Andean Tragedy: Fighting the War of the Pacific, 1879-1884

1. The Prewar Maneuvers

1. The Prewar Maneuvers F at Tuesday in 1879 fell on 25 February, less than a month before the end of the Bolivian summer. The next morning , La Paz’s newly penitent revelers exchanged their carnival masks for the cross of ashes, thus marking the onset of Lent. As these faithful trudged to church they learned some disquieting news: on 14 February, the Chilean ironclads Almirante Cochrane and Almirante Blanco Encalada, plus the corvette O’Higgins, had put ashore two hundred troops. The Chilean contingent commanded by Col. Emilio Sotomayor quickly occupied Antofagasta, the principal city and port of Bolivia’s littoral. Within hours of landing, the Blanco Encalada and the O’Higgins took up positions off Bolivia’s ports of Cobija, Tocopilla , and Mejillones. By the end of the month, two thousand Chilean soldiers, some of them militiamen from newly mobilized guard units, garrisoned Antofagasta, Cobija, and Tocopilla. It quickly became clear to Colonel Sotomayor that if he wished to defend Antofagasta against a possible Bolivian counterattack, he had to occupy some of the towns located in the interior. Thus, some six hundred regular troops marched 125 miles east from Antofagasta, through one of the world’s most desolate deserts, to Calama, a key road junction that controlled the overland approaches to the coastal cities, reaching the city by 23 March. Sotomayor, who did not scout the Bolivian position prior to the battle, divided his men into three groups, sending the first two to capture the city. Logically, the approximately 135 Bolivians , almost all poorly armed civilians, should have made some token show of resistance and then either surrendered or fled. 28 the prewar maneuvers Instead, they ambushed the Chilean cavalry unit that led the assault, killing seven and wounding six. Properly chastised, Sotomayor’s men redoubled their efforts. One Bolivian, Eduardo Abaroa, however, proved obstinate. When called upon to surrender, he supposedly replied, “Me surrender? Shit, let your grandmother surrender.” Taking Abaroa at his coarsely expressed word, the Chileans killed him. Abaroa’s act won him a place in Bolivia’s pantheon of war heroes; in another sense, his heroic martyrdom became emblematic of Bolivia’s plight: men dying in a war that should not have occurred. By the time the mourners buried Abaroa, Bolivia had become a landlocked nation.1 La Paz did not supinely accept the loss of its seacoast: some eight to ten thousand of its residents massed in one of the capital’s main plazas demanding weapons so they could expel the Chilean filibusters who had seized their coast. In truth, these enthusiastic but utterly unprepared volunteers could do nothing. Even President Hilarión Daza had to limit himself to symbolic gestures: two weeks after the Chilean occupation of Antofagasta, he declared that Chile had imposed “a state of war” on Bolivia . Apparently this decree did not constitute a formal declaration of belligerence, which he announced on 18 March. Only on 5 April did Santiago reciprocate, plunging South America’s west coast into what became known as the War of the Pacific, a conflict that lasted until 1884.2 The Chilean seizure of its seacoast should not have surprised Bolivia. For days one of Santiago’s man-of-war, the Blanco Encalada, had hovered off Antofagasta. Chile’s President Aníbal Pinto had sent the ship north to demonstrate his concern about one of Bolivia’s recent acts. On 14 February 1878, President Daza had increased, by ten cents per quintal, the taxes levied on the export of nitrates. In truth, the surcharge on the tax was inconsequential. Nor, given Bolivia’s history of threatening the “property, the liberty, and life itself of foreigners,” was this arbitrary levy utterly unexpected.3 But its imposition upset the Compañía de Salitres y Ferrocarril, a Chilean-owned corporation extracting salitre from the Bolivian littoral. The company reacted predictably: citing the 1874 treaty, which explicitly prohibited the Bolivian government from taxing Chilean companies exploiting the Atacama Desert, the miners demanded that Daza rescind the impost. And to give its complaints more gravitas, the mining company also appealed to San- the prewar maneuvers 29 tiago to support its claims. Since the shareholders of the Compañía de Salitres y Ferrocarril constituted some of Chile’s most powerful political and economic elites, President Pinto could ill afford to ignore their plight; he too joined the chorus of naysayers. For the Chilean president the dispute became...