Military Rule and Regional Tensions in the Andes in the 1970S

The International History Review

ISSN: 0707-5332 (Print) 1949-6540 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rinh20

The War that Didn’t Break Out: Military Rule and Regional Tensions in the Andes in the 1970s

Sebastián Hurtado-Torres & Joaquín Fermandois

To cite this article: Sebastián Hurtado-Torres & Joaquín Fermandois (2019): The War that Didn’t Break Out: Military Rule and Regional Tensions in the Andes in the 1970s, The International History Review, DOI: 10.1080/07075332.2019.1652839 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/07075332.2019.1652839

Published online: 18 Aug 2019.

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Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rinh20 THE INTERNATIONAL HISTORY REVIEW https://doi.org/10.1080/07075332.2019.1652839

The War that Didn’t Break Out: Military Rule and Regional Tensions in the Andes in the 1970s

Sebastian Hurtado-Torresa and Joaquın Fermandoisb aInstituto de Historia y Ciencias Sociales, Universidad Austral de Chile, Valdivia, Chile; bInstituto de Historia, Universidad San Sebastian, Santiago, Chile

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS Throughout the 1970s, tensions among various South American countries, Military rule; South America; ruled for most of the decade by military governments, mounted, which Andean region; led actors and observers in the region and elsewhere to believe that a war; diplomacy war would break out at some point in the decade. To a large extent, these tensions and fears of war resulted from the interplay between the challenge posed by the Peruvian military regime to the ideological and military balance of the Andean region, and the reactions of the rest of the countries of the region to that challenge, especially Chile. The possibility of a war between Chile and Peru concerned all the countries in South America as well as the United States, for its outbreak could lead to a regional confrontation of great magnitude. However, the military governments of the countries of the Andes did not want war and, through public displays of cordiality and discreet diplomacy, avoided hostilities, even though a few situations of tension and military incidents seemed to point inevitably towards an international conflagration.

Introduction For most of the 1970s, most countries of South America were ruled by military dictatorships. To different degrees, all these governments pursued foreign and defense policies based on the traditional strategic views of the armed forces, in whose understanding of the national interest the preservation of the territorial integrity and the security of the borders of their countries stood above any other consideration. The officers of the armed forces of Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile were systematically trained on the principle that the territorial entity of their countries had been shaped by geopolitical processes driven by the expansionist ambitions of other countries or was the consequence of victories in wars fought for just and legal reasons. In all cases, the experience of war in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had left a deep mark in the professional identity of the military.1 Consequently, the strategic views of the armed forces of all the countries of the region stood in opposition to each other. In the 1970s, as military rule prevailed in South America, these differences, sometimes aggravated by ideological considerations, created a climate of high tension, provoked a few serious diplomatic crises, and at least twice in the decade led some of the countries of the Andes to the verge of war.2 The records of the Brazilian, Chilean, and Argentine foreign ministries, the U.S. Department of State, the White House, and the British Foreign Office—the sources on which this essay is based—show how the strategic visions, geopolitical outlooks, and interpretations of history of

CONTACT Sebastian Hurtado-Torres [email protected]; [email protected] ß 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 2 S. HURTADO-TORRES AND J. FERMANDOIS the military in Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile drove the situation in the Andes to a level of tension unseen in the region in decades. These records, it must be noted, deal with events in the region mostly from the perspective of diplomats and other foreign policy officials in some of the countries involved or interested in the international politics of South America in the 1970s. They portray the motivations and views of the actors most directly involved in the decision-making processes in moments of crisis, such as the military chiefs of Chile, Ecuador, and Peru, through the lenses of some of their diplomatic interlocutors or representatives in foreign posts. Consequently, they do not show the full extent of the fears and specific intentions of the main individual protagonists of the story, especially the Peruvian generals, or the most sensitive information regarding military strategies and tactics of the countries of the region. Still, these diplomatic records have allowed us to reconstruct in detail the story of the tensions that beset South America during most of the 1970s.3 Ultimately, the widespread fears of war in South America in the 1970s did not materialize. The preservation of the peace resulted mostly from the fact that none of the military governments of the Andes had the most aggressive intentions attributed to them by their regional counterparts. Whatever the rhetoric of the more hawkish military officers in Peru, Ecuador, or Chile, when the course of events seemed to be pointing towards armed conflict, all the governments of the region chose the path of diplomacy over military escalation. Somewhat counterin- tuitively, the international history of South America in the 1970s, marked by the authoritarian and often brutal rule of military governments, offers a nice example of how, in a situation in which the national interest is not under an urgent and clearly recognizable threat, willingness to keep the peace through diplomacy conducted in good faith can outweigh the pressures towards conflict derived from the diverse and conflicting geopolitical views of the actors of a particular international sub-system.

The challenge of the Peruvian military dictatorship To a large extent, the situation of high tension in South America in the 1970s resulted from the interplay between the challenges posed by the Peruvian military dictatorship (1968–80) to the political and military balance of the region, and the responses they elicited from Peru’s neighbors and other foreign powers. The Revolutionary Government of the Armed Force (RGAF), as the Peruvian military dictatorship was officially called, stood conspicuously apart from past and contemporary military dictatorships in Latin America. Typically, military governments in the continent, including Peru, had been conservative, had allied themselves with national oligarchies, and had received quiet or explicit support from the United States, the regional hegemon. On the contrary, even though the RGAF explicitly opposed Marxism, the philosophical core of most radical left-wing movements in Latin America, it set about to transform Peru in a radical fashion, implementing measures, such as land reform and nationalization of foreign companies, that coincided with the program of the radical Left in Latin America and the Third World.4 Although the RGAF presented itself as a radical departure from the historic trajectory of Peru, the nationalism of the Peruvian armed forces contained, along with its economic and social aspects, a more traditional strain of thought centered around the territorial entity of the Peruvian state, its geopolitical situation within South America, and its relative strength vis-a-vis its neighbors. In particular, the Peruvian military assumed the doctrine that, since Peru shares borders with five countries, its armed forces had to be singularly strong within the South American stage, in order to being able to withstand a conflict with at least two of its neighbors simultaneously. In all likelihood, one of these adversaries would be Chile, the country that defeated Peru and Bolivia in the War of the Pacific (1879–84) and took territory from both countries as a result.5 Thus, while the ideological identity of the RGAF was mostly associated to its THE INTERNATIONAL HISTORY REVIEW 3 measures regarding land ownership, foreign companies, and the exploitation of natural resour- ces, a significant part of its program aimed at building up the armed forces. In addition to the historic relationship with Chile, the Peruvian military based its strategic thinking on a rather exaggerated appraisal of the ambitions and intentions of one of its northern neighbors, Ecuador. In 1941, Peru defeated Ecuador in a short war and took territory in the Amazonian basin theretofore disputed by both countries. The Protocol signed in Rio de Janeiro after the end of the hostilities, guaranteed by other countries of the continent, recognized Peru’s control of the disputed area.6 Ecuador, however, did not recognize the Protocol as the definitive resolution of the issue. In light of this Ecuadorean position, the Peruvian military concluded that Ecuador might establish an alliance with Chile and, therefore, any war between Peru and one of the two countries would in fact lead to a conflict with both. This interpretation of the international situation of the Andean region led the highest officials of the RGAF to develop a defense strategy based on the principle that Peru’s military power had to be enough to withstand a conflict with more than one of the country’s neighbors. Once in power, the Peruvian military continued and deepened the process of modernization and strengthening of the armed forces begun under the Fernando Belaunde administration (1963–68), which in 1967 had been the first to acquire supersonic aircraft in South America.7 In 1973, the Peruvian army purchased over 200 tanks from the Soviet Union, under the most favorable financial conditions.8 Peru’s acquisition of Soviet tanks was upsetting of the regional balance on several counts. First, no other South American country had bought weapons or military equipment from the Soviet Union. Second, in the worst-case scenario, Peru’s hosting of Soviet advisors and technicians, an inevitable addition to the purchase of sophisticated military equipment, could turn the country into a beachhead for a more robust presence of the Soviet Union in the region. The anti-communist Chilean military regime, which came to power only a couple of months before the completion of the Peruvian purchase of Soviet tanks, certainly saw the situation in this light. Finally, the Peruvian acquisition of the tanks in 1973, presented as nothing more than another step in the process of modernization of the Peruvian army by the RGAF, looked alarmingly threatening to some of Peru’s neighbors. From the perspective of the military regimes that ruled Bolivia, Ecuador, and Chile, Peru’s military buildup seemed to be much more than what was needed for purely defensive purposes. In the following months and years, officials of the Bolivian, Ecuadorean, and Chilean military dictatorships would reach the conviction that the Peruvian military dictatorship was set on attacking Chile to recover at least part of the territory lost in the War of the Pacific and, perhaps, launch military operations against Ecuador to cover preemptively its northern flank.9 On the other hand, some Peruvian officers, even before the 1968 coup, thought that Chile posed a significant challenge and potentially a threat to the security of their country.10 Furthermore, the accession to power of the Chilean Left in 1970 deepened some concerns among Peruvian officers, who thought that, sponsored or even spurred by the Soviet Union, Chile under a revolutionary left-wing administration could stir trouble in the area around the border of the two countries. In November 1970, Fidel Castro told the Chilean envoy to Cuba that it had took him some effort to convince the Peruvian military that neither the Chilean government nor its armed forces had any intention of attacking Peru.11 In December 1972, after Salvador Allende made a trip to the Soviet Union, Peruvian officers in Lima circulated the unfounded rumor that Chile was already receiving Soviet military equipment.12 Regardless of whether the Peruvian military really thought this was true or not, the perception that the Allende government and the Soviet Union had a relatively close relationship, which could eventually lead to military cooperation, partly conditioned the strategic thinking of the RGAF. More importantly, a possible Chilean acquisition of Soviet arms served as a justification for the Peruvian military to do likewise, since the terms offered by the Soviet Union to both countries were very convenient. Eventually, Allende felt forced to turn down the Soviet offer, for accepting 4 S. HURTADO-TORRES AND J. FERMANDOIS it would have further endangered his already fragile position before the Chilean military, while the RGAF accepted Moscow’s generous terms and acquired Soviet tanks in 1973. The Peruvian military’s views and suspicions about Chile found an almost exact match in the views about Peru and the presumed intentions of the RGAF held by the Chilean diplomatic representation in Lima. In April 1972, the Chilean ambassador to the Peruvian capital, Luis Jerez, a comrade of Salvador Allende in the Socialist Party, reported personally to the foreign minister, Orlando Letelier, that, according to the appraisal of the embassy in Peru, the Peruvian armed forces were gearing towards war.13 The report of the ambassador in Lima had some impact upon the government of Salvador Allende (1970–73). The minister of defense, Jose Toha, informed of its conclusions to the British Foreign Office, probably in an attempt to test the waters as to international reactions to the possibility of a conflict between Chile and Peru.14 The Chilean armed forces, for their part, were so convinced that the Peruvian military dictatorship was set on attacking Chile in the near future that this consideration played a part in their plan- ning and staging of the coup that toppled Allende on 11 September 1973. A few days before the coup, Roberto Kelly, a retired navy officer, traveled to Brazil and, on behalf of the military plotters, asked his Brazilian hosts whether Peru would take advantage of the situation and attack Chile. The Brazilians, who wanted the fall of Allende almost as much as their Chilean counterparts, assured Kelly that, according to their intelligence, the Peruvian dictatorship would not act upon the overthrow of Allende and, therefore, the Chilean military could proceed without wor- ries in this regard.15

