Brazilian steamers ramming Paraguayan ships in the Battle of Riachuelo, painted by Eduardo de Martino 1882-1883 (public domain image – Wikipedia “Paraguayan War”)

(18) PARAGUAYAN WAR (1864-1870)

Ever since reading about it, I’ve been fascinated by the Paraguayan War – also known as the War of the Triple Alliance, although let’s face it, Brazil did the heavy lifting.

It’s a war that seems like a meme or something out of a cartoon, at least as traditionally attributed to the “mad dictator” of Paraguay, President Francisco Solano Lopez – “the infinite ambitions of a supposedly megalomaniac and bloodthirsty Solano López who had the intention to create the “Greater Paraguay” through the conquest of territories of the neighboring countries.”

By neighboring countries, that means Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. In fairness, he might have had a shot against one of them, even the larger and more populous Brazil – Paraguay was not styled as the Prussia of Latin America for nothing – but not all three at the same time.

I suppose that’s the part that appeals to me. It’s like Paraguay as the “Prussia of Latin America”, was having a dress rehearsal in the jungles of South America, for the same basic script of the actual Prussian state in Europe, Germany, for the world wars – and defeated by the same basic lack of understanding of war or understanding the limits of military and national power. In other words, encirclement and attrition by a coalition of enemies with superior resources – a coalition brought about by their own actions, “a foolish attempt to fight an unwinnable war that almost destroyed the nation”.

It’s almost like that adage by Karl Marx about history repeating itself except in reverse – with history happening first as farce and then as tragedy.

Although in the case of the Paraguayan War, it involved both farce and tragedy, the latter particularly for Paraguay itself, as it was ground down in attrition by its three opponents first in conventional warfare, then in its drawn-out guerilla resistance until Lopez was killed in action.

In the end, Paraguay was defeated and lost almost 40% of its territory, but it was Paraguay’s casualties and losses of population that are truly staggering. We don’t really know what they were because of a lack of reliable census figures before the war but they’re usually reckoned as at least half the population or even 60% or so, making it proportionately one of the most destructive wars in modern history – with the worst figures estimating the loss of 90% of the male population

Whatever the case, there was an 1871 census with about a 4:1 ratio for adult female population to adult male population – such that there was an informal acceptance, even by the Catholic Church, of polygamy afterwards to help repopulation.