The breakup of Gran Colombia in 1830, Simón Bolívar's short-lived dream, dissected the northern highlands of South America into three republics (Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela). Across Colombia's southern border, Ecuadorian elites, heirs to the old audiencia of Quito, set out to construct a distinctly different nation-building project – one more deeply grounded in the country's colonial past and responsive to its peculiar set of regional power balances and dynamics that set Ecuador apart from its northern neighbor. Ecuador had emerged from the independence wars with a fairly cohesive aristocratic ruling class – badly damaged by the chaos of the wars and regionally fragmented but still largely in tact. Ecuador's conservative Creole elites were extremely skeptical about Colombian schemes of free trade, slave and tribute abolition, secular education, and even republicanism itself. Indeed, monarchism continued to hold a powerful grip on the political imaginings of many an Ecuadorian politician well into the nineteenth century.

Although Creoles never took the drastic step of inviting Napoleon III to send one of his nephews to rule its unruly lands (as did Mexican Conservatives in the 1860s), they eventually found a strong, authoritarian leader in President Gabriel García Moreno, who quickly enlisted the Catholic hierarchy in his “civilizing mission.” The capital of Quito remained the site of conservative rule, a city famous for its cacophony of church bells and plethora of black-robed curates.