Peru-Bolivian Confederation

The Peru-Bolivian Confederation is a federal republic of the central Andes, comprising the three states of North Peru, South Peru and Bolivia, with its federal capital at Tacna and about forty-eight million people on two and a quarter million square kilometres. It is the oldest surviving federation in the Americas after the United Kingdom of America itself, having been constituted by the Pact of Tacna in 1836 and never dissolved.

It was not expected to last three years. It was made by Andrés de Santa Cruz, a Bolivian soldier and administrator of Spanish and Indigenous descent who governed Bolivia, invaded a Peru that had asked him in, divided it into two states and joined both to his own under a federal pact of which he was Supreme Protector. The scheme was intelligent, was resented by Peruvian and Bolivian nationalists alike, and was regarded in Santiago and Buenos Aires as an intolerable concentration of power on the Pacific coast. Chile declared war within a year and sent two expeditions to destroy it.

They were abandoned. Diego Portales, the Chilean minister who had made the war and was the only man in Chile committed to it, was seized and shot by mutinous troops of his own army in June 1837, and the war party in Santiago never recovered. The second expedition sailed, achieved nothing, and came home. The Chilean victory at Yungay that every strategist of the period expected in 1839 did not happen, because the campaign that would have produced it was never mounted, and the Confederation Santa Cruz had built survived the only period in which it could easily have been destroyed.

It has been at war with Chile once since, and it lost. The War of the Pacific, fought from 1879 to 1883 over the nitrate districts, took the Atacama and Tarapacá and left the Confederation’s southern coast in Chilean hands. It also did the thing nobody predicted, which is that the union held. A federation of three states that had spent forty years arguing about whether it should exist discovered under invasion that it preferred to exist, and no serious proposal to dissolve it has been made since.

The reason it is now beyond argument is simpler and is geographical. Chile took Bolivia’s own coast in 1884. Bolivia reaches the sea through the ports of South Peru, at Arica and Matarani, because it is part of the same country as they are. Dissolve the Confederation and Bolivia is landlocked the next morning, and every Bolivian knows it. The union that was imposed on Bolivia in 1836 is the thing that keeps Bolivia on the ocean, and that is why a question settled by argument everywhere else was settled here by a map.

The name

The Confederation has been the Peru-Bolivian Confederation since 1836 and the name has survived every proposal to change it, of which there have been many and most of which came from Peruvians who disliked the ordering.

The states are North Peru, South Peru and Bolivia, which is Santa Cruz’s original division and is the source of the arithmetic that governs everything: two of the three states are Peruvian and one is Bolivian, and the two Peruvian states together contain about two thirds of the people. Peruvians have argued since 1836 that a country two thirds of whose population is Peruvian ought not to be a country in which Peru is outvoted two states to one, and Bolivians have replied that this is precisely the arrangement Bolivia agreed to and the only reason it agreed.

In ordinary speech the country is la Confederación and its people are confederados, though almost nobody uses the second word about themselves. A person from the Confederation, asked what they are, will say Peruvian or Bolivian, and will say so without any sense of contradiction, in the manner of a Scot or a Bavarian.

History

Independence, and the problem it left

The Spanish viceroyalties of Peru and of the Río de la Plata were broken up in the wars of independence between 1809 and 1826, and what emerged in the central Andes was two republics that had been one economy.

Upper Peru, the silver country around Potosí and La Paz, had been governed from Lima for two centuries and from Buenos Aires for forty years, and in 1825 was constituted as an independent republic under Bolívar’s name. Lower Peru kept Lima, the coast and the viceregal apparatus. The mountains did not notice the border. Silver moved north, mercury and manufactures moved south, and the Aymara and Quechua populations on both sides of the line were the same populations.

Every serious person in both republics understood that the division was artificial, and the twenty years after independence were consumed by rival schemes to undo it, each of which foundered on the question of who would be in charge.

Santa Cruz, and the Pact of Tacna

Andrés de Santa Cruz was born at La Paz in 1792, the son of a Spanish official and a woman of the Indigenous nobility descended from the lords of Huarina, and he never concealed either half. He fought on both sides in the wars of independence, governed Bolivia from 1829, and made it the best-administered state on the continent: a legal code, a functioning treasury, a university, roads and a currency that held.

Peru descended in the same years into a succession of coups, and in 1835 one Peruvian faction invited him in. He came, he won, and instead of annexing the country he divided it.

The Pact of Tacna of 1836 constituted three states, each with its own government, assembly and courts, joined in a Confederation under a Supreme Protector with authority over foreign affairs, war, the currency and the customs. North Peru was governed from Lima, South Peru from Arequipa, and Bolivia from La Paz. The federal capital was placed at Tacna, a town of no great size on the southern coast, which was neither Lima nor La Paz and was chosen for exactly that reason.

The Chilean wars, 1836 to 1839

Chile declared war in December 1836, and the Viceroy of the British River Plate, on his own authority, sent a force north over the Chaco and Tarija, which London disowned. The Chilean case, made by the minister Diego Portales, was that a union of Peru and Bolivia would dominate the Pacific coast, that Valparaíso would be reduced to a feeder of Callao, and that no Chilean interest could survive it. It was a commercial argument dressed as a strategic one and Portales was frank about it in private.

It was his war and almost nobody else’s. The Chilean congress was unenthusiastic, the army was worse, and the first expedition of 1837 achieved nothing and signed a treaty of withdrawal that Portales repudiated.

