Word: ecuador
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...years ago, a handful of Quito Creoles rose up, overthrew Spanish rule for the first time in South America. It took three more revolts before Ecuador decisively crushed Spanish power on May 23, 1822. An officer named Juan José Flores became President, preaching freedom and practicing tyranny. He wrote three constitutions, all disregarded...
...Great Conservative. Ecuador hustled Flores off to Europe in 1845 with a pension, and underwent 15 years of anarchy. For the next 15, the country was ruled by the greatest Ecuadorian of the 19th century. Gabriel Garcia Moreno hated democracy. He was a conservative, a working Roman Catholic who dressed in black, went daily to Mass and revered Thomas à Kempis' The Imitation of Christ; he believed that "only through force may good be attained." But he also despised militarism, gave the country a uniform currency, the first highway between mountainous Quito and seaside Guayaquil, established an efficient treasury...
...years after that, the generals, the bankers and Liberals gave Ecuador "chocolate prosperity," based on rich cacao plantations. Paris became the mecca of the planters, while back home the nation and the people lost ground, literally, to grabby neighbors: 26,000 sq. mi. to Brazil in 1904; 62,000 sq. mi. to Colombia in 1916; 79,000 sq. mi. to Peru in 1942, at gunpoint. By 1949, the nation had tried 15 constitutions, 44 presidents, only 10 of whom lasted out full terms...
Full-Term Presidents. Ecuador had nowhere to go but up. It did. In 1948 Manhattan-born Galo Plaza, onetime football player for U.C.L.A., won election at the head of an independent ticket. Plaza, now 53 and main speaker at the recent Puerto Rican conference of U.S. Governors, gave Ecuador its first census, developed the world's largest banana industry to relieve Ecuador's dependence on witches'-broom-diseased cacao, offered Ecuador "chemically pure" democracy, free of press censorship and police statism. He served out all his four years, the first president to do so in 28 years...
...countries. A neighborhood club at heart. Rotary would like, as Harold Thomas puts it, to "make the whole world a neighborhood, and bring it even more bridges to friendship." It set up the cultural exchange group that later became UNESCO, settled a 150-year-old boundary dispute between Ecuador and Peru...