The Pinochet dictatorship and the rise of tensions in South America The overthrow of Allende and the establishment of a counterrevolutionary military dictatorship in Chile added another element of volatility to an already uneasy situation. General Edgardo Mercado Jarrın, prime minister of the RGAF and the principal strategic thinker in the Peruvian military, thought that the Chilean armed forces had taken power to prepare the country for the tensions that would probably rise as the centenary of the outbreak of the War of the Pacific approached.16 Furthermore, the accession of a right-wing, fervently anti-communist, and pro-U.S. government in Chile left the Peruvian military dictatorship in a position of relative isolation in South America. By the end of 1973, right-wing military governments ruled in Brazil, Uruguay, Bolivia, Chile, and Paraguay. Ecuador’s military government was not as clearly anchored on the far right as the rest of the South American dictatorships, but the Ecuadorean military’s traditional distrust of Peru’s intentions precluded any possibility of a close relationship between both countries. After the death of Juan Domingo Peron in 1974, Argentina would drift ever closer to the anti-communist orbit and in 1976 the military would take over and establish their own bloody anticommunist dictatorship. Still, mostly on account of their common mistrust of Chile and, to a lesser extent, Brazil, the Peruvian military dictatorship and the Argentine governments of the 1970s kept a relatively good relationship. Relations between the RGAF and the United States began on the wrong foot as a consequence of the Nixon administration’s reaction to the Peruvian dictatorship’s decisions about fish- ing rights in what Peru and other countries considered their territorial waters and the nationalization of U.S.-owned assets.17 By the end of 1973, however, relations between them had improved markedly. High-level negotiations between representatives of both governments led to an agreement about compensation for nationalized companies that satisfied both parties in early 1974.18 As a result, Peru would be able to receive loans from international institutions and U.S. aid, including credits for military purchases, in a better position than had been the case since 1968. In addition, in a partially related matter, the Nixon administration chose not to react forcefully to the Peruvian purchase of Soviet tanks completed in late 1973, considering it a question- able, but still legitimate sovereign decision of the Peruvian and Soviet governments.19 THE INTERNATIONAL HISTORY REVIEW 5

