The Grandchildren of Solano López: Frontier and Nation in Paraguay, 1904–1936 by Bridget María Chesterton (review)

Chesterton’s history of the disputed “wilderness” known as the Chaco between Paraguay and Bolivia provides an excellent interdisciplinary study of how an emerging nation imagines a frontier region and how a frontier in turn can shape a nation’s identity and history. Thus does it echo the trajectory of the United States in its westward expansion. The Chaco was Paraguay’s Manifest Destiny, the site of a supposed agrarian national movement, even if few Paraguayans ever visited, or even wanted to visit, this region, given its physical remoteness from Paraguay’s heartland east of the Paraguay River (the one road leading into it has been paved but is heavily potholed). Chesterton’s study combines history with geography, anthropology, literature, poetry, sociology, theater, and psychology in a textured and engaging narrative.

Too little has been written about the Chaco, certainly in English; the scant material that is available usually features a military history of the Chaco War (1932–1935). Chesterton’s welcome presentation ranges from Marshal Solano López’s disastrous War of the Triple Alliance (1864–1870), which shattered Paraguay and left the Chaco in Bolivia’s hands, to the nineteenth-century scientific Social Darwinism that justified Paraguay’s annexation of the late Chaco, then inhabited by Indians who were presented as ethnically Paraguayan and in need of being “civilized.” Chesterton also examines the foundational narratives of modern Paraguay, arguing that they are bound to notions about the Chaco. Although her argument does not always result in definite proof, it is cogent and persuasive nonetheless. How the Paraguayans stamped their mark on the Chaco and shaped the region told a story about Paraguay and its people; their involvement with the Chaco forced them to consider their national identity.

The missionaries sent into the region and the Mennonites who settled there (their descendants remain even now) intended not only to stake a national claim but also to make “citizens” of the “native” peoples, whom the science of the time depicted as distinctly “Paraguayan.” The Chaco embodied the Paraguayan nationalism that emerged before and just after the Great War, as imagined in songs, postcards, literary works, and poems. In this guise, the Chaco—which certain travelers had dubbed the “green hell”—assumed a beneficial image, showcasing the good health of the nation. Like Roman legionnaires, soldiers who fought in the Chaco were given land there, notwithstanding the fact that few of them wanted it; the area remained a wilderness.

Paraguay—born, or reborn, after 1870—was on an inevitable collision course with Bolivia. Festering since the 1920s, all-out war erupted in 1932. Paraguay’s victory avenged its defeat in 1870, redeeming the Chaco (Chesterton has little to say about the Bolivians, leaving readers to wonder whether there were similar frontier and identity issues at stake in La Paz). The war meant that the soldiers’ language of Guaraní displaced Spanish as the national tongue. Moreover, the Paraguayans’ re-discovery of the tomb of Marshal López afforded them an opportunity to bury him with full honors along with an unknown soldier in a national pantheon, as at Arlington Cemetery.

Paraguay’s acquisition of the Chaco from Bolivia had various effects on domestic politics, one of which was the military coup in 1936, supported by disgruntled veterans, that ousted the Liberal government. Its long-term legacy was the military rule and gross human-rights abuses that burden Paraguay to this day. Again, Paraguay’s plight echoes a wider history that encompasses the radical political movements in Europe that war veterans tended to support after 1918.

Chesteron is to be commended for her thoughtful, innovative, exciting, and scholarly examination of Paraguay’s frontier history that reaches far beyond the confines of that land-locked country to inform the history of Latin America as a whole in the twentieth century. Her treatment of Paraguay’s struggles with ethnicity, identity, democracy...