Gran Colombia-Peru War
Gran Colombia and Peru went to war in 1828, three years after both had won independence from Spain with each other's help. The dispute was territorial and personal. Guayaquil, Jaén and Maynas had been administered from Peru at various points and had been claimed by Bolívar for Colombia; Peru had also expelled the Colombian troops garrisoning Lima and repudiated the constitution Bolívar had written for Bolivia. José de La Mar, Peru's president, was himself Ecuadorian by birth, which did not help. Peru invaded Bolivia in 1828, forced Antonio José de Sucre out of the presidency there, and then moved on Guayaquil, taking the city and blockading the coast. The Colombian answer was Sucre. He met a larger Peruvian army at the Portete de Tarqui in February 1829 near Cuenca, attacked before it had fully assembled, and beat it in a morning. The terms he offered afterwards were unusually generous — a mutual withdrawal, the release of prisoners, and the recognition of the pre-independence boundaries — and were signed at Girón the next day. La Mar was overthrown by his own officers that year. The Treaty of Guayaquil in 1829 settled the border on the colonial line, and the ambiguity in that formula has produced Ecuadorian-Peruvian wars in 1858, 1941, 1981 and 1995. Gran Colombia dissolved within a year, and Sucre was assassinated in June 1830. Both countries had spent their first years of independence fighting each other rather than consolidating anything. The last of those wars was settled by treaty in 1998, 169 years later.
- Year: 1828 CE
- Category: Military
