The Empress of
South America
Nigel Cawthorne
1
A national heroine
One night in May 1961, a Paraguayan of Lebanese descent named Teófilo Chammas scaled the walls of Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. The gates were locked but the high walls were not topped with barbed wire as they are today. Nor was the cemetery patrolled at night. And then, as now, young lovers climbed into the graveyard to lose themselves in the darkness there.
Chammas, however, had something altogether more shady in mind. Once inside Père Lachaise made his way down the Avenue Carette, past the tomb of Oscar Wilde, to Division 92 of the cemetery. There he began searching for plot number 6/42 –18/90. The nearest landmark was the reclining brass figure of journalist Victor, Noir whose lips and crotch have been burnished by the countless caresses of female mourners lavished on his effigy since he was shot by Prince Pierre Bonaparte in 1870, hastening the end of the Second Empire. Six rows behind Noir and eighteen from the Avenue Carette, Chammas found what he was looking for.
At the foot of the ornamental sarcophagus at plot 6/42 – 18/90 was the label ‘C.A.P.’ – Concession à Perpétuité – ‘No 542 année 1886’. An inscription on the lid of the sarcophagus noted that the tomb belonged to the Famille Martin. The grave, according to another inscription, housed one Estelle Martin, who had died on 18 February 1900. But it was not Estelle Martin that Chammas was interested in. There were other curious clues on the sarcophagus. On one side there was the puzzling legend Paz y Justicia – ‘peace and justice’ in Spanish. Beneath it was the figure of a dancing lion holding, on a stick, a Phrygian cap – once worn by freed Roman slaves, but better known as the French Revolutionary’s ‘red cap of liberty’. This figure was borrowed from the great seal of Paraguay. The other side of the sarcophagus bore the five-pointed star and olive branch of the Paraguayan flag. At the end of the sarcophagus nearest Victor Noir there was an escutcheon bearing three stylised shamrocks. Above it appeared a wolf; below, the motto read: Lupus me fugit inermen – ‘The wolf flees from me though I am unarmed’.
Although the meaning of these inscriptions would have been lost on the casual visitor, they would have told Chammas that he was in the right place. To those familiar with the troubled past of South America, their significance would have been explained by a small marble plaque on the other end of the sarcophagus, which said in Spanish:
Monument erected
by
Enrique, Federico and Carlos Solano López.
To the illustrious memory
of their always beloved and unforgettable mother
Doña Elisa Alicia Lynch-López.
Died 25 July 1886.
Reading this, students of Latin American history would instantly recall the bloodiest war in the history of the Americas, a war which left more dead that the United States’ bitter Civil War and all but destroyed a wealthy nation, through the weakness of a man and the ambition of a woman. It was this woman, Elisa Alicia Lynch– López – better known as Eliza Lynch – that Chammas had come for.
A freelance import–exporter and general entrepreneur, Chammas was new to the grave–robbing business, but he had cultivated useful contacts among the staff at Père Lachaise. Money had changed hands and the tomb had already been opened. There were five coffins in the grave. The first two occupants were Estelle Martin and Eliza Lynch. They had been buried there in May 1900. Estelle Martin had died in February of that year and had been interred briefly elsewhere, while Eliza had languished in a tiny grave in Division 53 of Père Lachaise since 27 July 1886. As these two had been buried first, the other coffins were stacked up on top of them, making exhumation difficult. Manhandling a coffin out of a grave is a strenuous and time-consuming business at the best of times and coffins that had lain in the damp soil of Père Lachaise for any length of time would have been in a fragile state. So by the time Chammas reached those of Estelle and Eliza, it must have been nearing dawn.
According to Chammas, when he finally opened what he took to be Eliza’s coffin, the corpse’s long, black hair turned instantly to luminous gold. This may have just been hyperbole, but perhaps, at very moment he opened the coffin, the first rays of the spring sun burst over the horizon, bathing the corpse in golden spring sunlight. He certainly would not have been able to linger over the scene. Daylight would bring the work– men who tended the graves and officials who ran the cemetery. Soon after, Père Lachaise would be open to visitors. Chammas was certainly not eager to be caught. He hurriedly packed up Eliza’s remains and made his escape.
At around this time the Paraguayan Ambassador to Paris, Dr Hipólito Sánchez Quell, was making official representations to the French government, formally requesting the return of the remains of Eliza Lynch. Although Eliza was an Irish woman, British by birth, French by marriage and Parisian by inclination, Paraguayan dictator General Alfredo Stroessner believed that her body belonged in Paraguay. The appropriate paperwork was lodged with the French authorities and, while the bureaucracy went slowly about its business, Dr Quell paid a visit to Eliza’s grave with his ten-year-old daughter. It would have come as a shock to him when he discovered that Madame Lynch’s remains had already been disinterred and had been hurried out of the country. But Dr Quell had no doubt who was responsible – a fellow countryman who he denounced as the chief contrabandista.
While Dr Quell had been seeking the removal of the remains through the proper channels, Chammas smuggled the corpse back to South America in a coffin packed with Lebanese hashish. It was intercepted by customs at Buenos Aires. From Argentina, the remains either travelled on to Paraguay in a gunboat after some diplomatic arrangement had been stitched together, or Chammas, a drug smuggler who had turned grave–robber to ingratiate himself to the dictator Stroessner, paid off the Argentine customs officials, chartered a seaplane and look Eliza’s remains back to Paraguay in a suitcase.
At least that is one version of the story. Bizarre, certainly. But it would have been a fitting postscript the life of a truly remarkable woman. There are, of course, more prosaic accounts of her return to Paraguay.
The French authorities insist that Eliza Lynch was legally exhumed. The records clerk at Père Lachaise even says that the Paraguayan Ambassador was there when she was disinterred, though the cemetery records are closed to the general public. However, under French law, it is necessary to have the consent of the next of kin of all the people buried in a grave before it can be disturbed. The Prefecture of Police had the consent of Jorge Manuel and Elisa A. Solano López, Eliza Lynch’s grandchildren, to remove her body. But it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to track down the families of the four other people buried there.
