The Chaco War: Environment, Ethnicity, and Nationalism 9781474248846, 9781474248907, 9781474248877

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The Chaco War

The Chaco War Environment, Ethnicity, and Nationalism Edited by Bridget María Chesterton

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 Paperback edition first published 2017 © Bridget María Chesterton and Contributors, 2016 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the authors. British Library Cataloguing-­in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: HB: PB: ePDF: ePub:

978-1-4742-4884-6 978-1-3500-4567-5 978-1-4742-4887-7 978-1-4742-4889-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-Publication Data The Chaco War : environment, ethnicity, and nationalism / Bridget María Chesterton. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4742-4884-6 (hardback) — ISBN 978-1-4742-4887-7 (ePDF) — ISBN 978-1-4742-4889-1 (ePub)  1. Chaco War, 1932–1935.  I. Chesterton, Bridget María, 1973- editor, author. F2688.5.C473 2016 989.207’16—dc23 2015030760 Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

Contents List of Illustrations List of Maps List of Tables List of Contributors

1 2 3 4 5

6

Introduction: An Overview of the Chaco War  Bridget María Chesterton

vi vii viii ix

1

“Same as Here, Same as Everywhere”: Social Difference among Bolivian Prisoners in Paraguay  Elizabeth Shesko

21

Union Activism in La Paz before and after the Chaco War, 1920–1947  Luis M. Sierra

43

Channeling Modernity: Nature, Patriotic Engineering, and the Chaco War  Ben Nobbs-Thiessen

67

Paraguay Guazú: Big Paraguay, Carlos Fiebrig, and the Botanical Garden as a Launching Point for Paraguayan Nationalism  Bridget María Chesterton and Thilo F. Papacek

91

Indigenous Peoples and the Chaco War: Power and Acquiescence in Bolivia, Paraguay, and Argentina  Erick D. Langer

113

Energy and Environment in the Chaco War  Carlos Gomez Florentin

135

8

Bolivian Oil Nationalism and the Chaco War  Stephen Cote

157

9

Engraving Conflict: The Chaco War in a Shell Case  Esther Breithoff

177

7

Bibliography Index

191 209

Illustrations   1 Prisoners in Encarnación Cathedral, undated.   2 Home of Carlos Antonio López and Carlos Fiebrig in the Botanical Garden, Asunción, Paraguay.   3 Port of the Botanical Garden, Asunción, Paraguay.   4 Max Schmidt at the Botanical Garden, Asunción, Paraguay.   5 “Región Chacoana (vecindad del Rio) laguna con casa lacustre, para el laboratorio biológico.” Botanical Garden, Asunción, Paraguay.   6 “Jardín Botánico: sección Argentina caminito apepuí,” Botanical Garden, Asunción, Paraguay.   7 The zoo at the Botanical Garden, with “deer” and “ostrich,” Asunción, Paraguay.   8 Mennonite cow bells made from Chaco War shell cases.   9 Details on reverse side of decorated shell case. 10 Reverse side of decorated shell case. 11 Butterfly detail on reverse side of decorated shell case.

24 92 93 95

98 100 101 181 183 185 186

Maps 1 Map of the Grand Chaco. 2 Map of the failed Bolivian–Paraguay Treaties. 3 Map of the proposed canal by Rodriguez.

3 6 68

Tables 1 Estimates of prisoners of war. 2 Detail of pack animals seized by the Junta Nacional de Aprovisionamiento of the Paraguayan Government during the Chaco War, from August 1932 to July 1935. 3 Details of pack animals donated by citizens to the Junta Nacional de Aprovisionamiento of the Paraguayan Government during the Chaco War, from August 1932 to July 1935.

22

142

145

Contributors Esther Breithoff received her PhD in modern conflict archeology and anthropology at the University of Bristol, UK, in 2015, where she also completed a master’s degree in historical archeology of the modern world. Esther earned her bachelor’s degree in archeology and Hispanic studies at University College Dublin, Ireland, and also spent a year reading history and anthropology at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Her PhD thesis looks at the landscapes and material culture generated by the Chaco War and its aftermath, and people’s interaction with these in Paraguay. Bridget María Chesterton is an associate professor of history at Buffalo State. She earned her PhD at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 2007. Her research is focused on the southern cone of South America. Her publications include The Grandchildren of Solano López: Frontier and Nation in Paraguay, 1904–1936 (2013); “Composing Gender and Class: Women Letter Writers during the Chaco War, 1932–1935” in the Journal of Women’s History; and “A White Russian in the Green Hell: Military Science, Ethnography, and Nation Building,” co-­authored with Anatoly V. Isaenko in the Hispanic American Historical Review. She has also published various book chapters for Spanish-­language publications. Her future projects include a monograph-­length text on the Stroessner years and consumption in Paraguay. Stephen Cote received his BA in political science (1985) and his MA in international studies (2005) at the University of Connecticut, and his PhD in Latin American history at the University of California, Davis (2011). He was a visiting assistant professor in the Department of History of Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, for three years and at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington, for one year. His current book manuscript explores political and social aspects of Bolivia’s petroleum sector since the late nineteenth century. He has published articles in World History Connected and Environmental History. Carlos Gomez Florentin is a PhD candidate in history at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is a Social Sciences Research Council International

x

Contributors

Dissertation Research Fellowship (SSCRC/IDRF) 2013/2014 fellow working on a dissertation on the story of the largest developmental megaproject of the Western hemisphere, the building of the Itaipú Dam in the late twentieth century in the borderlands of Brazil and Paraguay. In 2009, he earned an MA in politics from New York University; his BA in political science from the Universidad Católica de Asunción, Paraguay, was awarded in 2006. His published works include El Paraguay de la Postguerra: 1870–1900 (2010), Higinio Morinigo, el soldado-­dictador (2011), La Guerra Civil de 1947 (2013), Los Veteranos (2013), and 1954, El contexto histórico (2014). He also co-­authored the book chapter “El Centenario en la Construcción del Paraguay Moderno” with Bridget María Chesterton in 2012. Erick D. Langer is professor of history in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He has published extensively on the Andes and on the Chaco region, including Expecting Pears from an Elm Tree: Franciscan Missions on the Chaco Frontier in the Heart of South America, 1830–1949 (2009). He is also Editor in Chief of Gale World Scholar: Latin America and the Caribbean, a website on Latin American history and culture and a documentary database. Ben Nobbs-Thiessen is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Emory University in Atlanta. He completed a bachelor’s and a master’s degree at the University of British Columbia. His research interests include migration, frontiers, agricultural development, and environmental change. His dissertation explores those intertwined themes over the second half of the twentieth century in the department of Santa Cruz in Bolivia’s eastern lowlands. Thilo F. Papacek works as the assistant to the coordination office of the International Research Training Group “Between Spaces/Entre Espacios” at the Freie Universität Berlin, where from 2009 to 2012 he was enrolled as a PhD candidate. He recently completed his dissertation, entitled Der Wettlauf um den Chaco: Die Produktion von Raum und Territorium im Kontext des Chacokriegs aus transnationale Perspektive, 1921–1938 (The Scramble for the Chaco: The Production of Space and Territory in the Context of the Chaco War from a Transnational Perspective). His research interests include spatial history, human–nature relations, and the production of knowledge. Elizabeth Shesko is assistant professor of history at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. After receiving her PhD in history from Duke University

Contributors

xi

in 2012, she was awarded the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in History and Latin American Studies at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. Her research focuses on the role of obligatory military service on state formation and ethnic identity in twentieth-­century Bolivia. She is currently revising a manuscript entitled Conscript Nation: Negotiating Authority and Belonging in the Bolivian Barracks for publication and has written articles for Hispanic American Historical Review and International Labor and Working-Class History. Luis M. Sierra received his PhD from Binghamton University, State University of New York, in 2014, and is currently assistant professor of history at Wilmington College, Ohio. His dissertation is entitled Indigenous Neighborhood Residents in the Urbanization of La Paz, Bolivia, 1910–1950. He is currently working on a book manuscript based on his dissertation research.

1

Introduction: An Overview of the Chaco War Bridget María Chesterton

In the early twentieth century, the English travel writer Julian Duguid found himself in Buenos Aires searching for adventure. His idea was to travel by mule across land contested between Bolivia and Paraguay. An “Irish-Argentine” informed him that the region he wished to travel through was dangerous because “Bolivia and Paraguay were in the middle of a squabble about a piece of land called the ‘Chaco,’ and that . . . [they] might blunder into a war at any moment.”1 And “blunder” they did. This “squabble” developed into a full-­scale war in 1932 and, as it turned out, the deadliest international conflict in Latin America in the twentieth century: the Chaco War. Over ninety thousand Bolivians and Paraguayans lost their lives in what Duguid later chose to title his memoir: the “Green Hell.” Duguid was not alone in this description. Soldiers, missionaries, immigrants, and historians have also described the vast Gran Chaco of South America as el infierno verde. Europeans at the beginning of the twentieth century considered the region desolate and, consequently, there were only a few regions of the world less traveled by Europeans. They, along with Paraguayans and Bolivians themselves, generally considered the Gran Chaco notoriously hostile to human settlement and short on easily accessible natural resources. Even so, the region is a vast expanse of land that encompasses territory in four nations; it stretches from Formosa in Argentina, to Mato Grosso in Brazil, the Andes Mountains in Bolivia, and the Paraguay River in Paraguay. The area under dispute between Bolivia and Paraguay, the Chaco Boreal, consists of about 100,000 square miles (259,000 km2) of land running southeast from Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, to the banks of the Paraguay River across from Asunción, Paraguay. The region is notorious for its harsh climate, with droughts that last for months between May and October turning the landscape hot and dusty. During this long period, water can be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to find. The rainy season, from November to April, brings heavy downpours that often leave large swaths of land under water and cover the entire region in mud. Nonetheless, between 1932 and

2

The Chaco War

1935—at the depth of a global recession—Bolivia and Paraguay sent thousands of men into this wilderness to fight, suffer, and die.

The Gran Chaco, 1600s–1930s When the Spanish encountered the Upper Plata in the 1600s, the natives of what is today eastern Paraguay (the Guaraní) considered the region to the west of the Paraguay River best avoided. The Guaraní regarded the natives of the Chaco as enemies and referred to all groups living on the west bank of the Paraguay River and beyond as Guayacurú. In 1854, however, a small community of French immigrants settled in the Chaco at the invitation of Paraguayan President Francisco Solano López. The Paraguayan claim to the region lay in legal titles rather than occupation and settlement. For the Paraguayans, because Spanish expeditions to the Chaco in the sixteenth century originated from Asunción, the Chaco was undoubtedly part of Paraguay. Polemicists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries repeated how Paraguay held titles to the land in question since the colonial era and, as a result, the Bolivians were wrong in attempting to claim the region.2 In reality, the Paraguayans did not pay much attention to the region until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, after their recovery from devastating territorial and demographic losses during the War of the Triple Alliance (1864–1870) that pitted Paraguay against its much stronger neighbors of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay.3 For the Bolivians, the lowlands and the Chaco represented two-­thirds of their country but only a small minority of its population. Prior to European colonization, as documented by Erick D. Langer, the Chaco “was a frontier of the Inca Empire . . . the Incas [tried] to prevent the penetration of the Guaraní speakers into the Andean heartland.”4 Bolivian rhetoric also considered the Chaco part of the nation because of titles given to the Audiencia of Charcas in the colonial era demonstrating that “Bolivia had perfectly irrefutable and solid titles to show to any tribunal or arbitration in the world.”5 Like the Paraguayans, the Bolivians also took action to show that they were in control of the region, particularly after the War of the Pacific (1879–1883) and the later Acre War (1899–1903) in which Bolivia lost large tracts of lands to Chile and Brazil, respectively. In the late nineteenth century, Franciscan missionaries were invited into the region in an attempt by Bolivian officials to “civilize” the indigenous population of the lowlands, with the hope of incorporating them into the larger Bolivian nation both economically and culturally.6

Introduction: An Overview of the Chaco War

Map 1  Map of the Grand Chaco. Source: Paula Montenegro Gigante.

3

4

The Chaco War

Neither nation paid much attention to the region until late in the nineteenth century as both began to recuperate from devastating territorial losses of the War of the Triple Alliance and the War of the Pacific. Attempts at a diplomatic solution to the sticky question of territorial boundaries between Bolivia and Paraguay were made on numerous occasions in the latter part of the nineteenth century, including three failed treaties: Decoud–Quijarro (1879), Aceval– Tamayo (1887), and Benítez–Ichazo (1894). As noted by historian Ricardo Scavone Yegros, “in reality, not only the question of borders, but also the relations between Paraguay–Bolivia in general is characterized during the nineteenth century by a series of lamentable disagreements and initiatives that never reached fruition.”7 As diplomatic solutions failed, both nations attempted to assert authority over the region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by encouraging immigration and establishing missions to convert Indians to Christianity in hope of acquiring their loyalty to the respective nation states. The Bolivians, as noted earlier, employed Franciscan missionaries to convert the native Chiriguano (today known as the Avá Guaraní) of the Chaco Boreal.8 Later, the Bolivians secured the services of Catholic Oblate missionaries to work along the Pilcomayo River.9 The Paraguayans turned to Anglicans and Catholic Salesian missionaries. Mennonite immigrants fleeing the Soviet Union via Canada made their way into the Chaco in 1926 to establish farming settlements with the support of the Paraguayan state.10 These attempts to assert authority through religious missions were also reinforced by both nations with the establishment of small fortínes (forts). These fortínes, usually manned with only a few poorly armed and provisioned men, proliferated during the decade leading to the conflict. In 1928, war appeared on the horizon as Paraguayan Major Rafael Franco, acting without orders from Asunción, attacked the Bolivian fortín Vanguardia. This act almost single-­ handedly started a war. Bolivians reacted by staging protests in La Paz. According to David Zook, “youths massed outside the offices of the General Staff screaming ‘Viva Bolivia! Muera el Paraguay.’ ”11 War was averted when the International Conference of American States on Conciliation and Arbitration (ICASCA) met in Washington and determined that Paraguay was the aggressor in the attack and ordered the Paraguayans to rebuild Vanguardia while the Bolivians agreed to return the captured fortínes.12 It was becoming increasingly clear, however, that war was inevitable. The Bolivians sincerely believed that they had the upper hand in any war with Paraguay. The reasons for this posture were that they had a large standing army,

Introduction: An Overview of the Chaco War

5

superior aircraft, and overwhelming firepower.13 The Bolivians were also in a much stronger economic position than the Paraguayans, with large amounts of mineral wealth available to fund the war. Moreover, the Bolivians believed that their victory was secured when they hired German General Hans Kundt to lead their armed forces; he had previously served as the Bolivian Chief of the General Staff from 1911 to 1914, 1921 to 1926, and 1929 to 1930. Kundt led the Bolivian military from 1932, the outbreak of hostilities, until December 1933.14 The Paraguayan military was considerably less prepared for war in the early twentieth century than their Andean adversary. Paraguay did not have a standing army and, unlike the Bolivians, the Paraguayan economy was not linked to the larger global trade through any essential primary commodities. The extent of Paraguayan exports included yerba mate (South American green tea) and tannin extracts from the quebracho (break-­ax tree) that lined the left bank of the Paraguay River in the Chaco. The Paraguayans chose a native-­born national to lead their armed forces, Mariscal (Marshal) José Felix Estigarribia. Although there were many foreign military advisors who worked as scouts and helped to train the Paraguayan armed forces, including a significant number of White Russians, the Paraguayans never promoted these men to high positions in order to give the impression that the Paraguayans themselves were in charge of military operations.15 This self-­aware military leadership meant that the Paraguayans were proud of their achievements in strategy and military tactics during the conflict.

The major engagements of the war, 1932–1935 War between Bolivia and Paraguay broke out after Bolivian troops encountered Paraguayan forces at what the Paraguayans called Lake Pitiantuta and the Bolivians referred to as Lake Chuquisaca. Both sides considered the lake a strategic location because of the year-­round availability of water—a rare resource in the Chaco. Although the Bolivians were able to initially surprise the small Paraguayan garrison stationed there, within a matter of days the Paraguayans forced the Bolivians to flee. This was the blunder that inflamed war fever in Bolivia. Neither the Bolivian public nor its leadership was in the mood for negotiation, as they were after the 1928 Vanguardia incident.16 The news that the Paraguayans held Lake Chuquisaca/Pitiantuta arrived in La Paz on July 17, 1932, coincidently a holiday in Bolivia and, according to historian Ange-François Casabianca, “massive and spontaneous patriotic protests and parades erupted

The Chaco War

6

Rivers Modern Boundary gran chaco chaco boreal

Map 2  Map of the failed Bolivian–Paraguay Treaties. Source: Paula Montenegro Gigante.

Introduction: An Overview of the Chaco War

7

which would intensify in the following days, [and all of the protests] demanded war.”17 For the Paraguayans, the Lake Chuquisaca/Pitiantuta incident directly led to mass mobilization of men between the ages of nineteen and fifty.18 Although war was not declared until 1933, the reality is that after the events at Lake Chuquisaca/Pitiantuta the hopes of a peaceful settlement between the two land-­ locked nations had come to an end.19 After their humiliating defeat at Lake Chuquisaca/Pitiantuta, the Bolivian military focused their attention on the Paraguayan fortín at Boquerón. The Bolivians eventually overran Boquerón, only to have the Paraguayans retake the fortín in early September 1932. However, the victory for the Paraguayans was hard won. Estigarribia was able to secure a victory at Boquerón only by laying siege to the fortín, requiring the few Bolivian soldiers inside to survive “on mules and scanty air-­dropped food.”20 The loss of Boquerón was both a military and psychosocial defeat for the Bolivians and a reassuring success for the Paraguayans. President Salamanca of Bolivia, believing that his fighting forces required professional leadership, invited General Hans Kundt to return to Bolivia and take control of the Bolivian military. For the Paraguayan troops, after their success at Boquerón, they gained confidence that the Bolivians could be pushed back into the Andes. There was great hope that Kundt would turn the tide of the war in favor of the Bolivians, as he was quite popular with Bolivian troops and many believed that his return meant that success in the war was all but assured.21 The homegrown Estigarribia, according to this naïve belief, was surely no match for the Prussian. Kundt, after a long trip from Germany to Bolivia via Peru, decided to go on the offensive in the eastern Chaco. Kundt, with great confidence, organized the Bolivian offensive on the Paraguayan fortín at Nanawa.22 Although ultimately the Bolivian assaults at Nanawa failed, Kundt believed that it was fundamental to keep up the pressure on the Paraguayans and continued the offensive on their positions at Alihuatá and Toledo. His ideas proved correct and, under pressure from Bolivian forces, the Paraguayans retreated from Alihuatá. Although a win for Kundt, it turned out not to be much of a loss for the Paraguayans.23 Kundt noted in his memoirs that even though Alihuatá was not the major objective, the success did aid the Bolivians in terms of their immediate goal, the Paraguayan fortín of Arce.24 The Bolivians were quite emboldened after the success at Alihautá, but they were at the end of their supply lines; they were over a thousand kilometers from their supply bases. The Paraguayans, on the other hand, were much closer to their supply bases on the Paraguay River. By May of

8

The Chaco War

1933, after a disastrous defeat at Arce, it became increasingly clear that the Bolivians were having a great deal of difficulty continuing the offensive in the fighting. As noted by historian René de la Pedraja, however, “Kundt was just one step away from reaching the final and inevitable conclusion that the Bolivian army was incapable of any further offensive.”25 Even so, the Prussian general turned his attention to a second assault on Nanawa. The Paraguayans were thoroughly motivated to defend Nanawa and the Paraguayan leadership proved patient in waiting to see where and when the full Bolivian assault would come. As a result, Estigarribia was able to hold his significant reserves until it was apparent that the Bolivians were going to attack from the north. Years later, General Kundt still expressed amazement that the second battle at Nanawa went to the Paraguayans: “it is honestly surprising that. . . . [all of our efforts] did not break the resistance of the enemy.”26 In the end, the second battle of Nanawa in July 1933 marked the end of the Bolivian advance in the eastern Chaco. By mid-1933, the momentum was on the side of the Paraguayans, and Estigarribia went on the offensive. He focused his attention on Bolivian forces at Campo Grande, which was bombarded on August 30. On September 15, the surviving Bolivians at Campo Grande surrendered to Paraguayan forces. As a result of these failures, Kundt offered his resignation to President Saavedra, who refused it.27 The reality, however, was that Kundt’s days in charge of the Bolivian efforts in the Chaco were numbered. At about the same time that the Paraguayans were putting pressure on Campo Grande, Estigarribia held a meeting of his top commanders, including the ambitious Rafael Franco, at fortín Rojas Silva. At this conference, Estigarribia gave the eager Franco permission to move forward with his planned assault on fortín Gondra. Franco’s planning and execution of the drive toward Gondra made possible the continued Paraguayan offensive. Franco efficaciously broke the Bolivian defenses, opening a Paraguayan path all the way to Campo Vía, which he captured for the Paraguayans on December 1, 1933. As a direct result of the Bolivian failures at Campo Vía, President Salamanca replaced General Hans Kundt. General Enrique Peñaranda replaced him. The Bolivians called for a truce from December 15–30 in order to regroup. They desperately needed the break as the top organization of the Bolivian military was disorganized after the departure of Kundt and their positions were not well defended. The Paraguayans agreed; but they broke the truce four days later and took the Bolivian headquarters of Muños. The truce was then extended to January 6, 1934.28 While clearly the Bolivians needed to regroup after the

Introduction: An Overview of the Chaco War

9

devastating defeat at Campo Vía, the Paraguayans needed the chance to figure out how to supply their troops. The Paraguayans were now faced with long supply lines from the Paraguay River. While both sides struggled throughout the war to supply their soldiers in the far reaches of the Chaco, the Bolivians had the disadvantage in the earlier years of the war, while the Paraguayans struggled in the latter years. Carlos Gomez Florentin and Stephen Cote explore these themes in later chapters. At nine o’clock in the evening of January 6, 1933, the Paraguayans received their orders from Asunción to commence military operations at midnight.29 They spent the next few days marching from one abandoned Bolivian fortín to the next, making it all the way to Camacho and Magariños.30 Although the march into Bolivian-­held territory was relatively easy, the Paraguayans were now in unfamiliar territory.31 While the Paraguayans moved forward, the Bolivians began making preparations at Bavillián for a Paraguayan attack. With preparations underway at Bavillián, President Salamanca ordered his officers to attempt a last-­ditch effort to secure a port on the Paraguay River by staging an invasion from the north to secure Ingavi. The Paraguayans, viewing this as a threat to national security because of the belief that any Bolivian port on the Paraguay River threatened Asunción, set up a defense at a crossroad named 27 of November that the Bolivians were never able to penetrate. After their defeat at El Carmen, Bolivian troops withdrew from Ballivián. The end of the war came at Villa Montes, the heavily defended Bolivian headquarters. Although the Paraguayans were able to break through only the first line of defenses at Villa Montes before a permanent cease-­fire was called on June 12, 1932, Paraguayan historians believe that it was quite likely that the Paraguayans, even with limited supplies, could have broken through the Bolivian fortifications.32 Bolivian historians, on the other hand, unsurprisingly note that the war was shifting to a more favorable position for the Bolivians in that the Paraguayans were exhausted and too far from home to continue.33 Both the Bolivian and Paraguayan leadership after the war sought to explain their respective failure or success vis-à-­vis the “other.” In Estigarribia’s memoirs, he portrays his successes against the German general as a battle of wits that Estigarribia clearly won. Estigarribia wrote: The sturdy personality of the German leader was not unknown to me. During my stay in Europe I studied in detail his record in the World War and the recognition he had merited from his immediate superiors, who presented him as a man who was exceedingly authoritative, self-­confident, and tenacious, even to the point of stubbornness. His energy and activity were phenomenal.34

10

The Chaco War

Kundt’s defensive account concerning his losses in the Chaco War noted that: I will until the end of my days, which are probably not that far off, be grateful to the Bolivian nation for the confidence with which, without reserve was trusted to me, and I respond to all of my colleagues in the campaign [war] that I have not saved any effort nor sacrifice to maintain the cause of Bolivia before a well-­ prepared [Paraguayan] enemy.35

This “well-­prepared” enemy that Kundt wrote about was clearly not the impression that most observers either before or after the war saw. The military historian Matthew Hughes states that before the war “the Paraguayans were the smaller, weaker power.”36

Understanding the war The Chaco’s hostile environment left many Bolivians and Paraguayans dead from dehydration. Surviving memoirs document the horrors of men dying from thirst as water failed to reach them in the hot dusty environment of the Chaco. José L. Capriles, a Bolivian officer, recounts in his testimony of the war the horror of men dying of thirst in Campo Grande. Paraguayan memoirs often leave out the suffering of Paraguayans and focus on the suffering of the Bolivians in an effort to demonstrate the overall superiority of the Paraguayan logistics and glory. As recounted by Beatríz R. A. de González Oddone in her oral histories of the war, Paraguayan veterans remembered how “they made havoc of the enemy cavalry, and at last led to the surrender of 13,000 hallucinating Bolivians shouting ‘a bit of water, a bit of water, please paraguayitos [little Paraguayans]. . .!’ ”37 Nonetheless, Paraguayan fiction written about the Chaco War vividly recounts the horrors suffered by Paraguayan soldiers. The most famous of these was Hijo de Hombre (Son of Man), by Paraguayan novelist Augusto Roa Bastos, in which he wrote: Thirst, the White Death, walks among us arm in arm with the other, the Red Death, both of them cloaked with dust. Neither the stretcher-­bearers nor the water-­carriers give themselves any respite. But they cannot keep pace. There are not more than about ten trucks to bring the precious liquid to the men of the two divisions . . . In forty-­eight hours we officers have received half a canteen [of water], and the troops scarcely half a mug, of almost boiling water per man. The tinned meat of our iron rations increases our thirst in the most exquisite fashion. Whole platoons, mad with thirst, desert the firing-­line and fall on the water-­ trucks or on the valiant water-­coolies.38

Introduction: An Overview of the Chaco War

11

Neither the Bolivians nor Paraguayans were safe from either enemy fire or thirst. After the termination of hostilities, Franco wrote a stinging rebuke of Estigarribia and what he considered the Marshal’s inept leadership in that he ended the war before arriving at Santa Cruz de la Sierra.39 During the war, there was always a strong undertone of tension in the Paraguayan leadership between Franco and Estigarribia. For Franco and his followers, the failure to capture Santa Cruz meant that the Paraguayans had lost the conflict because they did not achieve the goal of asserting Paraguayan authority over the entirety of the Chaco Boreal. Estigarribia defended his actions, noting that weak supply lines so far from the Paraguay River threatened previous successes.40 This perceived failure led many disgruntled Paraguayan veterans to support the man they considered the real hero of the war, Rafael Franco, in his overthrow of President Eusebio Ayala in the 1936 Febrerista Revolution.41 (Estigarribia was in the far reaches of the Chaco during the Revolution and could not save Ayala.) To this day, there are many Paraguayans who feel that, as a result of Estigarribia’s failure to take Santa Cruz, the Paraguayans lost the war.42 For the Bolivians, the goal of a port on the Paraguay River remained elusive. More importantly, the morale of the Bolivian nation was broken. The Bolivian military appeared terribly disorganized and inept. The defeat in the Chaco, as outlined by political scientist Charles Weston, meant that the white and cholo (mestizo) middle classes of Bolivia no longer “accepted the traditional [Bolivian] elite [leadership] and sought to initiate revolutionary change” leading to the emergence of the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR) in the 1940s, the leadership of which was composed of Chaco War veterans.43 The 1952 Bolivian Revolution, which brought the MNR to power was, like the Febrerista Revolution in Paraguay, the result of the events on the Chaco frontier. Since the 1952 Bolivian Revolution, historians and political scientists have sought to understand its consequences. In the years immediately following the Revolution, Robert Alexander concluded that the Revolution would bring social and political changes similar to the events in Mexico or Cuba after their respective revolutions.44 Recent historiography, however, has shown that the MNR Revolution may not have brought as many changes as early observers of the Revolution would have hoped.45 Nonetheless, this debate in the historiography is hardly dead, as shown by the work of Luis M. Sierra in this volume. In general, the Chaco War has received limited attention from historians since its conclusion over eighty years ago; however, the war profoundly shaped the histories of both Bolivia and Paraguay ever since. The war fought in the wilderness has been overshadowed by those nations’ larger nineteenth-­century

12

The Chaco War

conflicts, the War of the Pacific and the War of the Triple Alliance, respectively. In both cases, the victors imposed punishing terms on the defeated. In the case of the War of the Triple Alliance, Paraguay lost a great deal of territory to Brazil and Argentina; after the War of the Pacific, Bolivia lost its outlet to the ocean to Chile. These devastating defeats shaped nationalism in both countries for decades and shaped how Bolivia and Paraguay reacted when faced with war in the early twentieth century. The root causes of the war continue to be debated by historians. In the immediate aftermath of the war, polemicists such as Tristán Marof (the pen name of Gustavo Adolfo Navarro), a widely known Bolivian socialist, blamed the war on US imperialism and Standard Oil.46 Paraguayan writer, and Chaco War veteran, Alfredo Seiferheld also blamed the economic interests of Standard Oil, but also emphasized other foreign economic interests, such as the large Argentine tannin company, Carlos Casado Ltd, for aggravating tensions between the two nations.47 Júlio José Chiavenato, a Brazilian historian heavily influenced by dependency theory, writing in the 1980s, took a position similar to that of Marof and argued the Chaco conflict was a proxy war between Royal Dutch Shell who supported the Paraguayan war effort and Standard Oil who funded the Bolivian cause.48 Historians in recent years have found little evidence for these previous narratives about oil. Ricardo Scavone Yegros argues that both Bolivian and Paraguayan diplomats and politicians failed spectacularly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to find a diplomatic solution and fix a boundary between the two states.49 Bridget María Chesterton argues that Paraguayan nationalism and the desire to honor the memory of Francisco Solano López, President of Paraguay during the War of the Triple Alliance, led Paraguayans to fight and die in a far-­off wilderness.50 Stephen Cote, in Chapter 8 in this volume, argues that while oil played a role in the war, it was not in the context suggested in the earlier historiography, but rather that of a “new oil nationalism.” In general, the military historiography of the war up until recently has been nationalistic in perspective. In other words, the war has been narrated from either the Bolivian or Paraguayan side. A prime example of this is Roberto Calvo Querejazu’s Masamaclay: Historia politica, diplomatica y militar de la Guerra del Chaco, which narrates the war from the Bolivian perspective; while works like Angel F. Ríos, La defensa del Chaco: Verdades y mentiras de una victoria explain the Paraguayan position.51 Even English-­language texts tend to favor one side over the other, such as Bruce W. Farcau’s The Chaco War: Bolivia and Paraguay, 1932–1935, which clearly narrates a more Bolivian perspective.52 In general, the

Introduction: An Overview of the Chaco War

13

Bolivian texts have sought to understand how the country lost the war, while Paraguayan texts have glorified the role of the average soldier.53 The result of the war on both nations’ cultural, social, and linguistic traditions, however, has received little attention, though that has begun to change in recent years. For example, Michelle Gigenho argues that the music developed during the war was fundamental in what is today considered Bolivian national music.54 Andrew Robert Nickson highlights how, in Paraguay, troops and intellectuals reclaimed the native language of Guaraní during the conflagration because of its successful use during the war.55 As noted already, almost all of the historiography about the Chaco War fails to give a comprehensive view of the conflict and its effects from both the Bolivian and Paraguayan perspective. One notable exception is the fresh work that has focused on the experience of the indigenous people during the war. The previously overlooked experiences of the Chaco natives have recently garnered the attention of historians and anthropologists, including the volumes edited by Luc Capdevila and Nicolás Richard. These texts have reconstructed the experiences of the Chaco Indians as they were courted and used by both Bolivian and Paraguayan military for their intimate knowledge of the region.56 The common desire to come to an understanding of the war in a broad transnational context is what links the original chapters in this volume. The chapters are broadly organized in the following fashion. Chapters  2 and 3, by Elizabeth Shesko and Luis M. Sierra, respectively, explore themes of class and politics in both Bolivia and Paraguay. The following two chapters, by Ben NobbsThiessen and Bridget María Chesterton/Thilo Papacek, consider how elites contributed to the creation of nationalism, as they hoped to create progressive modern nations, with the Chaco frontier as part of the larger national territories. Chapters 6, 7, 8, and 9 offer insight into the experiences of indigenous people, the environmental history of the region, and the experiences of combatants. As a result, the contributors expand knowledge of the Chaco War by moving beyond the military and political histories to explore themes such as environment (Gomez Florentin, Cote, Chesterton/Papacek, and Breithoff), ethnicity (Langer, Shesko, and Sierra), space (Cote, Nobbs-Thiessen, and Chesterton/Papacek), labor (Shesko, Langer, and Sierra), memory (Breithoff), and nationalism (Langer, Chesterton/Papacek, Sierra, and Breithoff) in one of Latin America’s least understood and studied international wars. These chapters introduce lesser-­ known actors in the Chaco conflict, moving our understanding beyond battlefield commanders and political leaders, and give rise to a comprehensive overview of the Chaco War.

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The Chaco War

The work of Elizabeth Shesko focuses on Bolivian prisoners of war in Paraguay, drawing on wartime sources associated with the Paraguayan military and Archbishopric alongside published oral histories of former prisoners. It investigates the labor assignments and living conditions of prisoners, who materially contributed to Paraguay’s war effort and infrastructure, replacing at least some of the Paraguayan men fighting in the Chaco. Arguing that national difference mattered little to many non-­elite Bolivians and Paraguayans, it shows how prisoners’ work duties and living conditions were structured by a cross-­ national consensus about status based on socio-­cultural markers such as literacy, language, diet, surname, schooling, occupation, region, residence, and income. It also investigates the racialized propaganda circulating about Bolivian prisoners in Paraguay, showing how often contradictory ideas about them influenced decisions about their care and encouraged Paraguayans to continue financing and staffing the war. Luis M. Sierra’s study engages with Bolivian historiography of the post-Chaco War period by arguing that the war represented a dramatic transformation of the political structures and political culture of Bolivia that scholars often cite as the awakening of the political elite and the rise of class and nationalist political projects in Bolivia. This chapter revises a portion of the earlier historiography by advocating for a more nuanced vision of the Chaco War and its effects. Thus, the Chaco War served to make several changes to the political context, but in other ways represented several continuities. In this context, people who might have identified as mixed-­race or indigenous also identified as workers and neighbors as they settled in La Paz. In addition, racial discourse and the indigenous racial identity continued to structure the post-Chaco War nation-­building projects; discrimination would be one continuous theme before and after the Chaco War. It is in the transition before and after the Chaco War that the chapter examines the effects racial and labor labels had on people living in La Paz’s neighborhoods, the influence urban activists had on popular protests in La Paz, and the ways in which workers helped shape the post-Chaco political struggles in the context of the larger political realignments in the Bolivian nation. The chapter by Ben Nobbs-Thiessen narrates how just before the outbreak of the Chaco War, the Bolivian engineer Miguel Rodriguez began the first of a series of letters to President Daniel Salamanca in which he proposed to radically alter the landscape and destiny of the Gran Chaco. His plan consisted of building a canal from Santa Cruz de la Sierra that would ultimately connect the city to the Atlantic Ocean nearly two thousand kilometers away. Located between two great fluvial systems, the Piray and the Rio Grande Rivers, the city of Santa Cruz is

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situated on a plain flanked by the rivers, which flow north into the Amazon. Rodriguez proposed the construction of a massive canal to re-­direct the Rio Grande across the Chaco and into the Paraguay River. The canal would give Santa Cruz, located in the heart of South America, direct access to the Atlantic. Patriotic engineering would supplant militarization as the means for guaranteeing sovereignty in the Gran Chaco. Over the next four years, an increasingly quixotic Rodriguez continued to petition Salamanca for the resources to realize this project, but the war overshadowed his vision. Nobbs-Thiessen’s chapter draws from Rodriguez’s personal correspondence, as well as newspaper articles and archival materials, to explore the interconnected imaginaries of infrastructure, nature, expertise, and development. He concludes his study by placing Rodriguez’s forsaken canal in conversation with infrastructure proposals of the post-­war period. Those petitions demonstrate the increasing traction of patriotic engineering as a defining discourse of development in the Bolivian lowlands. Bridget María Chesterton and Thilo F. Papacek’s chapter considers the efforts of a little-­known German naturalist in Paraguay, Carlos Fiebrig, and his family before and during the Chaco War. As highlighted by the authors, the chapter outlines how the work of Fiebrig in founding the Botanical Garden in Asunción shaped larger ideas about the nation, and how the Botanical Garden itself became a miniature representation of the larger Paraguayan nation in the heart of the Paraguayan capital of Asunción. The chapter also considers how Fiebrig involved himself in the larger war effort by providing space in the Garden for Bolivian prisoners of war and helping in the Paraguayan efforts to launch an unsuccessful spying mission from the port at the Garden. Using photographic evidence located in Berlin, Germany, the chapter narrates the development of the Garden and the construction of a port there. The chapter highlights how foreign actors influenced ideas about the Paraguayan nation during the early twentieth century, how these ideas were shaped, and how they in turn helped to reshape Paraguayan nationalism. Erick D. Langer’s chapter argues that part of the reason for the success of the Paraguayan military during the war can be attributed to the better treatment that the indigenous people received from the Paraguayans as compared to the heavy-­ handed behavior of both the Bolivians and the Argentines. This difference stems from the difference with which Bolivian and Argentine creoles interacted with indigenous communities in the nineteenth century. While the Bolivians and the Argentines forced many indigenous people into dangerous and difficult labor arrangements, the Paraguayans, on the other hand, had little interaction with the natives of the Chaco until the early twentieth century. But, more significantly,

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The Chaco War

when the Paraguayans did begin having more contact with Chaco natives, Langer narrates how the few opportunities for paid labor in the Chaco for the indigenous population led to less conflict between Paraguayans and natives until after the Chaco War. Langer concludes that Paraguayan interaction with the natives of the region was much more benign and, as a result, the indigenous people of the Chaco were more willing to work alongside the Paraguayan military during operations in the Chaco. Carlos Gomez Florentin’s chapter offers new insight into the environmental challenges faced by the Paraguayan forces during the Chaco War. While much has been written about the challenging location where the war was fought, little attention has been given to how the Paraguayan military faced the environmental challenges during the conflagration. Gomez Florentin’s research highlights how the Paraguayans confronted the challenges of lack of domestic oil and geographic isolation by emphasizing how the Paraguayan military adapted quickly to the realities of fighting in a hostile region. Moreover, the solution developed to overcome the lack of oil, in the end, led to an army that moved on what he labels “organic energy,” which included animal, human, and water energy. This strategy, developed out of Paraguay’s lack of domestic oil resources, geographic isolation, and economic challenges, proved superior to Bolivia’s modern oil-­based military. Stephen Cote’s contribution to this volume considers how the Bolivians began heeding the warnings of economic nationalists about the potential dangers of having the country’s strategic natural resources in the hands of foreign companies. While these sentiments had been articulated in Bolivia prior to the Chaco War, it was during the course of the war that oil nationalism became an enduring force in Bolivian history. Cote’s chapter examines the rise of oil nationalism before the Chaco War and the ways in which the conduct of the war reshaped debates over oil and the nation. The conflict transformed oil into a strategic and even sacred natural resource, betrayed Standard Oil Company’s intentions to possess, but not produce, the country’s petroleum, and repositioned economic nationalism from the fringes of the political spectrum to the center. The final chapter of this volume, by Esther Breithoff, takes a multi-­disciplinary approach of modern conflict archeology to look at the Chaco War and its aftermath. Just like the First World War, the Chaco War was an industrial war of matériel that produced a myriad of objects. Whether hidden under the Chaco surface or stored away in museums and private collections, many of these objects have withstood the ravages of time. By using the example of trench art (recycled war material), the author suggests that objects, just like written documents, can

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reveal information about the past through people’s continuous interaction with them. In addition, objects often disclose personal stories that may have fallen through the cracks in conventional historical accounts of conflict situations. In the case of the armed confrontation between Paraguay and Bolivia, surviving engraved shell cases serve as a powerful example of material culture conveying people’s personal experience of conflict. Moreover, people’s incessant engagement with the shell cases (in the factory, on the battlefield, in collections, and as object of archeological study) bestows the latter with their own personal biography. In other words, the decorated shell cases can be seen as both pictorial embodiments of the human experience of the Chaco War and as archeological artifacts whose meanings are continually being challenged and changed through people’s engagement with them. In the following chapters, the authors have demonstrated a profound interest in searching out the lesser-­known narratives of the Chaco War. These chapters move the study of the Chaco War away from the military and political histories that have dominated the limited English-­language studies of the conflagration. In original and insightful ways, the contributors highlight the efforts of both nations to secure a victory and the consequences of the Chaco War.

Notes 1 Julian Duguid, The Green Hell: Adventures in the Mysterious Jungles of Eastern Bolivia (New York: Century, 1931), 15. 2 See Manuel Domínguez, El Chaco boreal fue, es, y será del Paraguay (Asunción, Paraguay: Imprenta Nacional, 1927). 3 For more on the War of the Triple Alliance and demographic losses, see Thomas Whigham and Barbara Potthast, “The Paraguayan Rosetta Stone: New Insights into the Demographics of the Paraguayan War,” Latin American Research Review 34, 1 (1999): 174–184. 4 Erick D. Langer, Expecting Pears from an Elm Tree: Franciscan Missions on the Chiriguano Frontier in the Heart of South America, 1830–1949 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 12. 5 Jorge Antezana Villagrán, La Guerra del Chaco: Análisis y critica sobre la conducción militar (La Paz: Litografías e Imprentas Unidas, SA, 1979), 28. 6 See Langer, Expecting Pears from an Elm Tree for more information. 7 Scavone Yegros, Las relaciones entre el Paraguay y Bolivia en el siglo XIX (Asunción, Paraguay: ServiLibro, 2004), 13. 8 Langer, Expecting Pears from an Elm Tree, 85.

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9 Miguel Fritz, Pioneros en el Chaco: Misioneros Oblatos del Pilcomayo (Mariscal Estigarribia, Paraguay: Vicariato Apostólico del Pilcomayo, 1999), 17–18. 10 Bridget María Chesterton, The Grandchildren of Solano López: Frontier and Nation in Paraguay, 1904–1936 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 2013), 79–102. 11 David H. Zook, The Conduct of the Chaco War (New Haven, CT: Bookman Associates, 1960), 50. 12 Chesterton, The Grandchildren of Solano López, 109. 13 René de la Pedraja, Wars of Latin America 1899–1941 (Jefferson, NC: Macfarland, 2006), 329. 14 De la Pedraja, 361. 15 See Bridget María Chesterton and Anatoly V. Isaenko, “A White Russian in the Green Hell: Military Science, Ethnography, and Nation Building,” Hispanic American Historical Review 94, 4 (November 2014): 615–648. 16 Ibid., 333–334. 17 Ange-François Casabianca, Una Guerra desconocida: La campaña del Chaco Boreal, 1932–1935, Volume III (Asunción, Paraguay: El Lector, 2000), 43. 18 Casabianca, 51. 19 Pierre Mondain, “La Guerre du Chaco: Paraguay contre Bolivie (1932–1935),” Revue Historique 267, 1 (January–March 1982), 43. 20 Zook, The Conduct of the Chaco War, 99. 21 Ibid., 88. 22 Ibid., 92. 23 De la Pedraja, 348. 24 General Hans Kundt, in Raúl Tovar Villa, Campaña del Chaco. El General Hans Kundt: Comandante en Jefe del Ejército en Bolivia (La Paz, Bolivia: Editorial Don Bosco, 1961), 87. 25 De la Pedraja, 350. 26 Kundt, 113. 27 De la Pedraja, 355. 28 Farcau, 162. 29 Casabianca, Vols VI and VII, 27. 30 De la Pedraja, 364. 31 Casabianca, Vols VI and VII, 35. 32 De la Pedraja takes this position. See pages 391–392. 33 Zook, 232. 34 José Felix Estigarribia, The Epic of the Chaco: Marshal Estigarribia’s Memoirs of the Chaco War, 1932–1935 (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1950), 59. 35 Kundt, 67. 36 Matthew Hughes, “Logistics and the Chaco War: Bolivia versus Paraguay, 1932–1935,” Journal of Military History 69, 2 (April 2005), 412.

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37 Beatriz R. A. de González Oddone, Testimonios Veteranos: Evocando la Guerra del Chaco (Asunción, Paraguay: N/A, 1977), 26. 38 Augusto Roa Bastos, trans. Rachel Caffyn, Son of Man (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1988), 179–180. 39 Rafael Franco, Memorias militares, vol. 2 (Asunción, Paraguay: Nueva Edición, 1989). 40 See Juan B. Ayala, Las Batallas del Chaco a la luz de los principios de Guerra (Asunción, Paraguay: El Lector, 1984). 41 For more on the Febrerista revolution, see Roberto Céspedes Ruffinelli, El Febrerismo: Del movimiento al partido (Asunción, Paraguay: Editorial Luxe, 1982), and Bridget María Chesterton, “Performing Populism in Paraguay: Febrerismo in the Works of Ruffinelli and Correa,” in John Abromeit et al. (eds.), Transformations of Populism in Europe and the Americas: Histories and Recent Tendencies (New York: Bloomsbury Academic Publishing, 2015), 221–227. 42 Chesterton, The Grandchildren of Solano López, 128–130. 43 Charles H. Weston, “An Ideology of Modernization: The Case of the Bolivian MNR,” Journal of Inter-American Studies 10, 1 (1968): 87, 90. 44 Robert Alexander, The Bolivian National Revolution (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1958). 45 James Dunkerley, “The Bolivian Revolution at 60: Politics and Historiography,” Journal of Latin American Studies 45, 2 (2013): 325–350. 46 Tristán Marof, La tragedia del altiplano: Boliva y la Guerra (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Editorial Claridad, 1934). 47 Alfredo Seiferheld, Economía y petróleo durante la guerra del Chaco: Apuntes para una historia económica del conflicto Paraguayo-Boliviano (Asunción, Paraguay: Instituto Paraguayo de Estudios Geopolíticos e Internacionales, 1983). 48 Júlio José Chiavenato, La Guerra del Petróleo (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Editorial Punto de Encuentro, 2005). Chiavenato’s text on the Chaco War is an extension of his early work on the War of the Triple Alliance in which he blames the latter war on British imperialism in Latin America. Júlio José Chiavenato, Genocídio Americano. La guerra del Paraguay (Asunción, Paraguay: Carlos Schauman Editor, 1989). 49 See Scavone Yegros, Las Relaciones entre el Paraguay y Bolivia. 50 Chesterton, The Grandchildren of Solano López. 51 See Roberto Querejazu Calvo, Masamaclay: Historia política, diplomática y militar de la Guerra del Chaco, 2nd edn. (La Paz, Bolivia: Empresa Industrial Gráfica E. Burillo, 1975), and Angel F. Ríos, La defense del Chaco: verdades y mentiras de una victoria (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Editorial Ayacucho, 1950). 52 Farcau, The Chaco War. 53 For examples of the Bolivian case, see Emilio Sarmiento, Memorias de un soldado en la Guerra del Chaco (Buenos Aires, Argentina: El Cid Editor SRL, 1979); and René Danilo Aguirre Arze, Guerra y conflictos sociales: El caso rural boliviano durante la

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campaña del Chaco (La Paz, Bolivia: CERES, 1987). For an example of the Paraguayan case, see Arturo Bray, Armas y letras: Memorias, 3 vols (Asunción, Paraguay: Ediciones NAPA, 1981). 54 Michelle Bigenho, Sounding Indigenous: Authenticity in Bolivian Musical Performance (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2002). 55 Robert Andrew Nickson, “Governance and the Revitalization of the Guaraní Language,” Latin American Research Review 44, 3 (2009): 2–26. 56 Nicolas Richard (ed.), Mala Guerra: Los indígenas en la Guerra del Chaco, 1932–1935 (Paris: CoLibris, 2008); Luc Capdevila et al., Los hombres transparentes: Indígenas y militares en la Guerra del Chaco (1932–1935) (La Paz, Bolivia: Instituto Latinoamericano de Misionología, 2010).

