José Manuel Pando

Who was José Manuel Pando?

José Manuel Inocencio Pando Solares was President of Bolivia between October 1899 and August 1904. Born in Luribay, he studied medicine, joined the army during the War of the Pacific against Chile, and later dedicated himself to exploring his country's vast and thinly populated lowland forests. In the 1880s he joined the Liberal Party of Eliodoro Camacho, becoming its leader in 1894. Pando served as Congressional Representative from Chuquisaca during the administration of Severo Fernández and was the nucleus around which coalesced the increasingly more vocal and seditious efforts of the Liberal Party to topple the Conservatives from power.

Civil War finally erupted in 1899, under the guise of a regional dispute regarding whether Sucre should continue to be the capital of the country or the latter should be moved to La Paz. At this point, Pando's Liberals rallied around the movement to declare La Paz the capital and gathered considerable popular support behind the idea of turning hitherto unitary Bolivia into a federal republic.