A one-off map I made imagining a scenario where Juan José Latorre, a Chilean naval commander, makes a fateful split-second decision during an alternate Battle of Punta Gruesa that ends up costing Chile the War of the Pacific.
On the 14th of February 1879, 200 Chilean soldiers landed in and occupied the coastal town of Antofagasta in the Bolivian Litoral department, much of which was claimed by Chile. This military action followed a decades-long border dispute between the two nations, and was the direct result of the Bolivian violation of the 1874 Boundary Treaty a year earlier. Within a month, with the official Bolivian declaration of war, the War of the Pacific had begun.
To many foreign observers, the direction which the conflict could take seemed unclear in its opening stages. Peru and Bolivia, military allies since an 1873 treaty between the two nations, both had struggling economies and little in the way of fighting capability on land or sea. Similarly, Chile, a relatively more prosperous nation to the south, had its military contingent reduced in preceding years from 3,776 in 1867 to just 2,400 by the outbreak of war. No whole Chilean unit was deployed north of Valparaíso, some 1050 kilometres from the border with Bolivia.
With the harsh and entirely arid climate of the Litoral department, the main land theatre for the war, it was clear that moving troops and supplies around here would prove to be incredibly challenging. As such, the need for domination of the war's naval theatre quickly became apparent to either side. It was in this theatre that Bolivia's ally Peru successfully swung the war effort in their favour.
After the crushing defeat of Chilean naval commander Arturo Prat at the Battle of Iquique in May 1879, Peru was granted a boost in naval morale that would persist in the coming months. Disaster struck once again for the Chilean navy when the Peruvian ironclads
Huáscar and
Independencia engaged the Chilean ironclads
Almirante Cochrane and
Blanco Encalada in June 1879 off Punta Gruesa. The battle lasted for hours, and the stalemate was broken when a botched ramming attempt by the
Almirante Cochrane, commanded by Juan José Latorre, left the vessel with severe damage, succumbing to persistent fire from the two Peruvian vessels and sinking just thirty minutes later. Sustaining heavy damage itself, the
Blanco Encalada attempted to flee south, only to be caught up with and boarded by the crew of the
Independencia, forcing the ship's surrender.
With the two flagships of the Chilean navy either sunk or captured, Peru quickly appeared to have asserted its dominance over the naval theatre of the conflict. Chile's defeat at Punta Gruesa greatly hampered the military's ability to reinforce and resupply its occupied positions in the Litoral at Antofagasta and Calama, making their defensive lines vulnerable. October 1879 was to prove to be another turning point, when a combined Bolivian-Peruvian offensive won a close victory in the Battle of Antofagasta, driving out the undersupplied Chilean forces.
After an intelligence leak from the Argentine senate in October suggested that Argentina was preparing to intervene on the side of Bolivia and Peru so as to forcefully take its claimed territories in Patagonia (Argentina itself had been offered a position in the alliance in 1873), serious fears arose in Chile regarding the prospect of fighting a two-front war. With little hope of reclaiming either Antofagasta or naval dominance in the conflict, Chilean diplomats met with officials from Peru and Bolivia to discuss peace terms by the end of 1879, eager to ratify a treaty before an Argentine declaration of war.
The Boundary Treaty of 1879, signed in Lima in December, nullified the previous treaties of 1866 and 1874, and firmly defined the Chilean-Bolivian border at the 24th parallel. Though this did not account for Bolivian claims as far south as the 25th parallel, it served as a victory for Bolivia to have its coastal territory finally secured.
In the years following Bolivia's victory, Chilean companies, and many Chilean citizens, were expelled from the Litoral department, with many of the mining operations being inherited by Peruvian corporations. Antofagasta went from being an overwhelmingly Chilean town to having just 36% of its population made up of Chilean-born inhabitants. These actions of expulsion were to become a major source for diplomatic tension between Chile and Bolivia in coming decades, with Chile still labelling these efforts as 'criminal' to this day.