2

“Same as Here, Same as Everywhere”: Social Difference among Bolivian Prisoners in Paraguay Elizabeth Shesko

One month after Bolivia and Paraguay signed the peace protocol that ended the Chaco War in June of 1935, Bolivian First Sergeant Fortunato Sanchez wrote to the Paraguayan Minister of Defense. Explaining that he had fallen prisoner at Boquerón in September 1932 and been sent to a prisoner-of-war camp in the town of Altos, he pled permission to remain in Paraguay rather than be repatriated: “My desire is to stay in Paraguay, in this town, to dedicate myself to my profession of carpentry.” This 23-year-­old from Tarija explained that he had no family to whom to return in Bolivia and thus wanted “to stay here, where I have already made good relations.”1 On the other hand, Victoriano Nava Parraga, a Bolivian agriculturalist from Ravelo (Potosí, near Sucre), later told historian René Arze of the scarce rations, whippings, and hard labor that had characterized his year and a half as a prisoner in Paraguay.2 Although describing quite divergent experiences of imprisonment, these stories both call into question the nationalist versions of the prisoner-­of-war experience commonly told in Bolivia and Paraguay. They instead suggest the artificiality of national difference for many rank-­and-file Bolivian soldiers and even some of the Paraguayans who guarded and quartered them during their captivity. An examination of wartime sources associated with the Paraguayan military and Archbishopric alongside Arze’s oral histories of former prisoners reveals that many Bolivian soldiers devoted their days during imprisonment to similar pursuits and lived in similar conditions as they would have in Bolivia. Despite the context of international warfare and rampant patriotic propaganda, differences of class, education, ethnicity, and region trumped those of nationality in determining prisoners’ living and laboring conditions.

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Salvation and starvation: the capture and imprisonment of Bolivian soldiers Throughout the war, both sides captured soldiers on reconnaissance missions and those separated from their fellows during a retreat. These men provided vital pieces of intelligence (and misinformation) regarding the position, strength, and morale of their forces. Both Paraguayans and Bolivians also deserted over enemy lines, seeking relief from combat and dehydration. However, Bolivia captured only two to three thousand prisoners whereas Paraguay took approximately twenty thousand.3 Since the war was fought on neutral territory, the imbalance of prisoners taken (at least eight to one) is quite striking. The difference stemmed from the mass scale of repeated surrenders by Bolivian forces. Histories of the war seem to repeat the same story as they recount Bolivian defeats at Boquerón (September 1932), Campo Grande (September 1933), Campo Vía (December 1933), El Carmen (November 1934), and Pozo el Tigre (June 1935). Time and again, the high command missed signs or dismissed reports of Paraguayan activity, leaving substantial forces vulnerable to encirclement. Finding themselves surrounded, Bolivian forces ran out of provisions, and after days (or, in the case of Boquerón, a month) of attempts to break the siege, they surrendered, dehydrated, tired, hungry, and demoralized. Leading directly to General Hans Kundt’s resignation, the most significant surrender occurred at Campo Vía on December 11, 1933. There, Paraguay apparently captured somewhere between six thousand and eight thousand soldiers, several high-­ranking officers, twenty spiked guns, twenty-­five mortars, over a hundred heavy machine guns, around four hundred light machine guns, and between four thousand and eight thousand rifles, plus equipment and ammunition.4 Such mass surrenders were not only demoralizing to Bolivia but they also supplied a cash-­strapped Paraguay with much-­needed weapons, ammunition, and equipment to continue the war effort. Table 1  Estimates of prisoners of war Men recruited Bolivia Paraguay

POWs taken

162,083 to 250,000 17,000 to 25,000 140,000 to 150,000 2,500 to 3,000

Percentage POWs repatriated POWs in May 1936 7% to 15% 1.8% to 2%

16,825 to 17,143 2,478 to 2,562

Source: James Dunkerley, Origines del poder militar, 167, 235; Ramón César Bejarano, Mapa del Chaco Boreal, n.p.; Roberto Querejazu Calvo, Masamaclay, 482–484, 494; Juan Ramón Quintana, Soldados y ciudadanos, 54; Bryce Wood, The US and Latin American Wars, 95; David Zook, The Conduct of the Chaco War, 149, 240–241, 248.

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Paraguayan press releases depicted their forces as the saviors of Bolivian prisoners, who felt only relief after having suffered hunger, thirst, and abuse in the ranks of their own army.5 Telegrams from the front repeatedly reported “saving” rather than “capturing” Bolivian soldiers. For example, General Estigarribia notified the Minister of Defense in August of 1934 that his forces had “saved two-­hundred rank-­and-file soldiers who were lost in the brush, exhausted by thirst.”6 The horrific anecdotes included in Bolivian accounts of the war suggest that this was not just propaganda. For example, General Ovidio Quiroga’s memoir describes his soldiers as tired, demoralized, and resigned to death. So desperate was the hunger of one group, he notes, that they ate a putrid mule that had died on the path.7 Augusto Cuadros similarly writes of “the macabre spectacle of dried-­up men who died in anguish in the Green Hell.”8 And historian Roberto Querejazu describes one of the most horrible spectacles of the war, which occurred after Paraguay conquered the water wells at Irendagüe in December 1935: some Bolivian soldiers, he claims, resorted to suicide as their tongues swelled and turned black from dehydration. Bloated bodies lined their path as they retreated in the searing heat.9 Soldiers in such desperate circumstances certainly may have seen capture as salvation. At least in retrospect, however, many Bolivian soldiers narrated their capture as an agonizing experience, characterized by neglect and even cruelty. Carlos Pozo Trigo, for example, wrote of being deprived of food for days during the march to the rearguard and of Paraguayan soldiers stealing prisoners’ valuables. The oral histories of veterans recorded by Arze in the early 1980s echo this narrative. Cristóbal Arancibia, a pongo (tenant laborer obligated to perform domestic service) from Segura (Chuquisaca), remembered entering Paraguay with his arms tied up and wearing only underwear because his clothes had been stolen on the front lines.10 And fellow prisoner Victoriano Nava Parraga recalled, “Ugh! They treated us poorly, they even took our clothes . . ., all of our things they took . . . some were naked, without jackets or anything.”11 Upon capture, Bolivian prisoners were to be taken from the front lines to rearguard camps, such as Isla Poi and Puerto Casado. During in-­processing, prisoners were to be “disinfected” (likely through bathing them and shaving their heads), vaccinated against typhus and smallpox, and given medical exams to ensure that they would not infect the Paraguayan population.12 Some prisoners apparently spent weeks or months in the rearguard. With resources scarce so close to the front lines, these prisoners often suffered greatly, especially since many were already experiencing illness, starvation, and dehydration prior to their capture. No small number died due to injuries sustained in the field, illness,

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The Chaco War

Figure 1  Prisoners in Encarnación Cathedral, undated. Archivo de la fototeca del Museo Militar del Ministerio de Defensa Nacional.

deprivation, accidents, or suicide. Former prisoner Filiberto Mendoza, for example, narrated his time in the rearguard as one of acute hunger: “There were two or three deaths almost every day for lack of food. . . . I was so weak, I could barely stand up.”13 Cristóbal Arancibia agreed, asserting that he had received only three biscuits and a ladle of food each day while at Isla Poi.14 Eventually, the surviving prisoners were transported in railcars and river boats to Asunción, where most were assigned to one of the prisoner-of-war camps that had been established throughout the capital and interior. In Asunción, barracks, schools, prisons, and churches were repurposed to house prisoners. Likely part of a propaganda campaign, an image found in one of Paraguay’s military archives documents the use of Asunción’s Encarnación Cathedral for such a purpose. In it, each impeccably uniformed prisoner sits in the middle of a well-­made cot, complete with pillow, blanket, and a towel. The image depicts the newly shaven Bolivians as well cared for and implies Paraguay’s willingness to offer even its most sacred spaces to shelter them.

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Laboring for Paraguay According to the Paraguayan command’s interpretation of the laws of war, prisoners could be used as laborers “according to their rank and ability, with the exception of officers.”15 Segregated from those of higher rank, Bolivian non-­ commissioned officers (NCOs) and troops worked in agriculture, industry, and on roads. They thus materially contributed to Paraguay’s war effort and infrastructure, replacing at least some of the Paraguayan men fighting in the Chaco. More than any other factor, laboring assignments (or lack thereof) defined the daily lives of prisoners, whose experiences depended on the nature and location of their work and on the whims of their overseers. In the rearguard, the capital, and the interior, prisoners played important roles in sustaining Paraguay’s war effort. In reference to his time in the rearguard, former prisoner Filiberto Mendoza described ferrying gasoline in Puerto Casado and then being taken to Bahía Negra to join a group of prisoners dedicated to keeping the roads in this swampy region passable for the movement of troops and supplies. There, he remembered Paraguayan guards forcing him to continue working even during active bombardments by the Bolivian Air Force.16 In and around Asunción, prisoners spruced up the Botanical Gardens and the old penitentiary, laid bricks at the state-­run nursing home, worked as day laborers for the Public Health Inspector, repaired government vehicles, and bound books for the Office of Property Registration.17 The Auxiliary Chief of Staff even sent fifty Bolivians with experience in carpentry and smithing to work in the arsenal despite regulations prohibiting prisoners from engaging in labor directly related to wartime operations.18 Far from the capital, other teams of prisoners worked in logging camps or constructed municipal buildings.19 In the heat of Paraguay’s summer, this work could be grueling and was, at least according to one prisoner, enforced by the whip.20 Perhaps the most common labor assignment was staffing the road brigades that built and repaired highways and byways throughout the national territory. For example, in October 1933, the Chief of Staff ordered that four hundred of the most recently captured prisoners be sent in groups of twenty to ninety to work on nine different stretches of roads.21 These roads not only brought rural products to urban markets but also facilitated the movement of mobilized reservists and war-­related supplies.22 Thousands of Bolivian prisoners also staffed the state farms that provisioned Paraguay’s home front and troops. This stood in stark contrast to the situation in Bolivia, where the state faced a production crisis so profound that it had to take measures to curtail rural recruitment.23

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The Chaco War

Nor was Bolivians’ labor in Paraguay limited to state projects. The distribution of prisoners points to a complex domestic politics of patronage and political connections, as individuals, corporate groups, and private companies petitioned government officials to requisition prisoners for particular tasks as if they were pieces of equipment. Manuel Ignacio Torres, for example, wrote to the Minister of War asking for fifty prisoners “to work on the military farm that has been installed across from Villa del Rosario.”24 Many petitioners, like First Sergeant Agustín Martínez, invoked their wartime service in order to convince state officials to grant them prisoner labor: “I expect this petition to be granted in recognition of my inability to work due to wounds received during my four years of service in the Chaco. There, I also lost two brothers, leaving me as the only supporter of my family.” Whether or not the state responded to this particular demand remains unknown.25 Corporate groups and private companies also petitioned for access to prisoners’ labor. The Catholic Church, for example, received eight prisoners for agricultural work on its land in Asunción and Areguá.26 And, in 1934, the Agricultural Bank had fifteen Bolivians rebuilding its office buildings, the army turned over several prisoners “capable of textile work” to the Fasardi Company, and sixty were working for Liebig’s Extract of Meat.27 Other prisoners staffed storefronts in Asunción.28 The use of prisoners’ labor by private individuals or companies was in fact so common that one clothier repeatedly bought space in a newspaper to advertise its stock of “REGULATION dress and underwear” for Bolivian prisoners.29 Quite a few Bolivians worked on small farms throughout the country, as the Paraguayan state and local economic councils distributed prisoners to individual landowners, who often provided them with room and board in exchange for their labor.30 This tactic effectively dispersed the costs of maintaining prisoners away from the central state and shifted it to those whom their labor would benefit. The quartering of Bolivian prisoners in private homes perhaps marks the most surprising aspect of the prisoner-­of-war experience. Often filling in for absent husbands and sons, these prisoners worked farms and cattle ranches or served as domestic servants. While no statistics are available regarding the number of Bolivians in homes versus official camps, correspondence, newspaper articles, and memoirs indicate that the practice was quite common. One former prisoner even asserted that the “majority” resided in private homes, helping the widows and mothers of mobilized soldiers.31 Quite a few of the men discussed in the correspondence of the Archbishop of Asunción, Monsignor Juan Sinforiano Bogarín, were living or working in the homes of Paraguayan families. During and after the war, Bogarín played a vital role in the flow of information about

Social Difference among Bolivian Prisoners in Paraguay

27

prisoners, fielding thousands of requests from Bolivian families desperate for contact with their deployed husbands, brothers, and sons. For example, Bogarín informed one Bolivian mother that her son Juan Heredía was in Sapucaí, working “in the house of a German family named Appel,” and another that her son Andrés Urquista was “enjoying perfect health in the home of one Señor Juan S. Quintana, located in Puerto Sajonia (city).”32 We know little about the circumstances that governed prisoners’ placement into these homes or their treatment therein. Some may have been treated as members of the family, while others were clearly there to work. Nineteen-­year-old Bolivian prisoner Carlos Alvarez, for example, was quartered with nine other prisoners in the home of Sixto Ríos in Pilar (Néembucú). He testified to spending the day sowing cotton and gathering wood and the night sleeping on the patio, all the while guarded by either the overseer or his Paraguayan peon.33 Cristóbal Arancibia recalled similar circumstances: he described being assigned to work as a peon in Colonial San Miguel under Don Juan Cardozo, who treated him and his fellow prisoners “like slaves,” making them work seven days a week and punishing them harshly.34 However, another former prisoner asserted that those in private homes received better treatment than those in camps.35 And a photograph depicts several Bolivian prisoners with their Paraguayan counterparts and their overseer, suggesting a congenial working environment of mutual labor.36 Bolivian soldiers thus worked in a variety of occupations and circumstances during their imprisonment in Paraguay. For many, the nature of their work and the conditions under which they labored did not differ significantly from what they would have experienced in Bolivia’s peacetime army, where soldiers often suffered under harsh labor regimes as they built roads and harvested crops in addition to receiving military training.37 Nor would the use of whipping, beating, and sexual abuse to maintain authority be foreign to conscripts accustomed to working under Bolivian hacienda and mining overseers.38 The main difference was the beneficiary: Prisoners’ labors sustained the daily lives and war effort of the Paraguayan rather than the Bolivian government, troops, families, and private companies.

Social differentiation among Bolivian prisoners Although prisoners experienced a wide variety of living and working conditions in Paraguay, their assignment to the work crews, POW camps, and private homes that governed these conditions was by no means random. Paraguayan

28

The Chaco War

procedures mandated prisoner registration not only to identify each soldier but also to assess his health, social status, and skills. For example, one of the surviving conscription sheets on which Paraguayan officials noted soldiers’ vital data registers the presence of one Antonio Mamani among the prisoners. The sheet identifies him as a nineteen-­year-old illiterate bricklayer who entered service in October 1932 and fell prisoner seven months later. Whoever registered Mamani described him as having brown skin, black hair, a round face, brown eyes, and a snub nose.39 Officials then used this information when disposing of prisoners. For example, after being registered as bookbinders, prisoners Donato Ocheza, Arturo Escobari, Luis Cornejo, and Alejandro Paredes were sent to “render their professional services in the office of Property Registration.”40 Prisoners’ work duties and living conditions were thus structured by a cross-­national consensus about status based on socio-­cultural markers such as literacy, language, diet, surname, schooling, occupation, region, residence, and income. Prisoners stationed in and around the capital experienced better conditions than those in the provinces, since the supplies needed to clothe, house, and feed them were more readily available in Asunción. In addition, military and governmental authorities clearly acted based on an awareness of the international gaze on prisoners, especially after Bolivia, as part of efforts to improve its negotiating position, filed a formal accusation with the League of Nations in February 1934 that alleged the appalling mistreatment of prisoners in Paraguay.41 Prior to inspections by the Red Cross and the Apostolic Nuncio, the Minister of Foreign Relations took steps to ensure the hygienic conditions of camps in the capital and that prisoners there all had presentable uniforms and shoes, warning that “the report needs to be favorable for Paraguay’s international reputation.”42 Even months later, army command warned the Minister of Defense that better care must be given to prisoners in Asunción so as not to offer “a sad spectacle to the foreigners living in the capital.”43 However, foreign representatives seem to have ventured no further than Emboscada, forty kilometers from the capital.44 Conditions were far worse in the eighty-­five camps located in the interior.45 When discussing the transfer of prisoners at the end of the war, for example, the Minister of War asked for two hundred and fifty uniforms for the prisoners working on farms in the Limpio municipality because “said prisoners cannot be brought to the capital since the great majority of them are completely naked.”46 As noted by the quartermasters’ corps responsible for prisoners, many of these camps sat at a considerable distance from not only Asunción but also the main rail and fluvial routes. Having only one truck available with which to provision all outlying camps made

Social Difference among Bolivian Prisoners in Paraguay

29

periodic visits to inspect the books and prisoners’ living conditions quite difficult.47 And the central state could not possibly oversee the living and working conditions of the prisoners in the homes and farms of private individuals throughout the national territory. Family members writing to Archbishop Bogarín therefore frequently requested that he use his influence to ensure that their loved ones remain in Asunción.48 Social differentiation among prisoners was quite stark as career officers, educated civilians who had been appointed reserve officers, and even some intellectuals among the troops lived in relative luxury, segregated from the rank and file at the Military Academy, Cambio Grande, and Cambio Guazú, all of which were located in the capital. Given that officers were officially exempted from work, these camps could become centers of intellectual life, as prisoners built up large libraries and whiled away their imprisonment fervently debating Bolivia’s ills.49 The privileges enjoyed by these prisoners generated periodic backlashes from at least some sectors of Paraguayan society. A Paraguayan priest assigned to say mass at one of these camps complained that the prisoners there lived in luxury, did no work at all, and had the leisure to “organize math and language classes.”50 As part of its criticism of domestic policy, Crítica, Asunción’s radical newspaper, printed aggressive pieces explicitly arguing that Bolivian prisoners enjoyed too many privileges. Insisting that all POWs should be working, a February 1935 article alleged that some “wealthy” prisoners in Areguá “go out on the town all day, getting drunk, while our brothers fight and die in the Chaco.”51 Another rhetorically asked whether “we are in Bolivia or Paraguay,” given the liberties taken by prisoners who “are abusing our magnanimity and kindness in the application of military law.”52 The men assigned to these particular camps had the social and cultural capital necessary to denounce mistreatment, either real or perceived. Most importantly, their literacy skills facilitated their submission of protests in a form legible to the Paraguayan state and the international community. They exercised this prerogative, denouncing everything from severe abuse to a need for extra blankets and furniture.53 Some even threatened to elevate their complaints to the international community to ensure dignified treatment. One officer, for example, wrote to the Minister of War to report that Paraguayan soldiers had stolen his military insignia and had changed out his underwear for those of military issue onto which they had “written phrases that insult my nationality.”54 Sub-Lieutenant Arturo Beltrán even wrote to the chief of the Military Academy Prisoner Camp to denounce one Señor Riguelme for failing to fix his watch and purchase postage

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The Chaco War

for him even though he had been paid in advance.55 Paraguayan officials followed up on many of these reports by Bolivian officers, forwarding them to the proper authorities and sometimes even launching investigations or judicial processes. Back in Bolivia, the families of these elite prisoners also knew how to pull strings to receive news of their loved ones and had the means to send the letters, care packages, and money orders that would ensure their comfort during imprisonment. Many prisoners even established local bank accounts, suggesting that they had the opportunity to accumulate significant funds.56 Some families went further, asking favors of diplomatic representatives and Church officials. A lawyer in Cochabamba, for example, imposed on Archbishop Bogarín to provide his son Julio Beltrán with letters of recommendation, clothing, textbooks, and substantial sums of money.57 And Bogarín lent Mario Cariaga books and attempted to get him included on the list of prisoners to be repatriated after hearing from his mother, father (Uruguay’s vice-­consul in Tupiza), and uncle (a high-­ranking member of the Uruguayan government).58 When the Cambio Grande camp went silent in July of 1934, dozens of women wrote to Bogarín with worries about their husbands and sons. Upon inquiring, he learned that in order to punish prisoners’ “misconduct” and “establish discipline” in the camp, the authorities had briefly suppressed their correspondence.59 National borders, even during wartime, did not restrict the privileges demanded by and given to these elite prisoners and their families. Lacking connections and literacy skills, the families of the non-­elite prisoners had no such recourse. Many suffered months or even years without news of their husbands, brothers, and sons, sustaining themselves on rumors that they might be in this or that POW camp. After the war’s end, Bogarín received at least fourteen letters from women in the Oruro area with traditionally indigenous surnames such as Mamani, Quispe, Condori, and Ticona. All employ similar language and appear to be written in the same hand, suggesting that some literate entrepreneur facilitated these requests. Each of these formulaic letters begged Bogarín to look into the whereabouts of a son or husband, citing the number of months since the petitioner had had news of him. Bogarín apparently failed to answer: in March 1936, the letters were filed with “unanswered letters for not being able to get information from the office.”60 These Bolivian letters were somehow easier to neglect than those that came from the well-­connected mothers and wives of officers and even of students serving in the rank and file. Nor could most Bolivian prisoners in large camps officially complain of abuse by Paraguayan guards, even if they had the literacy skills and cultural capital to do so, since camp administrators delegated most of the daily duties of enforcing

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31

the disciplinary and laboring regime to Bolivian NCOs. For example, Bolivian Sergeant Dionilio Espinoza Saute, a railway worker from Nazareno (Potosí), told a Paraguayan magistrate that he was “the authority of my company, freely exercising its functions, even discipline.”61 Clerical observers confirmed this tactic, noting that “the overseer and guards treat them [the prisoners] with Christian kindness” and any harsh punishments were “always given by Bolivian authorities.”62 This measure exploited social divisions among Bolivian prisoners and allowed Paraguayans to remove themselves from the quotidian tasks of maintaining discipline and work schedules. Many Bolivian prisoners were thus commanded and disciplined by their compatriots, albeit ones of higher rank and with more social and cultural capital. Although luck certainly played a role, persistent differences in prisoners’ work duties and living conditions stemmed from assumptions about class and hierarchy that Paraguayan decision-­makers shared with their Bolivian counterparts: that officers and intellectuals among the rank and file deserved better conditions, whereas the mostly illiterate troops existed to perform manual labor. This fact was not lost on poorer and more indigenous prisoners: In his oral history of his captivity, farmworker Filiberto Mendoza noted that “professionals” received better treatment than “those in the camps, we were always doing heavy labor.”63 The elites who governed and documented prisoners’ daily lives saw them as gratefully receiving any favors that Paraguayans were willing to give rather than deserving better conditions. For example, an observer wrote of the “defenseless prisoners” receiving the charity and pity of the population in Lambaré, who donated fruit to supplement their diet, “biscuits and coffee with cream” to celebrate Easter, and the supplies with which to write to their families.64 Prisoners’ own capacity to draw on connections and to protest their conditions in terms understandable by the Paraguayan state compounded these inequities. National difference, even in the context of inter-­state warfare, was thus far less important than the social hierarchies shared by the belligerents.

The racialization of prisoners War necessitates the othering of the enemy in order to make his death acceptable. During the Chaco War, Paraguayan propagandists depicted their Bolivian foes as uncivilized and ignorant “Indians.” These characterizations took two forms: disgust and pity. The first drew on transnational tropes about savage natives, asserting that “Bolivian Indians are bloodthirsty and cruel by nature.”65 It also

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The Chaco War

perpetuated the superhuman myths of deprivation that circulated about indigenous soldiers: “These troops habitually eat only once a day and receive a one-­half-liter Vickers jug as their water rations.”66 Once soldiers became prisoners, these ideas about their capabilities and nature influenced decisions about their care. The classified communications of government officials reflect this othering, asserting that prisoners needed “a strict martial regimen in line with the psychology and condition of the Bolivian Indian, with the addition of the idea that he who doesn’t work, doesn’t eat.”67 In the hands of the radical press, this first form of racial othering became more virulent, especially when contemplating the potential of romantic ties between prisoners and Paraguayan women. Crítica revealed a deep anxiety regarding relationships that might develop between national women and Bolivian prisoners, referring with disgust to the “murdering indígenas, who, not content with trampling our patria, now want to carry away our women.”68 Other articles routinely referred to indigenous prisoners as “animals” and decried their “lack of respect for our women.”69 Given that most able-­bodied Paraguayan men of marriageable age should have been mobilized for war and that thousands of young, male Bolivian prisoners were taking their place in the fields, factories, and storefronts, the fear that local women might flirt with or even marry members of the enemy army residing in camps and private homes throughout the national territory was not unreasonable. However, the prisoners most likely to be in working and living situations in which they would have the freedom to interact with Paraguayan women were not indigenous men from the Bolivian highlands but rather officers, students, and men from Bolivia’s lowland departments. This form of othering thus racialized national difference, associating these relatively privileged prisoners with their highland indigenous compatriots. The second vein of othering asserted that the majority of rank-­and-file Bolivian soldiers had been unwillingly impressed into the army and therefore lacked loyalty to their nation. Soldiers recruited in 1934, one Paraguayan press release reassured the public, “were not of the same quality as before,” instead hailing from “isolated communities in certain zones of Bolivia, removed from national life.”70 Other press releases emphasized that only threats and violence kept these soldiers from deserting en masse.71 This narrative worked to persuade Paraguayans of their nation’s inevitable victory and encourage them to continue financing and staffing the war. Drawing on common tropes of indigeneity shared by Bolivian and Paraguayan elites, this propaganda depicted Bolivian natives from the highlands as childlike and timid rather than as active agents. This

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portrayal inspired pity, making the death of Bolivian soldiers a tragedy but one of Bolivia’s rather than Paraguay’s making: It implied that the government that had impressed these men into the army had caused their deaths rather than the enemy soldiers who shot them. In this interpretation, prisoners had been saved rather than captured and were actually experiencing true freedom for the first time during their captivity in Paraguay. One press release boasted, “For these poor Indians, it’s a dream to find themselves among free and equal men in an army where all are given equal respect and consideration.”72 Camp administrators also drew on these narratives, assuring officials that prisoners were advising one another not to flee because “we’re better off here than in our homes.”73 The press perpetuated these ideas, referring to highland prisoners whose “hunger, like that of beasts, is never quenched.” One article asserted that this tendency stemmed from “primitivism rather than hunger. The Aymara, once satisfied, keeps eating out of habit, not necessity.”74 Although this article also drew on the first form of othering by implying that Aymara soldiers’ hunger stemmed from cultural shortcomings, its overall tone was one of superior pity rather than aggressive disdain. Set by Paraguayan propagandists and widely circulated, these ideas about Bolivian troops prepared the ground for the narrative that would take over after the war. Although not as overtly negative as the other tropes, this propaganda also effectively accomplished the othering task, inspiring Paraguayans to fight to “save” the Chaco from a country that did not deserve to administer it and to “save” indigenous soldiers from exploitation by Bolivian elites. The historical narrative that captives came to recognize the superiority of the Paraguayan social system after receiving better rations and more respect as prisoners of Paraguay than as soldiers of Bolivia thus represents the culmination of wartime nationalism. In stark contrast to the narratives that circulated about highland indigenous soldiers, prisoners from the lowland department of Santa Cruz received markedly preferential treatment from their captors for both strategic and cultural reasons. As Papacek and Chesterton note elsewhere in this volume, a group of cruceño soldiers in captivity continued a decades-­old minority campaign for independence from Bolivia, which Paraguayan authorities fostered in order to improve their own position in the war and perhaps even eventually annex the rebellious region. The Minister of Defense thus ordered in May 1934 that cruceños be given “improved rations” and be allowed to send and receive correspondence unbeknownst to their fellow prisoners.75 Officials also worked to further segregate the POW camps, shifting the population so as to concentrate cruceños together in places like the Botanical Garden in Asunción and the

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The Chaco War

state-­run farm in Maciel (Caazapá).76 Paraguay publicized this rebelliousness as much as possible, announcing to the world that “cruceño prisoners propose to break away from Bolivian domination” and had taken an oath to the new cruceña flag in Asunción.77 In August of 1934, the Paraguayan Minister of War even proposed capitalizing on the propaganda coming from a committee of cruceño prisoners by freeing two of them and sending them to Argentina and Chile in order to contact politicians in Santa Cruz and organize commissions “in favor of cruceña autonomy.”78 Paraguayan decision-­makers also saw cruceño prisoners as culturally closer to their own lowland mestizo culture than to Bolivia’s overly indigenous and starkly divided highlands. The administrator of the state-­run farm in Maciel explained that since the majority of prisoners laboring on the farm hailed from Santa Cruz, he gave them “warm treatment, even guarding them without the use of weapons.”79 When a new group of non-cruceño prisoners arrived, the camp director drew a stark contrast between prisoners from Santa Cruz and “these Indians,” stating that the latter were “almost all idiots.”80 Thus political and strategic considerations compounded assumptions based on socio-­cultural markers to ensure that fewer indigenous prisoners from Santa Cruz and Bolivia’s other lowland departments received preferential treatment.

Conclusions Many Bolivian soldiers suffered greatly during their imprisonment. Some faced hunger, deprivation, and abuse at the hands of their guards, the civilians in whose homes they lived and worked, and even Bolivian NCOs. The long separation from family members and the loss of comrades added misery to an existence dominated by hard labor. In the face of these conditions, hundreds of prisoners seized opportunities to flee. Paraguayan consuls in Argentina (Formosa and Alberdi) and Brazil (Puerto Murtinho and Paraná) regularly reported the presence of escaped prisoners in their border cities. In November 1934, for example, the consul in Formosa reported that escapees were arriving “quite frequently and in a very alarming manner,” leading the Minister of Defense to call urgently for “more energetic measures” in custodial procedures.81 Other soldiers chose suicide, even after the war’s end. Felix Miranda Condore, for example, apparently snuck out of the camp barracks one night in September 1935 and drowned himself in the Paraguay River. A mechanic’s assistant from Oruro, Miranda had been captured in November 1934 and worked in the

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Arsenal’s foundry. In their testimonies during an inquiry into his death, his comrades reported to investigators that he had recently become “enclosed in silence” and had spurned the company of his friends.82 On the other hand, many prisoners clearly thrived during imprisonment and apparently preferred their lives in Paraguay. Like Fortunato Sanchez, the Bolivian sergeant with whom this chapter opened, several prisoners officially petitioned the Paraguayan government in the final months of 1935 asking for citizenship or permission to marry.83 And in June of 1936, Archbishop Bogarín replied to an anguished Rosa Martínez de la Torre that perhaps her son Hugo had “isolated himself in some house or family, as more than one has done,” suggesting that avoiding repatriation was not uncommon.84 Yet this evidence does not necessarily mean that these prisoners lacked a sense of Bolivian nationalism or preferred Paraguay to their natal country. Instead, it should serve as a reminder that many prisoners were in Paraguay for the formative years of their lives, the years during which men typically established an occupation and started families. Those quartered in private homes or working in small groups in government agencies or storefronts had the opportunity for significant contact with Paraguayans compared to those in large prisoner-­of-war camps. But even in official camps, some prisoners could cultivate personal relationships with their guards, drinking and carousing with them.85 However, prisoners were far more likely to develop these professional and personal relationships if they shared a language and social class with their captors and if the circumstances of their imprisonment facilitated interactions with Paraguayan men and women. The fact that these relationships existed also indicates that the Paraguayans with whom these prisoners interacted did not see them as the enemy or subscribe to the racialized narratives generated by state propaganda and the press. For them, as for many prisoners, the personal often outweighed the national. The social class, ethnicity, and region of origin of Bolivian prisoners in Paraguay determined where they would be stationed, the quality of their rations and uniforms, what type of work they would perform, and how they would be treated. The range of prisoners’ experiences explored in this chapter points to the importance of socio-­cultural status and to how little national borders mattered to many non-­elite Bolivians and Paraguayans. Perhaps a statement by former prisoner Filiberto Mendoza Zarate, a farmworker from Tarabuco who worked as a sapper and in a brick factory in Asunción and was interviewed about his experiences in 1982, best captures this contingency. When asked how the Paraguayans treated him, he said, “Same as here, same as everywhere, there were good people and bad people too.”86

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Notes 1 Fortunato Sánchez a Ministerio de Defensa, July 23, 1935, f. Notas Varias Guerra del Chaco, Archivo del Museo Militar del Ministerio de Defensa Nacional, Asunción, Paraguay (hereafter cited as AMM). 2 René Danilo Arze Aguirre, Guerra y conflictos sociales: El caso rural boliviano durante la campaña del Chaco (La Paz: CERES, 1987), 153–165. 3 For the unreliability of the available statistics on men recruited, killed, injured, and captured, see Elizabeth Shesko “Mobilizing Manpower for War: Toward a New History of Bolivia’s Chaco Conflict, 1932–1935,” Hispanic American Historical Review 95, 2 (2015): 299–334. 4 Robert Brockmann, El general y sus presidentes: Vida y tiempos de Hans Kundt, Ernst Röhm y siete presidentes en la historia de Bolivia, 1911–1939 (La Paz, Bolivia: Plural Editores, 2007), 314; David H. Zook, Jr, The Conduct of the Chaco War (New York: Bookman Associates, 1960), 167. A list compiled by Paraguay of prisoners taken at Campo Vía contains 6,473 names. See Estado Mayor General al Ministerio de Defensa, #788, February 5, 1934, f. Prisioneros bolivianos–Remitidos a Asunción, d. 287–417, AMM. 5 See, for example, Col. Garay en Caranda a ComChaco, no. 6438, August 14, 1934; Informative del Frente, no. 59, September 13, 1934, [loose on shelves], AMM; “La tropa boliviana está cansada, desnuda y hambrienta,” El Ordén, May 31, 1935, 3. 6 Gen. Estigarribia en Villa Militar al Ministerio de Defensa, no. 3631, August 17, 1934 [loose on shelves], AMM. 7 Gral. Ovidio Quiroga Ochoa, En la paz y en la guerra al servicio de la patria, 1916–1971 (La Paz, Bolivia: Libería y Editorial “Gisbert & Cía. S.A.”, 1974), 82–86. 8 Augusto Cuadros Sánchez, Los orígenes de la Revolución Nacional: La Guerra del Chaco y sus secuelas (1932/1943) (La Paz, Bolivia: Editorial Los Amigos del Libro, 2003), 57. 9 Roberto Querejazu Calvo, Masamaclay: Historia política, diplomática y militar de la Guerra del Chaco, 2nd edn. (La Paz, Bolivia: Empresa Industrial Gráfica E. Burillo, 1975 [1965]), 395–405. 10 Arze Aguirre, Guerra y conflictos sociales, 142–143. 11 Ibid., 155. 12 Departamento de Guerra y Marina a Director de Salud Militar, no. 72, October 3, 1933, f. Prisioneros bolivianos, d. 506; Ministerio de Defensa a Director de Salud Militar, no. 184, December 15, 1933, f. Prisioneros bolivianos, d. 487; Comandante de Etapas a Ministerio de Defensa, nos. 443–444, December 22, 1933, f. Prisioneros bolivianos—Remitidos a Asunción, d. 444–445; Dr Rodríguez en Puerto Casado a Ministerio de Defensa, nos. 451 and 622, April 20, 1934 and April 27, 1934 [loose folder on shelves], AMM.

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13 Arze Aguirre, Guerra y conflictos sociales, 203–204. 14 Ibid., 143. 15 Estado Mayor General a Ministerio de Defensa, no. 192, October 9, 1933, f. Prisioneros bolivianos—Remitidos a Asunción, d. 467–471, AMM. 16 Arze Aguirre, Guerra y conflictos sociales, 205–206. 17 Secretaria del Jardín Botánico a Ministerio de Guerra, no. 829, December 30, 1932, f. Prisioneros bolivianos—Remitidos a Asunción, d. 620; Ministerio de Guerra a Presidente del Junta Nacional de Aprovisionamiento, no. 208, February 16, 1933, f. Junta de Aprovisionamiento Guerra del Chaco; Ministerio del Interior al Ministerio de Defensa, no. 364, f. Memorias de Ministro de Defensa Nacional, Guerra del Chaco; Ministerio de Defensa al Ministerio de Educación y Justicia, no. 426, May 9, 1935, f. Prisioneros bolivianos—Remitidos a Asunción, d. 40, AMM. 18 Ministerio de Defensa al Estado Mayor General, no. 448, December 5, 1934, f. Prisioneros bolivianos, d. 267, AMM. For the regulation prohibiting this use of prisoners, see Ordén General del Comando en Jefe del Ejército en el Chaco, no. 248, April 15, 1934, f. Prisioneros bolivianos—Remitidos a Asunción, d. 207, AMM. 19 Ministerio de Economía a Ministerio de Defensa, no. 2753, July 7, 1934, f. Prisioneros bolivianos, d. 384–385; Delegado Civil de Pilar a Ministerio del Interior quoted in Ministerio del Interior al Ministerio de Defensa, no. 971, November 11, 1934, f. Notas al Ministro de Defensa, AMM. 20 Victoriano Nava Parraga quoted in Arze Aguirre, Guerra y conflictos sociales, 159. 21 Estado Mayor General to Ministro de Defensa, no. 192, October 9, 1933, f. Prisioneros bolivianos—Remitidos a Asunción, d. 467–471, AMM. 22 Departamento General de Guerra a Ministerio de Defensa, no. 556, November 28, 1933, f. Prisioneros bolivianos—Remitidos a Asunción, d. 457, AMM. 23 See April 1933 order that exempted indigenous farmworkers from mobilization in order to “intensify their agricultural work to supply the army and civilian population.” Prefecto de La Paz a Comandante de la Segunda División, no. 125, April 10, 1933, Prefecture Admin box 208, Archivo de La Paz, La Paz, Bolivia (hereafter cited as ALP). 24 Manuel I. Torres a Ministerio de Guerra, undated, f. Prisioneros bolivianos, d. 633, AMM. 25 Sgto. 1o Agustín Martínez a Ministerio de Defensa, July 23, 1934, f. Prisioneros bolivianos, d. 371, AMM. 26 Monseñor Juan Sinforiano Bogarín, Arzobispado de la Santísima Asunción a Ministerio de Economía, November 3, 1934, Guerra del Chaco 901.9, Asuntos relativos a la guerra del Chaco, Archivo del Arzobispado de la Santísima Asunción, Asunción, Paraguay (hereafter cited as AAA). 27 Banco Agrícola del Paraguay al Jefe del Departamento del Administración Militar, no. 59, February 14, 1934, f. Junta de Aprovisionamiento Guerra del Chaco; Estado

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The Chaco War

Mayor General a Ministerio de Defensa, June 14, 1934, f. Prisioneros bolivianos, d. 407; Liebig’s Extract of Meat Co., Ltd. al Departamento de Administración Militar, December 11, 1934, f. Intendencia Guerra del Chaco, AMM. 28 “Bolivianos almaceneros,” Crítica, March 12, 1935, 1. 29 Tienda y Ropería Don Pascual advertisement, Crítica, June 3, 1935, 3. 30 For an example, see testimony of Casimiro Irala, February 12, 1935, Investigación sumaria, f. Prisioneros bolivianos, d. 174–229, AMM. 31 Victoriano Nava Parraga quoted in Arze Aguirre, Guerra y conflictos sociales, 155. 32 César Rigualme, Jefe de Campo de Sapacuí, a Monseñor Juan Sinforiano Bogarín, February 18, 1935; Monseñor Juan Sinforiano Bogarín a Monseñor Fray Tomás Aspe, May 29, 1935, Guerra del Chaco 901.9, f. Prisioneros de Guerra I, AAA. 33 Declaración de Carlos Alvarez, February 12, 1935, Investigación sumaria, f. Prisioneros bolivianos, d. 219, AMM. 34 Arze Aguirre, Guerra y conflictos sociales, 142. 35 Filiberto Mendoza Zarate quoted in Arze Aguirre, Guerra y conflictos sociales, 208. 36 June 1935 photograph of Bolivian prisoners and Paraguayan peons, Guerra del Chaco, Retaguardia, #5, box 71, AMM. 37 See Elizabeth Shesko, “Constructing Roads, Washing Feet, and Cutting Cane for the Patria: Building Bolivia with Military Labor, 1900–1974,” International Labor and Working-Class History 80 (2011): 6–28. 38 See Laura Gotkowitz, A Revolution for Our Rights: Indigenous Struggles for Land and Justice in Bolivia, 1880–1952 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 149, 156; Waskar Ari, Earth Politics: Religion, Decolonization, and Bolivia’s Indigenous Intellectuals (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 68–69, 71; Robert L. Smale, “I Sweat the Flavor of Tin”: Labor Activism in Early Twentieth Century Bolivia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), 88, 164. 39 Director de Etapas en Puerto Casado a Ministerio de Guerra, no. 170, June 19, 1934, f. Prisioneros bolivianos, d. 408–426, AMM. 40 Ministerio de Defensa a Ministerio de Justicia y Educación, no. 426, January 22, 1934, f. Prisioneros bolivianos—Remitidos a Asunción, d. 426–431, AMM. 41 “La Liga de Naciones, ante la acusación formulada por Bolivia contra el Paraguay sobre maltrato de prisioneros,” El Ordén, February 1, 1934, 3. 42 Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores a Ministerio de Defensa, no. 356, February 6, 1934, f. Prisioneros bolivianos, d. 463, AMM. 43 Estado Mayor General a Ministerio de Defensa, no. 29, September 18, 1934, f. Prisioneros bolivianos, d. 303–304, AMM. 44 Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores a Ministerio de Defensa, no. 356, February 6, 1934, f. Prisioneros bolivianos, d. 463, AMM. 45 Number of interior camps referenced in: Memoria del Departamento de Administración Militar de 1934, March 5, 935 [loose on shelves], AMM.

Social Difference among Bolivian Prisoners in Paraguay

39

46 Ministerio de Guerra a Presidente de la Junta Nacional de Aprovisionamiento, no. 542, July 6, 1935, f. Junta de Aprovisionamiento Guerra del Chaco, AMM. 47 Memoria del Departamento de Administración Militar de 1934, March 5, 1935 [loose on shelves], AMM, AAA. 48 See, for example, the request of Dr. Ichazo about his son David Ichazo Osio in Monseñor Francisco Pierini, Arzobispo de la Plata, a Monseñor Juan Sinforiano Bogarín, Arzobispado de la Santísima Asunción, January 9, 1935, Guerra del Chaco 901.9, Prisioneros de Guerra I. 49 These discussions resulted in the formation of a secret military society known as Radepa. Intellectual historian Carlos Aramayo describes the members of Radepa as attempting to work though their “double experience of capture as both salvation and personal humiliation, combined with anger at the collective defeat of the Bolivian army.” The group’s full name, Razón de Patria (meaning “because of the patria”) encapsulated its fascist-­influenced remedy for Bolivia’s ills: putting the patria above all else. Aramayo includes the following quotation from the group’s statutes: “Personal desire has to be eliminated and society reshaped through rigid discipline. We must educate hearts that love the Patria, minds that serve it, and bodies that defend it.” After the war, ideas discussed in POW camps would sweep through the junior ranks of the Bolivian officer corps and play an important role in several ideological and political movements. Carlos Roy Aramayo, “The Intellectual Origins of the Modern Bolivian Political System, 1918–1943” (PhD dissertation, Yale University, 2008), 269–270. 50 Juan Ayala Solís, Parroquía de las Mercedes, a Monseñor Juan Sinforiano Bogarín, Arzobispado de la Santísima Asunción, July 19, 1934, Guerra del Chaco 901.9, Asuntos relativos a la Guerra del Chaco, AAA. 51 “Bolivianos serenateros,” Crítica, February 15, 1935, 1. 52 “Prisioneros groseros e irrespetuosos,” Crítica, April 1, 1935, 1. 53 See, for example, Capt. José Urcullo Velázquez al Ministerio de Guerra, September 20, 1933, and Sub. Lts. Cuellar y Aguirre a Lt. Morinigo, Jefe de Acantonamiento, June 2, 1933, f. Prisioneros bolivianos—Remitidos a Asunción, d. 491–494, 631, AMM. 54 Saavedra Siytin a 1 Lt. Gana Garay, Jefe del acantonamiento de prisioneros, June 30, 1934, f. Prisioneros bolivianos, d. 393, AMM. 55 Transcribed in Estado Mayor General Censura Militar a Estado Mayor General y Ministerio de Guerra, no. 70, June 3, 1933, f. Prisioneros bolivianos, d. 627–628, AMM. 56 Banco Germánico a Ministerio de Guerra, May 9, 1936 [loose on shelves], AMM. 57 See series of thirty-­six letters and telegrams exchanged between Bogarín, Daniel Beltrán, and Julio Beltrán from February 1934 to March 1938, Guerra del Chaco 901.9, Prisioneros de Guerra I–III, and Asuntos relativos a la Guerra del Chaco, AAA.

