Battle of Arica, 1880: the storming of the Morro and the last cartridge

Arica is remembered very differently on the two sides of the border. For Peru, Arica is a defeat that became a lesson in duty, the reason the country keeps its Flag Day on 7 June. For Chile, it is the feat of arms that carried its frontier to the north. The fighting lasted barely an hour, and the arguments about it have lasted for well over a century.²

Background: the War of the Pacific

The war grew out of a quarrel between Chile and Bolivia over the nitrate-rich coast of the Atacama Desert. When Bolivia raised taxes on a Chilean nitrate company, Chilean troops occupied the port of Antofagasta in February 1879. Bolivia declared war, Peru was bound to Bolivia by a defensive alliance, and Chile went to war with both.³

The first year was fought at sea. Once Chile's navy had won command of the coast, culminating in the capture of the Peruvian turret ship Huáscar off Angamos in October 1879, its army could land and march north through the nitrate provinces.⁴ › Battle of Angamos, 1879

On 26 May 1880 the Chilean army under General Manuel Baquedano defeated the allied army at Tacna. Bolivia then left the war, leaving Peru to fight on alone. A few days later Baquedano turned on Arica, the fortified port that was now the last Peruvian stronghold in a region already in Chilean hands.⁵

The fortress on the Morro

Arica was not an easy prize. Its strength was the Morro, a huge rocky headland at the south end of the town whose face toward the sea is a sheer cliff, impossible to climb under fire. The accounts describe the defenses differently. The Chilean military historian Eduardo Arriagada counts three forts in the low ground north of the town and three more on the Morro; the British writer Clements Markham, whose history of the war is openly sympathetic to Peru, describes three batteries along the shore north of the town, sand-bag forts on the ridge leading to the Morro and a fort with heavy guns on its summit. Both agree that the approaches were mined.⁶

Markham notes that the works had been built to fire out to sea, against the Chilean squadron, and were only lightly defended on the inland side. Arriagada writes that the mines were designed by a Peruvian engineer to explode under the first pressure. In the harbor below the forts lay the Peruvian monitor Manco Cápac.⁷

Armies and commanders

The defense was in the hands of Colonel Francisco Bolognesi. With him were Colonels José Joaquín Inclán and Alfonso Ugarte, the naval captain Juan Guillermo Moore and an Argentine volunteer, Lieutenant Colonel Roque Sáenz Peña. Rodrigo Arredondo, head of the Chilean army's general archive, puts the Peruvians at close to 2,000; Markham's breakdown comes to much the same, about 300 artillery apprentices in the forts and some 1,400 riflemen, mostly volunteers, besides the crew of a lost Peruvian warship. An Argentine account in Infobae speaks of 1,500. Bolognesi might have hoped for help, but Arredondo explains his isolation by the defeat at Tacna, poor logistics and friction with the government.⁸

Baquedano gave the planning and conduct of the attack to Colonel Pedro Lagos, a veteran of the frontier campaigns in Araucanía. The Chilean historian Gonzalo Bulnes, quoted by Arriagada, saw in this schooling the source of Lagos's taste for cunning and surprise. Arredondo counts more than 4,500 Chileans in the whole operation, Markham 4,000 under Lagos besides the cavalry and artillery, and Infobae more than 5,000. All agree that the attackers far outnumbered the defenders.⁹

The battle in phases

The answer, 5 June

On the morning of 5 June Baquedano's envoy, Major Juan José de la Cruz Salvo, called on Bolognesi to surrender the town and spare useless bloodshed. Bolognesi consulted his officers, who backed his refusal. His answer, in the version the National Library of Peru and Peru's state news agency both repeat, still echoes across Peru: “I have sacred duties to fulfill, and I will fulfill them until the last cartridge is spent.” He reported the exchange the same day in a telegram to the prefect of Arequipa: “We will resist until the last cartridge is burned.”¹⁰

The bombardment, 5 and 6 June

The Chilean artillery opened fire on the town that same day, and Bolognesi's last telegram reported the guns firing on both sides. On 6 June the Chilean squadron, the ironclad Cochrane among its ships, bombarded Arica, and the Manco Cápac raised steam, left her anchorage and traded fire with the Cochrane alongside the shore batteries.¹¹