On 3 June 1837 Portales was seized by mutinous troops at Quillota and shot. The mutiny was suppressed and its leaders executed, and the war outlived him by two years in name. It did not outlive him in substance. The second expedition sailed in 1838, occupied Lima briefly, could not hold it, could not bring the Confederation’s army to a decisive action, and was withdrawn in 1839 with nothing settled. A third was proposed in Santiago and was not voted.

The Confederation survived because the one man who wanted it destroyed was killed by his own soldiers, which Confederate historiography states as plainly as that and does not dress up. Santa Cruz’s own view, recorded in a letter of 1840, was that he had been saved by an assassin and that a state whose existence turned on such a thing had better make itself indispensable quickly.

Santa Cruz, and the making of a constitution out of a person

Santa Cruz held the Protectorate for fourteen years, from 1836 to 1850, and the question of what he did with them is the central argument of Confederate history.

He did not found a dynasty and he did not leave willingly. The Pact gave the Protector a ten-year term renewable once, which he took, and by the late 1840s the succession was the country’s whole politics. What ended it was not a coup but a coalition: the Peruvian states’ assemblies, which had spent a decade resenting a Bolivian Protector, combined with the faction of his own government that wanted the office made elective, and in 1850 he accepted a revised Pact that converted the Protectorate into a presidency of six years, not renewable, and stood down.

He was sixty-eight, he lived another fifteen years, and he spent them writing about the Confederation and being consulted about it. His reputation in the three states is different in each: in Bolivia he is the founder, in South Peru he is the man who made Arequipa a capital, and in North Peru he is the foreign general who divided the country, and all three views are taught.

The revision of 1850 is what turned a personal regime into a constitution. A federation built around one man’s authority survived the removal of the man, which is the test such arrangements usually fail, and the Confederation dates its constitutional order from 1850 rather than from 1836 for that reason.

Guano, and the money that built the union

The forty years after 1840 were paid for by bird excrement.

The guano islands off the Peruvian coast held the most concentrated nitrogen fertiliser in the world, European agriculture wanted all of it, and the Confederation held effectively the entire supply. The guano revenues between 1845 and 1875 were the largest windfall any American state received in the nineteenth century, and they went, as such windfalls do, on debt service, on public works, on an army, on a navy, on railways into the mountains that could not pay for themselves, and on a class of contractors and consignees who became very rich.

They also went on something durable. The railways from Mollendo and Arica up onto the altiplano, built at enormous cost and with heavy loss of life among Chinese and Andean labourers, are the physical fact that made the Confederation a country rather than a treaty: for the first time La Paz and Lima were connected to the same ports by the same gauge, and Bolivian tin and silver moved to the Pacific through Confederate rails to Confederate harbours.

The money ran out in the 1870s, as the deposits were exhausted and Europe found alternatives, and it left the Confederation with a magnificent transport system, a large navy and an unpayable debt, which is the condition in which it went to war with Chile.

The War of the Pacific, 1879 to 1883

The nitrate districts of the Atacama lay in Bolivia’s coastal province, the Litoral, and were worked almost entirely by Chilean companies with British capital. A Bolivian tax on the exported nitrate, imposed in 1878 in breach of a standing agreement, gave Chile the occasion it wanted, and Chilean forces occupied Antofagasta in February 1879.

The Confederation fought as one state and lost. The war followed the shape such wars follow: Chile won at sea first, which decided everything else, and then landed and fought north along a desert coast against an enemy that could not be supplied except by the sea it had lost. Tarapacá fell, then the Litoral, then Tacna. The federal capital was occupied by Chilean troops from May 1880 until the peace, which is the single most wounding fact in the Confederation’s national memory and is marked annually.

The Treaty of Ancón in 1884 gave Chile Tarapacá and the Bolivian Litoral outright, and returned Tacna and Arica after an occupation. That last was not generosity. Chile had no wish to hold the enemy’s capital and no ability to hold the port that supplied it, and the British and American mediators pressed for a line that left the Confederation a coast rather than a wound that would guarantee a second war.

James G. Blaine’s mediation failed completely, for the reasons his own article sets out, and the Confederation’s view of the Realm’s conduct in those years has never entirely recovered from it.

What the war did to the union

The war was supposed to destroy the Confederation and it made it permanent.

The Pact of 1850 had produced thirty years of continuous argument about whether the union should exist, conducted principally by Peruvian politicians who resented Bolivia’s weight and Bolivian ones who resented Peru’s numbers. The argument stopped in 1879 and has never seriously resumed.

Three things did it. The first is ordinary: a country invaded discovers it is a country. The second is that the war was fought and lost by all three states together, and the dead of Tarapacá and Arica came from all three, which gave the Confederation the thing it had never had, which was a shared bereavement.

The third is the one that matters and is not sentimental at all. Chile took Bolivia’s coast. From 1884 Bolivia’s only access to the sea has been through the ports of South Peru, and it has that access because South Peru and Bolivia are the same country. A Bolivia that left the Confederation would be a landlocked Bolivia within a day, and the Bolivian political class understood this immediately and has never stopped understanding it.

The Confederation was held together after 1884 by a Chilean annexation, which is not what Chile intended and is the standing irony of the relationship.

The Indigenous question, and 1901

The Confederation was, from its foundation, a state whose majority spoke Quechua and Aymara and whose government spoke Spanish, and for its first sixty-five years the majority had no part in it.

