Introduction

The years 1864-65 marked a decisive turning point in world-history. In the United States, the reactionary ‘Slave Power’ was decisively smashed, ending a semi-paralysis of US capitalist development by the irreconcilability of peripheral-type (planter-agrarian) and core-type (industrial, farmer-agrarian) class fractions.^[1] With territorial expansion now able to be pursued without the impediment of maintaining the agonizing balance between slave and free, the United States would soon control a continent-sized space from ‘Sea to Shining Sea.’ In the process it would forge world-beating industrial and farmer-agrarian productive complexes which,^[2] coupled with battle-tested innovations in Yankee arms, would make it the leading agent of world capitalism in the next century.

Let us remain on this last point for a moment. Although applying the descriptor “first modern war” to any conflict after the sixteenth century is semantically annoying if not meaningless–at least if, as is usually the case, “modern” is really a euphemism for “capitalist” -- there is no doubt that the widespread deployment of ironclad vessels and telegraph communications marked a huge leap in battlefield technology. And yet such was occurring at the exact same time in the Southern Hemisphere, in a conflict with eerie similarities to the US Civil War in terms of class forces and ideology. Only, as if historical development follows the same law of reversal as the direction in which water flows, the outcome here was a victory for the forces of Slave Power and backwardness. This war–the War of the Triple Alliance (also and henceforth called theParaguayan War) has been almost completely forgotten by Anglophone historiography–including by Marxists–and even in the countries which it involved directly is rather less remembered than one would expect.

Without falling into the trap of viewing any single event as a historical skeleton key, the Paraguayan War deserves to be revisited by Marxists–particularly those who are resident in the New World–for three reasons. Comparing it with the contemporaneous US Civil War provides a highly concrete example of the differing processes of peripheralization and (ascent to) coreness in the modern capitalist world-system. It is not just that the forces seeking to “escape from the periphery,” via industrialization, were defeated in late nineteenth-century South America but victorious in the North.^[3] Today, it is self-evident that any definition based on the Prebischian dynamic of exporting primary products versus manufactured goods is hopelessly outdated–although this heuristic held up well during the nineteenth century. But it is not so much the construction of a primary-goods centered economy in Latin America (specifically, its Southern Cone) versus an industrialization of the US which I wish to emphasize here. Rather, the moment of divergence–between two regions boasting immense stretches of fertile land, high European immigration, etc.–seems to lie in the differing class dynamics of their respective late nineteenth-century agrarian expansions. In the US, if plantation-style production did not die with the Confederacy, it was at least kept out of the Great Plains. This extraordinarily productive region–again, the site of the agro-industrial revolutions that powered later US hegemony–was given over to the small proprietorship of white settlers, who, unlike Black slaves and sharecroppers, could come to constitute an internal market for domestic industrial producers. In contrast, in the Southern Cone, externally-oriented latifundia-style production was doubled down on and ensured that European immigrants were in large measure incorporated into the same reserve army of the destitute as their indigenous, African, and mestizo (mixed) predecessors. Market size and low wages operated as the key constraint on later import-substitution industrialization (ISI) efforts.^[4] This outcome, as will be seen later, had everything to do with the Paraguayan War.

Second, the Paraguayan conflict offers a lens through which to view the historical evolution of distinct forms of exercising imperial power. Let me explain. Liberal interventionism and other forms of non-colonial capitalist imperialism are commonly viewed as originating with the US after 1945; supposedly the central innovation of US hegemony has been to deviously trick nations into believing they are free by providing juridical (but not economic) sovereignty.^[5] This is not really true, or if it is then neo-colonialism is not really so “neo” after all. The term “informal empire” which is sometimes used as a synonym for neo-colonialism or liberal imperialism, in reference to the global role of the US,^[6] has a long history of being applied to the relationship between Britain and South American countries (particularly Argentina) during the nineteenth century.^[7] In the Paraguayan conflict, London’s pursuit of imperial objectives through the provision of copious finance and materiel to formally independent partners, has no small echoes of Gaza, Ukraine, or any number of other contemporary US wars. Here we see the emergence of novel forms of power within the shell of a declining hegemonic power, paving the way for them to be taken up and expanded by a more vigorous upstart–a recurring dynamic of capitalism.^[8] In any event, the Paraguayan War certainly deserves to be counted as one of Britain’s “late Victorian holocausts,” even if it did not actually take place in a British colony.^[9]

The final reason why the Paraguayan War deserves to be revisited is that it ranks as one of the most extraordinary atrocities ever to take place in the Americas, even when placed alongside those of the Conquest. At the risk of shrillness, it is simply inexcusable that an (Anglophone) Left which has in recent years demonstrated increasing concern for indigenous issues and settler-colonialism is largely unaware that genocide on this scale took place in the late nineteenth-century New World. This is especially ironic given settler-colonial theory (SCT) literature has devoted much attention to the Southern Cone in the nineteenth century, particularly to Argentina and its notorious “Conquest of the Desert.” Comparisons between Patagonia and the North American West, as equally indistinct exemplars of “settler-colonialism” flatten their sharply divergent class and imperial dynamics. Analogizing the two conquests, and by extension the social formations that arose from them betrays–even if both were/are equally genocidal–a left-liberal bias in SCT literature. But unlike the Mapuche, the Guaraní Republic was far from defenseless. Its success at constructing an “authoritarian” state that resisted incorporation into the world-market is what has led non-Marxist theorizations ostensibly concerned with violence against indigenous peoples studiously ignore their annihilation on a scale unmatched, anywhere, during its historical moment

It is difficult to write about the Paraguayan War without becoming mesmerized by the sheer degree of carnage. Traditional estimates that the conflict killed somewhere between 60-70% of the entire Paraguayan population (400,000-450,000 people), long-dismissed as propagandistic, have been largely validated in recent years by scholars who are beyond reproach for pro-Paraguayan sympathies. By comparison, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union–undertaken with the express goal of genocide–resulted in the deaths of “only” 10% of the prewar Soviet population.^[10] This 60-70% number includes about 90% of the entire male population, and close to 100% of adult, fighting-age males.^[11] On a purely biological level, if the word genocide does not apply to the annihilation of a population at this scale it is difficult to credit it with any real meaning. And that is without considering the effects on social reproduction–the inability of a largely female surviving populace to marry, have sex, the simple disappearance of traditionally male social and economic roles. Coupled with the persecution of the Guaraní language (to be discussed below), the effects of the war utterly destroyed Paraguay’s vibrant hybrid-indigenous society and ushered in its reconstruction into one more pliant for capital, which persists today. Such a crime deserves to be remembered by anyone, anywhere, with a spark of internationalist conscience. But so too does the heroism and absolute ferocity of Paraguayan resistance, which subsequent authors have tried to malign as foolish. Notwithstanding the fantastic work of “revisionist” Argentine and Uruguayan historians of the conflict–on which this essay draws heavily–it is high time for the Paraguayan War to be recovered as something more than a regional curiosity.

