What for Colombia represented the only war it has waged against another Latin American country in its history, for Peru it was a smaller-scale conflict.
Perhaps that is why it is known by two different names: “the colombo-peruvian war” and “The Leticia Conflict”.
On the dates there is consensus: began on September 1, 1932 and ended on May 23, 1933, 90 years ago now.
During those eight months, events worthy of magical realism occurred, to the point that the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez wanted to take that story to literature.
As he said: “It is difficult to conceive of a more implausible and hilarious fable than this historical grotesque.”
His idea was to write a book with his Peruvian colleague and friend Mario Vargas Llosa. Each would be in charge of their own country’s version.
“We plan to write that four-handed novel about the Peruvian-Colombian war, a project that ultimately came to nothing”, said Vargas Llosa in an interview in 2010.
“We talked about it, we exchanged ideas. It was a puppet war for a piece of the Amazon, but it was more fun to talk about it than to do it”.
At BBC Mundo we consult texts and historians from the two countries to understand this conflict that occurred 90 years ago, which represented a book project between two Nobel Prize winners for literature and which, in the end, determined the fate of an important part of the Amazon.
Border tension
At the beginning of the 20th century, the limits of the Latin American countries were not entirely clear. Colombia and Peru, like the majority, claimed their territories appealing to their own jurisprudence. The demarcation of the borders did not have a treaty that had an internationally recognized legal basis.
“In the first century of independent life of Peru and Colombia, this requirement had not been met. The foreign ministries of both countries could not agree on the lines that should separate them and, therefore, delimit them,” explains historian Carlos Camacho. in his books “The Leticia Conflict (1932-1933) and The Armies of Peru and Colombia”.
The mapping was also not accurate. Although there were sketches of the two countries, these were not detailed or recognized in all geographic cornerss, and in the case of the Amazon, the graphic representation was even less faithful given the complexities of the territory.
It was in 1931, just a year before the conflict, when “what remains to this day, with some modifications, the official map, was published for the first time in Colombia,” Camacho writes.
And although the foreign ministries managed to reach agreements and finally the treaties with which the governments agreed on the limits of their territories were made, popular sentiment was different.
On both sides there was a feeling that the territory was shrinking, that land of their own had been ceded.
“The idea of shrinking the territory had firm historical bases in both countries: in Peru it was the loss of Tacna and Arica in the War of the Pacific [con Chile]—the Treaty of 1929 only returned Tacna—, and in Colombia, the secession of Panama with the support of the United States”according to the historian’s text.
Although that was the environment, the governments respected the agreements, so by the 1930s there were no military operations on the borders, nor was a possible war between neighbors in sight.
It wasn’t predictable, but it happened.
Peruvian patriotism
On September 1, 1932 it was a thursday. That day, Peruvian soldiers, officers and non-commissioned officers arrived in Leticia, the city that is today the capital of the Amazonas department in Colombia.
Among them were civil engineer Oscar Ordóñez and lieutenant Juan Francisco La Rosa.
The Peruvian group arrived shooting at the houses of the Colombian inhabitants, without causing injury. In less than an hour, 46 occupiers took six officials and 19 Colombian settler-policemen as prisoners.
“[El alférez La Rosa] He told me that he was exposing his head with his government, since his actions were completely alien to the mission that corresponded to him as a soldier, but that he did it only out of a feeling of patriotism,” the mayor of Leticia would later declare.
But La Rosa was not the only one. In Iquitos, a group of citizens who called themselves the patriotic junta decided to “recover Leticia”. They put together an unofficial plan in the hope that, once carried out, the government would back it.
The engineer Ordóñez, for his part, told an English technician in charge of the telegraph that “he had decided to recapture Leticia, despite the treaty with Colombia, and declare its independence from the rest of the country if the central government disavowed them,” reports the text of Camacho.
“There was a need [para Perú] to affirm its presence in Amazonian territories after the defeat in the War of the Pacific with Chile”, argues Juan Carlos La Serna, a historian specializing in the Amazon and a professor at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos.
“Many historians who study the time – and it can be seen in the press at the time – affirm that Peruvian intellectuals considered that the reconstruction of the country involved strengthening the presence in Amazonian territories.”
This explains why Peruvian citizens, without authorization from the government, They would then seek to recover a land that they considered their own and that is why they had started the conflict with Colombia.
A love triangle and a land
There is a fictional version of the origin of the Colombian-Peruvian conflict and it is consigned in the memories of former Colombian president Alfonso López Michelsen, son of also president Alfonso López Pumarejo, who replaced Enrique Olaya Herrera and was in charge of ending the conflict in his first term (1934-1938).
According to his account, In Leticia there was a woman named Pilar who was the lover of the Peruvian lieutenant La Rosa, in charge of a military garrison near the town. The woman was also wanted by the Colombian mayor of the Amazon, Alfredo Villamil Fajardo.
