Stupid Wars : A Citizen's Guide to Botched Putsches, Failed Coups, Inane Invasions, and Ridiculous Revolutions

by Ed Strosser

  López and Lynch slipped farther and farther north, their caravan shrinking in size with each successive month. His army fought bravely, but their major weapons — stones and clods of earth — were no match for the Brazilians, who were armed with more conventional weapons.

  THE SISTERS OF SOLANO LÓPEZ

  Few people felt the fully unhinged craziness of Solano López and Madame Lynch as ferociously as his sisters, Dona Rafaela and Dona Juana. Comfortably settled into their roles as beastly leaders of the Asunción jet set, they were suddenly pushed aside with the arrival of Madame Lynch. They immediately teamed with López’s mother to embarrass and isolate Lynch from the rest of society. For their troubles they were turned into Lynch’s personal whipping girls when she became head lady. First López made them toady to his woman. Then, after war broke out, he killed their husbands, impris­oned and tortured them while dragging the pair along in his caravan of craziness. Before he could finish them off, the Brazilians ended their big brother’s reign. They got the last laugh as they saw their big brother turned into a bloody corpse and his mistress thrown out of their wrecked land.

  By February 1870 López was down to 500 men and Madame Lynch’s last bottles of good champagne. They took up camp at Cerro Cora, his final capital. Realizing the end was near, he spent his remaining weeks composing his final words and designing a medal to commemorate his upcoming victory. To her credit, Madame Lynch stayed with her man, even though she had every opportunity to take off and head to Europe to live off the jewels she had stolen and thought­fully shipped off to friends for safekeeping.

  On the morning of March 1, the Brazilians stormed his camp. López fled alone on horseback. When he got stuck in a river he waded back to shore into the arms of the Brazilian commander and tried to shoot his way out. A Brazilian sol­dier speared the dictator and he fell. But like a movie villain, he proved hard to kill. López pulled himself up to his knees and tried to escape. But the Brazilians shot him down. He ut­tered his long-rehearsed words, “I die with my country,” before he expired. Little did he understand that his country was already dead.

  Meanwhile, the Brazilians surrounded Lynch and her sons in their carriage. The eldest son, Pancho, at age sixteen al­ready one of the older colonels in the army, came out swing­ing his sword. The Brazilians slashed him down and gave Madame Lynch the honor of burying López and her son. Dressed in a gown, the woman-who-would-be-empress got down on her hands and knees and scratched out a shallow grave for her two fallen men. The Brazilians then protected Lynch from the surviving Paraguayans, including López’s mother and two sisters, who would have preferred to show their love for Lynch by removing large sections of her skin, bones, and organs.

  When word reached Asunción that López had died and Lynch had been captured, the survivors of society held a ball. And the Tango of Craziness danced no more.

  WHAT HAPPENED AFTER

  The new government in Asunción demanded Madame Lynch be put on trial for her crimes, but the Brazilians decided to send her away instead, complete with a huge chest of stolen jewels.

  Exiled in Paris, Lynch tried to find the money she had so carefully stolen and secreted out of the country. But she found much of it pocketed by her fellow thieves and spent the better part of the next decade trying to win it back in court. In the meantime, she set up a fashionable home in Paris and sent her boys to fancy boarding schools. In 1875 she even had the impudence to return to Paraguay and pursue claims for her stolen land. The president had her kicked out the next day at gunpoint. Back in France the boys flourished while Madame Lynch slowly spent her money on lawyers and champagne. She died, alone and forgotten, on July 27, 1886, and was buried in Paris.

  The war, the deadliest in South American history, cost Paraguay almost 60 percent of its population. And more as­tonishingly, the country had only about 28,000 males at the war’s end, most of whom were children and old men. No modern society had ever suffered so much from a war in per­centage of population affected. For years thereafter the coun­try was known as the Land of Women.

  For their efforts, and about 100,000 Brazilian and 25,000 Argentine dead, the allies claimed about one quarter of Para­guayan territory that turned out to be essentially worthless. Argentina and Paraguay haggled for years over exactly which territory it should take. Finally, in 1878, President Ruther­ford B. Hayes, chosen as the arbitrator of the dispute, ruled in favor of Paraguay. Out of gratitude the land of López named a town in the president’s honor. This minor victory did not prevent Paraguay from being reduced to a state of chaos that endured for decades. For the sixty-six years fol­lowing the war’s end the country had thirty-two presidents, two assassinations, six coups, and eight failed revolutions.

