Peter V. N. Henderson. Gabriel García Moreno and Conservative State Formation in the Andes. (LLILAS New Interpretations of Latin America Series.) Austin: University of Texas Press. 2008. Pp. xv, 310. $70.00

Peter V. N. Henderson's biography of Gabriel García Moreno, the dominant figure in the politics of Ecuador for the fifteen years before his assassination in 1875, is by no means the first—the author accounts for more than thirty—but it is the first full-length study to appear in English since 1914. Together with Mark J. Van Aken's King of the Night: Juan José Flores and Ecuador, 1824–1864 (1989), it affords a useful introduction to the particularly obscure and tortuous politics of this republic in its first half-century of independence.

García Moreno was an authoritarian and ultramontane modernizer who concluded that his country could only be set on the road to progress with the assistance of a reinvigorated church. He was an early supporter of the return of the Jesuits, and in office a wholesale importer of foreign religious orders. He...