Colombres, José Eusebio (1778–1859)

José Eusebio Colombres (b. 16 December 1778; d. 11 February 1859), ecclesiastic and signer of the Argentine Declaration of Independence. Colombres was born in Tucumán, received his doctorate from the University of Córdoba in 1803, and was ordained a priest the same year. He served as a parish priest in Catamarca and supported the May Revolution of 1810. Colombres was elected to the Congress of Tucumán (24 March 1816) and was a signer of the Declaration of Independence of the United Provinces of La Plata on 9 July 1816, by which the political bonds with Spain were broken. While the leaders of the United Provinces were busy establishing their independence, Spain had reasserted its rule in the surrounding areas and overthrown the newly established regime.

Colombres played an active political role in Tucumán, but he is also known for reintroducing sugarcane cultivation there. Sugarcane had been introduced in the 1550s and fostered by the Jesuits on their estates, but at their expulsion in 1767 the industry collapsed. Colombres planted extensive fields and built ox-driven mills to crush the cane. In 1831, however, Juan Facundo Quiroga's forces burned the fields, and Colombres was imprisoned.

Colombres became a government minister under Governor Bernabé Aráoz. He supported the formation of the Coalition of the North, but when the unitarist forces were defeated, he went into exile in Bolivia. After the fall of Juan Manuel de Rosas (1852), Colombres returned and held ecclesiastical positions in Salta. He died in Tucumán.

See alsoRosas, Juan Manuel de .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Tulio Halperín-Donghi, Politics, Economics, and Society in Argentina in the Revolutionary Period, translated by Richard Southern (1975).

Additional Bibliography

Acevedo, Edberto Oscar. La revolución y las intendencias. Buenos Aires: Ciudad Argentina, 2001.

Adelman, Jeremy. Republic of Capital: Buenos Aires and the Legal Transformation of the Atlantic World. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999.

Harari, Fabián. La contra: Los enemigos de la revolución de Mayo, ayer y hoy. Buenos Aires: Ediciones RyR, 2006.

Szuchman, Mark D and Jonathan Brown, eds. Revolution and restoration: The Rearrangement of Power in Argentina, 1776–1860. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994.

                                 Nicholas P. Cushner