Peru-Bolivian Confederation

The territory ran from the Ecuadorian frontier to the Atacama desert along the Pacific, and from the Amazonian foothills across the cordillera to the Bolivian altiplano. Most of its people spoke Quechua or Aymara; the Spanish-speaking population was concentrated in Lima, Arequipa, Cusco, La Paz and Chuquisaca, and the officer corps that held the state together was largely mestizo. Peru's first republican census, taken in 1836, counted 1,873,736 people; Bolivia's count of 1831 gave 1,088,768. The economic weight of the union lay in the south — the silver of Potosí and Cerro de Pasco, the wool and hides of the highlands, the sugar and grape brandy of the Arequipa valleys, and guano beds whose value nobody yet knew how to calculate.

The Confederation matters for what it tried to be and for what its destruction made possible. It was the last serious attempt to join the two halves of the old viceroyalty of Peru, and it was defeated not by an uprising of its own subjects but by the armies of two neighbouring republics, one of which — Chile — emerged from the war with a national myth and a functioning state. It is also the clearest case in the region's history of a government that possessed an army and the customs houses but never constituted itself: the Protector governed for his whole term under provisional powers, because the general congress was not to be elected until the war was over, and the war never ended. The map draws the entity from 1836 to 1839, exactly the years of its life, so the usual warning about border data does not apply here; what no polygon can show is that the three republics were never administered as one.

At a glance

How did a Bolivian marshal come to rule Peru?

Andrés de Santa Cruz was born in 1792 at Huarina, a village on the shore of Lake Titicaca, the son of a creole official from Huamanga and a cacica of the pueblo, and he was educated at La Paz and then at the college of San Buenaventura in Cusco, where his fellow pupil was Agustín Gamarra, the man who became his rival for the next thirty years. He began his military life as a royalist officer in Upper Peru, changed sides, and made his name in the second campaign of the intermediate ports in 1823, when he led a patriot army into the altiplano, fought an indecisive action at Zepita and then marched the survivors back to the coast in a retreat that cost him more men than the battle had. Bolívar kept him. He was chief of staff of the Peruvian division at Junín in August 1824, missed Ayacucho because he was holding the communications at Huamanga, and was made a grand marshal in 1825.

Power in Lima followed. As president of the council of government from June 1826 he exercised supreme authority when Bolívar left Peru that September, presided over the oath to the constitution Bolívar had written, and after the anti-Bolivarian riots of January 1827 was left presiding over a caretaker junta whose only job was to convene a congress. He stood for the presidency that year and lost to José de La Mar; the new government then removed him from the country by appointing him minister in Santiago. From Chile he watched the collapse of Bolivarian Bolivia. Gamarra invaded in May 1828, Sucre signed the treaty of Piquiza on 6 July and the Colombian troops withdrew, and the congress at Chuquisaca elected Santa Cruz president on 31 January 1829. He took the oath at La Paz on 24 May, six months before his thirty-seventh birthday.

The war that broke out between Peru and Gran Colombia in 1828 was not his war, but it cleared the ground he built on. It was fought over Jaén and Maynas, the frontier provinces both republics claimed, and over Guayaquil, where Peruvian forces had intervened. At Tarqui, on 27 February 1829, Sucre's outnumbered Colombian army stopped the Peruvian advance; the treaty signed at Guayaquil on 22 September ended the fighting and left the boundary to be settled by commissioners along the line of the old viceroyalties of New Granada and Lima. That formula, agreed by Pedro Gual and José Larrea y Loredo, guaranteed a century of dispute: it named two jurisdictions whose frontier had never been drawn. The war also finished the Bolivarian order. Sucre left Bolivia, La Mar was overthrown at Piura by Gamarra, and the field was open for a soldier who had learned both the royalist and the patriot way of fighting and who now commanded the best-drilled army in the Andes.

Bolivia under his presidency was, for a decade, the exception in the region. He gave it a constitution in 1831 and a second in 1834, a civil code, a reorganisation of the treasury, schools and a general staff, and an army drilled, uniformed and paid regularly enough to stay loyal. He also gave it a port. Cobija, on the Atacama coast, was made a free port in 1832 — an expensive gesture, because almost everything Bolivia actually traded went through Arica, which belonged to Peru. His biographers make much of a letter of 1829 in which he called Bolivia the Macedonia of South America, the small power destined to unify a divided world as Macedon had unified Greece. Whether it was a programme or a flourish, the phrase describes what he did next.