The Paraguayan authorities also maintain that the exhumation was done legally. But strangely, Dr Quell, who was both a prolific writer and passionate devotee of Madame Lynch, makes no reference to her exhumation in the extensive volumes he wrote about his endeavours in Paris, even though the return of Eliza’s remains would surely have been his greatest diplomatic triumph.
The historian at Père Lachaise, Christian Charlet, says that this is easily explained. The request for the return of the remains of Eliza Lynch was handled covertly through the French embassy in Asunción, the capital of Paraguay. The Paraguayan Embassy in Paris was informed later and only discovered that the body was already gone when the ambassador visited Père Lachaise on 23 May.
‘In view of the use made of Elisa Lynch-López’s remains when they were returned to Paraguay, it is not impossible that the political power of the time (General– President Alfredo Stroessner) preferred to secure their return via a discreet approach, purely family,’ says M. Charlet, ‘rather than make an official political intervention that would be likely to provoke a negative reaction from the French Government.’
But the French Government were not that squeamish.
President Charles de Gaulle visited Paraguay in 1964, just three years after the remains had been returned. He does not seem to have been bothered by any ‘use’ the remains were put to. And certainly it would not have been possible for the French President to have visited Paraguay if there was any outstanding dispute between the two countries – over a little grave robbing, say. So perhaps the whole thing was swept under the carpet. After all, it is not very difficult to make the appropriate adjustments to records that are not open to the public.
At the time, the Paraguayans maintained that Madame Lynch’s remains were returned on a warship. But landlocked Paraguay did not have any ocean–going warships – and does not to this day. Its naval activity is limited to the three navigable rivers – the Paraguay, the Parana and the Pilcomayo – that mark four–fifths of the borders of modern Paraguay. Nevertheless, the remains did arrive at the dockside in Asunción on 25 July 1961, the seventy–fifth anniversary of Eliza Lynch’s death. General Stroessner, in a uniform befitting the president of a banana republic that grows no bananas, was waiting on the quay. He had proclaimed the day a ‘Day of National Homage’ and the entire government turned out, along with a guard of honour and a huge crowd. As the Paraguayan Army Band struck up Paraguay’s operatic national anthem, the remains were brought ashore in a large bronze urn. This urn was identical to one said to contain the remains of another great hero of Paraguayan history, Eliza’s lover and partner in crime, Mariscal Francisco Solano López – one–time dictator, former army chief and war hero, who was also variously described as the world’s worst tyrant since Nero and the biggest mass murderer since Genghis Khan. Between the two of them they were responsible for the slaughter of practically the entire male population of Paraguay while, behind Francisco’s back, Eliza bled the country dry.
However, according to General Stroessner’s grandiloquent speech at the quayside, the beautiful Eliza was a national heroine and a national martyr, though she had died far from Paraguay and in much greater comfort than most of her victims. The huge funeral cortege then made its way up the hill to the Panteón de los Heroes – a replica of Napoleon’s tomb in Les Invalides – which her consort Francisco had had built to house his own remains. Stroessner’s intention was that the two lovers were to be re-united there. He had hoped that the two unlikely national heroes would lie side by side in the Panteón de los Heroes in perpetuity. But, at the last minute, the Catholic Church had raised an objection. Eliza and Francisco had never been married. Throughout her time in Paraguay, Eliza was married to a Frenchman and her liaison with López had been adulterous. The Panteón de los Heroes stood on sanctified ground and, according to the Church, it would be an affront to God for the two of them to lie there together – even though it was unlikely that they would break the seventh commandment again, given the fact that they were dead.
The Church’s scruples did not hugely concern Alfredo Stroessner, the strongman who had ruled Paraguay unopposed since he seized power in a coup in 1954 – he would continue to do so until 1989, making him the longest–standing ruler of any South American country in the twentieth century. However, just six years before, he had seen his old friend Juan Peron ousted from Argentina after the Church turned against him. Peron had had the temerity to petition the Pope to have his late wife, the one-time prostitute Eva Perón (née Duarte) – Evita – canonised. And Eliza Lynch’s reputation was no more savoury. Privately Stroessner would accede to the demands of Mother Church. But publicly he was not going to be robbed of his moment of glory. As Pallbearer in Chief, Stroessner led Eliza’s funeral procession into the Panteón de los Heroes. In a scene rich in symbolism, Eliza’s urn was solemnly marched in through the front door of Francisco’s mausoleum, then – after the briefest reunion with the supposed remains of her lover – it was whisked out of the back door again.
From there, the remains were spirited down the Avenida Mariscal Francisco Solano López to the Ministry of National Defence. On the second floor, a small ‘Museo Madame Lynch’ had been prepared in what was essentially a broom cupboard, next to the gentlemen’s lavatory. It contained a rusty sword said to have belonged to Francisco López, a book of homage containing some 87,000 signatures and a portrait of the national heroine, showing Eliza’s dazzling beauty at its imperious height. There the remains were left to gather dust for the next nine years.
2
The river and the sea
Paraguay is a relatively small South American country, around the size of California. Trapped between the regional giants of Brazil, Argentina and Bolivia, it lies at the centre of the long tapering point of the chilli pepper that is South America. Once the richest and most powerful nation in the region, it was destroyed by the War of the Triple Alliance in the 1860s when it fought, simultaneously, Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. The war was largely the result of the ambitions of Eliza Lynch and the failings of Francisco López, Three-quarters of the population of Paraguay died. The country was looted, bankrupted and dismembered. Yet since the 1960s the authors of Paraguay’s destruction have been honoured as national heroes. But then, Paraguayan history has always read like the blackest of black comedies.
Paraguay was discovered by accident by Sebastian Cabot in 1526. The family was dogged by such mishaps. Sebastian’s father John Cabot had suffered a similar misfortune when, in 1497, he had stumbled upon North America, planted the Tudor flag in it and claimed it for England, possibly naming it for his patron, the High Sheriff of Bristol Richard Ameryk. The following year, John Cabot was lost on an expedition to find a north- west passage around the barren and unwanted continent that blocked Europe’s westerly trade routes to the Orient. However, there is evidence that suggests he sailed down North America’s eastern seaboard and into the Caribbean where he was captured – and perhaps murdered – by the Spanish to protect their discoveries there. This would make it all the more ironic that in 1526 his son Sebastian was sailing for the Spanish, searching for a south-west passage when, in April that year, he entered a broad channel which he thought might lead to the Pacific. He soon discovered that this was the mouth of the Rio de la Plata - the River of Silver or River Plate. Cabot gave it this name after the Indians on its banks gave him some silver trinkets and told him that there were vast quantities of the stuff further upstream.
