Viteri y Ungo, Jorge (1802–1853)

Jorge Viteri y Ungo (b. 23 April 1802; d. 25 July 1853), bishop of El Salvador and Nicaragua. Born in San Salvador of Spanish parents and educated in Guatemala, Viteri was active in the politics of Central America following the collapse of the federation. A noted orator and a leading adviser to Rafael Carrera, who was close to the Guatemalan conservative elite, he became a member of the Guatemalan Council of State in 1840. In 1842 he visited the Vatican, where he secured establishment of a separate diocese of El Salvador, to which Pope Gregory XVI named him the first bishop. Viteri also arranged for appointment of Francisco de Paula García Peláez as archbishop of Guatemala.

Viteri was an active force in Salvadoran politics in alliance with General Francisco Malespín, but when Malespín ordered the execution of a priest, Pedro Crespín, in 1845, Viteri excommunicated Malespín. Opposition to Viteri's meddling in politics forced him out of El Salvador in 1846. He went to Nicaragua, where the Vatican formally named him bishop of Nicaragua and Costa Rica on 5 November 1849. He was active in the politics of Nicaragua until his death.

See alsoCarrera, José Rafael; García Peláez, Francisco de Paula.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. Aguilar, El … los documentos que comprueban la complicidad que el Sr. Obispo Viteri ha tenido en … [el trastorno del] orden de este estado el l de noviembre último (1846).

Ramón López Jiménez, Mitras salvadoreñas (1960), pp. 47-71.

Arturo Taracena, "Biografías sintéticas," in Revista de la Academia guatemalteca de estudios genealógicos, heráldicos e históricos 7 (1979): 552.

Santiago R. Vilanova Meléndez, "Doctor y maestro don Jorge Viteri y Ungo, primero obispo de la diócesis de San Salvador," in San Salvador y sus hombres (1967), pp. 109-122.

Ralph Lee Woodward, Jr., Rafael Carrera and the Emergence of the Republic of Guatemala, 1821–1871 (1993).

                                Ralph Lee Woodward Jr.