Paraguay's awful history
The never-ending war
How a terrible but little-known conflict continues to shape and blight a nation
THE fall of the “father of all Paraguayans” was even more abrupt than his rise. In 2008 Fernando Lugo, a Catholic bishop and liberation theologian who called himself a champion of the poor, won his country’s presidential election and broke the Colorado Party’s chokehold on power. Shortly after his inauguration, however, four women said that he had fathered their children while under a vow of celibacy; Mr Lugo recognised two of them. The Liberal party, whose support had propelled him to the presidency, repudiated him. In June 2012 Congress summarily removed him from office, after he was accused of mishandling a clash between police and landless peasants.
In the eyes of the leftist leaders of Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, Paraguay’s partners in the Mercosur trade block, the lightning-fast impeachment was a coup. They suspended the country from Mercosur and encouraged the Organisation of American States (OAS) to do the same. On June 26th Hugo Saguier, Paraguay’s ambassador to the OAS, took the floor and lashed out. “If you want to form a new Triple Alliance,” he said, “go ahead.”
Many in the room were puzzled. But Brazil’s representative angrily replied that the comment was “unnecessary and gratuitous”. Mr Saguier had invoked one of the deepest scars in Latin America’s history: the War of the Triple Alliance, a conflict between Paraguay and a coalition of Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay that began in 1865 (just as the American civil war was drawing to a close), and ended in 1870. “I wanted [the speech] to hurt,” Mr Saguier says.
The war, known in Paraguay as the “War of ’70” or the “Great War”, was among the worst military defeats ever inflicted on a modern nation state. According to Thomas Whigham of the University of Georgia, as much as 60% of the population and 90% of Paraguayan men died from combat or, more often, from disease and starvation. Other researchers put the figure considerably lower—but still atrociously high. Federico Franco, Mr Lugo’s successor, recently called the war a “holocaust”. Yet it is little known outside the region. Even in Paraguay its moral ambiguities have caused generations of leaders to shroud it in myth.
But the diplomatic backlash against the impeachment has revived debate about this national trauma. After 142 years Paraguay is grappling with the mixture of hubris and heroism that plunged it into self-immolation, a tragedy that still defines the country.
Modern Paraguay—flat, landlocked and steamy—is a geopolitical pipsqueak. Its foreign influence is limited to two giant dams on its borders, soyabean exports that feed Chinese livestock and the free-for-all bazaar of Ciudad del Este, a border town where vendors of cut-rate electronics and clothes operate in public, and arms dealers and Hizbullah fund-raisers do so in private.
In the mid-1800s, however, Paraguay was a middling regional power. It began a breakneck industrialisation during the presidency of Carlos Antonio López, who imported European experts to build a shipyard, a foundry and one of South America’s first railways. He also beefed up the army to deter Paraguay’s twitchy neighbours: Argentina considered the country a rebel province until 1852, while Pedro II, the Brazilian emperor, claimed lands that Spain and Portugal had disputed.
In 1862 López died, and was succeeded by his son Francisco Solano. The younger López demanded absolute deference—he banned people from turning their backs to him, or sitting while he stood—and was eager to make a name for himself as a statesman. In 1864 he saw his chance. To protect its commercial interests, Brazil threatened to intervene in a civil war in Uruguay, a small buffer state between it and Argentina. López feared this would upset the regional balance of power, and announced that Paraguay could not tolerate the presence of Brazilian troops on Uruguayan soil.
Pedro shrugged him off and invaded Uruguay. Soon afterwards López declared war on Brazil and attacked its interior province of Mato Grosso. He later dispatched a force to Uruguay as well. When Argentina refused to let him march troops through its territory, López sent them anyway. Once the Brazilian-backed side won the war in Uruguay, the three governments signed a secret pact. They agreed to annex half of Paraguay’s territory, collect reparations and forbid it from keeping an army—and to fight until López was ousted.
The odds were stacked against Paraguay. The allies’ combined population was 25 times bigger. Paraguay relied on Napoleonic-era kit—muskets, 17th-century cannon and wooden boats—and, being landlocked, could not import modern armaments. Many of its horses were crippled by a spinal ailment. The allies ultimately mustered long-range rifles, artillery and ironclad warships.
Victory or death. It was death
The Paraguayan invaders were soon beaten back from Uruguay and Brazil, and López proposed peace. But Pedro’s honour would not let him quit until his rival was toppled (the Brazilian troops did most of the fighting). Honour similarly prevented López from abdicating, though perhaps no alternative, self-respecting Paraguayan leader could have surrendered on the secret pact’s terms. What began as a capricious escapade became a total war, and a struggle for national survival.
For three years the outgunned, undermanned Paraguayans battled their enemies to a stalemate in the country’s southern marshes. Water mines and obstacles at the fort of Humaitá blocked the Brazilians’ advance by river. But in 1868 heavy rains raised the water level, and their boats quickly reached Asunción, the capital. Paraguay’s army surrendered the next year.
