Ecuador breaks off relations with Germany

On 7 December 1917 the government of Ecuador broke off diplomatic relations with the German Empire. In the evening the foreign minister, Carlos Manuel Tobar y Borgoño, informed the American minister in Quito, Charles Hartman, by note that Ecuador had withdrawn the exequaturs of the German consuls and recalled its consul from Berlin, and had handed his passports to the German representative in the country, Dr Wilhelm Müller, ordering him to leave the territory of the republic. Hartman passed the news on to Washington the next morning, which is why part of the press of the time, among others the New York Times Current History, gives 8 December as the date of the break. It happened on the day on which the United States declared war on Austria-Hungary.

Ecuador had declared its neutrality in August 1914 and for three years guarded it carefully. At the beginning of the war the British accused it of allowing German warships to take on supplies in the Galápagos islands and a radio station to be used in Guayaquil, and the government in Quito issued additional regulations on maintaining strict neutrality. As late as August 1917 President Alfredo Baquerizo Moreno assured Congress in his message that neutrality continued, although he stressed that “America will always find us at its side”, and he put Ecuador’s attitude on a par with that of Colombia, Chile, Peru and Venezuela. From 1914 Ecuadorian diplomacy had proposed that the American states jointly defend the neutrality of each of them, and it accepted Argentina’s invitation to a congress of neutral states. In September Tobar y Borgoño sent the chancelleries of the whole continent a note on the unity and solidarity of America. Secretary of State Robert Lansing replied in October that the best proof of this solidarity would be a joint stand on the side of the states fighting Germany.

In the autumn Ecuador’s neighbours began to choose that path. At the beginning of October Peru and Uruguay broke off relations with Germany, and at the end of the month Brazil recognised that it was in a state of war with it. Peru expelled the German minister in Lima, Dr Perl, and according to Baquerizo’s later message Ecuador refused to receive this diplomat, which already amounted to a suspension of normal relations. When the President of Argentina, Hipólito Yrigoyen, renewed the invitation to the congress in Buenos Aires, Peru proposed that Bolivia, Ecuador and Uruguay take part in it only on condition that the congress deal above all with breaking off relations with Germany. At the end of November Ecuador agreed to this plan, and on 5 December it replied to Argentina that it would attend if all the states of America first reached agreement. Two days later it broke with Berlin.

The government did not explain its immediate reasons in detail. In his message to Congress in August 1918 Baquerizo cited the refusal to receive Perl, the unspecified “attitude of Mr Müller” and the duty to show solidarity with those states of America that had made similar or even more far-reaching declarations. Ecuador had not lost a single ship and had no dispute with Germany like the Peruvian Lorton affair. Its decision was above all a political gesture towards the United States, one of the country’s main export markets, and towards the neighbours who had done so earlier.

Ecuador did not declare war and took no part in the fighting. On 17 December, however, it announced that warships of friendly states would be able to enter its waters without the restrictions applying to the warships of belligerents, and that the radio station at Salinas would receive and transmit their messages. After the war, as a state that had broken with Germany, Ecuador was invited to the Paris Peace Conference and signed the Treaty of Versailles, but did not ratify it, and joined the League of Nations only in 1934.