Stupid Wars : A Citizen's Guide to Botched Putsches, Failed Coups, Inane Invasions, and Ridiculous R

In 1875 she even had the impudence to return to Paraguay and pursue claims for her stolen land. The president had her kicked out the next day at gunpoint. Back in France the boys flourished while Madame Lynch slowly spent her money on lawyers and champagne. She died, alone and forgotten, on July 27, 1886, and was buried in Paris.

The war, the deadliest in South American history, cost Paraguay almost 60 percent of its population. And more as­tonishingly, the country had only about 28,000 males at the war’s end, most of whom were children and old men. No modern society had ever suffered so much from a war in per­centage of population affected. For years thereafter the coun­try was known as the Land of Women.

For their efforts, and about 100,000 Brazilian and 25,000 Argentine dead, the allies claimed about one quarter of Para­guayan territory that turned out to be essentially worthless. Argentina and Paraguay haggled for years over exactly which territory it should take. Finally, in 1878, President Ruther­ford B. Hayes, chosen as the arbitrator of the dispute, ruled in favor of Paraguay. Out of gratitude the land of López named a town in the president’s honor. This minor victory did not prevent Paraguay from being reduced to a state of chaos that endured for decades. For the sixty-six years fol­lowing the war’s end the country had thirty-two presidents, two assassinations, six coups, and eight failed revolutions.

Not surprisingly, Solano López and Madame Lynch became two of the most despised people in Paraguayan his­tory. But then their fortunes turned. Needing a hero at the outset of the Chaco War in the 1930s, the Paraguayan dicta­tor at the time, yes, the country breeds dictators, resurrected López as a national hero. Almost instantly, his portrait ap­peared everywhere, and books extolling his virtues were turned out by the tens of thousands. His body was exhumed from the shallow, riverside grave and placed in the country’s Pantheon of Heroes where he rests today.

Needing a companion for their national hero, the country next resurrected Madame Lynch and transformed her from a greedy, thieving whore into the Mother Earth martyr of the country. In 1961 her transformation became complete when the ruling dictator, Alfredo Stroessner, had her body ex­humed from its Parisian grave and clandestinely shipped to Asunción and installed in her own museum. Finally, in 1970 she was placed in an elaborate mausoleum in Asunción, where the population is free to ignore her to this day.

FIVE. THE WAR OF THE PACIFIC: 1879

This is a story about birdshit.

Up until the early nineteenth century, birdshit, also known in the trade as guano, was virtually worthless. Birds pooped, end of story. But as the industrial revolution gained steam, the smelly substance was discovered to contain valu­able nitrates that could be used in fertilizer and explosives. On the western coast of South America, in what is now Peru and Chile, the mountains of guano that lined the coast sud­denly became the object of a very nasty tug of war among three countries that resulted in many, many deaths.

Peru, Bolivia, and Chile, newly freed from their colonial master, Spain, which had conquered the continent at the end of the sixteenth century, were struggling to find their places in the world as independent nations. Each country, led by the European elites inherited from the Spanish overlordship, ruthlessly continued the economic rape of their countries’ resources for the benefit of their own tiny ruling class.

Due to the political naïveté of the ruling classes, many mistakes were made. First of all, they had no idea how to run a country. The Spanish had created a greedy empire based solely on their lust for gold and silver. These three countries were left in such an infantile state of development that not only was the war started over birdshit, but the Peru­vians, who were dragged into the affair through a secret treaty with their neighbor Bolivia, who had started the war against Chile without asking the Peruvians if they wanted to join, kept fighting long after they had lost the war but didn’t even know it.

THE PLAYERS

President Hilarion Daza — the averagely brutal bolivian dictator took control in a coup in 1876 at the age of thirty-six and broke a treaty by taxing the bird poop exports of neighboring Chile.

Skinny — Raised mainly on the streets, he quickly scaled the ranks of the Bolivian military.

Props — Robbed the treasury to pay off the soldiers who supported him during his coup.

Pros — Never missed a coup.

Cons — Decided to skip the war he had inadvertently started.

Rafael Sotomayor — chilean “coordinator” of the war for President Anibal Pinto Garmendia, he was appointed to oversee the military heads and political rivals of Pinto.

Skinny — Perhaps the first military spinmaster, he handed out voluminous press releases extolling Pinto’s military prowess and disowning his role for any defeats.

Props — Repeatedly pissed off the military commanders without getting himself shot or his boss couped.

Pros — Realized that an army needs a constant flow of food and water, something the generals often overlooked.

Cons — Micromanaged the war to the point where he was countermanding orders of individual military units.

THE GENERAL SITUATION

On the western coast of Chile, Peru (and formerly Bolivia), where the bone-dry Atacama and Tarapacá deserts run up against the sea, the cool Humboldt current sweeps up from the South Pacific. The water is filled with plankton that at­tracts great schools of fish, which in turn become tasty meals for legions of birds.

The birds feed from the sea and hang out on land, where they defecate prodigiously, mountainously. In this driest part of the planet, decades pass with no rainfall. Lacking water to wash the guano away, towering cliffs of birdshit grow to hundreds of feet all along the coast.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, after the dissolu­tion of the Spanish Empire in South America, it was discov­ered that bird guano contained nitrogen, a key ingredient for fertilizer and explosives. Along the desert coastline, devoid of roads and visitors, the towering bird guano cliffs, the accu­mulated droppings of millennia, suddenly became incredibly valuable. They were the gifts of the birds that laid the golden poop.

At first, Chile, Bolivia, and Peru cooperated to mine the guano, with the more economically adroit Chile making most of the investment and sharing the profits with Peru and Bolivia. Treaties established the boundaries between the na­tions and the tax rates to be paid on the smelly export.

The Bolivian and Peruvian ruling classes of Spanish de­scent were happy to sit back and reap the rewards of yet an­other God-given resource like gold, silver, and tin, with most of the nasty work done by foreigners. The guano soon became a major revenue source for Peru, but with British and French companies reaping most of the profits, the locals were unable to create their own mining companies. Even though the bird poop business was booming, Peru was soon going broke because wealthy Peruvians invested their profits outside the country and neglected the rest of their own nation. Nothing was reinvested in Peru. Corruption and debt began to rise.

Bolivia suffered from the same shortsighted complex. Known as Upper Peru in the days of the Spanish