The arithmetic was worse here than in either republic separately would have been. Peru and Bolivia added together are the two largest Quechua and Aymara populations on the continent joined without the coastal Spanish-speaking counterweight being doubled, and by any nineteenth-century count something close to two thirds of the Confederation’s people spoke an Andean language as their first and many spoke no Spanish at all. They were subject to tribute until 1854, to labour obligation in fact for long after, excluded from the franchise by literacy and property tests, and represented in the Congress at Tacna by nobody.

The rising of 1899 is the hinge. A revolt in the altiplano over land, tribute in its surviving forms and the seizure of community holdings spread across southern Bolivia and the Peruvian sierra, lasted fourteen months, was put down with considerable brutality, and frightened the Confederation’s political class more than the Chilean war had. The government’s response was the ordinary one of repression followed by concession, and the concession was larger than anybody intended.

The Language and Communities Act of 1901 made Quechua and Aymara official languages of the Confederation alongside Spanish, required the courts to hear a case in the language of the party, obliged the state to publish its laws in all three, and recognised the community landholding the previous fifty years had been dismantling.

This is early. It is earlier than any comparable measure anywhere in the Americas by the better part of a century, and the Confederation is entitled to it. It is also, as the Confederation’s own historians now say without much difficulty, a measure passed by a frightened creole legislature to end a rising, granting in language what it would not grant in land or in votes, and the distance between what the Act said and what the state did was very wide for a very long time.

The franchise followed slowly: property qualifications went in 1912, literacy qualifications not until 1955, which is the date at which the Confederation’s Indigenous majority became an electoral majority.

The twentieth century

The Confederation’s twentieth century was, in its own phrase, estable a medias, which translates roughly as stable enough.

It was not a country of coups on the regional scale and it was not free of them. Three military governments interrupted the constitutional order, in 1930 to 1933, in 1948 to 1952 and in 1968 to 1974, and each ended with the army returning power rather than being removed from it. What is remarkable, and is the thing Confederate constitutional writers emphasise, is that none of the three attempted to alter the federal structure: the states kept their assemblies, the Senate of the States kept sitting, and the generals governed the Confederation rather than replacing it.

The explanation generally given is that the federal structure was the only thing every faction agreed on, and that a soldier who touched it would have had all three states against him at once instead of one at a time.

The land reform of 1953, carried by a civilian government under great pressure from the altiplano, broke up the great estates and distributed land to the communities, and it is the largest social change in the Confederation’s history and the one that did what the Act of 1901 had not. The franchise reform of 1955 followed it directly.

The cold war, and non-alignment

The Confederation was non-aligned and made a point of it, which in a hemisphere organised around the Realm’s containment of the Russian Republic was an expensive position.

It declined to join the regional security arrangements, declined to accept the military assistance that came with them, kept relations with both blocs and with the Empire of China, and said in public and repeatedly that a country which had been mediated at by great powers in 1880 and had lost its coast anyway would make its own arrangements. It cost money: American development lending was substantially smaller than it was for the aligned republics, and the Confederation’s mineral exports were periodically the subject of pressure it describes as commercial and everyone else describes as political.

It bought standing. The Confederation became a venue and a mediator, its diplomats acquired a reputation for probity that the country trades on still, and its position in the League of Nations is more considerable than its economic weight would suggest.

Nixon’s ministry, which supported the destabilisation of an elected left-wing government in Chile and accepted the coup that followed, was regarded in Tacna with a hostility the Confederation did not conceal, and the episode is the low point of a relationship with the Realm that had already been damaged in 1880.

Geography

The Confederation is two and a quarter million square kilometres arranged in three bands that run the length of it, and every political fact about the country follows from them.

The coast is desert. The Humboldt current runs cold water up the Pacific shore, the air above it does not rise, and the result is one of the driest places on earth: a strip a few tens of kilometres wide, crossed at intervals by rivers coming down out of the mountains, on which sit Lima, Trujillo, Arequipa’s port at Matarani, Tacna and Arica. Almost nothing grows without irrigation and almost everybody who is not a farmer lives here.

The sierra is the Andes, in two and in places three parallel ranges, with the altiplano between them: a high plain at around 3,800 metres running from southern Peru through Bolivia, containing Lake Titicaca, La Paz, Potosí, Oruro and the salt flats. This is the historic heartland, holds the mineral wealth and most of the Quechua and Aymara population, and is where the Confederation’s politics actually happens.

The east falls away into the Amazon and the Chaco: forest in the north, savannah and scrub in the south, thinly populated, holding the gas, and until the twentieth century governed only nominally.

Lake Titicaca is the fact that most distinguishes this country from the two it would otherwise be. A lake of that kind ordinarily becomes an international border with its two halves administered by rival states. Here it is an inland sea entirely within one country, the highest commercially navigable water in the world, with a single lake authority, a common fishery and ferries that require no papers, and the Confederation makes rather a lot of this.

The Atacama, which is Chile’s, lies to the south, and the Confederation’s frontier with Chile runs across the desert some way north of where Bolivia’s coast used to be.

The three states

The structure

The Pact of 1836 made three states and the revision of 1850 kept them, and the three-way division is the whole constitutional argument of the Confederation.

North Peru, governed from Lima, holds the northern coast and sierra, about twenty million people and the largest city. South Peru, governed from Arequipa, holds the southern coast and sierra, about twelve million, the ports Bolivia uses and the federal capital within its boundaries. Bolivia, governed from La Paz, holds the altiplano and the eastern lowlands and about sixteen million.

