By RONALD LEÓN NÚÑEZ*
The apparent and the essential in the interpretation of the War against Paraguay
It has been 160 years since the beginning of the war against Paraguay. The date of the outbreak, like almost every aspect of the conflict, remains the subject of great controversy. Given the influence of the nationalist, positivist and militarist narrative structured around the great man theory, the weight of the details should not come as a surprise.
If what is intended is a structural analysis, which involves interpreting complex processes with a totalizing focus to bring us closer to defining the nature of that war, getting involved in establishing “exact dates” is not irrelevant, but it is secondary.
Let us explain this point further. General Carl von Clausewitz, a theorist of military science, proposed that “war is nothing more than the continuation of politics by other means.” If we accept this definition, we will understand that wars are never isolated and sudden events, disconnected from previous events in the sociopolitical sphere. “In war,” writes the Prussian military man, “we must begin by looking at the nature of the whole; for here, more than in any other matter, the part and the whole must always be thought of together.” If only the study and clarification of the globality makes it possible to go beyond the apparent, the effort to reduce this process—necessarily contradictory and extended in time—to a date, reveals intellectual narrow-mindedness.
Of course, in political terms, the question of the date responds to the need to establish historically which was the “aggressor country”. Allied propaganda and, later, the liberal school, attributes this responsibility exclusively to Paraguay. The intention is, evidently, to justify the Treaty of the Triple Alliance and the subsequent military campaign on Paraguayan soil as legitimate and inevitable measures to defend the national honor of their countries, tarnished by the treacherous attack of a “barbarian” nation.
Solano López initiated hostilities with Brazil and Argentina. That is a fact. However, isolating him from the context and general dynamics of previous politics, to base oneself solely on the criterion of “who fired the first shot”, is another example of the kind of superficial reasoning we have just criticized.
The trigger, from Assunção's perspective, was the penetration of Brazilian troops into Uruguay, then governed by a party close to the Lopista regime, which began on October 12, 1864. López, as is known, had explicitly warned Rio de Janeiro that a land invasion of the eastern country would be considered a casus belli. This fact cannot be ignored. The dictator was convinced that the control of Montevideo by the two largest regional powers, in addition to strangling foreign trade controlled by his family and a handful of “citizen-owners”, was a first step towards, in a second act, ending Paraguayan sovereignty and, with it, his own regime.
With this reasoning, and being poorly informed, he decided to attack first, counting on the unlikely convergence of a series of favorable factors that never occurred. Solano López, an untimely and mediocre military man, erred in almost all of his political-military calculations, especially in his first offensive moves. However, it cannot be said that the hypothesis that the independence of his country — in which he considered himself “the State” — would be in danger due to the unusual Brazilian-Porto alliance that attacked Uruguay had no recent and historical foundations.
The threat existed. How the Paraguayan regime reacted to it is another discussion. Therefore, if we consider the dynamics of events, it seems correct to consider that the decisive event that put the regional crisis at a point of no return occurred on October 12, 1864, when the Brazilian slave-owning monarchy, aware of the potential Paraguayan reaction, put its boots on the ground in Uruguay. This effectively sealed the military alliance between Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires and the Colorado faction led by Uruguayan leader Venâncio Flores against the government of the White Party. The same faction that, months later, would march on Paraguay.
If we analyze the regional crisis of 1863-64 without omitting the expansionist and oppressive role that, historically, the porteños and Portuguese-Brazilians played over Paraguay, it is not so difficult to understand that, although Solano López took the military initiative against his powerful neighbors, he did so in the midst of a defensive situation, with a predominantly preventive purpose. This apparent contradiction consisted more of “attacking first” to gain time and ground and, thus, create a scenario — a negotiation? — more advantageous.
Obviously, no one knows what Solano López had in mind. However, the former hypothesis is much more plausible, given the dynamics of the whole, than the liberal cant about the supposed “Napoleon of the Plata”, whose uncontrollable expansionist plans led him to believe “…that he could defeat the neighboring nations and conquer portions of their territories”.[I]
The essentials
However, we insist, the anniversary should not revolve around the anniversary itself. It should mainly encourage debate on the nature of the guasu war, the crux of the main historiographical interpretations.
On the part of the allied governments, it was not a just war. It was not, as liberal propaganda maintained and its current heirs in academia and the corporate press repeat, the civilizing atonement of a barbaric people, brutalized by a tyrant, even though Solano López was, in fact, a dictator.
