Paraguay

Paraguay remains the least known, least understood and least researched country in Latin America. A landlocked country situated in the heart of the subcontinent and slightly larger than Japan, 98 percent of its 7.2 million people (as of 2021) live in the eastern region, which occupies only one-third of the total land area. An unusual history sets it apart from the subcontinent, in that an untypical form of colonialism has turned Paraguay into the only genuinely bilingual country in Latin America, where a ‘repressed’ language, Guaraní, is spoken by the majority of the overwhelmingly mestizo population. The springboard for the Spanish conquest of the southern half of the subcontinent, Paraguay later became embroiled in two of the three postindependence wars of Latin America, a fact that is indelibly marked on the country’s psyche to the present day. Defeat in the Triple Alliance War (1865–1870), the bloodiest war in the history of Latin America, in which around 75 percent of the adult male population died, has left deep psychosocial scars. Victory against Bolivia in the Chaco War (1932–1935) ensured control over the enormous but hardly populated western region of the country. Together these two wars gave rise to a militaristic and xenophobic form of “heroic nationalism” that was adroitly embedded by the dictatorship of the Alfredo Stroessner (1954–1989), whose rule was the longest of any head of state in Latin American history. This long period of political repression also saw the construction of the Itaipú hydroelectric plant, still the largest in the world. Although jointly owned with Brazil, Paraguay’s benefits from the enterprise have been extremely meager. The country’s road to democratization since 1989 has been rocky, with three attempted coups (1996, 1999, and 2000); the assassination of a vice-president (1999); and the burning of Congress (2017). Yet despite endemic corruption and extremely weak rule of law, economic change has been dramatic in the new millennium. For though long geographically and culturally isolated, the democratization process has coincided with the rapid introduction of mechanized agriculture, which has catapulted the country into becoming the fourth-largest world exporter of soybean, which now occupies 22 percent of the total land area of eastern Paraguay. Meanwhile, a weak state is striving to deal with the attendant problems that this economic transformation is creating in the form of deforestation and environmental destruction, expulsion of small farmers and Indigenous peoples from their land, the spread of narcotic-related crime, and worsening inequality in income distribution. This article aims to provide an insight into the wide range of fascinating issues that come together in Paraguay’s turbulent history.