Guayaquil Junta

The state it founded — the Provincia Libre de Guayaquil — lasted twenty-two months. It had a written constitution before most of Spanish America had a functioning congress, an elected college of fifty-seven delegates, and a foreign policy that consisted of writing to both Simón Bolívar and José de San Martín and asking which of them would like to save it. Its president, the poet and lawyer José Joaquín de Olmedo, ended his term in exile. In July 1822 the two liberators met in the city itself, and the province was absorbed into Gran Colombia by a man who had arrived with more troops than the junta possessed.

The episode matters for three reasons. It was the first independence in the old Audiencia of Quito that actually held, and it came from the coast, from merchants and shipping, not from the landed families of the sierra. It paid for the campaign that ended Spanish rule in Quito, which makes it an unusually well-documented case of a small state buying its own conquest. And it produced the strangest document in the independence story: an interview with no witnesses, no secretary and no agreed record, whose contents have been argued over ever since — including by people who invented a letter to fill the gap.

At a glance

Why did a cacao port matter more than a capital?

Quito was the seat of government; Guayaquil was the reason there was anything to govern. The port sat some fifty kilometres up the Guayas estuary, far enough inland to be safe from raiders and close enough for ocean-going ships, and it was the only deep-water outlet for the whole northern Andes. Everything the sierra produced that could bear the cost of mule transport — cacao from the lowlands, cloth, hides, timber, salt — left through Guayaquil, and everything the sierra consumed arrived there first.

The city's other industry was war. Its yards built and repaired ships for the Pacific squadron, and travellers were told to see the dockyard before anything else, because it was where the money circulated. William Bennet Stevenson, who lived in the city in the last years of Spanish rule, thought it the most important part of the town, since it employed "a great number of mechanics" and gave the working man a wage he could count on. The largest vessel launched there was the San Salvador of seven hundred tons; schooners of a hundred and fifty or two hundred tons were ordinary. The master shipwright, the master caulker and the master rigger were all Guayaquileños of African descent, and every other material — iron, copper sheathing, naval stores — came from Europe. A port that built ships but imported its nails was a port with strong opinions about free trade.

Its administration was a tangle that no one in Madrid ever sorted out. Stevenson listed the divisions plainly: the military department answered to the viceroy of Peru, the civil government to the Audiencia of Quito, and the church to the bishop of Cuenca. To that was added, in 1803, a royal order placing the province under Lima for military purposes, and in 1806 under Lima for commerce as well; then, in 1819, a further decree returned it to the Presidency of Quito and the viceroyalty of New Granada. Four masters in three capitals, and a customs house on the river at Babahoyo taking duties on goods entering or leaving the province.

The result was a civic identity that pointed outward. Guayaquil's merchants dealt with Callao, Valparaíso, Acapulco and Cádiz; their sons were educated in Quito and Lima; their news came by sea. Quito, three days' hard riding up the mountains, was where they sent their taxes and their lawsuits, and where the Audiencia's officials decided what their trade was worth. When the monarchy faltered after 1808, the port had both the motive and the means to go its own way — and the shipping to make a blockade expensive.

How did cacao money make a merchant class?

The cacao boom of the late eighteenth century did not create Guayaquil, but it made it rich, and it made a particular kind of rich family. The series that María Luisa Laviana Cuetos compiled from notarial and customs records, and which Carmen Anhalzer prints in her study of the region, gives the shape of it: about 35,000 cargas of cacao in 1765, 68,000 by 1779, 100,000 by 1800, 150,000 by 1809, and 180,000 to 190,000 by 1820. Anhalzer's calculation from planting records is that some four million new trees went into the ground between 1779 and 1820, and that the increase came from planting rather than from better methods: a thousand trees yielded about twenty-five cargas, roughly two pounds a tree.

Cacao was not the whole export trade, but it came to dominate it. Michael Hamerly's figures, again as cited by Anhalzer, put cacao at about 30 per cent of exports in 1765 and at 60 to 80 per cent by 1820; Carlos Contreras, working from different series, puts the later figure at 45 to 50 per cent. The disagreement is real and unresolved, and it matters, because the higher figure is what makes Guayaquil look like a monoculture with a single interest group. In 1777, for comparison, the province shipped 54,382 cargas worth 217,528 pesos, which was 55 per cent of its total exports.