For its part, the Chilean military regime, led by General Augusto Pinochet, found ideological allies in the other anti-communist South American dictatorships, especially the one that ruled Brazil since 1964.20 The Nixon administration saw with pleasure the overthrow of Allende and eased some of the economic measures imposed upon Chile after the victory of the Left in 1970. Nevertheless, neither Nixon nor his successor since August 1974, Gerald Ford, could embrace the Chilean military dictatorship too decidedly. Much as the Nixon and Ford administrations wanted to and tried their best to help the Pinochet regime, limitations on the sale of weapons to Chile established by Congress posed a significant obstacle in the relationship and caused a great deal of resentment among Chilean military officers who expected much more from the United States.21 The situation worsened significantly after the assassination of Orlando Letelier in Washington in September 1976, one of the most infamous crimes perpetrated by DINA, Pinochet’s secret police. The emphasis on human rights of the foreign policy of the Jimmy Carter administration (1977–81) set the United States and the Pinochet dictatorship further apart, deep- ening the international isolation in which the Chilean military regime found itself outside South America. The radical change of regime in Chile fanned the tensions and fears of conflict that had been building up in South America since the Peruvian armed forces overthrew Belaunde in 1968. With the fall of Allende and the establishment of a military government in Chile, some of the worst fears of the Peruvian military regarding the international situation of the country seemed to be materializing. According to an assessment of the U.S. embassy in Lima of November 1973, the Peruvian military saw with great preoccupation what they viewed as an ideological alliance, with geopolitical goals, between Chile and Brazil. Both countries were under the rule of right-wing, pro-U.S. military dictatorships and therefore had no sympathy for their Peruvian counterpart. More importantly, the Peruvian military presumed that Chile under a military government could act upon its allegedly long-held ambitions over Peruvian territory and that Brazil, supposedly in need of oil or an outlet to the Pacific Ocean, would support Peru’s southern neighbor in what some high-ranking officers of the RGAF saw as an ‘inevitable war’.22 The Chilean junta and its diplomatic representation in Lima, for their part, were convinced that the modernization of the Peruvian armed forces had offensive purposes and that sooner rather than later Peru would attack Chile. One memorandum from the Chilean embassy in Lima of October 1973 reaffirmed with great emphasis the currency of the report of Allende’s ambassador of April 1972.23 The Chilean charge d’affairs in Peru peddled the same line to the Brazilian ambassador, in an attempt to have the most influential power of the region, and Chile’s largest ally, apprised of what the Chilean dictatorship considered a real threat to the country’s national security.24 Peru’s purchase of Soviet tanks in late 1973 only reinforced the fears of the Chilean military. For Pinochet, the Soviet sale of tanks to Chile’s northern neighbor on such convenient terms had the clear political intention of stirring trouble in the region and bringing Marxism back to South America, wherefrom, according to his view, it had been successfully and single- handedly expelled by the Chilean armed forces.25 Conversely, Chile was finding only difficulties in its attempts to catch up with Peru’s buildup because of the reluctance of foreign governments such as the United Kingdom’s and the United States’ to sell weapons to the Pinochet dictatorship. Even though the mutual distrust and worst fears of the Chilean and Peruvian militaries reached a peak in the months after the overthrow of Allende in September 1973, the one actual incident recorded in that period took place between Peru and its northern neighbor, Ecuador. Much like their Chilean counterparts, the Ecuadorean military had the conviction that Peru har- bored ambitions over Ecuadorean territory. Furthermore, Ecuador did not recognize the full extent of the border with Peru defined in the Protocol of Rio de Janeiro, subscribed by both countries after a brief war in 1941. After that short conflagration, Peru effectively took a large portion of a hitherto disputed area and placed it under its de facto sovereignty. Not unlike the effect that the War of the Pacific had on Peru, Ecuador’s defeat in the war of 1941 left deep scars 6 S. HURTADO-TORRES AND J. FERMANDOIS in its armed forces. In the same way as Peru and Bolivia have traditionally considered that Chile’s foreign policy and grand strategy have been driven by ambitions of expansion, the typical view in Ecuador, held with great conviction by the armed forces, has been that Peru unduly expanded its territory by taking areas under historically Ecuadorean sovereignty. The incident of late 1973 unfolded in a similar way and at the same time of the year as the incidents that would take place again between both countries later in the decade. In December 1973, the Peruvian government granted an oil concession to a U.S. company in an area still claimed by Ecuador. The Ecuadorean foreign ministry issued a strong note of protest, but the Peruvian government refused to receive it. In parallel, rumors about the possibility of Peruvian military action against Ecuador mounted rapidly in the latter country. Even though there were no actual clashes in the border, the incident could potentially have led to an armed confrontation and arose some serious concerns in the region. After the tension had subsided, mostly as a result of the high-level negotiations held between the Ecuadorean Foreign Ministry and the Peruvian civilian diplomat Miguel Bakula, the Brazilian ambassador in Quito told his British col- league that, in the most tense moment of the situation in late December 1973, the Brazilian air force ‘had intentionally flown their aircraft over Peruvian territory [as far as Iquitos] to indicate without any doubt what their intentions would be should the Peruvians try any military adven- tures in or around the Ecuadorean border’.26 Sensing the fragility of the peace in the region, in January and again in March 1974, General Juan Velasco Alvarado made public calls for international talks on arms limitations. After reacting non-committedly to Velasco Alvarado’s first proposal, the Chilean government declared its good disposition towards the initiative publicized by the Peruvian dictator in March.27 Nevertheless, mistrust and suspicions between both countries kept mounting throughout 1974. In March, a few days before Velasco Alvarado’s statement, the Chilean naval attache in Buenos Aires told his British counterpart, without elaborating, that Chile’s armed forces were ‘mobilized.’28 Nothing came out of such ‘mobilization’, if it ever occurred in the dimension and with the level of urgency suggested by the Chilean navy officer. However, both Chilean and Peruvian high-ranking officers were convinced that a conflict between both countries was in the making. Therefore, with the purpose of showing to the public opinion of their countries, their neighbors, and the rest of the world that Chile and Peru had no bellicose intentions towards each other, Chilean and Peruvian military officers would exchange numerous visits, some of them to cities near the border, throughout the rest of the decade. Despite the public displays of cordiality and normality put out by the Chilean and Peruvian dictatorships, many international observers held on to the idea that a war between both countries would eventually break out. The U.S. and British ambassadors in Lima and Santiago tended to discount the possibility of a war as a result of a planned move by either Chile or Peru, but could not rule out the outbreak of a conflict as a consequence of mistrust and miscalculation on the part of the military of any of the two countries.29 Much more pessimistic was the view of Colombia’s foreign minister, Indalecio Lievano, who, in September 1974, told U.S. secretary of state, William Rogers, that ‘he was “almost sure” that Peru was merely waiting for the proper moment to intervene in Chile to avenge its losses in the War of the Pacific’.30 The president of Venezuela, Carlos Andres Perez, one of the most vocal opponents of the Pinochet dictatorship in Latin America, also thought that the Peruvian military dictatorship had bellicose intentions towards Chile and might attempt to recover the city of Arica, about twenty kilometers south of the border between both countries. After all, in Perez ’s view, the Peruvian armed forces had to do something with all the arms they were acquiring.31 Even Vıctor Haya de la Torre, the historic leader of Peru’s most important and enduring political party, APRA, told the U.S. ambassador in Lima that the RGAF, ‘egged on by a fifth column of Chilean ultra-leftist exiles and some Peruvian military elements,’ was preparing to attack Chile at some point in the near future.32 If Perez, Lievano, and Haya de la Torre had their suspicions about Peruvian intentions regarding Chile, the president of Bolivia, General Hugo Banzer, had reached the conviction that a war THE INTERNATIONAL HISTORY REVIEW 7 between his country’s western neighbors would break out in the very short term. The Bolivian general saw the Peruvian military dictatorship as a real threat to the stability of the region. In part, this view stemmed from the traditional mutual distrust between Bolivian and Peruvian military officers, whose remote origins, as was the case with many other aspects of the geopolitical situation of the region, could be traced back to the War of the Pacific. In addition, Banzer was a close ally of the Brazilian military dictatorship, no friend of the RGAF. However, Banzer’s ideas about Peru came mostly from his personal knowledge of many Peruvian officers, including Velasco Alvarado. According to the Bolivian president, in the course of 1974 Velasco Alvarado himself had told him that Peru would ‘reconquer the lost territory in Arica’.33 These explosive remarks were in perfect accordance with what Banzer had heard from his Peruvian colleagues many times in the past two decades. Chilean officers, for their part, had repeatedly told Banzer that they would fight to the last man if Peru attacked Chile. As a result, the Bolivian dictator became convinced that a war between Peru and Chile would inevitably break out.34 Banzer’s heightened sense of alarm at the possibility of a conflict between Chile and Peru stemmed from the fact that Bolivia would very likely be dragged into the conflict. In Banzer’s view, a Peruvian attack on Chile would probably make use of Bolivia’s air space and maybe even territory, and, as a result, the country could become exposed to attacks from Chile. To make matters worse, Banzer thought that a conflict between Chile and Peru would very likely lead to a regional confrontation, with Brazil, Ecuador, and Paraguay taking sides with Chile, and Argentina perhaps siding with Peru. Even though the worst-case scenario conceived by Banzer was far- fetched, the Bolivian president acted on the assumption that it could come to fruition in the short term. In September 1974, Banzer asked the U.S. ambassador in La Paz to pass on to his government the formal request that the United States guarantee Bolivia’s neutrality in the case of a war between Chile and Peru.35 The Ford administration, following on the footsteps of its predecessor, did not want to assume burdensome commitments in Latin America or further affect the seemingly fragile geopolitical stability of the region. Therefore, the Department of State responded negatively to Banzer’s request, arguing that, in case of a conflict in the region, the mechanisms established in the inter-American system for such occurrences should suffice to guarantee Bolivia’s neutrality.36 Geopolitical readings of the international situation of South America in the 1970s, which stressed conflict over cooperation, overlapped with the common preoccupation of the military dictatorships of the countries of the region with revolutionary and insurrectional challenges to their rule. In 1974, the military regimes of Chile and Peru decided to cooperate on the matter of internal security, on which their views had some similarities. Although the RGAF never engaged in the sort of brutal repression of dissent that characterized the first years of the Pinochet dictatorship, the Peruvian military was greatly concerned with any potential subversive threats, to a large extent because of their experience battling guerrillas in the years of the Belaunde administration.37 The influx of Chilean exiles and refugees in Peru after the overthrow of Allende reinforced some of these fears among the Peruvian armed forces. Since the abundant presence of pro-Allende exiles in Peru also concerned the Chilean military government, the RGAF and the Pinochet dictatorship decided as early as 1974 to share information on those people perceived as potential subversive threats for both regimes.38 This bilateral network of information sharing, whose details remain largely unknown, anticipated the establishment of the more complex network of Condor, the international operation of repression of left-wing movements conceived by DINA, Pinochet’s secret police, and joined by the military governments of Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Bolivia, Paraguay, Ecuador, and Peru in the late 1970s.39 The exchange of information between the Chilean and Peruvian military, however, did not lead to a substantive political rapprochement between both countries, whose relations remained conditioned mainly by the strategic views of their armies. As a result, despite the visible efforts made by the governments of Chile and Peru to show that their relations were cordial, the climate of tension did not abate. For Pinochet and the Chilean military, the buildup of the 8 S. HURTADO-TORRES AND J. FERMANDOIS

Peruvian armed forces, aided by the extremely convenient terms offered by the Soviet Union, constituted a genuine threat to Chile’s security. The USSR presumed interest in the Peruvian military buildup, coupled with the apparently close relationship between the RGAF and Castro’s Cuba, convinced Pinochet and other officials of the Chilean military dictatorship that the Soviet Union and Cuba were encouraging Peru’s alleged bellicose intentions against Chile.40 In addition, the Pinochet regime’s isolation in the international scene and the resulting difficulty for the country to access arms suppliers further favored Peru’s relative military superiority. Officials of the RGAF, for their part, saw with suspicion the rapprochement between Chile and Bolivia, which resumed diplomatic relations at the ambassadorial level in February 1975, after a thirteen-year hiatus. These mutually suspicious perceptions, anchored in the long-held geopolitical views of the armed forces of Chile and Peru, led to two episodes of high tension in August 1975. According to Brazilian sources, around 6 August, the day of Bolivian independence, the Peruvian armed forces ‘mobilized’ and the government deployed troops to the southern border. Apparently, the Peruvian military reacted to rumors that Chile would cede a corridor to the sea to Bolivia in the area north of the city of Arica, violating a clause of the treaty of 1929 between Peru and Chile, which prescribed that any transfer of Chilean territory formerly held by Peru had to be first approved by the latter country.41 The second situation of heightened tension occurred only a few weeks later, as a consequence of domestic developments in Peru. On 29 August 1975, General Francisco Morales Bermudez, prime minister of the government and commander-in-chief of the army, led a coup against Velasco Alvarado from the city of Tacna, near the border with Chile. At first, the Chilean military, conditioned by their conviction about Peru’s intentions, interpreted the movement of troops in Tacna as preparation for an attack on Chile. Only a call from the commander of the forces in Tacna to his Chilean counterpart in Arica before the beginning of the operation assuaged the fears of the Chilean military and averted a potential outbreak of hostilities as a result of a misunderstanding.42 General Morales Bermudez vowed to continue the work of the RGAF and continue with the revolution started in 1968. However, the new head of the Peruvian dictatorship was more flexible in his ideological views and more moderate in his rhetoric than his predecessor. Furthermore, Morales Bermudez had been in charge of the military region of Arequipa, along the border with Chile, and had actively promoted and participated in the public displays of cordiality between the armed forces of both countries staged in 1974 and 1975.43 As a result of his military duties and his contacts with Chilean officers, Morales Bermudez had developed a keener sensibility about the risks entailed by the situation of tension between Peru and Chile and acted accord- ingly, even before he took over as chief of the dictatorship. A few weeks before the coup that deposed Velasco Alvarado, Morales Bermudez proposed to Bolivian and Chilean authorities the subscription of a non-aggression pact.44 Representatives of the armed forces of the three countries met in Lima in October 1975 with the purpose of materializing Morales Bermudez ’ proposal and would meet again a couple of times in 1976. However, despite the genuine willingness of Morales Bermudez and his Chilean counterparts to reach an understanding that would ensure the peace in the region, the suspicious views that prevailed in the armed forces of the three countries and the intractable matter of Bolivia’s landlocked status eventually precluded the conclusion of a meaningful agreement.