Why did Peru fall apart in 1835?

Peru had written four constitutions in eleven years and had not yet managed a peaceful transfer of power. The constitution of 1834 was a liberal document adopted after a civil war, and the president it produced, Luis José de Orbegoso, was contested from his first day by Gamarra, by Antonio Gutiérrez de la Fuente and by the Lima notables who had expected to govern through him. In January 1835 a twenty-eight-year-old colonel, Felipe Santiago Salaverry, seized the castle at Callao and declared himself supreme chief of the republic. He was the candidate of Lima and of the northern sugar planters, and his programme was protection: high tariffs on imported cloth and flour, the Chilean trade kept out, the capital's merchants protected.

Orbegoso did what a weak president does when his own army will not save him. He invited a foreign one. Santa Cruz crossed the Desaguadero in June 1835 with some 5,000 Bolivian troops, and the Peruvian civil war became a war of intervention. At Yanacocha, on 13 August 1835, he beat Gamarra and drove him into exile; at Socabaya, on 7 February 1836, he beat Salaverry. Salaverry and his senior officers were shot in the main square at Arequipa on 18 February. Santa Cruz's defenders call this the necessary end of a rebellion; his critics call it a political massacre that made reconciliation impossible. Both are partly right. The executions removed a rival and created a martyr, and the Peruvian officer corps never forgot them.

The civil war was also a war between two economies, and this is the part that is usually left out. The north grew sugar and sold it to Chile, bought Chilean wheat and flour, and wanted the tariff wall that made its planters rich. The south sold wool, silver and coca to Bolivia, imported European goods through Arica and Islay, and wanted free trade and a port it controlled. Lima lived off the customs of Callao and the profits of the consulado, and feared any arrangement that moved trade south. Santa Cruz's project was the political expression of the southern economy: Arequipa welcomed him, Cusco acquiesced, Puno and Tacna petitioned to be joined to Bolivia, and Lima never accepted him at all. When Peruvians call the Confederation a Bolivian annexation they are describing, accurately enough, the interests that supported it.

How was the Confederation assembled?

The union was made by assemblies, and the assemblies were made to order. In the south, a gathering of the departments of Arequipa, Ayacucho, Cusco and Puno met at Sicuani from 16 March 1836, declared the independence of the State of South Peru and offered Santa Cruz its protectorate. In Bolivia, a congress at Tapacarí in June approved the union. In the north, an assembly at Huaura, opened on 3 August 1836 and sitting into the autumn, did the same for Lima, Junín, La Libertad and Amazonas, though with visible reluctance and only after a division of the army had been moved into the region.

The elections to these bodies were managed, and the management is documented in Santa Cruz's own correspondence. He told his agents whom to have elected, warned that a town which chose badly would suffer for it, paid for press campaigns, and used the army as a presence rather than a threat. This does not make the assemblies fictitious. The deputies were real notables, the south had solid reasons to want the union, and the petitions from Tacna and Moquegua asking to be attached to Bolivia were genuine expressions of a commercial interest that Lima had ignored for a decade. But it does mean that the verdict was the verdict of a caucus, not of a electorate, and everyone in Lima knew it.

The decree of 28 October 1836 announced the result. Its preamble is a small masterpiece of self-justification, and its signature is worth quoting, because it summarises the whole arrangement in one line: "Andrés Santa-Cruz, Captain General and President of Bolivia, Grand Marshal and Pacificator of Peru, Supreme Protector of the States of South and North Peru, charged with the foreign relations of the three States." It established the Confederation as composed of the North Peruvian State, the South Peruvian State and the Republic of Bolivia, and summoned a congress of plenipotentiaries, three for each state, to meet at Tacna on 24 January 1837 to fix its bases.

Arica was the price of southern loyalty. At Sicuani, Santa Cruz had wanted Tacna and Arica transferred to Bolivia as indemnity for the cost of the intervention — he told his vice-president that if Bolivia did not take that slice, he did not see when or how its outlays would ever be recovered — and the demand alarmed Lima even among those who accepted the union. He dropped the annexation and settled instead for a joint customs house at Arica, with the receipts divided between Bolivia and South Peru. That compromise is the clearest evidence that the Confederation was not a sentimental project. It was a customs union designed by the exporters of the south, and it was fought over by the importers of the centre.

