Treaty of Defensive Alliance (Bolivia–Peru)

Background

At the beginning of the 1870s the relations between Bolivia and Chile were strained because of the, for both sides, unsatisfactory Border Treaty of 1866. Furthermore, in August 1872 Quintin Quevedo, a Bolivian diplomat, follower of 1871 toppled president Mariano Melgarejo, started an expedition from Valparaiso against the Bolivian Government, allegedly with the connivance of the Chilean authority. Peru, at that time having naval supremacy in the South Pacific, sent the Huáscar and Chalaco warships to the Bolivian coast and told the Chilean Government that Peru would not accept foreign intervention in Bolivia.

History

In early November 1872 the Bolivian Assembly authorized the government to negotiate and ratify a Peruvian alliance. A few days later, the Peruvian Foreign Affairs Minister José de la Riva Agüero disclosed in the Council of Minister the will of the Bolivian Government and three months later, on 6 February 1873, a Secret Treaty of Alliance between Peru and Bolivia was signed in Lima. Four days after the signing of the treaty the Peruvian Chamber of Deputies asked the executive in a secret session to purchase naval armaments.

Besides the geopolitical Peruvian interest to control the South Pacific Coast, there was also an economic interest. On 18 January 1873 there was promulgated in Peru a Monopoly Law over Nitrate Export, to become effective in 2 months. But the difficulties in the way of establishing the monopoly would prove insurmountable and the project was shelved. Miller and Greenhill state in The Peruvian Government and the Nitrate Trade, 1873-1879: This development was doubly significant. it was the first Peruvian attempt to run public policy through a privately owned institution. It also clearly suggested that the estanco, now successfully delayed, was still a future possibility In fact, in 1875 Peru's government expropriated the salitreras of Tarapaca in order to secure revenue from guano and nitrate by means of a Peruvian Saltpeter Monopoly. But the nitrate from Peru had to compete with nitrate from Bolivia produced by Chilean capitalists.

On February 6, 1873, a few days after the signing of the "Estanco", the first attempt to build a Peruvian Saltpeter Monopoly, the Peruvian senate approved the secret treaty; the parliamentary proceedings have disappeared since then. Peruvian historian Jorge Basadre asserts that the two projects were unrelated to each other, but Hugo Pereira Plascencia has contributed several items of evidences to the contrary: in 1873 the Italian author Pietro Perolari–Malmignati cited the Peruvian interest in defending its saltpeter monopoly against the Chilean production in Bolivia as the main cause of the secret treaty, and also said that the Peruvian Foreign Minister, José de la Riva-Agüero, informed the Chilean Minister in Lima, Joaquín Godoy, about negotiations with Bolivia to expand the estanco in Bolivia.

In order to strengthen the alliance against Chile, Peru sought to bring Argentina, involved in a territorial dispute with Chile over Patagonia, the Strait of Magellan, and Tierra del Fuego, into the alliance, and sent Manuel Irigoyen Larrea (not to be confused with the Argentine Minister Bernardo de Irigoyen) to Buenos Aires. Bolivia didn't have a Minister in Argentina, hence she was also represented by M. Irigoyen. On 24 September 1873 the Argentine Chamber of Deputies approved the signing of the treaty and additional military funds for $6,000,000. The Argentine Government, under President Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and Carlos Tejedor as Foreign Affairs Minister, still required the approval of the Argentine Senate.

But the three countries had different aims at stake: Argentina and Peru were much concerned about the possible hostile reaction of Brazil and feared a Brazil-Chile axis. Bolivia and Argentina didn't reach an agreement in the Chaco und Tarija territorial disputes. Hence, Argentina asked to dismiss the 1866 Bolivia-Chile Treaty as casus foederis and offered to Peru an Argentina-Peru alliance against Chile (to protect Peru against a Chile-Bolivia Pact).

On 28 September 1873 the matter was discussed in the Argentine Senate and the decision postponed until 1 May 1874 and apparently also approved it requiring that it should be completed by the addition of certain declarations. These changes were resisted by Bolivian Foreign Affairs Minister Baptista.