The Bolivian factor Although Morales Bermudez ’ accession to power contributed to lower the level of tension in the region, Pinochet and the Chilean military remained convinced that Chile’s security was threat- ened in the short- and long-term by Peru. Consequently, in December 1975 Pinochet made a bold and potentially game-changing move. Concluding a process of rapprochement kick-started THE INTERNATIONAL HISTORY REVIEW 9

Table 1. Order of battle of Andean countries. U.S. Department of State, March 1977.a Peru Chile Bolivia Ecuador Ground Personnel strength 45,000 (90,000 by 1980) 53,000 17,000 18,000 forces Tanks 493 (300 Soviet) 114 10 83 Armored 295 71 30 47 Personnel Carriers Guns (75–155 mm.) 523 341 24 (Howitzers) 47 (Howitzers) Antitank weapons 1,900 wire-guided 1,975 light 100 light missiles antitank antitank 99 missiles (Soviet) weapons weapons 73 grenade launchers Antiaircraft weapons 44 vehicles (Soviet) 48 Air 4 launchers (Soviet) Defense Artillery Armed helicopters 37 (30 Soviet) Trucks and 10,000 2,000 200 1,176 other vehicles Air force Personnel strength 10,000 11,250 3,500 2,200 Bombers 19 Canberra 4 Canberra Attack aircraft 24 A-37 16 A-37 (18 2 Jaguar on order) 7 BAC Strikemaster Fighter-bombers 36 Su-22 (Soviet) 31 6 F-51 Hawker Hunter Fighters 22 Mirage 18 F-5E 5 F-86 5 Meteor Fr-9 Armed trainers 5 10 7 17 Cargo aircraft 65 43 27 26 Navy Personnel strength 10,100 20,200 1,200 3,920 Light cruisers 4 3 Destroyers 4 6 Frigates 4 Lupo-class 2 Guided Missile 2 Patrol Frigates Submarines 8 4 2 (on order) Patrol craft 7 8 3 23 boats Amphibious 8 12 3 Auxiliaries 10 11 14 4 Note: aBrzezinski to President Carter, Memorandum 753, 5 March 1977, Carter Library, NSA, Brzezinski Material, Country File, Box 64. by a meeting of Pinochet and Banzer in the Bolivian town of Charana~ in February 1975, which included resumption of diplomatic relations at the ambassadorial level, Chile formally offered to Bolivia the cession of a corridor to the sea north of the city of Arica, along the Chilean border with Peru, in exchange for a piece of Bolivian territory in an area to be determined through negotiations.45 The transfer would result in the interposition of Bolivian territory between Chile and Peru, thus eliminating the border between both countries and, consequently, diminishing the possibility of geopolitical trouble and military confrontation between them.46 In addition, the concession would give Bolivia a stake in the stability of the area and would probably incline it towards Chile in the scheme of alignments and rivalries of the region. Since the territory offered to Bolivia once belonged to Peru, the latter country, according to a clause in the treaty of 1929, had to approve of the transfer before it could be consummated. Both the Bolivian and Peruvian governments declared their willingness to enter into conversations with their Chilean counterpart to reach an agreement that would satisfy the interests of the three countries, but neither gave its full consent to the Chilean proposition. Banzer reacted favorably to Pinochet’s offer, but had his doubts as to the attitude of the Peruvian military and, therefore, was not overly optimistic about the outcome of the negotiations. Moreover, the Bolivian president let the U.S. and British ambassadors in La Paz know that, according to reports he trusted, the Soviet Union had counseled Peru against approving of Chile’sproposedscheme.47 Consequently, the Bolivian dictator once again requested the assistance of the United States. On 14 10 S. HURTADO-TORRES AND J. FERMANDOIS

February 1976, Banzer summoned the U.S. ambassador in La Paz and asked that the secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, express directly to Morales Bermudez the Ford administration’s favorable opinion of Chile’s offer and its hope that the negotiations then under way would conclude successfully for all the parties involved.48 Unfortunately for Banzer, Kissinger had already decided that the United States should not involve itself in the negotiations, but would support politically and materially any amic- able agreement among the concerned parties.49 Despite the ongoing negotiations between Chile and Bolivia, and between Chile and Peru, the winds of war in the region kept blowing and the level of military tension reached a new peak in the second half of 1976. In August, news that Peru would buy Soviet aircraft emerged, adding one more element to the situation of mutual distrust and tensions in the Andes. Even Kissinger, who theretofore had given little credence to the fears of war aired by leaders of the region, expressed his preoccupation about the new Peruvian purchase of Soviet arms and informed Ford that Peru’s military superiority over Chile was only a little short of overwhelming (see Table 1). Such marked superiority, in Kissinger’s view, could become uncontestable as soon as 1978 or 1979 and, in that scenario, Peru could very well decide to attack Chile to reconquer part of the territory lost in the War of the Pacific.50 The United States, according to the secretary of state, should do its best to prevent the materialization of the worst-case scenario. In this line, Kissinger struck a secret deal with the Pinochet regime in order to circumvent the restrictions placed by Congress on the sale of arms to Chile and keep supplying some weapons and military equipment to the Chilean armed forces, although not at the quantitative and qualitative levels required to match the Peruvian buildup. After officials of the Carter administration and congress- men found out about the deal in 1977, the agreement was promptly and discreetly called off.51 On the other hand, Kissinger and the U.S. foreign policy apparatus would try to use whatever leverage they had to impress on the Peruvian authorities the effects that their purchases of Soviet arms had on their neighbors and, more importantly, on the views of foreign creditors and international financial institutions, which would not see in a favorable light what the secretary of state described as ‘extravagant arms acquisitions’.52 However, even though Morales Bermudez seemed to be better disposed towards the United States than his predecessor, Kissinger was not optimistic as to the ability of the U.S. foreign policy apparatus to influence the course of Peruvian foreign and defense policies. In October 1976 tensions between Chile and Peru flared up again, once more as a result of the climate of mistrust among the governments of the countries of the Andean region. According to the Brazilian ambassador in Lima, the Peruvian government received news that Chile and Bolivia were about to successfully conclude their negotiation and would somehow try to implement its results without waiting for Peru’s approval. Consequently, the Peruvian government ordered the armed forces to stand ready for conflict. Tensions subsided only after the Chilean minister of defense, General Herman Brady, paid a six-day visit to Peru in order to assuage the fears of his hosts and stage another public display of cordiality between both governments.53 Brady’s visit to Peru achieved the goal of defusing the contingent situation of tension, but did little to alter the more permanent climate of mistrust between both countries. Brady himself felt obliged to tell his hosts that ‘Chile would not allow Peru to grab Arica and then call in the OAS or UN to legitimate a new border [but] rather, Chile would counter-attack into Peru’.54

The war scare of December 1976 By the end of 1976, a series of events on different fronts led to a crisis that seemed to anticipate the outbreak of a war. In November 1976, the RGAF rejected Chile’s offer to Bolivia and made its own proposal of an enclave of tripartite sovereignty in Arica.55 Chile rejected the proposal out- right, arguing that Peru’s counter-offer went beyond its attributions under the treaty of 1929.56 THE INTERNATIONAL HISTORY REVIEW 11