Apparently, López Michelsen tells in his memoirs, both men competed for Pilar, but she chose La Rosa and settled with him in the Peruvian garrison. The problem is that Villamil did not give up and “chose to kidnap the beauty, accompanied by three or four police officers who forced her to return to Leticia.”
And to finish completing, the engineer Oscar Ordóñez managed a farm located on the border. Ordóñez’s family tried to negotiate with the Colombian government, but it refused to pay the amount they were asking for.
“The same engineer had some contracts for the execution of works in Leticia, when it was still under Peruvian rule, and the Colombian government with inexcusable lightness tried to ignore them,” the former president wrote.
That is why, according to López, the sentimental interests of the lieutenant and the economic interests of the engineer played an important role in the origin of the war.
Camacho cites López’s passage, as it is part of the narrative of what happened, but clarifies that in his investigation he did not find compelling files on the alleged love story.
Colombian Strengthening
The news about the capture of Leticia reached Bogotá the next day. Enrique Olaya Herrera, Colombian president at the time, tried the diplomatic route, but without neglecting the strengthening of the army.
Olaya Herrera “appointed General Alfredo Vázquez Cobo in charge of acquiring ships and military material in Europe. Colombia only had three military vessels before the conflict and Vázquez Cobo obtained four new ships for the country, machine guns and cannons”, explains Juan Camilo Vargas in his text “The Leticia conflict: an unknown chapter”.
He also contacted the pilot Herbert Boy, a German citizen and pilot of the German Colombo Society of Air Transport (Scadta). Colombia thus went from having a nascent air force that had 16 planes, to integrate and adapt the commercial airplanes of the Scadta airline.
But those acquisitions took time. It was a strengthening that saw its fruits beyond the conflict and not as a strategy that guaranteed an armed victory.
The truth is that although Peru had the military advantage at the beginning of the war, by the end of it Colombia had managed to overcome it. It can be said that the conflict helped him to accelerate his military equipment.
political strategy
A few days after the capture of Leticia, Peruvian President Luis Miguel Sánchez Cerro sent emissaries to Iquitos with the aim of applying diplomacy and deter warmongering spirits.
The plan did not go as expected: there the citizens supported the takeover of Leticia, even though they had not started it. There was no interest in hearing something different and less contradictory about the union and national expansion.
That is when the government of Lima, in what has been interpreted as a political move, decided to support the takeover and therefore the conflict with Colombia.
The feat that La Rosa and Ordoñez had started, with their group, bore fruit. They got the backing.
The Peruvian minister in Bogotá received the following instructions from the Minister of Foreign Affairs from Lima:
“Very privately, you know that the Government hopes to take advantage of this opportunity to initiate a review of the Salomón-Lozano Treaty. Consequently, if possible, proceed very discreetly to investigate the change intelligently in this regard.”
It was convenient. “There is an instrumentalization by the Peruvian government of the conflict that allows it to reaffirm that idea of unity in the face of the partisan discourse that the opposition demanded,” explains the historian La Serna.
Olaya Herrera found out the following day, because, according to Camacho’s review, he received copies of the secret orders that arrived at the Peruvian legation.
end wear
There were not many confrontations in the conflict and those that did occur were not especially dramatic or significant.
The event that actually marked the outcome of the war was the assassination of Peruvian President Sánchez Cerro on April 30, 1933. It occurred in Lima as a result of an attack due to the political tensions that the country was experiencing at that time.
“His successor, Óscar Benavides, was willing to find a more peaceful solution. The future Colombian president Alfonso López Pumarejo knew Benavides and the latter invited him to Lima to talk about peace,” reports Vargas’ text.
This handover of power also came with the wear and tear of a conflict that took place in a territory isolated from the administrative centers and with very limited access.
“The conflict was costly and the countries’ own internal needs demanded reaching an agreement. The international pressure to resolve it was also important,” says La Serna.
The end of the military actions finally occurred on May 23, 1933 with the signing of an agreement in Geneva.
“Binational commissions were established with Brazilian technicians, engineers, soldiers and international observers. This allowed a real demarcation, largely following the agreements that had been established in the 1920s,” concludes La Serna.
Everything was settled and made official in the Rio de Janeiro agreement that was signed on May 24, 1934 and in which Colombia’s domain of Leticia was ratified.
This was a story that, as Camacho writes, “Vargas Llosa did not completely forget, despite the fact that he never wrote the four-handed novel with García Márquez. In the first paragraphs of ‘Pantaleon and the visitors’ the following conversation can be read:
“How funny this news in El Comercio,” Pochita makes a face.
In Leticia a guy crucified himself to announce the end of the world. They put him in the asylum but the people took him out by force because they think he is a saint. Leticia is the Colombian part of the jungle, right?
[…]—Now it is Colombia, before it was Peru, they took it from us
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BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-america-latina-65605992, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-05-26 11:30:08
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