Nor did the essence of the war consist, as the left wing of revisionism argues, in an epic confrontation between a rising industrial and cultural power, with “proto-socialist” elements, against the British Empire and its puppets, led by a progressive, Americanist and anti-imperialist marshal, supposed precursor of Fidel Castro, Salvador Allende or Hugo Chávez.
It has been demonstrated that, despite the notable modernization and technical advances introduced in communications and the military sphere in the decade prior to the conflict, neither was Paraguay an economic power—not even in relation to its neighbors—nor did Solano López, representative of the most powerful oligarchy in the history of that country, have a shred of “anti-imperialism”—an interpretation, by the way, scandalously anachronistic. The adherence to the personality cult of Solano López by almost the entire Paraguayan left does not imply any anti-imperialism, but the replacement of a class perspective by a reactionary and rancid nationalism.
I argue that traditional interpretations, from liberalism and revisionism and their offshoots, propose erroneous premises and conclusions about the nature of this war. Above all, they presuppose bourgeois worldviews of history, tailored to the interests of one or another fraction of the ruling classes.
Thus, on the one hand, the (neo)liberal school supports the victorious bourgeoisie; on the other, the so-called revisionism capitulates to the bourgeoisie of the defeated country. To such an extent that, in Paraguay, both the Colorado far-right[ii] as the reformist and “democratic-popular” left bows before the altar of the oligarch Solano López.
If the main interpretations propose false conclusions, what then was the character of the War? To answer this question, we must return to Clausewitz's maxim: we must start from an analysis of the whole, of the previous policy of the belligerents, that is, of the political aspirations which, as we know, always contain material interests.
From this perspective, it is possible to state that the Triple Alliance waged a reactionary war of conquest and extermination of a small, poor and oppressed nation. The facts are irrefutable. Paraguay lost two-thirds of its total population, a demographic catastrophe rarely seen in world history; it was occupied militarily until 1879; it endured the imposition of an immoral debt to its executioners until 1942-43; it lost 40% of its territory; and it has been reduced, to this day, to the status of a satellite state, not only of the hegemonic imperialisms of the XNUMXth and XNUMXth centuries, but also of the two most powerful regional bourgeoisies. Paraguay suffered a national defeat of historic proportions. Nothing could be further from the civilization and freedom promised by the allied capitals.
Some liberal authors admit the catastrophic consequences for the defeated country. However, they do not blame the Triple Alliance policy. They argue that debacle Paraguayan war was due to the dynamics of war — the “invisible hand” of war? — and, in a disgusting way, they suggest that the Paraguayan people are to blame for their own misfortune, since, animalized and tyrannized, they did not know how to surrender to the invaders.
This character of conquest and extermination, however, does not derive, at least not exclusively, from the unpredictable dynamics of any war. No: it predates it. It was enshrined in the Treaty of the Triple Alliance itself — at the beginning of hostilities — which established in advance the plunder and territorial division of the vanquished, definitively prostrating it. The military dynamics responded to this general policy.
On the other hand, if we analyze the nature of the war from the perspective of Paraguay, understood as a historically oppressed nation, the conclusion is the opposite: the popular resistance to the Allied invasion, which soon assumed the dimension of a total war, was a just cause and, therefore, a just war. And this character is independent of the oligarchic nature and the mediocre military conduct of the Solano López regime. The just war, on the part of ordinary Paraguayans, has nothing to do with the individual Solano López, but with the defense of the right to self-determination and, from a certain point on, of their very existence as a nation. This is what the nationalist left does not accept.
The Marxist approach, on the contrary, never omits that, although the defense of self-determination before and during hostilities was a shared goal of the Lopist oligarchy and the dispossessed people, both faced this existential danger on the basis of opposing class interests. The fundamental theoretical-programmatic flaw of the nationalist left lies in the denial of this premise, which is as fundamental as the previous one.
In these terms, it is clear that the main political controversy is with the liberal current and with all those who, in one way or another, justify or attenuate the conquering essence of the Triple Alliance. The issue, from a Marxist point of view, is that the critique of “history written by the victors” cannot be made by adhering to revisionist theses, that is, by capitulating to the personality cult of Solano López or the Argentine federal caudillos, representatives of a class sector as oligarchic as the liberals of the Río de la Plata.
Understanding the past to transform the present
The study of the past should not be an end in itself. It should serve to understand and transform the present, to elucidate theoretical and historical problems, and to seek to formulate, with rigor, appropriate programmatic responses to the scourges of the exploited classes and, when appropriate, of the oppressed nations.