The River Plate in Capitalist History

This article defends a world-systems theoretical approach, in line with that of scholars like Oliver Cox and Immanuel Wallerstein.^[12] Such a clarification is worth making, as the account below may appear to be advocating a periodization in which capitalist development “began” in South/Latin America only in the nineteenth century. This is not the case; the Spanish empire featured capitalist logics of competition and profit even if these had an admittedly medieval-seeming ideological and political face.^[13] The wide diversity of forms of labor control (proletarian, peasant, slave, etc.) and political structures under historical capitalism makes any definition more specific than the existence of expanded reproduction difficult to defend without historically dubious claims that certain zones of the planet have remained outside capitalism as far as up to the present, with their own coherent, distinct historical social systems.^[14] While the debate may seem arcane, it should be mentioned that the practice of choosing relatively late dates for the origins of capitalism has, in Latin America, had very real, damaging political effects. The belief of Moscow-aligned communist parties that the region had yet to “pass through” a supposedly progressive stage of capitalism licensed alignment withs right-wing developmentalism, in the Argentine case up to and including support for anti-Peronist assaults on the working-class and even for the Videla dictatorship.^[15]

What is true is that the form of capitalist development which South America underwent in the centuries immediately following the Conquest involved a minimal role for vast geographic sections of the continent. As summed up aptly by the remark supposedly uttered by Hernán Cortés that Spaniards had a “sickness of the soul” which only gold could cure, Spain was largely interested in the extraction of monetary metals. These were demanded by the financiers of Northern Europe and Italy who constituted the only true beneficiaries of the Spanish New World empire.^[16] As such, most of what is today called Southern Cone was only relevant insofar as it could supply inputs to the gigantic forced-labor mining complexes, particularly that of Potosí. The food needs of the Peruvian and (to a lesser extent) Chilean mining economies lead to the appearance of some export agriculture and stock-raising in what is today northern Argentina and Uruguay; this economy included large encomienda ranches but was supplied in large measure by small cultivators and by gauchos.^[17]

Ever since the publication of José Hernández’s epic Martín Fierro, the gaucho has been embraced by the liberal, Europeanizing Argentine ruling class as a symbol. Right-wing politicians affiliated with the rural lobby dutifully pose with men on horseback every election cycle in a manifestation of what is surely one of the most curious national myths in the world. The gaucho, contrary to popular belief, is not a mere South American version of the cowboy; the former being a hired hand where gauchos were free horsemen–typically dark-skinned and of mestizo (mixed) descent–who made their own subsistence hunting wild cattle from among the vast herds that roamed the Pampas.^[18] With abundant food and no predators, the population of cattle on these grasslands multiplied exponentially following their introduction, to the point that their numbers came to rival the famous bison herds of North America–really, the gaucho was more Indian than cowboy.^[19] Like the Plains Indians, he had to be eliminated as an obstacle to capitalist expansion, as will be discussed further below.

Paraguay owes its existence to this island-like nature of Spanish imperial capitalism. What is now Paraguay and much of northern Argentina was originally explored solely in the hopes of finding a direct river route from the port of Buenos Aires to the mines of Peru. Instead, the Spaniards found what is essentially a vast inland swamp (the Chaco of southern Paraguay and northern Argentina) beyond which lay only impenetrable jungle. This region was inhabited by the semi-sedentary Guaraní, who because of their isolation had largely escaped the ravages of Conquest, and who, like many New World peoples, welcomed the Spanish as allies against their rivals. The Guaraní were a people with extensive military traditions forged in conflict with other indigenous groups, mainly the Guaicurú of what is today southern Brazil, and which later were greatly reinforced by the necessity of self-defense when marauding Portuguese fortune-seekers began to arrive from Brazil.^[20]

Paraguay’s border status and loyalty won it high regard from viceregal authorities in Buenos Aires, but its remoteness ensured that actual Spanish influence was limited, and that the society remained in essential ways Guaraní. One of the few vectors of Spanish influence was religion, via the Jesuit order, whose missions came to function as enormous units of communal property. The legacy of the missions is complicated–on the one hand, their almost exclusively indigenous inhabitants prospered from mission-run trade in cattle skins; on the other hand the missions were obviously European-run in the last instance and also frequently held African slaves. Nevertheless, even if the missions were not some decolonial utopia, they ran afoul of the large private ranchers who became increasingly powerful in the River Plate by the nineteenth century–the result being that the Jesuit order was banned in both the Spanish and Portuguese empires, in order to make way for the dispossession of mission Guaraní and the expansion of capitalist holdings.^[21]

