A crazed 19th-century dictator who embroiled his nation in one of history’s most destructive conflicts may prove an unlikely tourist draw for Paraguay. Mark Stratton reports
Inside the Pantheon de los Heroes in downtown Asunción, there is a small coffin draped with a Paraguayan flag. It is dedicated to several thousand soldiers who were killed during the Battle of Acosta Nu in 1869. They were no ordinary troops, though, rather a ragtag army of Paraguayan children who had painted little moustaches on their faces to make themselves look older. Most of their military careers came to an abrupt and bloody end when they were charged by a division of Brazilian cavalry. It is said that their mothers witnessed the slaughter from the shelter of a forest near the battlefield, before themselves being put to the sword.
From 1864-70, South America shuddered as the most violent war ever witnessed on her soil played out. Throughout the War of the Triple Alliance, Paraguay fought with fanatical defiance against the overwhelming combined superiority of Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. By the time its commander-in-chief Francisco Solano López was gunned down by a Brazilian grenadier as he attempted to flee from defeat in 1870, Paraguay had been utterly annihilated.
Outside Latin America the war has largely faded into obscurity. This despite a story so incredible that even the most fanciful Hollywood producer might suspend belief. That is not least because of the improbable love interest between the dictatorial López and his Irish mistress Eliza Alicia Lynch (the ‘Empress of Paraguay’).
A spate of recently published books have, however, highlighted this forgotten war and are putting a country that has long lingered in the shadows of neighbouring Brazil and Argentina back on the map.
New Yorker Lily Tuck’s fictionalised account of López and Lynch, The News from Paraguay (which won the American National Book Award for fiction), and other works, have led Paraguay to hope that a literary-inspired tourism boom may be in the offing. The country is sprinkled with wartime battlefields and memorials to López and Lynch.
The conflict itself began late in 1864, after Paraguay launched military incursions into Corrientes (Argentina) and Mato Grosso (Brazil) provinces. After initial successes in Argentina, the tide then turned decisively. The allies first inflicted a crushing defeat on the Paraguayans at Tuyutí, still the largest battle ever fought in South America. This preceded the routing of the Paraguayan navy at Riachuelo in 1866, ensuring for the duration of the war the allies had control of the Rio Paraguay, which flowed deep inside Paraguay.
With southern Paraguay now opened up and with the allies possessing hugely superior troop numbers, it seemed victory was assured. However, nobody told the Paraguayans. Under the direction of British engineer George Thompson, they dug in using the southern city of Humaita as a strong point. They then inflicted a massive military reversal on the allies at Curupaity. This battle heralded a desperate and bloody stalemate of trench warfare, disease, and starvation that was played out for the next two years in the surrounding swamps. Tens of thousands perished.
There is much conjecture as to the causes of the war. British author John Gimlette suggests in his travelogue, At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig: A Journey into Paraguay, that López was ‘champing at the bit’ to attack Brazil after Emperor Dom Pedro II refused the hand in marriage of his daughter. Most modern historians, however, see the causes stemming from a regional power struggle over trade and territorial ambition.
The landlocked Paraguay’s initial incursions were meant to curtail Argentinean and Brazilian meddling in Uruguay’s sovereignty, which it saw as threatening its trade route along the River Plate to Montevideo. Even today, however, many Paraguayans believe that when the Triple Alliance treaty was signed in 1865 (between Brazil, Argentina, and a puppet Uruguay) to fight López, a pact was made to carve up their country.
Central to this drama is the highly controversial López and his leadership. After returning from a European sojourn with new ideas and a heavily pregnant Eliza Lynch, whom he had met in Paris, López took over a self-sufficient and wealthy country upon his father’s demise in 1862. He ruled absolutely and within two years led Paraguay into the war.
Modern Paraguayan opinion remains divided on the man. On one hand, Lopiztas recall him as a nationalist hero championing smaller nations while to the antilopiztas he remains a cruel sadist who destroyed the country. Gimlette savages López, describing him as a ‘bulldog, bully, and glutton… with a gross animal look’. Claiming López’s inept leadership lost the war while his vain refusal to surrender prolonged Paraguay’s agony, he tells of an increasingly unhinged leader executing scores of his own troops for treason (along with foreign workers and even his brothers). ‘It was difficult to write about “Franco” because he was obviously not a good person,’ adds Tuck, ‘so I had to make up something about him to make him a bit more tolerable to readers, like his love of children and animals’.
López’s great grandson, Ambassador Miguel A Solano López, believes his ancestor’s despotism was a product of the times. ‘Democracy was not as we know it today,’ he says. ‘During the war the treatment of those accused of treason wasn’t humane, but by all accounts those he condemned pales against the numbers executed under Simon Bolivar, now a hero of South American independence.’
‘If fighting to the death makes Marshal López a villain, then so be it, but no amount of cruelty could have ordered such sacrifice,’ he adds. He is referring to the horrifying statistic that Paraguay’s post-war population was just 220,000 – a terrible reduction from a pre-hostilities number that is estimated between 550,000 and 1.3 million. Of the survivors, only 28,000 men remained alive.