The people who grew it were not the people who sold it. Luisa Consuelo Soler Lizarazo's work in the Guayas notarial archive describes a chain: small and middling growers (cosecheros, huerteros) with a few hectares and an annual credit problem; local intermediaries who advanced money against the coming harvest; and a handful of export houses that controlled the shipping and the foreign contracts. The growers pledged their groves as security, and the archive is full of foreclosures. Soler quotes a bond of 1778 in which a grower obliged "persona y bienes" for a debt taken to plant more cacao — the ordinary trap of a boom.

At the top sat families who were merchants first and planters second: the Bejarano, Icaza, Vitores, Luzárraga and Garaicoa houses. Jacinto Bejarano owned ships worth more than 100,000 pesos each, including the Santiago el Fuerte and the frigate Sacramento; Martín de Icaza and Santiago Vitores moved capital out of shipping and into groves. They were also the people who lent money to the crown, sat on the cabildo, commanded the militia, and complained, in long petitions, about the Consulado of Lima's control of the Pacific trade and about the war taxes and forced loans that Madrid imposed after 1808.

That combination — economic weight, corporate power, and a list of specific grievances — is what made a port revolt possible. It also explains why the revolt was not a social revolution. The men who met on 9 October were planters, merchants, lawyers, priests and royal officials, including a number of peninsular Spaniards, and the troops they turned were the ones already in barracks.

Why had the coast and the sierra already parted company?

Quito, the northern capital of the Inca empire before it was the seat of an audiencia, had tried independence first, and failed, and the memory shaped everything that followed. On 10 August 1809 a group of Quiteño notables deposed the president of the Audiencia and set up a junta in the name of Ferdinand VII. It lasted nine months. A second junta followed, and in December 1811 the supporters of independence proclaimed the Estado de Quito with a written constitution; the royalists retook the capital in the second half of 1812 under General Toribio Montes, and the last organised resistance was destroyed at Ibarra before the year was out.

The repression that followed was remembered on both sides. Montes combined conciliation with executions, and among those shot was Francisco García Calderón, a royal officer born in Havana who had married into a prominent Guayaquil family and had led the patriot expedition against Cuenca. His son, Abdón Calderón, was eighteen when he died on the slopes of Pichincha in 1822, carrying the flag of a cause that had killed his father. Guayaquil's merchant families were tied to the sierra by marriage as well as by trade, which is one reason the coastal revolt was never simply a regional war.

The two provinces had also developed different ideas about what a political community was. Anhalzer's comparison is the most useful account of the difference. Quito's juntas rested on a corporate conception: the kingdom was a body of estates, corporations and towns, each with historic rights, and sovereignty reverted to that body when the king was captive. Guayaquil's settlers, by contrast, argued from individual consent — the language of Montesquieu and Rousseau that their better-educated merchants had absorbed in Lima and Cádiz. When the port declared independence, it did so, in the words of its own act, "through the general vote of the people", and it then convoked representatives of townships rather than of guilds and corporations.

There were hard interests under the theory. The sierra wanted protection for its textiles, its Indian labour and its markets; the coast wanted open ports and cheap imports. Quito's economy was stagnant and its elite was clerical and landed; Guayaquil's was expanding and its elite was commercial. Neither trusted the other to govern. Bolívar later built his Colombian state on the calculation that the coast could be attached to Bogotá and the sierra governed from Quito, and the calculation held only as long as his armies did.

What happened on 9 October 1820?

The plan was made at a party. On the night of 8 October a gathering at the house of a Spanish official gave the conspirators an excuse to be together without suspicion while the last arrangements were made. The core of the group was a set of officers from two regiments stationed in the city: Captain León de Febres Cordero, Captain Luis Urdaneta and Major Miguel de Letamendi, all Venezuelans lately of the Numancia battalion and all recently dismissed or posted away for their politics; and from the Granaderos de la Reserva, a regiment of some 600 men recruited in Cuzco, Captain Gregorio de Escobedo and Lieutenant Hilario Vásquez. Around them stood planters, merchants, lawyers, priests and royal functionaries, among them a significant number of peninsular Spaniards who had decided that their future lay with the province rather than with Madrid.

There was almost no fighting. The Granaderos were turned, the gunboats on the river did not fire, and Governor Pascual Vivero, whose own family was Peruvian, bowed to the inevitable. When a rumour spread that the naval officers meant to bombard the town, a crowd tried to storm a barracks, which was the only violence of the day. By the morning of 9 October the cabildo was sitting, the province was declared independent, and the question was who would govern it.