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The Chaco War

58 See series of sixteen letters exchanged between Alicia Aramayo de Cariaga, J. Enrique Cariaga, and Bogarín from October 1933 to October 1935, Guerra del Chaco 901.9, Prisioneros de Guerra II–III, and Asuntos relativos a la Guerra del Chaco, AAA. 59 Monseñor Juan Sinforiano Bogarín, Arzobispado de la Santísima Asunción a Monseñor Felipe Cortesí, July 14, 1934, f. Asuntos relativos a la guerra del Chaco, AAA. 60 Letters to Monseñor Juan Sinforiano Bogarín, Arzobispado de la Santísima Asunción, from Manuela A. de Fernandez (October 4, 1935), Vicenta Otazo de Gutierrez (November 6, 1935), Juan de Dios Lara (November 7, 1935), Rosa Saravia (November 8, 1935), María Calli de Lozano (November 13, 1935), Marcelina R. de Quanigenina (December 9, 1935), Bartolomé Quispe U. (December 15, 1935), Paulina Adrian de Mollo (December 12, 1935), Juana R. de Flores (December 12, 1935), Lorenza C. de Condori (January 9, 1936), Gregoria Ticona Calle (December 9, 1935), Bonifacia V. de Mamani (January 9, 1936), Tomasa v. de Claure (January 15, 1936), María P. de Rueda (January 30, 1936), Guerra del Chaco 901.9, Asuntos relativos a la Guerra del Chaco 1932–1936, AAA. 61 Declaración indagatoria de Sgto. Dionilio Espinoza Suate, February 10, 1925, Sumario instruido con motivo del fallecimiento del prisionero boliviano, Anselmo Miranda, f. Prisioneros bolivianos—Remitidos a Asunción, d. 54–80, AMM. 62 Juan Ayala Solís, Parroquía de la Mercedes, a Monseñor Juan Sinforiano Bogarín, Arzobispado de la Santísima Asunción, April 16, 1934, Guerra del Chaco 901.9, f. Asuntos relativos a la guerra del Chaco, AAA. 63 Arze Aguirre, Guerra y conflictos sociales, 208. 64 Juan Ayala Solís, Parroquía de la Mercedes, a Monseñor Juan Sinforiano Bogarín, Arzobispado de la Santísima Asunción, April 16, 1934, Guerra del Chaco 901.9, f. Asuntos relativos a la guerra del Chaco, AAA. 65 Informativo del Frente #110, November 7, 1934 [loose on shelves], AMM. Also published in El Orden, November 9, 1934. 66 Informativo del Frente #116, November 16, 1934 [loose on shelves], AMM. 67 Jefe Estado Mayor General al Ministerio de Defensa, no. 12, reservado, July 23, 1934, f. EMG Guerra del Chaco, AMM. 68 “Prisioneros piropeadores,” Crítica, January 9, 1935, 1. 69 “Prisioneros groseros e irrespetuosos,” Crítica, April 1, 1935, 1. See also “Bolivianos serenateros,” Crítica, February 15, 1935, 1. 70 Informativo del Frente #2, July 14, 1934 [loose on shelves], AMM. 71 Informativo del Frente #50, September 4, 1934 [loose on shelves], AMM. 72 Informativo del Frente #51, September 5, 1934 [loose on shelves], AMM. 73 Francisco González Durand a Andrés A. Rivarola, Delegado y Director del Acantonmiento Chacra Maciel, May 3, 1934, f. Notas al Ministerio de Defensa, AMM.

Social Difference among Bolivian Prisoners in Paraguay

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74 “Los indígenas del altiplano, como las bestias, jamás se sacian de comer,” El Orden, April 11, 1935, 3. 75 Ministerio de Defensa al Estado Mayor General, no. 135, May 12, 1934, f. Prisioneros bolivianos—Remitidos a Asunción, d. 172, AMM. 76 Andrés A. Rivarola, Delegado y Director del Acantonmiento Chacra Maciel, a Lt. Laureano Rodas León, June 16, 1934, f. Notas al Ministerio de Defensa; Estado Mayor General al Minsterio de Defensa, no. 577, July 14, 1934, f. Prisioneros bolivianos—Remitidos a Asunción, AMM. 77 Dirección de Propaganda, “Noticioso para el frente,” no. 9, May 20, 1935 [loose on shelves], AMM. 78 Ministerio de Guerra al Ministerio de Defensa, no. 215, August 2, 1934, f. Prisioneros bolivianos, d. 356, AMM. 79 Francisco González Durand a Andrés A. Rivarola, Delegado y Director del Acantonmiento Chacra Maciel, May 3, 1934, f. Notas al Ministerio de Defensa, AMM. 80 Andrés A. Rivarola, Delegado y Director del Acantonmiento Chacra Maciel, a Ministro de Economía Riart, July 25, 1934, f. Notas al Ministerio de Defensa, AMM. 81 Ministerio de Defensa a Estado Mayor General, no. 417, November 17, 1934, f. Prisioneros bolivianos, d. 273, AMM. 82 Declaración indagatoria de Enrique Callao, A. Rivero González, y Ignacio Arias, September 3, 1934, en Director de Arsenales de Guerra a Ministerio de Defensa, no. 314, September 5, 1934, f. Documentos varios, d. 1–3, AMM. 83 See Luis Ugarte a Estado Mayor General, November 1, 1935; Próspero Cárdenas a Ministerio de Defensa, November 18, 1935, f. Notas varias Guerra del Chaco, AMM. 84 Monseñor Juan Sinforiano Bogarín a Rosa Martínez de la Torre, June 29, 1935, Guerra del Chaco 901.9, Prisioneros de Guerra I, AAA. 85 “Prisioneros borrachos,” Crítica, April 10, 1935, 1. 86 Arze Aguirre, Guerra y conflictos sociales, 208.

3

Union Activism in La Paz before and after the Chaco War, 1920–1947 Luis M. Sierra

During a workers’ congress in August 1938, La Paz’s market vendors discussed their sacrifices for the nation and their right to earn a living during “. . . a proletarian parliament of the most extreme transcendence.” The various speakers spoke in Aymara, Quechua, and Spanish. One demanded to know: “Are we not Bolivian? We are not Chinese or Turks. Have our husbands and children not burst like toads in the Chaco and now they want to take the bread from our mouths too? Why should it be a shame for the poor to [be] sell[ing goods] on the city’s streets?”1 The women linked their labor and Bolivian national belonging to argue that they sacrificed their husbands and sons in the Chaco War, and that they, as poor Bolivian women, had the right to work in an honorable fashion and earn a living wage. The women’s testimonies of their involvement in these unions show the camaraderie, common purpose, and equality among them, despite differences in origin and language. The women, in later oral testimonies from the late 1980s, repeatedly underscored the equality they felt within the unions and emphasized the radical activism in which they were involved throughout the post-Chaco War period.2 The Chaco War represented a fundamental transformation of Bolivia’s political organization and discourse. Before the war, the Liberal and Conservative parties and a small group of elite politicians dominated Bolivia’s politics. These politicians rotated between municipal, congressional, and executive government positions, depending on the party in power and the various favors these politicians owed each other. The parties closely guarded their political power, and the vast majority of the population remained disenfranchised. Historian Herbert Klein estimates there were about ten thousand voters in a nation of two million in the late 1920s.3 The pre-Chaco War discourses questioned indigenous peoples’ capacity for political participation.4 During a 1921 La Paz city council debate concerning urban indigenous celebrations, for example, several politicians

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The Chaco War

argued that indigenous celebrations were evidence of the backward and “uncivilized” indigenous presence in Bolivia.5 Politicians, likewise, had little faith in La Paz’s workers. In 1926, after several mobilizations and demonstrations, the city’s master artisans gained the right to vote. Even this concession was highly restrictive; the ordinance allowing them this right only included those who owned their own shops.6 The conduct of the Chaco War discredited the traditional politicians and the parties associated with them. The transformations of the post-First World War period situate Bolivia in a broader world-­historical context. The death, devastation, and destruction of the Great War brought about a questioning and discrediting of the liberal world order. Reform movements arose throughout the Western world.7 In addition, the triumph of the Bolsheviks promoted greater labor activism throughout the world. The existing liberal order in Latin America also experienced transformation as several reform movements emerged in Peru, Mexico, and Brazil, suggesting broader transformation in the region.8 And yet in Bolivia, the changes prompted by the Chaco War were limited; the basic structure of politics remained unchanged, and many of the same elites and political operatives remained in positions of power after the Chaco War. Suffrage, moreover, did not expand significantly until after the 1952 Revolution. Some politicians, like Juan Bautista Saavedra, re-­invented their political personas and political discourse to fit the new context. All of the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario’s (MNR, Nationalist Revolutionary Movement) main founders were active in government before the war. Victor Paz Estenssoro, an influential member of the MNR, served several presidents, the Military Socialists, and the military dictatorships of the 1940s.9 The evidence presented in this chapter suggests that many post-Chaco War reformers were active in politics before the war. Moreover, pre-Chaco War politicians drafted and implemented some of the reforms associated with the Military Socialists, long before the advent of their populist programs. Many of these initiatives emerged in the 1920s under Baustista Saavedra. Popular activism similarly emerged prior to the Chaco War. The Military Socialists (1936–1939) took power and re-­deployed the very same labor reforms intended to help Bolivia modernize. The Military Socialists’ efforts gave the residents of La Paz’s indigenous neighborhoods another basis from which to organize and strengthen the local unions. My chapter, in this sense, works to revise a portion of the earlier historiography by advocating for a more nuanced vision of the Chaco War and its effects.10 In this context, people who might have identified as mixed-­race or indigenous also

Union Activism in La Paz before and after the Chaco War

45

identified as workers and neighbors. In addition, the Chaco War caused dislocation and inadvertently drove migration to La Paz. Thus, the Chaco War served to make several changes to the political context, but in other ways represented several continuities. In addition, racial discourse and the indigenous racial identity continued to structure the post-Chaco War nation-­building projects; discrimination would be one continuous theme before and after the Chaco War. The failures of the Chaco War prompted many changes. Many of the politicians closely associated with the Liberal and Conservative parties were replaced by a new generation of politicians and a new political discourse. The discourse discredited the traditional oligarchy (the rosca) and opened up space for reform-­ minded military officers and politicians. These politicians became the core of the Military Socialist experiment in the 1930s, the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario political party in the early 1940s, and the reformist dictatorship of Col. Gualberto Villarroel of the 1943 to 1946 period. The war also drove migration to La Paz from the countryside, from other cities, and from the mines. It was these migrants, many of them deeply affected by the war, who became some of the most active members of La Paz’s working classes in the post-­war period. The Chaco War opened up social space for workers’ political organizing in La Paz. The conduct of the war led veterans to create organizations that fought for pensions, sought political trials for the high command, and mobilized on behalf of ex-­combatant rights.11 In the 1920s, labor unions began to recruit workers in La Paz’s principal industries, government ministries, and artisanal crafts. At the time, there was no national labor federation, but regional and local federations were popping up in principal cities, and efforts to organize the mines also occurred at this time.12 In the 1920s, the Liberal politician and president Juan Bautista Saavedra (1920– 1925) employed a vague pro-­worker discourse and tepid support for workers’ rights to intimidate his political opponents in an effort to strengthen his nascent Republican Party.13 Workers used Saavedra’s vague discourse to expand their unions. Moreover, workers in La Paz, despite antagonistic government policies and sometimes violent opposition, used these organizations to expand upon the limited rights Saavedra envisioned for them, and established a pattern of engagement that would flourish after the Chaco War. In the aftermath of the Chaco War, the Military Socialists (1936–1939) and the military dictatorship led by the Gualberto Villarroel regime (1943–1946) openly supported unionization efforts and sought to use the unions to gain influence in the city’s indigenous neighborhoods, influence the social and spatial development of the

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The Chaco War

neighborhoods, and more generally, to shape the political life of the city.14 The Chaco War empowered social class identities as a means of organization for urban and rural residents of Bolivia, but it did not mean erasure of indigenous identities or structures. The promulgation of progressive social welfare laws, labor reforms, the political shift of the national and city governments, and the growth of the city’s population provided new avenues for social inclusion for mestizo and indigenous city residents. Once in the city, residents might be marked as indigenous, but popular actors often used the transformations of broader political and class discourses in Bolivia to blur the differences between rural, urban, mestizo, and indigenous identities. In the pages that follow, I examine how the workers of the indigenous neighborhoods developed unions out of mutual aid societies. I analyze how these organizations served as allies for Bautista Saavedra in his efforts to establish his regime, and how indigenous neighborhood residents used the political and organizational freedom acquired from the Military Socialists and the Villarroel regime to develop a strong presence in the city. Before the Chaco War, mutual aid societies and early craft unions faced government repression and persecution, until the new political alignments under Bautista Saavedra made unionization safer. In this more open climate, the city and national government faced challenges from urban unions.15 At the same time, Saavedra faced challenges in both the mines and the countryside.16 In addition, urban labor activism challenged Saavedra’s government to fulfill the promises of the pro-­worker discourse.17 This activism helped bring about the emergence of strong regional labor federations.18 After Saavedra’s overthrow in late 1925, unions continued to grow. In addition to the printers’ union, the construction workers’ union grew stronger and allied with the Federación Obrera de La Paz (FOL, the La Paz Workers’ federation). The FOL was an anarchist labor federation. In addition, the FOL supported the emergence of the Federación Obrera Femenina (FOF, the women workers’ federation) and the culinarias’ union (cooks’ union) in 1927. All of this labor activism suggests the importance of the unions and the development of cohesive regional labor federations before the Chaco War. Bolivia’s subsequent defeat in the Chaco War served as the impetus for a series of transformations that included the privileging of class and nationalist discourses in some political elites’ efforts to build a more inclusive national identity. The transformations also comprised the development of a middle-­class movement to replace and reorganize Bolivia’s political structures. These transformations signified the rejection of the elite-­oriented Liberal and

Union Activism in La Paz before and after the Chaco War

47

Conservative political parties, and some of the major personalities of these parties, in favor of different parties and elites. Political and intellectual elites’ search for why Paraguay defeated Bolivia in war led reformists to see the structure of Bolivia’s economics and politics as the reasons for this defeat. In order to address the structural inequality and fractured nation, these leaders pushed for social and political reforms and the cultivation of new alliances in the construction of an inclusive Bolivian nation. This search helped broker an alliance between workers and the middle class, and created a platform for the development of mass politics. It was through these alliances that indigenous neighborhood residents, the Military Socialists, and reformist politicians profoundly reshaped the city’s politics, and its social composition.19 After the war, many ex-­combatants, whose racial labels shifted between mestizo, cholo, and indígena, left their homes in rural Bolivia and settled in the north and west of the city, areas known as the indigenous neighborhoods.

Saavedra’s discourse on workers, its contradictions, and union activism before the Chaco War Over the course of his presidency, Saavedra courted Bolivia’s labor leaders. He also passed decrees that created a six-­day work week, an eight-­hour work day, and established a framework for unions to gain official government recognition.20 Newspapers across the country reported that the labor leaders had supported Saavedra’s candidacy, and later these same labor leaders continued to support his presidency.21 Saavedra, for his part, argued that Bolivia needed these workers to continue producing for it and that he was the best man to represent them in government and to stabilize Bolivian politics.22 The workers’ letters supported Saavedra because he was “genuinely interested in the workers’ plight” and because the revolution was about creating “stability.”23 His “revolution” was a “departure” from the personalistic rule of the Liberal Party and a return to“constitutionalism.”24 The irony, of course, was that Saavedra gained the presidency by overthrowing a former Liberal ally. He then used his support of workers’ activities to intimidate his opponents, to expand his personal power, and to institutionalize his Republican Party. The Saavedra government organized rallies in La Paz and the opposition press likened these actions to inciting an uncontrolled rabble.25 As much as Saavedra tried to represent himself as the workers’ president and his stance as revolutionary, workers and the local La Paz unions provided a contrasting picture of Saavedra and his support for workers.

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The Chaco War

When supporting and seeking the support of workers suited his political needs, Saavedra encouraged workers’ activism. When the alliance no longer served him, he then abandoned or repressed labor unions. For instance, the city’s slaughterhouse workers believed that they had an ally in Saavedra, and in late 1920 struck against the city council and “two or three capitalists” who owned most of the livestock and ran most of the butchers’ shops in La Paz.26 They campaigned for better wages and an eight-­hour work day.27 When the workers could not settle the strike with the city council, Saavedra chose to repress the workers, settled the strike, quieted his opponents by declaring martial law (the state of siege), and outlawed organizing among slaughterhouse workers.28 The national government quickly and violently put down this strike. In theory, then, Saavedra supported the workers of Bolivia. In practice, however, the Saavedra government withdrew that support any time that workers challenged the government or private industry to meet wage demands, work hours, or other demands.29 Thus urban labor movements and indigenous organizing in the countryside suffered similar fates: as long as they were under Saavedra’s control, he used them. However, when unions became liabilities, he repressed their activism. In 1923, La Paz-­based telegraph workers wanted to organize all telegraph and railroad workers into one union, the FOT. The telegraph workers asked for and received the support of several mutual aid societies and unions around Bolivia, and sought the support of the mining unions that had been organized up to that point. The telegraph workers wanted better wages, improved working hours, and an independent labor organization. When the Saavedra government refused to meet with union leaders to negotiate several demands, the union decided to strike. The printers’ union supported the telegraph workers. However, when the telegraph workers went on strike, the Saavedra government suppressed the strike and broke it. He sent in the military and fired all of the workers who were suspected of union activities. This action also severely damaged the unionization movement for the telegraph workers and severed the union’s connections to the FOT and the FOL.30 The Saavedra government made it illegal for government workers to unionize and rejected mediating on behalf of private sector unions. Thus, for a “revolutionary” government and a “pro-­worker” president, Saavedra’s policies were anti-­ labor. Saavedra’s actions also demonstrate that Saavedra was not particularly interested in aiding unionization efforts, but enjoyed workers’ support on behalf of the government only if he could mobilize that support for his own ends.

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In the context of Saavedra’s presidency and “revolution,” whenever workers threatened to move beyond the confines of Saavedra’s “revolutionary” programs or to posit independent actions, the government repressed the movements, jailed leaders, and controlled the course of union activism. However, Saavedra’s changes to the labor code (the eight-­hour work day, six-­day work week, and a legal framework for union recognition) and his courting of workers’ leaders inadvertently helped union organization grow. Evidence suggests that unions developed independently and also in conjunction with a more permissive postSaavedra political climate. The unions continued to organize during the preChaco War period despite the difficult political climate. Hernando Siles Reyes created the Nationalist Party and ascended to the presidency in 1926 after Saavedra’s attempt to manipulate the 1925 elections and topple his own handpicked successor’s government. Siles’s administration did not cultivate alliances with workers or enforce the labor codes passed during Saavedra’s tenure.

Labor and indigenous identities in La Paz The life and work histories of several FOF and culinarias’ union leaders demonstrate the entangled worker and indigenous identities, the ambiguity of Saavedra’s discourse on workers, and the migration patterns between the city and countryside. The union activism reveals the juncture between workers and Saavedra, and the limits of Saavedra’s worker discourse. Petronila Infantes, born in the city of La Paz, was one of the organizers of the culinarias’ union. In the 1920s, her father took the family in search of work to the mines near La Paz. She met her future husband in the mines and after a short courtship, they married and returned to La Paz. Upon her return to La Paz, she and her husband moved to the indigenous neighborhoods in the northwestern sector of the city. In 1933, just as the war entered its first year, her husband was drafted, and he died in the Chaco War. His death in the war not only determined her immediate prospects, but shaped her long-­term strategies for economic and social survival in the city. In order to help support her young family, Infantes began to work as a street vendor. She changed her clothing, abandoning the rough-­spun and homemade skirts typical of the countryside, and began wearing the pollera skirts. She did this because she felt like an outsider in La Paz and she wanted to fit in with the other market women.31 She initially entered the labor force as a market vendor, selling vegetables. Her stint as a market vendor was short-­lived; she was, by her

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The Chaco War

own admission, unsuccessful as a vendor. Her economic need led to her cooking, where she established herself and began working toward unionization. The Chaco War and the dislocation it brought shaped Infantes’s life tremendously. After the conflagration, Infantes actively sought to unionize her craft because she desired stable employment and better wages.32 In the process, she made connections with several members of the anarchist regional labor federation, the FOL, and she learned about anarchism via the “worker schools” that the anarchists and university students organized.33 She worked for a variety of employers, from private households to several foreign legations.34 She and her children lived in various areas of La Paz’s indigenous neighborhoods: in the cemetery district, in the Chijini district, and near the Rodríguez market. Infantes became one of the leading members of the culinarias; she helped organize meetings and coordinate activities and services for union activists in the culinarias and the FOF throughout the 1940s and early 1950s. The other women involved in the culinarias’ union migrated to La Paz for a variety of reasons and chose the line of work out of necessity. Tomasita Patón, another union member and leader, migrated to La Paz after her father’s death. Her father had been a long-­distance Aymara trader and he died during a trip. Patón’s mother moved the family to La Paz to live with relatives, and there Tomasita learned the craft of cooking from her urban relatives. Patón recalls living in the outskirts of the city with her relatives and then moving her family near the Garita de Lima in the indigenous neighborhoods. Graciela Barrios also left her rural life to live and work in La Paz. Barrios married young to escape the confines of her family life on altiplano. She and her husband left for La Paz looking for a better life in the city. She learned to cook and found employment with several different elite families on the Prado and then in Sopocachi.35 Exaltación Miranda was from Chuma in rural La Paz and left her home at sixteen or seventeen years of age to live in La Paz. She discovered her talent for cooking after accompanying a relative to her job in an elite home.36 She received glowing recommendations from her employers, who cited her “honesty, capacity for work, and morality.”37 Miranda worked in several elite homes, for several embassies, and in foreigners’ private residences. The Chaco War itself and the memories of the war shaped these women’s lives in the city. The common threads of their experiences included settling in the indigenous neighborhoods, choosing cooking as their craft, and becoming active residents of the city. The women joined together when it became clear that employers could fire them at any time, that the women had no recourse for the mistreatment they suffered, and that employers could block their move to

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another employer or ensure they were unemployable by suggesting they were thieves.38 Patón recalled facing discrimination for speaking Aymara in her employers’ homes and facing accusations of theft for taking leftover food or eating at work. As a result, Patón favored the creation of popular cafeterias and childcare facilities for working women.39 In addition to the discrimination they faced, the culinarias earned low wages compared to other working-­class women; they were among the lowest-­paid workers in La Paz.40 In contrast to women working in other unions, these women often worked in isolation, with only one or two women working in the same household.41 Thus, the culinarias’ union helped the women protect themselves from arbitrary abuses, helped them build community, and helped them create alliances with other working-­class women in other crafts. The women asserted their rights to public space despite the fact that city ordinances segregated public spaces. Sometimes, the women faced discrimination as Aymara indigenous peoples. For instance, the theater owners used the laws that prohibited indígenas from theater of the “first class,” which included all of the theaters on the Prado, La Paz’s main avenue, to bar these women from entering the theaters.42 In another instance, culinarias recalled that the Prado’s ice cream shops refused to sell the women ice cream because of “our way of speaking and our appearance.”43 It is unclear from the prohibitions and from the women’s recollections whether they faced discrimination due to their status as working-­class women or because they “looked” like indigenous women and therefore encountered discrimination based on their race. The culinarias allied with the FOF, and this federation had close links to the FOL. The culinarias’ leadership clearly recalled the discrimination they faced at work and in La Paz’s public spaces and used this discrimination to create alliances with the FOL and FOF craft unions in La Paz. Included among those unions were the construction workers. The construction workers remembered how Saavedra’s police harassed them when they entered the Plaza Murillo wearing “the vicuña poncho and the calzón rajado.”44 The workers suffered a double oppression. They were exploited in terms of labor (they worked long hours and for low wages) and, as the historians associated with the Taller de Historia Oral Andina (THOA) argue, they were discriminated against for their “cultural traditions, languages, and their way of life which was not well seen by the dominant caste.”45 The Aymaras and Quechuas of the rural communities were considered savages lacking in culture and were denied citizenship rights.46 Workers in the city and the mines were considered a cholaje or an urban indiada, and they were “humiliated daily for this condition.”47

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From this perspective, discrimination stemmed from both indigenous and worker identities as Saavedra’s soldiers harassed the construction workers and used the butts of their rifles to rip the ponchos and clothes of construction workers. In addition to organizing various industries, many union members lived in specific neighborhoods and belonged to the lay brotherhoods of their local parishes. The parishes were the ceremonial centers for the old indigenous ayllus of La Paz. Indigenous neighborhood resident and union activities structured union members’ social lives. For instance, many butchers’ union members lived in Challapata and Villa Victoria and the pork butchers’ union members in Entre Ríos near the cemetery district. Many of the construction workers lived in the Challapampa region (near the central railway station). El Día de los Reyes Magos (January 6) was the traditional day of the construction workers. They celebrated a mass and then held a procession that included the other guilds. They usually met near the Plaza Riosinho and the Av. Perú near the railroad station. For May Day, the guilds and the neighborhood associations held meetings, danced, and participated in another procession. The unions and mutual aid societies participated in the religious and social lives of the different parishes, and this sociability also connected them to the broader religious and social calendars of other neighborhoods and unions. The Chaco War had several important effects on the development of labor activism in La Paz. The war accelerated migration to and urbanization in the city. This affected the composition and activism within the city’s indigenous neighborhoods. Union activists participated in the cultural life of the neighborhoods as well as engaging in economic activity in the city. The war and its perceived failures marked all sectors of Bolivian society and shaped activism within the indigenous neighborhoods. The life and work histories of the FOF and FOL union activists demonstrate the ways in which labor and racial identity were intertwined and how it shaped labor activism in the city. The Chaco War shaped the view of the pre-­war period in many ways, but the evidence presented here suggests that we must reinterpret some of the pre-­war politics and activism in the city. As result of the defeat in the Chaco War, the Liberals, Conservatives, Saavedra, Siles, and Salamanca were portrayed as part of the same elite, and the politics of the pre-­war period as lacking social programs and inclusive political programs. Yet Saavedra’s break with the Liberal Party and his efforts to incorporate workers, albeit in a limited way, opened new spaces for activism in La Paz. If the pre-­war period requires reassessment, so too does the post-­war period, in which activism and political

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realignments are evident in the rise of the Military Socialists and other post-­war regimes of the 1940s.

The Chaco War and postwar realignments The collapse of the tin market in 1930 significantly affected the Bolivian state’s coffers and its ability to maintain its debt payments. Moreover, President Daniel Salamanca’s administration (1931–1934) employed a rather orthodox economic strategy; his government cut spending, devalued the currency, and employed regressive taxation schemes to extract more revenue. He tried to squeeze revenue from market vendors and itinerant vendors in the city’s markets. This did little to alleviate problems for the poorest sectors of society and eroded middle-­class earnings. The cut in spending meant less economic activity within the city, and since Bolivia was a major food importer, imports became more expensive, and costs for everyday items rose rapidly.48 The orthodox response to the economic crisis led the nascent unions and reformist political organizations to lambast the government’s approach to the economic situation. Salamanca, like Saavedra in the 1920s, chose repression instead of negotiation. In 1932, the government telegraph workers’ union went on strike to demand improvements in wages. The union asked the rail workers’ FOT to support the strike, but Salamanca declared the strike illegal and had military troops occupy all of the nation’s telegraph offices. He refused to negotiate with the FOT, and successfully stifled the strike. The shambolic conduct of the war demonstrated to political elites, military officers, middle-­class intellectuals, and common soldiers that the structure of Bolivian society had failed Bolivia’s people, and many argued that this failure led directly to the country’s defeat in the Chaco War. This defeat gave renewed impetus to the development of alternative political parties, to the re-­formation of unions, and to a rejection of the pre-­war political system. In addition, the Chaco War heavily influenced the generation of politicians who challenged the political system after the war. As soldiers on the front, these politicians witnessed the highly unequal class and race systems that engendered the needless death of many mestizos and indígenas, and they experienced the ineptitude of many army officers and political elites. As journalists and political operatives after the war, these leftist politicians and future MNR leaders helped bring about the realignments of the post-­war period. While the Chaco War caused a break with aspects of the past, it was not a clean break. The basis for class and race discourse

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shifted as a result of the Chaco War; while race had been more important before the Chaco War, class became more central in the political and social changes wrought in the aftermath of the Chaco War, although it did not displace the importance of race. As the Chaco War ended, veterans returned from the front and many rural peoples migrated to the cities. Among these migrants were many of the workers of the FOF and FOL. The national government authorities and the local authorities on the altiplano sought to prevent this migration. The government tried to legislate against labor recruiters who traveled to rural areas and recruited labor for work in Argentina and Chile. Moreover, all levels of the government sought to limit the impact that migrants had on the city. The government discussed the possibility of fines and the use of internal passports to prevent indígenas from moving to the cities. These proposals did not come to pass, but demonstrate that the realignment of society after the war was tricky and filled with uncertainty. In this context, the elements of the political left, previously at the fringe of politics, and whose criticism of the political machinery had been viewed with suspicion before the Chaco War, became central to the re-­imagining of society.49 The changes to Bolivian politics in the aftermath of the Chaco War and the expansion of the city’s population empowered labor activists in the city. The Military Socialists, in an effort to include all sectors of society in its corporatist vision of Bolivian society, decreed mandatory unionization. Labor activists in La Paz took advantage of this decree to re-­form several pre-Chaco War unions. When the Military Socialists were overthrown and replaced, labor organizing did not stop, it accelerated. Activists took advantage of the permissive climate under the elite-­oriented Concordancia government (1940–1943). A similarly open climate during the regime of the reformist dictatorship of Gualberto Villarroel (1943–1946), provided political spaces in which unions continued to organize and agitate for labor reforms and improvements to the city’s indigenous neighborhoods.50 Despite the activism of the post-­war period, the Chaco War did not transform many of the economic, social, and political bases of society. The government continued to rely on tin and the extractive economy for much of its revenue. A small number of elite controlled much of Bolivia’s arable lands. Despite the fact that the war discredited the pre-­war political parties, many of the politicians remade their career after the war. This included men like Bautista Saavedra, Victor Paz Estenssoro, and Hernan Siles. Other politicians, especially at the municipal level, maintained a level of stability that was not possible in the

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national political arena.51 Therefore, the war created several breaks with the past, but maintained several continuities. The Military Socialists took power in 1936. These men were junior military officers who had served during the Chaco War. German Busch Becerra was from Cochabamba and attended the military academy in La Paz. He served on the front in the Chaco War. Busch served with distinction and rose quickly through the ranks of the officer corps. He was active in Razón de Patria (RADEPA), the military political lodge, and the Chaco War seems to have been his political awakening. David Toro, another junior officer, also served during the Chaco War and was part of RADEPA. He was from Sucre and also graduated from the military academy in La Paz. Toro served as chief of staff at the Estado Mayor in La Paz and became a bridge between the junior officers in the field and the military high command. In 1934, the military high command promoted Busch to commander of the Estado Mayor in La Paz. The rise of the Military Socialists signaled changes in La Paz’s political arena. This dictatorship replaced the elected city council and mayor with appointed politicians and paved the way for a centralized municipal government, one that began investing heavily in the indigenous neighborhoods’ infrastructure in an attempt to bring the entire city into its vision of a modern urban life. The rise of the Military Socialists coincided with renewed labor activism. The Military Socialists, inspired by European Fascism, actively courted workers and unions as a way to build the corporatist model of government. In 1935, after the hostilities of the war had ended, the La Paz printers’ union decided to strike after the government postponed a decision to address the union’s demands for wage increases and food subsidies.52 The FOL supported the strike and called for a general strike. The strike mobilized so many sectors of La Paz’s working classes that the Tejada Sorzano government decided to withdraw all the police from the city. The military, under the leadership of German Busch, decided not to intervene as long as there was no violence.53 After this victory, the printers’ union, the FOL, and the FOF pressured the government for improvements in wages and working conditions for women and children. They also requested that the government suppress consumer goods monopolies, suspend the state of siege, allow freedom of association and the press, allow legal organizations for workers, craft new social legislation, and provide jobs for veterans. There was also a host of petitions for the mutilated victims and orphans of war.54 Before and during the Chaco War, the national government had stripped the unions of formal recognition and had persecuted its leadership, but it had not eradicated the activism within the crafts or the alliances that the unions and guilds

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had forged before the war. Activism from below continued despite government repression.

Worker activism in La Paz after the Chaco War After the Chaco War, unions quickly reformed. These unions were instrumental in several episodes that demonstrate how workers expanded and re-­interpreted elite discourses on class. One major instance of mobilization was provoked by the prohibition of the culinarias from boarding the trams to the markets in 1935. A second episode saw several La Paz unions mobilize against new market taxes, fees and new health department identification cards between 1938 and 1943. These instances demonstrate the widespread coordination among the labor unions. Despite elites’ best efforts to dismantle the unions and limit their influence in urban life during the Chaco War period, unions become central to these post-­war mobilizations. In addition, between 1947 and 1952, the FOL, FOF, and their associated unions lost influence and power as they suffered persecution, while other unions allied with specific parties gained influence and power. In this period of realignment, the use of the tram in 1935 became a major mobilization point and organization tool for the FOF and culinarias. In 1935, the tram administrator, a city employee in liaison with the privately owned Bolivian Power Company, prohibited women with baskets from boarding the tram. Several of the culinarias recalled how upper-­class women, when they boarded the tram, complained about “these cholas with their baskets.”55 In 1935, El Diario published an article that stated that keeping the bulky bags and baskets out of the tram prevented the spread of disease and infections because the baskets would no longer touch the other passengers and the “ladies of high society.”56 The tram prohibition meant that the culinarias were supposed to walk to and from the markets. At the time, the culinarias’ employers preferred La Paz’s two principal markets; one in front of the San Francisco Church and the other near the location of Club de La Paz (both in central La Paz). Most elite homes where culinarias worked were located south of the city center in San Jorge and Sopocachi, while some elite residences were located in the center of town along the Prado, and others in Miraflores. Therefore, the trek to the markets might be as long as an hour from Miraflores, and twenty-­five or thirty minutes uphill from Sopocachi and San Jorge to the markets. Carrying a load of fresh groceries, bread, cheese, and meat back down from San Francisco Plaza was cumbersome,

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tiring, and time-­consuming. This led the culinarias to organize and protest against the prohibition and successfully have it overturned. The tram prohibition had principally affected the culinarias, a relatively small minority of women workers; however, the city government’s insistence on the health cards for culinarias, sanitation cards for the market vendors, and a stall tax in the markets for the vendors concerned a broader swath of union activists. In 1937, the city government passed laws requiring that the market women, culinarias, and food vendors, purchase health cards and pay market stall fees. The market women, food vendors, and culinarias belonged to separate unions that made up the membership of the regional labor federation, the FOF. The culinarias’, food vendors’, and market vendors’ unions’ vehement opposition to the health and sanitation identity cards stemmed from the ID cards’ association with prostitution. The city required sex workers to register and carry identity cards. Registered sex workers had to submit to frequent, humiliating tests for sexually transmitted diseases, while the sanitary police and health inspectors conducted regular raids on both “clandestine” and “registered” brothels to search for untested women.57 Once the police arrested the sex workers, they were tested, quarantined in the tuberculosis hospital, and subject to poor treatment at the hands of authorities.58 In order to acquire these identity cards, the city government demanded market women, culinarias, and food vendors submit to the same testing as La Paz’s sex workers.59 The logic was that they ostensibly carried the same diseases as the sex workers. The unions mobilized using petitions, protests, and violence to oppose the health cards and tests, which, they argued, likened them to prostitutes. The culinarias opposed the city government’s efforts to have all of them acquire the health cards, arguing they were not like the sex workers. “[The office of hygiene] was destined to service women who do not work with their hands, this [fact] matters to the honesty of the proletarian women.”60 The culinarias argued that since they cooked in wealthy homes, the wealthy families’ doctors should examine them.61 The FOF and culinarias members recalled the pitched street battles against the police in their efforts to resist the implementation of the cards, stall taxes, and ID cards. They used soap to “wax” the cobblestones around the markets to prevent the police from using mounted officers to disperse the protesters.62 The soap made it difficult for horseshoes to grip the cobblestones. The use of the soap made the mounted officers ineffective. It may also be symbolic that the women used soap, an item generally associated with cleanliness, to neutralize the mounted police. Government functionaries and elites often leveled the accusation that the women were unclean and needed additional

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regulation as a means to control the women’s activism. Yet in this instance, soap served to neutralize the city government’s violent response to the women. The culinarias’, market vendors’, and food vendors’ unions capitalized on the opposition to the health cards to recruit more women. They used the successful protests to publicize their efforts to get Sundays off and obtain basic wage protections.63 The culinarias also wanted to rename themselves “laborers of the household” rather than “domestics” because they believed that the term “domestic” undervalued their labor and craft.64 For several years, the unions were able to resist the implementation of the health examinations by arguing that theirs was an “honorable labor” and that they shared no commonalties with the prostitutes of La Paz.65 The women remembered the Chaco War as something that changed their lives and forced them to make sacrifices and as an event that had been beyond their control. After the Chaco War, these union activists determined to gain control through unionization. In addition to strategy meetings, speeches, and confrontations, the women took a series of petitions to the city government. In one case, the women requested that Mayor Muñoz Cornejo fire the market inspector and curb the powers of the market police. Max Murillo Bocángel was the market superintendent. The culinarias recalled that Bocángel was ruthless in his treatment of the women; he encouraged the market police to fine the women for all infractions and repeatedly tried to enforce stall fees.66 They pressured the mayor and Bolivia’s President to remove Bocángel from his position.67 The city government relented to the unions’ pressure; the low occupancy rates and the culinarias’ and vendors’ mobilization convinced the city government to reduce the fees on stalls and forced the city government to abandon the medical examination requirements on the health cards.68 The mobilization of these unions demonstrates not only cross-­occupation activism, but it also demonstrates the inclusion of Aymara, Quechua, and Spanish-­speaking women associated with the FOF and allied with the male-­ dominated FOL. The culinarias and market women, according to their recollections, could be labeled indigenous, cholas, and workers. The culinarias recalled how they would be insulted as “cholas and indias,” discriminated in the theaters and shops on the Prado, and yet the unions included everyone in meetings regardless of ethnic differences or linguistic barriers.69 The women claimed to avoid employing the very same mechanisms of the discrimination they faced by including women of all kinds, from different occupations, races, and Aymara-, Quechua-, and Spanish-­speakers equally in their mobilizations and union activities. This suggests a complex interplay between race and class.

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The women in the FOF and culinarias’ union, depending on the circumstances and interactions, could be labeled as workers, and might have insults hurled at them and face discrimination based on their racial identity or language.

Conclusions The mutual aid societies and unions of the early twentieth century helped integrate a population of artisans and Aymara indigenous peoples into the fabric of the city. These institutions played a key role in the indigenous neighborhoods’ celebrations and helped organize the neighborhoods into craft-­based guilds. They joined together Aymara, Quechua, and mestizo craftsmen and tradesmen in mutual aid societies and lay brotherhoods. The FOL united men and women as it supported the culinarias, market women, flower sellers, construction workers, carpenters, butchers, and workers from other crafts who created unions and joined the FOL and FOF. The FOF became an important federation that organized market women, vendors, culinarias, and several other groups of women in various crafts. These unions and federations supported each other’s strikes, petitions, and activism. In the early 1920s, Bautista Saavedra sought to exploit this active labor movement. Saavedra’s discourse on workers opened up the possibilities for workers in new ways and extended their participation in the political system. This discourse was vague and limited to discussing Saavedra as a “revolutionary” leader and “ally” of the laboring class. In real terms, Saavedra was not willing to extend his “populist” stances beyond these vague promises. He decreed the eight-­hour work day and the six-­day work week. His coup, the discourse on workers, and labor legislation helped initiate the transformation of the political system. But as the unions and labor federations challenged Saavedra to back his pro-­worker discourse with action, Saavedra demonstrated he was more interested in intimidating his opponents than in instituting far-­reaching reforms. Workers used his government’s ambivalent stances to continue to organize labor unions and labor federations. Saavedra’s efforts to dictate the terms and extent of the labor legislation and place himself as the workers’ benevolent leader fit within the framework of controlling workers’ actions and expanding the role of workers as politically important without risking their independent actions. The private sector largely ignored many of Saavedra’s proposals, workers remained unprotected, and when they acted independently, he repressed the labor movement. Ultimately, the

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labor unions’ small numbers could not hope to gain control of a system that largely kept the elite minority in power by catering to itself and a small, middle-­ class urban sector. Yet the unions continued to organize and extend their influence within the city despite these obstacles. The Military Socialist experiment in Bolivia was the culmination of earlier processes in the 1920s, and it was also a re-­imagining of Bolivian society along a corporate model.70 The Military Socialists’ populist programs included the decrees establishing the eight-­hour work day, six-­day work week, restrictions on women and children’s labor, the legalization of unions, and amnesties for deserters. The labor laws were a reiteration of the laws that Saavedra passed in the 1920s. The amnesties for the military were part of a larger effort to bury the conflict between junior officers and the high command, and to avoid detailing army failures in the Chaco War. As Busch became impatient with the slow-­moving political apparatus, he pushed the government in radical directions. He closed the congress in 1938 and ruled by decree.71 Busch took increasingly radical steps; he passed decrees to enforce the mandatory unionization of all sectors of society.72 The Military Socialists analyzed Bolivia’s problems in terms of class dynamics and international capitalist exploitation.73 The consequences of the Chaco War severely hampered the traditional oligarchic parties. This led to alternating and unstable periods of leftist and populist military dictatorships and elite backlashes. The period between 1935 and 1952 witnessed the rise of the Military Socialism, Gualberto Villarroel’s populist-­style dictatorship, the reorganization of the oligarchy, military coups, rural and urban uprisings, the reinstallation of the traditional elite, and the triumph of the Revolution in 1952. In this context, labor activists were fundamental to the development of an alternative vision of the nation. The culinarias and market women emphasized their gainful employment and honest work, but in their oral histories, they also explicitly stressed the race-­based discrimination they faced. The importance of including all domestic laborers without regard to their racial identity or ability to speak Spanish was fundamental in the ethos of the culinarias’ union. In the FOL and FOF, the women stated that each one “could speak in Aymara, Spanish, or Quechua, [and therefore everyone] is much more apt to speak if she ha[s] the freedom to do it.”74 Employers and market inspectors, in contrast, scrutinized the “hygiene of their person and dress,” suggesting a class and racial component to the examinations.75 The women recalled how other household laborers warned them against speaking Aymara or Quechua while in the workplace for

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fear of discrimination and mistreatment.76 During their efforts to organize against the market fees and identity cards, the union members spoke in Aymara, Quechua, and Spanish. This evidence also demonstrates that language did not dictate rural or urban identities and it did not correlate to the indigenous label. Male and female union members were both workers and indigenous; people who identified as cholos or mestizos might speak mainly Aymara or Quechua. The interwoven histories of the FOF, the FOL, the construction workers’ union, and the culinarias’ union demonstrate that the women and men worked together and supported each other’s activism, strikes, and efforts for the recognition of rights. Studying the unions provides one avenue of understanding how labor activism emerged from within La Paz’s popular classes, and how these popular classes expanded elite discourse. The Chaco War did not completely reshape the political landscape. As we have seen, it was the oligarchic party system that suffered a decline. In addition to the de-­legitimation of the old party system, it is also clear that many of the politicians who would lead the leftist political surge and the MNR in the 1940s and 1950s gained invaluable experiences before and during the Chaco War. The urban unions’ continuous efforts before and after the Chaco War for the eight-­hour work day, social security legislation, and labor protections also call into question the thesis the Chaco War was a radical transformation of politics. The Chaco War’s most radical contribution was the rise of Military Socialism, the empowering of class discourses and class-­based organizations, and the stimulus it provided for rural-­to-urban migration.

Notes 1 La Calle, October 8, 1938 quoted in Ana Cecilia Wadsworth and Ineke Dibbits, Agitadoras de buen gusto: historia del Sindicato de Culinarias (1935–1958) (La Paz, Bolivia: TAHIPAMU, 1989). La Calle itself was closely tied to the reformist politicians and parties of the post-Chaco War era. 2 I believe it is the context of neoliberalism and the revalorization of the indigenous contributions to Bolivian society that shaped these memories. 3 Herbert S. Klein, Parties and Political Change in Bolivia, 1880–1952 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1969). 4 This discourse remained as a legacy of the 1899 Civil War and was a question Bolivia’s intellectual and political elites had grappled with since the inception of the nation in the nineteenth century. See E. Gabrielle Kuenzli, Acting Inca: National Belonging in Early Twentieth-Century Bolivia (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University

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Press, 2013). See especially Chapter 1; Rossana Barragán, “Indios, mujeres, y ciudadanos: legislación y ejercicio de la ciudadanía en Bolivia (siglo XIX)” (La Paz, Bolivia: Fundación Diálogo, 1999). 5 Boletín Municipal de La Paz, January 1921, 9. 6 The artisans in the city numbered a few hundred men at most, since the law stipulated that only those who owned their shops were eligible. 7 See, for example, James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998); Alan Dawley, Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). 8 Examples of nationalism, populism, and rejection of the liberal order in Latin America are numerous. See, for example, John Womack, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1970); Gerardo Renique, “Race, Region, and Nation: Sonora’s Anti-Chinese Racism and Mexico’s Post-Revolutionary Nationalism, 1920s–1930s,” in Nancy P. Appelbaum, Anne S. Macpherson, and Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt (eds), Race and Nation in Modern Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 211–237; Marisol de la Cadena, Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1919–1991 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000); Marisol de la Cadena, “From Race to Class: Insurgent Intellectuals de provincia in Peru, 1910–1970,” in Steve J. Stern, Shining and Other Paths: War and Society in Peru, 1980–1995 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 22–60. 9 Herbert S. Klein, A Concise History of Bolivia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Porfirio Díaz Machicao, Toro, Busch, Quintanilla, 1936–1940 (La Paz, Bolivia: Editorial “Juventud,” 1957). 10 Luis Antezana Ergueta, Historia secreta del Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario: Tomo 2 (La Paz, Bolivia: Librería Editorial “Juventud,” 1984); Herbert S. Klein, A Concise History of Bolivia; Edwin A. Möller, El Dios desnudo de mi conciencia revolucionaria: autobiografía y revolución nacional (La Paz, Bolivia: Plural Editores, 2001). 11 In this volume, Elizabeth Shesko examines the memories of POWs and the role of these memories in national narratives. 12 Klein, Parties and Political Change in Bolivia, 1880–1952, 120. 13 The similarities with Augusto B. Leguía in Peru are uncanny. Leguía and Saavedra used populist discourses, promulgated social reforms, and persecuted their enemies. Leguía seems to have been much more successful in his efforts to control Peruvian politics. The Peruvian and Bolivian cases point to a transformation of the political situation in each country. For an overview of the Peruvian case, see Thomas E.