Abandoning his commission to find a trade route to the Moluccas - the Spice Islands - Cabot headed on up the Parana River, thinking that it would lead him to the silver mines of Peru. This was another mistake, but the prospect of finding a water-borne route to loot the wealth of the Incas excited him so much that he named the whole area Rio de la Plata.
Cabot established the first Spanish settlement in the region at San Espiritu. But this was lost the moment his back was turned when the enterprising underlings whom he had left behind to hold the fort headed off in search of El Dorado, the fabled city of gold, never to be seen again. Meanwhile, Cabot continued upstream into the Paraguay River which branches off northwards about 700 miles from the sea where the Parana swings sharply to the east, now forming the southern border of Paraguay. It is said that the name Paraguay means, in the language of the area’s peaceful Guaraní Indians, ‘the river that gives birth to the sea’ – even though the Guaraní seem to have been pretty content with their jungle existence and it is unlikely that they ever ventured as far as the ocean. Others say that Paraguay means the ‘river that runs from the sea’ as the river was thought to have its source in Lake Xarayes. But Xarayes is no sea. It is a fetid swamp that only floods in summer. Other proposed derivations include the ‘the river of the crown’ – the fetid Xarayes swamp being the crown; ‘the sea-water hole’; ‘the river of many colours’ for the colourful flowers and birds along its banks; ‘the river of feathers’, again for its birds; and ‘the water of the Penelope bird’, though that particular species is not seen south of Ecuador. However, the most likely explanation is that the river was named for the warlike Payaguá or Canoe Indians, renowned for the artificially distended breasts of their womenfolk, or, more particularly, their one-time chief Paragua
About 125 miles further up the river from Tres Boccas – the ‘Three Mouths’ where the Paraguay flows into the Paraná – Cabot ran into the Payaguás at the narrows of Angostura. The Indians stood no chance against the Spaniards’ matchlocks and cannon. Cabot lost just two men in the encounter. Even so, he decided that reinforcements were called for. He returned to Spain, where he was arrested for failing in his mission to find a south-west passage and banished to Africa. After two years, he was pardoned and back to England where, undeterred, he began looking for a north-east passage to the Indies.
Despite Cabot’s downfall, the River of Silver took a fierce grip on the Spanish imagination. In 1534, four years after Cabot’s return, another expedition set out under a wealthy member of the royal household, Don Pedro de Mendoza. Hernando Cortés had needed just 500 men to butcher the ferocious Aztecs in Mexico and make off with their gold. With less than 200 men, Francisco Pizarro had slaughtered the highly organised Incas of Peru and looted their empire. So Mendoza took 2,650 heavily armed men on fourteen ships to face the primitive and defenceless Indians of the Río de la Plata.
Things began to go wrong even before they reached South America. During the Atlantic crossing Mendoza grew jealous of his popular and experienced military commander Don Juan de Osorio and had him arrested. At a hearing in Rio de Janeiro, a misunderstanding resulted in Osorio being stabbed to death by Mendoza’s Chief of Police Juan de Ayolas.
Next Mendoza founded Buenos Aires - universally recognised as the worst port in the world in the days of sail. Ships had to lie as much as nine miles off shore. It cost as much to lighter a cargo ashore as it did to freight it from Liverpool or New York. The rocky bottom meant that, with a slight change of wind, ships would drag their anchors, beaching themselves high up the river and leaving them fit only for firewood. Things were no better on the landward side. Inland from Buenos Aires there is a level and treeless plain, given to dust storms in the dry season. And in the rainy season, mud made it impassable.
Even from Mendoza’s limited perspective, the settlement at Buenos Aires was impractical. There were few provisions at hand to feed his men. The local Querandi Indians provided some game, but the amount was far from adequate. In an effort to wring more out of them,
Mendoza decided to attack them with his cavalry. But the Indians simply lured the mounted troops into a bog and killed half of them, including Mendoza’s brother Don Diego. The Querandis then stormed Buenos Aires with bolas – the traditional South American three-balled throwing weapon. Burning faggots tied to the tails of the bolas set fire to the fort and several ships.
The Spaniards clung on, but the foraging parties Mendoza sent out were picked off by the Querandi, leaving the Spaniards close to starvation. Fortunately the Timbus Indians who had supplied Cabot were still friendly, Mendoza headed off up the Paraná and established a fort at Corpus Christi, near the site of Cabot’s abandoned San Espiritu.
By this time there were only 600 men left out of the 2,650 Mendoza had started out with the previous year. Half of them then set off up river with Juan de Ayolas in search of Peru. They did not return. After a year, Mendoza sent more men out to look for them, including another kinsman Don Gonzalo. When they did not return either, Mendoza gave up and headed back to Spain. The strain had all been too much for him. He lost his reason and died a raving madman on the way.
However not all Ayolas’s men were lost. Domingo Martinez de Irala and a force of 100 men had established Fort Olimpo on the Paraguay River, some 240 miles above the site of the present capital Asunción. There he made peace with the Payaguás and sent regular search parties for Ayolas, who had continued up the river. Don Gonzalo de Mendoza reached Irala there, but as there was no news of Ayolas, he decided to head back to Corpus Christi. On the way, he spotted a tall bluff at a dog-leg in the river where the Paraguay met its principal tributary, the Pilcomayo. At the bottom of the bluff was a deep-water harbour. From the top you could see for miles across country. This would be the perfect place for a trading post on the road to Peru - at least it would have been if you could reach Peru this way. So, with the help of the mild-mannered Guaraní Indians, Mendoza began work on a fort there on 15 August 1537. This was the feast of the Assumption of the Virgin, so he named the outpost La Asunción. Older than any town in the United States, the capital of Paraguay was founded 70 years before the first English settlers reached Jamestown and 83 years before the Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth Rock.