What did the Fundamental Law of Tacna create?

The pact signed at Tacna on 1 May 1837 is a more serious document than its reputation suggests. Three republics "confederate among themselves"; they are equal in rights; citizenship is common to all three; the religion of the confederation is Catholic, apostolic and Roman; each republic keeps its own government and fundamental laws; and the three together have a general government with legislative, executive and judicial branches. It is a federal constitution, drafted by men who had read the constitution of the United States and the charter Bolívar had given Bolivia, and it is recognisably a state and not a personal fief.

The legislature was to consist of two chambers. The senate of fifteen, five for each republic, was to be chosen by the Protector from candidates proposed by the departmental electoral colleges; the chamber of twenty-one, seven for each, was to be elected by the general congress itself from among those already elected to the state chambers. The congress was to meet every two years for fifty days, and to sit in each republic in turn. The suffrage behind it was indirect and propertied: electors needed 3,000 pesos of capital, senators 1,000 pesos of annual rent or an industrial licence worth 2,000, and senators had to be forty years old. The indigenous majority, who paid the contribution and were citizens in law, stood outside these colleges in practice; the electorate was the vecino class of the towns.

The executive was the Protector. He held office for ten years and could be re-elected; he was generalissimo of all land and sea forces; he appointed senators, ministers, generals and the judges of the supreme courts; he directed foreign relations and concluded treaties subject to senate approval; he could declare war with the consent of congress; and article 30 gave him power to "arrange everything concerning foreign trade, establish and direct the general customs houses and the general administration of posts". Each republic was to keep its own coinage, its own arms and flag internally, and at least one major port for foreign trade. The Confederation's own flag was crimson, with the arms of the three republics entwined in a laurel, "the design to be given by the Protector".

Two articles decided the state's real character. Article 41 proclaimed Santa Cruz Protector for the first period and continued him "in the full exercise of the powers with which he was invested by the said congresses until the first congress of the confederation meets". Article 42 provided that the first general congress would be summoned six months after the end of the war with Chile. The war did not end until the Confederation did. The parliament was therefore never elected, the senate never sat, and the whole constitution operated as a promise about the future while the Protector governed under the emergency powers the assemblies had given him in 1836. A state that postpones its own legislature until after a war has given its enemy a veto over its constitution.

Nor did the pact satisfy the people it was meant to reconcile. The Bolivian congress that opened at Chuquisaca in September 1837 tried to reopen it, on the ground that Bolivia had conceded sovereignty to the Protector and received too little in return; Santa Cruz's managers had to talk it out of a vote. Lima objected that Bolivia had been consulted first. Santa Cruz himself admitted in a letter from Tacna that, in exchange for the concessions Bolivia made to the Protector, it received great advantages, quite apart from the influence it would exercise over the Confederation. A constitution that its own author described as unequal was unlikely to outlive a defeat.

How did the Protector govern?

Santa Cruz governed as a soldier with a good secretariat. He moved constantly — Lima, Callao, Chorrillos, Cusco, Arequipa, Tacna, La Paz and the hamlet of Pacayal — and his ministers ran the departments in his absence: Mariano Enrique Calvo, the vice-president of Bolivia; Andrés María Torrico, his client in Cusco; José María Mendizábal in Chuquisaca; and the German-born general Otto Philipp Braun, who commanded the southern frontier. The army was the spine of the system. Santa Cruz promoted clients, moved garrisons, changed uniforms, inspected accounts, and worried in his letters about the loyalty of Peruvian units and about officers who might be bought by Chilean money.

The three states kept their own presidents, congresses and constitutions, and this was not a formality: North Peru had its own chamber and its own budget, South Peru its own, and Bolivia its own congress which spent much of 1837 and 1838 arguing with the Protector. Orbegoso held the north until he broke with Santa Cruz in 1838; the south was governed by a succession of short-lived presidents and prefects; and in Bolivia the vice-president Velasco exercised authority while Santa Cruz retained the presidency himself. Each state coined money, kept its own flag and raised its own taxes, which meant that the union had three fiscal administrations, three sets of officials and one army to pay for.

