Andres Avelino Caceres

Andrés Avelino Cáceres fought a guerrilla war in the Peruvian sierra for three years after his country's army had been destroyed. Born in Ayacucho in 1836, he was a career soldier from sixteen and had fought in the civil wars and against Spain before the War of the Pacific began in 1879. He was wounded at San Francisco and Tarapacá and fought at San Juan and Miraflores outside Lima in January 1881, after which the capital fell and the government dissolved. What he did next is the reason he is remembered. He went into the central highlands, raised a force largely of Quechua-speaking peasants and villagers, and conducted a campaign against the Chilean occupation from the mountains for three years — the Breña campaign, fought at altitudes above 4,000 metres by men who lived there against troops who did not. He spoke Quechua, which mattered. He won at Pucará, Marcavalle and Concepción in 1882, and was finally beaten at Huamachuco in July 1883 when he accepted a conventional battle and ran out of ammunition. Peru signed the Treaty of Ancón three months later and ceded Tarapacá. Cáceres then fought a civil war against the general who had signed it and became president in 1886, and spent his term reorganising the state's ruined finances — including the Grace Contract, which handed the railways and guano to British bondholders in exchange for cancelling the external debt. He was overthrown in 1895 and died in 1923. The Breña campaign is also the first time in Peruvian history that Indigenous peasants were armed and organised on a large scale in the national cause, and the landowning class found the consequences alarming enough to prefer peace. That tension runs through the century that followed.

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