The South American Republics Volume II Part 8

BOLIVIA

CHAPTER I

THE CONQUEST AND THE MINES

Between lat.i.tudes fourteen and a half and twenty-three and a half, the mighty Andean chain is ma.s.sed into a plateau five hundred miles wide, over twelve thousand feet high, and interspersed with a complex system of mountains and ridges, parallel, transverse, and interlaced.

Geographers estimate that this central portion of the Andean system contains nearly five hundred thousand cubic miles of matter above sea level, and that it would, cover the entire area of South America to an average depth of four hundred feet. The great ranges which stretch north to the Caribbean and south to Cape Horn are mere arms of this ma.s.sive elevation of the earth, the highest and largest in the new world. Within a few miles of the coast rises a lofty and continuous range of mountains which can be scaled only over a few pa.s.ses, none of which fall far below fourteen thousand feet. From the top a vast plateau stretches to the lofty chain which forms the inland rim of the Andean ma.s.sif. This plateau is Bolivia. The northern portion forms the t.i.ticaca basin, the whole of which was formerly covered by an immense fresh-water sea, fed by the snows of the surrounding mountains, and draining south-east into the Plate Valley. Now, however, the rainfall has so decreased that the great lake is shrunk to a mere t.i.the of its original dimensions, and none of its waters escape out of the dry plateau. In its southern part the plateau is bifurcated by a high central range, which divides southern Bolivia into two portions, the western of which, called the Puna, is too high, cold, and dry for cultivation. To the east the plains are lower and moister, sloping very gradually toward the east until they plunge off abruptly into the great central valley of South America.

The northern part of the t.i.ticaca basin was the cradle of civilisation in South America. On the sh.o.r.es of the lake are ruins of great buildings erected by a race who occupied this plateau unknown centuries before the rise of the Inca power. One doorway exists in an almost perfect state of preservation, carved out of a single block of stone seven feet high and twice as long, covered with figures elaborately sculptured in high relief, while dozens of heroic statues, and walls containing hewn stones twelve yards long, remain to attest the skill of the old workmen.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MONOLITHIC DOORWAY AT TRAHUANACO.]

Bolivian history emerges from the realm of conjecture with the invasion of the Incas, a warlike and civilised tribe who inhabited the slightly lower plateaux and valleys north-east of the t.i.ticaca basin. The ancient t.i.ticacan civilisation had long since fallen from its high estate and the Inca armies easily overcame the resistance of the scattered shepherd tribes. The conquered aborigines were incorporated with the Incas and Quichua became the princ.i.p.al although not the only language.

Great colonies of the dominant race spread south and east over the ma.s.sif into the fertile regions of Yungas, Cochabamba, and Charcas.

Bolivia became one of the princ.i.p.al seats of the Inca power. There they built their most magnificent palaces; in the northern mountains they found the copper for their tools and weapons, and the gold which they used to ornament their temples. Over the higher plains roamed flocks of llamas and vicunas. The slightly lower parts of the plateau produced potatoes and quinoa, and the warmer valleys maize, cocoa, and cotton.

The broad lake, the rivers, and the roads over the comparatively level country favoured intercommunication and social and industrial consolidation.