The Church was the other instrument of government, and the most ambiguous. Santa Cruz was a regalist of the old school: he believed the state should control appointments, revenues and the discipline of the clergy, and he used the bishops as officials. But he was also pragmatic. His government negotiated with the papal internuncio at Bogotá, allowed the religious orders to be reformed rather than dissolved, and in the fundamental law accepted the Church's establishment while keeping the patronage in his own hands. The bishops of Trujillo and Arequipa signed the pact of Tacna as plenipotentiaries of the two Peruvian states, which tells you how far the Church had been folded into the new order — and how exposed it was when that order collapsed.

Coercion was real but selective. The regime executed Salaverry's officers, exiled Gamarra's and La Fuente's followers and closed newspapers. It did not attempt a reign of terror, and Santa Cruz's letters are full of instructions to conciliate, to pay, to flatter and to divide rather than to kill. What it lacked was a way of converting obedience into consent. The elections it ran were managed, the congress it promised never met, and the only institution that could have given the union legitimacy — a parliament elected under the pact of Tacna — was constitutionally deferred until a war that the Protector could not win.

How was the Confederation financed?

The union lived on customs. Peru's tariff of 1828, passed under Gamarra, had set duties at Callao as high as 80 per cent on foreign goods — a protectionist wall that was meant to shelter the north's sugar and the Lima merchants, and that was widely evaded. Bolivia's answer had been to make Cobija a free port in 1832, which cost the treasury money and never attracted the traffic, because La Paz, Oruro and Cochabamba all traded through Arica. Santa Cruz's solution was the one the geography demanded: in September 1836 he decreed freedom of trade for all merchant flags, "including the Spanish", declared Arica and Islay major ports, and turned Arica into a bonded warehouse.

The common customs house at Arica, run jointly by Bolivia and South Peru with officials appointed by both governments and receipts divided between them, is the Confederation's most concrete achievement. Its accounts survive in the Bolivian national archive. In 1836 it collected 75,956 pesos; in 1837, 202,828; in 1838, 200,985. Over the three years the Arica house produced 535,576 pesos, or 83 per cent of the total revenue of the joint customs, against 108,459 pesos, or 16 per cent, from Cobija. Before the union, Santa Cruz had calculated that the Arica customs produced barely 15,000 pesos a semester while La Paz produced 87,000; the common house was designed to change that balance, and for two years it did.

The money was not enough. The army consumed most of it, the war cut the transit trade, and the customs were paid partly in promissory notes which the merchants carried as debt to the government. Santa Cruz also resorted to the oldest expedient in the Andes: the peso feble, a debased coinage which he put into circulation and which gave the confederation a monetary hegemony of sorts while irritating every merchant who had to accept it. The fundamental law tried to keep the three currencies in circulation and to make each republic responsible for its pre-1837 debts, splitting the old Peruvian debt between the two Peruvian states. It was a sensible arrangement on paper and an impossible one in a war, when the only liquid revenue was the customs of a port that the Chilean navy could blockade.

Trade did not stop for the war, which is one of the surprises of the period. Foreign shipping continued to call at Arica throughout 1837 and 1838 — 67 British vessels in 1837, 30 French and a handful of North American — and Valparaíso's customs receipts rose by about 40 per cent between 1836 and 1837, partly because merchants concentrated goods there before shipping north. The Pacific economy was run by houses in Valparaíso, Liverpool and Bordeaux that traded with both sides, and they treated the war as a risk to be priced rather than a barrier. The Confederation's tragedy was that its economic logic was sound and its fiscal base was thin: a customs union of poor countries, at war with a neighbour that had the better port and the better navy.

Why did Chile declare war?

Chile's opposition was political before it was commercial, though the two were never separable. Diego Portales, the minister who ran the Chilean state behind President Joaquín Prieto, believed that the balance of power in the Pacific required that no single state dominate the Andes, and he saw in the union of Peru and Bolivia a power that could dictate terms to Valparaíso. Chilean historians call this the doctrine of the American balance. It was not a fig leaf: Chilean governments had used the same language about Bolívar's Colombia, and they used it again about the Peru-Bolivian union.

The commercial quarrel was concrete. Valparaíso had been made a free port with cheap bonded warehouses in 1830, and it lived by being the entrepôt where European goods were stored before distribution along the Pacific. Callao's high tariffs and its own bonded warehouse, opened in 1832, threatened that position; so did the Peruvian tariff of 1836 on Chilean wheat and flour, set at 2 pesos a fanega and 5⅔ reales a sack. Chile answered with a duty of 3 pesos an arroba on Peruvian sugar. A trade treaty signed with Peru in 1835 was never ratified by Chile, partly because it had been signed with Salaverry's government, which Santiago did not recognise. When Santa Cruz opened Arica and Islay to all flags, he was undercutting Valparaíso's warehouse trade at the same moment as he was building a rival political bloc.

