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 Peruvian viceroyalty, Bolivia was the site of Mount Potosi, from which flowed a huge portion of the silver sloshing around the Spanish Empire. After liberation, the Bolivian elite were more than satisfied to do nothing except harvest the wealth generated by the treasure that flowed out of the ground and to fight — almost continuously — over their share of it.
The result was that Bolivia had long been plagued by a seemingly endless series of dictators pretending to be presidents. The long-suffering native populace, huddled in their ancient villages on the high Andean plain, the Altiplano, survived the holocaust that befell their North American counterparts; the devout Spanish Crown had actually felt responsible to provide some measure of protection to the masses of potential new Catholic converts while the continent was stripped of its mineral wealth. The natives were rewarded with survival but at the price of being trapped as second-tier residents in a third-tier nation, subsisting in a slavelike state of economic misery for centuries.
Mariano Malgarejo took over in 1864 and proved to be an outstanding example of the type of bad dictators cycling through the presidential office of Bolivia. Malgarejo earned his stupid stripes by handing over a chunk of valuable Bolivian guanoland to Chile. Malgarejo’s giveaway hastened his end by the inevitable coup in 1872 at the hands of a dictator named Morales, who tried to undo some of Malgarejo’s mistakes. His well-meaning attempts were frustrated when his own nephew gunned him down, but not before he completed a secret treaty in 1873 with Peru under which each side pledged to support its brother country if invaded by the annoyingly well-organized Chileans.
In 1876 Hilarion Daza seized power from Morales in a coup of his own. Daza was a dumb and fiery soldier who quickly distinguished himself by raiding the treasury to pay his fellow officers of the palace guard, who had supported him loyally, and continued to do so until the next coup.
That same year, Mariano Ignacio Prado became president of Peru, succeeding Manuel Pardo, at a time when all Peruvian presidents apparently were required to share the same letters in their last names. Each successive president unsuccessfully attempted to bail the country out of the economic mess left by his decouped predecessor.
Chile was, by contrast, a paragon of political normalcy, but by the 1870s its economy had started to slip and the country became more volatile.
Borders drawn by the former Spanish Empire were somewhat elastic. Not much thought or effort had been put into defining the actual lines separating the Spanish viceroyalties, especially in desert wastelands like the Atacama and Tarapacá. The mining of the guano proved to be so lucrative that Chile’s mining operations kept creeping farther north, to the irritation of the Bolivians. Amid this simmering squabble in 1877, a tsunami devastated the coast and wiped out Antofagasta, the main guano mining port. To rebuild it the Bolivians wanted a tax, which the Chileans duly noted was illegal under their just-inked treaty. But Bolivian President Daza, finding the treasury he had recently raided short of funds, boldly slapped a tax on every shipment of exported birdshit.
The Chileans refused to pay and, to emphasize their point, dispatched their newly purchased ironclads into the area. In response Daza canceled the Chilean mining contracts and ordered all of the Chilean mining equipment impounded and sold at auction. The Chileans showed up on the day of the auction — not with a check but with their military, and snagged a chunk of Bolivia’s coast along with the port of Antofagasta for good measure. The war was on. Chile asked Peru to abrogate its treaty with Bolivia. But Peru could not break out of its dictatorial death spiral with Bolivia and spurned the Chilean offer.
On April 5, 1879, Chile declared war on Bolivia and Peru.
WHAT HAPPENED: OPERATION “THUNDERPOOP”
The guano regions were some of the driest and harshest areas on earth. Because no one lived there permanently, the region possessed virtually no roads, and those that did exist ran from the mines straight to the coast. Without any north– south routes, whoever controlled the sea-lanes would have the ability to move troops at will and could easily win the war.
Even though Chile had about half the combined population of Peru and Bolivia, its military was stronger. Its regular army had 3,000 men armed with sixteen new artillery pieces, some machine guns, and repeating rifles. It also had an 18,000-man national guard outfitted with U.S. Civil War–era muskets. The navy boasted precisely two ironclads, the Cochrane and Blanco Encalada, that possessed the firepower and strength to dominate the Peruvian Navy. The soldiers were poorly paid, however, and the army lacked a medical corps. In addition, the top officers of both the army and navy were political appointees lacking significant military experience. Still, by the standards of South America, Chile stood as a major power.
Chile’s President Pinto faced an even bigger problem, however. His top generals also happened to be the leaders of the opposing political party; a resounding victory in the field could catapult any one of them into his office. A defeat, however, would fall on Pinto’s head, also turning him from office. It was a classic no-win situation. Pinto cleverly solved the problem by appointing Rafael Sotomayor as the war “coordinator” to oversee the potentially victorious service chiefs, stealing their glory or handing them the blame.
Reflecting their economies, the armies of Peru and Bolivia stank. Peru’s standing army of 5,000 men was haphazardly equipped with a hodgepodge of guns. As befitting a dictatorship more concerned with infighting than defending its borders, the regiments were stationed close to the main cities, to lend a hand during any coup action.
Peru’s navy sported two English-made ironclads. While solid ships, they paled in comparison to the two Chilean ships. Even more problematic for the Peruvians, their ships had been manned mostly by Chileans. When the war started these sailors got kicked out, leaving the ships thinly staffed by the poorly trained Peruvians.
Bolivia’s state-of-war preparedness stank even worse. Despite having a coastline at this point in their history, it had no navy. Their army was just one step better, with slightly more than 2,000 men, principally skilled in overthrowing yesterday’s dictators as opposed to facing well-armed soldiers in the field. The best troops were probably the “Colorados” regiment of the palace guard (from which President Daza had ascended), numbering 600 seasoned coupmakers armed with modern repeating rifles. The army was also so top heavy it was a miracle it didn’t topple over. Of the 2,000 troops more than 600 were officers, almost all of whom had been promoted for political loyalty. Establishing a pattern of ridiculous missteps, at the war’s outset Bolivia promised its Peruvian allies it would field an army of 12,000 soldiers, a figure even casual observers knew was impossible. Still, in Bolivia’s capital, La Paz, war fever ran as high as the Andes. Four thousand or so volunteers, some from Bolivia’s best families, raised lavishly funded new regiments, wearing white trousers and jackets of various colors signifying their dandily organized regiment. The paucity of weapons didn’t dampen their enthusiasm for what everyone predicted to be a short and victorious war, filled with glory. The feeling seemed to be a cocktail-party war for the La Paz jet set.