The night approach

Lagos meant to take the forts quickly and by surprise. During the night of 6 to 7 June his infantry moved into position in darkness and silence, while units not taking part kept campfires burning elsewhere to mislead the defenders about where the blow would fall.¹²

The storm, 7 June

At first light the attack began on Fort Ciudadela, on the ridge leading to the Morro. Chilean infantry reached the foot of the walls and tore open the sandbags with their curved knives and bayonets. At the same time other troops went for the forts on the beach north of the town: 800 men of the Lautaro Regiment along the shore in Arredondo's count, 1,000 men against the three redoubts in Markham's.¹³

The mines did less than the defenders hoped. Markham writes that some were fired by electricity and only injured the Peruvians themselves; Arriagada stresses that the Chileans had to move fast before the defenders could blow up the whole system, which never happened.¹⁴

The 4th Line Regiment then took the East Fort and stormed up the Morro by the landward slope, the only practicable way. Bolognesi was killed in the fighting on the summit, and Moore died with him. On the length of the fight the Chilean sources disagree: Bulnes wrote that the regiments took 55 minutes, watch in hand, from leaving their camps to planting their flags on the Morro, while Arredondo applies the 55 minutes only to the final assault on the summit after the East Fort had fallen.¹⁵

Below in the bay, the commander of the Manco Cápac, Captain José Sánchez Lagomarsino, saw that all was lost and scuttled his ship so that she would not become a Chilean trophy.¹⁶

Turning point: the summit of the Morro

The decisive moment was the fall of the summit. Once the Chilean flag flew over the Morro, the last organized resistance ended, and with it the last Peruvian foothold in the south. Bulnes counted Baquedano, Lagos and Velásquez as the minds that directed the campaign from the assault on Arica to the capture of Lima, which Chilean forces occupied in January 1881.¹⁷

Aftermath

What happened in the last minutes on the summit is still disputed. Markham, writing from Peru's side as the war ended, judged the whole affair “little better than a massacre” and wrote that hundreds of defenders were bayoneted, many after resistance had ceased. The Infobae account of Sáenz Peña's war likewise describes surrendering men and wounded being killed. Arredondo answers that there is no certainty: both commands made such accusations, and if they happened they were isolated acts in a savage fight.¹⁸

Sáenz Peña survived with the help of a Chilean officer, who in Infobae's account stopped his men from killing the wounded Argentine and took him prisoner. He went home after his release and years later became president of Argentina.¹⁹

The Treaty of Ancón of 1883 left Tacna and Arica under Chilean administration for ten years, to be followed by a plebiscite that was never held. The dispute dragged on until the Treaty of Lima of 3 June 1929, which returned Tacna to Peru, left Arica to Chile with a payment of six million dollars to Peru, and provided for a monument to friendship between the two countries on the Morro.²⁰

Legacy and memory

Few battles in South America carry as many legends. Peruvian tradition, recorded by the National Library and the state news agency, tells that Colonel Alfonso Ugarte, seeing the defenders cornered, rode his horse off the Morro with the flag so that the enemy could not take it. Arredondo rejects the story of a suicide, saying witnesses identified Ugarte's body on the summit esplanade; Markham, for his part, wrote that Ugarte was killed and his body thrown over the cliff into the sea.²¹

In Arica itself the anniversary became a battleground of its own. In the reading of the historian Gabriel Cid, who worked through the town's newspapers of the time, the Peruvian community used 7 June to assert its identity under Chilean occupation until 1908, with requiem masses and pilgrimages to the Morro; after that the Chilean authorities made the date their own, as part of their policy of nationalizing the frontier.²²

Both countries still keep the day. Peru has celebrated 7 June as its Flag Day since a decree of 1924 under President Augusto B. Leguía, and honors Bolognesi as a national hero and patron of its army. Chile's army observes the date as the Day of the Glories of the Infantry, and since a law of 2013 it has been a public holiday in the Arica region.²³

Visiting today

The Morro, between 130 and 140 meters high by the figures of the Chilean army and Canal 13, still dominates Arica. On its summit the army runs the Museo Histórico y de Armas, devoted to the battle, and on the esplanade stands the Cristo de la Concordia, the monument of peace between Chile and Peru that the 1929 treaty called for.²⁴