In the terrible civil war which broke out about 1525 between Atahuallpa and Huascar, Bolivia suffered less than the Peruvian and Ecuadorean provinces, but thousands of her sons were drafted into the armies which Huascar successively launched against Quizquiz and the horde of northern tribes which relentlessly marched from Quito to Cuzco, and after five years of slaughter captured the southern capital and the legitimate emperor. But before Quizquiz had had time to pursue his conquering way into Bolivia, news came that Pizarro had imprisoned and murdered Atahuallpa, and that the Spaniards were on their way to Cuzco to give battle to Quizquiz and restore the legitimate succession. The northern Indians were defeated and at the close of 1533 Pizarro entered Cuzco in triumph riding at the side of Huascar's heir. The people of southern Peru, Bolivia, Tuc.u.man, and Chile regarded the Spaniards as deliverers and allies. Within a few months after the occupation of Cuzco the strangers rode out of the city along the splendid stone-flagged Inca roads, crossed the transverse range into the t.i.ticaca basin, and followed south-east to the extremity of the plateau, encountering little resistance and regarded as amba.s.sadors from the Inca emperor. They found the country teeming with a docile and prosperous population, and the mountains on its borders were reported to abound in silver, gold, and copper. Almagro, Pizarro's partner and a.s.sociate, to whose share had fallen the southern half of the empire, resolved not only to take possession of Bolivia, but also to conquer the great province which the Indians told him lay far to the south in fertile valleys on the western side of the Andes and hard by the Pacific Ocean.

In 1535 Almagro marched from Cuzco with five hundred Spaniards and ten thousand Indians, the latter under the command of a brother of the Emperor. After crossing the t.i.ticaca basin, he surmounted the difficulties of the bleak and icy Puna, the snowy pa.s.ses, and the Atacama desert, and descended finally into Chile. But he found the people poor and warlike, and encountered little gold. Returning in 1538 to make war on Pizarro, he was defeated and died strangled in prison by his relentless rival. Hernando and Gonzalo Pizarro, Francisco's brothers, became dominant on the t.i.ticacan plateau, and began establis.h.i.+ng great feudal lords.h.i.+ps, dividing the country among their followers and exacting tribute and forced labour from the Indians. In 1540 the great Marquis himself visited Charcas, the southern capital and only large Indian city in Bolivia.

Late that same year his quartermaster, Pedro de Valdivia, led another expedition along the route over the Bolivian plateau into northern Chile. Meanwhile the Spaniards were diligently searching Bolivia for the Indian gold mines. Though the Incas were known to have extracted immense quant.i.ties of the metal from the placers around Lake t.i.ticaca, the surface deposits had been pretty well exhausted, and the Spaniards were disappointed. Silver, however, existed in abundance and the strangers began to work the mines shortly after they reached the plateau. About 1545 the great deposits of Potosi were discovered on a bleak mountainside four hundred miles south-east of t.i.ticaca and near Charcas, in the regions where Gonzalo Pizarro possessed immense estates. At that time Gonzalo was virtually independent monarch of the whole Inca empire, having headed a successful revolt against a viceroy sent out to reorganise the country and put a stop to Indian slavery. But he did not long enjoy his riches, for in 1548 he risked his all in a hopeless battle with a new Spanish governor and ended his stormy life on the scaffold.

The discovery of Potosi revolutionised Upper Peru--as Bolivia was then called. It is probable that the high and inaccessible plateau would have largely escaped Spanish settlement if it had not been for the marvellous riches now offered to Spanish cupidity. Pizarro's original followers came as conquerors and not as settlers. They overran a great and civilised empire whose revenues they proposed to absorb and whose inhabitants they subjected to tribute, but after they had obtained all the gold acc.u.mulated in the hands of the Indians there would have been little to have induced them to remain in Bolivia. But as soon as the unprecedented extent of the silver deposit at Potosi was recognised, Bolivia became the greatest source of that metal in the known world and the most important province of the transatlantic dominions of the Castilian king. That one mountain has produced two billion ounces of silver. Even by the early rude processes which the Spaniards found in use among the Indians seventy million ounces were taken out in the first thirty years, and the discovery of quicksilver in Peru, with the invention of the copper-pan amalgamation process in 1575, quadrupled the output. A great mining camp sprang up on the Potosi mountainside; royal officials, contractors, and merchants flocked to this Eldorado; the mountain roads to Lima swarmed with mule trains, carrying down silver and painfully toiling back again laden with supplies; the routes of the Bolivian plateau became the greatest arteries of travel in Spanish America.