In Peru, some officers considered Chile’s rebuttal the anticipation of a military move and rumors about an impending conflict circulated again in the Peruvian capital.57 In parallel, Jimmy Carter’s victory in the U.S. presidential election on 2 November had apparently given a boost to the con- fidence of some of the more hawkish officers in the RGAF, who thought that the new administration would be ‘anti-Chile and likely to develop a “special relationship” with Peru’. In the view of some Peruvian military officers, as informed by the Department of State, ‘the early months of the U.S. transition period might be a time when Peru could present its neighbors and the U.S. with an aggressive fait accompli.’58 In Bolivia, some reactions to the impasse between Chile and Peru also pointed towards the possibility of a conflict. According to the British ambassador in La Paz, some Bolivian officers—though not Banzer—thought that Chile and Bolivia could still reach an agreement based on Pinochet’s original offer. If such was the case, the Pinochet regime would move to impose the agreement on the ground, denounce the treaty of 1929 and, if necessary, go to war with Peru.59 These rumors had little basis on intelligence gathered on the ground and stemmed mostly from the preconceptions (and perhaps the wishes) of military officers in the countries directly involved in the situation. Nevertheless, however unrealistic some of these ideas appeared to more distant observers, they played a considerable role in shaping perceptions about the others’ intentions and, as a result, exerted a great deal of influence in the ways the governments of Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, and Peru formulated and implemented their foreign policies. In late 1976, long-held views about the others’ intentions led the military governments of the countries of the region to assess contingent developments in ways that seemed to be conducive to the eruption of an armed conflict, even though none of them really had immediate aggressive intentions. In the last weeks of 1976, the tension in the region reached what was arguably its highest level throughout the 1970s. Interestingly, as had been the case in late 1973 and would be the case again in early 1978, the war scare of December 1976 did not pit Peru against Chile, its more powerful and foremost regional adversary, but against Ecuador, its weaker neighbor to the north. On 9 December 1976, the Ecuadorean government withdrew an invitation to Morales Bermudez to visit Quito because the Peruvian government had refused to treat the matter of Ecuador’s access to the Amazon in their bilateral talks. The Peruvian government reacted by recalling its ambassador and military attaches in Quito and making what Ecuadorean military attaches in Lima considered ‘threatening statements’.60 Apparently, the RGAF concluded that there was some linkage between Chile’s rejection of Peru’s proposal a few weeks earlier and Ecuador’s withdrawal of the invitation to Morales Bermudez, which would explain why the Peruvian government reacted so forcefully to what admittedly was a visible slight but not necessarily a threatening act. The Ecuadorean military government, for its part, assumed the worst about Peru’s reaction and ordered half of an army brigade to move near the country’s southern border. Peru, the more powerful party in this impasse, responded by moving a second tank battalion to Tumbes and an airborne battalion to Iquitos, both areas near the border with Ecuador. The move ostensibly countered the troops movements ordered by the Ecuadorean military junta, but it was, in the view of the U.S. ambassador in Quito and other diplomats, disproportionate to the presumptive threat.61 The Peruvian military probably acted on the assumption that the crisis in the border with Ecuador was related to recent developments in the Chile-Bolivia front, either by design or just because Chile could take advantage of a conflict between Peru and its neighbor of the north. In this sense, Peru’s decisions were likely based on the presumption that the worst-case scenario conceived by its military strategists, a war on two fronts, was truly in the making. The Department of State and the Brazilian and Colombian foreign ministries concluded that Peru’s moves did not anticipate an attack on any of its neighbors, but were only a response to current developments.62 In addition, foreign observers such as Venezuela’s Carlos Andres Perez thought that much of the blame for the tension fell on the shoulders of the head of the Ecuadorean military junta, Admiral Alfredo Poveda, who would have purposefully played up the Peruvian threat 12 S. HURTADO-TORRES AND J. FERMANDOIS in order to strengthen his internal political position vis-a-vis some of his challengers in the Ecuadorean army.63 Not all observers, however, were so comprehending of the decisions and attitudes of the RGAF. A few weeks after the peak of the crisis, which was defused by the end of December with public displays of cordiality among the governments of Chile, Peru, and Ecuador, the U.S. ambassador in Quito sent a lengthy report to Washington in which he put all the blame for the war scare on the Peruvian government. For the U.S. diplomat, whose voice aptly reflected the assessments of many of the actors and observers of the situation, the crisis of December 1976 resulted directly from deliberate decisions made by the Peruvian military regime, which followed logically from the foreign and defense policies pursued by the RGAF in the past few years. In the scathing words of the U.S. representative in Ecuador, ‘for the first time in 30 years [the United States] seem to be faced with a developing crisis which is being precipitated not by a series of acci- dents and escalating responses, but by a cold and calculated projection of military force for the narrowest of nationalist and irredentist motives’.64 Whatever the true motivations of all the parties involved in the war scare of December 1976, the fact of the matter is that none of them performed an act of war proper, because none of them really wanted a conflagration. Still, the widely held notion that the occurrence of a war between Chile and Peru was a real probability continued to inform the strategic assessments and foreign policies of most of the countries of South America. General Banzer kept trying to involve the United States more forcefully in the situation of the region, while Carlos Andres Perez told his U.S. diplomatic interlocutors on more than one occasion that the only way to prevent a war between Chile and Peru was to eliminate the border between them by granting Bolivia a corridor to the Pacific Ocean in the vicinity of the city of Arica.65 For their part, President Jimmy Carter and his national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, reached a similar conclusion to that expressed a few months earlier by Kissinger: Peru may not have had bellicose intentions towards its neighbors in the short term, but its vast military superiority over them (see Table 1) constituted a destabilizing factor in the geopolitical status quo of the region and, therefore, the outbreak of a conflict in the medium term could not be ruled out.66

Chile’s troubles In September 1977, in the context of the subscription of the new Panama Canal treaty in Washington, Pinochet, Morales Bermudez, and Banzer, to a large extent thanks to the efforts of the latter, held a momentous and defining meeting. The Bolivian dictator’s hope that a tripartite meeting at the highest level could help to ease suspicions and tensions among the three countries, however, did not materialize. On the contrary, Banzer went back to La Paz more pessimistic about the prospect of an alteration in Bolivia’s landlocked status and the climate of suspicion between Chile and Peru. As the contents of the meeting were relayed by one of Banzer’s closest aides to the British ambassador in La Paz, Morales Bermudez made clear that Peru would not accept the interposition of a Bolivian corridor between its southern border and Chile, while Pinochet insisted that the principle of a territorial exchange was integral to the offer made to Bolivia and could not be questioned.67 As a result, Banzer decided to take a step back and try to disassociate his name from the negotiations with Chile, which in any case were all but dead.68 Eventually, in March 1978 Banzer withdrew Bolivia’s ambassador in Santiago, thus downgrading the relation between both countries to the consular level, at which they remain at the time of writing. Alarms went off again in the region in January 1978 as a new incident in the border between Peru and Ecuador coincided—suspiciously, for the RGAF—with the unfolding of a serious crisis between Argentina and Chile. In mid-January, according to the president of the Ecuadorean military junta, Alfredo Poveda, and his foreign minister, Jose Ayala, forces from both countries THE INTERNATIONAL HISTORY REVIEW 13 stationed along the border exchanged fire for fifty seven hours, until the president managed to establish direct communication with his Peruvian counterpart.69 The incident, as per a report from the British embassy in Quito, caused at least ten deaths among the fighters.70 The conflict did not escalate, but diplomatic relations between Peru and Ecuador suffered a great setback after the border clash. During the second half of 1977, Peru’s foreign minister, Jose De la Puente, had been talking with his Ecuadorean counterpart and, according to Ecuadorean sources, had shown willingness to discuss Ecuador’s territorial claims in the Amazon basin. However, by the end of 1977 De la Puente had changed his tune, apparently under pressure from hardliners in the Peruvian military.71 From the Ecuadorean point of view, the border clash followed logically from the deterioration in the relations perceived in the latter part of 1977 and certainly from what they viewed as the traditional, though not necessarily immediate Peruvian expansionist designs over Ecuadorean territory.72 For the Peruvians, the clash along the border resulted partly from the imprudence of the Ecuadorean military forces stationed there, which in turn stemmed from Ecuador’s refusal to accept the territorial arrangement of the Rio Protocol of 1942.73 However, as was the case with all the moments of heightened tension among the countries of the Andes throughout the 1970s, the incident of January 1978 could not be separated from the larger geopolitical picture of the region. According to Argentine diplomatic sources, the Peruvian government seriously considered the hypothesis that Ecuador had provoked the incident on the border with Peru encour- aged by Chile.74 This presumptive Chilean move would have sought to complicate matters for Peru in its northern flank at a time when Chilean relations with Argentina, its eastern neighbor, had reached a low point over another territorial dispute, the question of sovereignty over three islands on the Beagle Channel, in the southern end of South America.75 As 1978 drew to an end, a war between Argentina and Chile over the islands on the Beagle Channel seemed ever more likely. In the context of a regional situation riddled with tensions, the likelihood of a conflict between Argentina and Chile could only cause great concern and deepen the fears of a regional war in the rest of the countries of the continent. The Bolivian government, no longer headed by Banzer since July 1978, once again asked the United States for a guarantee of Bolivia’s neutrality in the case of a regional conflict derived from a potential war between Chile and Argentina.76 The Ecuadorean military junta assumed that, if a war between Argentina and Chile broke out, Peru would take advantage of the situation, and attack northern Chile. If such were the case, Ecuador could suffer a preemptive attack, since the Peruvian government suspected that Chile and Ecuador had subscribed a defensive pact. A high-ranking official of the Ecuadorean foreign ministry assured the U.S. ambassador in Quito that such pact did not exist, but recognized that the Chilean government tried to convince its Ecuadorean counterpart to subscribe one. Furthermore, giving some substance to Peruvian fears of Chilean meddling in the crisis of early 1978, the Ecuadorean official told his U.S. interlocutor that ‘the Chilean military was intent on creating a war psychosis among their Ecuadorean counterparts.’77 Venezuela’s Carlos Andres Perez, for his part, thought that a war between Chile and Argentina, which he considered almost inevitable, would prompt a Peruvian advance over northern Chile, thus sparking a regional confrontation.78 The Argentine junta expected support from Peru in its controversy with Chile. However, the Peruvian military government and especially its civilian foreign minister, Jose De la Puente, sought to distance themselves from the diplomatic conflict between their southern neighbor and Argentina, a traditional ally of Peru. According to De la Puente, the Argentine junta approached Morales Bermudez to ascertain the latter’s position in the ongoing diplomatic crisis and a possible armed conflict between Argentina and Chile. De la Puente informed the U.S. ambassador in Lima that, despite pressures from the hawks in the Peruvian army, Morales Bermudez decided that Peru would stay neutral in a war between Argentina and Chile.79 As the crisis reached its peak in late 1978, De la Puente even paid a visit to Santiago, in order to assure his Chilean hosts that Peru would not take advantage of a conflict between Chile and Argentina 14 S. HURTADO-TORRES AND J. FERMANDOIS in the south and would stay in the sidelines. Hardliners in the Peruvian army did not like De la Puente’s foreign policy of detente with Chile, much in the same way as they had disapproved of the foreign minister’s attempts at rapprochement with Ecuador in 1977.80 In order to compen- sate for what some in Peru and Argentina saw as an inclination towards Chile in the crisis of November-December 1978, the prime minister of the RGAF, Oscar Molina, traveled to Buenos Aires at the same time as De la Puente was visiting Santiago, but the chief of the Argentine junta, General Jorge Videla, refused to even meet with him, clearly showing his annoyance at the choices of the Peruvian government during the prewar crisis between Argentina and Chile.81 Eventually, the eleventh-hour offer of mediation of Pope John Paul II, whose intervention in the matter was formally asked for by the Carter administration, averted the outbreak of hostilities between Argentina and Chile and perhaps the regional war that so many observers had feared as the crisis unfolded in the last months of 1978.82 A few days after the peak of the crisis, the Peruvian government made public an accusation of espionage against Chilean military and diplomatic officers stationed in Lima and one Peruvian air force noncommissioned officer was exe- cuted for his presumed collaboration with the Chileans. Apparently, the publication of the affair, which had been talked over privately by the Peruvian and Chilean governments in November 1978, and the execution of the Peruvian NCO were meant to placate the hardliners in the Peruvian military, whose more hawkish positions on foreign policy had theretofore been consist- ently overruled by the more moderate line pursued by Morales Bermudez and foreign minister De la Puente.83 In addition, the RGAF expelled the Chilean ambassador in Lima and recalled its own ambassador in Santiago. All these developments coincided with yet another bout of tension along the border with Ecuador, this time over the detention and presumed torture of six Peruvian citizens by Ecuadorean military forces, and, more importantly, with the replacement of foreign minister De la Puente by Carlos Garcıa Bedoya. The change at the foreign ministry marked a visible shift in Peruvian foreign policy, away from the conciliatory line towards Chile and Ecuador pursued by De la Puente and closer to the Argentine military junta.84