Each has its own assembly, executive, courts, police and revenue, and each is a genuine government rather than an administrative division. The Confederation holds foreign affairs, defence, the currency, the customs, the railways, the great rivers, citizenship and the criminal law.

The arithmetic, and the resentment

Two of the three states are Peruvian and one is Bolivia, and the two Peruvian states hold about two thirds of the population between them.

In the Chamber of Deputies, which is by population, that majority tells. In the Senate of the States, where each state has an equal number of senators, it does not, and any measure needing both chambers requires either Bolivian consent or the two Peruvian states to agree with each other, which they frequently do not.

Peruvian nationalism has therefore had one grievance for a hundred and ninety years, which is that Peru was divided in 1836 in order to be outweighed and is outweighed still. The proposal to merge the two Peruvian states into one is raised in every generation, was voted on in 1889, 1937 and 1996, and has failed each time, because merging them would require Bolivian consent in the Senate and Bolivia will not give it and has never pretended it might.

Bolivia’s position is that this is the bargain. Bolivia entered a union with a country of twice its size on terms that gave it a third of the Senate, and it is not going to surrender that in order to be a minority province. It also holds the argument that has become unanswerable since 1884, which is that the Confederation is the reason Bolivia has ports and that Bolivia is entitled to be paid for that in constitutional weight.

South Peru is the state everybody forgets and is the one that decides things. It is Peruvian and it is not Lima, it contains the federal capital and the Bolivian ports, and its interests align with Bolivia about as often as with North Peru. Every Confederate government is built on it, and no measure of any consequence has passed against it since 1884.

Government and politics

The Presidency

The head of state and government is the President of the Confederation, directly elected by the whole country for five years and one term, without possibility of re-election. The title was Supreme Protector until 1850 and President since, and the single term dates from the revision of 1912.

The President appoints and dismisses ministers, commands the armed forces, conducts foreign policy and has a veto over legislation that the Congress may override by two thirds of both chambers. The office is powerful, is not unlimited, and is bounded chiefly by the states: a President who has the Congress and not the state governments can be obstructed indefinitely in the delivery of anything, because delivery is the states’ business.

Rosa Quispe Alarcón has been President since 2025. She is an Aymara-speaking lawyer from the Bolivian altiplano, was minister of justice in the preceding government, and is the fourth President of Indigenous descent and the second to have grown up speaking an Andean language at home. The first was elected in 1979, a hundred and forty-three years after the Confederation was founded and twenty-four after the literacy qualification went.

The Congress

The Congress of the Confederation sits at Tacna in two chambers.

The Chamber of Deputies has two hundred and twenty members elected by proportional representation from departmental lists for five years, and is apportioned by population, so that North Peru holds about two fifths of it.

The Senate of the States has forty-five members, fifteen from each state, elected by the state assemblies for staggered nine-year terms. Its consent is required for any law, for the budget, for treaties, and for any amendment of the Pact, and it is the chamber that makes the Confederation federal rather than merely decentralised.

The equality of states in the Senate is entrenched: the Pact provides that it may not be amended except with the consent of all three state assemblies, which means Bolivia holds a veto over the one provision that protects Bolivia. This is generally described as the cleverest clause in the document and was written by Santa Cruz.

Parties

Politics is organised around three axes that do not line up, which is why Confederate governments are coalitions and why they are unstable in composition and stable in direction.

The first is left and right, in the ordinary way, over the mines, the gas, labour and the state’s share of the resource rents.

The second is the states, and it cuts across the first: a Bolivian conservative and a Bolivian socialist will agree about the Senate, about the ports and about the gas royalty against Peruvians of both persuasions.

The third is Indigenous representation, which since the 1970s has produced parties of its own, principally the Pachakuti movement on the altiplano, and which has changed the other two more than it has replaced them. The large national parties now all field Quechua and Aymara-speaking candidates as a matter of course, which they did not before 1979 and which the Indigenous parties regard as their principal achievement and as a form of theft.

Stability

The Confederation has had three military interruptions and has otherwise held constitutional government since 1850, which is a better record than the region’s and is not a spotless one. Elections have been credible since 1978. Turnout is compulsory and around eighty per cent. The army is large, is not politically central, and has not intervened in fifty-four years.

The one thing nobody proposes is dissolution. After a hundred and ninety-two years the union is simply the country, and a Confederate politician who campaigned for separation would be understood to be campaigning for Bolivia to lose its coastline, which is not a platform.

Language and society

Three official languages

Spanish, Quechua and Aymara are the official languages of the Confederation and have been since the Act of 1901.

Spanish is the language of the coast, of the cities, of business and of most higher education, and is spoken by essentially everybody. Quechua is spoken by something over twelve million people, principally in the Peruvian sierra and the Bolivian valleys, and is the largest Indigenous language in the Americas. Aymara is spoken by about three million, concentrated on the altiplano around Titicaca and in La Paz.

What official status means in practice took most of a century to establish and is still incomplete. The courts have heard cases in all three since 1901 and did so badly for sixty years. Bilingual primary education was not general until the 1970s. State broadcasting in Quechua and Aymara dates from 1963. The requirement that a public official in a district above a stated threshold be able to work in the local language dates from 1988 and is enforced unevenly.

The Confederation’s claim is that it did this first and its critics’ answer is that it did it slowly, and both are true. No other American state gave an Indigenous language official standing before the twentieth century was well advanced. No other American state had a two-thirds Indigenous-speaking majority to answer to either, and the Confederation granted in 1901 what it could not have withheld indefinitely.

