Humberto Ruiz (Napoleon's World)

Humberto Miguel Ruiz (January 5, 1877 - June 4, 1952) was a Colombian labor activist, political reformer and second longest-serving President after Eusebio Iglesias, in office from 1930-1946, and was the longest-interred President to come to power by democratic means, winning four consecutive elections on the Social Party ballot.

While a self-described Marxist in his youth jailed by the Iglesias government for publishing a socialist newspaper and a left-wing guerilla commander during the Colombian Civil War, Ruiz became more moderate after joining the national government in the early 1920's and being a part of the Congress that executed the Colombian participation in the Pacific War. He ran as the left-wing Social Party's Presidential candidate in 1930 on a platform of rebuilding the national infrastructure and economy in the aftermath of the destructive conflict and won in a landslide. He survived three assassination attempts in his Presidency as well as two threatened military coups, yet became a pivotal moderating force in various continental disagreements, especially in the early 1940's. He had a famously icy relationship with United States President Herbert Hoover, whom he once referred to as the "slave-master of Latin America," and he stoically refused to denationalize many Colombian industries or give the United States exclusive rights to the Panama Canal.

Ruiz is credited with bringing together educated urban professionals, labor activists, poor farmers and minority groups into a powerful political coalition that governed for twenty unbroken years known as the "Ruiz coalition." He is often cited as one of Colombia's greatest Presidents by historians and politicians across the political spectrum, and one of the major thoroughfares through Bogota is named Calle Humberto Ruiz in his honor, as is the Plaza de Humberto Ruiz in Caracas.