The Never-Ending War: How a terrible but little-known conflict continues to shape and blight a nation
Paraguay’s Awful History: The Never-Ending War
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.