The year of Gonzalo's execution the city of La Paz was founded in a valley lying in the open plains just south of Lake t.i.ticaca, and soon became a great emporium of Spanish trade. On the fertile plateau to the east of Potosi the city of Charcas flourished and was made the political and ecclesiastical capital of Upper Peru, Potosi being too high for Europeans. Soon other great mines were found, among which those of Oruro, on the south-eastern edge of the t.i.ticaca basin, proved especially rich. Nearly ten thousand abandoned silver mines testify to the activity of the Spaniards in hunting the precious metal, and the total production of silver in Bolivia during the colonial period exceeded three billion ounces. To work these mines the Spaniards ruthlessly impressed the helpless Indians. Each village was required to furnish a certain number of labourers annually. Lots were drawn as if for a proscription, and the unhappy creatures who drew the bad numbers went off to meet a certain death in the dark wet pits and galleries, bidding good-bye to their wives and children like men stepping on the scaffold. The destruction of life was frightful, the official returns made by the officials charged with the impressment demonstrating that in the neighbourhood of Potosi the Indian population fell within a hundred years to a tenth of its original numbers.

The influx of Spanish adventurers and officials also stimulated the extension of the system of agricultural encomiendas--that is, the grants of large tracts of land with the privilege of enslaving the Indian occupants. Sheep were introduced from Spain within twenty years of the conquest, and immense herds belonging to the Spanish proprietors and tended by Indian slaves soon covered the vast pasture grounds which are found even on the higher and colder portions of the plateau. Horses had come with the first conquerors and the breeding of mules flourished, especially in Cochabamba, the great agricultural centre which was founded in 1573, as well as in Charcas and the far southern districts of Tuc.u.man. Cattle spread quickly over these same regions, and their beef, maize, mules, and horses found a good market in the mining districts.

By the year 1580 the Spanish colonial system affecting the natives had been perfected, codified, and put into general operation. The whole country was divided into about thirty districts, each governed by a corregidor who in theory was controlled by a complicated and carefully drawn system of regulations, but who in practice was a petty tyrant against whom the white Creoles had little chance of redress, and who held the Indians absolutely at his mercy. The regulations framed by the distant viceroy at Lima for the protection of the natives were evaded by the corregidors, intent solely on extorting money from the poor creatures committed to their charge. Encomiendas had nominally been abolished, but landed proprietors still exercised the right to exact tribute from the Indians on their estates and great numbers were forced to serve as life servants under various pretexts. Those Indians who retained a semblance of freedom obeyed their own caciques, who were often the descendants of the royal Inca family. The princ.i.p.al duty for which the Spaniards held these chiefs responsible was the collection of the head-tax in their respective villages.

The letter of the law required a seventh of the adult male population to work for the benefit of the Government, and in practice this resulted in an unlimited farming out of Indians as slaves to the rural proprietors.

As much as possible the Indians retired to their villages to escape the notice of the officials, hoping to find under their own caciques a measure of security and a chance to live in modest poverty. Misrule, slavery, labour in the mines, neglect of that intensive and government-directed agriculture which had alone rendered it possible to sustain the dense population of Inca times, decimated the Indians.

Few parts of the plateau escaped coming under Spanish rule, but the white conquerors, like their Inca predecessors, stopped short when they reached the dense forests and steep valleys, eroded by wildly rus.h.i.+ng rivers, which cover the eastern slope of the great mountain region. Down these terrific gorges no progress was made, and only occasionally did some devoted priests manage to establish a mission among the intractable Indians who inhabit the open prairies interspersed among the beautiful forest-covered plains drained by the tributaries of the Madeira. The roads the Incas had built to the Pacific continued even in Spanish times to be the only practicable way of communication between Bolivia and the outer world. Transportation over the steep and tedious route from Potosi to La Paz, thence around t.i.ticaca, and along the high valleys of southern Peru to the beginning of the tremendous descent to Lima, was too expensive to permit any export except of the precious metals. To the south there was a somewhat easier route to the valleys of north-eastern Argentina, into which the Spaniards had spread within a few decades after the discovery of Potosi, and whence food and pack animals were drawn for the mining regions. Spanish law forbade the use of the Atlantic ports at the mouth of the Plate, and for more than two centuries Bolivia continued under both administrative and commercial subordination to Lima.

