Jose Manuel Marroquin
Jose Manuel Marroquin was a novelist and grammarian who took the presidency in a coup, ended a civil war, and lost Panama. He was a man of letters before he was anything else - a founder of the Colombian Academy of Language, author of light verse and of novels still read in schools - and he was seventy-three when he became vice president on a ticket whose head could not physically govern from the capital. In July 1900 he took the government himself, detained the president, and held office for the next four years. The Thousand Days' War ended on his watch, in 1902, with treaties signed on a plantation and aboard an American battleship, after casualties that may have reached a hundred thousand. What followed was worse for the country than the war. The United States had been negotiating for the right to finish the canal the French had abandoned across the Colombian province of Panama; Marroquin's negotiator signed a treaty in Washington in 1903, and the Colombian senate rejected it unanimously, holding that the compensation was too small and the concession of sovereignty too large. Washington's response was to support a separatist junta in Panama. A rising was declared on 3 November 1903, an American cruiser prevented Colombian troops from landing to suppress it, the United States recognised the new republic within three days, and a canal treaty on better terms was signed a fortnight later by a Frenchman acting as Panama's envoy. Colombia lost its most valuable province and did not recognise the loss until 1921, when an American indemnity of twenty-five million dollars made it possible. Marroquin left office in 1904 and is remembered by two constituencies for entirely different reasons.
- Lived: 1827 CE – 1908 CE
- Nationality: Colombian
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