The answer, for the first hours, was Olmedo. The council appointed him political chief — he had been the revolution's intended head from the start, once Colonel Jacinto Bejarano had declined on grounds of age — and set about turning a coup into a constitution. Adjoining towns adhered within the week: Samborondón on 10 October, Daule on the 11th, Naranjal on the 15th. Messengers went out to Bolívar in Venezuela and to San Martín, whose expedition had just landed on the Peruvian coast, asking for troops, money and recognition in roughly that order.

On 8 November 1820 the fifty-seven representatives of the province's municipal districts met as an electoral college and adopted the Reglamento Provisorio de Gobierno, the first constitutional text to take effect in the territory of the old audiencia. Executive power went to a junta of three — Olmedo as president, with Rafael Ximena and Francisco Roca — and the electors and the elected were to be addressed as "citizens". The franchise was not universal: electors were chosen by padres de familia, householders, which in practice meant the propertied. But the principle was contractual rather than corporate, and everyone in the province understood the difference.

Who was José Joaquín de Olmedo?

Olmedo was the son of a Spanish official, Miguel de Olmedo, who had settled in Guayaquil as a merchant and married into a leading local family. He was schooled at the Colegio San Fernando in Quito, sent to Lima for the rest of his education, took a doctorate in law at San Marcos in 1805 and later taught at Santo Tomás in Quito. In 1810 the province chose him as its deputy to the Cortes of Cádiz, where he was appointed a secretary of the Cortes, sat on the committee that drafted the constitution, and served on the Diputación Permanente.

His reputation in Spain rested on a speech rather than on parliamentary skill. Anhalzer, who is sceptical of his powers as an orator, records that he delivered "a dramatic plea against the mita" — the forced labour draft that supplied the mines and the textile mills — which made an impression in Cádiz and was later printed by Vicente Rocafuerte in London. The argument was straightforward: if Americans were to be citizens, they could not also be conscripted like subjects. It was the sort of position that made a colonial deputy useful to Spanish liberals and dangerous to Spanish officials.

He got back to Guayaquil later in the 1810s, having turned back in Mexico when the Junta Central he had meant to join dissolved. Anhalzer traces his politics through his poetry rather than his prose, since he left no political treatise: the early verse celebrates the Spanish nation and laments the misfortunes of the royal family, while by 1817 he was writing as a patriot who thought Spain had forfeited its claim. He had joined the Gran Logia Regional Americana in Cádiz, the masonic network that ran through the American deputations, and he had come home with a liberal's contempt for absolutism and a creole's impatience with peninsular officials.

As president of the junta he was the province's chief diplomat and its chief apologist. His inauguration speech explained independence as a natural coming of age: once men reach the age at which reason has "the sufficient degree of light and firmness" to know and defend their rights, and once they have the means to live comfortably, nature itself inspires "the sentiment of emancipation, and the desire to form a family". It is a good summary of the case the junta made to the world: not a rebellion of the poor, but a household coming into its own.

He was also, in the end, a poet who lost an argument with a soldier. When Bolívar absorbed the province in July 1822, Olmedo protested and left for Peru, where he sat in the first constituent congress. He came back to lead the province's resistance to Bolivarian centralism in 1827, served as Ecuador's first vice-president after 1830, and in 1845 headed the provisional government that ended the Flores era. His long poem on Bolívar's victory at Junín made him the national poet of a country that did not yet exist.

What kind of state did the junta actually build?

On paper, a liberal republic with a small electorate. The Reglamento Provisorio separated powers, declared equality before the law, opened the port to foreign trade, provided for voluntary military service and left the future status of the province to be decided by its own citizens; its one plainly conservative article established Catholicism as the official religion. It was the most advanced constitutional text produced in the audiencia, and it governed a territory of perhaps 70,000 people with one city, a river system, and no army worth the name.

That army had to be invented. The junta kept the Granaderos, raised new companies, and created what became the División Protectora de Quito — the "protecting division" whose name announced that its purpose was not to defend a province but to liberate a kingdom. Its first commander was a political appointment; its funding came from customs receipts on cacao and from forced loans on the export houses. Guayaquil was, in effect, taxing its own trade to pay for a war in the mountains, which is one reason the merchant elite's enthusiasm waxed and waned with the price of cacao.

The state also had a press. El Patriota de Guayaquil was the province's newspaper and the junta's mouthpiece, and it argued the case for independence, for the union of the former audiencia, and — after 1822 — for Guayaquil's own share of the credit for Pichincha. It is the sort of source that has to be read with care, since it was written by the government, but it shows that the junta understood something the sierra's juntas never did: that a small state at war needs to explain itself.