The country the languages describe

The Confederation is about forty-eight million people, of whom something over half identify as Indigenous, a large minority as mestizo, and a smaller minority as of European descent, with a significant Afro-Peruvian population on the northern coast, a Japanese community of a century’s standing in Lima, and a Chinese community older than that.

The social distance between the coast and the sierra is the country’s principal internal fact, and it is a distance of class, language and altitude at once. A Lima professional and an Aymara farmer near Titicaca live in the same state, vote in the same elections, and inhabit conditions that have very little in common, and the Confederation’s politics for fifty years has been substantially about closing that gap and has closed some of it.

Urbanisation has done more than policy. Lima is a city of eleven million, most of whose growth since 1950 came from the sierra, and the migration carried Quechua into the capital in numbers that made the language a coastal fact for the first time in four hundred years.

Religion

The Confederation is Roman Catholic in majority and has not had an established church since 1919, when disestablishment was carried by a liberal government against a good deal of opposition and with less consequence than either side predicted.

Catholicism in the Andes is syncretic to a degree the Church has spent four centuries accommodating. The festivals of the mountain and the earth, the offerings to the Pachamama, the pilgrimages to shrines that were shrines before the Spanish arrived, and the calendar of the agricultural year are Catholic practice here, are conducted by Catholic communities, and are not regarded by those communities as anything other than Catholic. Clergy who have objected to this have generally been moved.

The largest religious change in the Confederation’s modern history is evangelical. Protestant and Pentecostal churches, negligible before 1960, now account for something approaching a fifth of the population, are concentrated in the migrant districts of the coastal cities and in parts of the eastern lowlands, and are growing.

This is changing the politics, and the article records it because it is one of the few genuinely open questions about the country’s direction. The evangelical churches are socially conservative in a way the Catholic Church in the Andes has not generally been in practice, are organised, vote, and have begun to run candidates. Their relationship with Indigenous religious practice is hostile where the Catholic Church’s was accommodating, and the collision between an expanding evangelical movement and a syncretic Andean Catholicism is a live and sometimes bitter argument in exactly the communities that the Act of 1901 was written for.

Economy

The Confederation is a middle-income economy of about forty-eight million people, and it runs on what is under the ground and what swims off the coast.

Minerals

Copper, silver, tin, zinc, lead and gold. The Andes are among the richest mineral provinces on earth and the Confederation holds a great deal of them: it is a leading world producer of copper, silver, tin and zinc, and mining is about a tenth of output and rather more than half of exports.

Potosí has been producing silver since 1545 and is the oldest continuously worked major mining district in the world, which the Confederation notes and which is not entirely a boast: the mountain was worked under the mita, the Spanish forced-labour draft, at a cost in Indigenous lives that the Confederation’s own historians put in the hundreds of thousands, and Potosí is a national monument, a working mine and a mass grave in the same place.

The politics of mining is the politics of the country. Who owns the concession, what royalty the state takes, which state gets the money, and what is left behind are the questions every Confederate government is judged on, and the answers have swung between foreign concession and state ownership at least four times since 1920.

Gas, and the pipeline question

The eastern lowlands hold very large reserves of natural gas, which is the Confederation’s largest single export by value and the source of its most difficult internal argument.

The gas is in Bolivia. The pipelines run west across the altiplano to the Pacific and east to Brazil, and the western route crosses the Atacama question: the shortest and cheapest outlet to the sea is through Chilean territory that was Bolivian until 1884, and the Confederation has consistently refused to build it there. Gas therefore goes to the Pacific through Confederate ports at greater cost, and to Brazil through pipelines that make Brazil the largest customer.

The refusal costs money and is not seriously contested. A Confederate government that piped Bolivian gas across the Atacama to a Chilean port would not survive the announcement.

Lithium

The salt flats of the southern altiplano hold what is, on most estimates, the largest lithium resource on earth, and that makes them among the most contested pieces of ground anywhere.

The Confederation has approached this with a caution that its critics call paralysis and its defenders call the lesson of guano. Extraction is state-led, foreign partners are admitted on terms that several have refused, the royalty is high, and production is a fraction of what the geology permits. The argument inside the country is fierce and is not left against right: the altiplano communities on whose land the flats sit have a constitutional claim to be consulted that the Act of 1901 and the reforms of 1953 gave them, they are using it, and they are not unanimous.

Everybody involved is aware that the Confederation has had one enormous resource windfall before, that it spent it on railways and a navy and a debt default, and that the country lost a war immediately afterwards. Guano is not a historical subject in the Confederation. It is the standing argument against moving quickly.

Fisheries, agriculture and coca

The Humboldt current supports one of the greatest fisheries in the world, principally anchoveta rendered into fishmeal, and the Confederation is among the largest fishing nations on earth by tonnage. It is also subject to the periodic collapse of the fishery when the current warms, which happens every few years and which the Confederation manages better than it used to and not well.

Agriculture is coastal irrigation, altiplano subsistence, and the eastern lowlands, and it produces quinoa, potatoes in a variety no other country approaches, coffee, sugar and soy.

Coca is grown legally for traditional use, which is ancient, ubiquitous, and constitutionally protected, and is grown illegally for the cocaine trade, which is neither. The Confederation’s position, held by every government of the past forty years, is that the leaf and the drug are different things, that a state which criminalised the leaf would be criminalising the daily practice of a third of its population, and that the trade is a problem of law enforcement and not of culture. This has been a permanent source of friction with the Realm, whose drug policy since Nixon’s ministry has not accepted the distinction, and it is the second reason relations have never been warm.