López, however, had, to his credit, started to modernise his country. ‘He brought the railroad, a telegraph network, the first iron foundry and important architects and technicians from Europe,’ says his descendant. Visitors these days can still see his influences in Asunción amid the city’s enchanting yet somewhat hangdog colonial architecture.
The kitsch and highly decorative Pantheon de los Heroes off Avenida Palma confirms that López had more than a sneaking admiration for Napoleon Bonaparte. Its salmon-pink dome and icy-white stone walls are meant to resemble the Emperor’s Parisian mausoleum, Les Invalides. Perhaps fearing for his own mortality, López had the edifice started during the war, although it was only completed in 1937. Beyond the imposing colonnaded entranceway, guarded intently by sentries in period uniforms, López’s relatively modest mausoleum can be found inside the cool interior.
Several blocks away are the British-built central railway station, now a museum-cum-graveyard of 1860s steam locomotives and scattered wooden carriages, and López’s ostentatious family home, the Government Palace, which he also never saw finished. The latter has been given numerous nicknames – everything from Paraguay’s very-own Versailles to a wedding cake decoration. López ordered it built around 1860, commissioning British architect Alonso Taylor to oversee construction. My city guide, José Ramos, explains why the décor to the right of the palace’s cluster of columns and balconies was deliberately left unfinished. ‘The child workers were sent off to the war, so this decoration was left uncompleted to commemorate them,’ he says. Nearby, hinting at defiance beyond his grave, a redoubtable statue outside the futuristic parliament building depicts López astride his charger, belligerently waving his sword in the direction of Argentina.
Elsewhere, in Asunción’s suburbs, La Recoleta Cemetery hosts a white, pointed mausoleum dedicated to Eliza Lynch. The Empress of Paraguay’s remains were exhumed in the 1960s from a pauper’s grave in Paris.
Lynch’s return completed a remarkable rollercoaster life. She fled the Irish potato famine when a child, endured a failed marriage at 15, spent some time in Paris and rose to become Paraguay’s de facto first lady, but was forced into miserable Parisian exile after the war. When finally returned to Paraguay, her coffin was given a heroine’s welcome by the country’s then military strongman, General Alfredo Stroessner – who somewhat ironically died this summer also in exile, in Brazil.
Described as possessing ‘translucent, alabaster skin with blue eyes’, Lynch bore López seven heirs. They never married, perhaps due to López’s notorious womanising, or because she was reputedly shunned by Paraguayan high society, not least López’s immediate family, who despised ‘La Concubina Irlandese’. Yet while Lynch quickly acquired a taste for the good life (supposedly following López to the front replete with ball gowns and grand piano), there was undoubtedly steel underlying her character.
She is most definitely a genuine Paraguayan heroine, insists Ambassador López. ‘Several times during the war she declined invitations to return to Europe to a life of ease until the war’s end,’ he says, also refuting suggestions that Lynch’s own ambitions in any way influenced his ancestor in matters of war. ‘Her contribution was to bring us a degree of western culture, such as music and theatre, which Paraguay had never experienced before,’ he says.
By late 1868, Triple Alliance troops under the command of the Duke de Caixas had broken through at Humaita and routed the rump of the Paraguayan military en route to seizing Asunción. López fled north with Lynch, refusing to surrender.
The end was not long in arriving. On 1 March 1870, two Brazilian detachments tracked López down to Cerro Cora where he had fled with a handful of survivors from his army. The dictator tried to escape by swimming the Aquidaban River but was mortally wounded by a bullet. With his last breath he is reputed to have said: ‘Muero con mi Patria,’ (I die for my country). The story is that Lynch buried him nearby, digging the grave with her bare hands. His remains were exhumed in the 1930s and taken to Asunción.
Today at the beautiful Cerro Cora National Park, three hours’ drive from Asunción, travellers can visit the dictator’s memorial close to where he fell.
Other wartime legacies countrywide include Humaita’s historic trenches, the reconstructed La Rosada iron foundry that once fashioned Paraguayan munitions, and Vapor Cue, where warships scuppered by the Paraguayan navy in 1869, and since restored, are permanently on display.
The book’s publicity has already brought a modest upturn of interest from the American market, says Liz Cramer, Paraguay’s new minister for tourism. ‘Tourism had never been a state priority and negative press [of coups and dictatorships] may have held us back,’ she says. ‘But I’m confident than an increasing interest in the war might carve a niche for us in the international market.’
A wider remembrance of the terrible sacrifice made by the child soldiers of Acosta Nu might finally prove a fitting tribute.
ON THE TRAIL OF LÓPEZ AND LYNCH
GETTING THERE
Varig (www.varig.com) and Iberia (www.iberiaairlines.com) both fly to Asunción.
TOURS
Intertours will tailor-make packages to visit war sites (www.intertoursparaguay.com). Hotel Portal del Sol is a delightful three-star hotel in Asunción’s suburbs. Doubles: $50, including breakfast. Tel: (+595) 21 609 395 www.hotelportaldelsol.com
FIND OUT MORE
At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig: A Journey into Paraguay, by John Gimlette (Arrow, 2003). The News from Paraguay, by Lily Tuck (Perennial, 2004). www.asu-cvb.org.py www.senatur.gov.py