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Skidmore and Peter H. Smith, Modern Latin America, 5th edn. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 192–202. 14 The Military Socialists were a political group of junior military officers who had served in the Chaco War in various capacities on both the front lines and the military high command. 15 Klein, Parties and Political Change in Bolivia, 133. 16 In the countryside, the 1921 Jesús de Machaca uprising and repression challenged the Saavedra government’s “pro-­indigenous” policies. In the mines, the 1923 Uncía (Oruro province) miners’ strike and its subsequent repression also called into question Saavedra’s commitment to Bolivia’s “laboring classes.” 17 “La Doctrina Radical del Doctor Saavedra,” El Hombre Libre (La Paz), November 12, 1920. 18 Klein, Parties and Political Change in Bolivia, 76. 19 Carlos Montenegro, Nacionalismo y coloniaje, su expresión histórica en la prensa de Bolivia (La Paz, Bolivia: Ediciones Autonomía, 1943); Luis Antezana Ergueta, Historia secreta del Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (La Paz, Bolivia: Librería Editorial “Juventud,” 1984); Jacobo Libermann Z., Bolivia: 10 años de revolución [1952–1962] (n.d., 1962); James Malloy, Bolivia: The Uncompleted Revolution (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970); James Dunkerley, Bolivia: Revolution and the Power of History in the Present: Essays (London: Institute for the Study of the Americas, 2007); Jerry W. Knudson, Bolivia, Press and Revolution, 1932–1964 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1986); Gregory J. Papp, The Bolivian MNR: Aspects of Nationalism, MA thesis, University of Akron, 1973; Robert J. Alexander and Eldon M. Parker, A History of Organized Labor in Bolivia (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2005). 20 Klein, Parties and Political Change in Bolivia, 76. 21 La Reforma (La Paz), January 16, 1921. 22 El Fígaro (La Paz), October 20, 1920. Bautista Saavedra replied to a letter from the Sociedad in which they backed his candidacy. He argued that the July coup was about maintaining the public order. 23 La Reforma, January 8, 1921. 24 La República (La Paz), March 28, 1921. 25 El Diario (La Paz), April 4, 1925; “El Tirano Saavedra,” La República (La Paz), April 23, 1925. 26 El Hombre Libre, January 27, 1920. 27 La República (La Paz), March 28, 1921. 28 Ibid. 29 El Hombre Libre, October 20, 1920. 30 Klein, Parties and Political Change in Bolivia. 31 The pollera is a petticoat skirt imported from Europe and adopted by mixed-­race women in La Paz and other Andean regions. This pollera is a marker of race and

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social position for women in the city. The famous chola wears a pollera proudly. See Barragán, ″Entre Polleras, ñañacas y lliqllas: los mestizos y cholas en la conformación de la tercera república’ ”; Weismantel, Cholas y Pishtacos; Seligmann, Peruvian Street Lives. 32 Taller de Historia Oral Andina. Los Constructores De La Ciudad: Tradiciones De Lucha y De Trabajo Del Sindicato Central De Constructores y Albañiles De La Paz, (1908–1980). La Paz: Taller de Historia Oral Andina, UMSA, 1986. 33 La República, April 26, 1925; THOA, Los Constructores de la ciudad, 36. 34 Ana Cecilia Wadsworth and Ineke Dibbits, Agitadoras de Buen Gusto: Historia del Sindicato de Culinarias (1935–1958) (La Paz, Bolivia: TAHIPAMU, 1989), 32. 35 Wadsworth and Dibbits, Agitadoras de Buen Gusto, 43. 36 THOA, Los Constructores de la ciudad, 38. 37 Wadsworth and Dibbits, Agitadoras de Buen Gusto, 43. 38 Wadsworth and Dibbits, Agitadoras de Buen Gusto. 39 Wadsworth and Dibbits, Agitadoras de Buen Gusto, 39. 40 Marcia Stephenson, Gender and Modernity in Bolivia (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1999). 41 Dibbits, Agitadoras de Buen Gusto; Seemin Quayum, María Luisa Soux, and Rossana Barragán, De terratenientes a amas de casa: mujeres de la élite de La Paz en la primera mitad del siglo XX (La Paz: Ministerio de Desarrollo Humano, Secretaría de Asuntos Étnicos, de Género y Generacionales, Subsecretaría de Asuntos de Género, 1997). 42 A. Alarcón and J. Ricardo, Bolivia en el primer centenario de su independencia (New York: The University Society, 1925), 367; Bolivia, Anuario de leyes, resoluciones legislativas, decretos, resoluciones supremas y circulares, 1926 (La Paz: [s.n.]), 1395–1396. 43 Wadsworth and Dibbits, Agitadoras de Buen Gusto, 62. 44 THOA, Los Constructores de la ciudad, 10. 45 THOA, Los Constructores de la ciudad, 6. 46 Klein in Parties and Political Change shows that literacy tests limited the electorate to a small proportion of the population. About 10 percent of the eligible population actually had voting rights; see 161 and 404–406. 47 THOA, Los Constructores de la ciudad, 6. 48 The city council tried repeatedly to impose strict measures to end “speculation” within the market for basic necessities. “Informe Al Concejo Muncipal” ALP/ Correspondencia. 1917–1937, Caja 256. 49 Several leftist groups, including a Bolivian Socialist Party and Tristán Marof ’s (Gustavo A. Navarro) group Grupo Tupac Amaru, Izquierda Bolivia, Kollosuyo, and Exilados, were politically active before the war but usually only from exile, and their following was limited to radical elements of the middle class, students, and intellectuals. They united during the war to help create the Partido Obrero

Union Activism in La Paz before and after the Chaco War

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Revolucionario (POR), efforts to use Marxist critiques and organize Marxist parties really only found a widespread audience and legitimacy after the Chaco War. 50 Between the 1920s and 1940s, the city doubled in size and the unions became more active, which in turn allowed the indigenous neighborhoods to organize associations. Workers in the city became more visible and influential in politics, placing La Paz at the forefront of political and social transformation. Carlos Villagómez, La Paz Imaginada (Bogotá, Colombia: Convenio Andrés Bello Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2007), 61. 51 Between 1935 and 1947, La Paz had several mayors, but among the most influential were Luis Nardín Rivas, Juan Luis Gutiérrez Granier, and Humberto Muñoz Cornejo. They oversaw the reorganization of the municipal departments under the Military Socialists. This reorganization created a stable cadre of experts filling the executive positions throughout the 1936 to 1950 period and enabled a whole series of urban reforms to take shape and come to fruition under the guidance of a stable municipal regime. Boletín Municipal de La Paz, August 1934, 87; Boletín Municipal de La Paz, November 1942, 56; Anuario de leyes, decretos y resoluciones supremas 1936 (La Paz, Bolivia: Imprentas Unidas, 1938), 683, and Anuario de leyes, decretos y resoluciones supremas 1940 (La Paz, Bolivia: Imprentas Unidas, 1941), 480; Eloy Salmón, La Paz en su IV centenario, 1548–1948 (La Paz, Bolivia: Comité Pro IV Centenario de la Fundación de la Paz, 1948). 52 Klein, Parties and Political Change in Bolivia. 53 Ibid., 226–227. 54 Ibid., 225. 55 Dibbits, Polleras libertarias: Federación Obrera Femenina, 1927–1965 (La Paz, Bolivia: TAHIPAMU/HISBOL, 1989), 4. 56 Wadsworth and Dibbits, Agitadoras de Buen Gusto, 121. 57 Boletín Municipal Acta y Estadísticas, April 1929, 13. 58 Ann Zulawski, Unequal Cures: Public Health and Political Change in Bolivia, 1900–1950 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 59 Wadsworth and Dibbits, Agitadoras de Buen Gusto, 114. 60 La Calle, October 16, 1936. 61 Ibid. 62 Wadsworth and Dibbits, Agitadoras de Buen Gusto. 63 Marcia Stephenson, Gender and Modernity in Andean Bolivia. 64 Dibbits, Polleras Libertarias, 9. 65 The city government’s efforts to force the culinarias, market and food vendors to purchase the identity cards and pay the market stall fees motivated the unions to organize other unions. The market unions repeatedly refused to submit to testing and pay the market fees. Dibbits, Polleras Libertarias, 11; Wadsworth and Dibbits, Agitadoras de Buen Gusto, 156.

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66 Dibbits, Polleras Libertarias, 16. 67 Ibid., 15. 68 Ibid., 12. 69 Despite these recollections, intra-­class and inter-­ethnic tensions were also part of daily life. It was not simply collaboration or conflict, but a mixture of both of these things in the city. Plenty of the participants also recalled conflicts between unions and insults among indigenous neighborhood residents. Denise Y. Arnold, Rossana Barragán, David Llanos, Carmen B. Loza, and Carmen Solís, ¿Indígenas u obreros?: la construcción política de identidades en el Altiplano boliviano (La Paz, Bolivia: UNIR, 2009); Rossana Barragán, “Mas allá de lo mestizo, mas allá de lo aymara: organización y representaciones de clase y etnicidad en La Paz,” América Latina Hoy: Revista De Ciencias Sociales 43 (2006): 107–130. 70 Michael L. Conniff, Populism in Latin America (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999); Michael L. Conniff, Urban Politics in Brazil: The Rise of Populism, 1925–1945 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981); Jeffrey L. Gould, “ ‘For an Organized Nicaragua’: Somoza and the Labour Movement, 1944–1948,” Journal of Latin American Studies 19, 2 (1987): 353–387; Danny James, Doña María’s Story: Life History, Memory, and Political Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Amelia M. Kiddle and María L. O. Muñoz, Populism in Twentieth Century Mexico: The Presidencies of Lázaro Cárdenas and Luis Echeverría (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010); John D. French, The Brazilian Workers’ ABC: Class Conflict and Alliances in Modern São Paulo (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Joel Wolfe, Working Women, Working Men: São Paulo and the Rise of Brazil’s Industrial Working Class, 1900–1955 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993). 71 Klein, Parties and Political Change in Bolivia, and Machicao, Toro, Busch, Quintanilla, 1936–1940. 72 For a detailed account of this national socialist-­inspired unionization drive and government representation efforts, see Herbert Klein and Carlos Montenegro, Frente al derecho del Estado el oro de la Standard Oil (La Paz, Bolivia: Editorial Trabajo, 1938). 73 Machicao, Toro, Busch, Quintanilla, 1936–1940. 74 Wadsworth and Dibbits, Agitadoras de Buen Gusto, 117. 75 Ibid., 38. 76 Ibid., 115.

4

Channeling Modernity: Nature, Patriotic Engineering, and the Chaco War Ben Nobbs-Thiessen

From 1931 to 1934, the engineer Miguel Rodríguez sent a series of letters to embattled Bolivian president Daniel Salamanca requesting manpower and funding for an act of patriotic engineering in the department of Santa Cruz in Bolivia’s eastern lowlands. Rodríguez envisioned a massive navigable canal that would re-­direct the nearby Río Grande away from its natural outlet in the Amazon, channeling it across the lowlands and into the Río de la Plata basin. He wrote in the midst of a growing conflict that eventually brought tens of thousands of Bolivian and Paraguayan troops into the region. Yet in 1934, Rodríguez still insisted, with calculated audacity, that “our fight in the Chaco is more against nature than against the adversary.”1 Rather than extend sovereignty to the distant Paraguay River, he contended that Bolivia should bring the river to the lowland city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra. His dream cast inland Santa Cruz as a maritime Atlantic port, at last giving land-­locked Bolivia its outlet to the sea. Engineering would negate the deleterious progress of the war and push forward the modernization of the eastern lowlands. Initially suggesting the need for utmost secrecy, a frustrated Rodríguez eventually published his plans for the canal in a La Paz newspaper and held a public conference in 1934, hoping to shame the government into action. Today, the Río Grande (also known as the Guapay) still follows its sinuous route to the Amazon. Originating in the mountains to the east of Cochabamba, it drops dramatically, from 3,693 meters at its source down to just over 400 meters as it flows to the south and then east of Santa Cruz de la Sierra toward the Gran Chaco. On the edge of the Chaco region, it turns sharply to the north and eventually to the northwest, forming a large horseshoe around the city before completing a journey of 1,438 kilometers at its confluence with the Río Ichilo. The Ichilo flows into the Río Mamoré, which in turn joins the Amazon, finally depositing the Río Grande’s waters in the Atlantic Ocean near Belém in Brazil.2

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The Río Grande has demonstrated its character as a river of extremes many times over the last century. Disastrous seasonal flood waters frequently inundate surrounding farms and cities. At other times, the section of the river closest to Santa Cruz is reduced to a series of small channels no more than a meter in depth that wind lazily through the sandbars. Central to patterns of settlement in this agricultural boom zone, the river divides the densely settled Integrated North on its west bank from the Agricultural Expansion Zone on its east. The river is a defining feature of the landscape of the Santa Cruz plains yet, had Rodríguez succeeded, it might have looked radically different and ended its journey to the sea almost 4,000 kilometers to the south. Promoted in the midst of total war, Rodríguez’s proposal may seem ridiculous to modern readers—a casualty or relic of a conflict that had already escalated to a point of no return by the time of his early petitions. Why salvage the history of this project-­that-never-­was?3 My goal with this chapter is not to indulge in

Map 3  Map of the proposed canal by Rodriguez. Source: Map has been adapted and modified; produced by Kmusser, Wikimedia Common, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0.

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counter-­factual history by embracing Rodríguez’s contention that, if only his strategy had been followed, the war would have turned out differently, or perhaps might never have been fought at all. Rather, I mean to suggest that what did not happen in this particular case—the construction of infrastructure in the hope of solving the nation’s problems in one fell swoop—is far more indicative of the subsequent history of the Bolivian lowlands than the protracted, bloody, but ultimately singular, conflict that did take place. While Rodríguez’s proposal was politely rebuffed at the time and promptly forgotten in the aftermath of war, this chapter aims to call attention to its archival traces and broader historical significance. Through a close reading of Rodríguez’s letters and his public conference of 1934, we acquire a framework for understanding the infrastructure petition as a unique type of modernist genre and gain an intimate perspective on the worldview of its chief architect, the técnico. In the midst of total war, Rodríguez might appear a quixotic, lone voice in the wilderness. But his faith in the transformative power of science to re-­shape landscape and generate development through infrastructure remains a central aspect of Latin American modernity. Intertwined with this vision was a malleable, fluid conception of territoriality, one that privileged connections, nodes, and transit over a militarized one that insisted upon sovereignty as seen through the military post and the border. In the post-Chaco War era, the Bolivian state embraced Rodríguez’s self-­aggrandizing claim that it would be the engineer and not the soldier who would save the nation.

The origin of a petition When Miguel Rodríguez sent his first letter to Daniel Salamanca, he was living just north of Buenos Aires, in Bernal. A cruceño (resident of Santa Cruz) by birth, Rodríguez had been working in Argentina since before the turn of the century. In that time, he had witnessed the dramatic transformation of Buenos Aires from a sleepy city on the muddy banks of the Río de la Plata into what he described as “the largest, most cosmopolitan and cultured city in South America.” He remembered with a touch of nostalgia a moment when anxious porteños had feared that the very streets would sink beneath the weight of the rapidly expanding tram network. Infrastructure and agricultural expansion drove Argentine growth in the decades surrounding the turn of the century. Rodríguez had taken part in each of those intertwined initiatives, some close to Buenos Aires and others further

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afield. His impressive resumé included a period as the chief engineer for a modern sugar mill in the Argentine Chaco. He had also managed a railway survey commission in Buenos Aires province. In the early twentieth century, Argentina offered its neighbors like Bolivia a particularly impressive model for development. Rodríguez made use of this reputation to bolster his professional credibility, frequently referencing his Argentine experience in letters he sent back home. Despite his lengthy time abroad, in Paraguay as well as Argentina, he maintained close connections with Bolivian officials, offering his expertise and services on projects such as the planned Cochabamba–Santa Cruz railway and the construction of a municipal water system in Santa Cruz. During this expatriate professional life, Rodríguez had thus worked on all sides of the contested Chaco.4 Written on December 12, 1931, Rodríguez’s first letter to Salamanca was a short, dramatic pitch in which he hoped to gain approval in principle for the canal project. He had planned to write earlier, first conceptualizing the canal in 1929, but was delayed by the overthrow of Hernando Siles in 1930 and a personal illness in 1931. The first letter expressed his ardent desire “to contribute to the best of my ability to the aggrandizement of my patria in the study and solution of its major problems.”5 Rodríguez assured Salamanca, whose administration was reeling from the international economic crisis and the accompanying collapse of tin prices, that what he had in mind would be “a sure and decisive step, and one requiring but a relatively small investment.” Rodríguez proceeded to reveal his simple solution to Bolivia’s woes. He would extract the Río Grande from the Amazon Basin and “toss” it into the Río de la Plata. He promised the president that if “the fundamental idea were to be accepted,” he would proceed with a more detailed explanation. Hinting at Bolivia’s international situation in the Chaco, Rodríguez signed off by reminding the Bolivian president of the urgency of the issue and the importance of beginning studies of the canal without delay or publicity—“for obvious reasons.” The response from Salamanca, while relatively prompt, was far from an unqualified endorsement.6 The idea was “worthy of study,” the president admitted, but the issues were “complex” and Rodríguez’s letter “general”; Salamanca ultimately encouraged him to flesh out the proposal. Within a few weeks, Rodríguez sent a detailed memoria but, failing to receive acknowledgement from Salamanca, he passed along a second copy through the politician Daniel Sánchez Bustamante. Rodríguez’s urgency comes across in a note dated February 21, 1932, in which he admits that he is “worked up about the project” and “respectfully insists” on an answer.7 This time, the response was definitive. Salamanca, who was cutting funding across the public sector, even as he sought

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new loans to finance the military build-­up in the Chaco, claimed that the project was likely to be more costly than budgeted and that in the current economic situation it was simply impossible. “Our poverty,” he confessed to Rodríguez, “is pitiful.” The project “would have to be put off for better times.”8 The rebuttal should have brought Rodríguez’s dream to an end. But ultimately, it was this rejection that firmly established, in his own mind, the conclusion that the canal was the only possible savior of the nation. He expressed this tautology in a letter to Julio A. Gutiérrez, the Minister of War, the following month, insisting that, “the solution to the question will be the canal and without the canal it will never be resolved.”9 Rodríguez remained convinced of this fact even as increasing militarization in the Chaco pushed infrastructural solutions to the crisis into the background.

“Extremely powerful arguments”—nature, labor, and land on the verge of war On March 21, 1932, Rodríguez posted another missive from Bernal in which he set out to refute, point by point, Salamanca’s objections. He first leaned on his own technical expertise and credibility, explaining to the president that the feasibility study was based on “absolutely exact data” which he had carefully collected, and precisely audited.10 “Thus it is not possible to doubt the feasibility of the canal without putting in doubt the exactitude of the premises or data that supported the argumentation.” From here, Rodríguez moved on to a cache of “extremely powerful arguments” (argumentos poderosísimos) that he had left out of his memoria in the interest of brevity. He offered new considerations on the natural advantages of the terrain, the possibility of enlisting manpower, and the spatial transformation of the project zone. Rodríguez presented the enlistment of these latent forces as a pragmatic response to an economy of scarcity. Drawing on his extensive professional experience in Argentina, he began by introducing a key factor known to many manipulators of landscape, namely, “the decisive action of the river’s own current.”11 The erosive action of the Río Grande would essentially dig the canal on its own if given a simple guide channel to follow. Rodríguez held this up as a natural law of canals and rivers, one that in the case at hand “will be the most powerful aid that we are going to exploit.” In 1898, while technical director of the Tacuarendí sugar mill in Santa Fe, Rodríguez faced the challenge of constructing a 27-kilometer-­long canal to bring water from the Paraná River. He worked with a group of ten men to divert the

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water from a nearby lake. The canal was progressively deepened and, within five years, small-­scale transport was possible from the mill to the Paraná. The results, Rodríguez was willing to admit, were not ideal, nor as uniform as those produced by machine excavation. Yet this natural solution constituted a “palliative” measure for a nation struggling with the effects of the international economic crisis.12 In the Río Grande, Rodríguez envisioned the latent powers of nature that could be employed in the realization of his canal. From there, he turned to the latent manpower of thousands of troops that had been mobilized along the contested Chaco frontier. What if we were to take a thousand men, he suggested, who could devote themselves to the canal work? Rodríguez felt that these troops would work “enthusiastically” while “maintaining their vigilance,” challenging the distinction between productive labor and military action.13 In the mid-­nineteenth century, Argentine statesman Juan Alberdi had argued that “to reduce a great mass of men to an eighth of its size in two hours by firing a cannon—that is the heroism of the past. In contrast, to multiply a small population in just a few days—that is the heroism of the modern statesman.”14 Rodríguez, who frequently drew comparisons with Argentina’s rapid rise, made a similar argument. The soldiers would “not simply [be] completing their function,” he claimed. They would “in fact effectively [be] making war, but a war without loss of blood, without guns or shooting, every penny invested in this project the equivalent of so many cannons whose bullets won’t be wasted on the ground. They will truly be the seeds of abundance and prosperity.”15 His articulation of a prominent space for the military in development initiatives responded to a transformation that was already underway in Bolivia by the early 1930s. Over the course of the twentieth century, military conscripts were increasingly employed in non-­martial labor.16 Rodríguez had been involved in prior discussions with Gutiérrez about the participation of the army in public works such as the Santa-Cruz–Cochabamba railway.17 He now suggested that conscripts might be given a bonus in the form of land in the canal zone. This idea of the soldier as future colonist was resurrected by the military-­socialist governments of Toro and Busch in the 1930s, and later by the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR) as it opened new colonization zones in the 1950s and 1960s. If this option failed, Rodríguez pointed to another untapped source of labor. The US was just beginning to enlist its citizens in diverse public works projects through the Civilian Conservation Corps. Without directly referencing that initiative, Rodríguez reminded Salamanca that Bolivia also had its “army of unemployed” which could be put to productive use.

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After nature and manpower, Rodríguez identified land as the third latent force that could be put to use in the realization of the canal. Since its creation in 1905, the Bolivian Ministry of Colonization and War had encouraged settlement in the Chaco.18 But with no access to a reliable market, few settlers had arrived and those that did had little incentive to make improvements to their property. Instead, they typically held land in extensive tracts reflecting its low value. According to Rodríguez, the opening of the canal would cause a revolution in this limited market by drastically increasing land prices. The nearly bankrupt Bolivian state could mortgage the land’s future value to finance the work and pay wages. Rodríguez ended this lengthy petition with a reflection that further demonstrated the strong link between infrastructure and economics. Salamanca had previously cautioned Rodríguez not to publish the canal’s specific location as it might jeopardize the military situation in the Chaco. The engineer in turn warned the president that publishing the location of the canal carried an additional risk: hoarding.19 The phenomenon was widespread, Rodríguez confirmed. He recalled a previous experience from 1910 while under contract to survey a rail-­ line in the province of Buenos Aires. Forming three separate commissions, he sent them out simultaneously to survey and stake out two false routes along with the true line. With this subterfuge he hoped to mislead the army of land speculators that typically followed such commissions. Publicity of the canal route was not simply a question of national security vis-à-­vis Paraguay, but also one of effectively managing the speculative boom that this new enterprise would surely ignite. Salamanca’s response to these “argumentos poderosísimos” appeared muted at first. He wrote in May, apologizing that other issues had kept his government busy. He recommended that in the interest of securing financing, Rodríguez publish the proposal, once again, “omitting of course, anything that might be prejudicial or inconvenient in our dispute with Paraguay.”20 He concluded with the hope that a better economic situation might permit the project’s realization. Yet scarcely a month later, Rodríguez received another message from Salamanca authorizing him to begin work.21 It appeared his desperate petition had succeeded. He left Buenos Aires in August, with the hope that he would be working in the Chaco by the end of the month. Yet as the border incidents around Laguna Pitiantuta/Chuquisaca escalated, Rodríguez found himself lost in the bureaucratic maze of a mobilizing La Paz. He spent the next nine months attempting to secure funding. During that time, his frustration mounted and he began to suspect that key functionaries were “deliberately placing obstacles” in his way. It was all more than he could have expected, he claimed, from “even the most morose and careless public administration.”22 In the interim, Bolivia and Paraguay went to war.

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Bolivia’s frustrating political and administrative lag was hardly a novel experience for Rodríguez. A decade earlier, contracted as chief engineer of the Cochabamba–Santa Cruz railway commission, Rodríguez returned to Bolivia with the laudable desire “to be useful to my country.” Immersed in a series of quixotic incidents on the stalled project, he repeatedly clashed with members of the commission. After being physically assaulted by a member of Congress who took objection to his opinions on the proposed route, Rodríguez tendered his resignation. He was persuaded to remain on the condition that he could fire the entire commission and return to Argentina to recruit a professional outfit. Unfortunately, this plan also foundered. Delayed for two months on a ship that ran short of fuel, Rodríguez and his Argentine team arrived in Bolivia to find the treasury bankrupt and the nation in the midst of a Republican coup. When the new Argentine engineers attempted to resign, Rodríguez refused their request. In retaliation, they approached the Ministry of Development and launched denunciations against him. After two years of fruitless commitment to the project and suffering the indignity of an official investigation, a disillusioned Rodríguez finally quit. His departure from the country was no easier than his tenure. Despite a presidential guarantee of safe conduct, he was arrested and detained at the Argentine border and then again at the Chilean border. Ultimately, it took him four months to secure his safe exit. In view of this disastrous earlier experience, it is surprising that Bolivian officials were willing to consider Rodríguez’s new proposal and that he had any wish to ever return to Bolivia.23 Whether motivated by his professed patriotism or by the scarcity of gainful employment due to the global depression, Rodríguez returned to Bolivia in the early 1930s harboring no illusions about the importance of a subtle approach to bureaucratic delay and the need to cultivate official alliances. Facing such obstacles in mid-1932, Rodríguez made use of his time in La Paz to work through other channels. In addition to his earlier contacts with Bustamante and Gutiérrez, he also introduced the canal project to Romulo Herrera, another member of the chamber of deputies and a fellow cruceño. On October 18, 1932, Herrera offered his written support agreeing that the project was “of transcendental importance and feasibility for the nation.”24

Nature’s tactician: Rodríguez’s wartime correspondence During that time, Rodríguez also continued to petition Salamanca. In October of 1932, following the defeat of the Bolivian army at Boquerón and with 20,000

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protesters in the streets of La Paz calling for Hans Kundt to be placed in command of Bolivian forces, he wrote another letter to the embattled president.25 It began full of despair and disillusionment with the military operations in the Chaco. Like many Bolivians, Rodríguez felt that the campaign had seemed “promising” at the outset. He claimed that he had greatly admired and respected the army, “thinking it among the best in South America,” while dismissing all negative reports. “But now we are seeing the truth,” he continued, “the plans adopted could not be worse.”26 For Rodríguez, such despair was not an end in itself. As he critiqued the disastrous military operations in the Chaco, the engineer also offered his own tactical alternative. He framed both his critique and his recommendation in terms of environmental awareness, an analytical vantage point to which he claimed privileged access. Tactics, Rodríguez advised Salamanca, should flow directly from nature. He felt that the military displayed a fundamental lack of spatial awareness. Citing his earlier letters to the Minister of War at length, Rodríguez demonstrated that he had warned Gutiérrez that “to arrive at the river does nothing but put us at the mercy of the enemy who can engage in hostilities without any risk on its part.” Access to the river, such a clear advantage for Paraguay in the conflict, simply threatened to trap the Bolivians far from their supply lines. “As your Excellency can see,” he continued, “I had foreseen our defeat, one that could have been avoided by taking simple measures.”27 These measures depended upon the local knowledge that the military lacked and Rodríguez had gained through his exhaustive study of the region. It was clear to him from his prior experience in Paraguay that their forces possessed a vastly superior knowledge of the “topographical and regional conditions of the theatre of war.” In juxtaposition with Andean Bolivians, who were profoundly out of place in an environment to which they “were not accustomed,” the Paraguayans were “truly machines of war well adapted to the environment in which they are active.”28 “I have painted a picture of what is going on in these painful moments for Bolivia,” wrote Rodríguez, “and on top of this picture I am going to lay out my plan to overcome the adverse factors I have mentioned.”29 Having established his superior knowledge of place, Rodríguez proceeded with his pitch for an alternative tactical campaign in the Chaco. The canal, which he had once conceived of as an alternative to war, he now re-­packaged as offering a more effective way to wage it. In direct contrast with the “disciplined style of attack” offered by General Kundt, he called for an immediate abandonment of all forward positions in the Chaco outside of the future canal zone. Over a period

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of three to four years, Bolivia was to wage a guerrilla-­style campaign, depleting Paraguayan resources while pulling closer to their own supply lines. While they waged this “war of resources,” all effort was to be made to complete the canal. Rodríguez claimed that within a year, and with two thousand men deployed in construction, the basic canal would be capable of carrying small armed craft into the Río Paraguay. A well-­supplied Bolivian force would march alongside the canal, taking Bahia Negra/Puerto Pacheco on its downstream march to Asunción, where it could force a negotiated settlement. He listed the distinct advantages of the plan. He proposed that guerrilla tactics would wear out the Paraguayans and provisioning would be made easier, with Santa Cruz capable of supplying the front directly. Furthermore, the negative effects of fighting within the interior of the Chaco would disappear as these spaces were radically altered by the canal’s presence. Locks on the canal would even be capable of releasing a devastating wall of water on Paraguayan forces and of flooding strategic points in the Chaco.30 Rodríguez argued that this dramatic act of patriotic engineering was the only way to save the nation. He claimed it was “not guided by petty interest, but only the supreme interest of the patria,” and he was “obligated as a Bolivian” to carry the project forward.31

Taming a “vagabond” river Rodríguez never received a reply to his last letter. While the course of events in 1933 seemed to bear out his critique of Bolivian military strategy in the Chaco, in early 1934 he was no closer to realizing his dream. With official channels unresponsive and bureaucratic delays still holding back his funding, Rodríguez shifted his initiative fully into the public sphere. His timing was apt. He had received positive coverage of his canal project in La Razón in late 1933.32 Recognitions of the harsh environmental conditions of the Chaco were also prominent in public discourse as Bolivian war casualties mounted. In late February, the newspaper El Tiempo informed readers of the challenge and cost of bringing a single soldier to the Chaco. Long before a recruit faced the enemy, he had to struggle with “the desert itself,” overcoming both nature and distance in the long trek to the front.33 The following month, the newspaper Última Hora carried advertisements for water filters.34 The supplier boasted that their product was the best available, capable of filtering up to two liters per hour. The company warned soldiers about the dangers of traveling to the water-­scarce zone without one. On March 25, the same newspaper began a series of articles on

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the environment of the Chaco. “All Bolivians have the obligation to know what comprises the territory of the Chaco Boreal,” the authors began, “[to know] what it is worth for its natural riches and why it was necessary to mobilize reserves to neutralize the conquistador action of the Paraguayans.” They promised that subsequent non-­technical articles would demonstrate the critical value of the Chaco for all Bolivians. The authors admitted that the region often presented the outsider with “a sad and desolate aspect,” but they insisted that “human force could convert the desert” into a region suitable for agriculture and ranching. “The defeatists and ignorant affirm that the southeast of the country is not worth a thing [no vale para nada],” to which they replied, “we say the Chaco is worth much, very much indeed [el Chaco vale mucho, vale muchísimo].”35 A subsequent article in the series dealt with the rainy season, the region’s unique southern gales [surazos] and, of course, the primordial rights of Bolivia to the Chaco.36 Individual readers were called on to know their Chaco and thus justify Bolivia’s territorial claims and human expenditure in the region. As Bolivians sought knowledge of a harsh but potentially valuable Chaco, engineers like Rodríguez were ideally positioned to respond. They possessed the requisite abilities to re-­make worthless landscapes into potentially productive ones through their technical expertise and intimate knowledge of the environment. Finding his private correspondence with Salamanca fruitless, Rodríguez decided to address the public directly. In March of 1934, he announced that he would hold a public conference on the canal. On the 23rd of that month, prominent paceños gathered in the biblioteca universitaria to listen to him speak. Both La Razón and Última Hora publicized the event, the former wishing him success. In attendance were the future president of Bolivia José Luiz Tejada, officials from the Ministry of Communication and Development, and men and women of the city’s elite social circles.37 The conference allowed Rodríguez to finally bring together the series of arguments that he had been developing in his private correspondence with Salamanca and other officials over the previous two and a half years. As La Razón would point out the following day, the engineer presented “numerous rationalizations of a patriotic and technical order.”38 In his speech, Rodríguez offered a model for patriotic engineering by integrating concepts of history and sovereignty, space and environmental change, and infrastructure and development into a seamless whole. “Bolivia was born to life independent,” he began. “Perfectly situated, it did not lack anything to develop all its activities and exploit its immense sources of wealth in complete freedom and independence.”39 Yet the narrative of decline, present in his previous letter to Salamanca, hijacked this utopian scene. Rodríguez

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reminded the assembled audience that the “cultural seed of Charcas [the colonial audiencia containing Bolivia],” which developed so “lushly” in neighboring Argentina, had “degenerated” at home. In Bolivia, from Potosí to the Beni he saw formerly rich regions that had passed from “grand epochs” and were now reduced to “ruins.” The process of ruination was most obvious to anyone looking at a map. “Where is our beautiful Pacific shore, our rubber fields of Acre?” he asked, “and now are we not letting fall torrents of blood” in another foolish attempt to extend sovereignty?40 Rodríguez played on his audience’s fears that their sovereign nation was to become nothing more than a dreaded “Polish partition.” “Countries like ours that have remained stationary or backwards in their progress are called to disappear by historical law,” he intoned. National and racial pessimism had strong roots in Bolivia’s intellectual tradition.41 Having played to that tradition, Rodríguez made a dramatic discursive shift toward the redemptive. “We will save Bolivia,” he claimed, by “look[ing] for the causes of its decadence in history and not attribute it to the action of our neighbors.”42 The key problem, he argued, was that the concept of the patria is for many a static one. They believe generally that the patria is only the territory, the soil and nothing more. They do not understand that . . . in the patria there are always two key elements, a dynamic and a static part. [In Bolivia] the dynamic part is very small in comparison with the static part, that is to say we have a very small population in comparison with our territory.43

Would the nation’s dynamic population continue to be sacrificed for a static notion of territorial sovereignty? This is where Rodríguez felt his key intervention lay. Territoriality need not be conceived in such a limiting way. Rather than take landscape as a given constraint within a series of sovereign borders, the engineer proposed that any landscape, even the most intractable of ones, as the Chaco often appeared to outside observers, was inherently malleable. A reconfiguration of those static elements, as he envisaged the canal and subsequent settlement to be, could fundamentally shift the terms of Bolivia’s conflicted sovereignty in the region. Like the Río Grande he proposed to divert, spatial relations in the Chaco were ultimately fluid. Nothing summarized this perspective better than Rodríguez’s provocative claim that “our fight in the Chaco is more against nature than against the adversary.”44 New possibilities provided by modern engineering informed Rodríguez’s perspective on the war.45 “In Bolivia there are mountains and big rivers,” he noted, “to throw a mountain on the enemy is impossible, but to divert

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[a river] and throw it at the enemy is not.” “We should thus engineer to bring ourselves closer” to the river.46 Rodríguez framed this massive intervention in the natural world as the embrace of a pre-­destined environmental logic. “We seek the alliance of nature,” he reminded his audience, “that which today is fully allied with our adversary.”47 Channeling the waters of the Río Grande was not a disruption to the natural order of things, but instead its fulfillment. The river had long caught his attention, he claimed, “as it flows in the opposite direction that it should,” emptying in the Amazon basin instead of the Río de la Plata. Rodríguez turned to the geological history of Santa Cruz to explain the cause of this aberration. Trapped between the Andes and the “new” mountain range of Chiquitos, the Río Grande had unwillingly abandoned its “twins,” the Pilcomayo and the Bermejo, on the edge of the Chaco, to head north into the Amazon. The river was a “natural aberration” that could easily be improved.48 As the Río Grande spread its sediment over the plains near Santa Cruz, the entire region was slowly increasing in elevation. Ultimately, the river would have overcome the obstacle imposed by the Chiquitos range and returned to the Río de la Plata of its own volition. The canal, he claimed, would simply speed up the process, returning the river to its natural outlet. As an artificial transformation of the original Río Grande, the canal would also become “second nature,” a dramatic improvement on a regional fluvial system characterized by its volatility.49 The Paraguay River, the territorial objective of the entire conflict, he characterized as a malarial backwater whose flood-­prone banks retarded the growth of industry. Rodríguez noted that the area near Corumbá was too irregular in depth to be suitable for anything other than small launches. The waters of upper Paraná, he scoffed, was good for little more than yerba mate, the favored drink of the Paraguayan enemy. Looking at those other rivers, Rodríguez told his audience, “we will see that none compares to ours [the future canal].”50 Commentators on Rodríguez’s project agreed on the need to tame the unruly nature of the Río Grande if it were ever to be truly useful. A newspaper article from December 16 of the previous year supported the project and reminded readers of a “well-­known fact.” The author conjured an image of the Río Grande near Santa Cruz. Here, the river’s width could fluctuate anywhere from one and a half to three kilometers, while hardly managing a depth of greater than one meter. “It is true,” the author continued, adopting an anthropomorphic tone, “that the Río Grande is a vagabond, diverging much from its own banks [emphasis added].” As such, it could hardly be left “in the state of complete savagery that

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one currently finds it.” It was up to the “action of man” to “domesticate” and “civilize” the river’s “capricious current.”51 The writer’s assertion that Santa Cruz was a place well endowed but by an imperfect nature recalls the writings of boosters that drove the incredible growth of Chicago in the previous century. They had also called for individuals to complete the “avenues of commerce that nature had left unfinished,” after which, “at once, and by magic” the relation between that frontier boom-­town and its agricultural hinterland would be fundamentally altered. “The arteries of trade will then be open,” such individuals claimed, “and commerce will flow freely from them.”52 Rodríguez shared this mystifying vision that all things—economic, social, and political—would flow from the harnessing of nature through the development of infrastructure. “This canal is going to be the lynchpin between the basins of the Paraguay and the Amazon,” he proclaimed, “it will be of transcendental importance for inter-­fluvial communication on the American continent and the perfection of navigable river trade will give an impulse to commercial activism with the exploitation of immense zones today little more than unexploited for their conditions of isolation.”53 He imagined the canal as the creation of an agricultural emporium at the heart of South America, with formerly marginal Santa Cruz at the center. Through the alliance, improvement, and channeling of nature, the city would become a modern metropolis.

The bible of the proyectista The public conference marked the end of Miguel Rodríguez’s attempt to push the project forward. While failing to achieve his dream of a navigable canal between Santa Cruz and the Paraguay River, he made sure that the traces of his project would survive and enter the archive. In the winter of 1934, he published a notebook of all his materials related to the canal, creating a public record of the project. Rodríguez wrote the prologue to this personal collection of correspondence while still stuck in La Paz in July. It offered him a chance to reflect on the “mental inertia” which he identified, far more than the war, as the chief barrier to the realization of his magnum opus. While the canal project seemed an ever-­diminishing possibility, Rodríguez imagined his prologue and the appended documents as a sort of bible for the future booster or planner (proyectista). He began the prologue with an abstraction. The road from ideation to actuation to realization was an uncertain one, Rodríguez counseled. New ideas

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experienced a “slow gestation” and faced considerable resistance “before they became axiomatic.” He took his first example from none less than the “doctrine of Christ” which, as he noted, was still in an evangelical phase nearly twenty centuries after its inception. Passing through other key ideas from Newton’s Universal Theory of Gravitation to Columbus’s spherical view of the Earth, he came to a treasured example and “one more related to our situation . . . the famous Dr. Lesseps.”54 The construction of the Suez Canal, Rodríguez noted, was greeted with widespread enthusiasm and support by the French public even though it had not been essential to the survival of the nation. Lesseps’ subsequent, catastrophic failure on the Isthmus of Panama, an example with greater temporal and spatial proximity to his own, went unmentioned. Rodríguez could not help but make Lesseps’ experience into a bitter comparison with Bolivia, where the “proyectista” was hardly rewarded and a project aimed at national survival and designed to “break the isolation” of the country was callously ignored. “It deserves better,” he felt, than “indifference and glacial abandonment.” In the following passages, as he continued to challenge “unshakeable axioms,” “mental laziness,” the “fear of the unknown,” “envy, egoism, baseness,” “petty interests,” and—in a nod to Santa Cruz’s struggles within the nation— “antagonistic regionalism,” Rodríguez was sketching out a particular type of individual.55 The proyectista, unshakeable in his overarching conception of the inherent value of the project, steadfast in the face of ignorance, was also capable of a subtle attack and retreat, of opportune action and patient persistence. It was a series of traits that could see any operation, from the construction of a road, the excavation of a canal, to the dredging of a swamp, through to its successful completion. His collection of letters, an exemplary failure in that regard, was one that he clearly hoped a future legion of visionary planners could learn from.

Genre exercises: interpreting the lessons of the Chaco War In the post-Chaco War period, former combatants drew on their wartime experiences in novels and memoirs. This “Generation of the Chaco” established the social realist account as a critical genre of Bolivian literary production. Historians like Herbert Klein note the proliferation of such texts in the 1930s and 1940s. “As much as any single form of political ideology or revolutionary propaganda,” Klein argues, “the realism of the Chaco War novel had a profound impact on the youth and intellectuals who made up the core of elite thought.”56 The authors of such “bitter proletarian novels” focused on “the cruelty of the war,

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the waste of lives, the hunger and thirst, the incompetence, treason and cowardice of the officer caste” and other similar themes.57 Without proposing a specific political model, they discredited the old regime, launching a critique that was carried forward by socialist and Marxist politicians. This bitter reading of the lessons of the Chaco War culminated, according to Bolivian historians, in the revolution of 1952.58 Yet a focus on the social realist novel as the defining genre of the Chaco, as Klein terms it, obscures another powerful and enduring genre that also drew its object lessons from the bitter experience of war. Just as Rodríguez hoped, the infrastructure petition, like the social realist novel, found a new discursive energy in the wake of the war. This was especially true in Santa Cruz. Also like the social realist novel, the genre rested its legitimacy on what petitioners took to be the incontrovertible meaning of the war. They insisted, and would find no objection among recent historiography, that mobility—or the lack thereof— defined both the cause and the course of the conflict. From there, they made the next logical step, insisting that mobility, more than social justice as the Generation of the Chaco claimed, would be its defining legacy. After serving in the war, the surveyor Sixto Montero Hoyos and his brother Constantino, an agronomist, returned to Santa Cruz where they carried out exploratory trips around the department. In 1936, Sixto published Territorios Ignorados, containing his brother’s posthumous account of a journey through remote areas of Santa Cruz.59 The Chaco War, Sixto told his audience, “had one definite benefit, it made us realize and understand our productive capacity.”60 Yet while Santa Cruz had briefly flowered as the breadbasket of the Bolivian army, Sixto noted that the region was once again being reduced to isolation. His brother Constantino agreed. The central problem Santa Cruz faced, he claimed, was one of “transport (vialidad).” He had traveled by foot, canoe, and mule for over three thousand kilometers around the department. “The distances in this zone are fantastic,” he wrote,“while the means of locomotion are incredibly scarce.”61 He drew on the same tropes of “abandonment” and decline that Rodríguez had favored. Like Rodríguez, he also negotiated between despair, urgency, and promise, claiming that he saw an incredibly rich potential in the region if only absent infrastructure were constructed by the state. In the post-­war period, petitions like these did not always fall on deaf ears. Bolivia eventually reached agreements with both Argentina and Brazil to construct railroads connecting Santa Cruz to the exterior. In the pursuit of regional integration with foreign markets, the surveyor and the engineer, capable of effecting this desired transformation, took on increasingly important roles.

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When Hans Grether, who had worked with Rodríguez on the Cochabamba– Santa Cruz railroad in 1920, was conducting a geographic survey of Bolivia and a study for the proposed rail connection to Brazil in the 1930s, the Santa Cruz newspaper El Oriente enthused “for once the nation’s fortunes have not been robbed by unscrupulous foreigners.”62 Noting the meticulous nature of Grether’s work, the newspaper marveled that “even the slightest line traced on the map by the engineer, represents a hundred thousand adversaries and adventures lived by them in the arduous exploration of zones at once unhealthy, others impassable, generally unknown and virgin.”63 As proxies for the absent state, individuals like Sixto, Constantino, and Grether represented a new form of masculinity that combined the heroic role of the explorer with the transformative “scientific nationalism” of the técnico.64 They exemplified the patriotic engineer, that future proyectista whom Rodríguez had addressed in his prologue. As the breathless praise in El Oriente suggests, members of the public sphere increasingly embraced patriotic engineering along with the conclusion that mobility was the true lesson of the Chaco War. This persisted even if the experience of state infrastructure projects was typically that of frustration, absence, and deferral. Ambitious but underfunded, the state often needed to be prodded into action. In 1936, Montero Hoyos insisted that the desire for a railroad connection with Brazil was neither capricious nor evidence of a separatist regional spirit. He believed the justification was logically infallible and a natural consequence of science, geology, and topography. While residents of Santa Cruz had spent much of the early twentieth century demanding rail links to the highlands and to neighboring countries, the Chaco War allowed them to provocatively recast these existing grievances.65 In the early 1940s, the Alcaldía Municipal (city hall) of Santa Cruz responded with alarm at the news that a proposed railroad connection with Argentina they had fought for since the turn of the century was being opposed by the rival southern Bolivian city of Tarija. They responded with a series of public meetings challenging an objection that they, like Rodríguez, identified as “antagonistic regionalism.” The tone of their protest, by turns wretched and resplendent, is emblematic of the genre, perfectly capturing the rhetorical strength of the infrastructure petition in the post-­war era. They admonished La Paz, making clear what they took the lessons of the Chaco War to be, “that the desert, the uncultivated bush, the absence of roads, railways and population” were a dire threat to the sovereignty of the nation.66 The alcadía charged the state with abandonment, invoking a pathetic image of their neighboring cities in the lowlands that would also benefit from the rail-­line: Yacuíba, “poor in buildings, without a hospital, struggling

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painfully for a miserable little school building and improving her streets with scarce local resources. Without running water, promised but never delivered, with poor access roads at either approach—without public buildings worthy of mention;” Villamontes, where the Paraguayan advance had heroically been halted in 1935, had been left standing like a poor, lonely “sentinel” on the edge of the Chaco.67 The alcaldía capped this affective plea of desperation and need with a sensual projection of that joyous future moment when the railroad would arrive in Santa Cruz. “With the Bolivian flag in front, our thoughts fixated on our heroes and our glories, we will gather around the sight of the arriving locomotive and salute it with the proud and vibrant cry of ‘Long live the immortal Bolivia! Hurray for the great Bolivia of the future!’ ” This moment of conception, they promised, would surely lead to “a new and brilliant stage in our development.”68

Conclusion In their association of infrastructure, spatial transformation, and national development, the Santa Cruz alcaldía echoed the final words of Rodríguez’s public conference of 1934 when he concluded that, with the construction of the canal, the nation would at last become a “homogenous unit of permanent strength” where the “Bolivian spirit should vibrate in unison [from] the plaza Murillo to the last farthest corners of our rich Orient and all should repeat always and without dismay, Viva Bolivia!”69 His broader vision, while unrealized in the midst of war, has had a long after-­life. Large-­scale military mobilization would not occur again in Latin America to this degree, but in the decades following the Chaco conflict, proyectismo would reign supreme. For the remainder of the twentieth century, and into the twenty-­first, Bolivia continued to embrace mass infrastructure projects as the solution to the nation’s “backwardness.” Successive governments running the gamut of ideologies and formations, from military socialism, oligarchy, revolutionary nationalism, military dictatorship, neoliberalism, and pluri-­ethnic socialism, maintained a consensus that national development hinged on lowland infrastructure. With each proposed project, whether it was Erwin Bohan’s Santa Cruz– Cochabamba highway, Belaúnde’s Carretera Marginal de la Selva, the Cuenca de la Plata conferences, the construction of Viru Viru Airport, or the World Bank’s Eastern Lowlands Project, proyectistas imagined Santa Cruz just as Rodríguez had—as an ideal central place, a node in an expanding network of national and international commerce.70 The completion of infrastructure projects like the

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Argentine and Brazilian railroads did not always meet the lofty expectations of modernization put forward by planners. Yet the infrastructural imperative, which held the project to be the ultimate expression of modernity, remained unshaken.71 The shortcomings of one initiative were quickly subsumed beneath the projections for the next. Modern infrastructure thus has a distinctly “sedimentary” character in Santa Cruz in which the ruins of former projects languish alongside others that are finished or still under construction.72 Those gradients are uniquely visible when traveling along the freshly paved, multi-­lane Inter-Oceanic corridor in Santa Cruz. This recently completed modern highway, known as the “Trans-­con,” runs from Santa Cruz to the Brazilian border and closely follows the proposed route of Rodríguez’s canal. The International Development Bank-­funded roadway also parallels the slow, uneven rail line to Brazil that was finally completed in the 1950s, and even then lacked a permanent bridge over the volatile and “vagabond” Río Grande. Just before the highway crosses over the Río Paraguay into Brazil, it passes by the wishfully named but languishing town of Puerto Suárez. Currently marooned on a shallow lagoon off the Paraguay River, at the turn of the century the city was billed as the future of Bolivian transport in the lowlands.73 The traces of these overlapping projects—rail, road, river— form a crude palimpsest to which this article seeks to add Rodríguez’s canal. Such ruins are ultimately the perfect sites to understand the productive dialectic between failure and development as a central, driving, albeit disturbing, force of modernity.