What the junta did not have was recognition. Lima wanted the province for Peru; Bogotá claimed it under the fundamental law of Angostura, which had declared the Presidency of Quito part of Colombia while it was still royalist; Madrid regarded the whole thing as a provincial mutiny. The junta's diplomacy consisted of playing these claims against each other while trying to keep the war against the royalists going. It managed this for twenty-two months, which is longer than most of the new states of the period managed anything.

Why did the first march up the Camino Real fail?

There was one road that mattered, and both sides knew it. The Camino Real from Guayaquil ran upriver to Babahoyo, across the coastal plain, then climbed the western cordillera by the Cuesta de San Antonio to Guaranda, and from there over the high páramo to Riobamba, Ambato, Latacunga and Quito. Stevenson, who travelled it in 1821 with the president of the Audiencia, described the descent as a place where mules slid down on their haunches and where the track ran along a ridge "with a precipice on each side". At the top of the pass stood a stone gate, the parcara, which the Quiteños had fortified in 1811 against troops coming up from Peru.

Whoever held Guaranda could threaten Quito; whoever held the pass could starve Guayaquil. The junta's first campaign was an attempt to do both at once. In November 1820 a patriot column under Febres Cordero and Urdaneta pushed up the road and, on 9 November, found a royalist force under Colonel Antonio Fominaya dug in at Bilován, south of Guaranda, on the Camino Real itself. The royalists had prepared ambushes; the patriots learned of them, turned the position and drove Fominaya's men north. Two weeks later, on 22 November, the same army beat a royalist column under Francisco González at Huachi, near Ambato.

Then the campaign came apart. The patriot force was small, highland, and short of everything; the royalists regrouped under Melchor de Aymerich, the field marshal who now commanded in Quito, and the province's army fell back on the coast. An armistice followed, which the royalists broke. By the spring of 1821 Guayaquil was negotiating for its life, and Olmedo's government had begun writing to Bogotá in earnest.

Help arrived in April 1821 in the person of Antonio José de Sucre, twenty-six years old, sent by Bolívar with a small Colombian contingent and a double brief: to keep the province out of Peru's hands and to use it as a base for the liberation of Quito. He landed on 6 April, addressed the junta, and on 15 April signed a treaty by which Guayaquil kept its sovereignty but accepted Colombian protection and gave Sucre command of its troops. It was the deal the junta wanted and the deal Bolívar intended to revise.

How did Sucre take Quito?

In July 1821 Aymerich moved first. He brought 1,700 men against Guayaquil by way of Guaranda and Babahoyo while Colonel Francisco González advanced from Cuenca with 1,000 more, a double envelopment aimed at the port itself. Sucre marched on 7 August with about 1,000 infantry and 200 horse, caught González's column on the 19th at Yaguachi and destroyed it. Aymerich, refusing battle, withdrew to the highlands, and the immediate threat to the province ended.

The political war went on. On 3 September the junta voted in favour of union with Colombia, but the decision was never carried out: Ximena hesitated and Roca was hostile to Bogotá. A week later Sucre, pursuing Aymerich, was caught and beaten at Huachi on 12 September — the same ground where the patriots had won ten months earlier — and withdrew to Guayaquil with a wound and a ruined army. The sources disagree on who commanded the royalists that day; the Venezuelan dictionary credits González, Ecuadorian accounts name Aymerich. Either way, the province's army had to be rebuilt from scratch, and in October reinforcements reached it from Colombia.

December brought a new danger from the south. Two Peruvian generals, Francisco Salazar and José de La Mar, arrived as an embassy and as a claimant to command; the junta, swinging towards Lima, made La Mar governor of the province and asked him to bring the towns that had declared for Colombia to order. Portoviejo had done exactly that on 16 December, followed by Jipijapa and Manabí, citing the fundamental law of Angostura. Sucre talked both sides down, sent an agent to Lima, and obtained a Peruvian division under Andrés de Santa Cruz — the force that would give him the numbers for the final campaign.

That campaign began at the end of January 1822 with a concentration at Saraguro, in the south, where the Peruvian division could join him. The royalists had some 3,000 men spread across Cuenca, Riobamba, Ambato and Quito; Sucre's Ejército Unido, Colombian and Peruvian together, came to about 2,500. He took Cuenca in February, Riobamba on 21 April, Latacunga on 2 May, and then worked around the flank of the royalist position by the slopes of Cotopaxi, forcing Aymerich back into Quito on 16 May.