  Not surprisingly, Solano López and Madame Lynch became two of the most despised people in Paraguayan his­tory. But then their fortunes turned. Needing a hero at the outset of the Chaco War in the 1930s, the Paraguayan dicta­tor at the time, yes, the country breeds dictators, resurrected López as a national hero. Almost instantly, his portrait ap­peared everywhere, and books extolling his virtues were turned out by the tens of thousands. His body was exhumed from the shallow, riverside grave and placed in the country’s Pantheon of Heroes where he rests today.

  Needing a companion for their national hero, the country next resurrected Madame Lynch and transformed her from a greedy, thieving whore into the Mother Earth martyr of the country. In 1961 her transformation became complete when the ruling dictator, Alfredo Stroessner, had her body ex­humed from its Parisian grave and clandestinely shipped to Asunción and installed in her own museum. Finally, in 1970 she was placed in an elaborate mausoleum in Asunción, where the population is free to ignore her to this day.

  FIVE.

  THE WAR OF THE PACIFIC: 1879

  This is a story about birdshit.

  Up until the early nineteenth century, birdshit, also known in the trade as guano, was virtually worthless. Birds pooped, end of story. But as the industrial revolution gained steam, the smelly substance was discovered to contain valu­able nitrates that could be used in fertilizer and explosives. On the western coast of South America, in what is now Peru and Chile, the mountains of guano that lined the coast sud­denly became the object of a very nasty tug of war among three countries that resulted in many, many deaths.

  Peru, Bolivia, and Chile, newly freed from their colonial master, Spain, which had conquered the continent at the end of the sixteenth century, were struggling to find their places in the world as independent nations. Each country, led by the European elites inherited from the Spanish overlordship, ruthlessly continued the economic rape of their countries’ resources for the benefit of their own tiny ruling class.

  Due to the political naïveté of the ruling classes, many mistakes were made. First of all, they had no idea how to run a country. The Spanish had created a greedy empire based solely on their lust for gold and silver. These three countries were left in such an infantile state of development that not only was the war started over birdshit, but the Peru­vians, who were dragged into the affair through a secret treaty with their neighbor Bolivia, who had started the war against Chile without asking the Peruvians if they wanted to join, kept fighting long after they had lost the war but didn’t even know it.

  THE PLAYERS

  President Hilarion Daza — the averagely brutal bolivian dictator took control in a coup in 1876 at the age of thirty-six and broke a treaty by taxing the bird poop exports of neighboring Chile.

  Skinny — Raised mainly on the streets, he quickly scaled the ranks of the Bolivian military.

  Props — Robbed the treasury to pay off the soldiers who supported him during his coup.

  Pros — Never missed a coup.

  Cons — Decided to skip the war he had inadvertently started.

  Rafael Sotomayor — chilean “coordinator” of the war for President Anibal Pinto Garmendia, he was appointed to oversee the military heads and political rivals of Pinto.

  Skinny — Per
haps the first military spinmaster, he handed out voluminous press releases extolling Pinto’s military prowess and disowning his role for any defeats.

  Props — Repeatedly pissed off the military commanders without getting himself shot or his boss couped.

  Pros — Realized that an army needs a constant flow of food and water, something the generals often overlooked.

  Cons — Micromanaged the war to the point where he was countermanding orders of individual military units.

  THE GENERAL SITUATION

  On the western coast of Chile, Peru (and formerly Bolivia), where the bone-dry Atacama and Tarapacá deserts run up against the sea, the cool Humboldt current sweeps up from the South Pacific. The water is filled with plankton that at­tracts great schools of fish, which in turn become tasty meals for legions of birds.

  The birds feed from the sea and hang out on land, where they defecate prodigiously, mountainously. In this driest part of the planet, decades pass with no rainfall. Lacking water to wash the guano away, towering cliffs of birdshit grow to hundreds of feet all along the coast.

