The War of the Pacific (Spanish: Guerra del Pacífico), also known by multiple other names, was a war between Chile and a Bolivian–Peruvian alliance from 1879 to 1884. Fought over Chilean claims on coastal Bolivian territory in the Atacama Desert, the war ended with victory for Chile, which gained a significant amount of resource-rich territory from Peru and Bolivia. The war demonstrated Chile's military-technological superiority over its opponents at the time.
The direct cause of the war was a nitrate taxation dispute between Bolivia and Chile, with Peru being drawn in due to its secret alliance with Bolivia. Some historians have pointed to deeper origins of the war, such as the interest of Chile and Peru in the nitrate business, a long-standing rivalry between Chile and Peru for regional hegemony, as well as the political and economical disparities between the stability of Chile and the volatility of Peru and Bolivia. In February 1878, Bolivia increased taxes on the Chilean mining company Compañía de Salitres y Ferrocarril de Antofagasta (CSFA), in violation of the Boundary Treaty of 1874 which established the border between both countries and prohibited tax increases for mining. Chile protested the violation of the treaty and requested international arbitration, but the Bolivian government, presided by Hilarión Daza, considered this an internal issue subject to the jurisdiction of the Bolivian courts. Chile insisted that the breach of the treaty would mean that the territorial borders denoted in it were no longer settled. Despite this, Daza rescinded the license of the Chilean company, seized its assets and put it up for auction. On the day of the auction, 14 February 1879, Chile's armed forces occupied without resistance the Bolivian port city of Antofagasta, which was mostly inhabited by Chilean miners. War was declared between Bolivia and Chile on 1 March 1879, and between Chile and Peru on 5 April 1879.
Battles were fought on the Pacific Ocean, in the Atacama Desert, the Peruvian deserts, and the mountainous interior of Peru. For the first five months, the war played out in a naval campaign, as Chile struggled to establish a marine resupply corridor for its forces in the world's driest desert. Afterwards, Chile's land campaign overcame the Bolivian and Peruvian armies. Bolivia withdrew after the Battle of Tacna, on 26 May 1880, leaving allied Peru fighting alone for most of the war. Chilean forces occupied Peru's capital Lima in January 1881. Remnants and irregulars of the Peruvian army waged a guerrilla war but could not prevent war-weary Peruvian factions from reaching a peace deal with Chile involving territorial cessions.
Chile and Peru signed the Treaty of Ancón on 20 October 1883. Bolivia signed a truce with Chile in 1884. Chile acquired the Peruvian territory of Tarapacá, the disputed Bolivian department of Litoral (turning Bolivia into a landlocked country), and temporary control over the Peruvian provinces of Tacna and Arica. In 1904, Chile and Bolivia signed the Treaty of Peace and Friendship, which established definite boundaries. The 1929 Tacna–Arica compromise gave Arica to Chile and Tacna to Peru.
Etymology
The conflict is also known as the "Saltpeter War", the "Ten Cents War" (in reference to the controversial ten-centavo tax imposed by the Bolivian government), the "Nitrate War", and the "Second Pacific War". It is not to be confused with the pre-Columbian Saltpeter War, in what is now Mexico, nor the "Guano War" as the Chincha Islands War is sometimes named. The war largely settled (or set up, depending on one's point of view) the "Tacna-Arica dispute" or "Tacna-Arica controversy", and is sometimes known by that name as well, although the details took decades to resolve.
Wanu (Spanish: guano) is a Quechua word for fertilizer. Potassium nitrate (ordinary saltpeter) and sodium nitrate (Chile saltpeter) are nitrogen-containing compounds collectively referred to as salpeter, saltpetre, salitre, caliche, or nitrate. They are used as fertilizer, but have other important uses. Saltpeter is used to make gunpowder.
Atacama is a Chilean region south of the Atacama Desert, which mostly coincides with the disputed Antofagasta province, known in Bolivia as Litoral.
Background
When most of South America gained independence from Spain and Portugal in the 19th century the demarcation of frontiers was uncertain, particularly in remote, thinly populated portions of the newly independent nations. Bolivia and Chile's Atacama border dispute, in the coastal territories between approximately the 23° and 24° South parallels, was just one of several longstanding border conflicts that arose in South America.