The pretext came in 1836. Ramón Freire, a former Chilean head of state living in exile, sailed from Peru with a small expedition — backed, Santiago insisted, by Santa Cruz's government — and landed at Chiloé in an attempt to raise the province against Portales. The rising failed. Chile's minister in Lima, Mariano Egaña, demanded satisfaction and was, in Santiago's version, insulted. On 26 December 1836 the Chilean congress authorised war, on four grounds: that Santa Cruz held the sovereignty of Peru unjustly and threatened the independence of the other republics; that the Peruvian government had allowed an armed expedition to leave its ports to foment civil war in Chile; that a Chilean minister had been mistreated; and that the nation was insulted and threatened. The declaration is a lawyer's document, but the first clause is the real one — Chile went to war to break the union, not to punish a border incident.

Then, on 3 June 1837, Portales was arrested at Quillota by mutinous troops of the Maipú battalion, who had been ordered north to a war they disliked, and taken to Valparaíso. On 6 June he was shot there. The government and the press blamed Santa Cruz; there is no evidence that he ordered it, although his agents were certainly meddling in Chilean factional politics and the Chilean exiles in Peru had every interest in the murder. The effect was to make an unpopular war a national cause. Portales dead was a more powerful argument than Portales alive, and the officers he had purged in 1830 — the men who had fought at Lircay on the other side — were recalled to command the expedition.

Why did Argentina join, and how did that front end?

Juan Manuel de Rosas, who conducted the foreign relations of the Argentine Confederation, had his own quarrel with Santa Cruz, and it was older than the union. Bolivia held Tarija, which Argentina claimed; Santa Cruz sheltered Argentine unitarians who plotted against Buenos Aires from Peruvian and Bolivian soil; and a Confederate embassy in the north-west encouraged the idea of a buffer state in Jujuy, Salta and Tucumán under Bolivian protection. When Chile asked for an alliance, Rosas took the opportunity and declared war on 19 May 1837 — formally over Tarija and over the presence of Santa Cruz, in practice to recover a province and to unseat a government that was harbouring his enemies.

The Argentine front was fought in the puna, at the ends of two supply lines, and it was decided by logistics. Alejandro Heredia's Army of the North moved through Jujuy and Salta, while Braun held the Bolivian south with a small force. The Argentines were defeated at Montenegro, or Cuyambuyo, on 24 June 1838, and the campaign degenerated into raids and pronunciamientos. Heredia was overthrown in November 1838, and Rosas, faced with the French blockade of the Río de la Plata from 1838, had more urgent problems than Tarija. The fighting ended without a settled frontier.

Its importance for the Confederation was that it divided Santa Cruz's army. Braun's divisions spent 1837 and 1838 watching the southern passes instead of reinforcing the Peruvian front, and the money spent in Tarija was money not spent on the navy. The Argentine alliance with Chile also gave the war against the Confederation a continental character: a conservative republic and a confederation of federalist provinces agreed that a strong Andean state was a threat to both, and the French blockade of Buenos Aires — which Rosas blamed on Santa Cruz's intrigues — tied the two conflicts together.

What happened in the campaigns of 1837 and 1838?

Chile's first expedition sailed from Valparaíso on 15 September 1837 under Manuel Blanco Encalada, a naval officer commanding a land expedition, carrying some 3,000 men and a squadron. It landed at Islay, the port of Arequipa, in October, and found none of the welcome the Chilean press had promised. The south had wanted the union and did not want a Chilean army; the towns supplied nothing, the muleteers disappeared, and Santa Cruz, who had been concentrating his forces, refused battle while his agents raised the country behind the invaders. Blanco Encalada, short of supplies and outmanoeuvred, did the sensible thing and negotiated.

The treaty of Paucarpata, signed on 17 November 1837, was a peace on the Protector's terms: Chile treated with the Confederation as a state, the expedition re-embarked, three captured ships were returned, and the Protector accepted liability for a million and a half pesos of the London loan that had been advanced to Peru. Blanco Encalada signed it because the alternative was the destruction of his army. Santiago repudiated it within a month, refused to ratify, and put him before a court martial, which acquitted him — a verdict that tells you what his brother officers thought of the government's orders. The episode is the great might-have-been of the war: had Chile accepted the treaty, the Confederation would have survived with Chilean acquiescence and the general congress might have met.

