Francisco Robles

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.