Carbo y Noboa, Pedro José (1813–1895)

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Carbo y Noboa, Pedro José (1813–1895)

Pedro José Carbo y Noboa (b. 19 March 1813; d. 24 December 1895), leading proponent of liberalism in nineteenth-century Ecuador. A persistent voice for coastal interests, Carbo, a native of Guayaquil, served in Congress and as a diplomat in the early decades of the republic. His fierce ideological battles against archconservative dictator Gabriel García Moreno (1861–1865, 1869–1875) proved to be the defining struggles of Carbo's career. He led the opposition to García Moreno's concordat with the Holy See of 1862. Named president of the Senate in 1867, Carbo used his position to battle the figurehead presidents named by García Moreno. In 1869 Liberals supported Carbo in his bid for the presidency, but he was defeated and exiled to Panama.

During the dictatorship of Ignacio de Veintimilla (1876–1883), Carbo accepted appointments as minister of the Treasury (1876) and supreme chief of Guayaquil province (1883). His anticlerical policies, including steps toward the secularization of education, greatly angered the Catholic hierarchy and led to armed revolts against the government. As Veintimilla grew increasingly corrupt and violent, Carbo left the government, ultimately joining the Liberal opposition. After Veintimilla's defeat in 1883, Carbo served as head of the provisional government. In the last years of his life Carbo wrote Páginas de la historia del Ecuador (1898), a work that brought together his liberal perspectives on nineteenth-century Ecuadorian politics.

See alsoEcuador: Since 1830 .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

On nineteenth-century Ecuadorian politics, see Osvaldo Hurtado's interpretive Political Power in Ecuador, translated by Nick D. Mills, Jr. (1985).

Frank MacDonald Spindler's descriptive Nineteenth Century Ecuador: An Historical Introduction (1987). For a brief analysis of Ecuadorian political economy in the nineteenth century, consult David W. Schodt, Ecuador: An Andean Enigma (1987).