By the nineteenth century, the “Great Transformation” of a dramatic growth in private property and monetized exchange was underway in the River Plate basin.^[22] The alienation of Jesuit lands was symptomatic of a re-insertion of Latin America into the capitalist world-economy, this time as a producer of food. This was about more than just the exhaustion of the great mines and requires us to synthesize several accounts in order to understand what was occuring in its rich detail. Critical agrarian studies (CAS) have hitherto framed the growth in food imports to nineteenth-century Europe solely as a means of heading off working-class revolt and avoiding the necessity to pay higher wages. Furthermore, influential scholarship in or adjacent to CAS–food-regimes analysis, and more recently the world-ecology of Jason W. Moore–has evinced a kind of Anglo- or US-centrism in assigning primacy to the role of white-settler farmers–in the US, and to a lesser extent Canada, New Zealand, and Australia–in the story of Western Europe’s alimentary fix.^[23] Neither narrative is untrue, but both are partial. Food has significant world-systemic dynamics which are obviously intertwined with, but not reducible to domestic class struggle. It is not only that “Cheap Food” allowed the capitalists to level off domestic working-class discontent, but crucially, also to positively incorporate European workers into a pro-systemic, bourgeois historic bloc via the concession of access to an “imperial mode of living” whose condition of possibility was the overseas exploitation of colonial and semi-colonial spheres.^[24] Not by accident was the symbol of reactionary working-class identification in Great Britain that of the “beef-eater,” whose empire conferred on him a standard of living undreamt-of by the rest of the world.^[25] Behind this cultural figure was an informal empire in Argentina–whose cheap exports of bovine meat made it a daily food in Britain for the first time.^[26]

Similar class compacts existed in the white-settler states, particularly in the US whose awesome productivity is emphasized by Moore. This agrarian bounty was consumed first and foremost by the domestic industrial working class. Additionally, high producer incomes of white-settler farmers logically formed a floor on prices. By contrast, the extreme external orientation of South American elites meant that they could always be relied upon to impose an income deflation–a decline in the share of domestic consumption^[27]–upon the populace in order to increase the availability of locally-produced foodstuffs to the world-market. In other words, the lack of importance of workers and peasants to Latin American bourgeois as an internal consumer market made it feasible to reduce export prices via destructive ultra-liberal measures–wage suppression, currency devaluation–to a degree that was not possible in capitalist models based upon industrial upgrading. To the extent that Argentina has industrialized in the last century, it has largely been the result of foreign multinationals relocating to the country their lowest-waged, least productive production lines that would not be profitable elsewhere in the world.^[28] But before it could impose this course on South America, free-trade liberalism had to triumph over the politico-military forces arrayed against it. And no opposition was fiercer than that of Paraguay.

“Inland Japan”: The Paraguayan Experiment

When the dust cleared after South America’s wars of independence, it became apparent that the dreams of continental unity professed by the liberators Bolivar and San Martín would not become reality, and indeed had been unlikely to begin with. Argentina descended into a roughly three-way conflict between the oligarchic landowners of Buenos Aires, those of the interior, and the popular classes (read: gauchos). The latter two groups were frequently in alliance, with the desire of the interior elites to challenge the porteño monopoly over export rents and that of the gauchos to prevent the arrival of market civilization on the Pampas creating at least a common enemy.^[29] Such opportunistic coalitions were frequently short-lived, with a dizzying number of provincial warlords rising and falling over the decades that followed. Brazil faced similar centrifugal challenges, but its bizarrely archaic political regime–featuring an Emperor and titled nobility–and the huge profits to made from slavery, created a measure of elite consensus around such unique institutions. The Banda Oriental–present-day Uruguay–remained a no-man's-land between Brazil and Argentina, as will be discussed further below. Meanwhile, Paraguay turned inward.

It is important to specify what this means. Paraguay was in no means autarkic, contrary to sensationalist European and porteño accounts of the period which portrayed it as shrouded in mystery, a landlocked version of Tokugawa Japan. Rather, Paraguay was extensively dependent upon external trade–but with the internal consumer market of the broader Platine Basin. Europeans never developed a taste for its principal export, yerba mate, which, however, is an essential item in the regional diet, consumed as a hot beverage. Mate lent itself poorly to plantation-style production and was typically cultivated and/or gathered wild by Guaraní-speaking peasants (chacareros). Paraguay also produced tobacco and cotton, but in modest quantities compared to the great slave heartlands of the US South and Brazil; this also largely went to supply internal and regional demand. Meanwhile, the country mostly lacked a landowning oligarchy in comparison to Argentina or the Banda Oriental. Unlike in these countries, lands confiscated from the Jesuits had attracted few large-scale livestock producers and mostly sat idle in state hands.^[30] The stage was set for a leadership who would grant the peasantry their deepest desire: that of simply “remaining where they were,” which John Womack Jr. famously would famously describe as motivating the Mexican Revolution.^[31] Such a leadership soon appeared in the personage of Dr. José Gaspar de Francia.

An influential recent English-language account holds that Francia was a “reactionary” political thinker, positively an “absolutist of the Bourbon mold.”^[32] It is not really clear on what basis this evaluation is formed; Francia’s primary reference points in terms of political philosophy seem to have mostly been from the diametrical opposite tradition–that of the French Enlightenment, of Rousseau and Voltaire.^[33] What is true is that Francia chose a distinctly autocratic path towards defending republican values, assuming the title of Supreme Dictator (literally) and ruling as a lifetime president. For Marxists, it should be easy enough to take this sympathetically, given the history of repressive political forms and lifetime rule arising in twentieth-century socialist-states at least partially in response to the military threats posed by “capitalist encirclement.”^[34] Furthermore, the progressive gains made under Francia’s tenure speak for themselves: the establishment of universal Guaraní-language education, an anti-clerical policy which ended the Inquisition in Paraguay, and extensive land reform.^[35] Francia performed a Bolshevik-style classicide of the Paraguayan elite, transferring virtually all land to peasant cultivators or state-owned “Fatherland Ranches,” an early type of collective farm.^[36] The reasons why a “black legend” would form around him in the most unequal region on Earth may now seem obvious: Argentine president Bartolomé Mitre described him as “crueler than all tyrants of antiquity,” others scathingly qualified Francia as–horror of horrors!–an “atheist.”^[37]

