So what to do to celebrate an eventually successful uprising against Spain 100 years before. Show the leaders, it wasn’t just a junta, it was a patriotic junta. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.
We are lucky that Ecuador was nice enough to put this fellows name on the stamp. The issue marked 100 years since the uprising by a group of military men in Guayaquil. 200 years on the internet seems to have no record of him except as a street name in Quito. The problem is there was a different patriotic junta in Quito 8 years before that had their backsides handed to them by Spanish Loyalists. Well that is kind of what happened to the Guayaquil people as well. What can you do when your country’s cupboard is bare?
Todays stamp is issue A86, a four Centavo stamp issued by Ecuador in 1920. It was a twenty stamp issue in various denominations with lots of later overprints and surcharges in the shithole country style. In a few weeks Trump will leave office and we will have to revert to not calling a shithole a shithole, so lets enjoy it while we still can. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 25 cents used.
In the Spanish colonial days the most important and richest city was Lima in Peru. As a result, the people there fought the hardest to stay Spanish. The further you got away from Lima you got the more poverty and the more luck revolutionary generals like Columbian Simon Bolivar and Argentine San Martin had.
That doesn’t mean that locals didn’t rise up in neighboring Ecuador and try to establish themselves as independence leaders. The patriotic junta of 1812 in Quito tried to send an army into Peru and was soundly defeated. In 1820, the patriotic junta in Guayaquil immediately appealed for help from General Simon Bolivar. Bolivar responded by sending a small army that was again defeated by Peruvian Spanish Loyalists.
What to do, Lima was becoming quite the thorn in the side of the revolutionaries. General San Martin sailed up from Argentina/Chile and laid siege to Lima. Ashore he was able to send a fresh force to turn the tide against the Loyalists in Ecuador. Now it was time to divide the spoils or is it spoiled.
In 1822 there was a conference in Guayaquil where Jose de San Martin and Simon Bolivar met. Afterward there was a formal ball, perhaps even the good Senor Vivero was allowed to attend. Bolivar toasted the two most important people in South America, General San Martin and um myself. San Martin took the hint and quickly left Peru and quite soon retired to France. He wasn’t one of the two most important men there and maybe that was for the best.
Well my drink is empty. I write these articles a few weeks ahead of when they publish and it just came to me that Biden will have assumed office when this publishes. Naturally I withdraw my dubious charge that Ecuador was a shithole. Any holes in the ground there are at least potential gold mines. Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.