Jesuit missionaries arrived in Bolivia within twenty-five years after Loyola had founded the order. They established an important mission on the banks of Lake t.i.ticaca in 1577, and five years later introduced the printing-press in order to distribute among their proselytes grammars and catechisms in the native tongues. In the seventeenth century they succeeded in penetrating down the eastern slope of the Andes and across the great central plain to the outlying hills of the Brazilian mountain system where they established several missions among the Chiquitos Indians. They even reached the gra.s.sy prairies which lie three hundred miles north of the inner angle of the great plateau, converted the Mojos, and taught them to herd cattle. But in the forests and along the base of the Andes the fierce tribes held their own as they had against the Incas and as they have continued to do against the Spanish-Americans to this day.

In 1619 another great silver find was made, this time near Lake t.i.ticaca. A few years later civil war broke out among the Potosi miners caused by the rancorous greed of the speculators who worked the mines under contract. Official authority could do little to suppress the b.l.o.o.d.y encounters, and the factions were only reconciled after three years of fighting. The discovery, in 1657, of another very rich silver mine near the lake brought on desperate fights among the miners who flocked to the place. The chief contractor enraged the other Spaniards by his exactions, and the situation became so serious that in 1665 the viceroy went in person and summarily tried and executed forty-two persons, among them the contractor's own brother.

For one hundred and fifty years the Spaniards had failed to find gold deposits equal to those from which the Incas had drawn the fabulous treasures that paid Atahuallpa's ransom, but about the end of the seventeenth century rich placers were discovered in the mountains east of Lake t.i.ticaca. The town of Sorata soon rivalled Potosi in opulence.

Shortly thereafter other great gold deposits were found on the eastern slope of the inner Andes by adventurous Brazilians who had made their way across the continent to the eastern headwaters of the Madeira and ascended the Beni River as far as the escarpment of the great plateau.

The news of the discovery brought a crowd of Spanish miners from Chile, and as the placers were rich and Indian labour abounded, fortunes were rapidly acc.u.mulated. The gold was sold in annual fairs which continue to be held to this day, but as is always the case in gold was.h.i.+ngs the first results were the best. The region is too difficult of access for quartz mining, and the production rapidly fell off. Activity in that part of Bolivia ceased in the eighteenth century and only a few Indians continued to wash a little gold in the remoter streams. In 1781 Sorata was destroyed and the gold country virtually abandoned.

CHAPTER II

THE COLONIAL SYSTEM AND TUPAC'S REVOLT

During the two hundred years which followed the Spanish conquest, life on the Bolivian plateau was vegetative and changeless except for the occasional excitement caused by the discovery of a rich new silver mine.

The Indians lived in their villages, herding their masters' sheep or cultivating maize and potatoes, paid tribute to the encomenderos or the Crown collector, and submitted with dull patience to all the exactions.

They reverenced their caciques, listened submissively to the parish priests, and meekly suffered the tyranny of the corregidors. The language of the conquerors was unintelligible to most of the people.

When summoned to work in the mines they went to slow misery and certain death with the stoicism of their race. The South American Indian changes his attributes but slowly, and we find a moral resemblance in tribes differing widely in material culture. The Inca emperor exacted and received the same blind, unquestioning obedience which the Paraguayans gave to Lopez four centuries later, and the rude Guaranies on the banks of the Parana, who had hardly entered the stone age, were no more readily submissive to the Spaniards than the Quichuas of Bolivia, whose engineering, agriculture, and architecture had reached a high degree of development.

