Eduardo Abaroa Hidalgo was a merchant from Potosi who, without formal military training, joined the scratch Bolivian force organised to defend the oasis town of Calama and its approaches after Chile's occupation of the Bolivian port of Antofagasta in February 1879 opened the War of the Pacific. On 23 March 1879 Abaroa commanded a small detachment defending the Topater bridge over the San Salvador (Topater) river against a much larger advancing Chilean column; when a Chilean officer called on him to surrender, he is remembered in Bolivian national tradition as having replied with words to the effect of "Surrender, me? Let your grandmother surrender!" before continuing to fight and being killed at the bridge. Bolivia's overwhelming defeat in the war, which ended with the loss of its entire Pacific coastline and left the country permanently landlocked under the 1904 Treaty of Peace and Friendship with Chile, left Abaroa's stand at Calama as one of the few episodes of the campaign that Bolivian national memory could commemorate as heroic rather than catastrophic; he is honoured today as Bolivia's paramount military hero, with 23 March observed annually as the Dia del Mar (Day of the Sea) asserting Bolivia's continuing claim to sovereign coastal access.

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