Notes 1 Miguel Rodríguez, El Canal Navegable de Santa Cruz al Rio Paraguay: Correspondencia Oficial y Conferencia Publica sobre ese Proyecto (La Paz, Bolivia: Urania, 1934), 44. 2 Jean Loup Guyot et al., Sediment Transport in the Rio Grande, an Andean River of the Bolivian Amazon Drainage Basin (AISH, 1994), http://www.documentation.ird.fr/ hor/fdi:41288. 3 Rodríguez’s pre-­war correspondence is briefly discussed in Gabriela Dalla Corte, “La construcción de la región del Gran Chaco más allá de la nación: mensuras, conflictos de límites e intereses empresariales (1870–1932),” in Estado, región y poder local en América Latina, siglos XIX-XX. Algunas miradas sobre el Estado, el poder y la participación política, ed. Pilar García Jordán (Barcelona: Publicacions i Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona, 2008), 188–189.

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4 Rodríguez, 10, 12. 5 Rodríguez, 5. 6 Ibid., 6. 7 Ibid., 6–7. 8 Ibid., 7. 9 Ibid., 23 10 Ibid., 9. 11 Ibid. Hugh Raffles writes that the beguiling illusion of permanence in the “pristine” Amazon River basin hides continuous alterations of nature. Small-­scale human interventions, bolstered by powerful tidal and flood movements, are quickly transformed into access canals, fishing and hunting habitats, and cultivation zones: In Amazonia: A Natural History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). 12 Rodríguez, 10. 13 Ibid. 14 Juan Alberdi, “Immigration as a Means of Progress,” in The Argentina Reader: History, Culture, Politics, ed. Gabriela Nouzeilles and Graciela Montaldo (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 100–101. 15 Rodríguez, 11. 16 Elizabeth Shesko, “Constructing Roads, Washing Feet, and Cutting Cane for the ‘Patria’: Building Bolivia with Military Labor, 1900–1975,” International Labor and Working-Class History, 80 (2011): 6–28. 17 Rodríguez, 11. 18 See Erick Langer, Expecting Pears from an Elm Tree: Franciscan Missions on the Chiriguano Frontier in the Heart of South America, 1830–1949 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). 19 Rodríguez, 12. 20 Ibid., 13. 21 Rodríguez, 24. 22 Ibid. 23 In his early correspondence with Salamanca, Rodríguez presented the president and the Ministry of Development with a detailed re-­counting of every aspect of the failed 1918 venture, thereby exonerating himself of any wrong-­doing. He later published these documents in La Paz as Informe que presenta al ministerio de foment el ex-­ingeniero director de la commission de studio del ferrocarríl Cochabamba-Santa Cruz, correspondiente a la rendición final de cuentas del señor Miguel Rodríguez (La Paz, Bolivia: Escuela Tip. Salesiana, 1934). 24 Herrera let Rodríguez know that he had made a formal solicitation for further information from the minister of Fomento y Comunicaciones within the Chamber of Deputies. A copy of Herrera’s December 17 Petition de Informe, no. 52, exists in the chamber’s archive.

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25 Herbert S. Klein, Bolivia: The Evolution of a Multi-Ethnic Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 190. 26 Rodríguez, 13. 27 Rodríguez, 15. 28 Ibid. Rodríguez presaged subsequent historians of the Chaco War, who also tend to privilege environmental factors in the conflict. See Bruce W. Farcau, The Chaco War: Bolivia and Paraguay, 1932–1935 (Westport, CO: Praeger, 1996), which describes a landscape, “populated by an unsavory horde of characters: scorpions, venomous snakes, huge spiders, voracious mosquitoes, and unstoppable columns of ants.” Farcau, 5. Military historians are not alone in reading the conflict in explicitly environmental terms. Geographer Valerie Fifer, Bolivia: Land, Location, and Politics since 1825 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 212, argues that “the location and physical conditions of the Chaco were to combine as the most powerful protagonist [against Bolivia].” Ann Zulawski, Unequal Cures: Public Health and Political Change in Bolivia, 1900–1950 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), also centers on environmental factors during the conflict and the social inequalities that exacerbated them. 29 Rodríguez, 16. 30 Ibid., 17. 31 Ibid., 19. 32 “Canal Entre Los Rios Grande y Paraguay: Observaciones Inconsistentes,” La Razón, December 16, 1933. 33 “Lo que cuesta cada soldado boliviano puesto en el Chaco,” El Tiempo, February 24, 1934. 34 José Flores, “Acaban de llegar los conocidos filtros de campaña,” Última Hora, March 12, 1934. 35 “Innegable importancia que bajo el punto de vista economic tiene el territorio hoy disputado entre Bolivia y Paraguay,” Última Hora, March 25, 1934. 36 “Importancia Geografica del Chaco Boreal,” Última Hora, March 28, 1934. 37 “La Conferencia del Ing. M. Rodríguez,” La Razón, March 24, 1934. 38 Ibid. 39 Rodríguez, 24. 40 Ibid., 25. 41 The classic example is Alcides Argüedas, Pueblo Enfermo (Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Ercilla, 1937). 42 Rodríguez, 27. 43 Ibid., 29. 44 Ibid., 44. 45 Even before the conflict, he claimed, he had always sought “natural” alternatives to military conflict in the “immense natural resources that Bolivia has at its disposal.” Ibid.

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46 Ibid., 31. 47 Ibid., 44. 48 Ibid., 31. 49 William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), xix, discusses the Marxist and Hegelian concept of first and second nature and its relation to environmental history, second being “the artificial nature that people erect atop first nature.” 50 Rodríguez, 41. 51 “Canal entre los Rios Grande y Paraguay,” La Razón, December 16, 1933. 52 Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis, 63. 53 Rodríguez, 39. 54 Rodríguez, 1–2. 55 Ibid., 3–4. 56 Klein, 195–196. 57 Ibid. 58 Zulawski, 83–84. Robert J. Alexander and Eldon M. Parker, A History of Organized Labor in Bolivia (Westport, CO: Praeger, 2005), 1–2. 59 Sixto Montero Hoyos and Constantino Montero Hoyos, Territorios ignorados: sobre una visita a la serranía aurífera de San Simón y un estudio agropecuario de las provincias de Nũflo de Chávez y Velasco del ingeniero Constantino Montero Hoyos (Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia: Nicolás Ortíz, 1936). Sixto published Constantino’s account posthumously as his brother had been killed in the course of his voyages. 60 Montero Hoyos, under “Nota Liminar” in Territorios Ignorados. 61 Constantino Montero Hoyos, “Estudio agropecuario de las provincias de Nũflo de Chávez y Velasco,” in Territorios Ignorados, 59. 62 Mario Hollweg, Alemanes en el Oriente boliviano: Su aporte a desarrollo de Bolivia. 2, 1918–1945 (Santa Cruz, Bolivia: Sirena, 1995), 527–528. 63 Ibid. 64 Similar developments were underway on the Paraguayan side of the Chaco. For a discussion of “scientific nationalism,” see Bridget María Chesterton, The Grandchildren of Solano López: Frontier and Nation in Paraguay, 1904–1936 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013). 65 For a discussion of the “Ferrocarríl o Nada” movement of 1920, see Paula Peña Hasbún, La permanente construcción de lo cruceño: un estudio sobre la identidad en Santa Cruz de la Sierra (La Paz, Bolivia: PIEB, 2003). 66 Comité Pro-Defensa Intereses Cruceños, Argentina y Bolivia y su Vinculación Ferroviaria efectiva en el Oriente (La Paz, Bolivia: Artistica, 1942), 4. 67 Ibid., 5. 68 Ibid., 4. 69 Rodríguez, 45.

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70 Fifer, 262, gives an example from the late 1960s, during the “Cuenca de la Plata” conferences between Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina, and Uruguay, when Bolivia framed itself as the “keystone” of regional integration. 71 In Fernando Coronil’s The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 167, the author argues similarly that, “state leaders treated some of the most visible manifestations of modernity as the source of modern society’s progress rather than as their outcome.” 72 Gastón Gordillo uses the concept of “sedimentation” in “Ships Stranded in the Forest: Debris of Progress on a Phantom River,” Current Anthropology 52, 2 (2011): 159, to describe the cumulative process of ruination and re-­production in the Gran Chaco. Gordillo argues that ruins of former infrastructure projects are central to understanding the incomplete process of modernization in the region. 73 With the discovery of large mineral deposits in the nearby Cerro Mutún, proyectistas have continued to urge the revival of this port. Antonio Bazoberry Q., Canal Fluvial Nuevo Puerto Suárez (La Paz, Bolivia: Plural Editores, 2005).

5

Paraguay Guazú: Big Paraguay, Carlos Fiebrig, and the Botanical Garden as a Launching Point for Paraguayan Nationalism Bridget María Chesterton and Thilo F. Papacek

In the early twentieth century, the Minister of Education, and later President of Paraguay, Manuel Franco hired Carl Fiebrig, a German botanist who had immigrated to Paraguay, to build the new Botanical Garden in Asunción. The land for the garden sat on the edge of the city in a neighborhood known as Santisima Trinidad. At the time, the only buildings on the site were the former home of Carlos Antonio López, President of Paraguay (1844–1862), a few homes whose residents would soon be forced off the property, and an agricultural school. It was up to Fiebrig to construct and design the new park that would contain a zoo, an experimental garden, a museum, and a port. Marked with the words “Jardín Botánico,” the port became one of the most important staging areas for Paraguayan military and scientific inroads into the Chaco frontier. Fiebrig participated in larger national efforts to secure Paraguayan lands in the far west of Paraguay and an effort to integrate all of the “Bolivian” lowlands and regions of Argentina into a larger Paraguayan identity: a “Paraguay guazú,” or big Paraguay. Using the port inside the garden, Fiebrig organized espionage missions, hoped to plant the seeds of revolt among Bolivian prisoners of war when they were returned to the Bolivian lowlands, and helped secure a new home for Chaco Indians under the guidance of Juan Belaieff. Reconstructing the life and work of Fiebrig has been hampered by a dearth of written sources. Significantly, Spanish-­language sources about his life are limited and, as a result, Paraguayan historians have paid little attention to this German-­ speaking scientist.1 Nonetheless, it is possible to re-­construct his life and efforts in Asunción using the testimony of his daughter, Ortrun Fiebrig, who narrated her father’s life to Alden Dittman at the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut (IAI) in Berlin in lengthy correspondence in the 1980s, the photographs she donated to the IAI,

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Figure 2  Home of Carlos Antonio López and Carlos Fiebrig in the Botanical Garden, Asunción, Paraguay. Source: Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut, Berlin, Germany. (Hereafter referred to as “IAI.”)

and both his German- and Spanish-­language scientific publications. Taken together, it is possible to understand the lasting influence of Fiebrig’s efforts in creating ideas about space and the nation. Fiebrig accomplished these tasks at a critical moment in Paraguayan history: the nation was preparing for years of war over a dispute concerning the Chaco frontier against a larger and better-­prepared Bolivian military.2 His work is fundamental to understanding how Paraguayans understood their nation, and it also gave the Paraguayan government and military a springboard from which to launch their military campaigns. Historians of Paraguay have begun to reconstruct the lives of various foreign actors in Paraguay, including the many British engineers who helped shape cultural and social institutions there prior to the War of the Triple Alliance. This

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Figure 3  Port of the Botanical Garden, Asunción, Paraguay. Source: IAI.

emerging history clearly demonstrates that Paraguay was not isolated and marginalized from European ideas and culture, as was often highlighted in earlier literature.3 Significantly, works on twentieth-­century actors including Max Schmidt, Andrés Barbero, Moisés Bertoni, and Juan Belaieff have drawn scholarly attention to the fact that foreigners have profoundly influenced elite Paraguayan ideas about nationalism, natural and physical sciences, and military affairs.4 The work of Fiebrig, however, extends beyond influencing Paraguayan elites. His work demonstrates that foreigners profoundly shaped the physical layout of Asunción, specifically the large and popular Botanical Garden and, perhaps even more importantly, how non-­elite actors experienced their country and its biodiversity.

A German botanist Carl Fiebrig was born in Hamburg, Germany, on May 25, 1869. He was the son of the merchant Gustav Friedrich Fiebrig and his wife Marie Theodore Mathilde Sauerland.5 According to Ortrun Fiebrig, her father was home schooled for the

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first few years of his life. From an early age, Fiebrig showed a marked interest in natural science that resulted in his acceptance of an apprenticeship at a farming estate. Subsequently, he attended a gymnasium, a preparatory high school, in Berlin. However, soon after his arrival, he contracted tuberculosis. The illness haunted him for the rest of his life and determined much of his professional career. Due to this chronic condition, Fiebrig was forced to discontinue his studies and take refuge in a German sanatorium. Eager to continue his studies, he enrolled at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität (formerly known as the University of Berlin and, since 1949, as Humboldt University). During his brief enrollment at this prestigious institution, he became acquainted with Adolf Engler, a professor of botany and one of the world’s leading botanists during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Engler was quite fond of Fiebrig and became his mentor. His illness continued to plague him, however, and again he had to abandon this educational endeavor. In the face of these setbacks to his formal education, Fiebrig never stopped reading and became a self-­educated man. He always remained an autodidact, but despite this, and possibly because of it, he was able to build a splendid career as a botanist and scientific researcher.6 While Fiebrig was on a recuperative visit to the Azores and the Canary Islands in 1901 or 1902, he began collecting plants for the Royal Museum in Berlin that at the time was under the direction of his mentor, Adolf Engler.7 Always seeking warm, dry climates because of his medical condition, Fiebrig went on an expedition to South America in 1902 through 1904. During this sojourn, he collected many plants and published a few articles.8 Although the exact date of his emigration remains altogether unclear, in approximately 1907 he moved to South America. Fiebrig had not originally intended to make Paraguay his home. Rather, he had hoped to find employment in Bolivia. He had high hopes that the climate of lowland Bolivia would aid in his recovery from tuberculosis. After failing to secure work in Bolivia, however, he headed to Paraguay. Once there, he settled in the closed German community of San Bernardino, near Asunción.9 It was from San Bernardino that Fiebrig wrote a small monograph on the geography of plants in Bolivia, which was published in 1911 in Leipzig.10 Eventually, he was able to put his skills as a botanist to work in the building and planning of the Botanical Garden in Asunción. In 1910, according to his curriculum vitae, he received a job offer from the German government to administer a research facility in German East Africa (Deutsch-Ostafrika). Eager to keep the talented Fiebrig in Paraguay—and Fiebrig eager to stay—Franco made the German botanist an offer that was too good to turn down. He was granted a

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professorship at the Medical University in Asunción, despite the fact that Fiebrig did not hold any type of university degree. Moreover, the Minister of Education offered Fiebrig the opportunity to build and administer the new Botanical Garden in Asunción. This latter assignment was decisive for Fiebrig to remain in Paraguay, as it corresponded to both his personal and professional ambitions.11 Fiebrig spent the next twenty years researching and publishing in Paraguay. Fiebrig quickly established himself in the larger intellectual community in Asunción, becoming friends with many of Paraguay’s leading scientific figures, including Professor Max Schmidt, a well-­known figure in the scientific and ethnographic community in Asunción. Schmidt, the founder of the Scientific Society in Asunción and the journal of the same name, quickly became a close friend and colleague. Photographic evidence shows a young Schmidt relaxing

Figure 4  Max Schmidt at the Botanical Garden, Asunción, Paraguay. Source: IAI.

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and enjoying his time at the Botanical Garden. Significantly, Schmidt also published Fiebrig’s scientific studies in the Journal of the Scientific Society of Paraguay. After the death, in 1920, of Fiebrig’s first wife, Anna Gertz, he married Ingeborg Fick (1893–1973) in 1925. Fick received her education as one of the first female students of the German Colonial School, Deutsche Kolonialschule, in Witzenhausen, an institution that prepared would-­be colonists for their endeavors in the German colonies in Africa and/or the Pacific.12 The school actively helped to direct German colonial policy.13 Ingeborg put her education in tropical agriculture to good use in the Botanical Garden in Asunción. She assisted her husband in maintaining several experimental gardens on the site, and she remained his scientific aide for the rest of his life.14 Beyond his professional contacts in Asunción, Fiebrig’s family also seemed to have adopted Paraguayan customs and habits. Images collected in the family album show Fiebrig’s second wife photographed some time after the date of their marriage in a dress with complicated needlework typical of Paraguayan handiwork (ao po’i). She was also photographed in their country home of Bernal-­ cué under a collection of artifacts from the indigenous population of the Chaco. The Fiebrigs’ home in the Botanical Garden also demonstrates how their private space and their work on Paraguayan plants and animals overlap. In one image of the home, one can see Fiebrig’s laboratory, but, through the open door, the living room of the house is clearly visible. The space used by the Fiebrig family demonstrates that work and private life clearly coincided. His scientific investigations in tropical agriculture opened doors for Fiebrig to high administrative posts in Paraguay. His efforts on the experimental farms on the grounds of the Botanical Garden are well documented, and in some surviving photographs images of citrus fruits and other agricultural commodities including textile plants are highlighted. Because of this work, he was named to head the Ministry of Agriculture in 1934, a position he held until 1936.15 He thus maintained tight connections to the Liberal political elite of Paraguay—some of whom, as we will see, were fundamental in supplying the natural collections to the garden.

The “Yboty-Rendá” As already mentioned, the Botanical Garden was constructed on the personal estates of the former Paraguayan President Carlos Antonio López at the behest of the Minister of Education, Manuel Franco.16 The first and only director of the

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school was the famous naturalist Moisés Bertoni. The school closed in 1907. When the Fiebrigs moved into the very residence of the infamous Paraguayan dictator, only a “model farm” was operational on the property.17 The ground floor of the home was occupied by the directorate of the garden, as well as some laboratories. Fiebrig reserved the top floor for himself and his family. He lived there with Anna Gertz until her death. She played a significant role in the founding of the Botanical Garden of Asunción. For example, the flower garden that still welcomes visitors at the main entrance is of her design.18 After her death, he re-Christened himself Carlos Fiebrig Gertz. This Hispanicized name change marks a shift in identity for the German botanist. Carlos Fiebrig Gertz began to identify more closely with his new homeland and his late wife. He was naturalized as a Paraguayan citizen and began learning Guaraní.19 He gave the garden the name Yboty-Rendá (“flower garden” in Guaraní).20 In this way, he inserted himself in the new nationalist movement in Paraguay that sought to enhance the status of the cultural and linguistic legacy of the Guaraní Indians.21 Moreover, most of the plants he described scientifically for the first time he named in Gertz’s honor.22 The garden was opened to the public in 1914 and spanned over six hundred hectares. Significantly for this chapter, it was equipped with a port for ships traveling on the Paraguay River.23 By the late 1910s, the garden was a popular destination for asuncenos looking to escape the heat of tropical Asunción. In many ways, the garden became a miniaturized version of Paraguay. Fiebrig strived to represent all climate zones and soil formations and their respective flora and fauna. The garden was designed to become a botanical model of the whole country, including the Chaco, a region that at the time was hotly contested by Bolivia. In this way, the garden became a place where the entirety of the nation was represented to asuncenos, highlighting the Paraguayan rights over the region. This type of nationalism was consistent with the type of work being done by Paraguayan scientific elites of the time. For example, Dr Luis Migone’s work on climate and nosography (disease classification) in the Journal of the Scientific Society of Paraguay included a map of the nation that showed the contested Chaco frontier.24 In the end, the garden reflected ideas about a “Paraguay guazú” in a tangible way that flat maps could not. Moreover, as the masses strolled through the garden, the work of Fiebrig reached out to them in a popular way that scientific journals could never hope to achieve. Fiebrig conceptualized the garden as a representational space of the Paraguayan nation.25 By constructing the Botanical Garden in this way, Fiebrig and his first wife, Anna Gertz, created an expanse that represented the Paraguayan national space, as

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clearly demonstrated in the motto of the garden: “Consecrated to the study of the natural character of Paraguay: Marvel at the smaller to know the larger.” Like Baroque and Rococo gardens of European palaces designed to represent the plenitude of power of absolute monarchs, Fiebrig conceptualized the Botanical Garden as a representation of the nationalist and popular Paraguay. This Paraguay, as imagined by Fiebrig, was inhabited by the soldier-­agriculturalists who had given their lives defending the nation during the War of the Triple Alliance and would soon defend the nation again in the upcoming Chaco War. The fact that the garden soon became a popular destination for Paraguayans of all social classes highlights this interpretation. The nationalist intention in the building of the garden becomes apparent in view of the efforts of Anna Gertz’s nephew, who had followed his aunt to Paraguay and recreated the legendary fortress of Humaitá that had withstood months of Allied bombardment during the War of the Triple Alliance.26 Fiebrig’s design divided the garden into four separate areas, each corresponding to different geographic regions in Paraguay: the región central (central region), región selvatica (woodlands region), región noreste (northeast region), and the Chaco. In this way, Fiebrig divided the Paraguayan national territory into categories reflecting his botanical findings. The central region was represented in the entrance to the garden and its main buildings. There, he planted a variety of fruit orchards. The woodlands simply made use of the forest that already existed

Figure 5  “Región Chacoana (vecindad del Rio) laguna con casa lacustre, para el laboratorio biológico.” Botanical Garden, Asunción, Paraguay. Source: IAI.

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on the lands occupied by the garden. But in order to make it “more complete,” he planted yerba mate (Paraguayan green tea), sweet oranges, as well as other plants he collected during his excursions into the Paraguayan countryside. The northeast region featured pastures. This was the section where the agricultural school was located and where cattle could be found grazing. The largest section of the garden, however, was the Chaco section. With approximately three hundred hectares (about one half of the total space in the garden), it spanned 2,300 meters along the banks of the Paraguay River. The garden’s port was located in this section along with a restaurant and pergola, which invited visitors to find respite from Asunción’s unrelenting heat and humidity.27 From this section of the garden, asuncenos could see to the other side of the river and the Chaco itself. In this way, Fiebrig brought a slice of the Chaco to eastern Paraguay. Fiebrig produced a miniaturized virtual representation of the nation, and thus confirmed nationalist ideas about the country that helped forge a narrative about “Paraguayan” space. The Botanical Garden was a way of “mapping the nation” through the use of physical space in the capital. As noted by scholars such as Thongchai Winichajul, representations of space are an essential tool for the production of a national space as they define the power and limits of governmental authority.28 As a result, the Botanical Garden was designed as a place of rest and relaxation, while visitors experienced pride in the biological diversity of the nation. In the end, the Botanical Garden gave Paraguay’s soldier-­agriculturalists important knowledge about the nation even if they were illiterate. However, space in the Botanical Garden was also designed to extend beyond the national borders of early twentieth century Paraguay. It contained various sections that highlighted the diverse geographic and political realities of the old Vice-Royalty of the Rio de la Plata. For example, photographic records highlight a section entitled the “Argentina Section.” Including the larger colonial Rio de la Plata in the Botanical Garden emphasized an understanding that Paraguay extends beyond the borders imposed on the country by Brazil and Argentina at the end of the War of the Triple Alliance and, more significantly, highlighted the growing concern for the Chaco in Paraguayan identity. These larger ideas about what composed Paraguayan space were fundamental to creating a sense of the “guazú” nation in the years leading up to the Chaco War. With these ideas in mind, Fiebrig chose to give his garden a Guaraní name to highlight the importance of the language in the country. Significantly, Fiebrig wrote an article in 1923 that notes the importance of the Guaraní language in the understanding of the Paraguay guazú. As he notes:

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. . . we must not forget, however, that Guarany [sic] is not only actually spoken in Paraguay, but is a language, spread originally over the larger part of South America; that means that identifying vegetable species of Paraguay will only cover a small part of what we call Guarany [sic] botanical dictionary, being always aware of the ethnic and phylogenic equivalent of the Tupy [sic] and Guarany [sic] languages (the difference of which may perhaps be compared with the difference between Spanish and Portuguese those two sister languagos [sic] spooken [sic] today in the original Guarany [sic] territories.)29

He then continues to list the words in the Guaraní language used throughout the region and gives a brief explanation as to how the Guaraní language works. This is particularly interesting because Fiebrig notes that “he does not know this language [Guaraní] sufficiently well to speak it.”30 As a result, the work is highly dependent on the research of Bertoni; but nonetheless, it is clear that Fiebrig is attempting to make sense of the indigenous language and give meaning to the work being done in the garden. Both spatially and linguistically, Fiebrig is contemplating the Paraguay guazú.

Figure 6  “Jardín Botánico: sección Argentina caminito apepuí,” Botanical Garden, Asunción, Paraguay. Source: IAI.

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Figure 7  The zoo at the Botanical Garden, with “deer” and “ostrich,” Asunción, Paraguay. Source: IAI.

The garden also contained a zoo that highlighted the fauna of Paraguay, and photographic evidence that documents these efforts survives. Included in the zoo were native venado (deer) and a rhea, a large South American flightless bird.31 The “exotic”—African, European, or North American—animals were not included in the inventory of the zoo, probably due to limited funding. Birds also were important in the zoo, particularly native species. Large cages for birds were constructed for public viewing. Most biological specimens, including animals, were donations from Paraguay’s small but influential social, cultural, and political elite, including President Eduardo Schaerer.32

The Botanical Garden and Bolivian prisoners of war During the war, about two hundred Bolivian prisoners of war (POWs) from the Bolivian lowlands were interned in the Botanical Garden under the protection of Fiebrig.33 These, however, were not ordinary POWs; they were a privileged few. They were permitted to walk around with relative freedom and were housed

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in private homes.34 While giving them a relatively comfortable place to live during the war, Fiebrig undertook anthropological investigations of these POWs. These studies were based on prevailing racial theories developed in Germany.35 According to his wife Ingeborg, Fiebrig intended to show the fundamental differences between indigenous people from the Bolivian highlands and those from the lowlands. Although he had intended to publish a short article on the topic, the project never came to fruition.36 Nonetheless, it is possible to reconstruct this deeply nationalistic project eagerly embraced by Fiebrig by outlining how both lowland Bolivians and Paraguayan nationalists believed strongly that the Bolivian lowlands were culturally, socially, and linguistically tied to a greater “Paraguay guazú.” Had Fiebrig published this study, it would almost certainly have been used in the propaganda efforts of El Diario Dominical. In March 1934, the newspaper published a racist and pseudo-­scientific article on the racial conditions of the Bolivian POWs from the highlands, depicting them as subhuman.37 Although the author of the article is not named, and it is impossible to know if Fiebrig’s findings had found their way into this article, Fiebrig was, nonetheless, an active participant in the larger project of the Paraguayan government to expand the idea of the Paraguay guazú to the Bolivian lowlands, and it was Fiebrig’s Botanical Garden that served as a base for this campaign. Paraguayan nationalists became involved in a small separatist movement centered in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, in the early part of the twentieth century. Moreover, Paraguayans did not plan to fight for cruceño (residents of Santa Cruz) independence only with words. Paraguayans planned on taking advantage of the fact that, prior to the outbreak of the Chaco War, there had been a budding separatist movement in the Bolivian lowlands based in Santa Cruz. Significantly, many Guaraní-­speaking people of the Bolivian lowlands did not identify with the larger Bolivian nation or with its struggle to incorporate the Chaco region into the Bolivian nation.38 It is important to note that many lowland peoples, including the Chiriguanos (today known as the Guaraní Avá) and the Izozog, were practically enslaved by white and mestizo Bolivian cattle ranchers, often with government officials as accomplices. Since 1930, Izozog had been impressed into the Bolivian army, to work as sappers in road construction in the Chaco.39 Because they spoke Guaraní, the language of the Paraguayan enemy, they were regularly denied equal status to other Bolivian soldiers.40 Although the vast majority of cruceños rejected the idea, Paraguayan nationalist ideas about the Paraguay guazú meant that there was support in Asunción for this type of separatist movement.

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As a result, many Bolivian POWs in Paraguay were involved in the Paraguayan campaign to incite insurrection in Santa Cruz.41 In 1935, a member of the Paraguayan secret service, Raúl de Pozo Cano,42 published a pamphlet with texts written by cruceño POWs.43 The texts glorified Santa Cruz de la Sierra’s superior population (as opposed to the population of the Bolivian highlands) and emphasized its racial and ethnic connections with Paraguay.44 According to de Pozo Cano, cruceños were white, and thus, superior to the collas from the highlands. But it was a special kind of “white.” According to the pamphlet, “we said, that the majority of the population was white, but not of pure Spanish blood, but mixed with Guaraní, just as in Paraguay.”45 This shows how notions of Paraguayan nationalism—a positive view on Spanish–Guaraní miscegenation— were simply expanded on the Bolivian lowlands, which were in this way constructed as a part of the Paraguay guazú.46 For this reason, Bolivian POWs from the lowlands were not considered a threat in Paraguay and could be given special privileges in the Botanical Garden. These POWs were viewed as possible allies and part of the Paraguay guazú precisely because they were not colla Indians. This Paraguayan belief in the ethnic and racial similarities between Santa Cruz and Paraguay is further observed when in May 1934 the Paraguayan government organized the celebration of the day of the foundation of Santa Cruz de la Sierra. POWs from the Bolivian lowlands that were housed in the Botanical Garden participated in the festivities.47 The celebration was repeated the following year. According to a surviving transcript of Paraguayan radio broadcast, some six thousand Bolivian soldiers participated in the public ceremony, swearing allegiance to a newly created flag of the Republic of Santa Cruz de la Sierra. The Paraguayan government even went so far that year to bring izozeños (members of the Izozog tribe) to Asunción to take part in the celebrations.48 Both cruceños and izozeños were thus symbolically integrated into the imagined community of the Paraguay guazú. These events were supposed to immediately prepare for the fights for cruceño independence and an invasion to Puerto Suárez, the harbor city in the Bolivian lowlands. Significantly, there were rumors in Asunción that the captured Bolivian Colonel from Santa Cruz, Carlos Banzer (the uncle of later dictator Hugo Banzer), was participating in the plans for a joint cruceño-Paraguayan invasion to Puerto Suárez to fight for Santa Cruz’ independence.49 Benjamín Velilla coordinated all these efforts for the “Liberation of Santa Cruz.” He was officially an officer with the Paraguayan Foreign Ministry; in reality, he was the head of the secret service.50 In May 1935, Benjamín Velilla was in Corumbá, Mato Grosso, Brazil, trying to organize a rebellion among the Bolivian Fifth

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Division, which was mainly comprised of cruceño soldiers. Velilla was in contact with the young cruceño Luís Saavedra Suárez, who was the secretary to the Bolivian consulate in Corumbá. Because Saavedra Suárez was a cruceño, Velilla hoped that his sympathies lay with the cruceño conspirators; Velilla was wrong. While Velilla tried to convince Saavedra Suárez to participate in the conspiracy, Saavedra Suárez was busy reporting his conversations directly to the Bolivian Foreign Ministry.51 Velilla informed Saavedra Suárez that a task force formed by roughly nine hundred POWs from the lowlands was waiting in the Botanical Garden to fight for the independence of Santa Cruz de la Sierra. In a few days, they could reach Puerto Suárez to support a revolution in the oriente boliviano (eastern Bolivia).52 They would have left for Puerto Suárez from the very installations at the Botanical Garden that Fiebrig had planned and built. Carlos Fiebrig and the institution he founded were at the center for the construction of the imagined community of a greater Paraguay. The harbor of his garden was to be the launching point for the expansion of the Paraguay guazú to the oriente boliviano. The Paraguayan campaign for cruceño independence had little effect in Santa Cruz de la Sierra proper. The Fifth Division did not revolt, and the task force waiting at the Botanical Garden never left the harbor. Most cruceños rejected the idea, as evidenced in Saavedra Suárez’s loyalty. Most cruceños saw themselves as pure white and rejected any positive ideas about miscegenation between Guaraní and Spaniards.53 This view, however, changed in the 1950s. By the middle of the twentieth century, the political elites of Santa Cruz de la Sierra began embracing the Guaraní heritage of their region as something positive. They stopped calling themselves cruceños and began preferring the “more indigenous” word camba.54 Today’s proto-­nationalist camba discourse, propagated by the autonomy movement of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, also emphasizes the cultural ties to Paraguay.55 In a way, they embraced the idea of the Paraguay guazú, decades after the propaganda campaign of the Paraguayans. In many ways, Carlos Fiebrig’s work not only influenced the imagined geographies of Paraguay, but reached much further.

German-­language writing and negotiating in transnational space Eventually, his ties to the Liberal government put Fiebrig in a difficult situation. During the Febrerista Revolution of 1936, which brought an end to Liberal hegemony in Paraguayan politics,56 Fiebrig, who had been closely associated

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with the deposed Liberal regime, was forced, in altogether unclear circumstances, to leave Paraguay with his wife and his four children, as angry demonstrators threatened to storm the Botanical Garden in February 1936.57 The Fiebrigs returned to Germany in the late 1930s, and, although Fiebrig had become a naturalized Paraguayan, he had always maintained his German citizenship.58 He easily found employment at the IAI in Berlin, where he became the consultant on Argentine, Paraguayan, and Uruguayan politics, history, and botany.59 Fiebrig’s complicated relationship with Paraguayan nationalism, science, and war was highlighted in his ambiguous relationship with the country when writing for German-­language publications. After fleeing from Asunción, he published articles about the Chaco War and the environment of the region. Most notable is the article “What is the Chaco?” for the journal Iberian-American Archive. In this piece, Fiebrig notes a clear understanding of Paraguayan citizenship when he demonstrates that he was familiar with both the agricultural and military life of the Paraguayan citizen.60 Fiebrig was responsible for developing an experimental farm and certainly came into contact with many Paraguayans who had fought in the Chaco War. His efforts with the experimental farm are documented in a surviving photograph in which Fiebrig is shown gently tending to his plants. Although the photo is undated, it clearly shows the scientific agricultural work being conducted at the Botanical Garden before his return to Germany. Carlos Feibrig died in Tucumán, Argentina, in 1951. His work in Asunción was largely overshadowed by the scientific, military, and nationalist achievements of men such as Schmidt, Belaieff, and Bertoni. His legacy was lost because he, unlike the others, fled the country after the war. Paraguayans themselves have largely forgotten his work in biology, botany, and ethnography. Nonetheless, without his efforts, Asunción’s most peaceful and well-­maintained retreat most certainly would never have come to be.

Epilogue: the Ma’ka, the Botanical Garden, and the Paraguay guazú In the introduction to the Journal of the Botanic Garden, Fiebrig states that the purpose of the garden was to highlight the biological “in its broadest meaning.” Clearly, Fiebrig believed plants and animals were to be studied at the garden. Nonetheless, the garden also became the home to the Ma’ka Indians. The story of the Ma’ka is usually associated with the work of Juan Belaieff, but without

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Fiebrig’s work, finding the Ma’ka a home might have been rather complicated. The Ma’ka were a tribe from the Chaco who had aided Paraguayan troops during scouting missions under the command of Juan Belaieff. As a result of these efforts, Belaieff felt that it was imperative that the Ma’ka be protected, and he worked to ensure that they were given lands in the garden after the war. It is important to note, however, that by the time that the Ma’ka were given permission to move into the garden, Fiebrig had already left. Nonethless, the space created by Fiebrig ensured a home for the the Ma’ka. A few Ma’ka continue to make the garden their home, and they earned their living for the decades following the war entertaining tourists and selling their wares on the streets of Asunción— which they still do to this day. During the years when the vast majority of the Ma’ka lived in the Botanical Garden, they highlighted the “biological” material of Paraguay in the broadest of meanings that Fiebrig intended. Although it is impossible to know how he would have felt about the tribe living in the garden, it is quite possible to imagine that in many ways Fiebrig would have been pleased with the display because it would have highlighted the Paraguay guazú.

Notes 1 See Blas Rafael Pérez Maricevich, In natura veritas: Jardín Botánico y Zoológico de Asunción, 1st edn. (Asunción, Paraguay: Junta Municipal de Asunción, 2008). 2 For more on the military engagements of the war, see Matthew Hughes, “Logistics and the Chaco War: Bolivia versus Paraguay, 1932–1935,” Journal of Military History 69, 2 (April 2005): 411–437. 3 Josefina Plá, The British in Paraguay, 1850–1870 (Richmond, UK: Richmond Publishing, 1976); Thomas Lyle Whigham, “The Iron Works of Ybycui: Paraguayan Industrial Development in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” The Americas 47, 3 (1979): 201–218. 4 See Carlos Alberto Soler, Andres Barbero: Su vida y su obra (Asunción, Paraguay: Imprenta Salesiana, 1989); Danilo Baratti and Patrizia Candolfi, Vida y obra del sabio Bertoni: Moisés Santiago Bertoni, 1857–1929: Un naturalista suizo en Paraguay (Asunción, Paraguay: Helvetas, 1999); Bridget María Chesterton and Anatoly Isaenko, “The White Russian in the Green Hell: Military Science, Ethnography, and Nation,” Hispanic American Historical Review 94, 4 (November 2014): 615–648. 5 Alden Dittmann, “Carlos Fiebrig (1869–1951): Bio-Bibliographie eines deutschen Naturforschers in Südamerika und Berlin,” in De orbis Hispani linguis litteris historia moribus: Festschrift für Dietrich Briesemeister zum 60. Geburtstag, hg. von Axel Schönberger und Klaus Zimmermann (Frankfurt a.M.: Domus Ed. Europea, 1994),

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1490; the narrative is available at the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut of Berlin (from here on, referred to as IAI), Günter Vollmer, “Inventar des Nachlass ‘Carl Fiebrigs [Die Pflanzenwelt Südamerikas’]” (IAI, 1998). Besides some interesting photographs from Paraguay, a selection of which are reproduced here, the collection contains a few personal letters, but consists mainly of his unfinished manuscript on the plants of South America under the working title: “Die Pflanzenwelt Südamerikas.” 6 Dittmann, “Carlos Fiebrig (1869–1951)”, 1492. 7 It should be noted that it was quite common during this period for plant collectors to be working under the direction of more famous botanists. While senior scholars stayed in the metropole, young, ambitious men (and sometimes women) headed out to colonial holdings to collect plants and animals that would later be housed in large botanical garden or private collections. An excellent study of this practice is outlined by Tatiana Holway in her book The Flower of Empire: An Amazonian Water Lily, The Quest to Make it Bloom and the World it Created (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 8 Dittmann, “Carlos Fiebrig (1869–1951),” 1492. 9 Ibid. Today, San Bernardino is a popular summer resort for asuncenos. 10 Carl Fiebrig, Ein Beitrag zur Pflanzengeographie Boliviens: pflanzengeographische Skizze auf Grund einer Forschungsreise im andinen Süden Boliviens (Leipzig, Germany: Engelmann, 1911). 11 Dittmann, “Carlos Fiebrig (1869–1951),” 1493. 12 Concerning the Deutsche Kolonialschule and their role in German colonialism, see: Karsten Linne, “Witzenhausen: Mit Gott, für Deutschlands Ehr, Daheim und überm Meer—Die Deutsche Kolonialschule,” in Kolonialismus hierzulande: eine Spurensuche in Deutschland, edited by Ulrich von Heyden and Joachim Zeller (Erfurt, Germany: Sutton, 2007), 125–130. 13 Katja Kaiser and Heike Hartmann, “Berlin: Botanischer Garten und Botanisches Museum,” in Kolonialismus hierzulande: eine Spurensuche in Deutschland, edited by Ulrich von Heyden and Joachim Zeller (Erfurt, Germany: Sutton, 2007), 145–150. 14 Dittmann, “Carlos Fiebrig (1869–1951),” 1498. 15 Ibid., 1494. 16 For more on the making of Solano López as a hero, see Bridget María Chesterton, The Grandchildren of Solano López: Frontier and Nation in Paraguay, 1904–1936 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013). 17 President Manuel Franco hoped to build the Botanical Garden quickly. But he was faced with economic challenges. Although work on the site of the garden began in 1912, it was only in 1914 that the Paraguayan Government was able to properly fund the project. gG., “El Jardín Botánico del Paraguay—Breve Bosquejo de su Desarrollo,” Demeter: Hojas agrícolas del Jardín Botánico del Paraguay 1, 1 (1928): 9. We should note that it is unclear who the “gG” is.

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18 Dittmann, “Carlos Fiebrig (1869–1951),” 1493. 19 Ibid., 1495. 20 Ibid., 1493. 21 For more on language policy in Paraguay, see Andrew Robert Nickson, “Governance and the Revitalization of the Guaraní Language,” Latin American Research Review 44, 3 (2000): 3–26. 22 Dittmann, “Carlos Fiebrig (1869–1951),” 1493. 23 Ibid.; the garden was made a National Institution in 1918, with Paraguayan Law No. 303. 24 Luis Migone, “Apuntes de climatología y nosografía medica del Paraguay,” Revista de la sociedad científica del Paraguay 2, 5 (May 1929), 219. 25 For more, see Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 33–39; and Christian Schmid, Stadt, Raum und Gesellschaft: Henri Lefebvre und die Theorie de Produktion des Raumes, a. Aufl., Sozialgeographische Bibliothek, Vol. 1 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2005), 223. 26 Pérez Maricevich, In natura veritas, 20; the ruins were recreated on a golf course that Fiebrig had built for his own personal use. See: http://wwww.asunciongolfclub.com. For more on the fortifications of Humaitá, see George Thompson, The War in Paraguay with a Historical Sketch of the Country and Its People and Notes upon the Military Engineering of the War (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1869). 27 gG, “El Jardín Botánico del Paraguay,” 23–27. 28 See Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of the Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997). For more on the influence of maps and nation-­making in Latin America, see Raymond Craib, Cartographic Mexico: A History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). 29 C. Fiebrig-Gertz, “Guarany Names of Paraguayan Plants and Animals,” Revista del Jardin Botánico y Museo de Historia Natural del Paraguay II (1923), 99–100. Italics in original. The article is one of many he published in English. 30 Ibid. 31 In the album, the word used for the rhea is avestruz, which translates as “ostrich,” an African bird. It is impossible to know who wrote the note. As a result, we cannot clearly conclude if Fiebrig called the bird an avestruz or someone else did. But the animal in the photograph is a rhea. Significantly, it is not entirely clear that the venado in the image is a “deer.” It is impossible to tell from the photo. Other possibilities for the animal include one of many types of large rodents that inhabit Paraguayan territory, including, but not limited to, a capybara, a mboreví (tapir), or a taguá. 32 gG, “El Jardín Botánico del Paraguay,” 14. 33 This was reported by a Bolivian spy in Asunción (probably an Argentine citizen), see Legación Buenos Aires 1935, “Informaciones de Formosa,” March 25, 1935 (AHCB).

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34 AHCB, Ejercito de Bolivia, 1935. Letter of the General Staff from May 15, 1935. Contains the transcript of the report of a commission formed by the Paraguayan Ministry of Finance on the employment of Bolivian POWs, published in El Orden (Asunción), April 10, 1935. Paraguay held about 24,000 Bolivian soldiers as POWs; see Bruce W. Farcau, The Chaco War: Bolivia and Paraguay, 1932–1935 (Westport: Praeger, 1996), 238. 35 Although Fiebrig was clearly in tune with German politics, we would like to note that he was not Nazi. He, like many other German scientists of the era, was a strong nationalist and conservative in his politics. For more on this, see Cornelis Essner, Die “Nürnberger Gesetze” oder die Verwaltung des Rassenwahns 1933–1945 (Paderborn, Germany: Ferdinand Schöningh Verlang, 2002); Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racialized State: Germany, 1933–1945 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 36 According to Carl Fiebrig’s CV that his wife Ingeborg Fiebrig wrote in 1952, after his death. See Alden Dittmann, “Carlos Fiebrig (1869–1951),” 1495. 37 El Diario Dominical, March 18, 1934. 38 See Isabelle Combès, Etno-­historias del isoso—Chané y chiriguanos en el Chaco boliviano (siglos XVI a XX) (La Paz, Bolivia: Fundación PIEB; IFEA Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos, 2005), 286; Jürgen Riester and Mandiri Justo, Iyambae—Ser libre—textos bilingües guaraní-­castellano (Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia: Apoyo Para el Campesino-Indigena del Oriente Boliviano APCOB, 2005), 16. 39 Isabelle Combès, “Crónica de una muerte anunciada: Juan Casiano Barrientos Iyambae (1892–1936),” in Los hombres transparentes—Indígenas y Militares en la Guerra del Chaco (1932–1935), edited by Isabelle Combès et al. (Cochabamba, Bolivia: Instituto de Misionología, 2010), 190–191; Isabelle Combès, Etno-­historias, 286. 40 See Riester and Mandiri Justo, Iyambae, 22, 72–86. 41 Jorge Abuna, El Diario Dominical (Asunción), April 29, 1934. 42 Officially, he was the member of the “department of the ministry of foreign affairs.” See Carlos R. Centurión, Historia de la cultura paraguaya, Tomo II, Bd. 2 (Asunción: Biblioteca “Ortiz Guerrero,” no year), 139. Since 1925, the Bolivians had suspected him of being a spy; in 1928, they were certain: AHCB, Ministerio de Guerra y Colonización, 1929. Letter from March 3, 1929; contains a report on Paraguayan secret service activities in Puerto Suárez from November 28, 1928. 43 Raul Pozo Cano, Santa Cruz de la Sierra por Raúl de Pozo Cano en colaboración con universitarios cruceños (Asunción: Talleres de Valores Oficiales, 1935). 44 Ibid., 15. 45 “Hemos dicho que la mayoria de la población es blanca, pero no es de pura sangre española sino con mezcla de guaraní, tal como en Paraguay,” ibid.

