In 1852 the Chilean government took over the temporary observatory that the United States Navy had installed in Santiago three years earlier in an attempt to determine the solar parallax by observing Venus and Mars. The German astronomer Carl Moesta was appointed director of this Chilean National Observatory. In 1871, the president of the young Argentine republic, Domingo F. Sarmiento, created a National Observatory in the university town of Córdoba at the request of the American astronomer Benjamin Gould, who was named director. The same year, Emperor Pedro II of Brazil named the French astronomer Emmanuel Liais to head the Observatory of Rio de Janeiro. At about the same time a large meridian circle, ordered in Paris by the Peruvian government in the late 1860s, arrived in Lima. About ten years later, in 1882, the Governor of the Province of Buenos Aires, Dardo Rocha, decided that his new provincial capital, the utopian city of La Plata, would have an observatory – whose direction was entrusted to the French naval officer François Beuf.
We shall attempt to place the foundations of these South American establishments in their political and scientific contexts and give a description of their initial instrumentation. Then we shall try to assess the role of German science and the effects of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 on the purchase of European instruments for these new observatories.

This presentation is based on work co-authored by Jean Davoigneau and Santiago Paolantonio.