When the small party of men who were still holding Buenos Aires heard the news from Asunción, they decided to swap imminent starvation and hostile Indians for the fertile soil and fine climate upstream. But when they reached the upper reaches of the river, they were greeted by scenes of devastation. A plague of locusts had swept through the area, stripping the crops, poisoning the wells with their corpses and filling the air with pestilence as they decayed.
Meanwhile the bloodthirsty Ruiz de Galan had taken over command in Asunción. When Domingo Martinez de Irala came downriver from Fort Olimpo to challenge Galan’s authority, Galan had him arrested and sent back. While Irala was away, the Payagmis had had time to change their minds about Europeans invading their ancestral lands and ambushed him. They met with a terrible defeat. Irala killed twelve of their strongest men single-handed, it was said.
At the same time, Galan set off down the river to Corpus Christi where he massacred the Timbus Indians who had provisioned both Cabot and Mendoza. Other Indians struck back. In the middle of the ensuing battle, on 3 February 1538 – St Blaise’s Day – St Blaise himself appeared on the battlefield with a fiery sword in his hand. This blinded the Indians, making them all the easier to slaughter, and bloody St Blaise became, appropriately, the patron saint of Paraguay. Mind you, Galan could be just as brutal without heavenly assistance. When he found a Spanish woman who had gone to live with the Indians to save herself from starvation, he left her tied to a tree to be devoured by wild animals.
When a new ship-load of colonists arrived on the coast, Galan decided that it would be best to abandon Buenos Aires and group everyone together at Asunción – the only place the Spaniards had not yet succeeded in alienating the Indians. They arrived to find Irala firmly in control. With Don Pedro de Mendoza gone and Juan de Ayolas now almost certainly dead, an election was conducted to select an interim governor. Irala won. He decided that as they depended on the Indians for food, it would be a good idea to abandon Mendoza’s and Galan’s policy of killing them. Instead the Spanish men should shack up with the bare-breasted, brown-skinned and compliant Guaraní women and learn the local tongue. When the .Guaraní menfolk objected and rebelled, the ringleaders were rounded up and executed, and the Indians were forced to hand over their remaining wives, sisters and daughters. A Spanish chronicler later claimed that the Indians were happy to give up their womenfolk. They felt no jealousy and were cold when it came to sex, performing the act without preamble or any demonstration of affection, he said. With no wives or priests to suggest otherwise, most of the Spaniards kept 30 to 50 Guaraní concubines. Irala himself had 70. However, he seems to have been an enlightened man. To promote racial harmony, he insisted that the Spaniards’ children speak Guaraní and learn Indian ways.
Irala’s policy of racial mixing resulted in the rapid growth of the colonial population of Paraguay. Other towns were founded, bringing the settlers into conflict with more belligerent tribes. However, these hostile Indians had customs that practically guaranteed their extinction. Each woman was only allowed one child. The young women were beaten regularly around the belly to keep them nubile and childless as long as possible. Their first-born were slaughtered automatically. Only when a woman was reaching the end of her child-bearing years was she allowed to keep an infant. The rest were killed. When these tribes were defeated by the Spaniards and their mestizo offspring, the men were slaughtered and the women taken as concubines and allowed to keep as many babies as they could bear, turning the whole of Rio de la Plata into a burgeoning Spanish colony – albeit one that spoke Guaraní and followed Guaraní customs. It was later noted that Paraguayan ladies could deport them- selves as elegantly as any European at a ball of an evening and be seen the next day walking barefoot, wearing only a chemise and smoking cigars like an Indian. Irala’s race- mixing policy also meant that the Guaranís were saved from regular bonded slavery. A far worse fate awaited them.
Rio de la Plata was a peaceful and prosperous colony under elected governor Irala, but his governorship was only ever meant to be temporary, until a new governor was appointed by the King. His choice was Álvar Núñez de Vera Cabeza de Vaca – cabeza de vaca means ‘cow’s head’. He had a colourful past. In 1528, he had been sent as treasurer on an expedition to conquer Florida. Shipwrecked in Tampa Bay, he found himself alone and naked in what is now Galveston, Texas. Apparently, the local Indians, a smooth-skinned race, were impressed by his two beards – the one on his face and the one down below. They took him for a god and made him their chief. In 1536, Cabeza de Vaca, was rescued by a party of conquistadors Mexico and told them of the fabulous riches of the Seven Golden Cities of Cíbola that he had heard lay to the north. ‘Cow’s Head’ returned to Spain where he published an account of his time in ‘New Spain’ – the Spanish possessions in North America. Expeditions were duly despatched to look for the Seven Golden Cities. They were never found. As in South America the search for El Dorado was still on, Cabeza de Vaca was plainly the man send to Asunción.
After a terrible sea crossing, Cabeza de Vaca’s fleet of four small ships made land on the Brazilian coast at Santos, the port of modern-day São Paulo. Rather than continue the gruelling journey by ship, Cabeza de Vaca and his men struck out to cross 700 miles of virgin forest on foot. Cabeza de Vaca’s time with the Indians in North America stood him in good stead. He lost just one man on the trip, who accidentally drowned crossing a river. After four months and nine days in the jungle, Cabeza de Vaca’s party arrived at the Paraguay River in better health than when they had left the coast. But the moment
Cabeza de Vaca set foot in Asunción, Irala arrested him and sent him back to Spain, where he was tried for failing in his mission and, like Cabot, banished to Africa.
In 1580, a new colony was established at Buenos Aires. Despite its shortcomings as a port, it quickly over-shadowed its older rival 1,000 miles upriver. By then it had been definitely established that Asunción was not on the road to Peru, but rather on the road to nowhere. But although the riverine route through Paraguay yielded no Inca silver, it did produce the New World’s first saint. In 1589, Francisco Solano stumbled into Asunción. A native of Spain, he had arrived in Peru in 1582. From there he had scaled the Andes and crossed the Gran Chaco, the wasteland to the west of the Paraguay river that makes up more than half Paraguay’s land mass. On the way, according to Francisco Solano’s own account, he had out-baptised John the Baptist, immersing over 200,000 converts and explaining the mysteries of the Trinity, transubstantiation, the transfiguration of Christ and the papal succession to his new congregation. However, subsequent expeditions found no Christians in the area. In fact, there were very few people at all. Those there spoke languages with vocabularies of less than a thousand words, by and large related to the natural world around them – not the sort of languages that could be used to explain the finer points of theology. Nevertheless, Francisco Solano was beatified in 1675 and canonised in 1726.