López, however, would not give up. He moved his capital from one town to another, taking the entire state archives in tow. He imagined a vast conspiracy against him, and jailed and tortured thousands of his most loyal backers, including his own mother and sister. His brother was among the 700-800 people he had executed—often by lance to save ammunition.
Because López had drafted every man in Paraguay, there was no labour to work the fields, and starvation set in. Many who subsisted on bitter wild oranges succumbed to cholera, malaria and dysentery. As able-bodied men died, López recruited a new army of wounded and child soldiers. He armed them with sticks painted to look like guns, disguising the youngsters with fake beards. The army’s original red uniforms had dwindled to rags; rain seeped through ponchos made of shredded carpets. Eventually they fought naked. (Today, Paraguay celebrates Children’s Day on the anniversary of a battle in which 2,000 children perished.)
López continued to retreat. In 1870 the Brazilian army cornered him at last at Cerro Corá, in the remote north-east. His ring bore a slogan, “victory or death”, which he honoured by refusing to surrender. “I die with my homeland,” he proclaimed before being shot—though his partisans insist he said “for my homeland”. Elisa Lynch, his Irish consort, buried him next to their son.
My day will come
According to a rough-and-ready post-war census, just 29,000 males over the age of 15 were left in Paraguay. One observer called the survivors “living skeletons…shockingly mutilated with bullet and sabre wounds”. Jaguars roamed freely and feasted on human flesh. Women wandered the streets naked.
The war wiped out Paraguay’s elite. After an eight-year occupation the country was run by Argentine carpetbaggers and exiles who had backed the allies. They branded López a butcher and a tyrant, and excised him from history. He had foreseen what would become of his reputation. “I will be buried beneath the weight of mountains of ignominy,” he said on the day before his death. “But my day will come, and I will rise from the abyss of slander to…take my rightful place in history.”
Time would prove him right. By the 1920s tensions were rising with Bolivia over the Chaco region, wrongly thought to be rich in oil. Eager to whip up nationalist sentiment, the government recast López as a symbol of the country’s bellicose spirit.
From 1932-35 the two countries went to war. This time Paraguay won. The indigenous Bolivian soldiers did not want to fight for their white commanders, and could not understand Paraguayan radio signals in the Guaraní language. Their wool uniforms left them dehydrated in the arid Chaco.
With Paraguay’s pride restored, López’s remains were moved to a domed shrine in central Asunción. Today, el mariscal (“the marshal”) is the country’s improbable icon. A portrait of him atop a stallion hangs in the president’s office in the López Palace, which he built. His sword sits in a display case.
Yet despite this clumsy hagiography, Paraguay has done little to tell the real story of the war. Asunción has no history museum; the main battlefields have been neglected. Humaitá is now a fishing village, accessible only by a dirt road that is often blocked by cattle. The river moves a few feet east every year, taking the border with Argentina with it. It now threatens to flood the ruins of a church destroyed by the invaders. “What they didn’t take in the war, they’re getting from the river,” says Vicenta Mirando, a local schoolteacher.
The war’s worst atrocity occurred in Piribebuy, 80km (50 miles) east of Asunción by road. There Brazilian troops cut the throats of everyone they could find, and locked the doors to a crowded hospital before setting it alight. A gruesome concrete relief, illustrating the horror, has been built on the site; the town has funded a one-room museum, which includes a single tuft of braided hair removed from the mass grave below its 18th-century church. In the church itself, however, there is no sign of the history buried below the red-tiled floor. Speakers blare Christian rock between services.
It isn’t even past
Paraguay’s suspension from Mercosur set off a surge of nationalism. Asunción is plastered with posters trumpeting the country’s sovereignty. “We won’t accept foreign tutelage,” says President Franco. “This is a poor but dignified country. It’s poor as a consequence of an unjust war.” He demands that Brazil return Paraguay’s “Christian Cannon,” cast from melted church bells.
The episode has also increased sympathy for López in some quarters. “I’ve had my re-evaluation of el mariscal,” says Esteban Burt, a lawyer. “The Triple Alliance went out of its way to say [the impeachment] was a disgrace, that Paraguayans should be punished. We haven’t heard that sort of language since 1870.” Mr Burt thinks that Brazil’s wartime archives, the last of which were declassified this year, will reveal that the allies had conspired to destroy Paraguay years before the war began.
But Mr Lugo’s career highlights other aspects of the war’s legacy. His election was widely celebrated because it ended 61 years of unbroken rule by the Colorado Party, 35 of them under Alfredo Stroessner. It was under Stroessner that the cult of López reached its apex. “The emphasis on glory, self-sacrifice, authoritarian models and internal enemies felt very congenial to the stronistas,” says Mr Whigham, the historian. Stroessner’s state “legitimised itself by drawing a straight line between Big Al and the Marshall.”
