 While all conservatives in Hispanic America favored a strong and centralized rule that could maintain peace and political stability, and also opposed the full protection of individual freedoms, they did not look back in nostalgia to the destroyed colonial and Catholic order, arguably with the exception of Lucas Alamán in Mexico who also favored a return to monarchism (Collier 2003: 123), Nor did they confer the Catholic church a central place in the new republican order, again with the exception of Alamán but also of Miguel Antonio Caro in Colombia, and Gabriel García Moreno in Ecuador. While the liberal forces of secularization had won out in most of the region by the end of the century, the confrontation between liberals and conservatives played out in Colombia until the end of the twentieth (Del Par 2010). Though the difference between liberals and conservatives was sometimes not clear cut, it has been maintained that the only issue that consistently placed them at opposite sides in Hispanic America was the religious one (Bushnell 1996, 288–289).