Paraguay was formally separated from Rio de la Plata and the Buenos Aires colony in 1620 by Hernando Arias de Saavedra. From then on, Paraguay’s only outlet to the sea was through other countries’ territory, making war with its neighbours, some say, inevitable. As a young man Saavedra had travelled in Patagonia. His battles with the Indians there taught him that there were simply too many to exterminate. Instead, they would have to be converted so, in 1608, he sent for the Jesuits. Ignoring the mestizo heritage of Paraguay, the Jesuits tried to enforce strict racial segregation. They corralled the Indians in their missions and introduced the Guaraní to the love of God with the brand and lash – no means were too extreme to do the Lord’s work. The Indians, who had so far been saved from the rigours of commercial slavery, became .slavesof the Society of Jesus. The Indian schools established by the Franciscans were closed and the only thing the Indians were taught from then on was the catechism. However, Paraguay has one proud boast of its time under the Jesuits – it was the world’s first country run entirely without money, beating Pol Pot’s Kampuchea by over three-and-a-half centuries.
This state of affairs was not to last. When Don Luis de Cespedes Jaray was appointed governor, his Portuguese wife saw the docile Indians at the Jesuit missions as cheap labour for her plantations in Brazil and persuaded her husband to let the slavers in. But once they had cleared out the Jesuit missions in eastern Paraguay, they began raiding the nearby Spanish towns for slaves. As a result the entire province of Guayrá east of the Parana River was lost to Brazil.
The Jesuits made another enemy in the Bishop of Paraguay, Bernardino de Cardenas, an irascible Franciscan much given to excommunication. In 1644, he excommunicated the governor, Gregorio de Hinistrosa, who then had to beg for absolution at the bishop’s feet. The regional parliament, or Audience, in Charcas and the Spanish Viceroy in Lima heard about this and felt the bishop had overstepped his authority. They ordered Hinistrosa to arrest the bishop – which he did amid a blizzard of anathemas. Cardenas was expelled from Asunción to the sound of church bells and general rejoicing. He retired to Corrientes, 200 miles down- stream in what is now Argentina, where he spent five years scheming. When Hinistrosa died in 1648, Cardenas succeeded him as governor. Figuring the Jesuits were against him, when he returned to Asunción, he loaded them on to boats without sails or anchors and cast them adrift. Many drowned. The Viceroy banished Cardenas once more in 1649, though he was later pardoned by the Pope. Meanwhile, the Jesuits returned.
In 1717, Don Diego de los Reyes Balmaceda was appointed Governor, but serious charges were laid against him at the Audience in Charcas. A five-year investigation followed. In the meantime, Don José de Antiquera y Castro, who had been named as Balmaceda’s successor, got tired of waiting. He marched into Asunción to arrest Balmaceda, only to find he was away in Corrientes at the time. The Viceroy repudiated Antiquera and ordered him to withdraw. Antiquera ignored his orders and sent men to Corrientes to seize Balmaceda. The military governor of Rió de la Plata, Don Baltasar Garcia de Ros, was then sent to bring Antiquera to heel but when Antiquera defied him Ros withdrew for reinforcements.
Thinking that Ros had been successful, the governor of Buenos Aires, Bruno Mauricio de Zavala, sent him a letter, asking for troops to defend Montevideo, which was, under attack by the Portuguese. But the letter he fell into the hands of Antiquera. Hoping to ingratiate himself with Zavala, Antiquera sent 600 men and, suspecting that the Jesuits sided with Balmaceda, expelled them from Asunción once more. Zavala had little attention to spare from the Portuguese in Montevideo and sent Ros back to Paraguay with just 200 Spanish troops to crush Antiquera. Zavala also gave Ros permission to conscript Indians from the Jesuit missions. Although they were not a warlike people, the Guaraní had been taught by the Jesuits to obey orders without question. Later, when battle hardened, they would prove to have the makings of great troops. But this first time out under Ros, they were met by 3,000 men and soundly defeated. Some 1,800 Indians were killed.
The Viceroy then ordered Zavala to go in person to Paraguay and arrest Antiquera. Realising the whole force of the Spanish government in South America was ranged against him; Antiquera fled to Charcas and threw himself on the mercy of the Audience. They forwarded him to the Audience of Peru, where he was tried. But the trial dragged on for years and, during that time, public opinion swung in Antiquera’s favour. When he was eventually found guilty of high treason and sentenced to death by beheading, crowds turned out to protest the injustice of the sentence. As Antiquera was paraded through the streets on the way to the scaffold, an angry mob jostled the Viceroy. He panicked and ordered his troops to open fire on the prisoner. Antiquera and two friars on horseback beside him were killed. Even though Antiquera was now dead, the Viceroy ordered that the sentence be carried out to the letter. So Antiquera’s dead body was placed on the scaffold with its head on the block and the corpse was duly decapitated.
While Antiquera was on trial in Lima, the Jesuits had returned to Asunción. But when the people heard of Antiquera’s execution, they blamed the Jesuits and expelled them from the city yet again. This time, the Jesuits were prepared to resist. In the countryside, they had built up a slave army of 7,000 Guaraní, who had now been blooded in battle. Civil war broke out. The Jesuits backed the winning side, they imposed their merciless authority on the country as a whole. However, the international power of the Jesuits was already on the wane. In 1759, they were expelled from Portugal. France and Spain soon followed suit. In 1767, the order came to expel them from Paraguay and free the Indians. But it was feared that the Jesuits, with their huge army, might overrun the Spanish garrison. The fear was unfounded. For even though the Jesuits had seemingly reduced their Indian converts to a state of total obeisance, they feared that the Guaraní might rebel if they were forced to fight to maintain their own enslavement; the Jesuits left the country without resistance. The Guaraní, having been coerced by a single authority under the Jesuits, now found themselves trying to obey the orders of both the local priests and civil administrators. When these conflicted, the Indians were flogged and bastinadoed. The Jesuits had also kept them ignorant of money, so the Guaraní would supply any goods requested, without thought of payment or exchange. Inevitably they were ruthlessly exploited by a series of corrupt Spanish governors and their favourites, who dominated the export of tobacco, hides, tallow and yerba maté – the local narcotic, also known as Paraguayan or Brazilian tea.