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46 Bridget María Chesterton, The Grandchildren of Solano López, 23–25. 47 El Diario Dominical (Asunción), May 22, 1934. 48 Transcript of a Paraguayan radio broadcast, May 11, 1935, AHEMG. 49 Legación Buenos Aires, “Informaciones de Formosa,” March 25, 1935, AHCB. 50 As a member of the Paraguayan embassy in La Paz, he had already worked as a spy. See Gabriela Dalla-Corte Caballero, Empresas y tierras de Carlos Casado en el Chaco Paraguayo: historias, negocios y guerras (1860–1940) (Asunción, Paraguay: Intercontinental Ed., 2012), 323. 51 Correspondence with Consulados Belém [ . . . Clorinda . . . Corumbá . . .] Chicago 1935. Letter from the secretary of the Bolivian consulate in Corumbá, Luís Saavedra Suárez, to the consul Rodolfo Virreira Flor, May 18, 1935. Contains the transcript of an interview between Saavedra Suárez and Benjamín Velilla from May 18, 1935, AHCB. 52 Correspondence with Consulados Belém [ . . . Clorinda . . . Corumbá. . .] Chicago 1935. Letter of the Bolivian consul in Corumbá, Rodolfo Virreira, to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in La Paz, May 22, 1935, AHCB. 53 See, for example, the article series written by the cruceño intellectual Raul Otero Reiche, “EL ‘ISMO’ TRAGICO,” El Oriente—Periodico Liberal, ten articles, January 14 to March 4, 1936. 54 See Hernán Pruden, “Santa Cruz entre la post Guerra del Chaco y las postrimerías de la Revolución Nacional: Cruceños y cambas,” Historias: Revista de la Coordinadora de historia 6, 1 (2003), 41–61; this was the result of the Revolution of 1952. The electorate became much larger, making the elitist Cruceño discourse of the political elites inevitable. 55 Simon Ramirez-Voltaire, Symbolische Dimensionen von Partizipation: Aushandlungen von lokalpolitischen Gemeinwesen und Institutionen im Kontext der bolivianischen Dezentralisierung (Berlin, Germany: Edition Tranvía—Walter Frey, 2012), 316–328. 56 Concerning the era of liberal hegemony and the Febrerista Revolution in 1936, see Paul H. Lewis, Political Parties and Generations in Paraguay’s Liberal Era, 1869–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); Paul H. Lewis, Politics of Exile: Paraguay’s Febrerista Party (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968); Bridget María Chesterton, “Performing Populism in Paraguay: Febrerismo in the Works of Luis Ruffinelli and Julio Correa,” in John Abromeit et al. (eds), Tranformations of Populism in Europe, the United States and Latin America: Histories, Theories and Recent Tendencies (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 212–227, argues that Febrerismo was a populist movement that shared many traits with more famous such movements in Latin America, including Peronism in Argentina and the Vargas government in Brazil. 57 Dittmann, “Carlos Fiebrig (1869–1951),” 1497.

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58 Ibid. 59 Ibid., 1498; this pattern of returning to Germany at retirement age was relatively common. While it may be true that there was some larger political reason in Paraguay for Fiebrig to return to Germany, many other Germans commonly returned home after lengthy stays in South America. Benjamin Bryce, “Making Ethnic Space: Education, Religion, and the German Language in Argentina and Canada, 1880–1930” (PhD dissertation, York University, Toronto, 2013), 105–106. 60 Carl Fiebrig. “Was ist der Chaco?,” Ibero-Amerikanisches Archiv, 11, 2 (1937): 166–182.

6

Indigenous Peoples and the Chaco War: Power and Acquiescence in Bolivia, Paraguay, and Argentina Erick D. Langer

Indigenous peoples have received greater attention in the history of warfare in Latin America in the past few years. Most studies have concentrated on the wars of independence and, most obviously, on indigenous rebellions. The participation of indigenous peoples in these violent confrontations have received fresh attention by reviewing old and new documentation and with the new insights that ethnohistorical methods have brought to the table.1 There is also a new concern for understanding what happened to indigenous peoples during the Chaco War, reconstructed mainly on the basis of oral testimonies. Various informants remember indigenous participation during the war, but there is scant assessment of what role the peoples of the Chaco played in the outcome of the war, which resulted in the acknowledgment of Paraguayan sovereignty over most of the disputed territory.2 From the evidence available, indigenous peoples of both sides participated in the war, though it appears that the overwhelming impression is that Paraguayan troops had greater indigenous participation on their side and also better relations with Chaco peoples during the war. The question is why might this hypothesis, of greater indigenous acquiescence for the Paraguayan cause, be correct? Although much still needs to be done to prove this hypothesis, there are structural reasons to believe that the Paraguayans were considered much more favorably by Chaco peoples than the Bolivians. To understand why this was the case, it is necessary to delve into the history of relations between the natives, Bolivians, and Paraguayans. In addition, as this chapter will make clear, neighboring Argentina, which occupied a substantial portion of the Chaco, must also be taken into account. Its policies shaped the border with Bolivia and Paraguay. Without the military pressures from Argentina and the economic incentives provided by Argentine enterprises, it is not possible

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to understand native relations with Bolivians and, to a lesser extent, with the Paraguayans. These relations were essential for understanding the eventual outcome of the Chaco War and the shape of national boundaries between Bolivia and Paraguay. The Gran Chaco is a region where on the map the borders of Bolivia, Argentina, and Paraguay meet. All three states competed for this territory after independence, racing to explore the region, forge contacts with native groups, and establish a state presence. Given that it was difficult to sustain any type of European settlement in the region because of, among other things, the difficult ecology, indigenous peoples loomed large in the final shape that effective control, and thus the borders of each country, took in the nineteenth century. Although state power was also an important factor, other issues, such as indigenous resistance, economic incentives to use Indian labor, and the conception of different indigenous groups among Creole elites, helped determine to a greater extent how state boundaries finally appeared by the end of the century. This chapter explores the three main dimensions through which indigenous peoples impacted the formation of the borders of Argentina, Bolivia, and Paraguay during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These dimensions, in order of importance, were the effectiveness of indigenous resistance to Creole penetration, the use of indigenous labor in the regions surrounding the Chaco (especially on the western side, toward the Andean mountains), and the way in which the Creole elites on the national and regional levels envisioned the place of indigenous peoples in these territories. In other words, the effectiveness of state penetration depended largely on how much the Indians were able to keep the Creoles away from their territories and how much the Indians desired (or were forced) to work in the Creole estates on the edges of the Chaco. These “push” and “pull” factors regarding the Indians were also affected by the ability of the nation states to incorporate these populations through the local elites’ actions and official state policies toward indigenous peoples along the frontier. The Chaco’s relative inaccessibility and lack of exploitable resources by European economies meant that during the colonial period the region, after having been crisscrossed by Spanish adventurers in the sixteenth century, was then largely ignored. On the southern end, the Jesuits planted missions, but, as James Saeger shows, most were tiny and many were only seasonal settlements. In many cases, during most of the year the colonial missions harbored old men and women, as well as those heavily pregnant or with small children, who were relatively immobile and unable to live off the land beyond the missions. The majority of the indigenous population resided in the missions only to be fed by

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the missionaries when the harvest and fishing seasons were over.3 As a result, a large portion of the indigenous population of the Chaco was never incorporated into the Spanish colonial system, although by the eighteenth century a semi-­ circle of Catholic missions surrounded the Gran Chaco, from the Jesuit missions in Chiquitos to the north to the Franciscan missions in the Chiriguanía and the Jesuits in Salta to the Andean foothills to the west, as well as the Jesuit Paraguayan missions to the east.

Changes in the balance of power along the frontier The Gran Chaco and its borders was home to many different indigenous groups that varied in population, economic activities, and military capacities. They ranged from the numerous maize-­growing Chiriguano peoples along the northwestern edges of the Chaco, who effectively resisted Creole encroachment well into the nineteenth century, to the equally numerous fishing and horticultural Matacos, to the less numerous but more aggressive hunting culture of the Tobas, who adopted horse warfare. There were also smaller groups, such as the seasonal horticulturalists of the Izozog to the north, as well as the small bands of hunting and gathering peoples, such as the Sirionó, Nivaclé, Tapieté, Chamacoco, and Guisnayes. The Chaco region contained many different ethnic groups that often fought amongst each other; intra-­ethnic warfare was also common. However, by the nineteenth century, the main groups were the Izoceños along the Parapetí River to the north; the Chiriguanos in the Andean foothills and the western edges of the Chaco; the Tobas, who roamed and controlled much of the central regions of Chaco; and the Matacos (also known as Wichí or Weenayek) along the southwestern rivers of the Chaco, especially the Pilcomayo River. To the south were the Enlhet, or Eenlhet, and the Maká. To the east, along the Paraguay River, the Chamacoco, or Ishir, were the predominant group. It is possible to discern some overall patterns of relative power between indigenous and Creole societies, though these varied widely in local situations that later impacted national boundaries. In general, the late colonial period— from about the 1780s to the colonial crisis beginning around 1810—distinguished itself by increasing Spanish control over frontier regions, with the formation of Creole militias, the placement of new forts, exploratory expeditions into Indian territory, and the establishment of missions or fortification of already existing missions. To be sure, the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767 severely undermined the mission system, but by the late eighteenth century the economic dynamism

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of late colonial frontier society, at least in the circum-Chaco region, had made up for this blow. In particular, the Franciscan mission system along the Andean foothills south of Santa Cruz de la Sierra and reaching all the way into what is today northern Argentina thrived, with thousands of Chiriguanos and Chanés residing in missions. Likewise, the city of Orán, founded in 1794 in the foothill jungles of the Zenta Valley, provided another settlement from which the Spanish could advance into Indian territory.4 In contrast to the advances into the Chaco by late Bourbon colonial administration, after 1810 the areas controlled by the Spanish exploded into internecine warfare. All efforts to penetrate the Chaco were abandoned, and in fact indigenous groups, such as the Matacos and Chiriguanos, were able to recoup some of their territories. This was not so much the case on the eastern edges of the Chaco, where the dictatorial regime of José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia of Paraguay was able to maintain a unified front without much internal conflict. Moreover, the Paraguayan state looked toward the south, worried much more about an invasion from Argentina or Brazil than their hinterland east of the Paraguay River, where indigenous peoples did not represent the same kind of threat as the Creoles downriver. This was not the case on the western edges of the Chaco, where battles raged along a broad front. On the edges along the Chaco by Tucumán and Salta in Argentina, the new republican regime was able barely to hold on to the ex-­missions along the rivers by sending in a hastily constituted militia, the Partidarios de la Frontera, but Creole landlords lost much of the territory they had claimed farther into the Chaco. Even better for the Indians, the flourishing Franciscan missions farther north disappeared when patriot rebel bands attacked the missions and carted off the royalist missionaries.5 The most important independent Chiriguano leader, Cumbay from Ingre, allied himself with the patriot forces in 1814, reinforcing Chiriguano control over the former mission territory.6 As a result, Creole control over frontier territories receded significantly in this sector and returned to indigenous rule. Only in the second half of the nineteenth century did the balance of power shift back to favor Creole society. The revitalization of the cattle economy on the western edges of the Chaco was made possible by a thriving silver mining economy in Bolivia.7 As Creoles gained more resources, they were able to purchase more weapons and improve their armies’ capacities to remain in the field. By the 1870s, this pattern became even clearer, as Creoles acquired repeating rifles that made it possible for a small group of people to withstand large numbers of indigenous attackers.8 Also, by the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the

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sugar plantations of Salta and Jujuy purchased modern sugar-­processing machinery that made possible an economic boom right on the margins of the Chaco and which required large numbers of men and women to harvest the sugar cane. The railroad, which reached Tucumán by 1876 and somewhat later Salta, also accelerated the sugar boom, since finally sugar could be transported cheaply within the republic.9 In turn, the War of the Triple Alliance (1864–1870) severely debilitated the economy of the eastern edges of the Chaco in Paraguay. The feared Guaycurú fought the Paraguayans as auxiliaries of the Brazilians, leaving a legacy of destruction that discouraged the weakened Paraguayan state from moving into the Chaco.10 Also, Argentina appropriated for itself the territory between the Bermejo and Pilcomayo Rivers after the war, thus taking away a third of all Chaco lands claimed by Paraguay.

Indigenous resistance The overall changes in the balance of power between indigenous and Creole societies during the nineteenth century conceal important differences in the willingness and capacity of different indigenous societies to resist encroachment by members of the newly formed nation states. These differences were important, for they determined in large part the ability of national societies to impose their control over peoples and territories, and thus the borders between states. The varying degrees of power of the indigenous groups were the most important factor in determining these differences, though the policies of different national societies toward the Indians also were important. Indeed, frontier policies that disturbed indigenous societies least, such as Paraguay, eventually made it possible for that country to claim sovereignty over the largest part of the Chaco. Bolivia had the most aggressive and multi-­pronged policies toward the Indians along the Chaco. In turn, Bolivian Creoles also had to deal with indigenous societies that were the most capable of resisting encroachment. In the first place were the Chiriguanos, who inhabited the eastern Andean foothills and portions of the western Chaco. The Chiriguanos lived as corn farmers in small villages throughout the region. More numerous than the Creoles on the frontier, they were also excellent guerrilla fighters whose warrior ethos, honed in intra-­ethnic warfare and pressure from the Spanish colonial state, made them hard to beat. Also, their willingness to enter into temporary alliances with Creole villagers and the lack of central leadership (there were at least five or six major chiefs and many lesser chiefs who were willing to switch allegiances at any time)

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made it difficult for the Bolivians to dominate this ethnic group militarily or politically. Only the establishment of Franciscan missions beginning in the 1840s made it possible to overcome Chiriguano resistance. The missions, which expanded slowly eastward into the Chaco, created in the settlements permanent allies for the Creoles and thus undermined the previous political system along the frontier, where rapidly shifting alliances among the villages had kept them independent. In 1874, an alliance of the most important independent Chiriguano villages centered on Huacaya, as well as some Toba groups, staged attacks against ranches, a fort at Iguembe, and the largest mission, Macharetí. They failed when rifle sharpshooters killed two of the main Indian leaders, and the Chiriguanos retired their warriors. Although skirmishes continued for about two years, by the end the Creoles had conquered the last major independent Chiriguano villages and divided up the land (as well as the inhabitants living there) amongst themselves. Although there was a major Chiriguano rebellion in 1892, the Bolivian Creoles had finally overcome opposition on their left flank and began to colonize the interior of the Chaco Boreal.11 The colonization process of the Chaco by Bolivians was rather different than that of the Chiriguanía. Instead of a combination of village-­forts and Franciscan missions, the Bolivian state’s Chaco settlement policy changed in the 1880s to one of private military forts manned by cattle ranchers who received vast extents of land—a square league each—in the proximity of the forts. Unlike the earlier policy that combined alliances with Indian villages and missionization, from the 1880s onward the Creoles remained on an almost constant war footing with the ethnic groups of the Chaco interior. The private militias that received land grants for cattle ranches and some rifles from the Bolivian national government had few incentives to make nice with the Indians. Just the opposite: the militiamen thought of the Tobas and other peoples as cattle thieves who should be eliminated from their lands when the Indians hunted the roaming livestock on what they considered their territory. Tensions increased as the Bolivian state promoted the exploration of interior of the Chaco. In 1882, the Tobas killed the famous French explorer Jules Crevaux at Teyu, who had launched a state-­sanctioned scientific expedition into the region. In 1883, an expedition led by Daniel Campos fought its way through to Asunción, Paraguay.12 A peace treaty of 1884 brokered by the Franciscans between the Creoles and the Tobas, Noctenes, Tapietés, and Chorotes, was designed to prevent the Indians from taking cattle and permit the free transit of Creoles along the roads (including one projected toward Paraguay). If the

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Indians did not keep the peace, the Bolivian militia officer promised that “a war of complete extermination” would be declared.13 However, the treaty fell apart almost immediately. Creoles continued to attack Indian settlements, murdering the men and enslaving the women, as well as killing Indians on sight. The Indians resisted by all means, including the “stealing” of cattle, the kidnapping of settler women and children, and the killing of Creoles who dared enter their territory. In 1889, a colonist asserted that “it is absolutely impossible to agree to the peace . . . the Indians [are] always so disloyal, have never fulfilled their word and up to this date they have not been able to give the blow that the savages have premeditated only because of the constant vigilance of this fort.”14 Major incidents between Indians and settlers or the Bolivian military occurred in 1911, 1912, 1916, and 1918.15 The reorganization of the Bolivian frontier authorities into various delegations in the early twentieth century presumably aided in better organization to invade indigenous territories claimed by the Bolivian state. Congress created the Delegación del Gran Chaco in 1905. Congress also militarized frontier areas, with the professional military, not militias, in charge. The thrust of its direction was clear when the first Delegate nominated was Dr Leocadio Trigo, a partisan Liberal who detested the Franciscans and who was stoutly anticlerical.16 Between 1904 and 1907, he launched various expeditions into the Chaco and founded various forts in the middle of Indian territory of the Tobas, Matacos, and Tapietés. The Bolivians stayed mainly close to the Pilcomayo River, where they had water sources and were able to pasture their cattle. Most of the forts were huts of sticks and a small stockade plastered together. Trigo’s policy had been to have the small military garrisons take over the role of the missionaries and try to attract the Indians, who always were eager to gain trade goods and metal objects such as machetes, to the forts. However, by the 1920s, the forts were at best small points of state control in a vast shrub forest, since the cattle economy took a nosedive after the First World War. Oscar Mariaca Sanz, the Delegate at the time, asserted that the forts, staffed by infantry, were unable to control the interior. According to Mariaca: the effective guarantee that [the military garrisons] provide does not go farther than the radius of the forts, in the great extension of the Chaco and especially in the interior, the military garrisons have never made their influence felt. In this Delegation there are various requests of settlers asking for help and protection against the robbery of the Indians and the garrisons are not only impotent to concede them, but the commanders declare that that is not their mission.17

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The slow usurpation of the rivers by soldiers and cattle ranchers created a prolonged crisis among Chaco indigenous groups. The large rivers provided the Indians with fish, their most important source of protein. As a result, warfare broke out among indigenous groups in the interior of the Chaco far from the eyes and ears of the Creoles, to claim control over sections of the rivers not yet taken over by the Bolivians (or Argentines, as we shall see). The Tobas organized themselves to conquer territories of the Matacos so as to gain access to this vital resource. By the 1920s, the Tobas and others rarely attacked the forts along the rivers, instead focusing on their indigenous enemies.18 Be that as it may, in the early twentieth century the Gran Chaco claimed by Bolivia remained Indian territory beyond the few small forts that hugged the Pilcomayo or small water holes or lagoons in the interior.19 In Argentina, relations between the Indians and the Creoles were quite different. First of all, the sugar plantations of the provinces of Jujuy and Salta created incentives for indigenous peoples to work in the cane fields and gain access to goods not available in the Chaco. As we have seen, this included machetes and guns that were used for warfare as well as hunting. The Argentine frontier also contained missions run by the Franciscans. Beginning in the late 1850s, the Salta convent established a series of missions among the Wichí that lasted a relatively short time, since neither the settlers nor the provincial government supported this endeavor.20 Indeed, it was only in the second half of the nineteenth century that the Argentine government began to push into the Chaco. In Salta, the government was able to establish Colonia Rivadavia in 1862, a huge tract of land for ranching in what is now Anta department. As a result of the ranchers’ invasion into Indian territory, relations between the Indians and Creoles deteriorated rapidly. Some Indians joined Creole frontier settlements and were swallowed up as part of the landless rural proletariat. Warfare between Indians and settlers was well-­nigh universal in the 1860s and 1870s, in which the Indians (mainly Wichí and Tobas) attacked the invaders, and the Argentine soldiers and militias killed any Indian they encountered.21 The hostilities were undoubtedly fostered by the turmoil of the War of the Triple Alliance (1864–1870), when Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay fought against Paraguay, though Argentine forces were able to gain some respite from at least some indigenous groups. Many Chaco Indians also joined the troops of all sides, especially the Brazilian and Paraguayan armies.22 After 1870, Paraguay was forced to cede a huge portion of the Chaco between the Bermejo and Pilcomayo Rivers to Argentina (now Formosa and parts of Salta Provinces), putting part of the Toba and Mataco homelands in the way of the

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Argentine settlers and its army.23 In the 1880s, just as in Bolivia, the Argentine army established forts south of the Pilcomayo River to aid settlers in taking over new territories for their ranching enterprises. They also launched expeditions into the Chaco, most importantly the 1884 Victorica expedition, whose leader alleged to have conquered all territory claimed by Argentina, but in fact was only a large-­ scale raid that wiped out the indigenous villages it found in its path.24 Another expedition in 1911, led by Colonel Enrique Rostagno, followed up on the earlier expedition and set up a fort named Nuevo Pilcomayo close to the Bolivian border.25 Pressure from the Bolivians and the Argentines on Toba lands led the Tobas to push farther north and east, away from the settlers and the Bolivian and Argentine armies. As discussed above, the Tobas, equipped with horses and with some rifles (including some taken from settlers and the fifty rifles from the Crevaux expedition they had finished off in 1882), expanded mainly at the expense of the Matacos. We do not know of other such changes in territory, though the Creole invasions from the Bolivian and Argentine sides must have occurred throughout the Chaco from the late nineteenth century onward.26 Resistance continued among the Tobas, Pilagá, and other indigenous groups, leading to the last revolt in 1915–1918, in which the Tobas allied themselves with Wichí and Pilagá warriors to expel the Argentines from their homelands. Although a number of Creole settlers died in the attacks, the Argentine military was able to suppress the revolt.27 At this point, even a multi-­ethnic alliance between various Chaco groups was unable to dislodge the cattle ranchers who had penetrated the region. The Tobas fled to the army forts on the Bolivian side of the Pilcomayo. Curiously, according to indigenous oral sources, Bolivian officials who attended to the wounded warriors promised the refugees firearms if they were willing to return to the other side of the river and continue their fight. However, the warriors desisted.28 Were the Bolivians trying to use the Indians to gain territory at Argentine expense? In other words, if we can give credence to this oral history, by the early twentieth century the roles had changed; the Creole armies attempted to use the Indians as proxies to gain territory at the expense of another nation state rather than Indian groups defending their own territories for themselves. Paraguay did not deal much with the Chaco until the early twentieth century. The government of José Gaspar de Francia in the early nineteenth century attempted to wipe out the Mbyá, but their alliance with the Brazilians permitted them to survive at least until the War of the Triple Alliance.29 At best, Paraguayan settlers hugged the Paraguay River on the eastern edge of the Chaco, working in tannin factories that Argentine companies such as Carlos Casado built there.30

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Paraguay was by far the poorest of the countries bordering the Chaco in the nineteenth century, and during the period before the War of the Triple Alliance attempted to develop its economy south and east of Asunción, not worrying much about the Chaco “desert.” For tiny Paraguay, indigenous resistance was simply too great and the settlements along the Paraguay River remained tenuous. When the economies of Argentina and Bolivia quickened in the 1860s and 1870s, Paraguay instead suffered the severe economic consequences of the Triple Alliance War (1864–1870), in which about two-­thirds of all male Paraguayans were killed. Paraguay also lost its claim to the Central Chaco area between the Paraguay and the Bermejo Rivers, as we have seen. It was only in the late 1880s that Paraguay, despite various prior diplomatic initiatives, was able to look north. Even then, its efforts were minor compared to those of Argentina and Bolivia. As a result of the inability of Paraguayans to usurp the Indians other than along the river boundary, Paraguayan governments agreed (but never ratified) to various treaties during the nineteenth century that gave most of the Chaco to Bolivia.31 The Paraguayans only began to concern themselves with the Chaco after the First World War, when the Paraguayan military for the first time got involved in trying to punish a number of Pilagá who had killed some Argentine settlers who had entered into their territory.32 Otherwise, the Paraguayan government mostly permitted foreign enterprises to exploit the natural resources of the region, especially Argentine companies that cut the quebracho wood to make tannin in the Chaco forests. In the 1920s, the Paraguayan government permitted missionaries to enter the close-­in Chaco, in an attempt to control the natives in the same way that Bolivia had done with the Franciscans many decades earlier. As in Bolivia, in the early twentieth century the government permitted both Catholics—in this case Salesians—and Protestants—Anglicans—to establish missions among the natives. Also, a number of Argentine cattle barons utilized some of the land for ranching. The Paraguayan military played a very different role in the Chaco than the heavy-­handed Bolivian army. This was due to a remarkable White Russian general, Ivan Belyaev, who had gained the confidence of the Paraguayan government. Unlike his Bolivian counterparts, who disdained the indigenous population and saw them mainly as hindrances to the colonization of the region, Belyaev (transcribed as Juan Belaieff in Spanish), who brought his experience of the Russian army in the Caucasus with him, felt that the Chaco natives were admirable and that they should be incorporated in the Paraguayan nation. According to Bridget Chesterton and Anatoly Isaenko, Belaieff applied the Russian policies of integration of the natives that he had applied in the Caucasus

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to the Chaco, an approach that was much more benign than that of either the Bolivian army or, for that matter, the Argentine army.33 Belaieff led various expeditions into the Chaco and befriended the Chamacoco along the eastern edges, whom the Russian found were courageous and generous. He developed natives as guides for the army and himself led various exploratory expeditions into the Chaco. He understood that war with Bolivia was inevitable; to win, he thought that he needed the natives’ experience in the Chaco and also to find sources of water to sustain the troops who had to live and perhaps fight there.34 To sum up, indigenous resistance was an extremely important factor in establishing the borders of Argentina, Bolivia, and Paraguay. Both Argentina and Bolivia had trouble invading indigenous lands because of the military prowess of indigenous groups. Bolivian policy was most aggressive, but their success did not correlate with their efforts. First, it took the Bolivians most of the nineteenth century to break through to the Chaco because they were unable to break the back of Chiriguano resistance in the Andean foothills until the late 1870s. In part, they tried to do so to gain access to rivers that could provide access to the Atlantic Ocean, rivers that tantalizingly began in Bolivia and flowed through the Chaco. However, their attempts could not overcome the variable water levels of the Pilcomayo River, and most importantly, indigenous resistance to Bolivian settlement. Only combining religious missions with warfare made it possible to move into the Chaco proper. In the 1880s, expeditions, private military colonies, and a policy of extermination against the Chaco groups led to some gains. The establishment of a special administrative unit in the early twentieth century, the Delegación del Gran Chaco, and the injection of the Bolivian military in a series of forts hugging the Pilcomayo River, gave the Bolivians some access to the Chaco. Nevertheless, it also bought them the everlasting enmity of the Chaco ethnic groups. Indigenous resistance to the Argentine army was also great. Despite the establishment of the Rivadavia colony in the 1860s, Indians were able to contain the invasion of their lands until the 1880s. Complementing the southern “Campaign of the Desert” (1881–1882), the resource-­rich Argentine state sent its veteran Indian-­fighting army northward in 1884, to subdue its northern limits. Nevertheless, the dense brush and forest and the guerrilla tactics of the Indians meant that the “Conquest of the Chaco” in 1884 was only ephemeral. The army returned in 1911 to finish off the last military resistance, though even then a messianic movement by the Tobas from 1915 to 1918 caught the Argentine government by surprise.

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The Paraguayans were unable to do much in the Chaco and, despite good intentions, looked primarily toward the fertile lands south and east rather than on the western side of Pilcomayo River. As a result, there were virtually no military clashes since the Paraguayans were loath to invade Indian territory. Much of the Chaco remained unexplored territory other than along the eastern Paraguay River. This relative lack of conflict aided the Paraguayans later on, in the early twentieth century, when they were able to forge alliances with indigenous groups in years prior to the Chaco War.35

Indigenous labor Although indigenous resistance was a large factor in the drawing of borders during the nineteenth century, another reason for the drawing of borders were the choices that indigenous peoples of the Chaco made in terms of relations with the Creoles who bordered their territories. Foremost among these economic relations were the labor that the Indians provided for Creole enterprises. By providing their labor, they fortified the frontier economies of certain countries and debilitated others, thus providing or taking away resources that later could be used, ironically, to invade and conquer their territories. Likewise, the use of indigenous labor at times justified the intrusion of the national armies to gain access to indigenous labor, and thus also integrate these territories into the nation states. In the circum-Chaco region, by far the most important economic pole that attracted indigenous labor was the sugar cane plantation complex of Salta and Jujuy in Argentina. The sugar plantations sucked Indian labor not just from the unconquered stretches of the Chaco, but also from the regions that the Bolivians and, to a much lesser extent because it was relatively minor, the territory the Paraguayans had already penetrated. As a result, the Argentines were able to establish jurisdiction over the territories they claimed for themselves much more effectively than either the Bolivians or the Paraguayans and also created an incentive, as we shall see, to send the army into terra incognita. The sugar plantations of the Argentine provinces of Salta and Jujuy came into existence in the nineteenth century. By the 1820s, some of the Indians from the former missions in Salta to the south were migrating to the sugar plantations, such as those in San Ignacio de los Tobas.36 In the 1830s, Salta already exported sugar to the rest of the country, and the government was requesting its frontier regions to permit labor contractors to take Indians to the sugar plantations.37 In

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the 1850s, a number of Chiriguano groups migrated to Tartagal to work in the plantations of Ledesma, San Lorenzo, and Campo Santo. According to Benjamín Villafañe, these Indians were “docile [mansos] and hospitable,” who should be offered some land so that they could form a settlement. Villafañe’s image of the Chiriguanos was very different from that of the Bolivians, for whom the Chiriguanos were at that point the main obstacle to invading the Chaco lands. Matacos from the Pilcomayo River also joined the Chiriguanos to harvest sugar cane, in part for gaining access to guarapo, the cane juice that is the basic ingredient of sugar.38 Villafañe also described the Wichí who came to the plantations, both those who lived close to the Creole settlements and those who lived tierra adentro in the Chaco; by the mid-1850s, more than a thousand adult Indians came for the sugar cane harvest. Once the gathering season began in the Chaco, however, the Indians returned to their settlements in the interior. If plantation owners tried to keep the Indians during this period by retaining part of their wages,39 the Indians up and left anyway.40 In 1869, there were about five thousand Chaco Indians working on the sugar plantations just in Jujuy.41 The Franciscans established missions in the Chaco during the 1850s and 1860s among the Matacos and Tobas, but the missions were not very successful. The Salta provincial government supported the landowners over the friars, and the national government, run by anticlerical liberals, was not sympathetic to the friars. The missionaries were unable to keep the Indians on the missions by transforming them into agriculturalists. Instead, the indigenous population frequently left the missions to forage in the countryside, only returning when they had run out of food. As a result, the missions faded by the late 1860s and early 1870s.42 The sugar economy took off from 1870 onward, when the plantations incorporated modern machinery in their sugar mills. By 1895, there were over seven thousand Indians working in the Jujuy plantations.43 Since the Catholic missions in the Argentine Chaco were unable (and, to certain extent, unwilling) to supply the plantations with Indian labor, the plantations of Salta and Jujuy relied on two methods to obtain sufficient labor. First, they continued to use labor contractors to scour the countryside for workers. The contractors gave gifts and cash to the village chiefs to bring their men (and often women as well) to work in the cane fields. These enganchadores ranged far and wide into the Chaco, but also crossed the border into Bolivia and possibly Paraguay to gather workers.44 By the late nineteenth century, the Argentine army also aided in rounding up Indians in the Chaco for the plantations. Army expeditions went

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into the bush and visited Indian villages to obligate the men to migrate to the plantations.45 Thus, unlike in Paraguay, the missions in Argentina were used as labor reserves for the enterprises of local elites. The mixture of coercion and economic incentives consolidated the control of the Argentines over the indigenous groups in their part of the Chaco. For indigenous labor, the reach of the plantations incorporated portions of the Bolivian (and, to a lesser extent, Paraguayan) Chaco too. The call of the plantations, or mbaporenda, in Guaraní “the place where there is work,” helped consolidate Argentine economic control over much of the Chaco. The western reaches of the Chaco on the northern, Bolivian side were exporters of indigenous population toward Argentina. This occurred for a number of reasons. First of all, the haciendas of the Andean foothills in Bolivia developed one of the most oppressive labor regimes in the region. The Creoles mercilessly exploited the Chiriguanos they conquered during the nineteenth century. The Indian chiefs became labor administrators of their conquered villages, forcing their men to work from dawn to dusk in debt peonage and leaving the women and girls open to sexual exploitation by their new overlords. Landlords kidnapped children from their widowed mothers and sold men and women to households in towns and cities throughout the region. Other tactics included attracting Indian women to estates as a means of creating ties to hacienda peons so that the men would be less likely to escape. It is no wonder that many formerly independent villagers, who had been proud of their status of free warriors, left in droves for the sugar cane fields of Argentina.46 The Franciscan missions helped ameliorate to a certain extent the hemorrhaging of the Indian workers to Argentina, but only partially. Some of the most important chiefs on the missions accepted monies and goods from Argentine mayordomos to take their warriors to the plantations. The regimented life on the missions, where alcohol and fiestas were prohibited and converts required to go to mass and work on mission projects and for local authorities, also meant that Mbaporenda became more attractive, especially to the Indian youth. Combined with these factors, the mostly ranching-­based Bolivian frontier economy was unable to generate much lucrative employment to provide incentives for Indians to stay.47 The settlers’ attitudes toward the Chaco groups, such as the Tobas, Weenhayek, Tapieté, and other groups, also pushed them toward Argentina. Beginning with the creation of private military forts in the 1880s along the frontier in places such as Carandaití, the rancher-­militias considered the Chaco Indians to be like vermin, to be exterminated on sight. When the ranchers invaded indigenous

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territories with their cattle herds, the Indians naturally retaliated by killing and eating the livestock. The ranchers, gun at the ready at all times, thought of the Chaco Indians as cattle thieves who needed to be eliminated so that their estancias could thrive.48 Unlike in Argentina, the interior Chaco groups were not seen as likely workers, nor did the ranching economy of the Bolivian military colonies, where almost feral herds were left to roam the countryside, require many workers. The Bolivian government attempted to create economic growth poles in the Chaco, but failed to do so. The government founded the town of Villamontes on the moribund Franciscan missions originally established for the Tobas and Matacos along opposite shores of the Pilcomayo River in 1905 and invited a German merchant firm, Staudt and Compañía, to form a town on the missions, build a dam across the Pilcomayo, and plant subtropical fruits and crops on the thousands of hectares that were to be irrigated with the Pilcomayo’s waters. However, the company was unable to build the dam and instead helped investors from Buenos Aires to purchase vast tracts of Chaco lands for ranching adjacent to Villamontes. With the First World War, a Finnish company took over the German holdings, but was also unable to create economic growth.49 An attempt to introduce on the Chaco fringe settlers from the southern United States under a Colonel William “Alfalfa Bill” Murray in the 1920s also failed.50 The Paraguayan Chaco economy was even less labor-­intensive than the Bolivian one for indigenous peoples, and also less violent toward them. As noted above, some indigenous groups were attracted by the sugar economy in northern Argentina to migrate there as temporary laborers. Thus, the capitanes of the Nivaclé ethnic group after 1900 led their followers to work in the ingenios of Salta and Jujuy to gain access to goods not available in the Chaco.51 Cattle ranches existed on the Paraguayan side, but the weak state and a much less lucrative cattle economy meant that pressure on indigenous groups was much reduced. Mostly, Argentine-­owned logging companies, such as Carlos Casado Limitada, entered the Chaco to exploit wood.52 Loggers also tended to shoot Indians on sight. While the logging companies disrupted the indigenous economy somewhat, they did not have the impact that ranchers had. Moreover, once the loggers cut the wood they wanted, they left the area.53 The Anglican and Catholic missions provided labor reserves for Creole enterprises in Paraguay. Only the introduction in the 1920s of Mennonite colonies in the central Chaco around what is today Filadelfia brought about new possibilities for indigenous labor in the Chaco claimed by Paraguay. The Casado company enthusiastically supported the colonies and sold the Mennonites land

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that it had purchased from the Paraguayan state. The farming Mennonites attempted to harness indigenous labor for their fields and also missionize them. Initially, demand for indigenous labor by the colonists was minimal, since until the mid-­twentieth century, the Mennonites were wed to a subsistence economy. Relations with indigenous groups were generally less conflictive than in Bolivia or Argentina, as the Mennonites professed to believe in non-­violence.54 Until after the Chaco War, there was less demand for indigenous labor from the Chaco, and the Paraguayan economy did not attract (as was the case in Argentina) nor expel (as in Bolivia) Indian workers.

Tying it all together Taking as the major two analytical axes of indigenous resistance and labor demands, what can we say about the role of the Chaco Indians during the Chaco War? It is clear that the formation of borders in this terra incognita depended to a large degree on the actions of the indigenous peoples who inhabited the region. After all, Creoles who were organized in nation states claimed and then invaded territories that belonged to indigenous peoples, who themselves were rarely organized at a more complex level than village societies. These village societies often allied themselves with other villages or even with the Creoles of various nation states as a means to survive. The terrain favored the guerrilla warfare tactics of the natives and the extreme variations of overabundance and then lack of water, as well as the dense and spiny monte of much of the Chaco, made European penetration difficult and economically not very lucrative. During most of the nineteenth century, the combination of landscape and human resistance made it impossible for the weak nation states to take over Indian land; indeed, in the aftermath of the independence wars, indigenous peoples recouped some of the land that the colonial state had usurped. Only in the late nineteenth century, with the quickening of Latin American economies and the concomitant increase in state resources, was penetration of the Chaco made possible. Also important were the increasing disparities in military technology—as in the United States and in Africa, the repeating rifle had an enormous impact on the ability of a few well-­armed people to control large populations. Both Bolivia and Argentina took advantage of this conjuncture to expand aggressively at the expense of Chaco groups, but with a difference. The Bolivians, despite their greater aggression, were less successful because they were

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unable to make the Indians dependent upon them economically. Although the Argentine army had mixed success with its military campaigns, the combination of the attraction of the sugar plantations and the coercive abilities of the army to collect workers made this state able to “fill out” what they perceived to be their legitimate borders at the expense of the Indians. The Argentines’ success lay thus in part also on their ability to conceive of the Chaco Indians as potential laborers, not just savages to be eliminated. Most importantly for the argument of this chapter, the Argentine factories represented a kind of refuge for the Chaco natives claimed by Bolivia and were an attraction for them to work there during the harvest season. In the case of Bolivia, despite the Catholic missions, and the attempt to build Villamontes into a pole for economic growth, the lack of economic incentives made the aggressive military policy fail. When the Bolivians conquered a new area, ironically this exposed the indigenous populations to the siren song of the Argentine sugar plantations and provided incentives for them to leave. Poor labor conditions on the new ranches or haciendas did not help. The genocidal policy against the Tobas and, to a lesser extent, the Matacos, by the military colonists (only slightly ameliorated when the regular Bolivian army took over in the 1910s) stiffened the resistance of the Indians but also left a legacy of hate. The Bolivian conception of the Chaco Indians as pure savages who should be killed, or were at best useless to civilization, brought about this state of affairs. The Paraguayans, in turn, only turned to the Chaco in the early twentieth century, but kept better relations with the Indians than the Bolivians. The lack of economic demands on the Indians—not even to keep them in debt peonage as among the Bolivians did to the Chiriguanos—meant that the Indians had little reason to react violently to the Paraguayans. Some Indians in fact went voluntarily to the labor magnet of northern Argentina, but in smaller numbers than in the parts claimed by Bolivia or Argentina. General Belaieff, bringing a Russian policy of assimilation rather than elimination, also helped when Paraguay finally began to explore the Chaco at the beginning of the twentieth century. During the late nineteenth century and right up to the start of the Chaco War (1932), it appeared that the powerful and aggressive policy of Bolivia was more successful than that of poor and easy-­going Paraguay. However, in the end, it was latecomer Paraguay that was able to take much of the territory Bolivia had claimed and partially occupied, precisely because the Paraguayans allied themselves with the Chaco native peoples who then helped guide them and to overcome the technologically more advanced Bolivian army.

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Notes 1 See, for example, Cecilia Méndez, The Plebeian Republic: The Huanta Rebellion and the Making of the Peruvian State, 1820–1850 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Javier Marion, “Indios Blancos: Nascent Polities and Social Convergence in Bolivia’s Ayopaya Rebellion, 1814–1821,” Colonial Latin American Historical Review 15, 4 (2006): 345–376; Pilar Mendieta, Entre la alianza y la confrontación: Pablo Zaìrate Willka y la rebelión indígena de 1899 en Bolivia (Lima, Peru: Instituto Franceìs de Estudios Andinos, 2010). 2 An extremely valuable contribution is Nicolás Richard (ed.), Mala guerra: Los indígenas en la guerra del Chaco (1932–35) (Paris/Asunción: Colibris/Servilibro, 2008). Also see Luc Capdevila, Isabelle Combeis, and Nicolas Richard, Los hombres transparentes: Indígenas y militares en la Guerra Del Chaco (1932–1935) (Cochabamba, Bolivia: Instituto Latinoamericano de Misionologiìa, 2010). 3 See James S. Saeger, The Chaco Mission Frontier: The Guaycuran Experience (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000). 4 Alberto José Gullón Abao, La frontera del Chaco en la Gobernación de Tucumán (1750–1810) (Cádiz: Universidad de Cádiz, 1993). 5 See Erick D. Langer, “The Eastern Andean Frontier (Bolivia and Argentina) and Latin American Frontiers: Comparative Contexts (19th and 20th Centuries),” The Americas 58, 1 (July 2002), 33–63. 6 Thierry Saignes, Ava y karai: Ensayos sobre la frontera chiriguana (siglos XVI–XX) (La Paz, Bolivia: HISBOL, 1990), 127–162. 7 See Antonio Mitre, Los patriarcas de la Plata: Estructura socioeconómica de la minería boliviana en el siglo XIX (Lima, Peru: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1981) and Erick D. Langer, Economic Change and Rural Resistance in Southern Bolivia, 1880–1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 128–134. Also see Isabelle Combès, Etno-­historias del Isoso: Chané y chiriguanos en el Chaco boliviano (La Paz, Bolivia: Fundación PIEB, 2005), 134–196. 8 The French traveler Arthur Thouar described one of these altercations, where a small group of militiamen with rifles was able to beat a group of perhaps five hundred Toba warriors. See Arthur Thouar, A través del Gran Chaco 1883–1887, trans. Carmen Bedregal and Teresa Bedoya de Ursic (La Paz, Bolivia: Los Amigos del Libro, 1997), 434. 9 Marcelo Lagos, La cuestión indigena en el estado y en la sociedad nacional: Gran Chaco, 1870–1920 (San Salvador de Jujuy: Universidad Nacional de Jujuy, 2000). For the importance of machinery and railroads for sugar, see Donna J. Guy, Argentine Sugar Politics: Tucumán and the Generation of Eighty (Tempe: Arizona State University, 1980), and Daniel Campi, Estudios sobre la historia de la industria azucarera argentina (San Salvador de Jujuy: Universidad Nacional de Jujuy, 1991).

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10 See Maria de Fátima Costa, “Los guaikuru y la Guerra de la Triple Alianza,” Mala Guerra, 355–368. 11 There is no monograph on the Huacaya War. The best summary is Francisco Pifarré, Los Guaraní-Chiriguano: Historia de un pueblo (La Paz, Bolivia: CIPCA, 1989), 357–370. For the aftermath, see Langer, Economic Change, 128–131. For the 1892 rebellion, see Hernando Sanabria Fernández, Apiaguaiqui-Tumpa: Biografía del pueblo chiriguano y de su último caudillo (La Paz, Bolivia: Los Amigos del Libro, 1972). 12 For the Crevaux expedition, see Thouar, 70–81. For the Campos expedition, see Daniel Campos, De Tarija a la Asunción: Expedición boliviana de 1883. Informe del Doctor Daniel Campos (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Imprenta Jacobo Peuser, 1888). 13 “Tratado de paz, 15 Sep 1884,” Gaveta 8: 146, Archivo Franciscano de Tarija (hereafter AFT). 14 Desiderio de la Vega to Mission Prefect, Crevaux, July 29, 1889, Gaveta 3:s/n, AFT. 15 Jean-Claude Roux, in Thouar, 28. 16 For a brief biography of Trigo, see Bernardo Trigo, Tarija y sus valores humanos, v. 2 (Tarija, Bolivia: Universidad Juan Misael Saracho, 1978), 591–639. 17 Oscar Mariaca Sanz to Ministro de Guerra y Colonización, Ballivián, July 4, 1923, “Copiador: Oficios 19,” 220, Fondo Delegación del Gran Chaco, Archivo de la Casa de la Cultura de Villamontes. 18 See, for example, Rafael Karsten, Los indios tobas del Chaco boliviano (Jujuy, Argentina: CEIC, 1993 [1923]), 48. 19 For a good summary of these forts, see Valerie Fifer, Bolivia: Land, Location, and Politics since 1825 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972). 20 See Ana A. Teruel, Misiones, economía y sociedad: La frontera chaqueña del Noroeste argentino en el siglo XIX (Buenos Aires: Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, 2005), 83–123. Also see Erick D. Langer, “Liberal Policy and Frontier Missions: Bolivia and Argentina Compared,” Andes: Antropología e Historia, 9 (1998): 197–213. 21 Teruel, 55–57; also see Saeger, The Chaco Mission Frontier, 172–177. 22 There has been no systematic evaluation of the effect of the Triple Alliance War on inter-­ethnic relations on the Gran Chaco. According to Saeger, the Argentine army was able to make a treaty with the Tobas in 1865, so avoiding attacks on their left flank. See Saeger, 174. Also see Thomas Whigham, The Paraguayan War: Causes and Early Conduct (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002). 23 Of course, this “cession” of territory was on paper, since the Paraguayan state did not control this region. 24 Benjamín Victorica, Campaña del Chaco (Buenos Aires: Imprenta Europea, 1885) and Guido Miranda, Tres ciclos chaqueños (Crónica histórica regional) (Resistencia, Argentina: Editorial Norte Argentino, 1955), 102–111. 25 Marcela Mendoza, “Western Toba Messianism and Resistance to Colonization, 1915–1918,” Ethnohistory, 51, 2 (2004), 297.

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26 Erland von Nordenskiöld, Indianerleben: El Gran Chaco (Südamerika) (Leipzig: Georg Merseburger, 1913), 161. 27 Ibid., passim. 28 Ibid., 308. 29 Saeger, The Chaco Mission Frontier, 169. 30 Gabriela Dalla Corte, Lealtades firmes: Redes de sociabilidad y empresas: La “Carlos Casado, S.A.” entre la Argentina y el Chaco paraguayo, 1860–1940 (Madrid, Spain: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2009). 31 The literature on diplomatic efforts over the Chaco is immense, both in Bolivia and Paraguay. A good summary that is relatively even-­handed is Harris Gaylord Warren, Rebirth of the Paraguayan Republic: The First Colorado Era, 1878–1904 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985), 147–164. 32 Ange-François Casabianca, Una guerra desconocida: La campaña del Chaco Boreal (1932–1935), trans. Cristina Boselli, vol. 1 (Asunción, Paraguay: Editorial El Lector, 1999), 261–263. 33 See Bridget María Chesterton and Anatoly V. Isaenko, “A White Russian in the Green Hell: Military Science, Ethnography, and Nation Building,” Hispanic American Historical Review 94, 4 (2014): 615–648. 34 See ibid., and Nicolas Richard, “Los baqueanos de Belaieff: Las mediaciones indígenas en la entrada militar al Alto Paraguay,” Mala guerra, 291–332. 35 Jan-Åke Alvarsson asserts that this was the case in The Mataco of the Gran Chaco: An Ethnographic Account of Change and Continuity in Mataco Socio-Economic Organization (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 1988), 29. 36 “Escritura de venta hecha pr el Tente Governador de esta Ciudad de las Tierras de la Reducción de S. Ignacio de los tobas pertenecientes al Estado á D Pablo Soria,” Escribano Manuel Duran de Castro No. 78, 1821–1822, No. 2511, Archivo General de los Tribunales de Jujuy, San Salvador de Jujuy. 37 “No 68, Salta, Marzo 7, 1831” and “Al Teniente Governador en Oran,” Salta, April 2, 1831, “Gobierno de D. Rudesindo Alvarado año 1831, Mayo 1°/831 1833, Marzo 18/833 Libro Copiador, Comunicaciones oficiales,” Archivo Histórico de Salta, Salta. 38 Benjamín Villafañe, “Orán y el Bolivia: A la margen del Bermejo,” El Comercio (Salta), January 7, 1857, 3: 175, 2; January 10, 1857, 3: 178, 1. Also published as Orán y Bolivia a la marjen del Bermejo (Salta: Imprenta del Comercio, 1857). 39 These “wages” were in fact cloth, beef, and tobacco. See ibid., January 10, 1857, 3: 178, 2. 40 Ibid., January 10, 1857 3: 178, 1–2, and January 14, 1857, 3: 177, 1. 41 Marcelo Lagos, “Conformación del mercado laboral en la etapa de despegue de los ingenios azucareros jujeños (1880–1920),” in Estudios sobre la historia de la industria azucarera argentina II (San Salvador de Jujuy: Universidad Nacional de Jujuy, 1992), 58.

