Gabriel García Moreno and Conservative State Formation in the Andes (review)

This book discusses Gabriel García Moreno as a person, as a political operator, and as a state builder. While focusing on the career of García Moreno, from the time he studied at the university in Quito until his assassination in August 1875, this book also provides a political history of Ecuador from the 1840s.

The Ecuadorian conservative comes across as an extremely unpleasant man. The author describes him as “honest, austere, and hardworking,” but also “mercurial, impetuous, and harsh” (pp. 116–117). García Moreno was extraordinarily suspicious; it seems that the term paranoid would fit. He was quick to anger and “irascible” (p. 92). He was vindictive and “could hold a grudge passionately” (p. 214). Like others who have written on nineteenth-century Ecuador, Henderson notes the severe penalties that García Moreno visited upon those whom he considered his enemies—though Henderson sometimes attempts to attenuate the severity.

One wonders, given the personality evoked here, how García Moreno managed to gather sufficient support to become the dominant figure in Ecuador from the late 1850s until his death. Henderson attributes García Moreno’s political success in large part to networks of supporters, beginning with his family and a strategic marriage, but also including university companions. While in exile in Peru from 1853–1854, he acquired additional collaborators among other exiled Ecuadorians, civilian and military (p. 24). Military leaders provided crucial backing, and in his years of triumph, large landowners in the central and northern highlands stood behind him (p. 42). Although García Moreno was born and raised in Guayaquil, he came to detest the coast, depending in part on his family for support there.

On the construction of Ecuador as a nation, the author appropriately considers various themes. In a brief treatment of the question of national identity, the author asserts that many Latin Americans “had little sense of national identity, and for at least a few decades, tended to think of themselves as Spanish Americans at one extreme, or natives of a particular province at the other—rather than citizens of a particular country” (p. 13). This seems too simple a formulation. In the early decades after independence, as well as later in the century, political actors were likely to manifest a variety of identities—city, province, proto-nation, Spanish America—depending on the circumstances.

Another theme is the role of foreign models in nation building. García Moreno, as a conservative nation builder, looked first to the regime of Napoleon III as a model, having seen it in action while living and studying in Paris from 1855–1856. García Moreno was impressed by Napoleon III as a conservative modernizer, most notably in the construction of railways and roads and the expansion of education. García Moreno also fell under ultramontanist influences while in Paris. He was so favorably impressed by Napoleon III that in 1859 and again in 1861, he proposed that Ecuador become a French protectorate (pp. 24–25, 47). The other model of conservative modernization to which García Moreno looked was Portalean Chile. After a stay in Chile in 1866, García Moreno used the Chilean system as a model for his constitution of 1869 (p.126).

Henderson emphasizes the roles in state construction (1861–1875) of investments in overland communications (most particularly the cart road linking Quito to Guayaquil, with branches to intermediate zones), public education, and the military. During at least a part of his period, military expenditures were eight times those of education (p. 131). García Moreno also attempted to discipline the national bureaucracy. Still another resource was his embrace of the Roman Catholic Church. Henderson, not surprisingly, sees the Church as a central component of García Moreno’s nation-building project. The chapter most focusing on nation-building is entitled “Forging the National Soul: The Coming of...