  In the middle of the nineteenth century, after the dissolu­tion of the Spanish Empire in South America, it was discov­ered that bird guano contained nitrogen, a key ingredient for fertilizer and explosives. Along the desert coastline, devoid of roads and visitors, the towering bird guano cliffs, the accu­mulated droppings of millennia, suddenly became incredibly valuable. They were the gifts of the birds that laid the golden poop.

  At first, Chile, Bolivia, and Peru cooperated to mine the guano, with the more economically adroit Chile making most of the investment and sharing the profits with Peru and Bolivia. Treaties established the boundaries between the na­tions and the tax rates to be paid on the smelly export.

  The Bolivian and Peruvian ruling classes of Spanish de­scent were happy to sit back and reap the rewards of yet an­other God-given resource like gold, silver, and tin, with most of the nasty work done by foreigners. The guano soon became a major revenue source for Peru, but with British and French companies reaping most of the profits, the locals were unable to create their own mining companies. Even though the bird poop business was booming, Peru was soon going broke because wealthy Peruvians invested their profits outside the country and neglected the rest of their own nation. Nothing was reinvested in Peru. Corruption and debt began to rise.

  Bolivia suffered from the same shortsighted complex. Known as Upper Peru in the days of the Spanish Peruvian viceroyalty, Bolivia was the site of Mount Potosi, from which flowed a huge portion of the silver sloshing around the Span­ish Empire. After liberation, the Bolivian elite were more than satisfied to do nothing except harvest the wealth gener­ated by the treasure that flowed out of the ground and to fight — almost continuously — over their share of it.

  The result was that Bolivia had long been plagued by a seemingly endless series of dictators pretending to be presi­dents. The long-suffering native populace, huddled in their ancient villages on the high Andean plain, the Altiplano, sur­vived the holocaust that befell their North American coun­terparts; the devout Spanish Crown had actually felt responsible to provide some measure of protection to the masses of potential new Catholic converts while the conti­nent was stripped of its mineral wealth. The natives were re­warded with survival but at the price of being trapped as second-tier residents in a third-tier nation, subsisting in a slavelike state of economic misery for centuries.

  Mariano Malgarejo took over in 1864 and proved to be an outstanding example of the type of bad dictators cycling through the presidential office of Bolivia. Malgarejo earned his stupid stripes by handing over a chunk of valuable Boliv­ian guanoland to Chile. Malgarejo’s giveaway hastened his end by the inevitable coup in 1872 at the hands of a dictator named Morales, who tried to undo some of Malgarejo’s mis­takes. His well-meaning attempts were frustrated when his own nephew gunned him down, but not before he completed a secret treaty in 1873 with Peru under which each side pledged to support its brother country if invaded by the annoyingly well-organized Chileans.

  In 1876 Hilarion Daza seized power from Morales in a coup of his own. Daza was a dumb and fiery soldier who quickly distinguished himself by raiding the treasury to pay his fellow officers of the palace guard, who had supported him loyally, and continued to do so until the next coup.

  That same year, Mariano Ignacio Prado became president of Peru, succeeding Manuel Pardo, at a time when all Peru­vian presidents apparently were required to share the same letters in their last names. Each successive president unsuc­cessfully attempted to bail the country out of the economic mess left by his decouped predecessor.

  Chile was, by contrast, a paragon of political normalcy, but by the 1870s its economy had started to slip and the country became more volatile.

  Borders drawn by the former Spanish Empire were some­what elastic. Not much thought or effort had been put into defining the actual lines separating the Spanish viceroyalties, especially in desert wastelands like the Atacama and Tarapacá. The mining of the guano proved to be so lucrative that Chile’s mining operations kept creeping farther north, to the irritation of the Bolivians. Amid this simmering squabble in 1877, a tsunami devastated the coast and wiped out Antofagasta, the main guano mining port. To rebuild it the Bolivi­ans wanted a tax, which the Chileans duly noted was illegal under their just-inked treaty. But Bolivian President Daza, finding the treasury he had recently raided short of funds, boldly slapped a tax on every shipment of exported birdshit.

  The Chileans refused to pay and, to emphasize their point, dispatched their newly purchased ironclads into the area. In response Daza canceled the Chilean mining contracts and ordered all of the Chilean mining equipment impounded and sold at auction. The Chileans showed up on the day of the auction — not with a check but with their military, and snagged a chunk of Bolivia’s coast along with the port of Antofagasta for good measure. The war was on. Chile asked Peru to abrogate its treaty with Bolivia. But Peru could not break out of its dictatorial death spiral with Bolivia and spurned the Chilean offer.

