Francisco Robles García (Juan Francisco de Robles y García; 5 May 1811 – March 1893) was an Ecuadorian military officer and politician who served as the sixth President of Ecuador from 16 October 1856 to 31 August 1859. He was the first Ecuadorian president chosen in a relatively competitive constitutional election of the Marcist period and governed during one of the deepest crises of the nineteenth-century republic.
Robles’s administration expanded schools and backed liberal reforms associated with the post-1845 Marcist order, including the abolition of the Indigenous tribute inherited from the colonial era. His presidency is chiefly remembered, however, for the 1857 Ycaza–Pritchett contract, by which Ecuador attempted to settle part of its foreign “English debt” through land concessions in the Oriente and on the coast, provoking Peruvian protests and helping trigger the Peru–Ecuador crisis of 1858–1860.
Under pressure from Peru’s blockade and from domestic rivals, Robles moved the seat of government first to Riobamba and then to Guayaquil, but in 1859 Ecuador fragmented into competing regional governments in what Ecuadorian historiography often calls the Año Terrible (“Terrible Year”). Robles was overthrown, exiled to Chile and later Peru, and eventually returned to Guayaquil, where he died in March 1893.
Early life and family background
Robles was born in Guayaquil on 5 May 1811, the son of the merchant and landowner Lupercio de Robles Pacheco and Manuela García y Coronel. During the Gran Colombia–Peru War, he took part as a young officer in the naval combat of Punta Malpelo on 31 August 1828, one of the formative actions in the naval history of the former Gran Colombia and Peru.
By the 1830s Robles had begun to distinguish himself in both military and political life. During the Marcist Revolution of 1845, which overthrew the dominance of former president Juan José Flores, he supported the anti-Florean movement from the river approaches to Guayaquil while commanding the war steamer Guayas. Under President José María Urbina, Robles rose rapidly: he served as governor of Guayas, commander general of Guayaquil, deputy for Manabí, and Minister of War before becoming the official candidate of the ruling liberal camp in the 1856 election.
Abolition of the Indigenous tribute
One of the major liberal reforms associated with Robles’s presidency was the abolition of the Indigenous tribute, a colonial-era fiscal burden imposed on Indigenous communities. The dispute sharpened Ecuador’s long-running boundary conflict with Peru and pushed the Robles government into an increasingly dangerous diplomatic confrontation.
Exile
After his overthrow in 1859, Robles was sent into exile in Chile and later settled in Peru. A Catalan migration study identifies this banker as Antoni Madinyà Vilasendra (1837–1920).
- Francisco Robles y de Santistevan – died young.