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42 See Teruel, Misiones, economía y sociedad, 83–118. Also see Langer, “Liberal Policy and Frontier Missions.” 43 Lagos, “Conformación,” 58. 44 See Langer, Economic Change, 142–146 and Erick D. Langer, “Franciscan Mission and Chiriguano Workers: Colonization, Acculturation, and Indian Labor in Southeastern Bolivia,” The Americas 42, 1 (January 1987), 305–322. 45 Viviana Conti, Ana Teruel, and Marcelo Lagos, “Mano de obra indígena en los ingenios de Jujuy a principios de siglo,” Conflictos y procesos de la Historia Argentina Contemporánea, 17 (Buenos Aires: CEAL, 1988), and Nicolás Iñigo Carrera, “La violencia como potencia económica: Chaco 1870–1930,” Conflictos y procesos de la Historia Argentina Contemporánea (Buenos Aires: CEAL, 1988). Gastón R. Gordillo, Landscapes of Devils: Tensions of Place and Memory in the Argentinean Chaco (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 72–75. 46 Langer, Economic Change, 146–155. 47 Erick D. Langer, “Mandeponay: Chiriguano Indian Chief on a Franciscan Mission,” in The Human Tradition in Latin America: The Nineteenth Century, eds. Judith Ewell and William H. Beezley (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1989), 280–295; and Langer, “Missions and the Frontier Economy: The Case of the Franciscan Missions among the Chiriguanos (1845–1930),” in The New Latin American Mission History, eds. Erick D. Langer and Robert H. Jackson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 49–76. 48 Langer, “Missions and the Frontier Economy,” 133–134. 49 Hans Krieg, Indianerland: Bilder aus dem Gran Chaco (Stuttgart: Verlag von Strecker und Schröder, 1929), 108–112 50 Fifer, 198–202; also see Erick D. Langer, Expecting Pears from an Elm Tree: Franciscan Missions on the Chiriguano Frontier in the Heart of South America, 1830–1949 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 241–242, 251–252. 51 John Renshaw, The Indians of the Paraguayan Chaco: Identity and Economy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 126 52 Casabianca, v. 1, 257–261. 53 See Dalla Corte, Lealtades firmes. 54 For Casado and the Mennonites, see Casabianca, v. 1, 258–259; Warren, 210–211 and Bridget María Chesterton, The Grandchildren of Solano López: Frontier and Nation in Paraguay, 1904–1936 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013), 97–101. No systematic historical research has been done on Mennonite–indigenous relations. It is difficult to interpolate from studies in the “ethnographic presence” to earlier relations. The best study of recent economic relations is John Renshaw, The Indians of the Paraguayan Chaco: Identity and Economy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 115–181. For a very brief history of the Mennonite colonies in Paraguay, see Renshaw, 40–43, and Chesterton, The Grandchildren, 97–101.

7

Energy and Environment in the Chaco War Carlos Gomez Florentin

On February 26, 1928, Manlio Schenoni, the mastermind behind Paraguayan military reconstruction before the Chaco conflict, recommended the use of carbonite as a potential energy source because of the lack of petroleum found in Paraguayan soil.1 For him, as for everybody in the military at the time, an oil-­ based army was the best option for the impending war in the Chaco. The lack of reliable supply lines, however, made such dreams untenable for the Paraguayan military. This situation only worsened during the war. In 1933, the Paraguayan government ordered its representatives in Buenos Aires to broker a deal with Argentinean intermediaries to get four thousand cylinders of gas and four hundred tons of diesel from Buenos Aires. This request was made during March as the Paraguayan army was planning on moving swiftly into Bolivian territory, taking advantage of the dry weather. The request, however, was only fulfilled in late September when the dry season was almost over and the Paraguayan military had few chances of advancing toward enemy lines before the rains began flooding the region. While the Paraguayan officials in Asunción complained that their diplomatic representatives in Buenos Aires were doing a poor job brokering the government’s request, the latter explained that the problem was with the provider, Yacimientos Petrolíferos Federales (YPF). The Argentinean company claimed that the declaration of neutrality prevented new oil shipments to Paraguay. In fact, the Argentinean oil company simply could not fulfill the request due to production problems. Another problem was transportation from Argentina to Asunción. While justifying the lateness to fulfill the request, Paraguayan officials in Buenos Aires claimed that the rainy season that year blocked the main shipping lines for almost a month. This was a false claim. During that time, there was a week-­long window of opportunity with agreeable weather to ship oil on the Paraná River, but the train that was bringing the oil cargo derailed, failing to get to the decks of Zarate in Argentina on time. Finally, the Mihanovich Shipping Company, an Argentinean

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The Chaco War

company with monopolistic control of the Paraguayan shipping market, shipped the load to Paraguay after a journey that took almost three weeks.2 It took from March 23 to September 21, 1933, six long months during the height of war, to get the order to Asunción. It would take another couple of weeks to finally get the order to the Chaco region. This lack of reliable suppliers of oil led to the Paraguayan military’s failed attempt to build an oil-­based army during the war. Unable to find sources of oil, domestic or external, the Paraguayan military was forced to build an organic army that ran on sources of energy other than petroleum.3 Historians Gabriella Dalla-Corte and Bridget María Chesterton explored how the Chaco War brought Paraguayans driven by nationalism to the battlefield in an unsettled frontier where a nation was built. They also explained the pivotal role played by Anglo-Argentine businesses that heavily invested in the zone behind the war efforts for the Paraguayan nation state. Ultimately, as Diego Abente claimed, for the Paraguayan nation state waging war against the Bolivian army proved beyond the means of the liberal state, leading to its quick demise and the rise of a stronger nationalist militaristic state in Paraguay after the war.4 This chapter explores the Chaco War from an environmental perspective centered on energy.5 I argue that the Paraguayan success in the war was achieved largely due to the creation of an organic army that benefited from its own “backwardness.” In a war for oil fought in an extreme environment lacking water and with persistent problems with logistics, technological progress turned into a liability. The Paraguayan army took advantage of the hostile Chaco region’s demands not for more but less dependency on inorganic sources of energy. In short, whereas the Bolivian army was fighting a transitional war to become part of an energy regime based on oil nationalism as demonstrated by the historian Stephen Cote, the backward Paraguayan army relied on an energy regime of water to create a more successful military force in the Chaco front.6 Rather than better logistics alone, as Matthew Hughes argued, Paraguayans took the lead in the war by building a more reliable water energy regime that outperformed the energy regime run on oil of the Bolivian army.7 In the end, by creating an army built around the access to water and the resources provided by the Chaco rivers, Paraguayans visualized a brighter future through the idea of a different relationship with its rivers. The first section of this chapter centers on the discursive appropriation of the Chaco region by writer Leopoldo Ramos Jiménez, one leading Paraguayan intellectual of the early twentieth century. The second section highlights the awareness of Paraguayan officials regarding how different the Chaco region was from the rest of the country. A third section describes the seasonality of the Chaco weather, underlining how much more “watery” the region was than traditionally

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thought. A fourth section narrates the history of pack animals in the Chaco battlefields. The fifth section centers on human footpower at war. Finally, the last section revises the role of organic armies, locating the case of the Chaco War in the larger narrative of the fields of environmental history and military history.

The environmental appropriation of the Chaco region The environmental appropriation of the Chaco region for Paraguayans advanced simultaneously on two fronts: material and cultural. The Paraguayan writer Leopoldo Ramos Jiménez gave a lecture at the Comité Paraguayo of Buenos Aires on April 27, 1934. Ramos Jiménez was one of the leading figures of an early form of Paraguayan environmental nationalism led by Swiss naturalist Moises Bertoni and Paraguayan writer Juan Natalicio González.8 Ramos Jiménez was the keynote speaker in a fundraising event to support the Paraguayan troops. His speech titled “The Defamed Land” addressed both the Bolivian writers’ attack on the Chaco region on the representational level and the military occupation of the contested land by Bolivian soldiers. For him, Bolivian writers were portraying Paraguayan occupation of the Chaco region as a failed project due to their intrinsic inability to civilize frontier territory. Military occupation only aggravated the defamation of the Chaco territory as Paraguayan land was being taken over unrightfully by Bolivian invaders. For Ramos Jiménez, the Chaco region was something radically different from that previously presented in ethnographic and scientific reports. He thought that these misguided reports on the region were driven by Bolivian writers aiming to denationalize the Chaco territory from Paraguayan hands. According to him, writers usually presented the Chaco as an enigmatic territory, hard to define either by geography or by politics. The living contradictions of its territory pushed wanderers to the extremes of thirst, fever, and “endless swamplands” where human health was impossible. Hostile vegetation, salted lands, repugnant vermin, tribes of despicable Indians, all these images came from the Chaco, puzzling interpreters who try to figure out what to think without ever even putting a foot on its territory. For Ramos Jiménez, these writers worked the realm of fictional literature, turning the “Paraguayan Chaco” into the natural killer of both Bolivian and Paraguayan troops in a place where weapons were not necessary to spell massacre in both armies. The option to present the Chaco as a space of barbarism and death was politically motivated by Bolivian writers trying to turn it into a wasted land, a “defamed land,” waiting for redemption in civilizing Bolivian hands.9

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The Chaco War

Nonetheless, according to Ramos, the true Chaco was a source of life, not of death. Ramos Jiménez’s rhetoric surrounding the Chaco is significant as he was attempting to rewrite the natural history of the Chaco region, presenting it as the promised land of civilization and improvement. Far different from the unredeemable wilderness presented by the Bolivian writers that he chastised in his presentation—for these Bolivian writers, the Chaco’s development was impossible in Paraguayan hands—the Chaco territory became in Ramos Jiménez’s depiction a land of progress, a docile territory waiting for the magic touch of human civilization to blossom. In this regard, the Chaco War created a new environmental consciousness in Paraguayan people; closer, and fonder, with a territory the English missionary W. Barbrooke Grubb—who traveled there to convert Indians— presented as late as 1911 as a so far “unknown land with unknown people.”10 The distinction between rightful ownership and illegitimate occupation of the Chaco region was relevant as Ramos Jiménez criticized the Bolivian project to take over the Chaco region by force. Accordingly, the Chaco was not meant to be conquered through military aggression. Its nature required an industrial civilizational project such as the one commenced by the Paraguayan government. For Ramos Jiménez, geography dictated the terms of progress. A domesticated soil was the direct result of peaceful human civilization (in this case Paraguayan) and rightful ownership of territory (also Paraguayan). In this account, the Chaco could only be dominated by its rightful owner—Paraguay—even if as Ramos Jiménez acknowledged, Argentine capital played a critical role funding the Paraguayan expansion in the region. For Ramos Jiménez, it was critical to rebuff General Hans Kundt’s account of the war that had been garnering attention in international media. Kundt was a German officer who organized and trained the Bolivian military before the war. After an unpromising offensive for the Bolivian army in 1932, the government decided to bring him to lead the Bolivian forces. Again, over the course of the next years, the outcome of the conflict did not change, leading to Kundt’s dismissal by the Bolivian government. Kundt then spoke publicly, addressing the Bolivian failure in the war on the grounds of environmental determinism. For him, the Chaco’s nature was the primary reason for Paraguayan success in the war. In his view, brave Bolivian soldiers played only a secondary role in the outcome of the conflict.11 Ramos Jiménez took the opportunity to reframe Kundt’s allegations as proof of rightful Paraguayan environmental ownership of the Chaco territory. In his view, Kundt’s environmental determinism was ultimately right. However, he noted that Paraguayan soldiers performed better on the Chaco’s hostile

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battlefields because the Chaco region was Paraguayan, and as logic had it, Paraguayans themselves were thus part of the Chaco environment. Rather than undermining Paraguayan claims to the Chaco territory, environmental determinism confirmed, at least in Kundt’s and Ramos Jiménez’s eyes, that only Paraguayans could overcome the ruggedness of the Chaco terrain.12

The Chaco as something other than eastern Paraguay While authors like Ramos Jiménez struggled to make the case for a larger Paraguay with the Chaco region included in it, Paraguayan officials laboring on the front lines embraced the notion that the Chaco was a distinct environment from eastern Paraguay. As early as 1929, Paraguayan officials complained about the poor performance in the Chaco of trucks recently purchased from United States companies. These vocal and unrelenting complaints directly led to the visit of engineer Johny Bloomgreen from International Harvester Export Company of Buenos Aires, a subsidiary of the International Harvester Company, a major provider of vehicles for the Paraguayan military. On February 27, 1929, after accompanying the vehicles sold by his company through the Chaco region, Bloomgreen filed a report with the Paraguayan military. He made the trip from Riacho Negro to Fortin Orihuela, covering a distance of about 120 kilometers. The trip took him eleven hours, less than the time Paraguayan military claimed it took them, but still barely above the 10 kilometers an hour mark. After surveying the Chaco territory, Bloomgreen argued that the region’s peculiar climate forced trucks to work differently from the way they worked in the eastern region. This difference was particularly sensitive for Paraguayans who in the most part lived in the eastern part of the country were the weather remained mild throughout the year. This, however, was not the case for the Chaco region. The two seasons in the Chaco region—a dry season from May to October and a rainy season from November to May—required a different method of operation for the trucks. While trucks were operable during the dry seasons, the rainy season, with water levels rising at times to three feet high, made it impossible for the vehicles to operate on Chaco roads. Even during the dry season, trucks could only work when operators took certain precautions. Bloomgreen reported that trucks could only travel at speeds of up to 20 to 25 kilometers an hour, instead of the usual 30 to 35 that Paraguayan drivers were used to in the eastern part of the country. This speed restriction was due to the Chaco’s overwhelming heat. As trucks heated up faster in the Chaco region, drivers had to be particularly

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The Chaco War

careful to avoid engine stress and fatigue. Bloomgreen also underlined that trucks equipped with tires with dimensions of 34/7 inches and chains could outperform vehicles with regular-­size tires in the Chaco region. Even though the terrain was generally flat, the Chaco sorely needed better roads. In fact, roads were so poorly constructed that drivers normally talked about “rutas camionables” (truckable roads), suggesting that passing trucks alone turned roads usable. According to Bloomgreen, another critical reason why trucks struggled in the Chaco were the “tacurús,” ant nests that surfaced along the roads, leading to repetitive bumping, ultimately damaging the vehicles. Under these conditions, trucks were forced to travel at no more than five kilometers an hour. In addition to the difficulties for the trucks with seasonality of the weather in the Chaco region, Bloomgreen reported a number of issues with the personnel in charge of the vehicles. Most of the drivers did not grease the vehicles on a daily basis. Trucks needed grease and oil in the Chaco because of the roads’ mud and the dusty soil that soaked the lubricants on every short trip. Driving in these conditions made it harder to maneuver on bumpy roads with many curves. Moreover, a layer of mold accumulated over time, displacing the lubricant, forcing drivers to dismantle the entire engine and clean it with kerosene in order to continue driving. This meant that drivers were required to be more mechanics than simple technicians. Used to driving in the less sandy roads of eastern Paraguay, Paraguayan drivers kept considerably smaller amounts of grease and oil for truck maintenance than was necessary for the conditions in Chaco. Similar issues arose with batteries due to the lack of distilled water. Bloomgreen suggested traveling at night, stating the fresher night air with more oxygen would help save on water for the truck’s engines. Following recommendations on speed limit would also add to the life expectancy of the trucks. Finally, Bloomgreen concluded that, with the right maintenance work and training on basic mechanics, trucks should be able to work just fine even in the Chaco region for between eight and ten years, clearly below the life expectancy of the same trucks in the eastern part of the country.13

Pack animals in the Paraguayan battlefields As it follows from Bloomgreen’s report, trucks could make a difference in transportation in the Chaco region during the dry season. However, the necessity of war meant that the conflict continued during the rainy season when trucks became useless. Therefore, a transportation system less dependent on oil turned

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out to be much more efficient than trucks under such conditions. That was the case with pack animals in the Paraguayan army. This system of transportation, run on water, corn, grass, and alfalfa, outperformed the oil-­based modern truck system. The Paraguayan army pondered the issue of pack animals on the battlefield as early as 1929. A report from March 4 presented an inventory of the poor situation of Paraguayan military forces at the department of transportation based on animal traction. The Paraguayan military had only 1,005 horses for the entire eastern region, and 664 for the Chaco region. Mule numbers mirrored these: only 299 mules for the eastern region and 190 for the Chaco region. Significant in the report was the fact that the forces on the Chaco front had only 50 oxen. At the time, the estimated number of men in the military was 14,000, according to budgetary information for the 1928/1929 cycle, although the real number was about half that.14 While these numbers were modest and short of the minimal requirements to wage a war, the ratio shows a different approach to the problem of transportation in the two regions. In 1929, the war was imminent but had not yet commenced. Still, the Paraguayan forces had a much larger ratio of animals per man at the Chaco front. Also reflecting the poor roads in the Chaco region, oxen replaced trucks in the transportation system used by the military, keeping the oil-­based transportation vehicles for the eastern region. This also reflects the much larger number of working roads that the eastern region had compared to the Chaco region. All in all, military officials were aware of the much larger need for pack animals at the Chaco battlefields. Another critical aspect of the report concerned food consumption for pack animals. At the time, horses needed 5 kilos of corn and 5 kilos of alfalfa per day to meet their caloric needs. Mules required 3 kilos of corn and 3 kilos of alfalfa. One critical difference in the dietary requirements of horses in the Chaco region was that it was necessary to feed them 6 kilos of corn daily, as opposed to the 5 kilos consumed by the horses in the eastern region. This measure reflected the awareness of the environmental differences between the two regions for the officers at the military. The dietary requirement for oxen was established at 6 kilos of each of corn and alfalfa in the Chaco. The report also emphasized the fact that, while autonomous in corn production for animal food, the country relied largely on nextdoor neighbor Argentina as the exclusive provider for alfalfa.15 The report mentioned the central role that the Banco Agrícola, a national bank dedicated to funding agricultural production, should play to keep up with the increasing food demands of the military pack animals. Financial measures such as loans, interest rates, payment options, and direct negotiations with providers were critical for the long-­term plans of the government.

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The Chaco War

The state created a new institution called the Junta Nacional de Aprovisionamiento (National Supplies Commission) to address the increasing needs of the Paraguayan military during the war. The Junta served as broker between producers and distributors to ensure provision of well-­fed pack animals on the battlefield. As can be seen in Tables 2 and 3, from August 1932 to July 1935, the Junta Nacional de Aprovisionamiento seized 381,028 head of cattle. Cattle ranchers donated 3,389 cows and the government bought 13,666, totaling 398,083. The government likewise seized 10,800 horses; 1,671 mares; 3,252 mules; 14,087 oxen; 227,053 steers; and 149,900 heifers. Also, people donated to the Junta 2,854 horses; 420 mules; 539 mares; 913 oxen; 1,514 steers; and 962 cows. Finally, the Junta bought 7,932 steers and 5,734 cows. The amount paid by the government was 17,609,116.10 pesos.16 Table 2  Detail of pack animals seized by the Junta Nacional de Aprovisionamiento of the Paraguayan government during the Chaco War, from August 1932 to July 1935 Towns

Horses Mules Mares

Oxen

Steers Heifers

Abaí Alberdi Areguá Acahay Arroyos y Esteros Altos Ayolas Atyrá Bahía Negra Bobí Borja Barrero Grande Carayaó Chaco Concepción Colonia General Aquino Caacupé Caapucú Capiatá Caballero Colonia Nueva Australia Coronel Martínez

52 43 17 0 25 51 12 41 0 0 47 26 0 93 1,489 0 50 100 11 5 0 0

706 136 0 43 0 28 34 13 6 35 4 66 0 497 2,220 49 0 181 0 27 26 0

0 1,831 0 142 1,698 622 1,613 28 3,057 708 909 438 328 56,302 34,241 1 0 4,831 0 243 253 194

0 30 2 0 3 5 0 0 0 18 19 2 0 21 164 10 0 49 0 15 0 0

17 1 2 0 0 0 0 3 0 0 0 0 0 121 547 0 0 12 2 5 0 0

0 150 0 109 554 321 623 70 1,855 1,481 222 135 158 51,337 27,213 10 0 2,326 0 116 128 84

Energy and Environment in the Chaco War Colonia General Delgado Coronel Bogado Caazapá Caraguatay Coronel Oviedo Carmen del Paraná Carapeguá Capitán Bado Colonia Nueva Germania Desmochados Escobar Encarnación Emboscada Empresas Nortenas Chaco Fuerte Olimpo Guarambaré Guazu-­cuá Hiaty Humaitá Iturbe Itapé Ybycuí Ypané Itacurubí de la Cordillera Isla Umbú Itacurubí del Rosario Itá Ypacaraí Ybytymí Juan de Mena Luque Laureles Limpio Lima Maciel Mbuyapey Mbocayaty Paraguarí

5 0 84 55 52 13 0 0 32 34 40 19 0 433 0 35 62 0 33 0 0 103 20 0 34 20 60 64 0 37 0 15 21 0 29 12 0 111

0 20 34 22 6 105 0 0 25 0 1 0 0 75 0 2 8 0 0 0 0 64 1 15 0 29 1 6 19 23 0 0 3 0 0 5 0 33

1 0 13 7 0 0 0 0 1 1 6 0 0 70 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 24 1 0 0 4 4 18 0 0 0 0 10 0 7 3 0 17

2 34 128 125 213 91 92 122 56 96 0 15 24 3,314 7 0 85 0 109 36 29 270 0 4 35 238 0 62 30 33 8 110 0 58 0 80 0 43

143 876 533 1,364 4,593 3,264 195 470 0 25 841 15 440 427 11,665 3,280 0 1,042 38 1,348 264 147 859 0 362 366 851 0 77 1,281 3,513 0 1,362 0 32 697 834 139 2,385

135 336 524 1,248 1,175 157 99 0 0 408 94 278 119 5,801 1,783 0 547 22 721 110 167 407 0 89 901 212 0 130 517 1,380 0 874 0 15 416 1,158 81 1,154

(Continued)

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Table 2  (Continued) Towns Paso de Patria Pilar Piribebuy Pedro González Pirayú Quyquio Quiindy San Pedro del Paraná San Miguel San Juan Neembucú San Lorenzo Sosa y Yegros San Ignacio San Juan Nepomuceno Salitre-­cué Sapucai San Cosme San Bernardino Santa Rosa San José de los Arroyos San Joaquín Santiago San Juan Bautista Misiones Santa María San Estanislao Tacuaras Tobatí Tavapy Unión Villarrica Villa Franca Valenzuela Villa Hayes Villeta Villa Florida Villa de San Pedro Villa Oliva

Horses Mules Mares 32 56 70 22 43 71 84 18 136 111 19 125 62 13 10 0 32 14 182 71 10 202 352 95 28 53 82 12 0 106 0 14 18 0 15 75 24

0 0 0 0 0 65 18 11 38 23 18 67 17 4 1 7 44 1 36 57 0 22 55 27 37 46 1 0 15 342 0 7 1 5 8 53 3

0 0 0 0 0 7 10 0 27 33 2 24 8 4 2 0 1 3 31 1 0 12 54 20 2 16 0 3 0 9 0 0 1 0 0 14 0

Oxen 55 0 0 102 32 140 86 297 102 127 0 99 212 370 0 2 0 0 117 74 34 183 170 128 82 183 62 7 17 609 20 4 91 11 27 199 69

Steers Heifers 640 436 0 722 262 2,058 1,769 698 2,414 3,987 0 4,956 2,275 720 299 26 1,805 46 1,919 1,378 392 3,836 6,306 556 2,109 4,541 594 121 98 810 4,454 64 12,454 638 399 3,372 2,709

93 110 0 259 225 961 571 403 295 2,421 0 3,221 3,005 334 186 14 325 21 1,184 565 134 1,294 4,079 228 540 2,640 634 110 71 235 649 141 10,152 424 138 2,348 328

Energy and Environment in the Chaco War Villa del Rosario Yaguarón Yataity Yuty Yhú Yabebiry Kilómetro 9 Bought in the countryside Bought from abroad Total

48 57 9 109 0 17 0 3,035 1,783 10,800

55 1 1 57 0 3 0 1,157 114 3,252

7 0 0 29 0 0 0 365 84 1,671

145

389 1,248 1,154 0 0 0 45 31 17 262 4,253 2,165 0 92 48 56 477 162 4 65 66 0 0 0 0 0 0 14,087 227,053 149,900

Table 3  Details of pack animals donated by citizens to the Junta Nacional de Aprovisionamiento of the Paraguayan government during the Chaco War, from August 1932 to July 1935 Towns Abaí Alberdi Areguá Acahay Arroyos y Esteros Altos Ayolas Atyrá Bahía Negra Bobí Borja Barrero Grande Chaco Concepción Colonia General Aquino Caapucú Caballero Colonia Nueva Australia Coronel Martínez Colonia General Delgado Coronel Bogado Caazapá Caraguatay

Horses 28 120 4 0 10 1 25 0 0 49 53 1 53 130 7 121 41 0 0 17 91 0 91

Mules 0 5 1 0 0 0 3 0 0 1 19 1 0 0 3 28 1 0 10 7 13 0 3

Mares Oxen 0 56 0 0 0 0 2 0 0 4 1 0 0 23 0 76 2 0 1 1 1 0 6

4 0 0 57 0 1 8 0 0 0 0 0 0 12 19 30 22 0 46 18 22 39 0

Steers Heifers 2 25 0 0 26 3 8 0 29 0 23 6 0 110 2 20 1 6 8 5 3 10 0

2 25 0 0 0 4 8 4 0 0 0 3 2 72 23 0 0 1 4 17 0 8 0 (Continued)

The Chaco War

146 Table 3  (Continued) Towns Coronel Oviedo Carmen del Paraná Carapeguá Capitán Bado Desmochados Encarnación Emboscada Fuerte Olimpo Hiaty Humaitá Iturbe Itapé Itacurubí de la Cordillera Isla Umbú Itacurubí del Rosario Itauguá Ypacaraí Ybytymí Juan de Mena Laureles Lima Mbuyapey Paraguarí Pilar Pedro González San Pedro del Paraná San Juan Neembucú San Lorenzo Sosa y Yegros San Ignacio San Juan Nepomuceno Salitre-­cué Sapucai San Cosme San Bernardino Santa Rosa San José de los Arroyos

Horses 1 0 102 0 30 43 5 49 10 69 0 0 0 0 2 80 0 37 15 3 0 46 297 297 25 49 15 0 0 173 0 0 22 36 0 5 5

Mules 0 0 7 0 1 0 0 17 0 0 0 0 0 0 3 0 0 8 4 0 0 8 37 31 0 5 0 3 0 43 0 3 4 4 0 3 0

Mares Oxen 0 0 24 0 7 0 0 68 0 17 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 7 0 1 0 7 125 0 0 17 0 1 0 29 0 0 0 5 0 0 0

16 4 24 4 0 0 0 1 24 0 0 8 11 2 9 0 0 0 13 50 0 20 0 0 0 65 0 0 0 56 1 0 0 40 0 0 1

Steers Heifers 99 3 0 0 17 0 3 52 0 46 11 17 0 0 25 0 5 2 2 0 2 0 0 0 24 15 0 0 3 23 10 50 1 5 7 0 12

1 0 0 0 10 11 1 38 0 47 0 15 0 0 13 0 1 0 2 0 16 0 27 0 4 1 17 0 6 25 5 0 4 32 0 0 2

Energy and Environment in the Chaco War Santiago San Juan Bautista Misiones Santa María San Estanislao Tacuaras Tobatí Tavapy Unión Villarrica Villa Franca Valenzuela Villa Hayes Villeta Villa Florida Villa de San Pedro Villa Oliva Villa del Rosario Yaguarón Yuty Yabebiry Total

0 122 4 48 12 24 38 7 12 0 24 0 114 55 4 79 20 4 0 29 2,854

3 11 1 13 0 24 12 2 8 3 1 0 15 2 0 0 47 0 0 2 420

0 6 1 3 0 0 14 1 4 0 0 0 3 25 0 0 0 0 0 0 539

1 72 0 56 0 10 34 4 41 2 18 0 14 4 2 0 28 0 0 0 913

147 1 58 17 7 0 10 0 0 121 1 9 338 25 0 13 49 16 0 126 2 1,514

0 55 3 36 3 0 0 25 20 0 3 164 20 0 83 15 69 0 0 15 962

The tables also demonstrate from where the pack animals were procured. Places like the Chaco region and the northern port city of Concepción, both with a strong ranching tradition and shared climate, contributed the larger number of animals. Since these animals were closer and used to the Chaco’s weather, they adjusted better to the battlefields. Contrary to what could have been expected in wartime, and patriotism running high in Paraguayan veins notwithstanding, donated animals were the fewest. As animals seized by the government from the eastern region congregated in the Chaco region, one can only suspect that a deeper process of genetic mix followed. The spontaneous genetic mix that followed might have addressed the growing concerns about the alleged racial weaknesses of pack animals in Paraguay. Paraguayan experts were aware of the critical condition of the cattle on the Chaco front before the war started. Andrés A. Rivarola presented a paper at a conference at the Gimnasio Paraguayo on the economic situation of the country in 1931. The presentation, titled “Problemas Ganaderos” (Ranching Concerns),

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exposed the limits of the unscientific Paraguayan cattle-­ranching industry. According to Rivarola, Paraguayan cattle bred wildly in the Chaco territory. Cattle ranchers had not established the basic differences between natural prairies, nor had they worked the fields to make them more suitable for cows. Water was also a problem as cattle ranchers did not care to build artificial aguadas (watering troughs), nor did they distinguish between the good natural aguadas and the polluted ones. Finally, genetic experimentation ran wildly with no control from the cattle industry. In fact, cattle were in such poor shape that it was often hard to tell the good specimens from the bad ones before attempting to improve the genetic condition of the herds.17 The Paraguayan cavalry faced similar issues when dealing with horses in poor shape, resembling the situation of the cattle in the Chaco region. The poor quality of horses in Paraguay dated from well before the onset of hostilities. Early in the twentieth century, travelers wrote about them as “poor specimens,” although there were some sport racing horses, “a sport of which people are inordinately fond,” which should have helped to “improve” the race.18 During the war, officers often complained about the challenges that they had to face moving horses around in the battlefields. Many times, they complained that horses were of no use, given the lack of grass and water in the Chaco region. Thirsty horses too weak to ride forced cavalry squads to walk in the battlefields. Sometimes they took horses in better shape from the Bolivians but then again Paraguayan soldiers struggled to keep them well fed and watered.19 This situation was more extreme in the forests of the northern Chaco, where the bushes were not suitable food for horses. There were places in the Chaco where natural prairies eased the work of moving around, especially closer to Mennonite settlements where they already raised cattle before the war. Horses in the Chaco may have been better bred since Mennonites took a number of better-­quality specimens in the 1920s when they relocated to the region from Canada to set up new colonies. Some of these better horses might have made it to the Paraguayan military lines.20

Brute human force during the conflagration Perhaps the form of energy playing the decisive role on the battlefields was too human to be noticed. But the topic was discussed by doctor Manuel Rodríguez in a medical report on the type of food required to fight in the Chaco region. As early as 1931, Rodríguez published a series of articles on the dietary needs of the soldiers on the front lines. According to a Ministry of War and Marine’s decree

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number 14 from August 3, 1929, soldiers had a regular diet including meat (700 grams); bread (300 grams); sugar (60 grams); soup (30 grams); salt (30 grams); rice (50 grams); corn (70 grams); yerba mate (30 grams); grease (15 grams); firewood 40 percent; vegetables 0.20 cents; beans (80 grams); manioc flour (50 grams); and noodles (50 grams). Rodríguez calculated that soldiers actually used about 560 grams of meat. For him, the main concern was the proportion of albumin, grease, and carbohydrates in the soldiers’ diet. Rodríguez explained the composition of each type of food, classifying yerba mate as a type of “alimento nervioso,” a food drug, showing its multiple properties for the brain as a stimulant, like coffee or chocolate. Even though his claims were tarnished by overt nationalist biases—he said that Paraguayan yerba mate was better than that of Argentinean and Brazilian producers, and stronger than coffee in caffeine—he was right about the importance of considering the environment when designing the soldiers’ diet.21 Rodríguez disclosed the Paraguayan food ration according to calories: each soldier had albumin 186.05 grs (4 calories); grease 54.89 grs (9 calories); and carbohydrates 480.35 grs (4 calories). In this diet, each Paraguayan soldier ate not more than 3,159.61 brute calories; approximately 2,844 net calories. This caloric consumption was well below the standard set during the First World War, when European armies had at least 4,000 calories daily. Still, Rodríguez thought 4,000 calories was good for the harsh European winter but not for the Paraguayan semitropical weather. Judging the hostile Chaco environment, Rodríguez considered that soldiers needed at least 3,500 calories daily to cruise through the multiple activities that life there demanded. The main problem then was that the current dietary model was designed for soldiers living in the milder weather of the eastern region. The Chaco region, being a different environment, presented different dietary needs. The dietary problem was aggravated by the poor physical condition of many conscripts. In this regard, Rodríguez thought that the military diet had to address nutritional problems of the soldiers that had originated at an early age while they were living in the poor Paraguayan countryside. Many soldiers came from the campaña (countryside), reaching not more than 5 feet 3 inches tall and weighing barely 110 pounds. To combat this pre-­existent disadvantage, Rodríguez recommended a hyper-­albumin diet, critical to which was the consumption of meat. Rodríguez considered animal albumin more nutritious, even if more toxic, than vegetal albumin. Besides, on the front lines, it was easier to get meat. Cows could transport themselves and there were already cattle ranches in the Chaco region. Vegetables, in contrast, did not transport so easily. He showed an acute

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awareness of the environmental constraints of the Chaco region when he stated: “By improving our quartermasters’ service we will improve the food rationing. Otherwise we will fall back in the eternal evil of all our evils: theoretical solutions to our problems ungrounded in the environment and lacking possibilities of realization according to the means available.”22 Rodríguez had an environmentally sound plan to address the very specific soldiers’ dietary needs for the two main geographic regions of the country without compromising the Paraguayan state’s finances. For him, the Paraguayan military needed at least two different kinds of diets: one for the soldiers working in eastern Paraguay and another for the soldiers on the front lines. The first one designed along the lines of the then already current diet for the soldiers was based upon the demands of living in the eastern part of the country. The second, Rodríguez suggested, addressed the needs of the hardworking Chaco soldier, providing them with 300 extra calories. The critical differential 75 grams of carbohydrate (300 calories more)—soldiers in the eastern region would eat 490 grams of carbohydrate and their comrades in the Chaco region 565—would make the difference. Rodríguez thought that this difference could be compensated by adding 20 grams of beans and corn; 30 grams of rice; and 15 grams of sugar. This would give a total of 3,463 calories for the Chaco soldier and 3,162 for the soldier at the eastern region. Aware of the environmental constraints, Rodríguez recommended specific dietary catalyzers for the Chaco region. Instead of the regular legumes and fruits used as catalyzers in the eastern region but hard to find in the Chaco region, Rodríguez suggested the easily portable lemons and oranges to fill that need. The peel of citrus fruits also provided sufficient protection to the fruit inside in the Chaco’s unrelenting heat. The last part of Rodríguez’s report addressed the need to “nationalize” the soldier’s diet. Lack of reliable transportation, soaring international prices, and fiscal concerns led Rodríguez to argue for a strong “nacionalización” of the soldiers’ diet. A few steps would easily improve the precarious situation of the major military logistics squad at the Chaco front. Replacing wheat by other grains that grew in the country, such as rice or manioc, could ease the dependence on Argentinean provision. The use of corn flour instead of wheat flour (noodles), and manioc instead of bread, would also help. These steps, according to Rodríguez, proved that a few adjustments between environmental constraints and resources available would make the Paraguayan military fitter to fight the war with cheaper means.

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An environmentally sound army Engineer Vasilio Yakovleff, director of the Ministry of Marine’s direction of Hydrography and Rivers Management, filled in a report on the situation at the front in June 1935, a week after the governments of Bolivia and Paraguay reached a peace accord. Scouting the Chaco territory, Yakovleff, one of many “white Russian” officers who filled the upper echelons of the Paraguayan military after escaping Stalinist Russia, reported that the Paraguay River flooded the main Paraguayan forts around the confluence of the Río Verde and Río Negro in the Chaco region.23 With the Paraguayan military forts Patria, Galpón, Tte. Fernández, Campamento no. 2, Vanguardia, Caacupé, and Retén Isla Teyú under water, the government reported water heights of 20 feet at Corumbá and 18 feet at Bahía Negra, Yakovleff informed that all transportation on trucks, wagons, and horses were suspended. Out of options, the Division Commander developed an amphibious solution to the transportation issue. The commander created, according to Yakovleff, a “trineo tropical” (tropical slate) to move ammunitions, provisions, and forage for animals. In this “original mode,” the division moved wooden flatboats pulled by oxen, keeping the communication with the army closer to Bolivian positions fluid through the tropical slate. For minor cargoes, the army used canoes.24 In the end, it was this basic form of amphibious transportation run on animal traction, using the seasonal flooded rivers of the Chaco region, that prevailed. It was this kind of hybrid system that also prevailed in the field of transportation in the Chaco War. During the wet season, the Paraguayan army ran on pack animals; during the dry season, it moved supplies along the railroad lines of the Argentine tannin companies of the Chaco region. This flexible transportation system allowed the Paraguayan army to resist the advances of powerful oil-­based military such as the Bolivian army during the dry season, while it gave the Paraguayans the edge during the wet season when their opponents could not do much with trucks that ran on oil alone. Environmental conditions constrained the way the armies fought. In many cases, this proved to the favor of the more backward army, as was the case with Paraguay. Oil, while decisive for the more modern-­looking Bolivian army, played only a minor role for the Paraguayan army. In the end, by depending less on oil, the Paraguayan army adapted better to the Chaco’s very particular environmental conditions. It is therefore ironic that the war was fought, supposedly, for oil; oil did not help the more advanced army. For Paraguayans, the war was fought with a more environmentally sound army built around the main Chaco rivers. As the

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Paraguayan army took advantage of its riverine condition, many visualized the potential of the rivers’ organic forms of energy. As a result, rivers would later in the twentieth century become the main focus for developers in Paraguay, as in a different part of the country the promises of hydroelectricity far exceeded the advantages of fluvial transportation offered by the Chaco rivers. In the end, there was an advantage to backwardness for the Paraguayan army. This was related to the shaky supply of petroleum on the war front that ultimately paralyzed the more modern-­looking Bolivian army.25 More importantly, the advantage of a more environmentally sound army stemmed from the unruly terrain of the Chaco region. The Chaco then, perhaps not so much as today, was an uncontrolled landscape hard to alter with the technologies of the 1930s. As it was, an army with relative lack of power to alter the landscape proved easier to adjust, and outperformed its more developed opponent. The Chaco War presented as a case of a successful environmentally adjusted army fighting against a modern-­looking oil-­based army enriches our understanding of the relationship between war and environment. Edmund Russell has argued that war and control of nature co-­evolved, expanding geometrically the armies’ abilities to transform the environment. The Chaco War shows that war and control of nature do not necessarily go together. Quite the contrary, even though the Chaco War was a transitional modern war between the First and Second World Wars, the ability of armies to adjust to environmental constraints was central in the making of war. In the end, the Chaco region proved formidable to lasting transformations at the time of the war. As a result, the more backward army prevailed, as the Bolivian army, even if modern, proved unable to decisively transform the Chaco region to take full advantage of its powerful oil-­run army.26

Notes 1 Archivo del Museo Militar del Ministerio de Defensa Nacional. Hereafter cited as “AMM.” Caja no. 25, Confidential Report no. 138 from Manlio Schenoni to the Minister of War and Marine from February 26, 1928, s/n. 2 AMM. Caja no. 19, Telegrams from Buenos Aires to Asunción, March 23, 1933, and September 21, 1933, s/n. 3 Some authors have argued that the Chaco War was a war for energy. Some main actors in the Paraguayan army did think the same. For the main war for oil narratives, see Julio José Chiavenato, La Guerra del Petróleo (Buenos Aires,

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Argentina: Editorial Punto de Encuentro, 2005); Alfredo Seiferheld, Economía y Petróleo durante la Guerra del Chaco: Apuntes para una historia económica del conflicto Paraguayo–Boliviano (Asunción, Paraguay: El Lector, 1983). On the international politics of the conflict, see Luiz A. Moniz Bandeira, “A Guerra do Chaco,” Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional 41, 1 (1998): 162–197. 4 Bridget María Chesterton, The Grandchildren of Francisco Solano López: Frontier and Nation in Paraguay, 1904–1936 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013); Gabriella Dalla Corte Caballero, La Guerra del Chaco: Ciudadanía, Estado, Nación en el siglo veinte (Rosario, Argentina: Pro-Historia Ediciones, 2010); Diego Abente, “The Liberal Republic and the Failure of Democracy,” The Americas 45, 4 (April 1989): 525–546; and “Foreign Capital, Economic Elites and the State in Paraguay during the Liberal Republic, 1870–1936,” Journal of Latin American Studies 21, 1 (February 1989): 61–88. 5 The field of environmental history of war has expanded significantly since Richard Tucker and Edmund Russell’s groundbreaking edited collection from 2004: Richard Tucker and Edmund Russell, Natural Allies, Natural Enemies (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2004); Edmund Russell, War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Lisa M. Brady, War Upon the Land: Military Strategies and the Transformation of the Southern Landscapes during the American Civil War (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2012); Charles E. Clossmann, War and the Environment: Military Destruction in the Modern Age (Texas: Texas A. & M. University Press, 2012); John McNeill and Corinna R. Unger (eds.), Environmental Histories of the Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Peter Coates, Tim Cole, and Chris Pearson (eds.), Militarized Landscapes: From Gettysburg to Salisbury Plains (New York: Bloomsbury Academic Publishing, 2010); Chris Pearson, Mobilizing Nature: The Environmental History of War and the Military in Modern France (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012). See also the provocative book by John McNeill, Mosquito Empires, Ecologies and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 6 I understand energy regime as the organization of societies around the use of different forms of energy. By organic energy, I mean the use of forms of energy other than fossil fuels. In this case, mainly water but also solar and even eolian sources of power. On the use of “energy regime,” I built on John McNeill’s concept as presented in Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the TwentiethCentury World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001). On the use of “organic army,” I am drawing on the classic definition of Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995). For another use of this concept applied to an environmental history of war, see Mark Fiege, “Gettysburg and the Organic Nature of the American Civil War,” in Tucker and Russell, 93–109.

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The most specific article on the Chaco War is Stephen Cote, “A War for Oil in the Chaco, 1932–1935,” Environmental History 18, 4 (October 2013): 738–758. 7 Matthew Hughes, “Logistics and the Chaco War: Bolivia versus Paraguay, 1932– 1935,” The Journal of Military History 69, 2 (April 2005): 411–437; Stephen Cote, ibid. 8 Both Ramos Jiménez and González were born in Villarrica, an old city located about a hundred miles east of Asunción which developed its own cultural tradition. They played key roles in the modernization of Paraguayan literature, working as poets and essayists. Bertoni, who spent most of his life in eastern Paraguay in the borderlands with Brazil, wrote about Paraguayan nature, and regarding Indians culturally and materially developed on the same level as the Aztecs or Incas. He became highly influential for the ways writers like Ramos Jiménez and González thought of Paraguayan nature. This valorization of Paraguayan indigeneity, if problematic considering its paternalist and condescending appreciation for Guaraní peoples, set up the intellectual climate for coming to terms with the Indian legacy in Paraguay at a very early stage, bearing in mind the successful experience at the time only in countries like Brazil, Mexico, and Peru. Moisés Bertoni, Civilización Guaraní (Puerto Bertoni, Paraguay: Ex Silvis, 1922); Juan Natalicio González, Geografía del Paraguay (México DF: Editorial Guarania, 1964). 9 Leopoldo Ramos Jiménez, Revelaciones sobre el alma paraguaya (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Talleres Gráficos Ferrari Hermanos, 1934), 6. For a deeper study of the nationalization of the Paraguayan Chaco as a discursive, scientific, ethnographic, and civilizational project, see Chesterton; chapter 4 is especially illuminating on the arguments used by the Paraguayan intellectuals to turn the Chaco into an extension of the eastern region. On Ramos Jiménez, see Chesterton, 46. 10 W. Barbrook Grubb, An Unknown People in an Unknown Land (London: Seely & Co., 1911). 11 Ministerio de Defensa Nacional, Breve Resumen de la Campaña del Chaco (Asunción, Paraguay: Imprenta Militar, 1934); David Zook, The Conduct of the Chaco War (New York: Bookman Associates, 1960); Leslie Rout, Politics of the Chaco Peace Conference, 1935–1939 (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1970); and Bruce Farcau, The Chaco War: Bolivia and Paraguay, 1932–1935 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996). For a biography of General Hans Kundt, see Robert Brockmann, El general y sus presidentes, vida y obra de Hans Kundt, Ernest Rohm y siete presidentes en la historia de Bolivia, 1911–1939 (La Paz, Bolivia: Plural, 2007). 12 Ramos Jiménez, 9. 13 AMM. Caja no. 28, letter from engineer Johny Bloomgreen, of International Harvester Export Company of Buenos Aires from February 27, 1929, s/n. 14 AMM. Caja no. 28, Presupuesto del Ministerio de Guerra y Marina 1928/1929, s/n. 15 AMM. Caja no. 28, Report from the Junta Nacional de Aprovisionamiento to the Minister of War and Marine from March 4, 1929, s/n; and March 15, 1929, s/n.