Brazil ordered its Ministers in Peru and Argentina to investigate a rumored Peru-Argentina-Bolivia alliance regarding any implications such an alliance might have for Brazil and its strained relations to Argentina. Peru discreetly assured Brazil that the treaty did not affect its interest and delivered a copy of the treaty to the Brazilian Minister. Moreover, in order to quiet Brazil, Peruvian President Manuel Pardo asked Argentina and Bolivia to introduce a new clause into the Protocol, complementary to the Treaty, making it clear that the Secret Treaty was not aimed at Brazil but at Chile:

In this state of the affairs two things happened which completely modified the situation: on 6 August 1874 Bolivia and Chile signed a new Boundary Treaty and on December 26, 1874, the recently built ironclad Cochrane arrived in Valparaíso. It threw the balance of South Pacific power towards Chile. From that moment Peru realized the potentiality of the Patagonian conflict in which she did not wish to become involved and aware of Argentina's opposition to involvement in the West Coast politics (except for Chile), Peru instructed her Minister in Argentina to cease all efforts to get Argentina to join her secret pact. These events and the replacing of D. Sarmiento by Nicolas Avellaneda as President of Argentina put an end, for the moment, to the project of the Bolivia-Peru-Argentina alliance against Chile.

In 1875 and 1877, when the Argentina-Chile territorial dispute flared up anew, it was Argentina that sought to join the pact, but Peru refused diplomatically. In October 1875 the Peruvian Foreign Minister wrote to his Minister in Buenos Aires regarding the Argentine proposals:

After the official disclosure of the pact and prior to the Chilean declaration of war, during the Peruvian mediation, Chile asked Peru to declare itself neutral. Peru attempted to stall while it mobilized, neither accepting nor rejecting Chilean demands. However, when Chile declared war on Peru, the Peruvian government subsequently declared the casus foederis for its alliance with Bolivia.

At the beginning of the War of the Pacific, in 1879, the Peruvian Government instructed its Minister in Buenos Aires Aníbal Víctor de la Torre to offer the Chilean territories between the 24°S and 27°S to Argentina if Argentina entered the war. Later, the offer was made again by the Peruvian Foreign Affairs Minister Manuel Irigoyen in Buenos Aires, who met President Avellaneda and Foreign Minister Montes de Oca. But it was refused by Argentina, because of lack of a powerful navy, as they said.

During the USS Lackawanna Peace Conference in October 1880, Chile asked, among others, to abrogate the secret pact. The conference failed.

On 23 July 1881 Chile and Argentina signed the Boundary Treaty of 1881 between Chile and Argentina and put an end to Peruvian hopes that Argentina would enter the war.

Interpretation of the Treaty

While historians agree about most of the hard facts of the history of the pact, that is not the case of the content and interpretation of the treaty. Both sides agree that the treaty was oriented against Chile but differ in how much Chile knew about the existence, content, and validity of the Treaty.

The Peruvian historian Jorge Basadre asserts that it was a defensive alliance signed to protect the salitreras of Tarapaca, neighbor of the Bolivian salitreras in Antofagasta. The alliance, states Basadre, was a step further to creating a Lima-La Paz-Buenos Aires axis in order to guarantee the peace and stability of the American frontiers, also to prevent a Chilean-Bolivian Pact, that would cede Antofagasta and Tarapaca to Chile and Arica and Moquegua to Bolivia. He thinks that it could have been thought to impede the use of Bolivian territories by Nicolás de Piérola to conspire against the Government of Peru. Basadre denies any economic interests over the Bolivian salitreras, at least in 1873. He argues that the 1873 Nitrate Monopoly Law was an initiative of the legislative and not of the executive and he pleads that in 1875 as Peru began to buy licenses over Bolivian salitreras, Peru had dismissed to bring Argentina into the axis. On the other hand, Hugo Pereira Plascencia has contributed several items of evidences to the contrary: in 1873 the Italian author Pietro Perolari–Malmignati cited the Peruvian interest in defending its saltpeter monopoly against the Chilean production in Bolivia as the main cause of the secret treaty, and also said that the Peruvian Foreign Minister, José de la Riva-Agüero informed the Chilean Minister in Lima, Joaquín Godoy, about negotiations with Bolivia to expand the estanco in Bolivia.

Some Peruvian historians consider the treaty legitimate, harmless and a mistake because it gave Chile a pretext for the war, and that the Peruvian bargaining in Buenos Aires were just a defensive provision.

On the other hand, Chilean historian Gonzalo Bulnes analyzes the content and the historical context of the treaty and deduces that, Peru and Chile having no common borders, the only territorial conflict that could have arisen was one between Bolivia and Chile and therefore Peru could remain neutral without failing in her Treaty obligations in opposition to Bolivia which was tied to Peru through the (art. VIII) restriction of the right celebrating Treaties affecting Boundaries, "or other territorial arrangements", without previous knowledge of the ally. He points out that the Bolivia-Chile dispute about the territories between 23°S and 24°S wouldn't change Peru's neighborhood, for in any case an intermediate Bolivian zone would remain between her frontiers and those of Chile, including the ports of Tocopilla and Cobija.

