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.
The Chileans, running dangerously low on victory medals, now planned a march on Lima, the Peruvian capital. Forty-two thousand Chileans landed on the coast and marched toward the Peruvian duct-taped defenses outside the city. The defenders scraped the bottom of the barrel and formed ten reserve divisions of troops grouped by their civilian jobs. Thus the retail merchants, decorators, hairdressers, economists, teachers, and others with normally peaceful jobs all had their own divisions and their share of the city’s defense. Even some of the Altiplano natives with blowgun darts and poison arrows pitched in. When you are defending your capital with hairdressers and guys with blowguns, one must begin to realize that hope has fled the field.
The Chileans punched through the Peruvian hairdressers, shrugged off the flesh wounds from the dart guns, and capped their victory with a spree of looting and killing stragglers. Pierola ordered his soldiers to turn in their weapons and go home. Lima was now wide open. As the Chileans moved in to loot on January 16, 1881, Pierola took his government into the hills, becoming the second Peruvian leader to flee in the war. He bugged out so quickly he didn’t even have time to cart along the state papers or raid the treasury for some traveling money. A South American dictator actually fleeing and leaving money behind? Yes, indeed. The Peruvian elite, despite complete incompetence from the beginning of this disastrous war, were determined not to give up their ill-gotten lordship over their remnants of the Spanish Empire.
The Chileans occupied Lima and installed a lawyer by the name of Francisco García Calderón as Peru’s new president, expecting that he would repay the kindness by surrendering. The Chileans allowed Calderón to raise a small army mainly to protect himself from some of his angrier citizens. The Chileans found out, however, that he was not the pliable puppet he appeared to be. Infected with the illogic of the office, Calderón found a way out of signing a total surrender when the U.S. diplomats insisted that Chile could not keep any conquered territory unless the losers refused to pay war reparations.
Meanwhile, Pierola continued his resistance from the hills and was joined in April 1881 by the recently wounded General Andrés Cáceres, one of his ablest generals. The duo planned to maintain a low-level guerrilla war, hoping the Chileans would tire and offer a face-saving peace. To fight his new war Cáceres gathered sixteen of his finest comrades.
Beyond desperation, the Chileans sent a division into the mountains to chase the rebels. As they plodded high in the Andes, the wily Cáceres, whose forces now numbered about one hundred, easily sidestepped his would-be captors. They never got within smelling distance. The occupation-hating Peruvians flocked to Cáceres and swelled his mountain army by the thousands.
Frustrated by Calderón’s refusal to sign the peace treaty, the conquerors tossed him into jail. Easy come, easy go. The imprisonment transformed Calderón into a Peruvian martyr. On his way to the big house he named Admiral Montero the new president. Peru now boasted two illegitimate leaders. Cáceres, a wily backstabber, abandoned Pierola and threw his support to Montero. The now-dangling Pierola headed out on the well-worn path of exile to Europe.
Despite the march of Chilean victories, the war still refused to end. Cáceres took on the Chileans and even bested them on a few occasions. The occupation was beginning to tear Chile apart. Politicians in Chile raged at each other to handle the occupation. Some favored staying the course until a single, stable dictatorship was established in Peru. Others wanted to pull out and just hold on to the guanolands.
Into this swirling stew of chaos emerged another Peruvian wannabe, General Miguel Iglesias, a former army commander who then called for peace under any terms. Chile had found their man. That December he was elected
