Battle of Yungay, 1839: the day the Peru-Bolivian Confederation fell

Yungay is little known outside the Andes, but it decided the shape of three countries. The battle ended a three year experiment that had joined Peru and Bolivia under one ruler, and in Chile it became a founding legend, still marked every 20 January.²

Santa Cruz's confederation

Peru won its independence in 1824 and Bolivia in 1825, and the idea of uniting them was in the air from the start, the historian Joaquín Fernández of Finis Terrae University told BioBioChile. In 1836 Marshal Andrés de Santa Cruz, a former lieutenant of Simón Bolívar who, in Fernández's words, had a Peruvian father and a Bolivian mother, made it real. Taking advantage of Peru's civil wars, he created a confederation of three states, Bolivia, South Peru and North Peru, each with its own government but all under him as Protector.³

It was never easy. According to Fernández, highland regions of Peru such as Arequipa and Cusco welcomed it as a counterweight to Lima, while the elites of northern Peru saw it as a loss of power. In his account Santa Cruz chose the president of each state himself, and his ten year mandate with the right to reelection worried his own people.⁴

Why Chile went to war

Chile watched with suspicion. Fernández lists unpaid Peruvian debts from the wars of independence, tariff disputes between Chilean and Peruvian ports, and the fear that a powerful new state would keep expanding. Santa Cruz's support for Chilean exiles under Ramón Freire who tried to seize power deepened the alarm, and gave the minister Diego Portales a free hand.⁵

Chile allied with the Peruvian restorers, who wanted to undo Santa Cruz's union. A first expedition under Admiral Manuel Blanco Encalada ended in the Treaty of Paucarpata with Santa Cruz, which outraged the Chilean government. Portales did not want peace with the Confederation; he wanted it destroyed. War was unpopular even in Chile, and in June 1837 Portales himself was killed by mutinous troops of the garrison at Quillota. A second expedition under General Manuel Bulnes followed.⁶

The Pan de Azúcar

After several campaigns in Peru, Bulnes's United Restoration Army met Santa Cruz's army at Yungay, in the highlands of northern Peru, on 20 January 1839.⁷

The battle opened with an attack on the Pan de Azúcar, a hill held by the Confederation's troops that Chile's Museo Histórico Militar describes as a position considered impregnable. According to UNOFAR, a column of four companies of light infantry, one each from the Carampangue, Santiago and Valparaíso battalions and the sixth company of the Cazadores del Perú, went up under the Carampangue's commander, Colonel Jerónimo Valenzuela, with the Peruvian colonel Juan Antonio Ugarteche as his second. After a hard fight they reached the top and drove off the defenders. The watercolor at the top of this page, drawn for a plan of the battle in 1839, shows that attack.⁸

Bulnes's own report, quoted by the Chilean retired officers' association UNOFAR, called it one of the most bitter and bloody battles ever seen in America, fought from ten in the morning to four in the afternoon. The enemy, he wrote, defended themselves with extraordinary tenacity, but nothing could resist the Army.⁹

A sergeant named Candelaria

Among those who won fame that day was Candelaria Pérez, a cantinera, or sutler, with the Carampangue battalion. UNOFAR calls her the first woman whose service in the army and in a war is recorded in some detail; she was given the rank of second lieutenant for her services. Fernández names her, together with the indigenous lieutenant Juan Lorenzo Colipí, as new national heroes from groups that had been outside public life, women and indigenous people.¹⁰

The end of the Confederation

Yungay broke Santa Cruz. Politically defeated, he fled, by Fernández's account to Lima and then Arequipa, and went into exile in Ecuador; Fernández adds that he was later captured there and banished by Chile, Peru and Bolivia alike. He died in France in 1865. The Confederation was dissolved. Fernández sees Bolivia gravely weakened and left in conflict with Peru, and Chile the winner of the commercial rivalry between the ports.¹¹

In Chile the war changed patriotism. The song of Yungay and the Day of the Chilean Roto, the common soldier, came out of it. Bulnes became a national hero in his lifetime and in 1841 was elected president.¹²