1491_ New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann [130]
Or seemed to be, anyway.
A SLICE OF PERU
About a hundred miles north of the Peru-Chile border, the coastal highway passes by an uninhabited beach ringed by a tall chain-link fence. The fence has an entrance with a gigantic, stylized statue of a woman with huge earrings. By the statue hangs a faded banner: Bolivia Mar.
When Bolivia declared its independence it had a territorial pseudopod that extended southwest from its Andean heartland through the Atacama Desert to the sea. The land was useless for agriculture but had four plausible seaports and huge underground deposits of prehistoric guano, which Chilean companies mined and shipped to Europe for fertilizer. (Bolivia, then as now impoverished, didn’t have the capital for this industry.) In 1878, Hilarion Daza, the illegitimate son of an Italian acrobat, seized power in Bolivia. Immediately he raised taxes on the Chilean-owned guano mines, which the previous Bolivian government had promised not to do. Outraged, Chile rolled its army into the area. In vain did Bolivia counterattack with its ally, Peru; Chile simply repelled their incompetently led forces and took over the entire territory, as well as a chunk of southern Peru. Ejected in an outburst of popular anger, Daza fled to Europe, taking most of Bolivia’s treasury with him.
Chile finally returned most of Peru’s territory in 1929 but never gave back any land to Bolivia—an outcome that nation has never accepted. To this day, Bolivia’s parliament has a representative from the lost maritime province. The Miss Bolivia contest always includes a contestant ostensibly from the coast. Maps are sold in which the conquered land is still part of Bolivia.
In a gesture to its longtime, long-suffering ally, Peru symbolically gave two miles of its shoreline to Bolivia in 1992. Bolivia Mar—Bolivia-by-the-Sea—is a little island of Bolivia entirely surrounded by Peru. It has no facilities of any kind, so far as I could tell when I passed by. Private enterprise was supposed to build an industrial duty-free port in Bolivia Mar. Thus far the free market has not accepted the challenge. Every now and then parties of Bolivians drive down to Bolivia Mar to swim—a political gesture.
The main highway from Bolivia Mar to Bolivia itself follows the Osmore Valley, cutting a perfect sectional slice through Peru on the way. For the first fifteen miles the road climbs through a desert landscape almost devoid of settlement and prone to fog. Then the road hits a plateau and the fog dissipates. The landscape that comes into view is so dry that in most years the Osmore River simply disappears into the desert.
Around the small city of Moquegua the river hoves back into view and the highway abruptly pitches into the Cordillera Negra. The windshield fills with enough canyons, bluffs, mesas, and cliffs for a dozen Road Runner cartoons. Standing higher than its neighbors, at an altitude of about eight thousand feet, is a wide pillar of rock with a rounded, convoluted top that vaguely resembles the rounded, convoluted top of a human brain. The pillar is called Cerro Baúl. For about two hundred years, it was the sole meeting ground of two of the Americas’ largest societies—societies similar in scale to, say, the Maya realm, but much less well known.
The two states, Wari and Tiwanaku, were probably the greatest of the Inkas’ forerunners, and certainly the predecessors from whom they took the most. In their separate ways, both were children of Norte Chico. They worshipped figures in Staff God poses, lived in networks of vertical exchange, and had public architecture with designs based on templates from the coast. But in other ways they were as different from each other as Sicily and Scandinavia. Of the two, Wari was the more conventional, centralized state. Based east of Lima in the Andes heights, it first became prominent in the sixth century A.D.