Rival ambitions among its own leaders furnished, however, the immediate cause of the downfall of the liberal party. A close oligarchy grew up and that inevitable corollary, a powerful faction of dissident liberals, while the clericals remained formidable and irreconcilable even after their bloody overthrow in 1876. Rafael Nunez, a brilliant writer, a resolute and ambitious party chief, and a leader in the confiscation of church property, had been defeated in his candidacy for the presidency in 1875. The younger and dissatisfied liberals rallied behind him in his war against the oligarchy, and in 1880 the old-fashioned liberals could not prevent his election to the presidency. He vigorously strengthened the prerogatives of the federal executive and built up his personal following, but although the issue of paper money and the discontinuance of interest on the foreign debt--a debt which only ten years before had been scaled down to $10,000,000, one-sixth its original amount, on a solemn promise that at least this much would be faithfully paid--placed large funds at his disposal, the old-line liberals were strong enough to prevent his re-election in 1882. Their victory was illusory and temporary. Nunez controlled both houses of congress and was able to block President Zaldua at every turn. Eighty years old and in feeble health, the latter died after a year of fruitless struggle. [Illustration: STEAMERS ON THE MAGDALENA RIVER.] After a short _ad interim_ administration in which Nunez's influence predominated, he was re-elected to the presidency and installed in 1884. By this time his centralising tendencies were manifest, and the measures he adopted unmistakably pointed to the substitution of a unified republic for the old loose confederation. Many of his liberal supporters fell away and he was driven into an alliance with the conservatives. Appointments of members of that party to important positions were followed by the great revolt of 1885. The insurrectionists delivered their main attack on the Caribbean coast, whither the importation of arms was easy. Much of the department of Magdalena fell into their hands, and they besieged Cartagena in force. But when one of their expeditions invaded the Isthmus, burning Colon, and interrupting traffic on the Panama Railway, the president appealed to the United States, as previous presidents had done in similar cases, to carry out the guaranty of free transit contained in the treaty of 1846. At the same time the government troops attacked and defeated the isolated insurrectionists at Colon, and shortly afterwards the latter's main army suffered a bloody repulse in an assault on Cartagena. This broke the back of the movement against Nunez, and the liberals abandoned the hopeless struggle.