Capitol Building at Tacna
The province of Tacna, the most northern in Chile, formerly belonged to Peru. At the close of the Pacific War in 1880, Chile, the victor over Peru and Bolivia, annexed to her already long seacoast the Bolivian province Antofagasta and the Peruvian province Tarapaca; Tacna it was only supposed to annex temporarily. Chile was to occupy it for twenty years; a vote of the inhabitants was then to be taken to determine which country it should go to. Thirty-eight years have passed by and still no vote has been taken. The chances are that it will always remain Chilean. To keep it so, Chile has seven regiments in the province, five of which are stationed at Tacna, the capital city. The present government has tried to Chilenize the province by planting within its confines men from the south of the republic so that even in the event of a vote, which is doubtful, the majority will be in favor of the present ownership. It is another Alsace and Lorraine question because Peru is always thinking of the day when it will get it back and its inhabitants are Peruvian sympathizers. Peru even goes through the sham of having Tacna and Arica represented in its congress at Lima.
Street in Tacna Showing Earthquake Proof Houses
Tacna is thirty-eight miles north of Arica. The connecting railroad is the oldest in South America having been completed in 1844. The railroad at first skirts a fertile fringe near the seashore and then crosses a sandy desert until within a few kilometers of Tacna when it enters an oasis caused by irrigation from the Caplina River, all of whose water is drawn off for the gardens so that none of it empties into the ocean.
Tacna lies at an altitude of 2820 feet above sea level but so imperceptible is the rise that one can imagine it to be on the same level plain as Arica. The population is 14,176, including five thousand soldiers. The city appears much larger. The ordinary transient would carry the impression that it is a town of twenty-five thousand people. It is a healthy place yet the death rate exceeds the birth rate, which state of affairs is true in many old settled towns all over the world.
