14 - Paraguay from the War of the Triple Alliance to the Chaco War, 1870–1932

Summary

PARAGUAY UNDER ALLIED OCCUPATION

On New Year's Day 1869 foreign troops occupied Asunción, the capital of Paraguay. The almost deserted city was given over to pillage as the soldiers – mainly Brazilians, with a few Argentine and Uruguayan contingents – searched for booty and women. The Allies had been at war with Paraguay for over four years, and now, at last, the exhausted little nation's defences had finally collapsed. Even so, the war was not yet over. Paraguay's president, Marshal Francisco Solano Lopez, continued to fight from makeshift headquarters deep in the forests to the north, his dwindling army maintained only by the conscription of young boys aged between ten and fourteen. Not until 1 March 1870 was he finally cornered at Cerro Corá, near the Brazilian border, and killed.

In the meantime the Allies had set up a puppet government in Asunción. A triumvirate, appointed from anti-López elements, declared the Marshal to be an outlaw and confiscated all his property. The new government also promised to hold elections during the coming year for a constitutional convention which would form the basis for the establishment of a democratic state, after more than half a century of dictatorship under, successively, Dr José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia (1814–40), who after independence had largely sealed the country off from the outside world; Carlos Antonio López (1840–62), who had ended Paraguay's isolation and begun a process of economic and military modernization; and Francisco Solano Lopez (1862–70), whose dreams of a South American empire had together with the territorial ambitions of Paraguay's neighbours, Argentina and Brazil, led to the disastrous war.