La patria de Arboleda.

The present paper partly explores the debates on men's natural rights which took place in the public sphere in mid-nineteenth century Latin America. In Colombia, as in many other countries in the region, such debates were related to civil wars between liberals and conservatives which started around the year 1848. Romantic poet Julio Arboleda Pombo (1817-1862), military chief and catholic thinker, was a central figure of such doctrinal debates and of such civil wars. In his poetic and journalistic works it is possible to trace the emergence of a post-republican conservatism that would gravitate over the public sphere and academia in Nueva Granada, during the second half of the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]