Chile, and the Atacama

The relationship with Chile is normalised, commercial and privately unresolved, which is a stable arrangement and not a settled one.

The territorial question is formally parked. The Treaty of Ancón stands, the frontier is not disputed in any instrument, no Confederate government has advanced a claim in law since 1929, and the two countries trade heavily, share a border that is open, and cooperate on everything technical from air traffic to fisheries science.

It is privately alive in a way neither country pretends otherwise about. The Atacama is in every Confederate schoolbook. The occupation of Tacna between 1880 and 1884 is marked annually and the ceremony is attended by the President. Chilean and Confederate football matches require policing that other fixtures do not. And the refusal to pipe Bolivian gas across the Atacama, which costs the Confederation a great deal of money every year, is a territorial claim conducted by other means and is understood as one on both sides of the frontier.

Chile’s position is that the matter was settled by treaty in 1884, that the Confederation has a coast and functioning ports and has suffered no practical injury, and that a hundred and forty-four years is long enough. This is a strong argument and the Confederation does not have a good answer to it, which is part of why the claim is not pursued in law.

The Confederation’s position is not really about the territory. It is that Chile went to war in 1836 to prevent the union existing, failed, went to war again in 1879 and took a third of its coastline, and that the relationship cannot be discussed as though it began in 1884.

Foreign relations

The Confederation is the third power of South America, after the Empire of Brazil and the United Provinces of the River Plate, and behaves like a country that knows it will never be the first.

With the Empire of Brazil the relationship is the most important it has. Brazil buys the gas, is the largest trading partner, and shares two thousand kilometres of Amazonian frontier that neither country polices seriously. It is also very much larger, and Confederate policy toward it has for a century consisted of remaining useful and avoiding dependence, with mixed success.

With the United Provinces of the River Plate relations are correct and slightly cool, the two having a long memory of the Viceroy’s expedition of 1836, which London disowned, and a continuing disagreement about the Chaco and its rivers.

With Paraguay relations are warm, for the reason that both are small next to Brazil, and the Confederation still refers to the arbitration of 1878 in which Rutherford B. Hayes decided the Chaco boundary in Paraguay’s favour, an award the Confederation supported and the River Plate did not.

With the United Kingdom of America the relationship is transactional and has never been warm, and there are three reasons, all of which the Confederation can date. Blaine’s mediation of 1880, which failed and in which American holders of nitrate claims were credibly said to have had access to the Prime Minister. The Nixon ministry’s conduct in Chile, which the Confederation regarded as an announcement about what the Realm considered permissible in the region. And the drug policy, which does not accept the distinction between the coca leaf and cocaine and which the Confederation regards as a demand that it criminalise its own population.

The trade is nonetheless large, the mineral relationship is deep, and the Confederation’s diplomats at New Westminster are competent and unsentimental. It is a relationship of business between countries that have never much liked each other, which the Confederation states in almost those words and the Realm does not state at all.

In the League of Nations the Confederation is a member of long standing and a quiet one. It has never held a Security Council seat, has supplied a considerable number of mediators, arbitrators and technical officers, and its reputation there rests on the non-alignment of the cold war decades: a country that took nobody’s side is a country whose officers both sides will accept.

Culture and the inheritance

The Confederation contains Cusco, Machu Picchu, Tiwanaku, Potosí, Titicaca and the Nazca lines inside one set of borders, and what it has made of that is the most interesting cultural fact about it.

A divided Inca inheritance would be contested between rival republics, each claiming to be its true heir, and such an argument distorts the archaeology and the museums of everybody involved. Here it is not contested, because the heartland of Tawantinsuyu and the older civilisation of Tiwanaku are in the same country, and the Confederation has been able to treat them as one subject.

The practical results are real. There is a single antiquities service and has been since 1908, which means the material has not been divided between rival national collections and can be exhibited together. Excavation has been coordinated for a century. The great sites are managed as a network rather than as national trophies. And the scholarship produced in the Confederation on the pre-Columbian Andes is regarded internationally as the best there is, for the straightforward reason that its practitioners have never had to work across a border.

The Confederation makes a considerable amount of this and it is not entirely earned. The single antiquities service was created by a creole government which regarded the material as national patrimony rather than as anybody’s living inheritance, and the communities on whose land the sites stand were consulted about none of it until the 1980s. The revision of that relationship is recent, is incomplete, and is the subject of a continuing argument about repatriation, access, and who the ruins belong to.

Titicaca deserves its own note. The lake is entirely internal, is sacred in both Quechua and Aymara tradition, holds the islands of the Sun and the Moon, and is administered by a single authority with a single fishery and a single conservation regime. It is also badly polluted at its southern end by the growth of El Alto and La Paz, and the Confederation’s failure to deal with that is the most frequently cited example of a country that manages its heritage well and its environment poorly.

Symbols

The flag is red, charged in the centre with a wreath enclosing the arms of the three states, which is the design adopted under the Pact of 1836 and altered only in detail since.

The arms show the sun of the Andes over Titicaca, a vicuña, a cinchona tree and a cornucopia, the elements taken from the arms of the founding states and combined in 1836, and the composition is crowded in the manner of its period and has resisted every attempt at simplification.