Cobija, Paposo, Mejillones and the territory of Antofagasta appears on a 1793 map of Andrés Baleato and the 1799 map of the Spanish Navy as inside the jurisdiction of Chile, pointing out the Loa River as an internal limit of the Spanish Empire between Chile and Peru, leaving Charcas without sea access.
The dry climate of the Peruvian and Bolivian coasts had permitted the accumulation and preservation of vast amounts of high-quality guano deposits and sodium nitrate. In the 1840s, Europeans knew the value of guano and nitrate as fertilizer and the role of saltpeter in explosives. The Atacama Desert became economically important. Bolivia, Chile, and Peru were in the area of the largest reserves of a resource demanded by the world. During the Chincha Islands War (1864–1866), Spain, under Queen Isabella II, attempted to exploit an incident involving Spanish citizens in Peru to re-establish its influence over the guano-rich Chincha Islands.
Starting from the Chilean silver rush in the 1830s, the Atacama was prospected and populated by Chileans. Chilean and foreign enterprises in the region eventually extended their control to the Peruvian saltpeter works. In the Peruvian region of Tarapacá, Peruvians were a minority, behind both Chileans and Bolivians.
Boundary Treaty of 1866
Bolivia and Chile negotiated the "Boundary Treaty of 1866," or the "Treaty of Mutual Benefits," which established 24° S "from the littoral of the Pacific to the eastern limits of Chile" as the mutual boundary. Both countries also agreed to share the tax revenue from mineral exports from the territory between 23° and 25° S. The bipartite tax collecting caused discontent, and the treaty lasted for only eight years.
Secret Treaty of Alliance of 1873
In February 1873, Peru and Bolivia signed a secret treaty of alliance against Chile. The last clause kept it secret as long as both parties considered its publication unnecessary, until it was revealed in 1879. Argentina, long involved in a dispute with Chile over the Strait of Magellan and Patagonia, was secretly invited to join the pact, and in September 1873, the Argentine Chamber of Deputies approved the treaty and 6,000,000 Argentine peso for war preparations. Eventually, Argentina and Bolivia did not agree on the territories of Tarija and Chaco, and Argentina also feared an alliance of Chile with Brazil. The Argentine Senate postponed and then rejected the approval, but in 1875 and 1877, after border disputes with Chile flared up anew, Argentina sought to join the treaty. At the onset of the war, in a renewed attempt, Peru offered Argentina the Chilean territories from 24° to 27° S if Argentina adhered to the pact and fought in the war.
Historians including G. Bulnes, Basadre, and Yrigoyen agree that the real intention of the treaty was to compel Chile to modify its borders according to the geopolitical interests of Argentina, Peru, and Bolivia, as Chile was militarily weak before the arrival of the Chilean ironclads Almirante Cochrane and Blanco Encalada.
Chile was not informed about the pact until it learned of it, at first cursorily by a leak in the Argentine Congress in September 1873, when the Argentine Senate discussed the invitation to join the Peru-Bolivia alliance. The Peruvian mediator Antonio de Lavalle stated in his memoirs that he did not learn of it until March 1879, and Hilarion Daza was not informed of the pact until December 1878.
The Peruvian historian Basadre states that one of Peru's reasons for signing the treaty was to impede a Chilean-Bolivian alliance against Peru that would have given to Bolivia the region of Arica (almost all Bolivian commerce went through Peruvian ports of Arica before the war) and transferred Antofagasta to Chile. The Chilean offers to Bolivia to change allegiance were made several times even during the war and also from the Bolivian side at least six times.
On 26 December 1874, the recently built ironclad Cochrane arrived in Valparaíso and remained in Chile until the completion of the Blanco Encalada. That threw the balance of power in the South Pacific toward Chile.
Historians disagree on how to interpret the treaty. Some Peruvian and Bolivian historians assess it as rightful, defensive, circumstantial, and known by Chile from the very onset. Conversely, some Chilean historians assess the treaty as aggressive against Chile, causing the war, designed to take control by Peru of the Bolivian nitrate and hidden from Chile. The reasons for its secrecy, its invitation to Argentina to join the pact, and Peru's refusal to remain neutral are still discussed.
Boundary Treaty of 1874
In 1874, Chile and Bolivia replaced the 1866 boundary treaty by keeping the boundary at 24° S but granting Bolivia the authority to collect all tax revenue between 23° and 24° S. To compensate for the relinquishment of its rights, Chile received a 25-year guarantee against tax increases on Chilean commercial interests and their exports.