Chile's second expedition was organised with more care. It sailed on 16 June 1838 under Manuel Bulnes, with some 5,300 men and a staff that included the officers Portales had dismissed, and it landed at Ancón, north of Lima, on 6 August. On 21 August it fought its way into the capital at Portada de Guías, where Orbegoso's men held the approaches to the old gate and the Chileans carried the position after a confused afternoon of street and wall fighting. Lima fell, and the restoration government of Gamarra was installed in it. But the city was a trap. Disease, heat and a hostile population cost Bulnes more men than the campaign could afford, and Santa Cruz, instead of defending the capital, withdrew into the cordillera to make the Chileans come to him.

What followed was a campaign of manoeuvre in the Callejón de Huaylas, the valley of the Santa river between two ranges, where Bulnes marched north with Santa Cruz's army on his heels and the mountain passes in front. There were fights at Llaclla on 21 December 1838 and at the bridge over the Buin on 6 January 1839, where a hundred men under the cacique Juan Colipí held the crossing long enough to save the Chilean rearguard. Santa Cruz had staked his campaign on catching Bulnes in a position where the Confederates could repeat Paucarpata — starving him into a capitulation without a battle. The plan failed when the Chilean squadron destroyed the Confederate naval force at Casma on 12 January, after which Bulnes could be supplied from the sea and Santa Cruz could not. Both armies then turned towards Yungay, and the war came down to a hill.

How did it end at Yungay?

Yungay lies north of Huaraz, at the foot of the Cerro Pan de Azúcar, a steep, scrub-covered height that Santa Cruz's engineers had fortified and that his officers considered impregnable. The Confederate army held the hill and the ground around the town; the restoration army, some 5,300 strong, with Peruvian divisions under Gamarra and Castilla, had to attack uphill or starve. On 20 January 1839 Bulnes attacked. The battalions of Bulnes's army, the Carampangue among them, went up the slope in succession, were thrown back, and went up again; the fighting on the summit was hand-to-hand. When the hill fell, the rest of the Confederate line collapsed, and the cavalry charge that Santa Cruz ordered into the Chilean centre was broken by the fire of Ramón Castilla's Peruvian battalions.

The numbers are uncertain and the sources disagree. The Confederate army is given as anything from about 4,000 to 6,100 men, the allied army as about 5,300; the Confederates lost perhaps 1,400 killed and wounded and some 1,600 prisoners, the allies a few hundred. Chilean accounts claim a decisive victory against superior numbers; Confederate accounts put the disaster down to the collapse of the hill's garrison and the exhaustion of an army that had marched for a month. What is not in dispute is the result: the Confederate army ceased to exist as a force, and the Protector fled south with a handful of officers.

The political collapse was faster than the military one. Arequipa pronounced for Gamarra on 20 February 1839; Santa Cruz, who had fled there, resigned his authority by decree and rode for the coast. At Islay he took refuge in the house of the British vice-consul, Thomas Crompton, while a party of lancers came to arrest him. Crompton signalled to the frigate HMS Samarang, which landed fifty men, and Santa Cruz was taken aboard and carried to Ecuador. He left behind a Peruvian congress that stripped him of his honours by decree on 21 September 1839, a Bolivia that had already risen against him under Velasco and Ballivián, and a union that had lasted two years and four months.

What became of Peru and Bolivia after 1839?

Peru's restoration did not restore much. Gamarra ruled as a victor, promulgated a constitution at Huancayo in 1839 that was as authoritarian as anything Santa Cruz had written, and in 1841 invaded Bolivia in an attempt to undo the union by annexing it. On 18 November 1841 his army was destroyed at Ingavi, near Viacha, and Gamarra was killed. Peru then passed through four years of military anarchy, with the presidency changing hands repeatedly, until Ramón Castilla took power in 1845 and began the guano era, which financed a state that the Confederation had never been able to afford.

