ABSTRACT
In those countries where the triumph of liberalism came later (i.e. in the 1890s), the developmentalist authoritarianism that came into place mirrored that of those countries where the conservatives had been defeated in the 1860s to 1870s. In Nicaragua, the reformism of Jose Santos Zelaya (1893-1909) was typical of the period. In Ecuador, following the 1895 revolution, under the rule of Alfaro and his successor, General Leonidas Plaza (1901-06), the Church was assaulted at all levels. Its properties were confiscated; the press was freed from ecclesiastical censorship; education was secularised; ecclesiastical taxation was abolished; civil marriage became obligatory; divorce was legalised; laws were passed against political preaching from the pulpit; and Roman Catholicism ceased to be the religion of the State. By the time the 1906 Constitution was drafted, the Church was not mentioned in it once.
