Tajes, Máximo (1852–1912)

Máximo Tajes (b. 23 November 1852; d. 21 November 1912), military leader and president of Uruguay (1886–1890). Tajes began his military career as a distinguished soldier in the army while it was at war with Paraguay. He rose rapidly to the rank of captain (1875) and lieutenant colonel (1880), became minister of war and the navy in 1882, and assumed the presidency in 1886. Tajes pursued the course that had moved Colonel Lorenzo Latorre, who became dictator in 1876, and General Máximo Santos (president, 1882–1886), two men who implanted what has come to be known in Uruguayan history as "militarism." After the resignation of Santos in 1886, however, Tajes followed the advice of Dr. Julio Herrera y Obes and offered himself as constitutionally elected president in order to manage peacefully the transition from militarism to "civilism," a task he fulfilled satisfactorily. His administration took place during the "era of Reus," named after Emilio Reus, a young Spanish financier widely known at the time.

See alsoHerrera y Obes, Julio; Latorre, Lorenzo; Uruguay: Before 1900.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Enrique Méndez Vives, El Uruguay de la modernización (1976).

Washington Reyes Abadie and Andrés Vázquez Romero, Crónica general del Uruguay, vol. 3 (1984).

Gonzalo Aguirre Ramírez, La revolución del Quebracho y la conciliación: De Ellauria a Tajes, 1873–1886 (1989).

Additional Bibliography

Arocena Olivera, Enrique. La rebeldía de los doctores: El Uruguay del fusionismo al militarismo, 1851–1886. Montevideo: Librería Linardi y Risso, 1998.

Nahum, Benjamin, and Alberto Nin. La crisis de 1890. Montevideo: Ediciones de la Banda Oriental, 1998.

                                JosÉ de Torres Wilson