Ecuador The Rule of the Liberals, 1895-1925
Scenes of Quito and the gathering of cacao pods in 1907
Courtesy Prints and Photographs Divisions, Library of Congress
Eloy Alfaro is the outstanding standard-bearer for Ecuador's
Liberals, much as García Moreno is for the Conservatives. Some
Marxist groups have also looked to Alfaro; although his political
program was in no way socialist, it did prove to be revolutionary
in the extent to which it stripped the Roman Catholic Church of the
power and privileges previously granted to it by García Moreno.
Catholic officials and their Conservative allies did not give up
without a fight, however. During the first year of Alfaro's
presidency, Ecuador was ravaged by a bloody civil war in which
clergymen commonly incited the faithful masses to rise in rebellion
against the "atheistic alfaristas" and were, just as
commonly, themselves victims of alfarista repression. The
foreign-born Bishops Pedro Schumacher of Portoviejo and Arsenio
Andrade of Riobamba led the early resistance to Alfaro. A fullfledged bloodbath may well have been averted only through the
magnanimous efforts of the outstanding historian and Archbishop
Federico González Suárez, who urged the clergy to abandon the
pursuit of politics.
This final ecclesiastical struggle for control of Ecuador was
in vain, however. By the end of the Liberals' rule in 1925, Roman
Catholicism was no longer the constitutionally mandated state
religion, official clerical censorship of reading material had been
suppressed, many powerful foreign clergy had been expelled,
education had been secularized, civil marriage as well as divorce
had been instituted, the concordat with the Vatican had been
broken, most of the church's rural properties had been seized by
the state, and the republic was no longer dedicated to the Sacred
Heart of Jesus. The Roman Catholic Church in Ecuador would never
again hold prerogatives as extensive as those it enjoyed during the
late nineteenth century.
The other accomplishment for which the three decades of PLR
rule are remembered is the completion, in 1908, of the GuayaquilQuito railroad. At the time, however, Alfaro was condemned by his
critics for "delivering the republic to the Yankees" through a
contract signed with North American entrepreneurs to complete the
project begun by García Moreno. Although the criticism did not halt
Alfaro on this project, a similar nationalistic outcry did force
him to end negotiations with the United States, which wanted to
protect the soon-to-be-completed Panama Canal, over military base
rights in Ecuador's Galápagos Islands. Alfaro's affinity for the
United States was also evident in 1910, when war between Peru and
Ecuador over their perennial boundary dispute was narrowly averted
through the mediation of the United States, together with Brazil
and Argentina.
The Liberals can be credited with few further accomplishments
of major proportions. The system of debt peonage that lingered in
the Sierra came under government regulations, albeit weak ones, and
imprisonment for debts was finally outlawed in 1918. These and
other limited social benefits gained by the Indians and the mixedblood montuvio (coastal mestizo) working class were
overshadowed by the ruinous economic decline world wide and the
severe repression of the nascent labor movement at the hands of the
Liberals during the early 1920s. Furthermore, Liberal rule did
little to foster the development of stable democracy. On the
contrary, the first half of the period saw even more illegal
seizures of power and military-led governments than in previous
decades.
A major cause of the instability of the period was the lack of
unity within the PLR itself. Alfaro and a second military
strongman, General Leónidas Plaza Gutiérrez, maintained a bitter
rivalry over party leadership for almost two decades. Following
Alfaro's first period in the presidency, Plaza was elected to a
constitutional term of office that lasted from 1901 until 1905. In
1906, shortly after a close associate of Plaza had been elected to
succeed him, however, Alfaro launched a coup d'état and returned to
the presidency. Alfaro, in turn, was overthrown in 1911 after
refusing to hand power over to his own hand-picked successor,
Emilio Estrada. Four months later, Estrada's death from a heart
attack precipitated a brief civil war that climaxed the rivalry
between Alfaro and Plaza. Alfaro returned from his exile in Panama
to lead the Guayaquil garrison in its challenge to the Quito-based
interim government, which was under the military authority of
General Plaza. The rebellion was quickly defeated, however; Alfaro
was captured and transported to Quito via the same railroad that he
had done so much to complete. Once in the capital, Alfaro was
publicly and unceremoniously murdered, along with several of his
comrades, by a government-instigated mob.
Shortly thereafter, Plaza was inaugurated into his second
presidential term in office. It was the first of four consecutive
constitutional changes of government: following Plaza (1912-16)
came Alfredo Baquerizo Moreno (1916-20), then José Luis Tamayo
(1920-24), and Gonzalo S. Córdova (1924-25). Real power during this
second half of the period of Liberal rule was held, not by the
government, but by a plutocracy of coastal agricultural and banking
interests, popularly known as la argolla (the ring),
whose linchpin was the Commercial and Agricultural Bank of
Guayaquil led by Francisco Urbina Jado. This bank gained influence
by loaning vast quantities of money to the free-spending government
as well as to private individuals. According to Ecuadorian
historian Oscar Efrén Reyes, the bank was influential "to the point
that candidates for president and his ministers, senators, and
deputies had to have the prior approval of the bank." Many of the
private loans were to members of the Association of Agriculturists
of Ecuador, an organization that also received government funds
intended to promote an international cartel of cacao growers, but
which instead were used to line members' pockets.
All parties involved in la argolla, from the government
officials to the bankers and the growers, were professed militants
of the Liberal cause. It was not only the political fortunes of the
party that fell victim to their financial activities, however, but
also the national economy, which experienced runaway inflation as
a result of the printing of money by the private banks. The severe
economic problems during the final years of Liberal rule were also
partially caused by factors beyond the control of the politicians.
A fungal disease that ravaged Ecuador's cacao trees and the growth
of competition from British colonies in Africa abruptly ended
conditions that had favored Ecuador's exportation of cacao for over
a century. What was left of the nation's cacao industry fell victim
to the sharp decline in world demand during the Great Depression.
Ecuador's economic crisis of the early 1920s was especially
devastating to the working class and the poor. With real wages, for
those lucky enough to have jobs, eaten away by inflation, workers
responded with a general strike in Guayaquil in 1922 and a peasant
rebellion in the central Sierra the following year. Both actions
were aimed at improving wages and working conditions; both were put
down only after massacres of major proportions.
President Córdova, closely tied to la argolla, had come
to office in a fraudulent election. Popular unrest, together with
the ongoing economic crisis and a sickly president, laid the
background for a bloodless coup d'état in July 1925. Unlike all
previous forays by the military into Ecuadorian politics, the coup
of 1925 was made in the name of a collective grouping rather than
a particular caudillo. The members of the League of Young Officers
who overthrew Córdoba came to power with an agenda, which included
a wide variety of social reforms, the replacement of the
increasingly sterile Liberal-Conservative debate, and the end of
the rule of the Liberals, who had become decadent after three
decades in power.
Data as of 1989
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