Maté is the dried and powdered leaf of the Ilex paraguayiensis, a shrub of the holly family though in size and foliage it resembles an orange tree. The powder is mixed with water in a cow’s horn or gourd and the infusion is sucked through a bombilla, a silver straw with a bulbous end full of fine holes – though poorer people used the hollowed leg bone of a chicken with a piece of cotton wrapped around the stump. To this day, when Paraguayans have nothing else to do, they sit around sucking maté. But in the nineteenth century, its use outside Paraguay was widespread and its export was the origin of the country’s wealth.
Back in Europe in 1808 the Emperor Napoleon forced Charles IV of Spain and his son Ferdinand VII to abdicate and placed his own brother Joseph Bonaparte on the Spanish throne. This act of nepotism undermined the authority of the Spanish viceroys in the Americas, who ruled in the name of the king. Meanwhile, the Peninsular War – Spain’s War of Independence – tied up Spanish troops at home. In 1810 – the same year Simón Bolívar began his campaign to liberate Venezuela – the newly established viceroyalty in Buenos Aires was overthrown by a junta who, though seeking independence, claimed to rule in the name of the deposed Ferdinand. They invited Paraguay to join their revolution. But the Paraguayans saw no reason to favour Ferdinand over Joseph. They had suffered plenty under Spanish kings, not at all under French ones, and were currently enjoying the liberal governorship of the enlightened Don Bernardo Velasco.
To persuade them to join the cause, the Buenos Aires junta sent an envoy, perversely selecting the worst possible candidate, José Espinola, who had been the ruthless lieutenant of the previous corrupt governor Lazaro Ribera Espinosa and was consequently the most hated man in Paraguay. Before Espinola arrived in Asunción, few Paraguayans cared one way or the other about who was king nearly 6,000 miles away in Madrid, but after Espinola arrived they turned emphatically against Ferdinand. General Manuel Belgrano, the Argentine hero who had thwarted Britain’s attempted invasion of Río de la Plata in 1806, then decided that he could convince the Paraguayans of their need for liberation, arriving with an army on the borders of Paraguay on 4 December 1810. He issued a proclamation in Ferdinand’s name, offering to free all those ‘enslaved’ by the colonial yoke in Paraguay. To the Paraguayans, this seemed disingenuous. If they were slaves now under Joseph, they had been slaves before under Ferdinand. It further muddied the waters that Velasco had been appointed governor, not by Joseph Bonaparte, but by Charles IV, Ferdinand’s father – so, technically, Velasco and Belgrano were on the same side.
Belgrano then sent a letter asking Velasco to submit to the authority of the junta and to send a deputy to the Congress that was being held in Buenos Aires. The messenger was taken in chains to Asunción. Belgrano saw this as a hostile act and proclaimed that anyone caught with arms or who fired on his troops would be shot. This stiffened the resolve of the Paraguayans. The man claiming to be their liberator was threatening to execute anyone who tried to defend their homeland. To make it clear that he was there only to free them from colonial rule, Belgrano singled out a Paraguayan soldier of Spanish blood from among his prisoners and had him shot. This raised Paraguayan national fervour to fever pitch. The Paraguayans called Belgrano a butcher for shooting an unarmed prisoner of war – hardly the result he had intended. On the other side, however, the council in Asunción showed an extraordinary political naivety in accepting an offer of help from General Sousa, the commander of the Portuguese Army that was sup- pressing the breakaway Brazilian province of Banda Oriental, now Uruguay. Velasco had to seize their letter of acceptance from the Portuguese Embassy – otherwise Sousa would have ridden to the defence of Paraguay, annexed the country for the Portuguese Empire and Paraguay would now be part of Brazil.
Supremely confident in the justice of his cause, Belgrano crossed the Paraná into Paraguay with just 400 men and two artillery pieces, leaving behind a company of cavalry he felt were unnecessary. He had come to liberate the country from colonial rule and still believed that he would be greeted as a hero. In the face of Belgrano’s advancing army, Velasco’s men fell back. Civilians also fled from their self-styled liberator. Finding no one to liberate, Belgrano simply burnt everything he came across en route, making himself a victim of a self-inflicted scorched-earth policy. The more the Paraguayans fell back, the more confident Belgrano became – and the more his supply lines were stretched across the scorched landscape he himself had turned into a desert.
At the same time, the six-week rolling retreat concentrated the Paraguayan forces. By the time Belgrano caught up with them he found himself facing a force outnumbering his own by seven to one and in a strongly fortified position. Along the way he had also lost his baggage train. Nevertheless he decided to go on the offensive. But at the same moment he staged a surprise attack on the Paraguayan camp, the Paraguayans staged a surprise attack on his. The Paraguayans were raw troops and, at their camp, the defenders fled. The Argentinians chased them as far as the village of Paraguari where, thinking they had won the war, they began to get drunk.
At Belgrano’s camp, in the face of the Paraguayan onslaught, battle-hardened Argentine soldiers stood firm but were soon out of ammunition. Believing themselves to be cut off, they had fired on a cavalry escort bringing them fresh cartridges. The drunken pillagers of Paraguari were soon rounded up, while the rest of Belgrano’s forces fled. But the Paraguayans were far too disorganised to pursue them. This gave Belgrano a chance to rally his men. After all he had come to help Paraguay throw off the shackles of Spanish rule, even if he did so in the name of the royal family that had imposed them. He regrouped, but was attacked by a superior force. As losses mounted, his men clearly expected him to surrender. But when a flag of truce appeared and the Paraguayans demanded that either he capitulate or every man would have his throat cut, Belgrano refused to lay down the arms of the king. He persuaded his men that their only chance lay in a swift attack. This sent the enemy reeling. He then sent out his own flag of truce. It was during this cease-fire that Belgrano spelt out for the first time that he was not there to conquer Paraguay in the name of Ferdinand, but rather to free the country from colonial rule and invite them to join the Argentine Confederation. To show his good faith, he distributed gold to the widows of the Paraguayan men killed in the fighting.
