Eusebio Iglesias (Napoleon's World)

Eusebio Pedro Carlos de Las Iglesias y Lopez (16 February 1838 - 8 March 1905), better known as Eusebio Iglesias, was the President and military dictator of Colombia from 1874 until his death in 1905, an era commonly known as the Iglesias Era.

Despite coming to power as the head of a popular revolution, Iglesias developed a reliance upon using the military for exercising his authority and by 1880 had usupred power from the Congress of Colombia and was an effective dictator. However, during his reign, Colombia modernized, expanded its industry dramatically, became the first Western nation to give its women equal legal and political rights, experimented with socialist models of economic planning, built up its military as a regional power, went to war against Mexico to protect its Central American allies, and brokered an agreement with the United States to build a shipping canal through its Panama province. Iglesias' death in 1905 left a severe power vacuum in Colombia, causing ten years of instability capped off by the 1915-17 Colombian Civil War that would establish the country as a democratic parliamentary republic.