José María Velasco Ibarra
José María Velasco Ibarra was president of Ecuador five times, in 1934-35, 1944-47, 1952-56, 1960-61 and 1968-72, and finished only one of the terms, the third. He was the orator who said give me a balcony in every town and I will be president, and was. The country's politics for forty years was the question of whether Velasco was in or out. He was overthrown by the army four times, in 1935, 1947, 1961 and 1972, and each time he came back from exile in Argentina to be elected again by the crowds of the coast and the highlands who did not agree on anything but him. He was a thin man in a black suit with a cane who spoke for hours from the balconies about the fatherland, the poor and the oligarchy. He governed, when he governed, by decree, by dismissing congresses and by building roads, schools and the ports, with the money of the banana boom of the 1950s in the term he finished and with none in the others. He was born in Quito in 1893, the son of an engineer and a schoolteacher, studied law at the Central University and at the Sorbonne, wrote for the Quito papers under the name Labriolle. He was elected to congress in 1932 and to the presidency in 1933 as a liberal who was also a conservative and whose party was himself, which the Velasquistas made a movement without a programme. The fourth term ended in November 1961 when his own vice-president Arosemena took the presidency with the air force. The fifth began in 1968 with a third of the vote. In June 1970, with the congress against him and the students in the streets, he dissolved the congress and the supreme court and declared himself dictator. He ruled by decree for two years with the army's consent until the army withdrew it in February 1972, four months before an election he had called, because the oil of the Oriente was about to flow and the generals did not intend to let Velasco or the populist Bucaram spend it. He went to Buenos Aires, where his Argentine wife Corina died in 1979, and came home to bury her. He died a month later in Quito, at eighty-six, with the crowds on the streets one last time. The political scientists made him the type case of Latin American populism. The country made him the name of the avenues.
- Lived: 1893 CE – 1979 CE
- Nationality: Ecuadorian
- Roles: president, politician
