"...despite his pedigree, the State Department quite understandably did not exactly trust Adelbert Hay to stick to the script after his freelancing adventures at the start of the war and thus he was not one of the formal plenipotentiaries who would negotiate Chile's formal terms of unilateral, unqualified and unequivocal surrender. Some of this it turned out to be a largely internal feud within the State Department; Root, having been a junior member of the Blaine administration, viewed it as his personal duty to see to it that Chile was severely punished, and he was extremely leery of the glory of that mission being absorbed by the similarly-vengeful son of the man who had had his job as chief diplomat in 1885. Thirty years of compounding interest were about to come due.
Hughes had of course been a law student during the Chilean-American War and so had none of the genuinely personal contempt men of Root's generation of Liberal leaders held Chile in - as discussed in Chapter 17, he had had to be persuaded to pursue "Chile First" to begin with. The matter was thus deferred in part to Root and the South American allies, and an unlikely protagonist emerged on that front - Lindley Garrison, William Hearst's Secretary of State. Garrison's role in transferring the matter of the deteriorating relations with the Confederacy to the incoming Hughes administration is credited with leaving Root prepared ahead of the Niagara Conference and indeed Garrison and Root became informal friends who regarded each other with a healthy amount of respect and collegiality; the latter would consult Garrison on a great many matters, and praised his return to State in 1921 as "leaving the Republic in the best hands possible." Garrison was also, despite hailing from the more traditionally isolationist Democratic Party [1], one of the chief architects of the Axis, having brought the alliance with Argentina into force in 1911 which had set the stage for Hay's courting of Peru and Bolivia. As the contours of the push to force ruinous terms on Chile became more clear and accepted amongst the four victorious powers, he for that reason seemed a natural choice for leading the American peace delegation despite not being a Liberal. It helped that Speaker Clark and Senator Kern were adamant that, despite the Executive holding superiority in matters of foreign policy, they expected that the plenipotentiaries headed to South America be a bipartisan tandem.
Thus, after Hughes agreed that Root should not go himself, former Secretary of State Lindley Garrison and Assistant Secretary of State Henry Phillips - a Pennsylvanian Liberal career diplomat who had experience with Latin portfolios, having before the war served as Ambassador to Chile - set off for the first of many congresses that would determine a peace treaty to end hostilities bilaterally..."
- American Charlemagne: The Trials and Triumphs of Charles Evans Hughes
"...Buenos Aires was too threatened by proximity to the front, Santiago too unstable, La Paz too remote, and Asuncion was sandwiched between two belligerent powers clinging desperately to armed neutrality. The submarine campaign in the Caribbean was too fresh to make anywhere in the Spanish Insular Provinces safe, and neither Colombia nor Venezuela were willing to host the treaty conference, while Guayaquil was too oppressively hot in summer and Quito's mountain air too thin. Lima thus made sense as the place for the peace terms to be imposed on the Chilean delegation that arrived hat in hand to learn just how bad it would be, both due to climactic reasons and that it was the capital of one of the victorious belligerents, its accessibility by sea, and that it was one of the classic centers of Spanish cultural power in the Americas.
The negotiations of the Treaty of Lima were in part hashed out beforehand in many senses; Peru, Bolivia and Argentina all had straightforward territorial designs and claims dating back to the early 1880s that they had secretly amongst themselves more or less agreed to. The Leguia brothers - Roberto, President of Peru, and Augusto, a predecessor in the same office and now his Foreign Secretary - had even drafted the map that would be implemented and received cursory approval of the Montes administration in Bolivia. Indeed, American Assistant Secretary of State Henry Phillips huffed upon arrival that he was unsure why exactly he had come, since "the Latins have already drawn up the treaty before our boat even arrived."
Nonetheless, the affair was important as a show of raw Axis power. The United States delegation arrived with battleship escort and an all-gun salute was held off the coast of Lima for cheering crowds to see. The Figueroa brothers, powerful figures in the new Chilean government, arrived in a fugue, seemingly embarrassed to be there, not realizing the political trap that their enemies back in Santiago had set for two men viewed as hapless, harmless and well-meaning weathervanes. The view amongst all four Axis powers at Lima was collectively that Chile was a rogue, dangerous power that had expanded geographically at the point of a sword at the expense of her neighbors and was unusually responsible for the deterioration of relations in the early 1910s in the region; indeed, former American Secretary of State Garrison went so far as to suggest that Chile's belligerence had pulled Mexico and Brazil into the war whereas otherwise they may have stayed neutral. This line of thinking, overwhelmingly prevalent at Lima, was ahistorical but straightforward - Chile had defenestrated Peru and Bolivia in 1879, with that show of force cowed Argentina into swallowing a territorial settlement that favored Santiago two years later, and then given the United States an embarrassing bloody nose on the world stage in 1885. The Axis was out for blood towards Chile in a way that was matched perhaps only by American hatred of the Confederacy, and blood it would have.
