Triple Alianza, Un Genocidio Americano

Paraguay's awful history
The never-ending war
How a terrible but little-known conflict continues to shape and blight a nation
Dec 22nd 2012 | ASUNCIÓN | from the print edition
He died with his homeland
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 hewas 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 tothe 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 populationand 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 thediplomatic 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 exportsthat 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 Europeanexperts 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.
He died with his homeland
In 1862 López died, and was succeeded by his son Francisco Solano. Theyounger 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...