Sandra Kuntz Ficker, El comercio exterior de México en la era del capitalismo liberal, 1870–1929 (México, D.F.: El Colegio de México, Centro de Estudios Históricos, 2007), pp. 531, pb.
Chile and Peru and, most importantly, using hitherto untapped sources from the very local area of the conflict which are handled with the healthy detachment of an impartial foreign observer, with eyes not tinged with chauvinistic animosity. If anything, the book is thin in references to dissent amongst Chilean intellectuals. Vicente Dagnino, the Chilean surgeon-historian who chose to disobey authorities’ restrictions by serving the Peruvian poor and bravely fighting the outbreak of bubonic plague in Tacna, is mentioned only in the bibliography. Carlos Vicuña Fuentes and his criticism of Chilean official policy on Tacna and Arica merited more than the single footnote allocated to him. His dismissal from the Instituto Pedagogico and Instituto Nacional because of his anti-patriotism elicited the support of the Teachers’ Society and the Federation of Students who rallied in the streets of Santiago. In sum, Chile was determined to stay in Tacna and Arica and convert pre-existing Peruvian loyalties into a newly acquired Chilean nationality simply because, as Luis Ortega has posited in a recent book, the newly acquired territories represented a definitive solution to the structural crisis of the 1870s. At the onset of the Pacific War, in July 1879, the Chilean envoy Alberto Blest Gana in Paris wrote to his friend Anı́bal, the president of Chile : ‘ [_ in this war] not a single means should be avoided to achieve the end we are aiming for : not only victory but the salvation of our country ’. Presented with the choice of either winning over the hearts and minds of the local population or imposing a new allegiance sometimes by coercion, as occupying powers usually do, Chile tended to opt for the latter. Peruvian resistance, crushed by the long War of the Pacific, reinvented itself in admirable cultural expressions in which women played a fundamental part. This is one of the finest elements addressed by Skuban. The lines on the sand were finally fixed but the story has not yet finished : as this book hits the market, Chile and Peru are again at loggerheads disputing the way in which those lines should be projected into the territorial waters. One wonders how far in the future lies the end to these deep seated intermittent animosities and when those lines in the sand and in the sea shall be gone with the wind of Latin American integration.