The United States extracted its price first, getting Chile to agree to a policy of unilateral free trade with all four powers that was non-renegotiable. Chile was also to pay the United States a thousand dollars, in gold or silver, per soldier killed on land or sea and pay the full cost of the vessels sunk or captured at Chimbote. After it handed over what little was left of its navy to Peru and Bolivia, it was forbidden from putting to sea any vessel exceeding two thousand long tons displacement for a period of ten years and any vessel exceeding five thousand long tons thereafter for a period of a ninety years, and in perpetuity its navy was never to exceed a cumulative gross long tonnage of twenty thousand tons. The hated Patco conglomerate used to invest in and hold influence over Chile's economy would be granted even greater powers over Chile's mining industry, fisheries, and logging; the repayments would be as high as a five hundred thousand dollars per year in war reparations over a period of twenty years, and Chile was to forever drop its diplomatic efforts to prevent the United States from purchasing the Galapagos Archipelago.
These claims alone were shockingly crippling, but just the beginning. Peru demanded all lost territories from the Saltpeter War, extending their southern province back south of the Rio Camarones to include desired Iquique, and also reparations of two hundred thousand dollars per year and a restriction on the Chilean Army as a "national guard" of only five thousand men with ten thousand in reserve, a provision Chile was able to negotiate up to twenty thousand and thirty thousand, respectively. Bolivia, having taken the worst losses in 1879 and with some of its previous lands in Argentine hands thanks to border settlements in ensuing years, demanded not only their irredenta of decades past but further land up to the 25th parallel and 50 degrees south, thus placing the small port of Taltal within their claims in addition to most of the Atacama.
Argentina went for the jugular. Represented by former President Alem's increasingly politically estranged nephew Hipolito Yrigoyen, who sought to make a name for himself ahead of upcoming Presidential elections, Buenos Aires demanded a reversion to the 1881 settlement that placed Tierra del Fuego entirely within Chilean hands. The vast tundras of the end of the Southern Cone were to become Argentine south of the Deseado River not just to the Atlantic but in the opposite direction, too, with Lake Buenos Aires and its western outlet, the Rio Baker, becoming the new frontier between the two countries west of the Andes. In one fell swoop, Argentina was now a bicoastal power - it made no financial claims upon Chile, in part because its leaders understood that there was probably little left to claim and because it also understood the value that all this land could potentially produce. In all, the treaty stripped Chile of close to a quarter of its territory - in direct violation of the spirit of the Pan-American Congresses, but alas those had never had the force of treaties - essentially placed its entire economic output towards the purpose of enriching its conquerors, and had also left the country defenselessly supine and at the mercy of the Axis should it fail to adhere to these terms. It was hard to think of a more deliberately punitive peace treaty in modern times, and if the Desventuradas or Grito de 18 de Enero had not marked the decisive end of the Old Republic, then Lima most certainly did.
The Figueroa brothers understood, quite plainly, that these terms would be political suicide back in Santiago but also that the Axis was out to humiliate Chile and cripple it permanently. Javier Angel, the more canny of the two, approached the British ambassador in Lima who had been a guest of honor at the proceedings to beg for his intervention; but with the Chilean Navy at the bottom of the ocean and public order looking likely to disintegrate whether Chile fought on, this time under partial enemy occupation, or chose to swallow the poison pill of the peace terms, Britain had little interest in defending her one-time client, with "Perfidious Albion" now entirely in on cultivating its relationships with Argentina and Peru.
Chile was thus left to be dismantled from north to south, stripped over her far north and far south and left with reparations that would take over a generation to pay. "We have become a Haiti with penguins," Emiliano Figueroa declared in despair as he and his brother sailed south again to the deaths of their political careers having affixed their names to a document understandably seen even amongst their allies in the Council of the Republic as high treason but which Chile had foisted upon it. Their country was broken, doomed to poverty and humiliated for the world to see, and now tottering on the edge of civil war almost as soon as the ink had dried on June 17, 1915.
But, as far as the other powers were concerned, Chile was out of the war and probably out of interfering in their foreign policy ambitions for good, too..." [2]
- War in the Cone
[1] The party foreign policies are quite scrambled up ITTL, compared to Wilsonian internationalism and the rigid isolationism of OTL's Republicans like Lodge...
[2] So here we see the USA indulge its dark side and worst instincts a bit (to say nothing of the firesale on Chilean land indulged by its allies!), and we'll have a Wiki update and then the reaction in Chile proper, which I felt deserved its own update.