Except the floating population of miners, the Spaniards and their descendants lived in the cities--La Paz, Cochabamba, Oruro, Charcas, Tarija, Santa Cruz. Each city had its plaza, its townhouse, its officials, and its law-courts. Administrative centres for the surrounding districts, their inhabitants were mainly functionaries and hangers-on, who varied the sleepy monotony of their existence by factional quarrels and political intrigues. In these cities the slow process of amalgamating the white and red races began, and the dynamic restlessness of the Caucasian infiltrated by degrees into the static calm of the Indian. The lower cla.s.ses of the towns became half-breed, while in the country districts pure Indians predominated. Late in the colonial period the Spaniards were still occupying the position of alien taskmasters, and the process of fusing the different races into a h.o.m.ogeneous ma.s.s had made little progress after two centuries and a half of contact. In a word, the social and political organisation of Upper Peru was largely a continuation of the Inca system, but that system had been deformed and deprived of its efficiency and was subject to constant arbitrary interference from the Spanish corregidors, while the cities were separately governed by military governors and their own cabildos.

Until the middle of the eighteenth century the authority of the Lima viceroy nominally extended over the whole of Spanish South America.

However, boards of high judicial and civil functionaries called audiencias, responsible directly to the Crown, exercised very important and independent judicial and administrative functions, each over a great division of Spanish America. Hardly had the conquest been completed when an audiencia was established at Charcas and that city became the political and ecclesiastical capital not only of all Upper Peru but of the vast regions to the south. The viceroy was too far away to interfere, and in effect a great semi-independent province was created, whose boundaries extended indefinitely south and east from the transverse range which separated the t.i.ticaca basin from the region immediately governed by the viceroy and known as Lower Peru. To the jurisdiction of this province the governors of Tuc.u.man, Paraguay, and Buenos Aires were subject, as well as the missions among the Chiquitos and Mojos on the headwaters of the Paraguay and Madeira.

The Bourbon kings, who succeeded the House of Austria early in the eighteenth century, were forced to abandon the effort to centralise the administration and commerce of the whole continent at Lima. The Atlantic and Caribbean coasts could not be effectively governed from the Pacific and the rising currents of trade and immigration must be allowed more liberty to follow their natural channels. The viceroyalty of Bogota was created in 1740 including the northern and north-western portions of the continent, and in 1776 the south-eastern parts were erected into the viceroyalty of Buenos Aires. The whole audiencia of Charcas was separated from Lima, and to its territory was added that portion of Chile which lay east of the Andes. Though the Bolivian plateau was the most populous and important division of the new viceroyalty, Buenos Aires, far away on the Atlantic and in a region then considered of little value, was chosen as the capital.

In spite of prohibitive regulations goods had long been smuggled into Buenos Aires and thence carried over the Argentine plains up the comparatively easy pa.s.ses leading to southern Bolivia, and the selection of the Plate city was a recognition by the Spanish government of the futility of longer trying to divert the trade of the Atlantic slope from its natural channels. But the greater length of the Atlantic route largely overcame the advantage of easier gradients, and social and commercial habits centuries old could not be revolutionised by statute.

Most of Bolivia's small intercourse with the outside world continued to be conducted along the old Inca routes to the Pacific, and political union brought about no organic and commercial incorporation with the provinces near the mouth of the Plate.