Belgrano’s talk of independence quickly convinced the Paraguayans. But he did his job too well. They decided that they wanted independence, not just from Spain, but from Buenos Aires too. So in a bloodless coup in May 1811, the military deposed the governor in Asunción and Paraguay became an independent republic before Argentina did. In the process they rid themselves of Don Bernardo Velasco, the first truly enlightened man to govern Paraguay, only to replace him with someone very much worse.
3
El Supremo
The history of Paraguay may seem like a terrible and bloody farce up to this point, but things would only get worse after independence. After the Paraguayans had deposed Governor Don Bernardo Velasco, they faced the problem of how to replace him. Velasco’s secretary Dr Pedro Somellera – an old friend of General Belgrano from Buenos Aires who had been working for independence behind the governor’s back all along – suggested forming a three-man junta. Two of its members would be the popular military leaders Don Juan Pedro Cavallero and Colonel Fulgencio Yegros. Unfortunately, these two men, it was said, knew as little about government as the horses they rode. Worse, they were Spaniards, not native Paraguayans.
The only native Paraguayan in the country obviously qualified to sit on the junta was Dr José Gaspar Rodríguez Francia. His rule was to set the tone for that of Francisco Solano López. Born in Asunción in 1758, Francia was the son of a Brazilian army officer who had come to Paraguay to grow tobacco. Like Eliza Lynch and Francisco Solano López, Dr Francia was a Francophile. He changed his name from the Portuguese França or Franza to Francia – the Spanish for France – and claimed French descent. He had spent a couple of years at school during the time the Jesuits had been expelled and, as his parents were relatively wealthy, he was sent to study theology at the University of Cordoba, across the river in what is now Argentina. Back in Paraguay he became a provincial tinterillos – essentially a lawyer without any legal qualifications, a glorified form-filler. A man of simple tastes, he had little use for money and no time for his family. When his father lay dying and feared that he would not be admitted into heaven unless he was reconciled with his son, Francia sent a message telling him to go directly to hell. He hated his neighbours and seems to have had no friends. However, thanks to the Jesuits, Francia was the only native Paraguayan with any form of education. He could do mathematics to elementary school level and had a handful of books on his shelves at home. This was an impressive library in a country where the reading of the vast majority of people was limited to the prayer book. He was also the owner of an old theodolite, whose telescope he used to study the stars – leading superstitious Paraguayans to conclude that he was communing with the demons of the night, a myth he encouraged.
Although Francia took no part in the revolution – and was probably opposed to it – at Dr Somellera’s suggestion, he was selected to sit on the junta. As the other two members knew nothing of government and the law, it was left to Francia to write a constitution. It ran to just four lines. When it was ratified by a hastily convened Congress, Paraguay became the first independent republic in South America, at a time when Buenos Aires was still searching for a spare European royal to take over as head of state.
Francia rapidly tired of sharing power with the two gold-braided generals who were his companions on the junta. So he withdrew, leaving the government paralysed. Back in the countryside he stirred up discontent among the landowners – already troubled by the fact that Buenos Aires was at war with Spain and the river, essentially the only way for goods to get in and out of Paraguay, was closed. He also ingratiated himself with the Guarani by treating the wealthy and those of Spanish blood with ostentatious contempt. Soon he was seen as the coming man.
The 21-year-old Scottish merchant John Robertson was in Paraguay at the time, consorting with the amorous 84-year-old widow, Doña Juana Ysquibel. On 27 May 1814, Doña Juana’s saint’s day, he attended a party at her quinta, her country house at Ytaphá, 25 miles from Asunción. Doña Juana performed a lively sarandig, or heel dance, with a seven-foot giant named Bedoya. But at the end of the evening as lovers headed off into the darkness of an orange grove, a sense of foreboding hung in the air.
‘Ah, Mr Robertson,’ said Don Velasco. ‘I am afraid that this is the last scene of festivity we shall ever see in Paraguay.’
He was right.
‘Both the light and the music of the revels must have reached Dr Francia’s cottage,’ wrote Robertson. ‘At this very time he was planning those schemes which ... at once hushed hilarity and extinguished the light of liberty.’
Francia seized his moment when the junta in Buenos Aires once again sent a diplomat to Asunción to invite Paraguay to join the Argentine confederation. Francia put out the word that the Argentines were attempting by diplomacy what they had failed to do by force. Although in Francia’s absence the junta had been expanded to five, they were still all Spaniards and the people did not trust them to put the interests of Paraguay first. Rejecting the junta, there was no choice but to recall Francia. His price was that he be allowed to rule alone. He became first consul, then the Perpetual Dictator of Paraguay, known informally as ‘El Supremo’ – a title that Francisco Solano López would also adopt. Francia’s coup was not entirely unopposed. The troops under Yegros rebelled. Cavallero intervened to restore order. Both were jailed. Cavallero strangled himself in prison some years later in 1821; Yegros was executed.
Dr Somellera, a fellow graduate of the University of Cordoba, was arrested even though it had been he who had originally proposed Francia for the junta. He was jailed along with his brother Benigno and the former governor Velasco. In theory, Somellera was held incommunicado, but his cell door was often left open, enabling him to be informed about a planned counter-revolution to restore Velasco to the governorship. On the morning of 29 September 1814, soldiers took to the streets. But this was no counter-revolution; it was a trap. Those who rallied to the cause were shot down, their bodies hung from a gallows while the soldiers who had seemingly led the counter-revolution paraded under the gibbet, shouting patriotic slogans. With this simple ruse Francia disposed of the opposition. Somellera, knowing Francia well, had avoided falling into the trap and was allowed to leave the country. Velasco died in prison.
Francia immediately instituted a reign of terror, jailing anyone who criticised him on trumped up charges. It was said that the blacksmiths in Asunción could not forge shackles fast enough. Anyone who had previously held political office in the country was arrested and their property seized, and the houses where Francia fancied that plots were being hatched were burnt down.
