Administrative Justice Applied in Between the Dictatorships: A Criticism to the Construction of Administrative Law in Colombia

The Colombian institutional experimentalism and the dictatorial governments of elected presidents Mariano Ospina Perez (1946 to 1950) and Laureano Gomez Castro (1950 to 1952), and the military regime of Gustavo Rojas Pinilla following the coup (1953 to 1957), led to a more pronounced concentration of the national executive branch since the beginning of the 20th century in Colombia, due to the authoritarianism with which they ruled. From this perspective, there is a quite rich context of jurisprudential production, where the political and institutional capacity of the Council of State would be tested. It is argued that the mediation capacity of the Council would be committed to an exercise of dictatorial power as the Colombian Council of State was instituted as the judicial organ in the centralizing project of the "Regeneracion", but that was converted, during the "Republican" governments subsequent to the dictatorship of Rafael Reyes in 1910, in the institution in charge of controlling the legality of acts of the public administration.