Gabriel García Moreno and Conservative State Formation in the Andes

Chapter Two. Regionalism and Civil War, 1859–1860

Regionalism and Civil War, 1859–1860 31 When Gabriel García Moreno was courting his future bride in 1846, one of his good friends from Quito wrote him: “Now we have the good fortune of seeing you completely established in our country [nuestro país, meaning Quito and the northern and central sierra] and united with one of the most distinguished señoritas we have.”1 Certainly as of the 1860s, most Ecuadorians conceived of “my country” as the region in which they had been born and were living. Very few Ecuadorians traveled—García Moreno being a clear exception. The state of the country’s roads was abysmal, but additionally most people felt loyalty to the regions where their families resided. In many ways regionalism was a state of mind as well as a practical reality in the mid-nineteenth century. Political traditions furthered the sense of regionalism. When Ecuador separated from Gran Colombia in 1830, the founding fathers structured the nation around the three established colonial departments: Quito, Azuay (Cuenca), and Guayaquil. Each of these districts received equal representation in congress and each had an equal voice in the electoral college. As a result most Ecuadorians in 1859 thought of themselves as regional rather than national citizens2 (and there are still vestiges of this sentiment today). Nor were Ecuadorians alone in feeling this way during the nineteenth century. The regional impulse had a long and storied tradition. Catholic southern Germans, for example, felt distinct from northern Germans in both culture and religion. Regionalism destroyed the Central American federation, dividing a historically unified area into five individual countries in the 1830s.3 In the Andean nations the mountainous topography exacerbated regionalism. North of Ecuador, Colombians consciously divided themselves into separate regions and attributed racial identities to those regions. As noted in chapter 1, Ecuadorians’ regional views also combined racial characteristics with derogatory epithets: monos (monkeys) for the Regionalism and Civil War, 1859–1860 Chapter Two 32 gabriel garcía moreno and conservative state formation coast, chagras (rubes) for the Azuay area, and longos (servile Indians) for the central and north sierra. But the latter part of the nineteenth century, both in Europe and Latin America, became the age of nationalism—the antithesis of regionalism—exemplified best by the creation of new nation states like Italy and Germany. The Ecuadorian state also developed in the 1860s, as García Moreno began the process of state formation under his conservative program, which was both practical and visionary. The role of regionalism in Latin America has been the subject of considerable historiographical debate. Despite a centralist tradition dating from the colonial regime, regionalism dominated political thinking on occasion (such as in the postindependence era). Part of the controversy centers around the notion of “state” and when Latin American countries effectively created the mechanism known as the state.4 As we shall see in chapter 3, before García Moreno the Ecuadorian political leadership (with the possible exceptions of Flores and Rocufuerte discussed in chapter 1) had no clear definition of Ecuador in mind. The seeming lack of patriotism of the important players in 1859 becomes explicable only when one realizes that these men were, as García Moreno’s friend indicated, loyal to their own regional “país” rather than to any larger notion of national interests . In fact no better case study exists to demonstrate the destructiveness of regionalism than the Ecuadorian civil war of 1859 through 1860. That experience, however, allowed García Moreno to hone his leadership skills and to reach a greater understanding about how to create a nation, as this chapter will show. ecuador’s regions Obviously Ecuador’s four primary geographical regions did not fit neatly into the country’s three major political subdivisions. Writers describe the four topographical regions as: the coast, including the areas north and south of Guayaquil; the sierra (highlands), comprising the Avenue of the Volcanoes from the Colombian to the Peruvian border; the Oriente, consisting of the tropical area east of the Andes Mountains including tributaries of the Amazon; and the Galápagos Islands, separated from the mainland by more than 600 miles of open sea. Even this delineation may be an oversimplification. As a case in point: During the civil war of 1859, the highlands fragmented into three distinct subregions—the central-north, the southern highlands (Azuay), and the far south (Loja).5 Geologists confirm these finer distinctions, contrasting the low, older, contiguous , and...