  On April 5, 1879, Chile declared war on Bolivia and Peru.

  WHAT HAPPENED: OPERATION “THUNDERPOOP”

  The guano regions were some of the driest and harshest areas on earth. Because no one lived there permanently, the region possessed virtually no roads, and those that did exist ran from the mines straight to the coast. Without any north– south routes, whoever controlled the sea-lanes would have the ability to move troops at will and could easily win the war.

  Even though Chile had about half the combined population of Peru and Bolivia, its military was stronger. Its regular army had 3,000 men armed with sixteen new artillery pieces, some machine guns, and repeating rifles. It also had an 18,000-man national guard outfitted with U.S. Civil War–era muskets. The navy boasted precisely two ironclads, the Cochrane and Blanco Encalada, that possessed the firepower and strength to dominate the Peruvian Navy. The soldiers were poorly paid, however, and the army lacked a medical corps. In addition, the top officers of both the army and navy were political appoin­tees lacking significant military experience. Still, by the stan­dards of South America, Chile stood as a major power.

  Chile’s President Pinto faced an even bigger problem, however. His top generals also happened to be the leaders of the opposing political party; a resounding victory in the field could catapult any one of them into his office. A defeat, however, would fall on Pinto’s head, also turning him from office. It was a classic no-win situation. Pinto cleverly solved the problem by appointing Rafael Sotomayor as the war “co­ordinator” to oversee the potentially victorious service chiefs, stealing their glory or handing them the blame.

  Reflecting their economies, the armies of Peru and Bolivia stank. Peru’s standing army of 5,000 men was haphazardly equipped with a hodgepodge of guns. As befitting a dictator­ship more concerned with infighting than defending its bor­ders, the regiments were stationed close to the main cities, to lend a hand during any coup action
.

  Peru’s navy sported two English-made ironclads. While solid ships, they paled in comparison to the two Chilean ships. Even more problematic for the Peruvians, their ships had been manned mostly by Chileans. When the war started these sailors got kicked out, leaving the ships thinly staffed by the poorly trained Peruvians.

  Bolivia’s state-of-war preparedness stank even worse. Despite having a coastline at this point in their history, it had no navy. Their army was just one step better, with slightly more than 2,000 men, principally skilled in over­throwing yesterday’s dictators as opposed to facing well-armed soldiers in the field. The best troops were probably the “Colorados” regiment of the palace guard (from which President Daza had ascended), numbering 600 seasoned coupmakers armed with modern repeating rifles. The army was also so top heavy it was a miracle it didn’t topple over. Of the 2,000 troops more than 600 were officers, almost all of whom had been promoted for political loyalty. Estab­lishing a pattern of ridiculous missteps, at the war’s outset Bolivia promised its Peruvian allies it would field an army of 12,000 soldiers, a figure even casual observers knew was impossible. Still, in Bolivia’s capital, La Paz, war fever ran as high as the Andes. Four thousand or so volunteers, some from Boliv­ia’s best families, raised lavishly funded new regiments, wear­ing white trousers and jackets of various colors signifying their dandily organized regiment. The paucity of weapons didn’t dampen their enthusiasm for what everyone predicted to be a short and victorious war, filled with glory. The feeling seemed to be a cocktail-party war for the La Paz jet set.

  To start the land part of the war, a force of Chileans had moved against the tiny Bolivian town of Calama. The town was defended by about 135 citizens with a smattering of sol­diers, all armed with a jumble of old and barely functioning guns. On March 22 the Chileans marched across a river into town and scattered the defenders. One holdout remained, a civilian named Eduardo Abaroa. Surrounded, he poured fire from two rifles at the enemy. The Chileans asked for his sur­render. He rejected the offer, declaring, “Let your grand­mother surrender, dammit,” and the Chileans shot him down. For his defiance, generations of Bolivian children would repeat his stout declaration of honor, and a bronze statue of him stands prominently in La Paz. Bolivia had es­tablished its approach for the war; defeat followed by mar­tyrdom.