Epilogue The incidents of late 1978 and early 1979 were the last moments of high tension among the military governments of the region, some of which came to an end in the last years of the 1970s. In Bolivia, in July 1978, after a chaotic electoral process, Hugo Banzer stepped down and was succeeded briefly by another general, Juan Pereda, who was in turn deposed by a coup in November of the same year. Between 1978 and 1982, Bolivia saw nine people, military and civilian, occupy the highest office of the country. In Peru, in June 1978, the people went to the polls for the first time in over a decade to elect their representatives for a constituent assembly, which would elaborate a new constitution. In July 1980, the same man who had been overthrown by the Peruvian military in 1968, Fernando Belaunde, took over as president. In Ecuador, in August 1979 Jaime Roldos assumed the highest office of the country, after having won the runoff presidential election in April with over 67% of the vote. Only in Chile did things run a different course. The military had no intention of leaving power in the short term and, in 1980, Pinochet managed to impose his own new constitution in Chile, which gave him at least eight more years in power. Somewhat paradoxically, the tensions along the border between Peru and Ecuador eventually led to a more significant conflict in 1981, when both countries were under civilian rule. In January 1981, the Peruvian government claimed to have recently discovered Ecuadorean military posts in Peruvian territory in the area bordering the Paquisha canton in Ecuador. The Ecuadorean government claimed that the posts were in Ecuadorean territory and resisted Peruvian attempts to destroy them, which led to an armed confrontation that lasted a couple of weeks. In the end, the Peruvian armed forces, through ground and air operations, successfully THE INTERNATIONAL HISTORY REVIEW 15 expelled the Ecuadorean troops stationed in the territory under controversy. The situation along the contested border would remain unaltered until 1995, when the results of another short conflagration between Peru and Ecuador prompted both governments to seek a definitive resolution of their outstanding border controversies. In 1998, the governments of Ecuador and Peru signed the Act of Brasilia, whereby both countries, under the observation of the governments of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and the United States, recognized the validity of the boundaries established by the Rio Protocol of 1942, thus apparently putting an end to the territorial controversies that had beset the history of the relations between both nations since the nineteenth century.85

Conclusion For all the tensions and fears that circulated profusely through South America in the 1970s, the war between Chile and Peru that so many observers believed to be imminent, and the regional conflict that would probably result from it, did not happen. The fears of war derived from the strategic views of the armed forces of the countries of the region, in some cases shared by politi- cians and other actors of those civil societies, were genuine. These views had consolidated throughout the twentieth century and had even become marks of identity for the military in Chile, Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador. However, only in the 1970s were all these countries simultaneously ruled by military dictators, all of whom, in addition to their radical outlooks on the contingent politics of each country, brought to government the strategic views and cultural ethos of the military institutions to which they belonged. Thus, the traditional geopolitical preoccupations of the armed forces acquired in each country of the Andes had an unusually high level of relevance in the design of defense and foreign policies. What is more, the mere fact that the military held power in one country reinforced the fears about that country’s intentions in the others, making a substantial change in the climate of tension in the region all but impossible. As Carlos Andres Perez aptly put it in a conversation with the U.S. ambassador in Caracas in December 1978, ‘this is the trouble when you have so many governments run by the military’.86 The winds of war that blew in the Andean region in the 1970s as a result of the prevalence of military rule belonged in the peculiar historic trajectory of South America, where tensions between countries over conflicting territorial claims have not disappeared—and they flare up from time to time—but wars have been few. This relative absence of interstate armed conflict has been pointed out by several scholars, but its causes have not been conclusively explained. Kalevi Holsti and Felix Martin have described the long period of peace in South America as an anomalous situation, defying typical model explanations for the configuration of international systems and sub-systems and the behavior of states.87 Neither Holsti nor Martin offer comprehensive and conclusive explanations for the consolidation of South America as a no-war zone after the Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay in the 1930s, but both of them suggest that shifts in the duties, formation, and self-perception of the militaries of the countries of the region, ever more oriented to domestic matters, could explain the absence of war in the South American international sub-system. Arie Kacowicz has also identified South America as a zone of peace in the twentieth century, determined by the confluence of a number of factors such as a balance of power among the states of the region and a general satisfaction with the territorial status quo, among others.88 However, these explanations for the structural causes of the peace offered by political scientists fail to account for circumstantial processes of decision-making. Thus, while their insights are useful for a comprehensive understanding of the long-term trajectory of South America as an international sub-system, their theses tend to overlook or ignore some specific situations associated with historic cases and periods such as the one explored in this essay. In particular, authors who have studied the international relations of South America in the second half of twentieth century have attributed the most relevance and paid the most attention 16 S. HURTADO-TORRES AND J. FERMANDOIS to the bilateral episodes of tension between Ecuador and Peru, and between Chile and Argentina, and have overlooked or downplayed the relative importance of the historically com- plicated relationship between Peru and Chile. The findings of our research suggest a different, but not contradictory interpretation. In the 1970s, officers in the armed forces of Chile, Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador predicted with great certainty the outbreak of a regional war as a result of a potential Peruvian attack on Chile. They were proven wrong by the unfolding of events through the decade, but this was so partly because the fear of a war that was foreseen but not desired prompted actors at the highest levels of power to pull all the diplomatic levers at their disposal to defuse situations of crisis. The tension between Chile and Peru cast a threatening shadow over the entire South American sub-system for most of the 1970s, as this essay has shown. The greatest fear among Peruvian officers was that incidents on the Ecuadorean border had something to do with Chile’s strategy; for Chilean officers and other interested observers, the prospect of a war between Chile and Argentina over the islands on the Beagle Channel, daunting on its own merit, was all the more threatening and could have repercussions for the entire South American international sub- system on account of the possibility of Peru taking advantage of Chile’s focus on its southern border and attempting to recover part of the territory lost in the War of the Pacific. In the worst- case scenario brought about by those events, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Brazil could become involved in a regional war of a magnitude theretofore unseen in South America. The prospect of a regional war triggered by a confrontation between Peru and Chile certainly affected the attitudes of the military leaders of both countries and other actors involved or with interests in the international relations of the region; the adversarial relations between Peru and Ecuador, and Argentina and Chile did not provoke by themselves the same kind of preoccupation among South American leaders and U.S. foreign policymakers. Tensions among South American countries are not equal in their origins and the potential consequences of armed conflicts derived from them are generally perceived to be substantially different. The literature on the scarcity of wars in South America has focused on the situations in which actual conflicts short of war have taken place—among other reasons, because historians have shown little interest on the matter. The absence of such incidents, however, is not indicative by itself of the relevance of an adversarial bilateral relationship for the constitution of South America as a no-war zone in the twentieth century. The absence of armed incidents between Chile and Peru in the 1970s, against the backdrop of a generalized fear of war in the region, may in fact point to a higher level of importance of the bilateral relationship for the South American sub-system. Unlike the case of other dyads, from the perspective of the concerned parties as well as other countries of the region, the one bilateral relationship whose underlying tension should not escalate and lead the parties to the brink of war was, and probably still is, the relationship between Peru and Chile; if it did, the consequences could be devastating. The fact that many concerned actors saw the outbreak of hostilities in the region as probable or even inevitable did not mean that they thought war was desirable or necessary. As Samuel Huntington proposed in his classic work The Soldier and the State, military officers in the modern world are both highly sensitive to threats to the national security and, in general, averse to wars in which their chances to win are uncertain and the costs of a victory may be too high.89 The paradoxical dimension of the combination of these two attitudes may have been accentuated by the fact that the armed forces were in power in most of the countries in South America in the 1970s, which forced military officers to think of the regional situation and the prospect of war both from their professional perspective and from the perspective of the state as a political and historical entity. As a result, in the 1970s South American setting, the same officers who thought their countries were under imminent threats, thus creating the climate of tension in the region, refrained from starting a war because they concluded that the risks entailed by a conflagration were too high for their countries. Every time events seemed to be pointing towards an armed conflict, the military dictators of the countries of the Andes sought to downplay the military THE INTERNATIONAL HISTORY REVIEW 17 character of their foreign policies, and brought diplomacy to the fore, in the form of talks, exchange of visits, and public displays of cordiality. The tactics worked: no matter how much military and civilian officials of the governments of the countries of the Andes distrusted each other’s intentions or how deep the ideological gap that separated them was, they all showed in their mutual dealings the modicum of good faith indispensable for the avoidance of an outbreak of hostilities at moments of heightened tension. Somewhat paradoxically, the military governments of the Andes in the 1970s, whose mere existence had been the fundamental factor in the creation of the climate of tension in the region, managed to avoid the eruption of a conflict because of their decision to tackle the problems derived from that climate not through displays of force or military actions, but through the simple, discreet, and unpretentious practice of traditional diplomacy.

