The War In The Andes

The Maoist guerrilla group Shining Path launched its violent campaign against the government in Peru’s Ayacucho region in 1980. When the military and counterinsurgency police forces were dispatched to oppose the insurrection, the violence quickly escalated. The peasant community of Sarhua was at the epicenter of the conflict, and this small village is the focus of Unveiling Secrets of War in the Peruvian Andes. There, nearly a decade after the event, Olga M. González follows the tangled thread of a public secret: the disappearance of Narciso Huicho, the man blamed for plunging Sarhua into a conflict that would sunder the community for years. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and a novel use of a cycle of paintings, González examines the relationship between secrecy and memory. Her attention to the gaps and silences within both the Sarhuinos’ oral histories and the paintings reveals the pervasive reality of secrecy for people who have endured episodes of intense violence. González conveys how public secrets turn the process of unmasking into a complex mode of truth telling. Ultimately, public secrecy is an intricate way of “remembering to forget” that establishes a normative truth that makes life livable in the aftermath of a civil war.

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.

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.

Berlin 1937, Adolph Hitler and his cabinet meet with representatives of a tiny Latin American nation. Years later, the unfolding consequences of that fateful meeting plunge a continent into flames. New World War concludes the saga begun in Axis of Andes. These stunning alternate histories explore the baroque and tragic journey of Latin America from independence to the depression, and chronicling a dark history that might have been. In Axis of Andes, a tiny change alters the outcome of an election. Rippling outwards, Fascist movements gain more momentum, local politics unravel in new directions. What in our history was a small brushfire war between Ecuador and Peru becomes a death struggle as a prepared Ecuador fights back. As the world looks on, Chile attacks Peru, the Andean wars begin and the conflict brings invasions, counter-invasions, trench war, sea battles and brutal contests extending from mountains to rain forests. New World War shows us the Andean powers stalemated and growing desperate. None of them have the power to knock their adversaries out of the war. Instead, one by one other nations are drawn in as the warring nations seek advantage, Bolivia falls into civil war as Peru and Chile invade. Beyond the Andes mountains, in the headwaters and tributaries to the Amazon, dueling riverboats and jungle fighters from Ecuador and Peru blunder into Brazil, and in the north and south, Argentina and Colombia meddle for their own advantage. New World War is written both as a history and as a series of compelling narratives. It features deep examinations of the societies and economies of each combatant, and exploring the underlying tensions and stresses, the fault lines and tectonic divides that drive the internal politics and international agendas of each combatant. Away from the big pictures, we see scenes of the war and the combatants from their own perspective as the world falls apart around them. The Axis of Andes and New World War is a thrilling, yet scholarly, Alternate History series which ultimately rewrites the map of South America.

Latin America experienced an epochal cycle of revolutionary upheavals and insurgencies during the twentieth century, from the Mexican Revolution of 1910 through the mobilizations and terror in Central America, the Southern Cone, and the Andes during the 1970s and 1980s. In his introduction to A Century of Revolution, Greg Grandin argues that the dynamics of political violence and terror in Latin America are so recognizable in their enforcement of domination, their generation and maintenance of social exclusion, and their propulsion of historical change, that historians have tended to take them for granted, leaving unexamined important questions regarding their form and meaning. The essays in this groundbreaking collection take up these questions, providing a sociologically and historically nuanced view of the ideological hardening and accelerated polarization that marked Latin America’s twentieth century. Attentive to the interplay among overlapping local, regional, national, and international fields of power, the contributors focus on the dialectical relations between revolutionary and counterrevolutionary processes and their unfolding in the context of U.S. hemispheric and global hegemony. Through their fine-grained analyses of events in Chile, Colombia, Cuba, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Peru, they suggest a framework for interpreting the experiential nature of political violence while also analyzing its historical causes and consequences. In so doing, they set a new agenda for the study of revolutionary change and political violence in twentieth-century Latin America. Contributors Michelle Chase Jeffrey L. Gould Greg Grandin Lillian Guerra Forrest Hylton Gilbert M. Joseph Friedrich Katz Thomas Miller Klubock Neil Larsen Arno J. Mayer Carlota McAllister Jocelyn Olcott Gerardo Rénique Corey Robin Peter Winn

Through a series of comparative case studies, the author demonstrates that the conflicts and struggles over capitalist globalization in the Andes are intricately connected to the political power of the military in the region.

Berlin 1937, Adolph Hitler and his cabinet meet with representatives of a tiny Latin American nation. Three years later, the unfolding consequences of that fateful meeting plunge a continent into flames. What, in our history, was an almost bloodless brushfire conflict between Ecuador and Peru, escalates into a life and death struggle which spreads relentlessly to almost every country in South America, bringing death and destruction. Axis of Andes is a stunning alternate history, exploring the baroque and tragic journey of Latin America from independence to the depression, and chronicling a dark history that might have been. A tiny change ends up altering the outcome of an election. Rippling outwards, Fascist movements gain more momentum, local politics unravel in new directions. Dominos cascade as the war spreads steadily, involving country after country in a death struggle. Deep examinations of the history, societies and economies of each combatant reveal the underlying tensions and stresses, the fault lines and tectonic divides that drive the internal politics and international agendas of each combatant. We see scenes of the war and the combatants from their own perspective as the world falls apart around them. Written as both a history and as a series of compelling narratives, The Axis of Andes is the first part of a two part Alternate History series which ultimately rewrites the map of South America. Volume One begins the war with the Invasion of Ecuador, the March on Lima, expanding to trench warfare between Peru and Chile, sea battles between Chile and Peru, and a jungle war slowly spreading through the interior. Followed by New World War, chronicles the resulting Bolivian Civil war, Brazil's rain forest war and the inevitable engagement of Argentina, Paraguay, Columbia in the conflict. Over everything, the spectre of the United States, distracted by European and Asian theatres, looms darkly.

A narrative history of the unlikely Maoist rebellion that terrorized Peru even after the fall of global Communism. On May 17, 1980, on the eve of Peru’s presidential election, five masked men stormed a small town in the Andean heartland. They set election ballots ablaze and vanished into the night, but not before planting a red hammer-and-sickle banner in the town square. The lone man arrested the next morning later swore allegiance to a group called Shining Path. The tale of how this ferocious group of guerrilla insurgents launched a decade-long reign of terror, and how brave police investigators and journalists brought it to justice, may be the most compelling chapter in modern Latin American history, but the full story has never been told. Described by a U.S. State Department cable as “cold-blooded and bestial,” Shining Path orchestrated bombings, assassinations, and massacres across the cities, countryside, and jungles of Peru in a murderous campaign to seize power and impose a Communist government. At its helm was the professor-turned-revolutionary Abimael Guzmán, who launched his single-minded insurrection alongside two women: his charismatic young wife, Augusta La Torre, and the formidable Elena Iparraguirre, who married Guzmán soon after Augusta’s mysterious death. Their fanatical devotion to an outmoded and dogmatic ideology, and the military’s bloody response, led to the death of nearly 70,000 Peruvians. Orin Starn and Miguel La Serna’s narrative history of Shining Path is both panoramic and intimate, set against the socioeconomic upheavals of Peru’s rocky transition from military dictatorship to elected democracy. They take readers deep into the heart of the rebellion, and the lives and country it nearly destroyed. We hear the voices of the mountain villagers who organized a fierce rural resistance, and meet the irrepressible black activist María Elena Moyano and the Nobel Prize–winning novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, who each fought to end the bloodshed. Deftly written, The Shining Path is an exquisitely detailed account of a little-remembered war that must never be forgotten.