Traditionally, the various hypotheses about the origin of the state in Colombia are strongly linked to juridical and constitutional events, e.g., the Declaration of Independence (1810) and the Constitution of 1886. This article sustains that these juridical events, in fact, legalize and modernize the configuration of a State that had been formed by the wars of Conquest. Therefore, in the first part of the paper, I contrast the contractualist version of the genesis of the state with the description of the struggles that make it possible. This article assumes a genealogical perspective (Foucault), which describes the configurations of power necessary to articulate social machines (Deleuze) in the context of colonization. At the same time, the specificity of the power formations (military, economic and religious) are analyzed as processes of collective subjectivation. In the second part, taking into account the historical and ethnohistorical narrations, I argue that the extermination of the Pijao nation can be interpreted as a condition of possibility of the foundation of the State in the Nueva Granada. Finally, I conclude that the frontiers between the processes of inwardness of the state and that 'outside' that, still today, generates uncertainty about the administrative and cultural boundaries of the Colombian State.