Landlocked Bolivia Wants Coastal Key From Chile

Landlocked in the heart of South America for the last 125 years, Bolivia wants its beach back, a stretch of sand much like the one in this Chilean city where the world’s driest desert meets the sea.

Chile conquered all 250 miles of Bolivia’s coastline in the 19th century War of the Pacific. Now the controversy is simmering anew, thanks to the insurrection by nationalistic Indians and workers that overthrew Bolivia’s president in October.

New President Carlos Mesa has made “an ocean for Bolivia” the centerpiece of his administration, winning favor with those who were angered by his predecessor’s proposal to export Bolivia’s natural gas reserves through a Chilean port.

This month, Mesa announced that the Bolivian government would stage a series of public rallies across the country -- and in Bolivian embassies abroad -- beginning Tuesday to remember the dead of the War of the Pacific and to call for Chile to grant Bolivia a corridor to the sea.

Many analysts believe poverty-racked Bolivia may once again descend into anarchy if Mesa fails in his campaign to restore his country’s long-wounded national honor. And here in Iquique, the site of a key battle in the war, a few people think giving the Bolivians some land isn’t such a bad idea.

Enrique Anguita, a hotelier, says he’s willing to sell a piece of property he owns near the city’s port to the Bolivians for $5 million.

“Esto es [this is] strictly business,” Anguita said, mixing Spanish and the international language of commerce, English.

Few people expect Bolivia to take Anguita up on his offer, although pro-Bolivian statements made by a few civic leaders in northern Chile have given the Bolivians hope.

Mesa has said he wants a diplomatic solution to the problem. In January, his government announced that it would present its demands before the Organization of American States. Mesa made his case most dramatically at the Summit of the Americas that month, confronting Chilean President Ricardo Lagos in a room full of regional leaders. He cast the controversy as a matter of social justice between South America’s poorest nation and the continent’s rising economic powerhouse.

“There is a country that has lost an essential part of itself, a loss which brought incalculable economic loss and difficulties which it still suffers today,” Mesa said. “I agree that we should look forward, toward the 21st century. But we can only go forward with a definitive resolution to a just Bolivian claim.”

The leaders of Argentina and Venezuela have said they back Bolivia’s claim, with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez saying, “I hope one day to swim at a Bolivian beach.”

Lagos has said repeatedly that his country will not cede territory to Bolivia. Chile considers the matter resolved by a 1904 treaty that officially brought hostilities between the two countries to a close, 25 years after their war began.

Accepting negotiations with Bolivia “is as absurd as imagining that Mexican President Vicente Fox would ask for mediation with George W. Bush in order to recover Texas and California,” Lagos told the French newspaper Le Figaro during a visit to France this year.

Nevertheless, Mesa proposed that Chile grant Bolivia a corridor along the Peruvian border -- setting off a new round of denunciations, satirical cartoons and general outrage in Santiago, Chile’s capital.

“If we did give them a corridor, there’s nothing to guarantee that in five years or so they wouldn’t be asking us for more territory,” the daily newspaper La Tercera said in an editorial.

Leaders of the Chilean city of Arica, which is adjacent to the proposed corridor, also denounced the plan, saying it would balkanize the region and cut the city’s trade links to Peru.

“A great fire will be ignited,” Carlos Valcarce, Arica’s mayor, warned in an interview with foreign correspondents.

“This region will rise up. It will become a kind of Bosnia of Latin America.”

Another alternative is a corridor to the former Bolivian port of Antofagasta, but that would split Chile in two, leaving 400 miles of Chilean coastline severed from the rest of the country.

Though most Chileans say they would never accept the surrender of territory to Bolivia -- 80% are against the idea, according to polls -- in Iquique people are more ambivalent, thanks in large part to the region’s economic links to its neighbors.

Hotel owner Anguita said that by law he can sell his property to anyone, although only the government can decide whether it could become Bolivian territory.

“As a Chilean, I offer this [property] as a means to dialogue,” he said. “The two countries should be talking. It seems to me you have to start somewhere.”

Neither Iquique nor Arica to the north was ever part of Bolivia -- before the War of the Pacific began in 1879, both were Peruvian ports. Peru was Bolivia’s ally in the war, and both lost territory to Chile, nearly all of it desert that is rich in nitrate deposits.

Exports of nitrate fertilizers financed the construction of Iquique’s opera house and other civic projects. But northern Chile’s economy has foundered since the nitrate boom collapsed in the 1920s.

Now Iquique Mayor Jorge Soria sees hope for his fading city.

He has spent much of his 24 years in office traveling to Bolivia, Paraguay and Brazil, lobbying local governments to improve the network of highways that lead to the Pacific.

“Many years ago I visited the United States, and I understood at once the source of their success -- their highway system,” he said, speaking inside a 19th century Peruvian customs house he converted to municipal offices. “The future of Iquique is as a gateway to the heart of South America.”

And if a transcontinental highway led to a Bolivian port in Iquique, so much the better.

“Eventually the Bolivians will get the coast they need to satisfy their psychological need for one,” Soria said.

“I am only a mayor. So I can only offer them a port concession. Matters of sovereignty are, of course, to be handled by our president.”

Bolivia and Peru have not had full diplomatic relations since 1962, when talks over the ocean corridor issue broke down. Bolivian resentment of Chile simmered for decades, then exploded last year when the government of Bolivia’s then-president, Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, announced that it was considering exporting natural gas through a Chilean port.

Opposition to the plan united the many peasant and labor groups angered by Sanchez de Lozada’s economic policies. They saw it as one more concession to Bolivia’s longtime nemesis. Sanchez de Lozada’s successor, Mesa, has won widespread support by making an outlet to the sea his administration’s top priority.

“He is telling the international community that there has been an uprising in Bolivia that put at risk democratic stability, and that this uprising was fueled by the lack of an outlet to the sea,” said Alvaro Garcia Linera, a political scientist in La Paz, the Bolivian capital. “And he is saying that Bolivia’s local instability could become a problem throughout the region.”

In January, Mesa met with a brain trust of public relations specialists and current and former Bolivian diplomats to plan his next move.

“Chile has the bull by the horn, because they are the ones who can say yes or no to our demands,” said Cesar Rojas Rios, a La Paz writer and sociologist. “But we are putting a lot of pressure on them.”

Several times in recent weeks, residents of La Paz have staged anti-Chile demonstrations, creating bonfires out of boxes of Chilean goods. Several groups have called for a boycott of products from Chile.

On the same day newspapers throughout Chile published pictures of the latest Bolivian protests, Anguita sat with a reporter on the balcony of his beachfront hotel, across town from the property he has proposed selling to Bolivia.

“As you can see, all is tranquil here,” Anguita said, waving his arm in a broad arc over Iquique’s Cavancha beach. The sands were filled with frolicking bathers, mostly vacationers from Chile and Bolivia.

The only violence to be seen was from the local pelicans, which were swooping like dive bombers into the sea.

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Special correspondent Oscar Ordonez in La Paz contributed to this report.