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79 4 Toikove Ñane Retã! Republican Nationalism at the Battlefield Crossings of Print and Speech in Wartime Paraguay, 1867–1868 Michael Kenneth Huner B y the early months of 1867, writing was a difficult task in the Para­­ guayan encampment of Paso Pucú. The Brazilian warships that blockaded the Río Paraguay, the single viable trade artery in a landlocked country, exacerbated the privations of warfare. Paper and ink, among many other things imported, were scarce. The Paraguayan army only a year before had turned this sparse, dusty elevation along a grove of orange trees into a bustling military headquarters. It now had the appearance of a small town. The straw houses that lodged Paraguayan army commanders formed characteristic urban blocks, and a web of telegraph wires converged upon the village, spreading throughout the Paraguayan earthworks. Although it lay in an isolated swampland, Paso Pucú was now a center of administrative control. Writing was a logistical and ideological necessity. With the supply shortages, the Paraguayans took to rationing and innovation. Military officers penned their correspondence in preciously small handwriting on reused parchment. Meanwhile, technicians manufactured paper from the fibers of one native plant and extracted ink from another. A printing press at the encampment used these materials to continue to publish military orders, political proclamations, and even a newspaper.1 Paso Pucú resembled a curious lettered city.2 This idea, first developed by Angel Rama, recalls the urban centers of administrative and judicial power that were pillars of rule in the colonial empires of Latin America, forged through assiduous control of the written word. Living in prominent towns and cities, cadres of lettered men and sometimes women—clerics, nuns, notaries, lawyers, and poets—had manipulated the pens that inked the essence of social and political power in illiterate societies. They produced the legal scripture for wills and testaments declared, property deeds 80 Building Nineteenth-Century Latin America consolidated, lawsuits filed, testimonies given, judicial rulings issued, and government proclamations decreed.3 Later, in the heady days of the postcolonial world, with independent countries now strewn from shattered empires, lettered officials preserved the scripted elements of state power and even further reconstituted them with printing presses and upstart newspapers, often operating in far less-formal settings than old provincial capitals. In this regard, the Paraguayan encampment at Paso Pucú featured the typical concentration of political authority in an urban landscape where lettered bureaucrats exploited the technology of writing to exercise their power of the state. It was indeed a rustic military headquarters whose lettered officials nonetheless included scribes who fought as soldiers, rough-speaking military officers who served as judges, and priests freshly ordained in the trenches. Amid gray mud, trenches, and cholera, these lettered officials operated the telegraph lines and worked the printing press. They also conducted meticulously documented tribunals, putting to death alleged traitors and deserters.4 It was a lettered city on a war-footing in a desperate struggle for national survival. More than two years before, the Paraguayan president Francisco Solano López had made a bid for geopolitical power in the Río de la Plata region of South America and invaded Brazil and Argentina on the pretext of defending American republicanism against the machinations of the Brazilian monarchy. In 1864, Brazil had invaded Uruguay with the tacit support of the Mitre government in Buenos Aires. López launched his attacks with the alleged purpose of rescuing Paraguay’s “sister republic” from imperial domination. Yet in 1865, Argentina, Brazil, and its now client-state Uruguay quickly formed an unlikely alliance to destroy the government of Francisco Solano López. Their forces soon repulsed López’s armies and by 1866 began a protracted invasion of their own into Paraguayan territory . Their advance stalled later that year, however, and combat operations­ settled into the grim stalemate of trench warfare. Deep in the swamplands of southern Paraguay, disease and hunger killed off more soldiers and camp followers than the constant barrage of bombs and bullets. For his part, López realized that his main hope lay in standing firm and wearing down the allies. More than ever, the López government required the active support of the population that it claimed to represent.5 The rustic lettered city of Paso Pucú churned out print propaganda that tactically exploited the intersection of written and oral cultures. Its news­ paper—a satirical publication with the Guaraní title Cabichuí—employed humor, images, and song to rouse the patriotism of the mostly illiterate...

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