Article 4 explicitly forbade tax increases on Chilean enterprises for 25 years:
The duties of exportation that may be levied on minerals exploited in the zone referred to in the preceding articles shall not exceed those now in force, and Chilean citizens, industry, and capital shall not be subjected to any other contributions what ever except those now existing. The stipulations in this article shall last for twenty-five years.
All disputes arising under the treaty would be settled by arbitration.
Causes of war
The historian William F. Sater gives several possible and compatible reasons for the war. He considers the causes to be domestic, economic, and geopolitical. Several authors agree with them, but others only partially support his arguments.
Some historians argue that Chile was devastated by the economic crisis of the 1870s and was looking for a replacement for its silver, copper and wheat exports. It has been argued that the economic situation and the view of new wealth in nitrate were the true reasons for the Chilean elite to go to war against Peru and Bolivia. The holder of the Chilean nitrate companies, according to Sater, "bulldozed" Chilean President Aníbal Pinto into declaring war to protect the owner of the Compañía de Salitres y Ferrocarril de Antofagasta (CSFA) and then to seize Bolivia's and Peru's salitreras (saltpeter works). Several members of the Chilean government were shareholders of CSFA, and they are believed to have hired the services of one of the country's newspapers to push their case.
Another US American historian, David Healy, rejects that thesis, and Fredrick B. Pike calls the allegation "absurd." The economic development that accompanied and followed the war was so remarkable that Marxist writers feel justified in alleging that Chile's great military adventure was instigated by self-seeking capitalists to bring their country out of the business stagnation that had begun in 1878 since the war provided Chile with the economic means to come of age. Sater states that that interpretation overlooks certain important facts. The Chilean investors in Bolivia correctly feared that Daza, the Bolivian dictator, would use the war as an excuse to expropriate their investments. Among them were Melchor de Concha y Toro, the politically powerful president of Chile's Camara de Diputados, Jerónimo Urmeneta, and Lorenzo Claro, a Chilean founder of the Banco de Bolivia and a prominent member of the National Party. A Santiago newspaper claimed that Melchor de Concha y Toro offered President Pinto 2,000,000 Chilean pesos to end the dispute and to return to the 1874 border. "In other words," writes W. Sater, "there were as many powerful interests opposed to helping the Compañía de Salitres as there were those seeking to aid the corporation." Also, B. Farcau objects to the argument: "On the other hand, the sorry state of the Chilean armed forces at the outbreak of the war, as will be discussed in the following chapter, hardly supports a theory of conscious, premeditated aggression."
Sater cites other sources that state that the true causes of the conflict were not economic but geopolitical, a struggle for control of the southeastern portion of the Pacific Ocean. In 1836 the Peruvian government tried to monopolize commerce in the South Pacific by rewarding ships that sailed directly to Callao, to the detriment of Valparaíso. Peru tried to impede the agreement that had been reached between Spain and Chile to free its new warships built and embargoed in Britain during the Chincha Islands War. Sater cites Germany's minister in Chile, who argued that the war with Peru and Bolivia would "have erupted sooner or later, [and] on any pretext." He considered that Bolivia and Peru had developed a "bitter envy" against Chile and its material progress and good government. Frederik B. Pike states: "The fundamental cause for the eruption of hostilities was the mounting power and prestige and the economic and political stability of Chile, on one hand, and the weakness and the political and economic deterioration of Bolivia, on the other.... The war—and its outcome—was as inevitable as the 1846—1848 conflict between the United States and Mexico. In both instances, a relatively well-governed, energetic, and economically expanding nation had been irresistibly tempted by neighboring territories that were underdeveloped, malgoverned, and sparsely occupied."
Another reason, according to Sater, was Peru's desire to monopolize and appropriate the nitrate works to strengthen its nitrate monopoly, which required the Bolivian and Chilean salitreras to be controlled by Peru. As unenviable as Chile’s situation was in the 1870s, that of Peru was much worse. The 1870s was for Peru's economy "a decade of crisis and change". Nitrate extraction rose while guano exports, the source of substantial revenue for Peru, declined from 575,000 tons in 1869 to less than 350,000 tons in 1873, and the Chincha Islands and other guano islands were depleted or nearly so.