Rather than analyze semantically the text of the treaty Bulnes' argument rests mainly upon private and diplomatic correspondence, and politician speeches before, during and after war. Many of the information is gathered from the "Godoy papers", documents of the Peruvian Foreign Affairs Ministry, that fell into Chilean hands during the Occupation of Lima

Bulnes sees the pact as part of Peruvian move that would oblige Chile in 1873 to submit to arbitration what ever suited them (Peru, Argentina and Bolivia), and when that had been effected it would leave them with the domination of the Pacific and with the territory in dispute occupied by Bolivia:

Since Chile, according to Peru, had this aspiration [to seize Bolivian Antofagasta], it was convenient for Bolivia to take advantage of Chile's lack of maritime forces and of the fact that Peru was in condition to impede the mobilization of troops in defense of the disputed territory. Moreover, she would have to move quickly because Chile was having two ironclads constructed in England.

Such was the idea, The means of carrying it out the following.

Bolivia was to declare that she would not respect the treaty of 1866, then in force, and should occupy the territory over which she claimed to have rights, that is to say, the salitre zone. Chile naturally would not accept the outrage and would declare war. It was necessary that the initiative of the break should come from Chile. After requesting England to embargo the Chilean ships in construction in the name of neutrality, Peru and Argentina would come into action with their fleets. I mention Argentina because the cooperation of that country formed part of Pardo's plan. ... The advantage to each of them was clear enough. Bolivia would expand three degrees on the coast; Argentina would take possession of all our eastern territories to whatever point she liked; Peru would make Bolivia pay her with the salitre region.

Among others, Bulnes cited, a letter from the Peruvian Foreign Affairs Minister Riva Agüero to his Minister in Bolivia La Torre:

So, then, what Bolivia, ought to do is to waste no more time in time-killing discussions that conduce to nothing ... [and should] by adopting some other measure conducive to the same end: always however so arranging matters that it is not Bolivia that breaks off relations but Chile that is obliged to do so. Relations once broken off and a state of war once declared, Chile could not obtain possession of her ironclads, and lacking force with which advantageously to attack, would find herself in the necessity of accepting the mediation of Peru, which could in case of necessity be converted into an armed mediation – if the forces of that republic sought to occupy Mejillones and Caracoles ...

Peruvian historian Alejandro Reyes Flores in "Relaciones Internaconales en el Pacífico Sur" wrote:

Gonzalo Bulnes, states:

Peruvian historian Jorge Basadre wrote (Cap. 1, pág. 8):

Basadre explained the targets and means of the alliance:

Basadre had reproduced in Cap. 1, pág. 6 the editorial published in the eve of the secret treaty's approbation in Peruvian senate:

Pedro Yrigoyen, Peruvian embassador in Spain and son of the Peruvian Foreign Minister at the beginning of the War on Chile, explains the reasons of the treaty

Edgardo Mercado Jarrín, former Peruvian Foreign minister under Juan Velasco Alvarado describes the plan to follow:

Secrecy

It is still a matter of dispute in the Chilean historiography, to what extent the Chilean government or some Chilean politicians were informed about the treaty. Sergio Villalobos asserts that the treaty wasn't properly known in Chile until 1879. But Chilean historian Mario Barros in his Historia diplomática de Chile, 1541-1938 states that the treaty was known from the very beginning.

Consequences

One of the first consequences of the treaty was to bring together Brazil and Chile. As soon as the first rumors appeared about the new Peru-Bolivia-Argentina axis, they generated a closer cooperation between two states in conflict with some of the states in the axis. Brazil saw Argentina as a potential foe.

According to Basadre, Peru neglected her military because of an excessive trust in the treaty. As Antonio de Lavalle questioned Peruvian President Manuel Pardo about the new Chilean ironclads being built in Great Britain, Pardo answered that he also had two ironclads named "Bolivia" and "Buenos Aires", in reference to the axis.

Bolivia, counting on its military alliance with Peru, challenged Chile with a violation of the 1874 Boundary Treaty.

After its disclosure the treaty had a shocking impact on the Chilean public opinion, and therefore the treaty blocked any attempt of Peruvian mediation, sincere or not.