Alfonso Quiñónez Molina (11 January 1874 – 22 May 1950) was a Salvadoran politician and physician who served as the 24th President of El Salvador from 1923 to 1927. He also served as the country's acting president on two separate occasions (1914–1915 and 1918–1919) and twice served as Vice President of El Salvador under his brothers-in-law Carlos and Jorge Meléndez. The presidencies of Quiñónez and the Meléndez brothers from 1913 to 1927 are collectively known as the Meléndez–Quiñónez dynasty.
Quiñónez studied medicine and surgery at the University of El Salvador. He practiced medicine and served as an administrator of several Salvadoran hospitals from the late 1890s to early 1900s. He entered politics in 1899, becoming an alderman on the municipal council of San Salvador (El Salvador's capital city). He served as both mayor of San Salvador and an alternate member of the Legislative Assembly of El Salvador in 1912. He was El Salvador's interior minister and war minister from 1913 to 1914. Quiñónez became provisional president of El Salvador in August 1914 while Carlos Meléndez (the incumbent president) ran in the 1915 presidential election; Carlos Meléndez won and appointed Quiñónez as vice president.
Quiñónez ran for president during the 1919 presidential election and established the Red League, a paramilitary organization, to attack and intimidate his political opponents. In December 1918, Quiñónez became provisional president after Carlos Meléndez resigned due to poor health; Quiñónez's assumption of the presidency made him ineligible to contest the presidential election. Quiñónez appointed Jorge Meléndez to run instead. He won and appointed Quiñónez as his vice president. Quiñónez ran for president again in 1923; he won with the Red League's help and assumed office on 1 March.
Quiñónez was succeeded as president in 1927 by Vice President Pío Romero Bosque, another brother-in-law. Through Romero, Quiñónez intended to rule El Salvador from behind the scenes, but Romero instead broke with the Meléndez–Quiñónez dynasty. Quiñónez left El Salvador for exile in France due to student protests against him and the Legislative Assembly reviewing the constitutionality of his appointment as the first presidential designate. Quiñónez backed a coup d'état against Romero in December 1927 which was unsuccessful. Quiñónez returned to El Salvador in 1936 and he died in San Salvador in 1950.
Alfonso Quiñónez Molina was born on 11 January 1874 in Suchitoto, El Salvador. His parents were Lucio Quiñónez and Aurelia Molina de Quiñónez. Quiñónez studied medicine at the Liceo San Luis in Nueva San Salvador from which he graduated as a Bachelor of Arts and Science. He then studied at the University of El Salvador and completed his Doctorate of Medicine in surgery in 1898. Quiñónez practiced medicine at the General Hospital of San Salvador beginning in 1897, and the following year, he was became a member of the board of the country's insane asylum. He also served as the chair of the hygiene and therapeutics and a counselor of the medical faculty at the University of El Salvador. In 1904, Quiñónez became the director of the Insane Asylum. At some point, he became the head of the first surgery clinic at Hospital Rosales.
In 1905, Quiñónez married Leonor Meléndez. The couple had one daughter, Mercedes. Carlos and Jorge Meléndez were two of Quiñónez's brothers-in-law through his marriage to Leonor. In 1906, Quiñónez served as the acting physician for El Salvador's Red Cross society. Beginning in 1908, Quiñónez petitioned the government of Divisional General Fernando Figueroa, the president of El Salvador, to allocate funds to upgrade the Insane Asylum's buildings. In Figueroa's last presidential act in 1911, he approved a law allocating one cent from the revenue of each manufactured brandy bottle to fund these buildings. Quiñónez oversaw the construction of three new Insane Asylum buildings on 60 manzanas of land in San Salvador.
Quiñónez represented El Salvador at the Pan-American Medical Congress in Guatemala City, Guatemala, in 1908 and at the Fourth International Sanitary Conference in San José, Costa Rica in 1909. In 1910, Quiñónez attended the Diplomatic Conference in The Hague, Netherlands; the Tropic Agriculturists Congress in Brussels, Belgium; the 3rd International Conference of Hygiene in Paris, France; and the International Congress on Tuberculosis in Barcelona, Spain.
Quiñónez was a pragmatic liberal. In 1899, Quiñónez was elected as a regidor (alderman) of the San Salvador municipal council for a one-year term. He was again elected to the municipal council in 1904 for another one-year term. In 1912, Quiñónez was elected as an alternate deputy of the Legislative Assembly of El Salvador from the San Salvador Department; the legislative term began on 5 February and ended sometime later that year. Quiñónez was also the mayor of San Salvador in 1912. At some point between 1911 and 1913, President Manuel Enrique Araujo appointed Quiñónez as Minister of Government. As minister, Quiñónez established the School of Graphic Arts, the Home for Orphans, and the Tuberculosis Hospital.
On 9 February 1913, Araujo died to wounds sustained during an assassination attempt a few days prior. As Vice President Onofre Durán had resigned before Araujo's death, Carlos Meléndez (the president of the Legislative Assembly) became president of El Salvador as he was the first presidential designate. On 4 March 1914, the Legislative Assembly named Quiñónez as the first presidential designate. In 1913, Carlos Meléndez appointed Quiñónez as Minister of War, the Navy, and Finance.
Presidencies and vice presidencies
First presidency and vice presidency
On 29 August 1914, Carlos Meléndez resigned from the presidency to be eligible to run in the 1915 presidential election as the constitution prohibited anyone serving as president six months prior to an election from participating in an election. As Quiñónez was the first presidential designate, he succeeded Carlos Meléndez as provisional president. Quiñónez and Carlos Meléndez's sharing of power helped start the Meléndez–Quiñónez dynasty, a political dynasty that ruled El Salvador throughout much of the 1910s and 1920s.
Quiñónez appointed a cabinet consisting of Francisco Martínez Suárez as Minister of Exterior Relations, Public Instruction, and Justice; Cecilio Bustamante as Minister of Government, Promotion, and Agriculture; Samuel Luna as Minister of Finance, Public Credit, and Benefits; and Pío Romero Bosque (another brother-in-law) as Minister of War and the Navy. During Quiñónez's first provisional presidency, he established the Military Hospital and the National School of Finance and Commerce. Carlos Meléndez won the 1915 presidential election as a member of the Club Melendista pseudo-political party and appointed Quiñónez to serve as vice president.
Quiñónez handed the presidency to Carlos Meléndez on 1 March 1915, at which point he became vice president. In May 1915, Quiñónez represented El Salvador at the 1915 Pan-American Financial Conference in Washington, D.C., in the United States along with finance minister José Esperanza Suay. Quiñónez also attended the Panama–Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco.
Ahead of the 1919 presidential election, Carlos Meléndez went against precedent and did not select his successor. According to the memoirs of Enrique Córdova, then Minister of War and the Navy, Carlos Meléndez was unable to select a candidate between Quiñónez (a family member) and Tomás García Palomo (his government and finance minister and a close friend). In 1918, Quiñónez established the National Democratic Party (PND) to support his presidential campaign. He also established the Red League, a paramilitary organization that terrorized Palomo's campaign. Their supporters clashed during the December 1918 municipal elections as both candidates wanted to monopolize polling stations ahead of the presidential election the following month. The clashes killed around 100 people and injured more than 200. Quiñónez's allies won the municipal elections, effectively guaranteeing his victory in the presidential election.