War of the Confederation
Chile declared war on the Peru-Bolivian Confederation in December 1836 and destroyed it within three years. Andrés de Santa Cruz, a marshal of Bolivian and part-Inca descent who had fought for both sides in the independence wars, had united Bolivia with a Peru divided into northern and southern states, and made himself Supreme Protector of the whole in 1836. The result was a state with a larger population than Chile and control of the trade of the southern Pacific. Chile's objection was commercial and strategic. Diego Portales, the minister who effectively governed the country, argued that the Confederation threatened Valparaíso's position as the Pacific's leading port and that Chile must destroy it or be reduced by it — and wrote privately that the two countries could not coexist. The pretext was a Peruvian-backed expedition by the exiled Chilean general Ramón Freire. The war was unpopular in Chile. Portales was seized and murdered by mutinous troops in June 1837, and the first expedition returned having signed a treaty its government repudiated. The second, under Manuel Bulnes, landed in 1838, took Lima, and settled the war at Yungay in January 1839 in a frontal assault up a defended hillside. Santa Cruz went into exile in Ecuador and then Europe. The Confederation dissolved, and Peru and Bolivia have never reunited. Chile emerged with a settled political order, a professional army and naval supremacy in the Pacific — which it used again against both of them in 1879. Bolivia lost its coastline in that war and has been landlocked since.
- Year: 1836 CE
- Category: Military
