Chapter II
Peru: General Castilla—manuel Pardo—pierola
The political work of General Castilla—Domestic peace—The deposits of guano and saltpetre—Manuel Pardo, founder of the anti-military party—The last caudillo, Pierola: his reforms.
The gestation of the Republic of Peru was a lengthy process. The vice-kingdom defended itself against Colombian, Peruvian, and Argentine troops: against the armies of Bolivar and San Martin. Here the penates of Spain were preserved: the treasure, the vigilant aristocracy, the warlike armies. It was not until 1824, when America was already independent, that the victory of Ayacucho liberated Peru from the Spanish rule.
Bolivar wished to give Peru the same constitution as Bolivia; to force the institution of the irremovable President on the anarchy of these republics; but the municipality of Lima refused the project. The Peruvians exalted the Liberator; "hero" and "demi-god" the poets called him; his praise was sung in the churches; the Congress granted him riches and honours. His generals were struggling for the supreme command. The Colombian hero returned to his own country, and at once President followed President and revolution revolution. The history of the first twenty years of the Republic, as in Mexico and the Argentine, records only the clash of the forces of society organised and disciplined by the colonial régime. Generals and "doctors," autocracy and anarchy, the oligarchy of the vice-kingdom and the advancing democracy, all were at war among themselves. Byzantine factions struggled to attain the supreme power in the assemblies and the barracks. Aristocratic Presidents—Riva Aguero, Orbegoso, Vivanco, and military Presidents—La Mar, La Fuente, Gamarra, followed one another with bewildering rapidity. In the south Arequipa, the home of a tenacious race, engendered terrible revolts. External wars, such as that with Colombia in 1827 and Bolivia in 1828 and 1835 (to repulse the protectorate of Santa-Cruz), were really due to the quarrels of ambitious generals who were disputing the succession of Bolivar. New nations, whose frontiers as yet were vague, had not yet acquired a national consciousness. Santa-Cruz, President of Bolivia, unified Peru, founding a confederation, from Tumez to Tarija, necessary to the equilibrium of American politics; but he was a foreign President. Amid the host of provincial chiefs a general presently arose who for twenty years was the energetic director of the nation's life—Don Ramon Castilla.
GENERAL ANDRES SANTA CRUZ.
President of Bolivia (1829-1839).
He recalls Paez rather than Rosas. He was no invulnerable tyrant, but a caudillo of great influence. Born in Tarapaca in 1796, he was a mestizo, having in his veins the blood of an Indian grandmother. This origin perhaps explains his endurance and astuteness. His father was Asturian, a member of a warlike race. Castilla passed his youth at Tarapaca, in a region of vast plains and narrow valleys, and the desert made him a nomad, a chief of legionaries. A Spanish soldier in Chili, he was made prisoner at Chacabuco; set at liberty, he travelled through the Argentine and Brazil, and on his return to Peru he offered his services to San Martin; in 1821 he fought beside Sucre at Ayacucho, followed General Gamarra against Bolivia, and retaken prisoner at Ingavi, he finally became general, then marshal. Short, with virile features and a penetrating glance, he was a great leader, strong and tenacious in the field. His bearing was martial; men felt that opposition irritated him, that he was an autocrat by vocation. Without much culture, he was astute enough to seem learned. He intuitively knew the value of men and the manner in which to govern them. His strong point was the gift of command. Experience made him sceptical and ironical; his speech was stern and incisive. His ideas were simple; a conservative in politics, he respected the principle of authority. Like San Martin, to whom he wrote some suggestive letters, he hated anarchy. In the midst of the tumult of revolution he understood the necessity of a strong government. He defeated the dictator Vivanco, in skirmishes and pitched battles, at Carmen-Alto, and became President of Peru in 1845. He granted an amnesty to the vanquished and re-established order. His government marked the commencement, after twenty years of revolutions, of a new period of administrative stability, during which commerce developed and the public revenues increased; new sources of wealth, namely, guano and saltpetre, transformed the economic life of the country. The telegraph united Lima to Callao in 1847; the first Peruvian railroad was inaugurated in 1851. The service of the external debt due to foreign loans commenced, and the internal debt was consolidated. The first presidency of General Castilla resulted in peace and economic progress.
