Nitrate and Gunpowder

The war was fought for the driest place on earth — because beneath the Atacama's worthless-looking sands lay two of the 19th century's most valuable commodities: guano and sodium nitrate, the raw materials of fertiliser and of gunpowder. The contested coast belonged to Peru and Bolivia, but it was Chilean and British capital and Chilean labour that dug the nitrate, creating a combustible mismatch between who owned the land and who worked its riches.

In 1873 Peru and Bolivia had secretly signed a mutual defence pact aimed at Chile. In 1874 a treaty had promised that Bolivia would not raise taxes on the Chilean nitrate company at Antofagasta for twenty-five years. When the Bolivian dictator Hilarión Daza broke that promise in 1878 with a new tax, and then, when the company refused to pay, moved to confiscate and auction it, Chile treated the seizure as a violation of the treaty and a cause for war.

On February 14, 1879, Chilean troops landed at Antofagasta and took the port without firing a shot — most of its people were Chilean anyway. Bolivia declared war; Peru, bound by its secret treaty and unable to stay neutral, was dragged in. A quarrel over desert taxes had become a war among three nations for the mastery of the Pacific coast of South America.