The battle came on 24 May 1822, on the slopes of the Pichincha volcano above the city. Santa Cruz's advance guard seized the heights at eight in the morning; the royalists attacked uphill into a position they could not turn, and for four hours neither side could decide it. Sucre's battalions, short of ammunition, were ordered to charge with the bayonet, and Córdoba's Magdalena battalion broke the royalist line at about noon. More than a thousand royalists were taken, 160 of them officers, with fourteen guns and 1,700 rifles. Aymerich capitulated the next day, and Sucre entered Quito on the afternoon of 25 May, aged twenty-seven.

The battle settled the province's politics as well as the war. Quito's notables declared the province incorporated in Colombia, and Guayaquil's own assembly was already being pressed to do the same. Bolívar, who had been fighting his way through Pasto, promoted Sucre to general of division and made him intendant of the new department of Quito.

What was settled at Guayaquil in July 1822?

Bolívar reached Guayaquil on 11 July 1822, three weeks after Pichincha, with soldiers and with a decision already made: the province belonged to Colombia. He had said so in the fundamental law of Angostura in 1819 and in his instructions ever since; the port was the gateway to Peru, the last royalist stronghold, and he was not going to leave it in the hands of a junta that had spent two years flirting with Lima. He assumed supreme command, set aside Olmedo's government, and had the province's incorporation proclaimed by the end of the month. Olmedo, who had written to him in protest, left for Peru.

San Martín arrived in the roads on 25 July aboard the Macedonia and was rowed ashore on the 26th. The two men met that day and the next behind closed doors, without a secretary and without witnesses. San Martín wanted three things: Colombian troops for the campaign in Peru, a settlement of the boundary question in Mainas and Quijos that had been left vague by a royal decree of 1740, and a decision on the form of government for Peru, where he had come to believe a constitutional monarchy was the only workable option. Bolívar wanted the war in Peru finished, the continent's new states federated, and no kings.

What actually passed between them is known only from what each man wrote afterwards, and both wrote within days. Bolívar dictated a reserved account to his secretary José Gabriel Pérez on 29 July, sent a parallel account to Sucre the same day, and wrote to Santander as well. From those letters the agenda can be reconstructed: Guayaquil, the aid to Peru, the monarchical question, the limits, and the confederation. San Martín, for his part, told the Peruvians that he had embraced "the hero of the South" and that it had been one of the happiest days of his life, and that Colombia was sending three battalions.

The famous "Lafond letter", in which San Martín is supposed to have described a cold refusal of help, was published in Paris in 1844 by the French traveller Lafond de Lurcy, twenty-two years after the event, and is regarded as apocryphal by most historians who have worked on it — Vicente Lecuna devoted two volumes to demolishing it. Its durability says something about how badly people want the interview to have been a betrayal: a meeting that decided nothing in the room is less satisfying than one in which the continent was divided.

San Martín re-embarked at dawn on 28 July, resigned the protectorate in Lima within weeks, and sailed for Europe. Bolívar went on to Peru and to Ayacucho. The province that had hosted them became a department of Colombia, and the interview became the founding scene of a rivalry that neither man had time for.

Was 1822 a union or a coup?

Both readings exist and both have evidence. The Colombian case rests on law and consent: the fundamental law of Angostura had claimed the Presidency of Quito for Colombia in 1819, Portoviejo and other towns had declared for Colombia in December 1821, and an assembly of electors was convoked at Guayaquil for 28 July 1822 to ratify incorporation. On that reading Bolívar regularised a decision the province's own municipalities had already been making, town by town, for eight months.

The Guayaquil reading rests on the circumstances. Bolívar entered the city with a Colombian army, took supreme command, displaced a government that had been elected under the province's own constitution, and secured a ratification from an assembly convened under his guns. Ecuadorian historians of the coast have used plain words for it — a coup against the junta, an enforced annexation — and the fact that Olmedo and two of his colleagues left the country rather than accept it is not nothing.

The truth is probably that both are true at once, which is why the argument has lasted. The province was genuinely divided: Ximena hesitated, Roca was pro-Peruvian, the merchant houses wanted peace and open trade, and the towns of the north had already gone over. A ratification of some kind was likely. It was not likely to have happened in July 1822, under those conditions, with that army in the streets, if Bolívar had stayed in Quito.

