Pedro José Domingo de Guerra

Born into a family with roots in the Spanish colonial nobility, he won enviable distinction as a statesman, jurist and diplomat. In the late 1830s, he served as Bolivia's consul in Paris and minister plenipotentiary to the Court of St. James's. There, he met and, in 1840, married the scion of an aristocratic Anglo-Irish family, Lady Maria Rynd. She was the stepdaughter of Admiral Thomas Brown, the niece of physician Francis Rynd and a maternal relative of Lord Palmerston.[1]

An oil painting of President Guerra, circa 1850

As minister plenipotentiary in Lima, he was charged in the 1840s with a project that was far too ambitious for its time, a first attempt to lay the groundwork for a treaty that would integrate the Empire of Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador and the Republic of New Granada into an "American Union", exclusive of the United States of America.[2]

He served first as justice, and then chief justice, of the Supreme Court. He presided over the government in time of national emergency, during the trying period of the War of the Pacific between Chile and an allied Bolivia and Peru, after General Hilarión Daza's 1879 withdrawal from the presidency to take the helm of the army.[1] He died in office in 1879, aged 69.