By the time of Francia’s successor–Carlos Antonio López–the shape of what was being constructed in Paraguay had become clearer. López extensively reinvested the foreign exchange from the export of cattle hide from state ranches and of mate into the upgrading of agricultural and artisan production; he also initiated a heavy-industry construction drive. The state-owned Ybycuí iron works, though modest by European standards, made Paraguay the first Latin American nation to produce “steam engines, steamboats, building material, machine tools and mechanical devices of every kind.”^[38] To be sure, Paraguay used foreign technical expertise, striking up a particularly close relationship with the British firm of Blyth Brothers, which brought trained engineers to Paraguay and purchased physical plant for the country on the European market.^[39] But this relationship was not only of a vastly lesser scale, but also a different character to the servile ones Argentina and Brazil had developed with London banks. When Paraguay constructed railroads and telegraph lines, they were intended to link together the country’s complementary productive units rather than simply convey raw materials to port. National ownership over the former presents a particularly stark contrast with neighboring Argentina, whose railways remained British private concessions well into the twentieth century.^[40] What we have here is probably the world’s first example of delinking: not a total isolation, but one in which external trade is undertaken only insofar as it serves a planned accumulation process with national and popular goals, in the process breaking with the imposed (and impoverishing) rationality of world-market prices.^[41] This was accomplished by virtue of a system of land tenure radically more egalitarian than any seen before (and arguably, since) in Latin America.

A Song of Red and White

Moving from the abstract to the concrete, we now return to the dynamic of “Cheap Food” described in the second section–a specific historical and regional moment which was responsible for sparking the Paraguayan War. Exploding demand for sugar and coffee in Europe, coupled with the abolition of slavery in British Caribbean colonies, created an economic boon for Brazil. Unlike plantations in the US South, those of the Empire produced virtually none of the food products consumed by their workforce; entire regions such as the Brazilian northeast were given over to non-food crops.^[42] Keeping the slaves at even a minimal level of fitness to work thus required that food–particularly dried and/or salted meat–was imported over long distances. Furthermore, the massive increase in slave prices as a result of British efforts to suppress the trade, meant that the horrendous death rate of Brazilian plantations–to which poor nutrition was a major contributor–was now a fetter on profitability, since it was increasingly less economical to simply replace slaves with new imports from Africa. The result was rising production costs for slave owners that could only be arrested if it became less expensive to feed their human property at least marginally better, therefore increasing the working lifetime of a slave.^[43]

Portugal had briefly occupied the Banda Oriental during the collapse of the Spanish New World empire, before being pushed out by the forces of gaucho leader José Artigas. Artigas, today regarded as the father of Uruguayan independence, was at the time allied with the Argentines in the effort to form a Hispanophone Platine confederation. Brazil’s independence a few years later is impossible to understand without the context of the Portuguese imperial seat having been briefly moved there during the Napoleonic Wars, laying the groundwork for a later split of the royal family along transatlantic lines. With the new country being ruled by a branch of the same Portuguese dynasty, little had changed other than the capital being in Rio instead of Lisbon. The Empire of Brazil thus inherited much of its former colonial power in terms of political structure and ideology, including a belief in the God-given legitimacy of terrestrial conquest. This expansionist drive fused in the 1850s with the lobbying efforts of powerful meat-salting barons in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, for whom the windfall profits to be made in supplying slave rations had caused them to set their sights on neighboring Uruguay–now an independent country, but with vast herds of wild and semi-wild cattle still largely unexploited.^[44]

Like Argentina, Uruguay had, upon independence, become embroiled in an extended civil war between liberal forces in the capital and major port city (Montevideo) and gaucho-backed protectionists in the interior–with the latter group, the Blancos (whites, for the color of the pennants they wore on their lances) eventually prevailing and forming a national government. Ironically, in light of later events, Paraguay became involved on the Brazilian-backed Colorado (red, for the color of their pennants) side. The motivation for this on behalf of Marshal Francisco Solano López, who had succeeded his father as Paraguay’s leader, was fear of the supposedly expansionist designs of Buenos Aires under the dictatorial rule of Juan Manuel de Rosas. Rosas is a much-debated character in Argentine Marxist and left-wing historiography; the fact that he was a champion of interior interests and a strong protectionist has caused some accounts to present him in a positive light as the predecessor of later forms of national-populism. Others point to his extreme Catholic zealotry and dedication to the twin projects of enclosing the Pampas and proletarianizing gauchos as proof that the Rosas period was as deeply reactionary as any other in Argentine history during this time.^[45] The Paraguayans fell somewhere closer to the latter view, seeing Rosas as pursuing the exact same subjugation of the region to Buenos Aires as his liberal counterparts.

A renewed Colorado revolt against the Blanco government in 1864 provided Brazil with its chance to install a subservient regime in the Banda Oriental, and thus transform it into an appendage of the Brazilian slave economy. In this the empire was tacitly if uneasily supported by the liberal government now in charge in Buenos Aires–for whom the Blancos were an enemy akin to and allied with their own rivals in the Argentine interior–but which maintained an official neutrality in light of the extreme dislike for Brazil felt by virtually every sector of Argentine society.^[46] Brazil’s eventual deployment of an expeditionary force to Uruguay in support of the Colorados seemed to confirm the fears of Paraguayans and many Argentines that the Slave Power was bent on subjugating its neighbors–and that they would be next. In Buenos Aires, Mitre simply tried to avoid being bucked off the horse by popular anti-Brazilian sentiment, while Paraguay acted. Responding to an appeal for support from the outmatched Blancos, in December 1864, Paraguay declared war on the empire and invaded its remote province of Mato Grosso.

The foray into Mato Grosso was motivated by the huge military stores Brazil had built up in the province; seizing these would provide Paraguay with a windfall of materiel and more importantly pre-empt the Brazilian invasion that Solano López had believed from the beginning was inevitable.^[47] To actually aid the Blancos would require passage through the Argentine province of Corrientes–which Buenos Aires refused, citing neutrality. Solano López, correctly, viewed this neutrality as a smokescreen for Argentine complicity with Brazil and so simply transited his forces through the province anyway–turning his request into an invasion of Argentine territory.^[48] Solano López’s merits as a leader will be discussed later on, but this seemingly reckless act had a number of well-reasoned assumptions behind it, even if these largely proved false. Solano López underestimated the power of the Buenos Aires government over its interior provinces, believing that the largely Guaraní-speaking correntinos would welcome his army as liberators.^[49] This may have been true at an earlier date, but by the 1860s, the military superiority of Buenos Aires over the provinces had caused a significant degree of reluctance to challenge the central government, with former rebels instead seeking an accommodation with it that would leave their local patronage systems intact.^[50] Justo José de Urquiza, the warlord of the Entre Rios province who had once posed the strongest threat to porteño dominance, fervently sided with the capital against the Paraguayan threat, and his endorsement had the ability to sway many in the Argentine interior.^[51] Facing unexpectedly stiff resistance from correntino and entrerriano provincial militia, the Paraguayans soon became bogged down in northern Argentina; in the meantime Montevideo fell to the Colorados.^[52] An anachronistic comparison to Vladimir Putin’s assumptions about the Russian-speaking population of eastern Ukraine prior to launching the “special military operation” is almost too tempting not to make.

