presidential election, and the Supreme Court allowed it. His successor, César Gaviria, called the vote on 9 December 1990 that elected a 70-member assembly. The demobilised M-19 guerrillas, now a party, won more votes than any other single list. Gaviria's Liberals, running many separate lists, won the most seats.
The assembly was chaired jointly by three presidents from rival camps: the Conservative Álvaro Gómez Hurtado, the Liberal Horacio Serpa and Antonio Navarro Wolff of the AD M-19. It began work on 5 February 1991, and the new constitution was promulgated on 7 July 1991.
1991: What the "Constitution of Rights" Built
The 1991 text defines Colombia as a social state under the rule of law (estado social de derecho). It bans capital punishment in Article 11 and outlaws discrimination in Article 13. It moved judicial review from the Supreme Court to a new Constitutional Court of nine judges. The Senate elects them for eight-year terms from shortlists of three drawn up by the President, the Supreme Court and the Council of State. Any person can file an acción de tutela asking a judge to protect a fundamental right quickly, and the Constitutional Court reviews these rulings. An Attorney General's office, the Fiscalía, introduced an accusatory system of criminal prosecution. Article 103 added referendums, popular consultations, open town meetings and the right to recall local officials.
The charter also redrew the map of local power. Each of the 32 departments now elects a governor and an assembly for four years, and governors cannot serve consecutive terms; the list is in how many departments Colombia has. Presidential re-election was banned outright.
2004–2016: Re-election and the FARC Peace Agreement
The re-election ban did not last unchanged. A 2004 amendment allowed one immediate re-election, which the Constitutional Court upheld on 19 October 2005. Álvaro Uribe and later Juan Manuel Santos each served two terms under it. In 2015 Congress restored the single-term rule. Santos's government formally opened peace talks with the FARC in Oslo on 18 October 2012 and continued them in Havana. Voters rejected the resulting agreement in a referendum on 2 October 2016, by 50.2% to 49.8%. A revised text was signed in November and ratified by Congress instead: the Senate approved it 75–0 on 29 November 2016 and the House 130–0 the next day. Under the deal, the former guerrillas' party, Comunes, was guaranteed five seats in each chamber for two terms. Sixteen Special Transitional Peace Constituencies were also created for victims of the conflict in the hardest-hit rural areas.
2022–2026: Petro, de la Espriella and the Congress Elected in March 2026
In 2022 Gustavo Petro became the first left-wing candidate elected president since independence. The congressional election of 8 March 2026 was the first without the Comunes guarantee, and the party lost all five of its seats. In the presidential race, de la Espriella, founder of the right-wing Defenders of the Homeland party, led the first round on 31 May with 43.7% against 40.9% for Senator Iván Cepeda. He won the runoff on 21 June by 49.66% to 48.70%, the narrowest margin ever recorded, with a record 12.9 million votes. Cepeda conceded on 24 June. Petro accepted the result while alleging fraud and foreign interference.
The new Senate seats 100 members elected nationwide, two for Indigenous communities and one for the presidential runner-up. The Chamber has 161 members for the departments and the Capital District, along with seats for Afro-Colombian, Indigenous, Raizal and overseas voters, the 16 peace seats and one for the runner-up's running mate. Presidents take office on 7 August and govern from the Casa de Nariño, close to the Capitolio on Plaza de Bolívar, in the historic centre of Bogotá, Colombia's capital.