Narciso Campero

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General Narciso Campero Leyes (1815-1896) was president of Bolivia from 1880 to 1884. The Narciso Campero Province was named after him.

A career military officer of unimpeacheable credentials, Campero took control of his country's fate at the invitation of an emergency Congress, in the difficult aftermath of the loss of the War of the Pacific against Chile (1879-1880 for Bolivia, 1879-1883 for Peru). He was given a four-year term, and his presidency marks the beginning of the long, civilian-controlled oligarchic period of Bolivian politics. This was an era in which the military for the most part remained firmly ensconced in its barracks and conservative propertied elites ran Bolivian politics, with an almost complete exclusion of the large native majorities.

The respected Campero had the support of the two largest political parties of the time, the Liberals of Eliodoro Camacho and the Conservatives of Aniceto Arce. A proponent of rearmament and reinsertion into the war against Chile with an eye to recovering the lost territories, Campero was opposed in this endeavor by his vice-president, the Conservative Arce. Arce was linked to Chilean monetary and financial interests and favored an "accommodation" with Santiago, essentially advocating the giving up of the Litoral in exchange for investment and perhaps a promise to obtain a port through previously Peruvian but now Chilean-occupied at Arica. Campero soon accused Arce of treason and exiled him precisely to Chile.

Although as president Campero tried to rule in an apolitical manner, he gravitated increasingly toward the Liberal party of Eliodoro Camacho, joining it after he left office in 1884. Campero died in Sucre on December 11, 1896, and is best remembered as the founder of the most stable era of Bolivian politics, with regular elections and rare and brief coups. The status quo he helped create would last until the 1930s, although within the framework of a plutocratic and severely restricted version of democracy, in which only white or mestizo propertied elites could vote.