Wartime depopulation also influenced Stroessner’s policies. Post-war governments distributed brochures offering immigrants a free trip to Paraguay and land. A series of Utopian colonies sprung up, including a “New Australia” and an Aryan-supremacist “Nueva Germania”, co-founded by Friedrich Nietzsche’s sister, where a German flag still flies. In 1931 descendants of that group set up the first Nazi party outside Germany. (At the start of the second world war, Paraguay’s government openly sympathised with Hitler. The national police director named his son Adolfo Hirohito; police cadets wore swastikas on their uniforms.)
Another German who came to Paraguay after the war was Stroessner’s father, a Bavarian. Stroessner himself had no direct ties to the Paraguayan Nazis, but he shared many of their instincts: in 1974 he was accused by the UN of committing genocide against the native Aché people. He also harboured numerous Nazi war criminals, including Josef Mengele.
This autocratic tradition may have influenced Mr Lugo’s dismissive attitude to other politicians—a crucial factor in his downfall. The Liberals abandoned him in part because they felt their support had not been adequately rewarded in policies and jobs. Instead Mr Lugo had packed his cabinet with leftist allies. “You get in with one group and govern with another,” he reportedly said.
“Piribebuy has funded a one- room museum, which includes a single tuft of braided hair removed from the mass grave below its 18th-century church”
But alienating the Liberals cost him his presidency, because the Paraguayan left was far too weak to protect him. That too has roots in the war. “Our economy never overcame the deficiencies the war imposed on us,” says Jorge Rubiani, an architect and author, “so there was never an industrial structure to generate class consciousness.” Brazilian troops destroyed the foundry at Ybycuí, Paraguay’s main industrial asset, so it could never be reused.
The pretext for the impeachment also stems from the conflict. Before 1865 most Paraguayan land was state-owned. To pay reparations, post-war governments sold off huge plots to Argentine landowners. The broad subdivisions of Paraguay in 1880s maps refer to individual possessions, not provinces. Those concentrated holdings still bedevil the country: they include the ranch where police fired on peasant squatters in June.
Even Mr Lugo’s first misstep, his paternity scandal, can arguably be traced to the war. Sexual relations in Paraguay have always been open: in 1545 a Spanish priest called the country “Muhammad’s paradise” after witnessing his compatriots sleeping with numerous native women, behaviour he associated with Muslims. In the mid-1800s most Paraguayan households were led by señoras, often depicted chomping cigars, carrying food on their heads and sporting white cotton dresses. They paired off with a rotating cast of itinerant men.
But even that tradition did not prepare society for the post-war free-for-all. “Men without modesty”, wrote one newspaper, “may be found even in the corridors of the Church and the cemetery, atrociously scandalising even during the day to satiate their brutal passions.” No one knows whether the intercourse in “plazas, streets and meeting places” was rape, prostitution or a result of the privileges men enjoyed because of the distorted sex ratio. Mr Lugo might not have realised quite how far sexual mores had changed. “Lugo was the cultural extension of the idea that we have to populate the country,” says Benjamín Fernández Bogado of 5 Días, a newspaper. “Having children in huge quantities wasn’t a problem. Even priests could have children.”
Sexual violence during the war itself poisoned attitudes to race. In its own way, Paraguay is a melting pot: the countryside is full of blond-haired, blue-eyed peasants who speak fluent Guaraní and halting Spanish. Yet López’s propagandists tried to drum up prejudice against the Brazilian army, which was mostly black, since Pedro promised to free slaves who fought. They called the emperor the “chief of the monkey tribe”. The resentment lingers. “The kambá raped our women,” says Miguel Ángel of the Piribebuy museum, using the Guaraní word for blacks. Legend has it that the resulting black babies were killed.
The would-have-been country
Perhaps the final tragedy of the war is that it is so little known abroad. Mr Fernández Bogado thinks this is no coincidence. “The world isn’t a comfortable place for us,” he says of his country’s insularity. “It’s a scene of danger, conspiracy and death.” For Paraguayans, he explains, success is a prelude to danger: when the national football team scores, “It makes us nervous and we panic.”
Guaraní—still spoken by 80% of the population—renders time differently from Western tongues. The future is uncertain: the word for “tomorrow” means “if the sun rises”. The past is divided between what happened, and what was supposed to but did not. If you quit a seminary, you are a “would-have-been priest”; a broken engagement yields a “would-have-been spouse”. This grammar is “like a backpack you can never take off,” says Alejandra Peña, a former national museum director.
Paraguayans still die in falls and accidents while digging for treasure supposedly buried by their forefathers during the war. Perhaps they can only truly understand the conflict in their mother tongue. They know full well the woes of the country they live in, but never forget the one that might have been.
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