Francisco Solano López in 1862 was the inexperienced spoiled son of an iron-willed dictator. He overestimated the military strength of his country and felt that Paraguay should have a larger voice in the affairs of the region. Thus, when Uruguay, wracked by civil war, was threatened with intervention by Brazil, López took an increasingly bellicose position. When Brazil ignored his warnings and ultimatums and invaded Uruguay in August 1864 to support a pro-Brazilian faction in the civil war, López decided to use the strength of his military machine. In November he ordered the capture of a Brazilian war steamer and sent units of his army and navy north to invade the Mato Grosso Plateau, simultaneously preparing a larger army corps to strike south to destroy the Brazilian army in Uruguay. When Argentina denied his request for transit of a Paraguayan army, he declared war on Argentina as well, in March 1865. In May, as Paraguayan troops were approaching, a puppet Uruguayan government signed the Treaty of the Triple Alliance with Brazil and Argentina, committing all three to the war against Paraguay.

The Paraguayan force heading southward was destroyed at Uruguaiana, in Brazil, and a strike into northeastern Argentina resulted in heavy Paraguayan casualties and the virtual destruction of López’s fleet in 1865. Much of the rest of the war was fought in southwestern Paraguay, near and around Humaitá. In May 1866 López threw the elite of his army into suicidal attacks against allied forces at Tuyutí, losing almost 20,000 of his best men. Other lost battles in 1866–68, as well as widespread epidemics of Asiatic cholera, devastated the population of the country. In 1869 and 1870 the tragedy was completed as López, pursued by large allied forces, retreated through the interior of his country with a shattered army and thousands of civilian refugees, dragging famine, disease, and death in his wake. Perhaps by that point unhinged, he ordered the executions of hundreds of people, including his own two brothers, two brothers-in-law, and scores of his officers. Finally, on March 1, 1870, his last camp was attacked at Cerro Corá by Brazilian cavalry, and López died in combat. His country by then lay in ruins, with more than half of its former population dead. A Brazilian occupation army remained, further draining the country, until 1876. The Paraguayan War, or War of the Triple Alliance, was one of the bloodiest in Latin American history.

Reconstruction

Under a liberal constitution promulgated in 1870, Paraguay began a painful reconstruction. Only the mutual jealousies of Brazil and Argentina prevented the country from losing much of its territory. As a result, Brazil gained no lands that it had not actually occupied before the war, and Argentina’s claims to most of the Chaco were reduced considerably when, in arbitration, U.S. Pres. Rutherford B. Hayes decided one key boundary issue in 1878 in favour of Paraguay. When the army of occupation was removed in 1876, it left a crowd of Paraguayan politicians noted for their corruption and ambition. In 1887 Paraguay’s two major political parties, the Liberal Party and the National Republican Association (Asociación Nacional Republicana; ANR), generally known as the Colorado Party, were born. The Colorados were in power from 1887 until a liberal revolt unseated them in 1904, and the Liberal Party, in its turn, dominated the presidency for the next 30 years.

The Chaco War

Paraguay’s reconstruction was complicated by a dispute with Bolivia concerning boundaries in the Chaco. The dispute was exacerbated when, in the 1880s, Bolivia lost its seacoast in the War of the Pacific with Chile and, seeing the Chaco as a possible outlet to the sea via the Paraná River, began to penetrate it with soldiers and colonists. By the 1920s armed clashes had begun to take place as Paraguay moved into the region in greater force. As Paraguay was frantically trying to arm itself, a Bolivian force stormed a Paraguayan fort on June 15, 1932, and the war began. Paraguayan Pres. Eusebio Ayala gave a military carte blanche to Gen. José Félix Estigarribia, who gradually pushed the Bolivians back until they were almost entirely ejected from the Chaco. Through foreign mediation, a cease-fire was attained on June 12, 1935, and a peace treaty ending the Chaco War was signed three years later, awarding Paraguay three-fourths of the Chaco.

In February 1936 Ayala and Estigarribia were imprisoned following a military coup known as the Febrerista revolt, conducted by radical officers. The inept new government soon fell, however, and Estigarribia was elected president in 1939.

On September 7, 1940, before he could actually implement a new constitution that gave him great authoritarian powers, Estigarribia was killed in an air crash. He was replaced by Gen. Higinio Morínigo, a harsh opportunist, who immediately persecuted the Liberals and rewarded the Colorados. A revolt of Liberals and other groups in 1947 caused a civil war that again devastated the country. Morínigo was deposed by the Colorados themselves in 1948. In the next six years Paraguay had six weak presidents, and then, in 1954, Gen. Alfredo Stroessner, supported by both the Colorados and the army, seized power.