Ed Strosser - Stupid Wars - A Citizen's Guide to Botched Putsches, Failed Coups, Inane Invasions, and Ridiculous Revolutions

The loss of all the guanolands rocked both losing coun­tries. Even before the loss President Prado had sniffed defeat in the air. He turned over command of the Peruvian army to Vice Admiral Lizardo Montero and fled to Lima, to “orga­nize” the war effort. There, however, riots over the abysmal state of the war trapped him in the presidential palace. On December 18 he figured out how to fix the problems: fire his cabinet, take a chunk of government gold, kiss his family good-bye, and hotfoot it over to Europe to “buy more arms.” In a letter to Daza, Prado said he was fleeing for the good of the country, personal reputation be damned. He was right — his reputation took a beating.

Now chaos erupted in Peru. Not only was a foreign army camped on its soil, not only had the country suffered a cata­strophic defeat, not only had it lost its sole valuable resource, not only was its army commanded by an admiral, but the country now had no leader. Vice President de la Puerta as­sumed command, but at the age of eighty-four he was in no condition to lead the war. On December 21, into the leader­ship breach jumped Nicolas Pierola, a former pirate and ever-lurking power grabber. He wrangled the support of some troops and led them against soldiers loyal to de la Puerta, but the aging VP had no stomach for a fight, and the cream of Lima society convinced him it was best for Pierola to take over. Pierola quickly established a much more effi­cient constitution that handed himself all the power and eliminated potential ambiguities such as the legislature. He also tacked on the unfortunate title of “protector of the in­digenous race.” To bolster his hold on the country, Pierola created his own army. While he redirected new arms to his favored army, he slowly strangled the regular army under Admiral Montero, his archrival.

Sill locked in the death spiral with its ally, Bolivia dabbled in its own version of political twister. Unearthing a plot by Daza to pull his troops completely out of the fight, the Boliv­ian army leaders on December 26 appealed to Admiral Montero for help in removing Daza. But the Peruvian did not want to start a mini civil war within the Bolivian army camp based in Peru, so he gracefully declined to lend his troops. He did, however, agree to a sneaky plot. On December 27, Daza boarded a train to meet Montero. A few hours later Daza’s chief of staff and coup leader or­dered Daza’s Colorado troops to stack their arms in their barracks and head to a river for a relaxing bath. While they splashed in the river, troops loyal to the coup locked up the barracks and took control of army headquarters.

Word reached Daza that he had been double-couped out of his posts of army and government leader. Panicking, he asked Montero to put down the coup. Montero, having lived through his second coup in a week, was now an expert in sidestepping such upsets and declined to get involved. Daza rushed madly about: he jumped on horseback, fled to the coast, and started the well-worn trek to exile in Europe.

As the two former dictators slunk off to their European futures, the leaders in Bolivia appointed General Narcisco Campero as provisional president. Trained at France’s mili­tary academy at St. Cyr, Campero’s new title came with the dubious prize of leading the feeble Bolivian war effort.

To compound its avalanche of problems, the Peruvian economy was officially in shambles. The country had lost its guanolands and virtually all exports were halted by the Chilean blockade. The one bright spot was that it still out­classed Bolivia’s economy. Chile had control of the seas, conquered all the guanolands, and signed deals to sell vast quantities of bird poop to them, parlaying the money into fresh arms.

As 1879 closed, the allies had suffered naval, military, political, and economic defeat. But true to their undying spirit of incompetence, they didn’t know enough to call it quits.

Chile wanted to end the war but couldn’t, at least not until they had a treaty that officially awarded them the conquered guanolands. While the war had achieved more than they could have imagined, Chilean pride was hurt by the defeat at Tarapacá. They didn’t want to end the war on a down note. Sotomayor reorganized the army, pumped up the number of troops, and prepared to attack again.

On February 26, 1880, the Chileans landed at a town called Ilo, one hundred miles north of the Peruvian town of Arica, and sent the defenders fleeing into the desert. The road to Lima lay wide open for a strike to end the war, but the Chilean president Pinto got cute. He wanted to defeat the allied army based in the southern Peruvian city of Tacna, take possession of that region, and exchange it with the Bo­livians for agreeing to quit the war. The Chileans struggled with the difficult terrain, searing heat, and lack of water along their long march to Tacna. As they assembled their army outside Tacna, Sotomayor suddenly died of a stroke.

The allied army of 9,000, under the direct command of the new Bolivian dictator, Campero, defended Tacna on a mesa north of the town, holding a strong defensive position. The Chileans scouted them and withdrew to prepare their of­fensive. The allies, however, mistook this as a sign of Chilean weakness and mounted a surprise predawn attack. But once again, the troops got lost in the dark and struggled back to their positions just in time to absorb the surging Chilean attack at dawn on May 26. They beat off the Chileans suc­cessfully until a Peruvian officer decided that a temporary lull by the Chileans to rearm was a retreat, and repositioned his unit on the exposed slopes. A quick Chilean counterat­tack cut them down, and this blunder snowballed into yet another devastating defeat.

Two thousand Chileans had been killed and wounded, one quarter of their forces, but their allied opposition had been crushed. Campero led one thousand Bolivians on the long march home, through blistering desert and icy mountains, where he learned he had been formally elected president of his beleaguered and defeated nation. Meanwhile, his hardmarching men died in droves along the way and had to endure the further humiliation of being disarmed at their own border to prevent them from rioting when told the gov­ernment would not pay them for losing the war. The Bolivi­ans had ignominiously quit the war they had started, and now they let the Peruvians carry the fight for them. Admiral Montero trudged home to Lima with his victory-challenged fighters, now smothered in defeat. The Bolivians were done, never to be heard from again.

The Chileans now focused on the Peruvian town of Arica, the port that connected La Paz to the Pacific by train. The defenders installed large guns to defend the town from a naval invasion; they dug in on the land side to counter the inevitable attack from the Chileans marching down from Tacna. The Peruvian defenders planted newfangled land mines all around the town, which had the unintended effect of imprisoning the Peruvian troops who feared patrolling near the minefields. When the Chileans captured the proud designer of the defenses, he was uninhibited by any sense of loyalty and happily revealed the exact locations of the mines. A daylong bombardment by the Chilean fleet signaled the start of the attack. Two days later, after the Peruvians refused to surrender, the Chileans easily sidestepped the mines and stormed the trenches from the land. The Peruvians were deci­mated, and their inevitable surrender arrived even before the morning dew had burned off.

Now Chile stood tall. It had conquered the entire Bolivian coastline along with Peru’s nitrate region. They had indeed cornered the market on bird poop.

The logical move for Bolivia and Peru was to finally give up. Logic, however, was not an abundant natural resource in these two countries. While Bolivia watched with waning in­terest from its distant mountain perch, the Peruvians slogged it out with the enemy mano a mano. The Chileans were desperate to get this whole thing over and return to their beloved guano mining. Their navy block­aded Peru’s coastline to squeeze the remaining life from Peru’s economy. After failing to buy some new warships in Europe to turn the tide of war, Peruvian president Pierola fi­nally agreed to a peace conference. The Chileans demanded they keep the conquered nitrate territories and required the allies to pay them for the privilege of getting smashed. In return they would cede a chunk of Peru’s coast to Bolivia as a consolation prize. In essence, Peru would be agreeing to lose money, territory, and prestige. Perhaps still believing they were as important and powerful as in the days when Peru held the seat of the Spanish Empire in the new world, they rejected the deal. Their losing effort would continue.