The anthem dates from 1841. The Confederation is one of the few countries whose anthem is officially sung in three languages, Spanish, Quechua and Aymara, a provision of the Act of 1901 that was ignored for eighty years and is now universal at state occasions.

Titicaca Day, on the anniversary of the Pact of Tacna in October, is the national day and is deliberately named for the lake rather than for Santa Cruz, whose reputation is different in each of the three states and who is therefore not commemorated nationally by name.

The Pact

The Confederation’s constitution is the Pact of Tacna, agreed in 1836, revised comprehensively in 1850 and amended twenty-two times since, and it is a short document by the standards of the hemisphere at about fourteen thousand words.

What it does

It constitutes the three states, defines what the Confederation holds and what the states keep, establishes the Presidency and the two chambers, and stops. It contains no bill of rights, the rights of the citizen being in the Confederal Code rather than in the Pact, which is a continental arrangement and which the Confederation has never seen a reason to change.

Its central provision is the enumeration in Article 9: the Confederation holds foreign affairs, defence, the currency, the customs, the posts, the railways and navigable rivers, citizenship, and the criminal law, and the states hold everything else. The list has been added to four times and never subtracted from, and the direction of travel over a hundred and ninety-two years has been steadily toward the centre, at a pace the states have found tolerable because they set it.

Amendment

An amendment requires two thirds of both chambers of the Congress and the consent of two of the three state assemblies.

The exception is the one that matters. Any amendment altering the equality of the states in the Senate requires all three assemblies, which gives each state a veto over the provision that protects it, and which in practice means Bolivia can never be outweighed and knows it.

The clause is Santa Cruz’s and it is the reason Bolivia signed. Every constitutional writer in the Confederation identifies it as the single provision without which there would be no country, and the Peruvian ones say so with a certain amount of teeth.

Twenty-two amendments in a hundred and seventy-eight years is a rate the Confederation is pleased with, and the pace is explained less by the difficulty of the procedure than by the fact that most constitutional change here happens in the states, where it is easier and where most government actually is.

Defence

The Confederation maintains an army, a navy and an air force under federal command, conscription having been abolished in 1994 and replaced by a professional force of about ninety thousand with a large trained reserve.

The army is organised around the mountains, which is to say around the proposition that the Confederation’s territory is its principal defensive asset and that no force can be moved across it quickly. Its formations are regional, its logistics are built around the railways and the few roads over the passes, and its doctrine assumes a defensive war fought at altitude, which is a specialism it exports: Confederate mountain-warfare instruction is used by a number of armies, including the Realm’s.

The navy is small and is not the point. It was substantial and expensive before 1879, it lost the war at sea, and the Confederation drew the conclusion that a middle power on that coast cannot outbuild Chile and should not try. What it maintains now is a coastguard, a fisheries protection force, a modest submarine flotilla and a river flotilla for the Amazon and the Beni, and it buys its security in the Pacific by having nothing anybody wants to attack.

The frontier with Chile is the only one that is garrisoned seriously. The Amazonian frontiers with Brazil and New Granada are policed rather than defended, and the one incident on them, the Leticia Incident of 1932, in which irregulars seized a Granadine town and the Confederation’s government disowned them, was not a war, and the eastern lowlands’ problem is smuggling and illegal mining rather than any state.

The Confederation has fought no war since 1883, which is a hundred and forty-five years, and is one of a small number of countries anywhere able to say it.

Transport

Nothing about moving in the Confederation is easy and the whole country is shaped by the attempt.

The railways built with guano money in the 1860s and 1870s are the physical fact of the union, and the lines from Mollendo and Arica up to the altiplano remain among the highest and most difficult standard-gauge railways in the world. They are slow, are expensive to maintain, carry a great deal of freight and very few passengers, and are federally owned under Article 9, which is the provision the states have most often tried to reclaim.

The roads came in the twentieth century and are better than the railways for people and worse for ore. The Pan-American runs the length of the coast. The routes over the passes are subject to closure, landslide and altitude, and the road from Lima to the sierra rises three and a half kilometres in a hundred and twenty.

Aviation matters more here than in most countries, for the obvious reason. The Confederation has an unusually dense internal air network, and La Paz and Cusco are among the highest commercial airports in the world, which imposes performance limits on aircraft that airlines dislike and pay for.

The ports are the Confederation’s connection to everything: Callao for Lima and the north, Matarani and Arica for the south and for Bolivia. Arica in particular is not merely a port but a constitutional fact, being the harbour that keeps Bolivia maritime, and the rail and road corridor from Arica to La Paz is the single most strategically important piece of infrastructure the Confederation owns.

Cities

Lima is the largest city in the Confederation and among the largest in the Americas, about eleven million people on a desert coast that cannot supply them with water, grown chiefly since 1950 by migration from the sierra, and organised around a colonial centre it long neglected and has spent thirty years restoring. It is the commercial capital, is not the political one, and has never entirely forgiven the arrangement.

La Paz sits in a canyon at 3,600 metres with El Alto on the rim above it, the two together holding about three million people, and it is the highest city of its size in the world and the seat of the Bolivian state government. The cable-car network built to connect the canyon to the rim is the most-used urban aerial system anywhere and is the Confederation’s favourite piece of infrastructure.

Arequipa, the seat of South Peru, is built of white volcanic stone under the cone of Misti, has about a million and a half people, and has a self-regard that the rest of the country finds funny and that is grounded in the fact that South Peru decides most things.