Francia took over the running of the courts personally. Confessions and the indictment of co-conspirators were obtained by torture behind closed doors in the so-called Chamber of Truth. He created a police force and set up a spy system so effective that it was said he even knew the thoughts of the dying. Brother informed against brother; son against father; servant against master; husband against wife. Prisoners often had no idea what they had been imprisoned for. No one dared ask. Some were simply arrested and held until a ransom was paid, though they were rarely released even then. Few emerged from Francia’s prisons. Prisoners were left there, ill-fed, unwashed, unkempt, with no medical attention until they died. Their relatives knew they were still alive only because they were permitted to send them food.
Francia also acted as chief executioner, issuing the bullets to his firing squads. But he was stingy with the bullets, usually handing over only two or three at a time. His men were not very good shots and, if they failed to kill the prisoner, the victim would be cruelly bayoneted to death. These executions always took place early in the morning. The banquillo – the stool where the condemned man sat – was set up under an orange tree outside Francia’s window. He watched to make sure the deed was done and insisted that the body remained outside his window in the heat all day to make sure the victim was dead before the family were allowed to take it away.
A merchant named Mendez was arrested merely for having a party. When he was exiled to a penal colony, no one dared take over his business, act as his agent or buy his property in case they suffered the same fate. After that, a general gloom settled over the country.
In the eyes of Paraguayans, Francia was more powerful than God. A reader of Voltaire and Rousseau, he ignored their espousal of the rights of man but adopted their anticlericalism. He made himself head of the Church in Paraguay, seized all church property, closed the monasteries, banned church services and had his own likeness carved above every church door.
‘If the Holy Father should come to Paraguay,’ he said, ‘I would do him no other honour than to make him my personal chaplain.’
Francia was also a follower of Benjamin Franklin, who he declared to be the ‘first democrat of the world’. Within forty years, he said, every Latin American country would he ruled over by a man like Franklin, bringing to them a liberty that they had not been prepared for by Spanish rule. But in his 28 years in power, Dr Francia did little to promote this end. Worse, within 40 years, Paraguay would be ruled over by Francisco Solano López.
Like López, Francia was terrified of assassination. Even though the cigars he smoked were made by his sister, every one was carefully unrolled to see if it contained poison – his sister was not above suspicion because he had imprisoned her husband, along with his own brother and another brother-in-law, and had had one of his nephews executed. He checked on the ingredients of his meals and made his own maté. No one was permitted to come into his presence with even a cane in his hand nor approach him within six paces; their hands had to be kept well away from their sides. Francia himself was never without a loaded pistol and an unsheathed sabre within easy reach. To guard against insurrection, no man in the army was promoted above the rank of captain. Nor did he trust his own government ministers, who were made to stand in the hot sun while he harangued them, and they were regularly imprisoned.
No one was allowed out on the street when Francia rode out with his escort. All shutters had to be closed along his route and orange trees, shrubs and other potential places of concealment were uprooted. Anyone caught in the streets had to prostrate themselves or risk being cut down by sabre. When his horse shied at an old barrel outside a house, the owner was instantly arrested.
Francia himself held the only keys to his palace. Each night, he locked and barred the doors himself, and slept with a revolver under his pillow. The only person he confided in was the unwashed drunken mulatto who dressed his hair each morning. However, he had a servant boy imprisoned for hitting his dog, then thought better of it and had the boy shot.
The only person other than his hairdresser to whom Francia showed any respect – or even any mercy – was José Artigas, the ‘father of Uruguayan independence’, who spent his last years in exile in Paraguay. With the reputation of having cut more throats than any man alive, Artigas was granted a handsome pension of thirty dollars a month.
The whole apparatus of terror was run by Francia’s soldiers, who were conscripted for life. They were not paid, receiving only a daily ration of beef and an extravagant uniform designed by Dr Francia himself. And Francia never enforced the law against his own troops, so they were free to get drunk, steal and rape with impunity.
As a mark of respect, all adults were compelled to doff their hats to Francia’s soldiers. Indians who could not afford a hat had to wear a brim. Silver spurs were very much in fashion in Paraguay at the time, even among those who could not afford a horse, and it was not uncommon to see Guaraní striding through the streets of Asunción naked except for a hat brim and spurs long after Francia was dead.
Francia banned education and sealed the borders of Paraguay, preventing his subjects escaping and precluding any trade with the outside world. Outsiders who stumbled into the country fared little better than the natives. The Scottish trader John Robertson and his brother William, who arrived in Asunción in 1812, were only released in 1816 when John promised to present the products of Paraguay at the bar of the House of Commons, though it remained unsure as to how he would get them past the Sergeant at Arms. Two Swiss naturalists, Johann Rengger and Marcel Longchamp, crossed the border on a field trip in 1819 and were only permitted to leave in 1825 when the British chargé d’affaires in Buenos Aires promised to provide arms in exchange for their release. Francia claimed he wanted to make Paraguay the first nation in South America, as Britain was the first in Europe. He was to be disappointed. The British did not supply the arms.
The world-famous French botanist Aimé Bonpland, who had explored much of South America with the great German explorer Alexander von Humboldt, did not even have to enter Francia’s hermit state to find himself in trouble. Noting the market for yerba maté in Buenos Aires and Rio, he set up a farm on the western side of the Paraná River, outside Paraguay. Around him he gathered a colony of Indians whom he instructed in the cultivation of maté. Arguing that growing Paraguayan tea outside the country was a threat to the Paraguayan economy, Francia sent 400 troops across the river. They slaughtered the Indians, razed the plantation and brought Bonpland, badly wounded with a sabre-cut to the head and wreathed in chains, back across the Paraná into Paraguay. Exiled to the remote settlement of Santa Maria, Bonpland made use of his skills as a doctor and built up a carpentry business and a smith’s. Then after nine years, when he was relatively prosperous again, he was expelled from Paraguay with less than twelve hours’ notice. He was forbidden to take anything with him and was dumped, alone, at night, with the minimum of ceremony, on the other side of the Parana, where he started all over again.