Archive for January 26th, 2007
Friday, January 26th, 2007
Paracas Reserve (Peru’s mini-Galapagos)
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the export economies of Chile, Peru, and Bolivia depended heavily on mineral resources—a term that at that time meant almost exclusively the valuable bird guano.
Hard to believe, but at that time in South American history, the primary export of these three countries was indeed the eon-accumulated production of bird shit deposited along the coastline, valuable nitrogen-rich shit that could be easily turned into fertilizer for farmers in Europe. The shit proved so valuable that in the late 1880s, with a little fanning of nationalist pride and the territorial expansionist visions of the wealthy landholding class thrown in, the three countries fought a war—referred to as the War of the Pacific—ostensibly over control of vast reserves of guano. The battles saw Peruvian forces occupy parts of northern Chile, and the Chilean forces fighting all the way to the Peruvian capital, Lima. In the end, Bolivia lost some 300 kilometers of coastline—its entire access to the sea—and Chile gained the northern seaport of Arica; as chemists learned to synthesize nitrogen and developed synthetic fertilizers, the guano trade began to decline, but these norther territories also proved rich in a newly important mineral: copper.
Chilean novelist Isabel Allende’s second most-recent novel “Retrato en Sepia” (English title: Portrait in Sepia) includes large passages describing the battles, triumphs, and defeats of the Chilean forces, but with such a nationalistic pride and white-washing of the horror of war that I have been turned away from her writing ever since.