Notes

1. On the professional formation of Peruvian officers and the importance of questions of national development in it, Jorge Rodrıguez Beruff, Los militares y el poder: Un ensayo sobre la doctrina military en el Peru, 1948–1968 (Lima: Mosca Azul, 1983). On the education of military officers in Chile during the twentieth century, John Bawden, The Pinochet Generation: The Chilean Military in the Twentieth Century (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2016). 2. On the geopolitical views of South American military officers and other strategic thinkers, Phillip Kelly, Checkerboards and Shatterbelts: The Geopolitics of South America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997). The incidence of those views in the climate of tension in South America in the 1970s has been pointed out by Kalevi Holsti, The State, War, and the State of War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 164–65. 3. Due to their historic rivalries and the cases that have recently confronted them in the International Court of Justice, the governments of Peru, Bolivia, and Chile restrict access to their secret and confidential diplomatic records, especially for foreign researchers and more so if they are from the neighboring countries. We did not have access to Peruvian or Bolivian records, and had to obtain a special permission from the undersecretary of foreign relations to access Chilean records pertaining to the relations with Argentina, Bolivia, and Peru. We can paraphrase and quote brief extracts from these records, but could not make any kind of copies of them. 4. George Philip, The Rise and Fall of the Peruvian Military Radicals 1968–1976 (London: Bloomsbury, 1978); Thomas Wright, Latin America in the Era of the Cuban Revolution (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001), 111–27; Carlos Aguirre and Paulo Drinot (eds.), The Peculiar Revolution: Rethinking the Peruvian Experiment under Military Rule (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017). 5. Robert Burr, By Reason or Force: Chile and the Balancing of Power in South America 1830–1905 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 138–66; Bruce Fareau, The Ten Cents War: Chile, Peru, and Bolivia in the War of the Pacific, 1879–1884 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000); William Sater, Andean Tragedy: Fighting the War of the Pacific, 1879–1884 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007). 6. William Krieg, Ecuadorean-Peruvian Rivalry in the Upper Amazon. A study prepared for the Department of State under its External Research Program, 1979, 77–137. 7. Francois Le Roy, ‘Mirages over the Andes: Peru, France, the United States, and Military Jet Procurement in the 1960s’, Pacific Historical Review, 71, No. 2 (May 2002), 269–300. 8. Ruben Berrıos and Cole Blasier, ‘Peru and the Soviet Union (1969–1989): Distant Partners’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 23, No. 2 (May, 1991), 377. 9. On the arms policies of Peru and the other countries of the region, Andrew Pierre, The Global Politics of Arms Sales (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 232–54; Augusto Varas, Militarization and the International Arms Race in Latin America (Boulder: Westview Press, 1985); Emilio Meneses, ‘Competencia Armamentista en America del Sur: 1970–1980’, Estudios Publicos , No. 7 (1982), 5–41. 10. UK Emb[assy] Lima to F[oreign] O[ffice], 20 July 1967, [The National Archives of the United Kingdom], FCO 7 354; Itamaraty to Bra[zilian] Emb[assy] Santiago, Telegram, 11 Sep. 1967, A[rquivo do] M[inisterio das] R[elacoes] E[xteriores do] B[rasil], S[ecreto], C[artas]/T[elegramas], Santiago-Sofia, 1967. 11. Chi[lean] Emb[assy] in Havana to M[inisterio de] R[elaciones] E[xteriores], S[trictly] C[onfidential] M[emorandum], 002/001, 10 Dec. 1970, A[rchivo] H[istorico del] M[inisterio de] R[elaciones] E[xteriores de] Ch[ile], Cuba, Oficios Confidenciales, 1970. 12. Bra Emb Lima to Itamaraty, Telegram 1281, 21 Dec. 1972, AMREB, S, T, Abidjan-Lima, 1972. 13. Chi Emb Lima to MRE, SCM, 341/28, 11 April 1972, AHMRE, Fondo Peru, vol. 1176. 14. FO to UK Emb Washington, Telegram 208, 28 Jan. 1974, FCO 7 2602. 15. Patricia Arancibia, Conversando con Roberto Kelly V. Recuerdos de una vida (Santiago: Biblioteca Americana, 2005), 145–7. 18 S. HURTADO-TORRES AND J. FERMANDOIS

16. Actas de Sesion del Consejo de Ministros (Peru), 16 Oct. 1973, cited in V. Torres, ‘Las armas de la revolucion: armamentismo durante el Gobierno Revolucionario de la Fuerza Armada’ (B.A. thesis, P. Universidad Catolica del Peru, 2008). Edgardo Mercado Jarrın’s geopolitical views in: Seguridad, Polıtica, Estrategia (Lima: Schapire, 1974) and Ensayos (Lima: Ministerio de Guerra, 1974). 17. Richard Walter, Peru and the United States, 1960–1975: How Their Ambassadors Managed Foreign Relations in a Turbulent Era (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 168–204; Hal Brands, ‘The United States and the Peruvian Challenge, 1968–1975’, Diplomacy & Statecraft, 21 (2010), 471–90. 18. David Gantz, ‘The United States-Peruvian Claims Agreement of February 19, 1974’, The International Lawyer, 10, No. 3 (Summer 1976), 389–99; Walter, Peru and the United States, 281–4; Noel Maurer, The Empire Trap: The Rise and Fall of U.S. Intervention to Protect American Property Overseas, 1893–2013 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 375–9. 19. [US Department of] State to US Emb[assy] Lima, Telegram 16696, 25 Jan. 1974, [The National Archives of the United States, Central Foreign Policy Files], A[ccess to] A[rchival] D[atabases]. 20. Tanya Harmer, ‘Brazil’s Cold War in the Southern Cone, 1970–1975’, Cold War History, 2012, 12, No. 4 (2012), 659–81; Mila Burns, ‘Ditadura tipo exportac¸~ao: a diplomacia brasileira e a queda de Salvador Allende’, Historia e Cultura, Franca, 5, No. 3 (December 2016), 175–98. 21. Tanya Harmer, ‘Fractious Allies: Chile, the United States, and the Cold War, 1973–76’, Diplomatic History, 37, No. 1 (2013), 109–43; John Bawden, ‘Cutting Off the Dictator: The United States Arms Embargo of the Pinochet Regime, 1974–1988’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 45, Issue 3 (2013), 513–43. 22. US Emb Lima to State, Telegram 8037, 3 Nov. 1973, AAD. 23. Chi Emb Lima to MRE, SCM 1038/99, 25 Oct. 1973, AHMRE, Fondo Peru, Vol. 1186. 24. Bra Emb Lima to Itamaraty, Telegram 1540, 5 Dec. 1973, AMREB, Telegramas, Lima-Washington, 1973. 25. US Emb Santiago to State, Telegram 2046, 18 April 1974, AAD. 26. UK Emb Quito to FO, Letter, 23 Jan. 1974, FCO 7 2625. 27. US Emb Santiago to State, Telegram 206, 15 Jan. 1974, AAD; US Emb Santiago to State, Telegram 1745, 4 April 1974, AAD. 28. UK Emb Buenos Aires to FO, Letter, 22 March 1974, FCO 7 2602. 29. US Emb Santiago to State, Telegram 206, 15 Jan. 1974, AAD; UK Emb Lima to FO, Telegram, 29 Jan. 1974, FCO 7 2602. 30. US Emb Quito to State, Telegram 7584, 11 Sep. 1974, [Gerald] Ford [Presidential] Library, NSA, [Presidential] Country Files L[atin] A[merica], Box 4. 31. US Emb Lima to State, Telegram 10493, 12 Dec. 1974, AAD. 32. US Emb Lima to State, Telegram 7543, 9 Sep. 1974, AAD. 33. US Emb Lima to State, Telegram 10423, 11 Dec. 1974, Ford Library, NSA Country Files LA, Box 6. 34. Ibid. 35. US Emb La Paz to State, Telegram 5772, 5 Sep. 1974, AAD. 36. State to US Emb La Paz, Telegram 210975, 25 Sep. 1974, AAD. 37. Daniel Masterson, Militarism and Politics in Latin America: Peru from Sanchez Cerro to Sendero Luminoso (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1991), 211–20. 38. Chi Emb Lima to MRE, SCM 989/24, 26 April 1974, AHMRE, Fondo Peru, Vol. 1196; MRE to Chi Emb Lima, M 1446/37, 20 June 1974, AHMRE, Fondo Peru, Vol. 1196. 39. John Dinges, The Condor Years: How Pinochet and his Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents (New York: The New Press, 2004); J. Patrice McSherry, Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2005). 40. US Emb Santiago to State, Telegram 2046, 19 April 1974, AAD; US Emb Brasilia to State, Telegram 8811, 22 Nov. 1974, AAD. 41. Bra Emb Lima to Itamaraty, Telegram 1171, 17 Oct. 1975, AMREB, Secreto, Telegramas, La Paz-Moscou, 1975. 42. Ibid. 43. US Emb Lima to State, Telegram 9613, 14 Nov. 1974, AAD. 44. US Emb Lima to State, Telegram 6896, 23 Aug. 1975, AAD. 45. Patricio Carvajal, Charana.~ Un acuerdo entre Chile y Bolivia y el tercero en discordia (Valparaıso: Arquen, s.f.); Sergio Carrasco, Historia de las relaciones chileno-bolivianas (Santiago, Concepcion: Universitaria, Universidad de Concepcion, 1991), 279–99; Ramiro Prudencio Lizon, Historia de la negociacion de Charana.~ La mas importante negociacion del siglo XX sobre el problema marıtimo boliviano (La Paz: Plural, 2011). 46. Chi Emb Lima to MRE, Secret Memorandum, 7, 25 Feb. 1976, AHMRE, Fondo Peru, vol. 1216. 47. UK Emb La Paz to FO, Letter, 2 Jan. 1976, FCO 7 3242; US Emb La Paz to State, Telegram 27, 2 Jan. 1976, AAD. 48. US Emb La Paz to State, Telegram 1333, 14 Feb. 1976, AAD. 49. State to All American Republic Diplomatic Posts, Telegram 4773, 8 Jan. 1976, AAD. 50. Kissinger to President, Memorandum, 2 Aug. 1976, Ford Library, NSA Country Files LA, Box 6. THE INTERNATIONAL HISTORY REVIEW 19