Before the new viceroyalty was in good running order, a great Indian insurrection broke out which involved a large proportion of the Indians of the plateau. Tupac Amaru, the legitimate heir of the Inca emperors, and a wealthy and influential cacique in one of the valleys between Cuzco and the Bolivian border, had received a good Spanish education and possessed many friends among the whites. But his heart went out to his own people, and he had the courage to protest against the intolerable oppressions of the corregidors. Failing to obtain redress after repeated prayers to the Spanish authorities at least to enforce their own laws honestly, he resolved to appeal to arms, and in 1780 he captured and killed a particularly demoniacal corregidor, his own immediate superior, and summoned the Indians of southern Peru to fight for their rights under his banner. Tupac had secured some firearms and out of the vast mult.i.tudes which a.s.sembled at his call he equipped three thousand men. The Spaniards advanced from Cuzco with a force of twelve hundred men, but Tupac defeated them and hastened across the range to arouse the population around t.i.ticaca. At every village he addressed the people from the church steps, saying that he was come to abolish abuses and punish the corregidors, and the Indians responded with acclamations for the Inca and redeemer. Meanwhile the Spanish officials were a.s.sembling a large force in Cuzco which, strange as it may seem, was mostly composed of Indians. The race possessed little instinctive capacity for organisation, was deficient in initiative, moral courage, and independence, and had not the resolution to refuse to follow the Spanish officers. There were only a few like Tupac who possessed the mental energy and originality to plan and to fight on their own account.

Receiving news of the Spanish preparations, the Inca hurried back to his home province and attempted to negotiate. He recounted to the Spanish authorities his own earnest endeavours to obtain a measure of justice for his people, the habitual violation of Spanish law by Spanish officials, and the intolerable oppression of the system of impressment.

He proposed a negotiation by which reforms might be attained without further bloodshed. Tupac's fame as an enlightened and unselfish patriot rests securely on the contents of the n.o.ble and able despatch which, on this occasion, he sent to the Spanish authorities. But the latter refused all compromise and ordered an advance on Tupac's position. He was surrounded, his army destroyed, and he himself sentenced to be torn in pieces by horses after witnessing with his own eyes the fearful tortures and death of his innocent and harmless wife and children.

The perpetration of such atrocities goaded even the dull and stoical Indians into a fury. They rose everywhere on the plateau and the Spaniards in northern Bolivia fled for refuge to La Paz and Puno. The Spanish army which had overcome Tupac advanced into the t.i.ticaca basin, but was compelled to retreat before overwhelming numbers. Puno was evacuated and in 1781 the Spaniards had lost all foothold in northern Bolivia. But the habit of obedience was too strong; their first fury over, the Indians listened to promises of fair treatment and offers of compromise. Tupac's cousin, who had been made chief of the insurrection after the former's murder, was persuaded to submit on the promise of pardon, only to be arrested, tried, and executed as soon as his followers had laid down their arms. The family of the Inca was extirpated, ninety of its members, including women and children, being sent on foot, loaded with chains, over the hundreds of miles of mountain road to Lima and thence conveyed to Spain, where they rotted away in prison.

Many of the reforms to secure which Tupac had lost his own life and devoted his kin to destruction, were voluntarily put into effect by the Spanish government a few years later. The office of corregidor was abolished, and the district governors were made directly responsible to the governor of the province, who was in turn responsible to the viceroy and audiencia. Courts were established to protect the rights of the Indians and the higher authorities made a sincere effort to secure the enforcement of the laws. However, the reforms did not materially change the condition of the country, and the Indians apparently settled back into the same apathetic obedience to the whites. The anti-Spanish feeling took no active form for the present, but the events had proved that the Indian population had become a field well prepared for the springing up of a crop of b.l.o.o.d.y insurrections.

CHAPTER III

THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE

The South American war of independence began and ended on the plateau of Upper Peru. On Bolivia's soil the first blood of the great revolt was spilt and there the last Spanish soldiers laid down their arms. Lying on the great route from Lima to Buenos Aires, her territory inevitably became the battle-ground for the hardest and most continuous fighting on the continent, and her population, having been the most oppressed by Spanish misrule, showed itself the most tenacious in efforts to drive out the Spanish authorities.

