"...lack of support. Alessandri's Foreign Minister, Ismael Tocornal Tocornal, was the chief architect of the rebuilding of trans-Andean relations, but the major reason for the foreign shift behind Chile came from American businessmen in charge of managing Chile's indemnity fund in Santiago who at the start of the fighting season in late September 1916 started making noises towards Philadelphia about their concerns around the surprising resilience of the Suristas in Concepcion and beyond. The Republic's forces had sat on or around the Maule for months and months, with sporadic fighting producing little more than senseless bloodshed every time an attack began and ended almost as soon. Aldunate's conservative, anti-government forces lacked the ability to march on Santiago by the turn of 1916 to 1917 but it also seemed clear that they would exist for years to come as a thorn in the side of Alessandri and his moderate reformism, and American, and to a lesser extent Argentinean, diplomats in a rare show of long-term thinking began to mull what exactly a post-Alessandri government might look like if the Radical Republic failed.
The truth was that Aldunate was the graver threat - Surismo explicitly rejected the Treaty of Lima in its entirety and there was a certain seductive revanchism inherent in that for the exhausted Chilean populace - but the Consejismo of Recabarren in the Red North was also a problem, because Recabarren's revolutionary socialism both appealed to Chileans who hated the Old Republic's corruption and oligarchy and thus formed the backbone of the Radical movement, while seeming like a logical next step (or two or three) from Alessandri's thinking and rhetoric. Recabarren's main flaw, indeed, was his relative lack of nationalism - he was too married to the ideas of world revolution and the "international general syndicate" that was starting to become the core organizing idea of the hard left in the late 1910s - but he nonetheless was ambivalent at best about Lima's indemnity provisions, viewing them less as an affront to Chilean patriotism a la Aldunate and more on the lines of being an imposition of capitalist imperialism by victorious powers.
The United States and Argentina were not entirely sure what to think of Recabarren, beyond that they understood that the Bolivians hated him, but Ismael Montes' government had declined rapidly in the eyes of Philadelphia and Buenos Aires in early 1917. Emboldened by the return of the Bolivia Irredenta in the Littoral Province and once again enjoying access to the sea via Antofagasta, Montes' increasingly autocratic and oligarchic Liberal Party was investing enormous amounts of energy into seeing to it that it won the August 1917 elections, which it was favored to carry by a wide margin due both to patriotic fervor over Bolivia's gains in the war and a heavy dose of fraud. To that end, Montes became the first Bolivian President to begin to make a resolution of the "Chaco Question" a key plank of his platform, expounding on Bolivia's traditional territorial claims to the Chaco Region of the eastern Andean foothills that it disputed with Paraguay. This was a position popular with Bolivian settlers in the Chaco but exceptionally unpopular in Buenos Aires, which since Asuncion had ended its war with Brazil on terms generally disappointing to both sides viewed Paraguay as an important regional ally and had spent the past year deepening those ties.
The relative unreliability of Bolivia as a partner to the two main pieces of the Axis moving forward, and concerns about the enforcement of Lima's terms should Alessandri fall, tipped the hand of both the United States and Argentina into less equivocal support for Alessandri, particularly on the part of the latter (the new American President Elihu Root, inaugurated in March of 1917, was considerably more hostile to Chile due to his role in the 1885 war and it took a fair deal of persuading by experienced Latin American hands at the State Department to sway him). Starting in January of 1917, food imports into Chile dramatically increased under the guise of avoiding "humanitarian crisis," thus eliminating one of the Surista advantages; the next month, Argentinean trainers were working alongside Grove to drill light artillery units and the Republic's forces increased their supplies from six field guns - six, for the entire army - to twenty in the course of sixty days and by the winter lull in fighting in July had closer to fifty. The United States, suddenly awash in military light airplanes, maintained their strict position that Chile was not to be permitted a navy but sold as surplus a small squadron at heavy discount to Alessandri's army, thus giving the Republic some kind of aerial support for future attacks. The Radical Republic may not have been an explicit ally of Buenos Aires or Philadelphia, but both powers had certainly finally made their choice and intervened more forcefully in the war.
The Concepcion government had a hard time responding to this. Britain, too, had made its peace with Alessandri being in charge, and while the lack of a navy made smuggling and shipments into Surista held southern ports like Concepcion, Valdivia and Puerto Montt possible, it was not at the scale at which the legitimate government of Chile was being resupplied, and in March 1917 that showed as the Maule line collapsed entirely. Altamirano's forces broke through the Putagan River and seized Linares, and pushed even further southwest across the Longavi to Parral on April 1st, disrupting the early harvest and collapsing Aldunate's lines to the point that it sparked a general retreat southwards to Chillan, dangerously close to Concepcion and indeed forcing Aldunate and Ochagavia to abandon that capital for Temuco, further south and away from the coast.
This offensive's ambitions were stymied days later when the first attacks against Chillan were interrupted by a mutiny of Colorado forces, angry over a lack of pay and food, and this brief delay may indeed have allowed the Blancos to flee further south and regroup at Los Angeles without being cut off and badly defeated. This issue was not contained to the Colorado side, either - farmers across the South threatened to embargo their produce as the lean third harvest of the civil war looked to be paid for in scrips or simply impounded, and this Farmer's Rebellion became a major episode in the historical memory of the region as the final nail in the coffin of Surismo. Across Chile, men were hungry, men were desperate, and men were tired of fighting - and while Alessandri's government was boosted by the successful capture of Concepcion in late April, essentially denying Aldunate his most symbolically important city and making it clear which direction the war was going with continued American-Argentine support, the soldiers' mutinies of that autumn were a dark foreboding for a country that had known nothing but pain and loss since September 1913..."
- Between Two Chiles