Meanwhile, nationalist outrage provided a brief window of opportunity for Mitre to sign a treaty of alliance with Brazil, of which the new Colorado government of Uruguay was also a signatory (not that they had much of a choice in the matter). No alliance with the hated empire was going to be tolerated by–much less popular–with Argentines for long, and Mitre promised a quick war–Allied forces would supposedly be in Asuncion, Paraguay’s capital, “in three months.”^[53]

The Treaty of the Triple Alliance contained numerous maximalist clauses, calling for the removal from power of Solano López and the cession of large swathes of disputed and/or simply Paraguayan territory to Argentina and Brazil. It is here that we get to the crux of the issue. The territorial causes, originally secret, were leaked to the press by an annoyed British Foreign Office–something which intensified the Paraguayan view that this was a war of national survival. British leaking of the hidden clauses–clearly a move calculated in order to raise some degree of international opprobrium against the Allies–has been cited as evidence against the “revisionist” thesis that the war was driven by British imperialism.^[54] Such a view is more-or-less consensus among Anglo-American historians of the war, probably because–aside from reflecting subtle biases about Latin American conspiratorialism–it conforms to the partial history that is sine qua non of the academy in English-speaking countries. This is Braudel’s l'histoire événementielle – the history of events–a style of writing history in which social forces, particularly those of liberal capitalism, are made invisible as a way of avoiding having to critique them. Britain’s desire to prevent Argentine and Brazilian territorial aggrandizement is perfectly comprehensible within an overall backing of the Allied cause if the British goal was to suppress the possibility for autonomous development in South America–which would require Paraguay to lose, but also for the Allies not to win too much. Britain wanted a continent of more-or-less equally weak states, unable to push against the forces of the world-market. Allowing any of these states to whet appetites for territorial expansion, at least to an extent greater than necessary to incentivize them to continue fighting, was thus not in the cards.^[55]

It is first of all irrelevant if Britain was behind “every turn in Platine politics” since the bourgeois elites of South America who conceived of and signed the Triple Alliance Treaty were organically connected with the British hegemonic world order. Mitre and his wartime successor, Domingo Sarmiento, were both notorious Anglophiles and avid readers of Jeremy Bentham; the liberal political project of both explicitly referred to British precedents to justify bringing the “civilization” of enclosure and private property to the Pampas. No doubt the ideological affinity was less in Brazil–where, as recently as 1862, diplomatic relations with Britain had nearly broken down for not the first time over the slave trade. But even in this ultraconservative, Iberian-styled country, Britain dominated the financial system and external trade. Much the same had been true of Argentina ever since Spain permitted British merchants to enter Cádiz. The wealthiest man in Brazil, charged with diplomacy during the Uruguayan crisis and financier of the Colorados on behalf of his government, was the Baron de Mauá–who got his start working for the Rothschilds and was a personal acquaintance of numerous senior diplomatic and banking figures in London.^[56]

The men who set the Triple Alliance in motion did not need to be commanded to start a war for British interests; they stood to benefit from these same interests and above all that of free trade and the extermination of all inward-looking development in South America. There is also no need to resort to specific commodities–such as cotton, for which British industry may have needed an alternative supply in light of the US Civil War, as a specific explanation, as Hobsbawm does,^[57] and as has been easily and extensively critiqued on a narrowly empirical basis. Doing so runs the risk of indulging in a “substance fetish”–giving power to things when the question is in fact relational.^[58] Subjugating South America guaranteed cheap flows, not only or particularly of cotton, but of every major agro-mining commodity that nineteenth-century capital required.

Second, the historical fact remains that the Allies would have been unable to wage war, much less continue to do so for as long as they did, without the support of British arms suppliers and particularly that of British lenders. Both Argentina and Brazil were nearly bankrupted by the war (in light of its political instability, the Uruguayan troop contribution was rarely more than nominal); extensive loan facilities from the Bank of London and from Barings helped to defray the cost until Paraguay had been thoroughly razed–at which point both countries found themselves facing debt crises.^[59] In the case of Argentina, the expenditure was not so much on fighting the Paraguayans as on fighting other Argentines: Solano López’s anticipated revolt of the Argentine interior eventually did materialize. As the war dragged on, the memory of Solano López’s ill-fated venture into Corrientes became less acute than that of fighting a costly war alongside the hated Brazilians, against a country with which most Argentine provincials still felt at least some measure of kinship. The result was to set the stage for the Montoneros revolts that swept the far west of the country from 1866 onwards and for which the left-Peronist guerilla group of the 1970s was named.^[60] Mitre left the field to focus on internal suppression and, especially after he was succeeded by Sarmiento, dealing with Paraguay was increasingly left to the Brazilians.

