Two successive expeditions were directed against the coast of Peru. Santa-Cruz defeated the first, which was led by the Chilian general Blanco Encalada, in 1837. General Bulnes was the leader of another "army of liberation." Peruvian generals supported him: Gamarra, La Fuente, Castilla, and Orbegoso himself. The battle of Yungai, in 1838, put an end to the Confederation, and Santa-Cruz lost all power over the peoples of Bolivia and Peru.
His political work, the Confederation, tended to unite two peoples which Bolivar had separated in spite of colonial traditions; it organised, on the shores of the Pacific, a stable power to oppose the increasing imperialism of Chili. Eminent Peruvians seconded the unifying efforts of the Bolivian leader: Riva-Aguero, Orbegoso, Garcia del Rio, and Necochea.
His work shattered, Santa-Cruz retired to Europe in 1845, but attempted, when urged by excited supporters, to return to his own country. Chili and Peru both opposed the suggestion. He was a friend of Napoleon III. in Paris, where he several times represented Bolivia, and where he died in 1865. The Confederation which he vainly desired to found would have changed the destiny of the peoples of the Pacific, by giving the political supremacy to Bolivia and Peru united. The successors of Santa-Cruz in the Bolivian presidency, Ballivian and Velasco, were friends of his, and continued his ambitious policy, although they had revolted against his autocracy. Since the days of the great mestizo leader no ruler has attained an equal reputation, nor attempted so great a political mission. Of later presidents, Baptista and Arce, civilians, and Pando and Montes, soldiers, exercised a real influence on Bolivian history, but had not the importance of the first presidents. The last was a remarkable organiser and a builder of railways which saved his country from a dangerous isolation. They belonged to a prosaic age of steady economic development. Bolivia has also had its tyrants, figures of tragi-comedy, vulgar and gloomy: Belzu, Velasco, Daza, and finally Melgarejo, the bloody incarnation of Creole barbarity. He was the Nero of Bolivia; a man capable of every cruelty and every licence; daring, energetic, he inaugurated a reign of terror, surrounded himself with a prætorian guard, and represented the instincts of the mob, exacerbated by alcohol and envy. In vain did well-meaning dictators like Ballivian in 1841 or Linares in 1857 strive to continue, in the interval between two episodes of barbarism, the civilising task of Santa-Cruz. They dreamed of founding a Republique Almara, like Renan in the domains of Caliban, a tyranny of the intellectual elements. Their effort was fruitless. Down to 1899, the year in which President Pando inaugurated civil government, the history of Bolivia was a dreary succession of revolutions and tyrants. A remarkable writer who has studied his "sick people"[[1]] writes that "from 1825 to 1898 more than sixty revolutions broke out, and a series of international wars, and six Presidents were assassinated: Blanco, Belzu, Cordova, Morales, Melgarejo, and Daza, without counting those that died in exile."
COLONEL ISMAEL MONTES.
President of Bolivia (1905-1909).
[[1]] Pueblo enfermo, by A. Arguedas, Barcelona, 1906.