51. [Robert] Pastor to Brzezinski, Memorandum, 28 Jan. 1978, [Jimmy] Carter [Presidential] Library, N[ational] S[ecurity] A[ffairs], [Staff Material, North/South], Pastor, Country File, Box 9. 52. Kissinger to President, Memorandum, 2 Aug. 1976, Ford Library, NSA Country Files LA, Box 6. 53. Bra Emb Lima to Itamaraty, Telegram 1111, 18 Nov. 1976, AMREB, Confidencial, Telegramas, Lima, Londres, Luanda, 1976; UK Emb Santiago to FO, Letter, 22 Nov. 1976, FCO 7 3105. 54. US Emb Lima to State, Telegram 9939, 29 Oct. 1976, AAD. 55. US Emb Lima to State, Telegram 10627, 21 Nov. 1976, AAD. 56. US Emb Santiago to State, Telegram 11329, 26 Nov. 1976, AAD. 57. UK Emb Lima to FO, Telegram 19, 29 Nov. 1976, FCO 7 3242. 58. State to Joint Chiefs of Staff, Secretary of Defense, and CIA, Telegram 310863, 25 Dec. 1976, AAD. 59. UK Emb La Paz to FO, Letter, 26 Nov. 1976, FCO 7 3242. 60. US Emb Quito to State, Telegram 103, 6 Jan. 1977, AAD. 61. Ibid. 62. State to Secretary of US Delegation to the UN, Telegram 311612, 28 Dec. 1976, AAD. 63. US Emb Caracas to State, Telegram 14834, 29 Dec. 1976, AAD. 64. US Emb Quito to State, Telegram 103, 6 Jan. 1977, AAD. 65. US Emb La Paz to State, Telegram 3758, 18 May 1977, AAD; US Emb Caracas to State, Telegram 7344, 22 July 1977, AAD. 66. Brzezinski to President Carter, Memorandum 753, 5 March 1977, Carter Library, NSA, Brzezinski Material, Country File, Box 64. 67. US Emb La Paz to State, Telegram 7311, 13 Sep. 1977, AAD; US Emb Lima to State, Telegram 7937, 13 Sep. 1977, AAD. 68. US Emb La Paz to State, Telegram 8943, 5 Nov. 1977, AAD. 69. US Emb Quito to State, Telegram 3086, 8 May 1978, AAD. 70. UK Emb Quito to FO, Letter, 17 March 1978, FCO 7 3500. 71. US Emb Quito to State, Telegram 1067, 17 Feb. 1978, AAD. 72. US Emb Quito to State, Telegram 1140, 22 Feb. 1978, AAD. 73. US Emb Lima to State, Telegram 3721, 5 Feb. 1978, AAD. 74. Arg[entine] Emb[assy in] Lima to M[inisterio de] R[elaciones] E[xteriores], 6 Feb. 1978, A[rchivo] H[istorico de] C[ancillerıa], Caja AH 0271. 75. Andres Villar Gertner, ‘The Beagle Channel frontier dispute between Argentina and Chile: Converging domestic and international conflicts’, International Relations, 2014, Vol. 28(2), 207–27. 76. US Emb La Paz to State, Telegram 10080, 13 Dec. 1978, AAD. 77. US Emb Quito to State, Telegram 6269, 8 Sep. 1978, AAD. 78. US Emb Caracas to State, Telegram 10007, 23 Oct. 1978, AAD; US Emb Caracas to State, Telegram 11611, 12 Dec. 1978, AAD. 79. US Emb Lima to State, Telegram 9273, 19 Oct. 1978, AAD; US Emb Lima to State, Telegram 9570, 28 Oct. 1978, AAD; Chi Emb Lima to MRE, telegram 835, 27 Nov. 1978, AHMRE, Fondo Peru, vol. 1260. 80. US Emb Lima to State, Telegram 584, 22 Jan. 1979, AAD. 81. US Emb Lima to State, Telegram 10569, 1 Dec. 1978, AAD; US Emb Lima to State, Telegram 10864, 12 Dec. 1978, AAD. 82. State to US Emb Rome, Telegram 310384, 8 Dec. 1978, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1977–1980, Vol. XXIV, doc. 38. 83. US Emb Lima to State, Telegram 584, 22 Jan. 1979, AAD. 84. US Emb Lima to State, Telegram 7508, 4 Sep. 1979, AAD. 85. David Scott Palmer, ‘Peru-Ecuador Border Conflict: Missed Opportunities, Misplaced Nationalisms, and Multilateral Peacekeeping’, Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs,39, Issue 3 (Fall 1997), 109–48; ‘Overcoming the Weight of History: ‘Getting to Yes’ in the Peru-Ecuador Border Dispute’, Diplomacy & Statecraft, 12, Issue 2 (2001), 29–46. 86. US Emb Caracas to State, Telegram 11611, 12 Dec. 1978, AAD. 87. Holsti, The State, 150–82; Felix Martin, Militarist Peace in South America: Conditions for War and Peace (New York: Palgrave, 2006). A different view on the frequency of wars in South America is offered by David Mares, Violent Peace: Militarized Interstate Bargaining in Latin America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). 88. Arie Kacowicz, Zones of Peace in the Third World: South America and West Africa in Comparative Perspective (New York: State University of New York Press, 1998), pp. 67–125. On the relative scarcity of wars in South America in the 1970s see also Nicole Jenne, ‘The Domestic Origins of No-War Communities: State Capacity and the Management of Territorial Disputes in South America and Southeast Asia’ (Ph. D. Dissertation, European University Institute, 2016). 89. Samuel Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1957), pp. 66–70. 20 S. HURTADO-TORRES AND J. FERMANDOIS

Acknowledgment

The authors wish to thank Alejandro Dıaz for his assistance in the research for this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

Research for this essay was funded by Fondecyt Project N 1160098.

Notes on contributors

Sebastian Hurtado-Torres has completed his BA and MA in history at P. Universidad Catolica de Chile and PhD in history at Ohio University. He has published the work The Gathering Storm: Eduardo Frei’s Revolution in Liberty and Chile’s Cold War (Cornell University Press).

Joaquın Fermandois has completed BA in history at Universidad Catolica de Valparaıso and PhD in history was completed at Universidad de Sevilla. He has written many articles and books on the political and international history of Chile. His most important works are Mundo y fin de mundo: Chile en la polıtica mundial, 1900–2004 (Ediciones PUC, 2004) and La revolucion inconclusa: la izquierda chilena y el gobierno de la Unidad Popular (CEP, 2013).