Therefore, the war against Paraguay does not belong to a dead past, with no connection to the reality of the 20th and 21st centuries.
The victory of the Allies, as we have argued, exacerbated a pre-existing relationship of national exploitation and oppression. Both the Brazilian and Argentine bourgeoisies have always considered Paraguay to be their backyard. There are many facts that illustrate this attitude. In the case of Brazil, without going too far, let us remember that in 2022, Bolsonaro's former minister, Paulo Guedes, declared that Paraguay was nothing more than a Brazilian state.[iii]
Brazilian ruling class businesses penetrate Paraguay through unequal trade[iv]; the proliferation of companies that produce with zero or very low tax, energy and labor costs, taking advantage of the “maquila regime” guaranteed by the Paraguayan governments[v]; the unbridled expansion of agribusiness, controlled by owners of Brazilian origin, to such an extent that, currently, it is estimated that 14% of land titles in Paraguay belong to the so-called brazilians[vi]. In departments such as Alto Paraná and Canindeyú, which border the states of Mato Grosso do Sul and Paraná, the portion of the territory in the hands of these Brazilian businessmen is scandalous: 55% and 60%, respectively.
To make matters worse, the Itaipu Treaty, the main legal-economic instrument of Brazilian domination over the small Mediterranean republic, eliminates any indication of energy sovereignty of the weaker partner.[vii]
The critical study of history, especially that of war, is an indispensable basis for understanding urgent problems in the context of the dynamics of power relations between the states of the Southern Cone. It is also a prerequisite for rigorously substantiating deeper questions, such as the need for material reparations to Paraguay.
In the defeated nation, where this war naturally occupies a central place in education and national identity, it is imperative to rid oneself of any nationalist approach, whether from the right or the left. The demand for the defense of the right to self-determination should not be confused with chauvinism nor should it justify animosity towards brothers and sisters of foreign origin. The destruction of Paraguay was the work of the elites of the allied countries, not of their peoples.
Among the working classes of the victorious countries, a study of the war with a class-based approach would reinforce an internationalist perspective, contributing to the knowledge of the reality of Paraguay and thus combating many chauvinist prejudices. However, it would also help to understand in a much broader way the historical particularities of their socioeconomic formations, the character of their ruling classes and the singularities of the processes of formation of their national states and the genesis of their professional armies, the same ones that today repress workers' and social struggles.
On the other hand — and this is very important — a class-based and internationalist approach to the problem in the victorious countries would be of great help in consciously combating, on a daily basis, the xenophobic and racist view of Paraguay and Paraguayans, promoted by the ruling classes — as well as by the “educated” middle classes. There is no shortage of stereotypes and pejorative expressions: the “paraguas”, the “guarango”, the “boliguayo” in Argentina; the “muambeiro”, the “cavalo Paraguaio”, the “caboclo” and the deeply rooted idea that Paraguayan is synonymous with fake and of poor quality in Brazil.
The anniversary should prompt, among other pending issues, reflection on the extent to which this xenophobia is not rooted in the intense liberal, Mitrist and monarchist propaganda that Paraguay had a barbaric, backward, racially inferior people who should be civilized…
If the study of the War, with the approach we propose, is fundamental for the political education of the exploited classes of all the countries that participated in it, it can be said that it is crucial for all those who, politically, seek to overcome the exploitation and oppression of capitalism, because, as Marxism teaches: “the people who oppress others cannot be free”.
*Ronald Leon Núñez he holds a doctorate in history from USP. Author, among other books, of The War against Paraguay under debate (Sundermann). [https://amzn.to/48sUSvJ]
Translation: Marcos Margarido.
Originally published on Cultural Supplement of the ABC Color newspaper
[I] According to the quote by Luiz Octávio de Lima on the pro-Bolsonaro website “Parallel Brazil”: see this link.
[ii] The conservative Colorado Party, which has governed Paraguay for more than 70 years and acted as one of the pillars of the last military dictatorship, has always used the figure of López to legitimize itself historically.
[iii] Veja this link.
[iv] Brazil is Paraguay's main trading partner, accounting for 28,5% of total transactions in 2022. It is followed by China (18,3%), Argentina (12,8%), the United States (6,9%) and Chile (4,8%).
[v] Approximately 72% of companies under the maquila regime in Paraguay are Brazilian. See using this link
[vi] Veja this link.
[vii] Between 1984 — the year Itaipu began operating — and 2022, Brazil received 91% of the total energy produced by the company. See this link.
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