They set to it with a vengeance. By the end of 1865, it was clear that Paraguay could not achieve anything approximating a victory; it seemed highly improbable that Solano López could invade Brazil and Argentina again even if he wanted to. Nevertheless–spurred on by the view of Emperor Pedro II that overthrowing Solano López was a matter of “honor”–the Brazilians continued to fanatically prosecute the Triple Alliance Treaty, particularly its regime-change clause to the letter.^[61] In the only negotiation between Solano López and an Allied leader of the conflict–his meeting with Mitre in 1866–the Argentine acknowledged widespread desire in his country to end the fighting, but intimated that the Empire’s intransigence on the point of López’s removal left him no choice but to continue.^[62]

Pitting Argentina and Paraguay against one another appeared to have made the Brazilian dream of continental dominance possible, though this eventually proved to be a chimera. Nevertheless, Mitre’s resignation as supreme Allied commander–both as a result of trouble at home and of his perceived responsibility for the disastrous Allied defeat at the Battle of Curupayty in 1866–put the Brazilians definitively in the driver’s seat of the war effort.^[63] The new Allied commander–a Brazilian nobleman, the Marquis de Caxias–concluded that the Paraguayan insistence on never surrendering even an inch of ground meant that reaching Asunción would require the death of more-or-less every defender. As the Imperial military advanced further into Paraguay, it killed virtually every male Paraguayan it found; wounded and captured Paraguayans were summarily executed as a matter of course.^[64] No doubt, the majority of deaths were of non-combat causes like starvation and disease–but it goes without saying that this was also a natural and intended consequence of the scorched-earth tactics by which the Allies chose to prosecute the war. Genocide committed for military-strategic gain is still genocide.

Upon capturing Asunción, Caxias realized that his enemy still refused to give in and suffered a psychological breakdown as a result.^[65] He was replaced with the French-born husband of Brazilian Imperial Princess Isabel–the Count D’Eu–who enthusiastically continued the task of extinguishing all Paraguayan resistance. By this time, it is hard to call the rampage of Imperial soldiers through the Paraguayan countryside “warfare,” but two extraordinary (and in Paraguay, legendary) final moments of the fighting bear mention. The first is the last major engagement of the conflict at Acosta Ñu. The Paraguayan fighting-age population had been so decimated by this point that the clearly doomed resistance could only be continued by child soldiers; astonishingly, they did so with enthusiasm and a bravery beyond all description. At Acosta Ñu, a force of boys as young as six–many having attempted to improvise false beards to disguise their age from the enemy–turned back several charges of seasoned Brazilian cavalry before inevitably breaking. At this point, the victorious Brazilians put most of those remaining on the field to the lance. A fire, alleged by some authors to have been deliberately set, consumed the rest.^[66] Solano López was not present, but not because he had deserted his people. Having refused all Allied offers of a comfortable European exile, Solano López wound up retreating with an ever-smaller force of guerillas into the far-northeastern wilderness of Paraguay. Finally intercepted by a Brazilian hunting party on 1 March 1870, López suffered a gut wound and even at this late stage was offered an honorable surrender by the commander of the small force. He refused, drew his saber, and charged the Brazilian officer, screaming “¡Muero con mi patria!” (“I die with my country!”). He was then unceremoniously shot dead.^[67] Truth is sometimes, if not frequently, more tragic than fiction.

Conclusion

The influence of the Marxist- or dependency-inflected Uruguayan and Argentine “revisionist” school of Paraguayan War historiography on the mainstream is such that today overt apologism for the extraordinary mass killing perpetrated by the forces of the Triple Alliance during their regime-change invasion of Paraguay is largely limited to the Brazilian extreme right. What exists instead is a pernicious myth, one that the Allies themselves were already constructing during the conflict. The extraordinary grit and gallantry of the Paraguayan troops could not be denied, and so to justify what they were doing to their populations and to themselves, the Allies narrated the conflict as an undoubtedly meritorious people being exterminated “because of one man.”^[68] López’s absolute refusal to surrender even once Paraguayan defeat was certain is seen as not only symptomatic of megalomania but as the only cause of the war’s long and savage continuation.

This is as grotesque and vapid as latter-day Israeli rhetoric about human shields in Gaza. It draws on classic themes of anti-indigenous racism in a particularly Latin American variant, in which peoples like the Guaraní are child-like and naturally submissive to any level of brutalization.^[69] It assigns Solano López a mysterious, almost supernatural Svengali-like power to make people die for him. And most of all, it constitutes a total denial that the Paraguayan people who followed this leader unto death may have actually had something to fight for.

Like any other indigenous people on the closing frontiers which defined late-nineteenth century capitalism, the Guaraní fought for land–land as the basis for life, for reproducing the socio-ecological relationships by which their society survived. Dispossession at the hands of the Allies was equivalent to death for the Paraguayan populace, overwhelmingly rural–and their access to agricultural land was fundamentally guaranteed by its state-ownership. Without the Solano López regime, Paraguay would become a “zone of starvation,”^[70] just like the Brazilian northeast, and even worse–the empire might treat its people as it did black slaves. Even if this latter fear was in a literal sense unrealistic–and the treatment of what Paraguayan prisoners the Allies did take made it appear far from so–what was actually on offer from the installation of a comprador regime was not much better.^[71] The Paraguayan people were well aware of what was at stake. Solano López’ choice of death with honor rather than capture, humiliation–and by that point, likely execution anyway–far from being the action of the maniac he has been portrayed as, sums up that made by the nation as a whole. Modifying a well-known adage, we can say that the Paraguayan peasantry, at least in any free, independent incarnation, chose to die on its feet rather than to die on its knees.

Some may object to my argument thus far by saying that antebellum Paraguay was really a mestizo, as opposed to indigenous, society. “Mestizo” seems to be increasingly a dirty word among left-liberal Latin Americanists, who as they have adopted intersectional and “anti-racist” frameworks, have come to view such blanket categories of national or transnational identity on the continent as constituting nothing except for the sinister erasure of specific identities and experiences. While the long history of nation-builders in places like Argentina rendering black and indigenous populations invisible cannot be ignored, mestizo also has another history–that which Che Guevara emphasized in his remark on the claims that a “single [Latin] American race” should make against imperialism.^[72] The Paraguayans (who, at least by linguistic standards, were overwhelmingly Guaraní) were fighting to preserve free access to land coveted by local compradors and international capital, but so were non-indigenes like the gauchos. My point is that “mestizo” and “indigenous” are not always absolutely exclusive categories, especially in cases like this, where peoples belonging to both categories and to neither all engaged in struggle against the sale of a shared national patrimony to Albion.