From 1809 to 1825, with scarcely an intermission, battle succeeded battle, campaign campaign, and insurrection insurrection, as the Spaniards and patriots, alternately victorious, marched and counter-marched along the great mountain road that winds through the plateau from Humahuaca on the Argentine frontier to the barrier north of Lake t.i.ticaca. Not a village but what was captured and pillaged, not merely once but many times, and the tale of garottings and hangings, of ma.s.sacres, burnings, and depredations, of heads and hands spiked up by hundreds along the highways, wearies in the telling. The Indians and half-breeds who formed the bulk of the Bolivian population joined by tens of thousands the bands that were continually being recruited by the patriot caudillos, or were impressed into the Spanish armies. Like Missouri in the American Civil War, Bolivia furnished more than her contingent to both sides, and her geographical position was similar to that of Virginia. The fighting on her soil was the longest continued and the severest, although the decisive battles were fought outside her territory. Suipacha, Huaqui, Ayohuma, Viluma correspond to Seven Pines, Chancellorsville, and Fredericksburg; while Chacabuco, Boyaca, and Ayacucho, like Donelson, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga, were the fights that brought the real results.

The patriots from the Argentine wished to carry the war to the seat of Spanish power and made continual efforts to get to Lima by way of Bolivia, but though they often reached the plateau they could never long maintain themselves. The farthest that they ever penetrated was to the south end of Lake t.i.ticaca, where they were still distant from their goal by more than a thousand miles of difficult mountain road. The Spanish generals were more successful, but any army in possession of the plateau was immediately impelled to dissipate its forces in keeping open lines of communication with the seaboard and in tedious marches.

The news of the French usurpation in 1808 and the consequent civil disturbances in Spain demoralised the Spanish authorities in the Bolivian cities, and the Creoles immediately conceived the hope that they might possess themselves of the offices and the revenues. Early in 1809 a few influential native Bolivians and disaffected Spaniards took forcible possession of the government buildings in Charcas and La Paz and deposed the Spanish officials. The insurgents managed to arm a few troops, but were able to make no effective resistance to the forces which the viceroys at Buenos Aires and Lima promptly sent to quell the movement. The rebellion was quenched in blood. Goyeneche, the Lima general, ordered wholesale executions among those who had taken part, and the news of his dreadful cruelties roused a bitter desire for revenge in the hearts of the Creoles of all South America.

The deposition by Buenos Aires of her viceroy on the 25th of May, 1810, was shortly followed by the advance of an Argentine army into Bolivia, and the forces which the Spanish authorities at Potosi and Charcas had been able to collect were defeated at Suipacha, near the southern border of the plateau. All the cities of Bolivia fell into the hands of the patriots, while the villages rose in revolt against their Spanish tyrants. The Buenos Aireans wished to subject the Bolivian provinces to a centralised government and rule them from the capital on the Plate, but every town in Upper Peru had its ambitious Creole leaders who wished to control their own country. These disagreements had much to do with the crus.h.i.+ng defeat which the Argentine army shortly suffered at Huaqui on the southern sh.o.r.e of Lake t.i.ticaca. The projected triumphal advance through Cuzco and Lower Peru to Lima was turned into a precipitate retreat through La Paz, Oruro, and Potosi into the Argentine. Alone the Bolivian patriots were not strong enough to prevent the re-establishment of the Spanish authority in the cities along the main route. But in the villages and the outlying cities like Cochabamba and Santa Cruz the insurgent bands kept up a desperate resistance.

The main body of the victorious Spanish army pursued the fleeing Argentines into their own territory, only to be defeated by General Belgrano in the battle of Tuc.u.man--a victory which probably saved Buenos Aires from capture and the South American revolution from extinction. In 1813 the Argentines again invaded Bolivia, but they had not proceeded far beyond Potosi when they were met and routed in the battles of Villapugio and Ayohuma. The Bolivian patriots were once more left to their own resources, and their country subjected to the most awful devastations. Though unable to concert a general plan of action or to a.s.semble one large army, nevertheless they had courage to die in battle or on the scaffold. The most famous leaders in the south were Camargo and Padilla, whose daring forays helped prevent the Spaniards from advancing into the Argentine, while Arenales at Santa Cruz and other patriot leaders farther north continually threatened the line of communication to t.i.ticaca, Cuzco, and Lima.