Hilarión Daza

Hilarión Daza Groselle (January 14, 1840 – February 27, 1894) was President of Bolivia from 1876 to 1879.

Daza Groselle was born 1840 in Sucre, Chuquisaca to Marco Grossole Delgadillo and Juana Daza y Ponce de Léon. He was the first of two children having one sister, Josefa Alvarez-Daza, five years his junior. He was of an old creole family of Catalan, Basque, Corsican, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Native American background. He preferred to use his mother’s maiden surname as it was not Corsican like that of his father and was more accepted by peers. His father was of humble means, but with hard work and sacrifices was able to maintain the military studies of Hilarion, who since a young age showed great intelligence and ambitions and was able to successfully reach the top of Bolivian society.

A career military officer and native of Sucre, Daza came to power on May 4, 1876 in a coup against the constitutional president Tomás Frías. He was supported by much of the country's financial elite because of his avowal to maintain order and stability.

To a large extent, Daza Groselle entered the Palacio Quemado with a desire to create Bolivian control over the remote, sparsely-populated maritime province of Litoral. By the late 1870s, the latter was already settled mostly by Chileans, who found access to the region much easier than did the highland Bolivians. Predictably, a corollary of this growing physical and economic Chilean presence in the region was its irrendentist claim by Santiago, especially when rich deposits of guano were discovered near the Bolivian port of Mejillones.

To make matters worse, Daza was facing an ongoing recession and the effects of the most severe drought in Bolivian history up to that point. Daza hoped to gather the support of nationalist Bolivians to strengthen his internal position from insurrections, a massive demonstration by artisans in Sucre, and widespread opposition. For these reasons, he rescinded the treaty (quite favorable to Chile) that had been signed in 1874 by President Frías freeing from Bolivian taxation all Chilean citizens living and working in the now disputed Litoral region. Chile threatened war, and Daza immediately invoked an existing self-defense pact/alliance with Peru. Daza Groselle thought that for such a minor reason the Chilean government was not going to start a war against the allied Bolivia and Peru, but in February and March 1879 Chilean troops invaded and occupied the "Bolivian Litoral" around Antofagasta, sparking the War of the Pacific.

Following the Chilean occupation of the Peruvian port of Pisagua, the combined forces of Peru and Bolivia where supposed to surround Chilean forces in an ambitious pincer manoeuvre.However, the Bolivian army never took part in the subsequent battle of San Francisco because the Bolivian division "Camarones" -commanded by Narciso Campero- retreated before the combat began.At that point, Bolivian troops headed off for the heights of the Andes, ostensibly to defend the core of the country (the Altiplano) on terrain much better known by Bolivian fighting men, and better suited to them. If this was indeed the goal, it was never met, for the "Camarones" withdrawal only led to the outright annexation of the now-uncontested Litoral province by Chile, and to the abandonment of Peru to fight the rest of the war alone against an enemy that eventuallycame to occupy its capital of Lima. The "Camarones" debacle led to the unseating of Daza Groselle on December 28, 1879, when a Council of State was convened. The latter would name Narciso Campero Constitutional President on January 19, 1880. As for Daza, he remained briefly in Peru and then went into exile for 14 years mainly in France (but even for some months in Italy) with a portion of Bolivia's treasury.

A controversial figure to say the least, Daza was blamed for the Bolivian Army's defeat (since then Bolivia has lost access to the Pacific Ocean).

In 1894, the ex-president decided to return from exile in France and Italy to Bolivia and explain himself, confident that he would be absolved of any wrongdoing, whether illegal act or incompetency. Historian José Mesa, Teresa Gisbert, and Carlos Mesa Gisbert wrote that he was killed in order that he could not testify in the La Paz Parliament.

Indeed, he appeared to hint that Bolivian silver mining elites tied to Chilean capitalist interests had influenced his administration to produce the abandonment of Peru at Camarones (by the division of Narciso Campero) and thereafter. Most of these elites were associated with the Conservative Party of Bolivia, which had been in power since soon after Daza's ouster.

Daza Groselle was murdered in the train station of Uyuni soon after entering Bolivian soil on February 27, 1894; he was 54 years old. The people of Bolivia placed responsibility for this crime squarely on the government of Mariano Baptista, then President of Bolivia, but nothing was ever proven. In a twist of fate, his sister’s great granddaughter, the artist Carmen Alvarez-Daza Thomaier, was married to the diplomat and author, Mariano Baptista Gumucio, who was the great grandson of President Mariano Baptista.