If the Paris Commune was a prologue of the worker’s movement in the next century, it might be said that Paraguay prefigured the aspirations for national liberation and development that swept the Third World after decolonization and whose echoes continue today. I am not arguing that nineteenth-century Paraguay was some sort of utopia, or even that the regime would have survived absent the Triple Alliance. There is no question that power in Paraguay was impossibly centralized in the autocratic executive, with virtually no bureaucratic cadre to speak of. Nor was there any attempt to create one under Francia or either of the two Lópezes.^[73] The extreme lack of autonomy of Paraguayan officers, their dependence on Solano López for command decisions, probably did not determine the war’s outcome but did result in myriad tactical errors and lost opportunities. Regimes like this tend to be quite fragile, with the concentration of power in elite groups–in this case, literally a single man–tending to make the betrayal of a revolutionary or progressive course possible at the drop of a hat. Maybe this would have happened under Solano López or a successor, maybe not. Maybe oligarchic or externally-backed interests would have easily retaken power after Solano López died a natural death with no clear successor. The Paraguayan state-owned industrial economy spoken of above was admittedly tiny (though not in comparison with the rest of nineteenth-century Latin America), but then again it barely had time to exist before being drowned in blood.

What is undeniable is the degree to which the Paraguayan War shaped the tragic destiny of South America, Argentina perhaps most of all. Mitre entered the war reluctantly, but the oligarchic class of Buenos Aires may have been its greatest winners. Paraguay was invaded and destroyed almost entirely by the Brazilians, which allowed Buenos Aires to conserve its forces to focus on the task of consolidating its internal dominance over Argentina. To this day, the city remains the main beneficiary of what few agrarian rents do not flow to the Global North–and is the seat of reactionary politics in Argentina. Current Argentine President Javier Milei’s libertarianism reads as bizarre in the rest of the world, but note how the terminology used for his politics in Spanish–they are simply “liberal” or occasionally “liberal libertario.” Bartolomé Mitre, not Friedman or Hayek, is Milei’s true intellectual godfather–committed to a comprador free-trade liberalism which has dominated the country for a century and a half with no interruption save the ineffectual Peronist challenge.

In Brazil, the war had a fallout which ironically hit its most ardent promoter–Dom Pedro II–the hardest. Brazil’s pre-conflict military consisted largely of untrained territorial militia, a professional standing army was viewed as too autonomous–a threat to monarchic rule. The drawn-out conflict eventually convinced Dom Pedro to cave to Caxias’s suggestion that officers be promoted on the basis of merit rather than noble title; this turned the postwar military into exactly the power base for middle-class liberals and antiroyalists that had been feared. After eighteen short years, the entire edifice of power that had gone to war with Paraguay–the emperor, the slave economy, the nobility–would be gone.^[74] Of course, the end of slavery was a response to the pressures that had motivated Brazil to set the whole chain of events in motion to begin with–namely, that it was simply uneconomical for Brazilian capitalists to have a workforce which they were solely responsible for keeping fed and clothed. Slavery would be replaced with various forms of debt peonage and what Ruy Mauro Marini called “super-exploitation”–the payment of wages so low as to be incompatible with survival–but the Brazilian northeast remained a sugar monoculture and a “zone of starvation.”^[75] And Black Brazilians are still the poorest, most malnourished, most exploited people in the Americas today.

As for Paraguay, the puzzle of how it re-created a society still puzzles demographers and historians to this day. But it did–just a poorer, less proud, and more unhappy one. Guaraní is still spoken by virtually all of the country’s citizens–efforts by the Allied installed-government to ban it from being used in schools could not undo the prior decades in which the language was universally spoken.^[76] But the Colorado Party (not to be confused with the Uruguayan party of the same name), which came to prominence in the wake of the war, gave the country the violent dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner and has remained in power with few interruptions for a century and a half. The achievement of the Paraguayan ancien régime was that of giving the people land. This was completely reversed by the Triple Alliance; aside from the actual territorial cessions made to Brazil and Argentina, postwar Paraguay was forced by the victors to conduct enormous land auctions. Agrarian landownership in Paraguay remains overwhelmingly dominated by foreigners; it has the dubious distinction of having the most unequal land ownership in what is already the most unequal region in the world. In recent years, this land has increasingly been bought up by so-called brasiguayos–wealthy Brazilian farmers, mainly soy growers, looking to produce more cheaply across the border.^[77] And so, in a way, Solano López’s prophecy that Paraguay faced conquest by its giant neighbor has come true after all.

1. Christopher Chase-Dunn, Global Formation: Structures of the World-Economy (Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), 183.

   ↩

2. Jason W. Moore, El capitalismo en la trama de la vida: ecología y acumulación de capital (Traficantes de sueños, 2020), 285-287.

   ↩

3. Jean Batou, "Nineteenth-Century attempted escapes from the periphery: the cases of Egypt and Paraguay," Review (Fernand Braudel Center) (1993), 279-318.

   ↩

4. Arghiri Emmanuel, "Myths of development versus myths of underdevelopment," New Left Review 85 (1974), 61-82.

   ↩

5. Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-colonialism. (Nelson, 1965).

   ↩

6. Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, "Global capitalism and American empire," Socialist Register 40 (2004).

   ↩

7. H.S. Ferns, "Britain's informal empire in Argentina, 1806-1914," Past & Present 4 (1953), 60-75.

   ↩

8. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (Verso, 2010).

   ↩

9. Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (Verso Books, 2002).

   ↩

10. Thomas Whigham and Barbara Potthast, "The Paraguayan Rosetta Stone: New Insights into the Demographics of the Paraguayan War, 1864–1870," Latin American Research Review 34, no. 1 (1999), 174-186.

    ↩

11. Julio José Chiavenato, Genocidio americano: la Guerra del Paraguay. (C. Schauman Editor, 1989), Chapter Fourteen.

    ↩

12. Oliver Cromwell Cox, The Foundations of Capitalism (Philosophical Library, 1959); Oliver Cromwell Cox, Capitalism as a System (Monthly Review Press, 1964); Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (University of California Press, 2011).

    ↩

13. Milcíades Peña, Historia Del Pueblo Argentino: 1500-1955 (Emecé, 2012), 63-66.

    ↩

14. Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, vol. II: The Wheels of Commerce (University of California Press, 1992), 265-272.