Bolivia came out of the collapse better than its neighbours expected. Ingavi was a national victory, and it confirmed Bolivian independence against the neighbour that had invaded to undo it. José Ballivián, the general whose defection had destroyed Santa Cruz, governed from 1841 and kept much of the administrative machine the man who had been his godfather had built: the codes, the treasury, the army. What Bolivia lost was the coast. The Confederation's fall left Bolivia without a viable Pacific port, and the war of 1879–83 took from it the Atacama and Antofagasta, a loss that Bolivians have connected ever since to the failure of the union that might have given them Arica.

Santa Cruz himself lived another twenty-six years. He went from Guayaquil to Quito, tried to return to Bolivia, was arrested on landing at Camarones on 2 November 1843, and was handed over to Chile, which confined him at Chillán in comfort and under guard while Ecuador, France and Britain protested. In December 1845 he was allowed to leave for Europe. He served as Bolivia's minister plenipotentiary in France from 1848 to 1855, settled at Versailles, and died at Beauvoir-sur-Mer in the Vendée on 25 September 1865. His remains were brought back to Bolivia in 1965 and placed in the cathedral at La Paz, where a guard of honour keeps watch over them and the crimson flag of the Confederation is displayed.

Why is the Confederation still argued about?

Chile made Yungay into the founding battle of its republic. 20 January is still commemorated as the day of the roto chileno, the ordinary Chilean soldier, and the victory gave the country a national story in which a small, orderly republic defeated a larger, militarised neighbour. Bulnes became president, the war's officers became the state's officers, and the Chilean army dates its modern self-image from the campaign. That story is not false; the Chilean army did fight well and its logistics were better. But it is a story told from one side, and it has made the Confederation, in Chilean memory, a menace rather than a state.

Peruvian memory has been less uniform. Nineteenth-century school texts, from Carlos Wiesse to Gustavo Pons Muzzo, presented Santa Cruz as a foreign adventurer who partitioned Peru for Bolivia's benefit, and that is still the version many Peruvians learn. Twentieth-century Peruvian historians were less uniformly hostile, and the scholarship of the last two decades has moved further, treating the Confederation as an experiment in Andean state-building rather than an aberration: Natalia Sobrevilla Perea's biography of Santa Cruz is the main modern account in English, and the Chilean and Peruvian essays collected by Carlos Donoso and Jaime Rosenblitt in 2009 reopened the question of how much support the union actually had.

The most durable myth is that Santa Cruz wanted to restore the Inca empire. The claim appears in Chilean and Peruvian war writing and in popular histories on both sides, and it has a certain imaginative force: a mestizo marshal, a cacica's son, uniting the old heartland of Tawantinsuyu. But the documentary record does not support it. Santa Cruz's project was a federation of three constitutional republics, with a senate, a chamber of deputies, a written pact and a flag composed of three coats of arms; he described it in the language of Bolívar, not of the Incas. The Inca reference belongs to the rhetoric of his enemies, who needed a way of saying that the union was a backward, despotic and racially dangerous thing. It is worth noticing that the same charge was made against Bolívar's Colombia a decade earlier, and that it says more about creole fears of the Andean majority than about Santa Cruz's programme.

The Confederation's real lesson is institutional. It had an army, a customs union, a constitution and a competent administration, and it failed because it never allowed its own citizens to constitute it. The parliament was postponed until after a war; the elections were managed; the treaty was unequal between its members; and the whole structure rested on one man whom his Bolivian supporters thought too Peruvian and his Peruvian supporters thought too Bolivian. When the army broke at Yungay, there was nothing else holding the state together. That is why the union of 1836 remains interesting: not because it nearly restored an empire, but because it shows exactly how a modern state fails when it mistakes command for legitimacy.

Common myths about the Peru-Bolivian Confederation

Timeline of the Peru-Bolivian Confederation

What the map shows next

The drawn range is exactly the life of the entity, 1836 to 1839, which is unusual for this dataset and worth saying plainly: there is no gap between the historical dates and the border data. What the map cannot show is the sequence within those four years. At 1836 on the map the union is already drawn, although the assemblies at Sicuani and Huaura had only just declared the two Peruvian states and the pact that was supposed to constitute the Confederation would not be signed until the following May.

At 1837 on the map the three republics appear as one territory at the moment when the fundamental law was signed and the first Chilean expedition was in the field; at 1839 on the map the polygon is still there, although the army that held it together had been destroyed on 20 January and the Protector had resigned by the end of February. The dataset works in whole years, so the year of the collapse is drawn as a year of existence; the two republics appear as separate shapes only when the range ends.