What is not in doubt is the outcome. Guayaquil became the Departamento de Guayaquil, one of the three departments of the southern district of Colombia alongside Ecuador (Quito) and Azuay (Cuenca), with a governor appointed from Bogotá and a customs house that now collected for a government three weeks' ride away. The province that had financed the liberation of Quito discovered that it had also financed its own absorption.

What does the map's 1813 polygon actually show?

The map draws this entry in 1813, and the shape it draws is not the free province. Measured from the border data, the polygon runs from about 1°26′ north on the Pasto frontier down to 2°40′ south near Loja, and from the Pacific at 80°14′ west to the Andean foothills at 75°21′ west, enclosing roughly 140,000 square kilometres in a single outline. That is the old Audiencia — the Presidency — of Quito: the sierra with its cities, the coast with its port, and the Amazon slopes beyond. The Free Province of Guayaquil was a coastal strip perhaps a fifth of that area, and it never governed Quito, Cuenca or Pasto, which remained royalist until 1822.

The years are wrong in the same direction. The dataset carries this polygon only in the 1812–1813 window; in 1809, 1810 and 1811 the same ground is simply coloured as part of the Spanish Empire, and from 1814 it reverts. So the junta appears on the map in a year when nothing of the kind existed anywhere in the audiencia — the port was still royalist in 1813 — and disappears three months after it was proclaimed in 1820.

The most economical explanation is a border-data artefact. The 1812–1813 window fits the Estado de Quito, the sierra-based independence proclaimed in December 1811 and destroyed in late 1812, far better than it fits Guayaquil: a Quito-territory polygon was drawn for those years, and it has been attached to the nearest available entry in the glossary, which is this one. I can show that the shape and the window are inconsistent with the junta; I cannot show the dataset's working, and I would not want to imply that someone sat down and decided the junta ruled the Andes.

Read the polygon as the ground on which the story happened, not as the territory the junta governed, and read the date as the dataset's, not the entry's. The dates that matter are 9 October 1820, 24 May 1822 and 31 July 1822; the map offers 1813, which is seven years before the revolt and nine before the province's annexation.

What became of the free province?

Guayaquil's incorporation was not the end of its politics. In 1827 the department rose against Bolivarian centralism, with Olmedo and Rocafuerte among the organisers, and the revolt helped break the Colombian union from within. In the war that followed with Peru, Sucre — by then president of Bolivia — defeated a Peruvian invasion on the plain of Tarqui on 27 February 1829, and the peace signed at Guayaquil later that year settled nothing about the boundary, which is why Ecuador and Peru were still arguing about it in the twentieth century.

When Ecuador was founded in 1830 out of the three southern departments, Guayaquil was one of its two great cities and the counterweight to Quito: the port that exported the cacao, imported the goods, and paid most of the customs revenue, governed by a capital in the mountains that had once tried to rule it from a junta of its own. The rivalry was institutionalised in the new republic's politics and has never quite gone away.

The cacao economy boomed again after mid-century, this time on a world market, and collapsed in the 1920s with disease and competition from West Africa. The city that had built ships for the viceroy became the country's commercial capital, then its largest city, and finally — in the twentieth century — a place where the river, the plantations and the port were all still the point. The old centre burned again and again, as it had in 1692, 1707 and 1764, and was rebuilt each time in wood.

The memory of 1820 is kept carefully. Guayaquil celebrates 9 October as its independence day, with the names of the Granaderos' officers and the planters of the conspiracy recited in the newspapers each year, and Olmedo's statue stands where the junta met. It is a rare case of a national founding moment that belongs to a city which lost the argument: the province that declared independence first, paid for the war, hosted the interview, and was then absorbed by the state it had helped to create.

Common myths about the Guayaquil Junta

Timeline of the Guayaquil Junta

What the map shows next

At 1812 on the map the whole of the northern Andes is still one colour: the Spanish Empire, with Quito's own independence already extinguished. Nothing on the map suggests that within eight years a port on the coast would declare a free province and start hiring armies.

At 1813 on the map the entry appears — a large inland shape that takes in the sierra, the coast and the road between them, and that will vanish again the following year. Read it as the ground of the story rather than its subject, then follow the coast south: the Peruvian ports were already the base for San Martín's expedition, and the Colombian republic was assembling the army that would climb Pichincha. After 1822 this province is one department of that republic; see 1812 on the map again for the older order it replaced.