Andean Tragedy

The year 1879 marked the beginning of one of the longest, bloodiest conflicts of nineteenth-century Latin America. The War of the Pacific pitted Peru and Bolivia against Chile in a struggle initiated over a festering border dispute. The conflict saw Chile's and Peru's armored warships vying for control of sea lanes and included one of the first examples of the use of naval torpedoes.

This ecological history of peasant society in the Peruvian Andes focuses on the politics of irrigation and water management in three villages whose terraces and canal systems date back to Inca times. Set in a remote valley, the book tells a story of domination and resulting social decline, showing how basic changes in the use of land, water, and labor have been pivotal in transforming the indigenous way of life. The author carries out a comparison of contemporary practices in communities that vary systematically along certain dimensions. He analyzes the communities’ similarities and differences in hydraulic organization, landscaping, water use, and other variables. Strikingly diverse patterns appear in local practice, which prove to be the key to unraveling the area’s history. The book concludes by describing the recent intensification of a water conflict. This struggle between peasants and former landlords ultimately led villagers to rise up against the national government. The story culminates in the violent intrusion of the revolutionary group known as Shining Path.

The only comprehensive history of Andean South America from initial settlement to the present, this useful book focuses on Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, the four countries where the Andes have played a major role in shaping history. Although Henderson emphasizes the period since the winning of independence in 1825, he argues that the region’s republican history cannot be explained without a clear understanding of what happened in the pre-Hispanic and colonial eras Henderson carefully explores the complex relationship between the Andean peoples and their land up until the fall of the Inka Empire in 1532 before addressing the Spanish conquest and the colonial aftermath, emphasizing the syncretism often unwillingly forced upon the original inhabitants of the region. His account of the nineteenth century discusses the attempts of the Andean elite to fashion modern nation-states in the face of many divisive factors, including race. The final chapters carry the story from 1930 to the present as the Andean countries debated different ways to create a more inclusive and prosperous society.

The War of the Pacific (1879–1883) looms large in the history of Peru and Chile. Upending the prevailing historiographical focus on the history of conflict, Beyond Patriotic Phobias explores points of connection shared between Peruvians and Chileans despite war. Through careful archival work, historian Joshua Savala highlights the overlooked cooperative relationships of workers across borders, including maritime port workers, doctors, and the police. These groups, in both countries, were intimately tied together through different forms of labor: they worked the ships and ports, studied and treated disease transmission in the face of a cholera outbreak, and conducted surveillance over port and maritime activities because of perceived threats like transnational crime and labor organizing. By following the movement of people, diseases, and ideas, Savala reconstructs the circulation that created a South American Pacific world. The resulting story is one in which communities, classes, and states formed transnationally through varied, if uneven, forms of cooperation.

For centuries, the Andes have caught the imagination of travelers, inspiring fear and wonder. The groundbreaking scientist Alexander von Humboldt claimed that ""everything here is grander and more majestic than in the Swiss Alps, the Pyrenees, the Carpathians, the Apennines, and all other mountains I have known."" Rivaled in height only by the Himalayas and stretching more than 4,500 miles, the sheer immensity of the Andes is matched by its concentration of radically contrasting scenery and climates, and the rich and diverse cultures of the people who live there. In this remarkable book, travel writer Michael Jacobs journeys across seven different countries, from the balmy Caribbean to the inhospitable islands of the Tierra del Fuego, through the relics of ancient civilizations and the remnants of colonial rule, retracing the footsteps of previous travelers. His route begins in Venezuela, following the path of the great nineteenth–century revolutionary Simón Bolívar, but soon diverges to include accounts from sources as varied as Humboldt, the young Charles Darwin, and Bolívar's extraordinary and courageous mistress, Manuela Saenz. On his way, Jacobs uncovers the stories of those who have shared his fascination and discovers the secrets of a region steeped in history, science, and myth.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A harrowing, moving memoir of the 1972 plane crash that left its survivors stranded on a glacier in the Andes—and one man’s quest to lead them all home—now in a special edition for 2022, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the crash, featuring a new introduction by the author “In straightforward, staggeringly honest prose, Nando Parrado tells us what it took—and what it actually felt like—to survive high in the Andes for seventy-two days after having been given up for dead.”—Jon Krakauer, author of Into the Wild “In the first hours there was nothing, no fear or sadness, just a black and perfect silence.” Nando Parrado was unconscious for three days before he woke to discover that the plane carrying his rugby team to Chile had crashed deep in the Andes, killing many of his teammates, his mother, and his sister. Stranded with the few remaining survivors on a lifeless glacier and thinking constantly of his father’s grief, Parrado resolved that he could not simply wait to die. So Parrado, an ordinary young man with no particular disposition for leadership or heroism, led an expedition up the treacherous slopes of a snowcapped mountain and across forty-five miles of frozen wilderness in an attempt to save his friends’ lives as well as his own. Decades after the disaster, Parrado tells his story with remarkable candor and depth of feeling. Miracle in the Andes, a first-person account of the crash and its aftermath, is more than a riveting tale of true-life adventure; it is a revealing look at life at the edge of death and a meditation on the limitless redemptive power of love.

With the break up of the Spanish empire in South America, the continent split into nine independent states with often ill-defined boundaries. One of these was that between Bolivia and Chile, which were separated by the Atacama Desert, tone of the driest regions in the world. When it was realized that the area contained nitrates that the world needed for explosives and fertilizer the scene was set for the inevitable clash. When war broke out in February 1879, both sides found themselves unprepared for war. Rapid armament followed as the Peruvians were dragged into the conflict in support of their Bolivian allies. Initially there was a tiresome naval war of blockade and guerre de course. Two naval actions decided the naval campaign in favor of the Chileans who then proceeded to use their naval power to attack the Allies’ isolated armies and capture Lima two years after war had broken out. Fighting then developed into a cruel and ruthless guerrilla war in the Andes, sometimes even pitting Peruvian against Peruvian, before the Peruvians finally concede defeat. The war was notable in the West for fights involving ironclads, particularly the Battle of Angamos, which saw the only time ironclads were pitted against each other between the Battle of Lissa and the Battle of the Yalu River. The war helped formulate Captain Mahan’s thoughts in “The Influence of Sea Power upon History”. The land war was more or less ignored abroad, although it included some of the biggest battles ever fought on the continent, using all the latest technology, including breech loading rifles and cannons and machine guns. The armies on both sides initially lacked experience and training as well as modern equipment. The Bolivian Army started the war with 806 officers and only 1369 other ranks! In the end the Chileans won because of their more stable government, better financial situation and their control of the sea, due to their two superior ironclads. From the Atacama to the Andes tells the brutal struggle between two sides to control the wealth of the Atacama and for retention of Bolivia’s coast. The result was that Chile gained the mineral resources of the “New North” and Bolivia became the second landlocked country on the continent, paving the way for the even more catastrophic Chaco War 50 years later.