Tacna is the federal capital and has about four hundred thousand people, which makes it by a very wide margin the smallest capital of any large country. It is a purpose-built political town on a small coastal river, holds the Congress, the ministries, the supreme court and the embassies, and empties at weekends. It was occupied by Chile from 1880 to 1884 and the fact governs its civic identity entirely.

Potosí, Cusco, Trujillo, Sucre, Santa Cruz de la Sierra and Cochabamba are the other cities of consequence, and Santa Cruz de la Sierra in the eastern lowlands is the fastest-growing of them by a distance, which is shifting Bolivian politics away from the altiplano in a way that is only beginning to show.

Education and health

Both are state functions rather than federal ones, which is the single most important thing about them and the source of most of what is wrong with them.

Education is the responsibility of the three states, and the three states are not equally rich. North Peru spends more per pupil than Bolivia does and has done for a century, the sierra departments of every state spend less than their coasts and valleys, and the Confederation’s attainment figures accordingly vary more by place than by anything else.

The federal contribution is the language regime and the equalisation grant, both of which are more recent than they should be. Bilingual primary education, general since the 1970s, is the more successful: a child in a Quechua or Aymara-speaking district is taught in that language and in Spanish, teachers are trained for it, and the effect on attainment where it is properly resourced is large and measurable. The equalisation grant, which transfers federal revenue to the poorer states and departments, dates only from 1961 and has never been large enough to close the gap it was created to close.

The universities are old and are good. San Marcos at Lima, founded in 1551, is the oldest in the Americas; San Francisco Xavier at Sucre dates from 1624; and the Confederation’s higher education is free at public institutions, competitive to enter, and produces more engineers and geologists per head than any comparable country, for reasons the mining industry explains entirely.

Health is likewise devolved, is likewise unequal, and is complicated by altitude in ways that make comparison with other countries misleading. The Confederation’s high-altitude medicine is world-leading because it has had to be. Its rural provision on the altiplano is thin, its urban provision is adequate, and maternal mortality in the remoter sierra remains at figures the government publishes and does not defend.

A federal health service has been proposed by four Presidents and has never passed the Senate of the States, on the ground that health is the states’ and that a federal service would be the largest transfer of authority to the centre since the Pact was written. The argument is entirely constitutional and the consequence is entirely medical, which is the plainest illustration in the country of what federalism costs.

What is contested

The Peruvian merger. Whether North and South Peru should become one state. It has been voted on three times, has failed three times, requires Bolivian consent, and will not get it. The argument is a hundred and ninety-two years old and is conducted with complete predictability.

Lithium. How fast, on what terms, with whose consent, and who keeps the money. This is the live economic argument and it cuts across every other alignment, because the flats are in Bolivia, the communities on them have consultation rights, the federal treasury wants the royalty and the Peruvian states want a share of a resource that is not theirs.

The gas route. Whether the refusal to pipe across the Atacama is principle or expensive sentiment. Raised by economists every few years and never by politicians.

The evangelical turn, and what a socially conservative and rapidly growing religious movement does to a settlement built on accommodating Andean practice.

And the coast. Not as a claim, which nobody advances, but as a fact about how the relationship with Chile is discussed and about whether a country ought to organise a portion of its economic policy around a border it does not formally dispute.

Dissolution is not contested. It is not proposed, is not polled at figures worth reporting, and is understood by everybody to be the proposal that Bolivia become landlocked.

Assessment

The Peru-Bolivian Confederation is the most successful thing in the Americas that nobody expected to last a year.

It was made by one man, for reasons that were partly national and substantially personal, against the wishes of a large part of both populations it united, and it survived its first crisis because a Chilean minister was shot by his own troops. The Confederation’s own historians say this without embarrassment, and the honest version of its founding is that it was not so much built as spared.

What it did with being spared is the achievement. It converted a personal protectorate into a constitutional order in 1850, when Santa Cruz could have refused and did not. It built the railways that made three governments into one country. It gave its Indigenous languages official standing in 1901, earlier than any comparable state by the better part of a century, for reasons that were frightened rather than generous and that produced a real thing anyway. And it lost a war in 1883 without coming apart, which is the test that had broken every other federation in the hemisphere.

Its failures are of a piece with its region and are not excused by it. The Act of 1901 gave language and withheld land and votes for fifty more years. The altiplano was governed as a subject province by a coastal elite into living memory. Potosí is a national monument standing on a mass grave. And the Confederation’s care of its inheritance, which is genuinely exemplary, was for eighty years conducted over the heads of the people whose inheritance it is.

What holds it together is not sentiment. Bolivia is in the Confederation because the Confederation is Bolivia’s coastline. The two Peruvian states are in it because leaving would require the other to agree. Nobody is held by affection and everybody is held by arithmetic, and the Confederation’s political class understands the arrangement precisely and describes it in public without any apparent discomfort.

It is a union that was imposed, was nearly destroyed twice, and became permanent because its enemy took the one thing that made leaving impossible. Chile made the Confederation in 1884 more completely than Santa Cruz made it in 1836, and that sentence, in one form or another, is in every Confederate history of the country.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• James G. Blaine, whose mediation of 1880 failed and whose Pan-American scheme the war destroyed
• Rutherford B. Hayes, who arbitrated the Chaco for Paraguay in 1878
• Richard Nixon, whose ministry’s conduct in Chile the Confederation did not forgive
• League of Nations, of which the Confederation is a long-standing and quiet member
• United Kingdom of America, with which relations are transactional and have never been warm