Carlos Antonio López Ynsfrán (November 4, 1792 – September 10, 1862) served as leader of
Paraguay
Paraguay (; ), officially the Republic of Paraguay ( es, República del Paraguay, links=no; gn, Tavakuairetã Paraguái, links=si), is a landlocked country in South America. It is bordered by Argentina to the south and southwest, Brazil to t ...
from 1841 to 1862.
Early life
López was born at
Manorá (Asunción) on November 4, 1792, as one of eight children.
He graduated from Real Colegio y Seminario de San Carlos and then began a law practice, a profession which allowed him to develop influential connections.
He attracted the hostility of the
dictator
A dictator is a political leader who possesses absolute power. A dictatorship is a state ruled by one dictator or by a small clique. The word originated as the title of a Roman dictator elected by the Roman Senate to rule the republic in time ...
José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, his reputed uncle, which caused him to go into hiding for several years.
Political career
López served briefly as secretary of the
military junta
A military junta () is a government led by a committee of military leaders. The term ''junta'' means "meeting" or "committee" and originated in the national and local junta organized by the Spanish resistance to Napoleon's invasion of Spain in ...
led by Colonel
Mariano Roque Alonso
Mariano Roque Alonso Romero (16 August 1792 Ybytimí – 7 August 1853) was President of the Provisional Junta of Paraguay from 9 February 1841 to 14 March 1841. On 14 March 1841, he established a government ruling jointly with Carlos Antonio Ló ...
that ruled the country from 1840 to 1841, after the death of Francia.
On March 12, 1841, Congress chose López and Alonso to be joint consuls for three years.
In 1844, he exiled Roque and assumed dictatorial powers. A few months later, Congress adopted a new constitution, which changed the head of state's title from consul to
president
President most commonly refers to:
*President (corporate title)
* President (education), a leader of a college or university
* President (government title)
President may also refer to:
Automobiles
* Nissan President, a 1966–2010 Japanese ...
and elected López to the new post for a 10-year term.
The constitution vested López with powers almost as sweeping as those "El Supremo" had held for most of his 26-year rule, effectively codifying the dictatorial powers he had seized just months earlier. The document included no guarantees of civil rights; indeed, the word "liberty" was not even mentioned in the text.
He was re-elected for a three-year term in 1854 and again in 1857 for ten more years, with the power to nominate his own successor.
His government was directed towards developing Paraguay's primary resource extraction and strengthening Paraguay's armed forces. He contracted numerous foreign technicians, most of which were English, and built up the formidable
Fortress of Humaitá.
Prior to the constitution adopted in 1844 that legitimized López’s presidency, Paraguay had no official document of sovereignty; López’s influence led to the recognition of Paraguay as an independent nation.
However, his approach to foreign affairs several times involved him in
diplomatic
Diplomatics (in American English, and in most anglophone countries), or diplomatic (in British English), is a scholarly discipline centred on the critical analysis of documents: especially, historical documents. It focuses on the conventions, p ...
disputes with the
Empire of Brazil
The Empire of Brazil was a 19th-century state that broadly comprised the territories which form modern Brazil and (until 1828) Uruguay. Its government was a representative parliamentary constitutional monarchy under the rule of Emperors Dom ...
, the
United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country Continental United States, primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., ...
, and the
British Empire
The British Empire was composed of the dominions, colonies, protectorates, mandates, and other territories ruled or administered by the United Kingdom and its predecessor states. It began with the overseas possessions and trading posts e ...
, which nearly resulted in
war. His government was somewhat more tolerant of opposition than Francia's had been. He released all political prisoners soon after he took full power and also took measures to abolish
slavery
Slavery and enslavement are both the state and the condition of being a slave—someone forbidden to quit one's service for an enslaver, and who is treated by the enslaver as property. Slavery typically involves slaves being made to perf ...
.
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During López’s presidency, Paraguay’s economy saw unprecedented growth. He signed commercial treaties with Brazil in 1850; Great Britain, France, and the United States in 1853; and Argentina in 1856.
His government worked to improve infrastructure and transportation within the country through the establishment of a new railroad line and steamship river routes.
López also encouraged public education through the expansion of primary schools and the reopening of the seminary he attended as a young man, which increased literacy throughout the country.
His eldest son,
Francisco Solano López (1827–1870), succeeded him as president after his death.
A barrio of Asuncion is named after him.
Sources on his life are scarce. For a brief modern biography see Bealer, Lewis W. "Carlos Antonio Lopez, Organizer and Dictator of the Paraguayan Republic" (Chapter Eleven, pages 136-153) in South American Dictators During the First Century of Independence, edited by A. Curtis Wilgus (George Washington University Press, 1937; reissued by Russell & Russell Inc., 1963). Bealer cites Captain Richard F. Burton's Letters from the Battlefields of Paraguay (London, 1870) as his primary source of factual information, though for those who read Spanish, he cites in the positive Andres Gelly's El Paraguay (Paris, 1926), who was Lopez's minister at Rio de Janeiro, as a good source for information "on developments to 1848". Bealer claims Washburn's History of Paraguay (2 vols., Boston, 1871) is "woefully unreliable and biased except where direct quotation is made".
See also
*
History of Paraguay
*
List of presidents of Paraguay
References
Sources
*
*Plá, Josefina (1976). The British in Paraguay 1850–1870. The Richmond Publishing Co in association with St Antony's College, Oxford.
*Williams, John Hoyt (1977). "Foreign Tecnicos and the Modernization of Paraguay". Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs (Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Miam): pp. 233–257.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Lopez, Carlos Antonio
1792 births
1862 deaths
People from Asunción
Presidents of Paraguay
19th-century Paraguayan people