Manuel Antonio Sanclemente
Manuel Antonio Sanclemente was eighty-three when he took office, governed from a village because the capital's altitude made him ill, and was deposed by his own vice president while a civil war was going on. He was a Conservative lawyer of the old school, elected in 1898 at an age that his opponents treated as the whole argument against him and his supporters as proof that the party machine could elect anyone. The climate of Bogota genuinely did not suit him, so he governed from Villeta and later Anapoima, several hours away by road, which left the capital to his vice president and the ministries to whoever was in them. The country he inherited was in the last stage of a quarrel that had produced eight civil wars in seventy years. The Conservatives had held power since 1886 under a centralising constitution the Liberals regarded as illegitimate, and elections were managed. Then the price of coffee, which was most of the export economy, collapsed in 1898. In October 1899 the Liberals rose, and the war that followed ran for a thousand days, killed perhaps a hundred thousand people out of four million, and ended with guerrilla bands operating across most of the country. Sanclemente's presidency did not survive the first year of it. In July 1900 his vice president, with the support of Conservatives who thought the war was being lost through incompetence, took power in the capital and had the old man detained at Villeta. He was held for two years and died there in 1902, still nominally president in the eyes of his own faction, while the war that had removed him ground on towards a peace signed aboard an American warship.
- Lived: 1814 CE – 1902 CE
- Nationality: Colombian
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