General Echenique succeeded him, and financial scandals, guano concessions, speculations, and a corrupt thirst for wealth engendered discontent. The prophecy of Bolivar was accomplished: gold had corrupted Peru. Castilla hesitated before revolting against a constitutional government. A lover of order, he respected authority in others and in himself. But finally a fresh revolution broke out, and triumphed at La Palma in 1855. In the same year Congress elected Castilla as President.
In the preceding year the general-President had already proclaimed the emancipation of the negro slaves, in order to ensure that the revolution which he now headed should be welcome. Congress declared the personal tribute demanded of the Indians abolished. A new constitution, the basis of that of 1860, which is still in force in Peru, changed the political organism in several essential aspects. It suppressed the Council of State and replaced it by two vice-presidents; it organised the municipalities, and set a term of four years on the duration of the presidency. Vivanco rose against Castilla in 1857, but was defeated. The government of General Castilla terminated peacefully: from 1844 to 1860 he directed the national policies with a hand of iron. None before him had been able to give the life of the nation such continuity. All the moral and economic forces of the country were developed; the exports attained to three millions sterling, which sum was in excess of the imports; railways and telegraph lines crossed the wilderness, and the credit of the country permitted of new and important loans. Peru, conscious of her progressive energy, aspired to extend her domains. Castilla declared war upon Ecuador in 1859, the pretext being a question of frontiers; as victor he granted generous terms of peace. He built ships to oppose the future maritime supremacy of Chili; then, divining the importance of Eastern Peru, he sent out expeditions to explore the great unknown watercourses. Like Garcia-Moreno in Ecuador and Portales in Chili, he established peace, stimulated wealth, promoted education, created a navy, and imposed a new constitution on the country. His action was not only political but social; by freeing the slaves and Indians he prepared the future of democracy. The journals of the period condemned his absolutism. "The formula of the General is 'L'Etat c'est moi,'" wrote Don José Casimiro-Ulloa in 1862. For fifteen years he was the dictator necessary to an unstable republic.
After him the national life was personified by a civil President, Manuel Pardo, who represented the reaction of lawyers and business men against the militarism of Castilla and his predecessors. He did not govern for two terms, like the autocratic General, nor did his personal influence last ten years; yet his reputation increased after his death, so that his name, like that of Balmaceda in Chili, presides over the fortunes of a party.
Pardo was born in Lima in 1834. He was the son of a poet, Don Felipe Pardo; but he soon abandoned dreams for action; to him material interest seemed superior to all other questions.
He detested "pure politics"; he regarded the Constitution as a "dead letter in national life." His vocation impelled him to protect the financial affairs of the country; he was Minister of Finance from 1866 to 1868, fiscal agent in London, and founded a bank in Lima. His best address deals with the subject of taxation. As President he decreed a monopoly of saltpetre in 1875, an economic measure often criticised as having provoked the disastrous war with Chili.
An economist and champion of order, he continued the work of Castilla, was triumphant over revolution, and organised the country.
In 1862, when he had already been minister and mayor of Lima, a popular election carried him to power. In four years his extraordinary activity reformed all the public services: education, finance, and immigration. He ordered the census to be taken in 1876; he endeavoured to attract foreigners; founded the Faculty of Political Sciences and the University of Lima for the education of diplomatists and administrators, and the School of Arts and Crafts for the improvement of popular education; he opened new primary schools, sent for German and Polish professors, and entrusted the pedagogic direction of the country to them. He promulgated new regulations dealing with education on the classic European lines. He re-established the National Guard, as Portales had done in Chili, and organised departmental juntas with an eye to decentralisation. His action was restless and universal. He preferred a positive policy, devoid of doctrinaire quarrels, dreamed of a practical republic, like Rafael Nuñez in Colombia and Guzman-Blanco in Venezuela, and preferred the faculty of political sciences, which formed administrators, to that of letters, which created literary men and philosophers.
Nevertheless, the country became bankrupt. Loans, the great undertakings of President Balta, and speculations in guano and saltpetre had exhausted it. Pardo could not prevent this financial disaster. He assured the service of the foreign debt and informed the democracy, intoxicated by the economic orgy, that it was ruined. He vainly sought the alliance of the Argentine and Bolivia in order to erect a triple bastion of defence against the ambitions of Chili. His efforts were fruitless, both at home and abroad. He was succeeded by a military President. The alliance of Peru and Bolivia was powerless against the might of Chili, and Pardo himself was assassinated during a supreme reaction of the demagogy which he hoped to rule.
