Battle

Naval Battle of Chipana

At the beginning of the war with Chile, the Peruvian ships had to be repaired. On April 7, the "Union" and "Pilcomayo" corvettes sailed from Callao. On April 12 they met the Chilean corvette "Magallanes" at the height of Punta Chipana to which they approached.

At 11.15 am, as the ships were nearby, the battle pavilions were raised. The "Union", in order not to lose sight of the target, ordered the "Pilcomayo" to break the fires. In this way, the smallest ship of our navy was the one who fired the first cannon of the naval campaign.

A shot from the "Union" destroyed the boat that the "Magallanes" had on its side. The Chilean commander La Torre, when threatened, decides to break the secret correspondence he was carrying for his Minister of War and Navy. From 2:40 p.m. Peruvian vessels begin to lose distance due to the poor condition of their old boilers. A total of 226 cannon shots were fired, of which 184 were Peruvians.

Operation

Operation Chavín de Huántar

Military operation carried out to free hostages, captured 126 days by members of the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) in the Japanese ambassador's residence, which occurred in December 1996. This operation is considered one of the most successful in the rescue of hostages in the world.

The Peruvian government maintained a negotiation with the terrorist band while training peruvian Army soldiers, and the peruvian Navy in a replica of the Residence, digging underground tunnels. These tunnels resembled the ancestral temples of the Chavín de Huántar culture. During the morning the army was broadcasting military marches with megaphones around the house. The media speculated that it was a maneuver to lower the morale of the terrorists. The rumble of the military marches altered the nerves of those who remained in the Japanese ambassador's residence; however, the real reason for these maneuvers was to evacuate the land extracted during the night by means of trucks that left a house located in the back street of the residence.

On April 22, 1997, after several failures in the negotiation and the prospect that for this reason the kidnappers begin to deny medical attention to the hostages, the Government makes the decision to send to the Chavín de Huántar Command. After verifying that the terrorists were distracted by video cameras secretly introduced from the tunnels and microphones introduced by military health personnel through which they communicated some hostages of military rank, it was decided to start the operation. At 03:23 a strong explosion started the operation, with the blasting of the floor of the main hall, where a group of terrorists played futsal. 142 commandos broke through that and other accesses firing their machine guns. All the terrorists were killed during the operation.

One of the hostages, the Judge Carlos Giusti, was wounded in the leg, which caused a violent hemorrhage that caused his death; He was the only hostage killed in the action. Two commands also died, they were Juan Valer Sandoval and Raúl Jiménez Chávez. One of them, according to some testimonies, protected Chancellor Tudela while he was escaping on the roof.