Marroquín, José Manuel (1827–1908)

José Manuel Marroquín (b. 6 August 1827; d. 19 September 1908), acting president (7 August 1898–3 November 1898), president of Colombia (31 July 1900–7 August 1904). Marroquín, a member of the upper class, is better remembered for his literary achievements than for his political performance. As a writer, he was concerned with form as well as substance, and published works on Spanish poetics and rhetoric. His poetry has been hailed as charming and assured. He was a charter member of the Mosaico group of costumbristas ("sketch of manners" writers) and probably was the best of them, employing gentle satire to prod and instruct his readers. He was also a novelist; his best-loved work in that genre, El Moro (1897), is a sentimental tale about a horse. As president and nominal head of a disintegrating faction of the Conservatives, Marroquín had the ill fortune to preside ineffectually over a Colombia being torn apart by the War of the Thousand Days (1899–1903) and dismembered by the U.S.-sponsored secession of Panama (1903).

See alsoColombia, Political Parties: Conservative Party .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Charles W. Bergquist, Coffee and Conflict in Colombia, 1886–1910 (1978), pp. 51-80, 196-219.

Frank M. Duffey, The Early Cuadro de Costumbres in Colombia (1956), pp. 59-67.

José Manuel Marroquín Osorio, Don José Manuel Marroquín íntimo (1915).

Additional Bibliography

Morales Benítez, Otto. Sanclemente, Marroquín: El libera-lismo y Panamá. Santafé de Bogotá, Colombia: Sta-mato Editores, 1998.

                                      J. LeÓn Helguera