MANUEL PARDO.
President of Peru (1872-1876).
Death made his influence lasting, as was the case with Garcia-Moreno and Balmaceda. A strong ruler of men, he had gathered about him enthusiastic and even fanatical partisans. His work of reformation became the evangel of a party, the civil party which he had founded. As early as 1841 the dictator Vivanco had united, in a conservative group, the leading men of the time: Pando, Andres Martinez, Felipe Pardo. Ureta, Pardo's rival in the presidential campaign, united the first elements of a civil party. But it was his rival who concentrated all these forces, making them lasting and harmonious. A scion of ancient families, of the Aliagas and Lavalles, Pardo represented the colonial traditions in a disordered democracy.
Thanks to the discovery of new sources of wealth —saltpetre and guano—and to fiscal monopolies, a powerful plutocracy suddenly arose in Peru, which was soon, by the prestige of its wealth, to overpower the old Peruvian families. Pardo, not opposing the national transformation, joined this plutocracy; and his party, reinforced by the alliance, became the obstinate champion of property, of slow reform, and of order, against the anarchy of the Creoles. It was conservative without rigidity, liberal without violence, like the moderate parties of monarchical governments, or the Progressists of the third French Republic. Originally an aristocratic power, it abandoned its old severity, and became the party of the wealthy classes, taking mulattos and mestizos to its bosom. So, as in other South American democracies, the ancient oligarchy was replaced by a plutocracy which included the sons of immigrants, half-breeds, and bankers.
The influence of Pardo was greater and more lasting than that of Castilla. It responded to many of the needs of Peru; placed between militarism and demagogy, the civil element was the only agent of order and progress. The work of Pardo, interrupted during the war with Chili (1879-84) and the period of anarchy which followed, despite the efforts of a military leader who had fought like a hero in the war against Chili—Colonel Caceres—was by the irony of human affairs continued by the sworn enemy of Pardo: Pierola, the last of the great Peruvian caudillos; restless, romantic, and always ready to seize the reins of power by the violent aid of revolution.
In 1869, at the age of thirty, he was Minister of Finance, following Garcia Calderon, who had resigned his post rather than authorise the waste of fiscal resources. Ten years later Pierola proclaimed himself dictator, and prepared, with unusual energy, to defend Peru against the invasion of Chili. A reformer after the methods of the Jacobins, he thought to transform the nation by heaping decree upon decree and by changing the names of institutions. His noble enthusiasm makes it easy to overlook his errors.
The Peruvian troops defeated, Pierola did not resign power, and divided the country. Ten years later, in the full maturity of his intellectual powers, he was elected President (1895-99); from which period we may date the Peruvian renaissance. Without raising loans he transformed an exhausted country into a stable republic. Like all the great American caudillos, he was an excellent administrator of the fiscal wealth of the country; he established a gold standard as the basis of the new monetary system, promulgated a military code and an electoral law, and by means of a French mission endeavoured to change an army which was the docile servant of ambitious factions into a force capable of preserving domestic peace. His organising talent, his patriotism, and his extraordinary ability, surprised those who had known only the revolutionary leader.
DON NICOLAS DE PIEROLA.
President of Peru (1895-1899).
He founded a democratic party, as did Pardo a party inimical to militarism. But in spite of the denomination of this party it has lent its aid to the military leaders, and no law in favour of the workers has emanated from the democrats. Pierola, who called himself "the protector of the native race," established a tax upon salt, which was a great hardship to that poverty-stricken race.
DON FRANCISCO GARCIA CALDERON.
President of Peru (1881-1884).
The leader of the democrats is himself an aristocrat; not only by origin, by the somewhat old-fashioned elegance of his style, and by his patrician tastes; he has always preferred to surround himself with men of the old noble families: the Orbegosos, Gonzalez, Osmas, Ortiz de Zevallos, &c. This contrast between his tastes and tendencies and the party which he founded does not detract from the great popularity which the old ex-president enjoys in Peru; he is popular by reason of qualities which are wholly personal, like those of Manuel Pardo, and his supporters become fanatics. His mannered phrases, his heroism and his audacity, have a religious significance in the eyes of his believers; like Facundo in the epic of Sarmiento, he is the nomadic khalif who brings to a democracy in the throes of anarchy the promise of a divine message.