    ↩

15. Deborah Levenson-Estrada, Trade Unionists Against Terror: Guatemala City, 1954-1985 (UNC Press Books, 1994), 19-20; Hugo Martin, “Jorge Sigal: ‘Para el Partido Comunista, Videla era un general moderado con el que se podía hablar.’” infobae, May 4, 2023. https://www.infobae.com/politica/2023/05/04/jorge-sigal-para-el-partido-comunista-videla-era-un-general-moderado-con-el-que-se-podia-hablar/.

    ↩

16. Peña, 2012, 54-57, 75-77.

    ↩

17. Osvaldo Barsky and Jorge Gelman, Historia del agro argentino: desde la conquista hasta comienzos del siglo XXI (Sudamericana, 2009), 60-71.

    ↩

18. Nicolas Shumway, The Invention of Argentina (University of California Press, 1991), 11-13.

    ↩

19. Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: the Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 178-179.

    ↩

20. Thomas Whigham, The Paraguayan War: Causes and Early Conduct. (University of Calgary Press, 2018), 9-11.

    ↩

21. Julia Sarreal, "Disorder, Wild Cattle, and a New Role for the Missions: The Banda Oriental, 1776–1786," The Americas 67, no. 4 (2011), 538-545.

    ↩

22. Ezequiel Adamovsky, Historia de las clases populares en la Argentina: desde 1880 hasta 2003. (Sudamericana, 2012), Chapter One; see also Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Beacon Press, 2001).

    ↩

23. Harriet Friedmann and Philip McMichael, "Agriculture and the state system," Sociologia ruralis 29, no. 2 (1989); Jason W. Moore, "Cheap food & bad money: Food, frontiers, and financialization in the rise and demise of neoliberalism," Review (Fernand Braudel Center) (2010), 225-261.

    ↩

24. Robert W. Cox, Production, Power, and World Order: Social Forces in the Making of History (Columbia University Press, 1987), 6-9; Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen, The Imperial Mode of Living: Everyday life and the Ecological Crisis of Capitalism (Verso Books, 2021).

    ↩

25. Tony Weis, The Ecological Hoofprint: The Global Burden of Industrial Livestock (Zed Books, 2013), 70-71.

    ↩

26. Matilda Baraibar Norberg, The Political Economy of Agrarian Change in Latin America: Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 120.

    ↩

27. Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik, A Theory of Imperialism (Columbia University Press, 2016); Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik, Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present (Monthly Review Press, 2021).

    ↩

28. Juan Iñigo Carrera, "Argentina: The Reproduction of Capital Accumulation through Political Crisis," Historical Materialism 14, no. 1 (2006), 193-198.

    ↩

29. Peña, 2012, 119-126.

    ↩

30. León Pomer, La Guerra Del Paraguay: Estado, Política y Negocios (Centro Editor de América Latina, 1987), 32-33.

    ↩

31. John Womack Jr., Zapata y la Revolución mexicana (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2017), Preface.

    ↩

32. Whigham, 2018, 39.

    ↩

33. Chiavenato, 1989, 26-27.

    ↩

34. Domenico Losurdo, Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend (Iskra Books, 2023), 58-63.

    ↩

35. Chiavenato, 1989, 22-25.

    ↩

36. Ibid, 18-19.

    ↩

37. Pomer, 1987, 35.

    ↩

38. Batou, 1993, 286.

    ↩

39. Whigham, 2018, 178.

    ↩

40. Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz, Política Británica En El Rio de La Plata (Plus Ultra, 1965), 263-268.

    ↩

41. Samir Amin, "The Sovereign Popular Project; The Alternative to Liberal Globalization," Journal of Labor and Society 20, no. 1 (2017), 7-22.

    ↩

42. Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (Vintage Books, 1976), 62-63; Eduardo Galeano, Las venas abiertas de América Latina (Siglo Veintiuno, 2006), 85-92.

    ↩

43. Ruy Mauro Marini, The Dialectics of Dependency. (Monthly Review Press, 2022), 132-135.

    ↩

44. Pomer, 1987, 59-61.

    ↩

45. Peña, 2012, Chapter Four.

    ↩

46. Pomer, 1987, 86-90, 92-95.

    ↩

47. Whigham, 2018, 192-193.

    ↩

48. Ibid, Chapter Nine.

    ↩

49. Ibid, 264-271.

    ↩

50. Peña, 2012, Chapter Eight.

    ↩

51. Whigham, 2018, 220-223.

    ↩

52. Ibid, 276.

    ↩

53. Ibid, 271-276.

    ↩

54. Ibid, 277-281.

    ↩

55. Pomer, 1987, 115-118.

    ↩

56. Ibid, 98-102.

    ↩

57. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848-1875 (Abacus, 1997), 98.

    ↩

58. Moore, 2020, 210-214.

    ↩

59. Pomer, 1987, Chapter Eight.

    ↩

60. Peña, 2012, 254-257; Thomas Whigham, The Road to Armageddon: Paraguay Versus the Triple Alliance, 1866-70 (University of Calgary Press, 2017), 124-128.

    ↩

61. Whigham, 2017, 122.

    ↩

62. Ibid, 101-108.

    ↩

63. Ibid, 143-144; 215-219.

    ↩

64. Chiavenato, 1989, 173-176.

    ↩

65. Whigham, 2017, 332-336.

    ↩

66. Chiavenato, 1989, Chapter Fifteen.

    ↩

67. Whigham, 2017, 387-390, 409-410; Chiavenato, 1989, 181.

    ↩

68. Whigham, 2017, 64, 202-203.

    ↩

69. Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet (University of California Press, 2017), 35-38.

    ↩

70. Galeano, 2006, Ibid.

    ↩

71. Whigham, 2018, 372.

    ↩

72. Adamovsky, 2012, 12-15.

    ↩

73. Chiavenato, 1989, 39-41.

    ↩

74. Whigham, 2017, 420-423.

    ↩

75. Marini, 2022, Ibid.

    ↩

76. Whigham, 2017, 382-383.

    ↩

77. Baraibar Norberg, 2020, 241-253.

    ↩