The South American Republics, Part 2 of 2

by Thomas Cleland Dawson

CHAPTER III

THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE

The South American war of independence began and ended on the plateau of Upper Peru. On Bolivia's soil the first blood of the great revolt was spilt and there the last Spanish soldiers laid down their arms. Lying on the great route from Lima to Buenos Aires, her territory inevitably became the battle-ground for the hardest and most continuous fighting on the continent, and her population, having been the most oppressed by Spanish misrule, showed itself the most tenacious in efforts to drive out the Spanish authorities.

From 1809 to 1825, with scarcely an intermission, battle succeeded battle, campaign campaign, and insurrection insurrection, as the Spaniards and patriots, alternately victorious, marched and counter-marched along the great mountain road that winds through the plateau from Humahuaca on the Argentine frontier to the barrier north of Lake Titicaca. Not a village but what was captured and pillaged, not merely once but many times, and the tale of garottings and hangings, of massacres, burnings, and depredations, of heads and hands spiked up by hundreds along the highways, wearies in the telling. The Indians and half-breeds who formed the bulk of the Bolivian population joined by tens of thousands the bands that were continually being recruited by the patriot caudillos, or were impressed into the Spanish armies. Like Missouri in the American Civil War, Bolivia furnished more than her contingent to both sides, and her geographical position was similar to that of Virginia. The fighting on her soil was the longest continued and the severest, although the decisive battles were fought outside her territory. Suipacha, Huaqui, Ayohuma, Viluma correspond to Seven Pines, Chancellorsville, and Fredericksburg; while Chacabuco, Boyacá, and Ayacucho, like Donelson, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga, were the fights that brought the real results.

The patriots from the Argentine wished to carry the war to the seat of Spanish power and made continual efforts to get to Lima by way of Bolivia, but though they often reached the plateau they could never long maintain themselves. The farthest that they ever penetrated was to the south end of Lake Titicaca, where they were still distant from their goal by more than a thousand miles of difficult mountain road. The Spanish generals were more successful, but any army in possession of the plateau was immediately impelled to dissipate its forces in keeping open lines of communication with the seaboard and in tedious marches.

The news of the French usurpation in 1808 and the consequent civil disturbances in Spain demoralised the Spanish authorities in the Bolivian cities, and the Creoles immediately conceived the hope that they might possess themselves of the offices and the revenues. Early in 1809 a few influential native Bolivians and disaffected Spaniards took forcible possession of the government buildings in Charcas and La Paz and deposed the Spanish officials. The insurgents managed to arm a few troops, but were able to make no effective resistance to the forces which the viceroys at Buenos Aires and Lima promptly sent to quell the movement. The rebellion was quenched in blood. Goyeneche, the Lima general, ordered wholesale executions among those who had taken part, and the news of his dreadful cruelties roused a bitter desire for revenge in the hearts of the Creoles of all South America.

The deposition by Buenos Aires of her viceroy on the 25th of May, 1810, was shortly followed by the advance of an Argentine army into Bolivia, and the forces which the Spanish authorities at Potosí and Charcas had been able to collect were defeated at Suipacha, near the southern border of the plateau. All the cities of Bolivia fell into the hands of the patriots, while the villages rose in revolt against their Spanish tyrants. The Buenos Aireans wished to subject the Bolivian provinces to a centralised government and rule them from the capital on the Plate, but every town in Upper Peru had its ambitious Creole leaders who wished to control their own country. These disagreements had much to do with the crushing defeat which the Argentine army shortly suffered at Huaqui on the southern shore of Lake Titicaca. The projected triumphal advance through Cuzco and Lower Peru to Lima was turned into a precipitate retreat through La Paz, Oruro, and Potosí into the Argentine. Alone the Bolivian patriots were not strong enough to prevent the re-establishment of the Spanish authority in the cities along the main route. But in the villages and the outlying cities like Cochabamba and Santa Cruz the insurgent bands kept up a desperate resistance.

The main body of the victorious Spanish army pursued the fleeing Argentines into their own territory, only to be defeated by General Belgrano in the battle of Tucuman—a victory which probably saved Buenos Aires from capture and the South American revolution from extinction. In 1813 the Argentines again invaded Bolivia, but they had not proceeded far beyond Potosí when they were met and routed in the battles of Villapugio and Ayohuma. The Bolivian patriots were once more left to their own resources, and their country subjected to the most awful devastations. Though unable to concert a general plan of action or to assemble one large army, nevertheless they had courage to die in battle or on the scaffold. The most famous leaders in the south were Camargo and Padilla, whose daring forays helped prevent the Spaniards from advancing into the Argentine, while Arenales at Santa Cruz and other patriot leaders farther north continually threatened the line of communication to Titicaca, Cuzco, and Lima.