The Grandchildren of Solano López: Frontier and Nation in Paraguay, 1904–1936

6: Becoming Guaraní: Soldiers, Agriculturalists, and Poets

103 Chapter Six Becoming Guaraní Soldiers, Agriculturalists, and Poets [ In a letter dated December 21, 1928, Juan Azuaga spoke of his concern about events on the Chaco frontier. He observed that while there was no official word in the newspapers of fighting in the Chaco, many asuncenos, himself included, assumed that there must be conflict because unnamed “official sources” reported that Bolivia had received supplies from Europe, including “thirty machine guns, ten cannons, and four airplanes.”1 In eastern Paraguay, according to Azuaga, rural villages were “silent, meaning empty, of all men,” as there were already “about 22,000 men [sent to] the Chaco,” and in Asunción another 14,000 were prepared to head there. Azuaga reports, on the day he composed his letter, that a thousand men from Encarnación had arrived in the capital “with bloodied feet” after an arduous march. They came to Asunción, Azuaga claimed, because in Encarnación the barracks were already full of men. Were they sent back to Encarnación? Were they promptly deployed to the front? Azuaga does not tell us. But what is clear is that these men were prepared to defend their nation. Furthermore, this sort of description of empty rural areas was reminiscent of descriptions of Paraguay devoid of men during the War of the Triple Alliance, when the Paraguayan rural classes heeded Solano López’s call to arms. As noted by many observers of that earlier postwar period, only women remained in Paraguay; all the men had been called to fight and die for the nation.2 As early as 1928 it was apparent that rural Paraguayans were once again preparing to sacrifice themselves for the national cause, as they had during the War of the Triple Alliance. chapter six 104 For the Paraguayan rural classes, their first introduction to the Chaco frontier came with the death of Lieutenant Adolfo Rojas Silva. Like Solano López, Rojas Silva was a martyr for the national cause. In death, he came to represent one of the responsibilities of Paraguayan citizenship: defending the land from foreign aggression. Immediately following the well-controlled rallies organized by the Liberal government for Rojas Silva on March 26, 1927, the newspaper El Liberal reported that asuncenos testified that his image had appeared on the wall of his former home. It quickly became a pilgrimage site. The image attracted “at any hour of the day . . . a large crowd congregated with all eyes staring in the same direction.” In the image, apparently distinguishable only at a distance, Rojas Silva was carrying a gun in one hand while in the other he was holding a Paraguayan flag. The newspaper account claimed that his image was “facing the immense grasslands of the Chaco that hold the remains of his body.” Viewed this way, Rojas Silva was forever defending national sovereignty.3 The image was a reminder to the nonelite and illiterate Paraguayans of the continued Bolivian “encroachment” on Paraguayan territory, the dangers this Bolivian “occupation” foretold, and the responsibility of citizenship that Guaraní speakers had to defend Paraguayan land. The Chaco War was not fought by the Paraguayan intellectual elite, the naturalists, or the missionaries. Rather, the men who composed Paraguay’s fighting force were the soldier-agriculturalists who populated the eastern Paraguayan countryside, farming small plots of land or working on the yerba mate plantations and speaking Guaraní. These rural classes kept alive the wartime heroism of their forefathers in the War of the Triple Alliance in both poetry and song. These men were not aware of the debates in the newspapers concerning the legal rights of either Bolivia or Paraguay to the Chaco; they had little time or interest in the scientific nationalism of the frontier; nor they did they take an interest in the work of the missionaries in the wilderness. These men would fight for the honor of their nation and for the memory of Francisco Solano López, the man whom their grandfathers had followed into battle. They understood their responsibilities as citizens of a nation and wrote of the glories found in the Chaco. Through their experiences on the battlefield , these soldier-agriculturalists came to understand the Chaco frontier in a new way from the elites who had previously wandered into the Chaco: a place where Solano López was a hero and where they proved their citizenship and loyalty to the country and its history. Becoming Guaran...