Oriba, Manuel

1792 –1857) was the 2nd Constitutional president of Uruguay. At the beginning of the revolution of independence he took part as volunteer alongside Artigas’s resistance against the Luso-Brazilian invasion in 1816. In late 1817, with Montevideo already fallen into the hands of the Brazilians and the military situation going out of hand, Oribe moved to Buenos Aires after having words with Artigas, who insisted on his favorite, Fructuoso Rivera, to be military commander in the south of Río Negro. Following the defeat of Artigas, with the Banda Oriental occupied and transformed into “Cisplatina Province”, two groups came into being separated by the acceptance or rejection of that military presence: a pro Potuguese group that included Montevideo-Fructuoso Rivera and the exiles in Buenos Aires, where Oribe was located, a proponent of reintegration into the United Provinces of Río de la Plata. Those groups would eventually become the Colorado and White party. Oribe, served as President of Uruguay between 1835 and 1838. When Fructuoso Rivera forced him to resign in 1838, he started a rebel army and began a long civil war, which lasted until 1851. Oribe besieged the capital Montevideo for eioght long years. He was defeated in 1851.