Latin America: Its Rise and Progress

by Francisco García Calderón

In 1862, when he had already been minister and mayor of Lima, a popular election carried him to power. In four years his extraordinary activity reformed all the public services: education, finance, and immigration. He ordered the census to be taken in 1876; he endeavoured to attract foreigners; founded the Faculty of Political Sciences and the University of Lima for the education of diplomatists and administrators, and the School of Arts and Crafts for the improvement of popular education; he opened new primary schools, sent for German and Polish professors, and entrusted the pedagogic direction of the country to them. He promulgated new regulations dealing with education on the classic European lines. He re-established the National Guard, as Portales had done in Chili, and organised departmental juntas with an eye to decentralisation. His action was restless and universal. He preferred a positive policy, devoid of doctrinaire quarrels, dreamed of a practical republic, like Rafael Nuñez in Colombia and Guzman-Blanco in Venezuela, and preferred the faculty of political sciences, which formed administrators, to that of letters, which created literary men and philosophers.

Nevertheless, the country became bankrupt. Loans, the great undertakings of President Balta, and speculations in guano and saltpetre had exhausted it. Pardo could not prevent this financial disaster. He assured the service of the foreign debt and informed the democracy, intoxicated by the economic orgy, that it was ruined. He vainly sought the alliance of the Argentine and Bolivia in order to erect a triple bastion of defence against the ambitions of Chili. His efforts were fruitless, both at home and abroad. He was succeeded by a military President. The alliance of Peru and Bolivia was powerless against the might of Chili, and Pardo himself was assassinated during a supreme reaction of the demagogy which he hoped to rule.

MANUEL PARDO.
President of Peru (1872-1876).

Death made his influence lasting, as was the case with Garcia-Moreno and Balmaceda. A strong ruler of men, he had gathered about him enthusiastic and even fanatical partisans. His work of reformation became the evangel of a party, the civil party which he had founded. As early as 1841 the dictator Vivanco had united, in a conservative group, the leading men of the time: Pando, Andres Martinez, Felipe Pardo. Ureta, Pardo's rival in the presidential campaign, united the first elements of a civil party. But it was his rival who concentrated all these forces, making them lasting and harmonious. A scion of ancient families, of the Aliagas and Lavalles, Pardo represented the colonial traditions in a disordered democracy.

Thanks to the discovery of new sources of wealth —saltpetre and guano—and to fiscal monopolies, a powerful plutocracy suddenly arose in Peru, which was soon, by the prestige of its wealth, to overpower the old Peruvian families. Pardo, not opposing the national transformation, joined this plutocracy; and his party, reinforced by the alliance, became the obstinate champion of property, of slow reform, and of order, against the anarchy of the Creoles. It was conservative without rigidity, liberal without violence, like the moderate parties of monarchical governments, or the Progressists of the third French Republic. Originally an aristocratic power, it abandoned its old severity, and became the party of the wealthy classes, taking mulattos and mestizos to its bosom. So, as in other South American democracies, the ancient oligarchy was replaced by a plutocracy which included the sons of immigrants, half-breeds, and bankers.

The influence of Pardo was greater and more lasting than that of Castilla. It responded to many of the needs of Peru; placed between militarism and demagogy, the civil element was the only agent of order and progress. The work of Pardo, interrupted during the war with Chili (1879-84) and the period of anarchy which followed, despite the efforts of a military leader who had fought like a hero in the war against Chili—Colonel Caceres—was by the irony of human affairs continued by the sworn enemy of Pardo: Pierola, the last of the great Peruvian caudillos; restless, romantic, and always ready to seize the reins of power by the violent aid of revolution.

In 1869, at the age of thirty, he was Minister of Finance, following Garcia Calderon, who had resigned his post rather than authorise the waste of fiscal resources. Ten years later Pierola proclaimed himself dictator, and prepared, with unusual energy, to defend Peru against the invasion of Chili. A reformer after the methods of the Jacobins, he thought to transform the nation by heaping decree upon decree and by changing the names of institutions. His noble enthusiasm makes it easy to overlook his errors.

The Peruvian troops defeated, Pierola did not resign power, and divided the country. Ten years later, in the full maturity of his intellectual powers, he was elected President (1895-99); from which period we may date the Peruvian renaissance. Without raising loans he transformed an exhausted country into a stable republic. Like all the great American caudillos, he was an excellent administrator of the fiscal wealth of the country; he established a gold standard as the basis of the new monetary system, promulgated a military code and an electoral law, and by means of a French mission endeavoured to change an army which was the docile servant of ambitious factions into a force capable of preserving domestic peace. His organising talent, his patriotism, and his extraordinary ability, surprised those who had known only the revolutionary leader.