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16 The numbers actually do not add up in all the cases in the report. Apparently, there were various miscalculations in the report. The author has done the calculations to come up with the above number. AMM, Colección Gil Aguínaga, Carpeta no. 82, Junta Nacional de Aprovisionamiento, Cuadro Estadístico de Ganados, 1932–1936, s/n. 17 Andrés A. Rivarola, “Problemas Ganaderos,” paper presented at the Gimnasio Paraguayo in 1931, AMM. 18 Constance Kent, Life in Paraguay (Devon: Arthur H. Stockwell, 1958), 15. 19 Ministerio de Defensa Nacional, 13. 20 William E. Bradford, Frederic R. Fischer, Joseph W. Romita, Thomas S. Darrow, et al., El Chaco paraguayo, Misión de operaciones de los Estados Unidos de América en el Paraguay: Asunción, Paraguay, 1955. 21 Manuel Rodríguez, “La alimentación de nuestro ejército y marina (Conclusión),” Revista Militar, Asunción, Paraguay: Mayo 1931, año VIII, 4276–4296. For more on yerba mate, see Christine Folch, “Stimulating Consumption: Yerba Mate, Myths, Markets and Meanings from Conquest to Present,” Comparative Studies of Society and History 52, 1 (January 2010): 6–36. 22 Rodríguez, 4200. 23 Paul Robinson, “Forgotten Victors: White Russian Officers in Paraguay during the Chaco War 1932–1935,” The Journal of Slavic Military Studies 12, 3 (1999): 178–185. 24 AMM. Caja no. AV 355-1, D.M. IV no. 131 from July 16, 1935, Engineer Vasilio Yakovleff to the Minister of Marine and War, s/n. 25 Hughes, 437; and Cote, 753. 26 Russell, 2–3. See also David Biggs, Quagmire, Nation-Building and Nature in the Mekong Delta (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011), 6.

8

Bolivian Oil Nationalism and the Chaco War1 Stephen Cote

On March 15, 1937, just two years after the fighting ended in the Chaco Boreal and one year before the belligerents signed the peace treaty, Bolivian military forces and state oil company representatives forced their way into the La Paz headquarters of Standard Oil Company of Bolivia.2 They ordered everyone out of the building, making sure that the Standard Oil employees took nothing with them. The Bolivians presented the company administrators with a Supreme Decree from the military junta dated two days earlier, announcing the cancellation of the oil company’s 1922 concession contract. The decree asserted that Standard Oil had defrauded the state and had acted in bad faith.3 Standard Oil’s refineries, wells, and drilling equipment were now property of the state. The company declared with outrage that “not a chair or a pencil was left.”4 No Latin American country had ever nationalized a foreign oil company before, or any major foreign company.5 It was a bold and unprecedented act taken by a bankrupt country undergoing collective war trauma against what was arguably the largest and most powerful corporation in the world and a US-based corporation in the United States’ self-­proclaimed geopolitical sphere of influence. Why did Bolivia take such a risky measure, and in what ways did the Chaco War shape the historic decision? I define oil nationalism as an expression of desire that the country’s petroleum resources be exploited by and for the nation. I use the word “desire” because, like nationalism, desire drives powerful emotions that at times defy logic and even lead to violence. Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism can help to frame our understandings of the ways in which a resource’s changing use-­value, such as petroleum and its many derivatives, “transcends sensuousness” as commodities on the international market.6 As transnational oil companies and global powers competed for the geostrategic natural resource, love of nation and lust for petroleum became formidable forces that instigated violence in many regions of the world. And oil nationalism crossed the political spectrum. Marxists believe

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all property should be owned by the state to benefit everyone equally. Those on the far right express strategic concerns about the control of resources to build state power and bolster national security. The realization of those ideological functions for oil has often blurred under populist regimes in Latin American countries like Venezuela and Argentina.7 Oil nationalists of all political stripes united in Bolivia during and after the Chaco War. The Great Depression framed the context for the Chaco War and for Bolivian oil nationalism. The tin sector had already begun to reach the natural limits of ore quality and quantity in the 1920s, but still remained the most important source of revenue to the state. The sharp decline of tin prices on the world market in 1930, however, demonstrated the weakness of relying on the ore. The soon-­tobe bankrupt state turned its gaze toward the relatively undeveloped lowlands to the east of the Andes for new sources of revenue. The eastern lowlands contain diverse ecological zones from the Amazon Basin in the north to the dry tropical lowlands of the Chaco Boreal in the south. The most developed industry east of the Andes in the 1920s was petroleum. There were also enormous tracts of land for ranching and agriculture to attract settlement. For the east to become a viable engine of economic growth, however, two major obstacles needed to be overcome. The first was the lack of good transportation lines. The state would need to build roads or railroads and pipelines either west over the Andes, north through the Amazon Basin, south into Argentina, or east to the Paraguay River. Each route had serious drawbacks, leading to the second major obstacle. To open the east, the border dispute with Paraguay needed a resolution. Repeated attempts at diplomacy between Bolivia and Paraguay since the middle of the nineteenth century had failed.8 Bolivia’s aggressive moves into the Chaco, therefore, were carried out in part to diversify the country’s economic base with an eye toward the country’s petroleum reserves. The growing attention paid by the state toward the Chaco and the petroleum reserves on its western edge increased manifestations of oil nationalism. The roots of Bolivian oil nationalism are found in the discourse of the earliest Bolivian petroleum pioneers.9 In 1896, a Sucre physician, Dr Manuel Cuéllar, hoped to utilize the dark liquid that he found oozing from a small spring in a remote mountainous area to light his city and propel his country out of backwardness and poverty.10 His attempts to haul barrels of oil to Sucre on the backs of mules and to drill oil wells in the southeastern Sub-Andean ranges ultimately failed, as did similar attempts by other Bolivians, Chileans, and North Americans.11 None of these petroleum pioneers had the financial resources or the technical skills to drill in the fractured subsoil geology of the Sub-Andes.

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The state, moreover, focused its limited resources on the highland mining centers and mostly ignored the nascent petroleum industry. As most of the Bolivian oilmen came from the elite classes that were entrenched in national politics, their voices sometimes emerged in debates over petroleum on the national level. In 1915, for example, a report to the Bolivian Senate from the Ministry of Justice and Industry lamented the lack of state involvement in the petroleum sector.12 The minister begged Congress to provide funding to the Cuerpo Nacional de Minas (National Mine Corps) to conduct studies into the origin, locations, and amounts of the country’s petroleum. The government had been adjudicating petroleum concessions on the basis of little more than crude maps with often disputed property measurements, leading to confusion and conflict. The report suggested employing the services of businessmen such as the Santa Cruz petroleum pioneer Luis Lavadenz, and looked to Argentina and its state oil company (YPF), one of the first in the world, as a model.13 The author went on to emphasize the growing importance of the industry as science found more uses for oil, especially with the invention of the internal combustion engine, noting that, “Nothing justifies our indolent attitude.”14 The conclusion warned that it would be shameful if the industry collapsed at its beginning due to lack of state attention, or worse, that the profits would only end up enriching the coffers of foreign governments. But the state, controlled by highland mining interests and landowners, remained focused on the highland mining centers as frustrated oil nationalists lobbied in vain. A 1918 report to the legislature by the Minister of Justice and Industry, Julio Gutiérrez, offered a different view.15 He observed that the mining centers were importing goods such as sugar, rice, wheat, and petroleum from other countries when Bolivia possessed these commodities internally and could easily be the main supplier but for the lack of reliable transportation lines, echoing the frustration of eastern lowland businessmen who wanted more assistance from the state to market their goods. He said it was “urgent” to develop the petroleum industry to “revolutionize the industrial economy of the country.”16 While building roads to the oil regions might be too costly because of the mountainous terrain, he supported the idea of a trans-Andean pipeline to carry the oil to the highland cities. He complained about the state’s ignorance of the petroleum sector, the fact that there was no office for technical information or subsoil studies, and that laws requiring rent payments and a share of production for the state were obstacles to much-­needed foreign investment. Unlike those who wanted the state to subsidize a domestic oil industry, Gutiérrez felt that only foreign companies had the capital

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to develop this sector, and it was urgent that they do so. Otherwise, the domestic oilmen would continue to hold their enormous concessions as speculative investments, as many were, without any production. While Gutiérrez saw a role for the state, that role was to attract foreign investment to exploit the oil for the mining centers. President Bautista Saavedra (1921–1925) placed his trust in Standard Oil Company (NJ) to accomplish what the pioneers had not, and granted the foreign company millions of acres of the country’s most promising petroleum concessions, which Standard Oil had secretly acquired from other companies such as the New York based Richmond Levering & Company. But not everyone was as enthusiastic about Standard Oil as the president and his ministers. Raucous debate erupted in the Bolivian national legislature over the concession contract. The most vocal critic of the deal was Abel Iturralde, a senator from La Paz. He claimed the transfer of some of the concessions from Richmond Levering & Company of New York to Standard Oil violated a no-­transfer clause in Richmond’s contract, and that the size of the concessions violated a recently-­passed petroleum law that limited conessions to 100,000 hectares.17 Therefore, both contracts should have been nullified and the concessions returned to the state. Iturralde believed that granting millions of acres of petroleum concessions to Standard Oil Company would lead to actions like those taken by Chilean nitrate interests at the former Bolivian seacoast forty years earlier, and that a similar result could be expected— the loss of sovereignty over national territory and the loss of a strategic commodity.18 Bolivia had lost its seacoast and territory rich in nitrates to Chile in the 1880s War of the Pacific. It had also lost territory rich in rubber, another strategic resource, to Brazil in 1903. Iturralde’s stance on behalf of Bolivian oil gained him the moniker “El Centinela del Petróleo,” (the Guardian of Petroleum).19 Standard Oil requested a modified contract with the Bolivian government in November 1921.20 Changes to the final (and generous) contract, signed by Saavedra in July 1922, removed a clause that permitted the Bolivian government to confiscate the properties for fraud.21 Another lowered the royalties to the state from 15 to 11 percent. Yet another established a sliding scale for rents based upon the number of years the concessions were held and the production date. The first two years required a low rate to assist during the greater capital investment of the exploration phase. The rate would increase only after the company began to produce oil.22 Senator Iturralde strongly objected to the contract modifications because the 11 percent of production reserved for the state would not satisfy domestic demand, for the vagueness of the definition of production, and that there was no clause requiring the company to pay damages

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for accidents such as fires or spills.23 Furthermore, Iturralde warned that based on Standard Oil’s questionable practices in other countries, any contract with the company should be especially stringent.24 Saavedra’s finance minister went before the Senate to answer questions and to rebut Iturralde’s claims. He argued,“It is necessary not to forget that the petroleum reserves in Bolivia exist only in regions inhabited by savages, where one cannot find water, the principal element of life, where the diseases are endemic and almost always fatal; where many explorers have paid with their lives, in the end, where existence is made possible only through grand difficulties and privations.”25 President Saavedra and his minister believed that only foreigners had the capital, the technical capacity, and the knowledge to tame the oil regions. These perceptions were fundamental to the argument against the oil nationalists, and betrayed the cultural outlook of many of Bolivia’s elites. In their minds, the indigenous peoples who inhabited the Chaco were “savages” and they feared that Bolivians, most of who were indigenous and mestizo (mixed race), did not have the capacity to construct a modern industrial society by themselves.26 These perceptions, however, were not just racist, but also misguided as they failed to account for the different objectives of foreign companies like Standard Oil that were far less interested in Bolivian development than profit margins. By 1928, despite locating oil at four separate locations and building two small refineries to produce higher-­value products from the crude, the North Americans of Standard Oil had not produced a single drop of oil for Bolivia.

Depression, war, and oil In the late 1920s the state initiated two lines of offense in the eastern part of the country. The first was to establish a number of small outposts across the disputed boundary with Paraguay deep inside the Chaco Boreal. The second was to coerce more production from Standard Oil Company’s operations on the western edge of the Chaco. The company had been operating in the country for six years, had drilled dozens of wells, had found oil in four separate locations, but had not delivered any oil or much revenue to the state. The company claimed that the small amount of oil it did produce, less than 100 barrels per day, was only enough to run the company’s day to day operations. Therefore, it had not entered the vague contractual period of production that would require it to pay higher rents. Frustrated by the company’s attitude amid increasing demand for both oil and revenues, the government of Hernando Siles (1926–1930) took action. On

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July 12, 1928, Siles altered the 1922 contractual production start date with a Supreme Resolution from the Budget Ministry.27 The decree set the date of production for January 1, 1930, whether there was oil “produced” by then or not. The state noted that up to that point the company had complied with its other obligations and paid its non-­production rents, but it would soon start paying more. In 1930, Standard would have its rents increased from 2.5 centavos per hectare to 10 centavos, and then further increased to 50 centavos per hectare by the seventh year. Siles made it clear that the company was obligated to provide the state 11 percent of the sales, either in oil, or cash from sales of the oil. The departments where the oil was located entered into the deal with Law 922 of December 31, 1929, which gave them a 30 percent share of the state’s 11 percent take.28 The regional governments began pressing for greater oil production levels to fund services in their provinces. They also pressed for a greater share of the revenues, which led to regional divisions in the country and provided fodder for autonomy movements in the east in more recent times.29 The border dispute with Paraguay also began to heat up in the late 1920s. Siles was able to avert war through diplomatic channels, but the Chaco became increasingly militarized, and blood spilled from isolated border clashes. The press fed the growing clamor inside Bolivia to defend its territory, and focused more attention on the oil sector and on Standard Oil Company. The Sucre newspaper El País, for example, ran a series of articles in 1927 and 1928 titled “Camino al Chaco” (A Road through the Chaco) that advocated pushing east to the Paraguay River to gain an outlet on the Atlantic Ocean to export oil and open the eastern part of the country for colonization and industry.30 Standard Oil’s operations prior to this point had mostly impacted remote and sparsely populated areas of the country far outside of the gaze of the highland urban centers. With war looming in the east, however, the company’s operations and the militarily strategic resource became objects of closer investigation. Bolivia needed oil to fuel its military machine and oil revenues to fund the government. Few, however, called for nationalizing the resource at this time. The agenda of the Left called for nationalizing the mines, carrying out agrarian reform, and trying to stop the war. A military coup overthrew Siles in 1930 as tin prices began a precipitous decline on the international market. Elections held in 1931 carried the elder statesman Daniel Salamanca into Bolivia’s presidential residence, the Palacio Quemado (Burnt Palace). Salamanca acted more aggressively toward both Paraguay and Standard Oil Company. In 1931, he reverted the oil company’s contractual production start date, which Siles had set at 1930, back to 1924. The

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company now owed back taxes. Standard Oil appealed the decree to the Supreme Court, which never issued a decision. The quarrel over taxes drew the company into direct conflict with the Bolivian state at a critical moment, because by 1932 Salamanca had led the country into a war with Paraguay.31 Part of his decision to be so aggressive with the border issue had to do with petroleum. The president had begun to talk openly about the need for a port on the Paraguay River to export oil, saying in 1931, for example, that “Bolivia could not resign itself ” to its landlocked status.32 Many in the country agreed. Standard Oil Company would not cooperate with Bolivia during the Chaco War. It moved trucks, drilling equipment, and other material from the oil camps in Bolivia over the border to its operations in Argentina. The company refused to increase production levels for the state, even capping some wells, and denied it could process aviation fuel at its small refineries in Camiri and Sanandita.33 Bolivians complained that the company charged the state inflated prices. The company’s attitude further eroded the already declining relationship with the state over production taxes. The Bolivian military confiscated company vehicles and pack animals from Standard Oil to transport troops to the front. Standard, in turn, sued the Bolivian government. The company repeatedly declared neutrality, and ignored a clause in the 1922 contract that obligated the company to provide more oil to the state during wartime. Bolivia had to import more petroleum from a Standard Oil subsidiary in Peru. In May 1933, during the disastrous campaign at Nanawa, Bolivia’s top general Hans Kundt informed the president that the lack of gasoline was “greatly detrimental to operations.”34 On May 15, President Salamanca issued a Supreme Decree establishing oil distribution service in the war zones, and reminded Standard Oil Company of its contractual obligations during wartime.35 The chronic deficit of fuel for both the army and the country’s airline because of Standard Oil Company intransigence led the military to take over one of the company’s two refineries that October.36 The state followed up in February by setting monthly production quotas.37 Output at the main oil camp in Camiri increased nearly eight-­fold under state control in 1933.38 The military operated the refinery for a short while, but found that it did not have the technicians capable of maintaining the facility so it brought back Standard Oil engineers. Standard complied with the state at this point, but it became clear that it had been lying for years about its production capacity. The company had also lied about being able to refine airplane fuel for the military, which it began to do in 1933. Standard had no desire to develop Bolivia’s oil reserves until the price of oil was high enough to justify building the

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expensive infrastructure needed to export from Bolivia’s isolated southeast. But Bolivia needed its oil. Standard Oil Company non-­cooperation fueled two competing narratives of oil nationalism during the war. The first blamed Standard Oil for not doing enough to help the Bolivian war effort. The company and its employees became enemies of the Bolivian people for declaring neutrality, refusing to increase production, moving equipment out of the country, and suing the state for confiscating company equipment for the war effort. This line of argument became the legal basis for the 1937 nationalization. The second narrative fits neatly into classic dependency theory. Bolivians began to blame Standard Oil for starting the war, in league with the Bolivian government, to gain access to (non-­ existent) oil reserves deep inside the Chaco plains. Elsewhere, I have traced the popularization of this claim to speeches by Louisiana Senator Huey Long and writings by Bolivian leftist Tristan Marof.39 Regardless of the origin, this narrative fueled an increasingly hostile public response against the oil company and the oligarchy of tin mining interests and large landowners who controlled Bolivia’s economy and political power, and growing demands to nationalize the reserves. In 1934, some also began to blame Royal Dutch Shell for allegedly supporting Paraguay and competing with Standard Oil for the imagined reserves deep inside the Chaco. In 1934, Paraguayan forces pushed the Bolivian army west, beyond any previous treaty limit, and into the foothills of the Sub-Andean ranges where the actual oil reserves were located. One Bolivian regiment gained the nickname the “Defensores del Petróleo” (Defenders of the Petroleum) for defending oil wells at Ñancorainza in July 1935.40 As Bolivian forces successfully held the high ground and routed the Paraguayan troops, the oil camps became battlegrounds defended with the lives of Bolivian soldiers. The oil transformed as if in a refinery in the blood-­soaked subsoil of the western Chaco from a strategic commodity to an enduring and sanctified symbol of Bolivian nationalism.

The military socialists In 1934, President Salamanca traveled to the Chaco front lines to fire his top general. Instead, a group of officers arrested the president and forced him to resign. The war ended the following year under his vice-­president. Shortly thereafter, a group of Chaco War officers took control of the government. They called themselves the “military socialists,” a term that would have been clearly understood in the global context of the late 1930s, and promised to rejuvenate

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the nation. While the junta did not nationalize the tin mines or carry out land reform demanded by the Left and the highland indigenous laborers, it did impose new taxes on the tin mines and incorporated the indigenous soldiers into the fabric of society through veterans’ organizations formed by the soldiers themselves. The most radical measure taken by the military socialists came in March 1937 when they canceled the contract of Standard Oil Company. The year before, the government had approved the establishment of a state oil company, Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales Bolivianos (the Bolivian State Oil Reserves, or YPFB), and in April transferred all of Standard Oil Company’s previous operations to YPFB. When Standard Oil fought back, the company found out how deeply oil nationalism had penetrated the nation’s psyche. The Confederación Socialista Boliviana (Bolivian Socialist Confederation, or CSB), for example, included the nationalization of petroleum in its July 1935 “Program of Action.”41 According to Laura Gotkowitz, the CSB was the most influential of the new political parties in the post-­war scene.42 The members would go on to form the core of the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (Nationalist Revolutionary Movement, or MNR), which would lead the National Revolution of 1952. Veterans groups also demanded the nationalization of Standard Oil Company properties. Veterans organized throughout the country under the umbrella Legion of Ex-Combatants (LEC).43 The LEC, radical leftists, and right-­wing nationalists rallied in the streets to support the military government’s decision to nationalize Standard Oil Company. They held demonstrations in the major cities denouncing Standard Oil as an enemy of the people. In May 1937, for example, the Frente Popular de Potosí (The Potosí Popular Front) gathered to protest alleged subversive acts taken by Standard Oil after the nationalization.44 The front was made up of veterans, miners, railroad workers, and socialist party members. The LEC printed an open letter to the junta on May 10, declaring its support for the nationalization and against “treasonous” acts taken by the oil company.45 It also voiced support for the state oil company.

The institutionalization of oil nationalism The model for Bolivia’s state oil company came from its southern neighbor. General Enrique Mosconi, the first director of Argentina’s state oil company (YPF), had encouraged the establishment of state oil companies throughout

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Latin America in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1927 and 1928, General Mosconi traveled to Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and Chile to promote his model.46 He hoped to integrate the region’s economies and exploit natural resources to develop Latin America’s economic independence decades before his countryman Raul Prebisch advocated import substitution industrialization (ISI) strategies. Within Bolivia, a small group of men led by Santa Cruz businessman Dionisio Foianini Banzer propagated the idea of a state oil company.47 Foianini had earned his doctorate in chemistry in Italy, where he specialized in mineralogy and petroleum geology. When he returned from Europe, he traveled to Argentina and visited family friends in the Argentine government. He also took the time to study YPF operations while he was there. In 1932, Foianini went to La Paz and met with President Daniel Salamanca to sell his idea for a Bolivian state oil company. Salamanca, however, was too occupied with the economic crisis and the looming military situation in the Chaco. Foianini made important contacts in the Bolivian government during the war that helped him to lobby for the oil company. He met engineers and administrators including the director of the Ministry of Mines and Petroleum, Jorge Muñoz Reyes, and a notary at the Ministry, José Lavadenz. Muñoz and Standard Oil Company technician Guillermo Elder had operated the Standard Oil refinery for the Bolivian military during the Chaco War.48 After the war, Foianini elicited support from people in the military socialist government such as Gustavo Chacón, Secretary of the Ministry of Economy. He also brought in Santa Cruz historian Humberto Vásquez Machicado, and petroleum engineer Guillermo Mariaca. These men made up the first directorate of YPFB.49 In December 1936, the team presented a proposal to the President of the Junta, Colonel David Toro, with support from the Chief of the Military General Staff, Germán Busch.50 Later that month, Toro and the Council of Ministers signed the decree creating YPFB and brought Foianini’s dream to fruition.51 The Supreme Decree creating YPFB began with the premise that since the oil reserves already belonged to the state, it was the duty of the state to decide the best and most efficient manner to develop the resource. Secondly, it stated that Bolivia’s petroleum resources had not yet benefited the country’s economy in proportion to the quantity of known reserves. Furthermore, petroleum’s importance both to the world economy and to the national security interests of the state required the state to control the country’s oil reserves. The decree assigned YPFB the task to explore and exploit oil inside designated areas, and also the “commercialization, transportation, and export of petroleum and its derivatives inside the territory of the Republic.”52 Article four of the Decree allowed YPFB to enter into contracts

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with private companies, which they did. For example, Luis Lavadenz, the Santa Cruz petroleum pioneer, made plans to exploit 300,000 hectares of concessions as a mixed company with YPFB in 1940.53 In January 1937, the state awarded YPFB all of the oil lands outside of established concessions. These, of course, did not include the areas controlled by Standard Oil. In March, the state cancelled Standard Oil’s contract and provisionally transferred Standard’s operations to YPFB. In April, the provisional status became permanent, giving the state oil company productive wells and refineries to operate. On May 6, 1937, the government passed a law establishing YPFB as an autonomous government agency and approved ten million bolivianos operating capital, although YPFB received only 50,000 to start out with.54 It was far from the ten million promised and certainly not enough to drill and explore. On July 13, 1937, Germán Busch assumed control of the government and provided YPFB an additional 100,000 bolivianos to jumpstart the company’s exploration and drilling plans, although it was still not sufficient to do so.55 As Foianini later wrote, Bolivia had no money, but it had oil, and one was the same as the other.56 Both, however, were in short supply. YPFB faced serious challenges that included the lack of capital, few trained personnel to run an oil company, and scant geological information about the oil regions. The company needed to increase production to gain the resources necessary to begin new exploration and drilling. The state enterprise hired technical personnel from outside the country to operate the refineries. Bolivians received scholarships to study in Mexico and Argentina to learn how to administer an oil company and operate the machinery. In this way Bolivia began to develop a technical class outside of the mines. YPFB purchased trucks and railcars to ship oil to the highland cities and mines to reduce imports. The company also carried out the first extensive state study of the nation’s mineral deposits.57 Standard Oil could have done all of these things, but was not interested in Bolivia’s development except as it would have helped the company’s bottom line. YPFB, on the other hand, was part of the government and had as its mission using the oil reserves to modernize the country. The state gave the YPFB directorate another mission to carry out in Buenos Aires. Germán Busch asked Foianini to determine the exact location of the oil reserves for the delegation at the Chaco Peace Conference.58 Foianini and Jorge Lavadenz, who had directed transportation operations for Standard Oil, pieced together from memory and old maps the most likely oil sites. Their estimations were correct, and the border that emerged from the three years of negotiations in 1938, though ceding large amounts of land to Paraguay, left the oil on the

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Bolivian side of the new border. Keeping the oil was a victory that the military government could bring the Bolivian people to smooth over the painful loss of so much territory. YPFB began the complicated process of building an oil company. It purchased a building in La Paz for its administrative headquarters. During the Chaco War, the state had expropriated 300,000 hectares of a ranch in Camiri where Standard Oil had an oil camp and refinery. YPFB acquired this land for its operational headquarters.59 Foianini used his contacts in Argentina to buy drilling equipment on credit.60 Jorge Lavadenz, son of the cruceño pioneer Luis Lavadenz, and an ex-­employee of Standard Oil, chose the location for YPFB’s first well. At 585 meters, the drill struck oil and soon began producing 800 barrels per day, nearly double the 450 barrels per day production of Standard’s wells in 1936.61 It was a remarkable strike of luck for a wildcat well, and a sign of the success to follow. In 1954, called the Year of Petroleum, production grew to 269,000 cubic meters, a full 83.6 percent of domestic consumption.62 In 1955, production exceeded consumption (428,000 cubic meters to 338,000 cubic meters) for the first time, and YPFB achieved energy independence for Bolivia.63

Standard Oil and Bolivian oil nationalism Standard Oil did not simply accept the confiscation of its properties by the Bolivian state in 1937. The company developed a strategy to regain its properties through the Bolivian courts and the US Department of State. Standard Oil, and other transnational oil companies, feared the precedent being set. The US Department of State, however, was operating under the tenets of the Good Neighbor Policy, which tempered US intervention in the region. The US had new foreign policy considerations, as well. Franklin Roosevelt desired strategic Bolivian minerals in response to the growing Axis threat in Europe. Standard Oil based its legal arguments on three main points.64 The first was that under the 1922 contract, the state did not have a right to cancel the contract without going through a process that involved notification of a complaint, followed by six months for the company to fix the complaint, and an appeals process in the courts. Second, the company declared a so-­called clandestine and illegal pipeline to Argentina that was part of the confiscation decree to be neither concealed, illegal, nor a violation of the contract, and provided documents to prove its point. Third, Standard reminded the state that the earlier production

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revenue disagreement was still being processed in the Supreme Court. Therefore, the company had neither defrauded the state nor acted in bad faith. But legal arguments did not really matter. Oil nationalism encompassed strong emotions and strategic concerns. Bolivia’s Foreign Minister Enrique Finot said that, “we had to drive Standard Oil Company out of Bolivia for political reasons.”65 He claimed “a moral justification arising from the company’s non-­cooperative attitude during the Chaco War,” and that it was, “a natural aspiration of a country to control its own petroleum resources.” The confiscation, seen by the company as both illegal and unprecedented, was to Bolivia both “moral” and “natural.” Bolivia could remain trapped in a dependent relationship to a foreign company with little interest in developing the resource for the country, or it could develop the oil by itself. During the Chaco War, the matter gained an urgency which could no longer be ignored. In 1939, a Bolivian law professor speaking before the Supreme Court on behalf of the state asked, “What is all this if it is not fraud? Has [the company] not defrauded the cause, the very purpose of the concession, the industrial exploitation and benefits of petroleum? Has it not defrauded . . . the laws, the expectations, the life, the progress, the future of Bolivia?”66 He added that since the petroleum was public property, then the nationalization was no more than restoring a public good, but that there was a dual purpose: one social, the other legal and punitive. The company needed to be punished for its obstructionist actions during the war. Meanwhile, the press stirred up anti-Standard Oil sentiment by printing rumors of company plots to overthrow the government, and conspiracies of government officials acting as agents of Standard Oil. In July 1938, an article in a La Paz newspaper questioned the patriotism of the Bolivian lawyers representing the oil company. The lawyers faced intimidation and even exile.67 The lead lawyer for Standard Oil was a former petroleum pioneer, Dr Carlos Calvo. In November 1937, on his way to work, Bolivian police picked up Calvo and put him on a train to Argentina under police escort.68 Eight lawyers who openly agreed with Standard Oil’s legal argument found themselves in the center of a national outcry.69 A petition went before the Supreme Court asking for their disbarment. Another petition went before the Congress asking to strip the lawyers of their citizenship. In 1938, a demonstration against Standard Oil in Oruro called for the lawyers’ heads. In February 1939, the Director General of the National Police stated on a radio show, “It is precisely in these moments that we should make known to the Supreme Court justices our decision to tear out their entrails and burn their blood if perchance they should rule against the sacred interests of the Nation and in favor of Standard Oil Company.”70 Clearly, oil nationalism had grown to be a powerful force in the post-­war climate.

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In March 1939, the Bolivian Supreme Court ruled against Standard Oil. The Court based its decision on the fact that the original transfer from Richmond Levering & Company in 1921 was invalid, and therefore the company had no legal standing in the country. It was the same argument made by the “Guardian of Petroleum,” Senator Abel Iturralde, in 1922.71 Standard Oil turned to the US Department of State for help, but found little support. In December 1936, the same month as the founding of YPFB, and during the Chaco War Peace Conference in Buenos Aires, the United States had signed the Protocol Relative to Nonintervention. The US Minister to Bolivia assured the country that the US would “let American investments abroad take care of themselves.”72 After the nationalization, the US told Standard Oil to work out its problems in the Bolivian court system, and later offered to mediate between the two sides. The company’s position was that it would accept a cash settlement, but not the legal validation of the nationalization that would set a precedent for other countries to follow. Mexico did just that one year later. Bolivia learned first-­hand the limits to the Good Neighbor Policy when it found it could not obtain development loans. The US Department of State blocked loans to pressure Bolivia to settle with Standard Oil. Deep in debt and under political pressure at home, President Enrique Peñaranda decided in 1942, the best course would be to make a small cash settlement to the company. The company accepted $1,750,000, approximately one-­tenth of its investment in the country, and returned maps and geological data on the oil regions it had held (in violation of its contract) in the United States. YPFB benefited greatly from the information, and Bolivia got its loans. Standard Oil could save face and declare that the settlement proved that the cancellation of its contract was an illegal confiscation. Oil nationalists then forced Peñaranda out of office for his action.

Conclusion Oil nationalism emerged as a powerful force in Bolivia during the Chaco War as oil’s strategic importance grew and soldiers shed blood defending the reserves. Having such an important resource controlled by a foreign company, Standard Oil, made sense for some because Standard had the capital, experience, and technical capacity to develop the reserves. When Standard did not deliver on its promises to produce oil to satisfy domestic demand, the state began to question the company’s motives and the veracity of its claims. The result was increasing pressure from successive Bolivian governments to coerce Standard

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to produce much-­needed oil and revenues for Bolivia. Most Bolivians, however, had little knowledge or interest in the remote and isolated oil camps until the outbreak of hostilities with neighboring Paraguay put a spotlight on the eastern half of the country and the oil camps located on the edge of the Chaco. As 250,000 mostly highland indigenous conscripts found their way to the Chaco front, many passed through oil camps and traveled on roads built by Standard Oil Company. They wondered who started the war, and who was to blame for the tragic and inept conduct that led to nearly 60,000 Bolivian deaths. Many found it easy to blame the oil company that had declared neutrality and refused to increase production for the war effort. Others questioned whether the oil company had its own interests in the war, and speculated that it had instigated the conflict to seek oil reserves deep inside the disputed territory. The foreign company became a scapegoat for the military failures, and seeds of oil nationalism began to sprout in the popular imagination. After the conflict, the logic of nationalization seemed both “natural” and “moral” to Bolivians who felt that the reserves should better serve the interests of the country. Santa Cruz businessman Dionisio Foianini Banzer and other oil nationalists pushed the military socialists to establish a state oil company modeled after Argentina’s. They succeeded, and YPFB began operations in late 1936. In March 1937 came the historic nationalization decree, and soon the state oil company was producing oil to meet domestic demand. Bolivia achieved energy independence shortly after the National Revolution of 1952. The success bolstered the arguments of the oil nationalists. In 1956, YPFB found itself competing with foreign companies when the revolutionary state opened the sector in order to obtain international loans. Gulf Oil became the most important oil and natural gas producer in the country in the 1960s, but during an angry public outburst of oil nationalism another military socialist government nationalized Gulf ’s holdings in 1969. A round of privatizations took place amid neoliberal reforms in the 1990s, and the state oil company was split up and sold off. But the transnational oil companies who came to Bolivia attracted by low tax rates and large natural gas fields reaped financial rewards while Bolivians saw little benefit. A proposed natural gas pipeline from southeastern Bolivia to the Chilean coast caused an outburst of oil nationalism and mass protests in 2003 that drove the neoliberal president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada from the presidential office and onto a plane to Miami. Before he left, he ordered the military to fire on the protesters, causing the deaths of dozens in the highland city of El Alto.

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The coalition of indigenous peasants, miners, coca growers, labor unions, and neighborhood associations that led the Gas War of 2003 supported a political party called MAS (Movement Toward Socialism), and elected one of their own as president in 2005. Evo Morales returned the majority share of the hydrocarbon sector to YPFB and forced the transnationals to pay higher rents and taxes if they wanted to continue operating in the country. All of them did. Evo clearly understood the historic context of oil nationalism in Bolivia when he named the decree returning control of the hydrocarbons to the state “Heroes of the Chaco.”

Notes 1 Some of the ideas and language in this chapter have been previously published in Stephen Cote, “A War for Oil in the Chaco, 1932–1935,” Environmental History 18, 4 (October 2013), 738–758. 2 Standard Oil Company of Bolivia, Confiscation: A History of the Oil Industry in Bolivia (New York, 1939), 7–8. 3 Bolivia: Ministerio de Minas y Petróleos, “Resolución Suprema de 13 de Marzo de 1937.” (Siglo XX “A” MH, Libro 3–4), ABNB. 4 Standard Oil Company, Confiscation, 8. 5 While Argentina had the first state oil company, it did not confiscate any foreign companies. Mexico’s historic nationalization came one year later. 6 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1990), 163. 7 See, for example, the discussion of Peronism in Elana Shever, Resources for Reform: Oil and Neoliberalism in Argentina (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012); and Fernando Coronil, The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1997). 8 For a map of the various treaty lines from 1879 to 1927 and an explanation of the diplomatic efforts between the countries, see Leslie Rout, Politics of the Chaco Peace Conference, 1935–1939 (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1970), 3–27. 9 See, for example, Adolfo Costa du Rels, Bewitched Lands, trans. Stuart Edgar Grummon (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945). Originally published in French as Terres Embrasées in 1931, and later in Spanish as Tierras hechizadas. The book is a semi-­fictional account of Costa du Rels and some of his oil business partners. 10 Carlos Royuela Comboni, Cien años de hidrocarburos en Bolivia (1896–1996) (La Paz, Bolivia: Los Amigos del Libro, 1996), 35–38.

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11 I use the term “Sub-Andes” to refer to the ten north–south running mountain chains between Sucre and the Chaco Boreal. 12 Bolivia: “Memoria del Ministerio de Justicia e Industria” (1915): xcii–xcix. 13 YPF stands for Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales, or the State Oil Reserves. Argentina first began developing its oil reserves in 1907, and the government of Hipólito Yrigoyen founded YPF in 1922. See Carl Solberg, Oil and Nationalism in Argentina: A History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1979). 14 Bolivia: “Memoria del Ministerio de Justicia e Industria” (1915): xciv, BCN. 15 Bolivia: “Memoria del Ministerio de Justicia e Industria” (1918): 118–129, BCN. 16 Ibid., 127. 17 Moises Alcazar reprinted parts of Iturralde’s Senate speeches in Abel Iturralde: el centinela del petróleo (La Paz, Bolivia: Editorial “La Paz,” 1943), 179–186. 18 Alcazar, Abel Iturralde, 182–183. 19 In one of those ironies of history, Abel’s niece, Ximena Iturralde, married neoliberal president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, who privatized the oil reserves in 1997, and was driven from the country in the Gas War of 2003. 20 Standard Oil Company of Bolivia, Confiscation, 1. 21 Bolivia: Ministerio de Hacienda e Industria, “Resolución Suprema de 22 de julio de 1922.” From a digital archive of Bolivian petroleum legislation which the author accessed with permission of Bernardo Prado Liévana of hidrocarburosbolivia.com, presented henceforth as, HBC. 22 Bolivia: Enrique Gutierrez to President of the Republic (February 23, 1928). (PR-No. 60–61), ABNB. 23 Abel Iturralde, Debates en el H. Senado Nacional sobre la concesión de un millón de hectáreas petrolíferas a Richmond Levering Co. y la Standard Oil Co.: petición de informe del H. Senador por La Paz doctor Abel Iturralde, legislatura ordinaria de 1921–1922 (La Paz, Bolivia: Litografías e Imprentas “Unidas,” 1922), 40–56. The question of what constituted production became a drawn-­out legal battle between the company and the Bolivian Supreme Court that had not been resolved at the time of nationalization in 1937. 24 The US broke up the Standard Oil Trust in 1911 under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act because of its monopolistic and predatory corporate behavior. At the same time as these debates took place in Bolivia, the Teapot Dome Scandal broke in the US. While not involving Standard Oil, the scandal sullied the reputations of big oil. Ecuador passed legislation giving the state ownership of subsoil resources in 1919 because of actions taken by an agent of Standard Oil, who attempted to obscure Standard’s involvement in the deal. See Mira Wilkins, “Multinational Oil Companies in South America in the 1920s: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru,” The Business History Review, 48, 3 (1974): 414–446. 25 Iturralde, Debates en el H. Senado Nacional.

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26 The literature on racial views of Latin American elites is extensive. See, for example, Nancy Lee Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (New York: Cornell University Press, 1996). 27 Bolivia: Ministerio de Hacienda, “Resolución Suprema de 12 de julio de 1928,” revised with Ministerio de Interior, “Resolución Suprema de 15 de octubre de 1929,” HBC. 28 Bolivia: H. Congreso Nacional, “Ley 922 de 31 de diciembre de 1929,” HBC. 29 See, for example, Bret Gustafson, “Flashpoints of Sovereignty: Natural Gas and Spatial Politics in Eastern Bolivia,” in Crude Domination: An Anthropology of Oil, edited by A. Behrends, S. Reyna, and G. Schlee, 220–242 (London: Berghahn, 2011). 30 “Camino al Chaco,” El País (Sucre), October 19, 1927; January 26, 1928; September 26, 1928. 31 Roberto Querejazu Calvo, Aclaraciones históricas sobre la guerra del Chaco (La Paz, Bolivia: Editorial “G.U.M.,” 1995), 7. 32 José Romero Loza, Temas económicos de actualidad (La Paz, Bolivia: Empresa Editora “Universo,” 1952), 200. 33 The two small refineries used heat to alter the molecular state of crude petroleum and produce higher-­value products such as gasoline. 34 Alfredo Seiferheld, Economía y petróleo durante la guerra del Chaco: Apuntes para una historia económica del conflicto Paraguayo-Boliviano (Asunción, Paraguay: Instituto Paraguayo de Estudios Geopolíticos e Internacionales, 1983), 484. 35 Bolivia: Presidencia de la República, “Decreto Supremo de 15 de mayo de 1933,” HBC. 36 Victor Hoz de Vila Bacarreza, Petróleo: referencias y su legislación en Bolivia (La Paz, Bolivia: Los Amigos del Libro, 1983), 146 37 Bolivia: Ministerio de Industria, “Resolución Suprema de 27 de febrero de 1934,” HBC. 38 Seiferheld, Economía y petróleo durante la guerra del Chaco, 458. 39 Cote, “A War for Oil in the Chaco, 1932–1935.” 40 General Nogales Ortiz, La guerra del Chaco, otra sorpresa histórica para Bolivia (discurso) (La Paz, Bolivia: Federación de Ex, Combatientes del Chaco del Departamento Oruro, 1960), 15. 41 Confederación Socialista Boliviana, Programa de acción socialista (La Paz, Bolivia: Imprenta “Renacimiento,” 1935). 42 Laura Gotkowitz, A Revolution for Our Rights: Indigenous Struggles for Land and Justice in Bolivia, 1880–1952 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 110. 43 Felix Alurralde Anaya, Leyes Sociales en Beneficio de Ex-Combatientes de la Guerra del Chaco y Beneméritos de la Patria (La Paz, Bolivia: Editor “Universo,” 1981), 10. 44 “Potosí hace pública su protesta contra la Standard Oil,” La Nación (Santa Cruz), May 6, 1937. 45 “Amparando el desahucio decretado contra la Standard Oil,” La Nación (Santa Cruz) May 10, 1937.

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46 Solberg, Oil and Nationalism in Argentina, 129–130. 47 Dionisio Foianini Banzer, Misión cumplida (La Paz, Bolivia: Fondo Editorial de los Diputados, 2002). 48 Elder helped build the refinery for Standard Oil in 1930, YPFB, Libro de Oro de YPFB, 1936–1996 (La Paz, Bolivia: YPFB, 1996), “Fundación de Camiri”; Augusto Gottret Baldivieso, Petróleo: Historia y Derecho (La Paz, Bolivia: Editorial “Actuario,” 1988), 185. 49 Royeula Comboni, Cien años, 81. 50 YPFB, Libro de oro, “Creación de YPFB.” 51 Bolivia: Presidente de la Junta Militar de Gobierno, “Decreto Supremo de 21 de diciembre de 1936,” HBC. 52 Ibid., Article 2. 53 Luis Lavadenz, Caupolicán: Departamento de La Paz-Bolivia (La Paz, Bolivia: Editorial “Renacimiento,” 1940). 54 Royeula Comboni, Cien años, 82. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid., 83. 57 Federico Ahlfeld, Jefe de la Sección Geológica de la Dirección General de Minas y Petróleos, Los yacimientos minerales de Bolivia (La Paz, Bolivia: Litografías e Imprentas Unidas, 1941). 58 Foianini Banzer, Misión cumplida, 142–145. 59 YPFB, Libro de oro, “Fundación de Camiri, capital petrolera de Bolivia.” 60 Royuela Comboni, Cien años, 84. 61 Henrietta Larson, Evelyn Knowlton, and Charles Popple, History of Standard Oil Company (New Jersey): New Horizons, 1927–1950, Volume 3 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 121. 62 YPFB, Memoria anual 1954 (La Paz, Bolivia: YPFB, 1954). 63 YPFB, Libro de Oro, “Anexos.” 64 Standard Oil Company, Confiscation, 8. 65 Larson, Knowlton, and Popple, History of Standard Oil Company, 125. 66 R. Gómez Reyes, Los derechos de Bolivia y el litigio con la Standard Oil Company: caducidad de concesiones petrolíferas (Sucre, Bolivia: Editorial Charcas, 1939), 16–17. 67 “Abogados de la Standard Oil,” La Noche (La Paz) July 18, 1938, as cited in YPFB, Bolivia y The Standard Oil Company: el juicio contencioso y contencioso-­ administratativo seguido contra el estado (Sucre, Bolivia: Editorial Charcas, 1938), 143. 68 Standard Oil, Confiscation, 10–11. 69 Ibid., 11. 70 As cited in Larson, Knowlton, and Popple, History of Standard Oil Company, 127. 71 Iturralde, Debates en el H. Senado Nacional. 72 Larson, Knowlton, and Popple, History of Standard Oil Company, 125.

9

Engraving Conflict: The Chaco War in a Shell Case Esther Breithoff

The Chaco War has been described as the bloodiest conflict of twentieth-­century South America. It may come as a surprise then that it remains largely unheard of outside Paraguay and Bolivia. Although numerous personal diaries from both Bolivian and Paraguayan members of the military yield insights into the challenges and horrors experienced by the soldiers, many of these sources seem to concentrate on the logistics of the war. The often extreme nationalistic undertone of the diaries (especially in the Paraguayan case) leads one to question the validity of certain accounts. Besides a small number of exceptions (including the chapters represented in this volume), both the Spanish and the English scholarly sources tend to focus on the military history and diplomatic aspects of the conflict. Although thorough and highly informative, they cover a very specific angle of the war and are thus aimed at an equally specific audience. Military histories are essential to our understanding of any war, but they are not the only way of analysing armed conflicts and their legacies. As the chapters in this book clearly demonstrate, the Chaco War can and should be studied from a variety of perspectives. This chapter will adopt the necessity for the multi-­ disciplinary approach of modern conflict archeology toward the study of the material culture of the Chaco War and its aftermath. Not an archeology in its conventional sense, modern conflict archeology applies research methods from a wide range of different fields such as anthropology, material culture studies, cultural geography, and military history to the material remnants created by recent conflict. By doing so, it moves beyond the mere collecting of artifacts and listing of battles and weapon types, and instead reveals the human beings behind the objects.1 In Paraguay, archeology remains underdeveloped. Modern scientific archeological training is unavailable, and no universities offer degrees in archeology. The Secretaría Nacional de Cultura houses the Gabinete de

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arqueología y paleontología, which employs Ruth Alison Benítez, a passionate and knowledgeable técnico who is in charge of mostly rescue excavations in the country. Unfortunately, her and the institution’s enthusiasm and genuine efforts to save Paraguay’s national heritage are not matched by any professional archeological training and adequate fieldwork equipment. As a result, the country relies on foreign specialists (with financial resources) to carry out research on national territory. In June 2013, the first ever archeological excavation of a Chaco War site took place in the Paraguayan Chaco. In collaboration with the Secretaría Nacional de Cultura and logistical support from the Ministerio de Defenso Nacional (RC 1 Cnel Valois Rivarola, Pozo Colorado), I directed the “Campaña arqueológica Fortín Nanawa.” The aim of the project was to dig various test trenches inside the old military fort and to establish the potential for an archeology of the Chaco War. Hidden away in dense scrubland on private property, the site was exceptionally well preserved, with the trench system still clearly delineated. Despite the small scale of the excavation, the abundance of finds was overwhelming both beneath and especially above the ground. Today, almost eighty years after the cessation of violence, the Chaco landscape remains littered with war debris. Metaphysically too, the war survives. There are numerous accounts of the bush reverberating with screams, shots, and the thrumming noise of passing airplanes at the dead of night; the bush is alive with echoes of the war.2 Although a great deal is concealed from view by layers of sand and thorny thicket, the archeological evidence of conflict is nonetheless visible everywhere. Standing inside Fortín Nanawa, one finds oneself in fact surrounded by archeology. Trenches, empty bullet cases, buttons, medicine bottles, and parts of military vehicles have withstood the ravages of weather and time. Some tree trunks are marked with bullet holes in which the occasional projectile is still stubbornly piercing the bark. Today, much of the Chaco War material culture and, more importantly, the personal stories it carries, have survived right before our eyes.

Modern conflict archeology in the Chaco In its essence, archeology concerns itself with the understanding of the human past through the study of material remains. There is a general view that archeological work is always done with a trowel and brush in hand. It is, however, a common misconception that all archeology is hidden underground and in need of excavation. Although digging can be an important part of archeological

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research, it is not always essential or even necessary. Professionals specializing in Roman archeology, for example, are not only digging for Roman coins and wine vessels. They record surviving structures above ground such as Roman towns and amphitheaters, and spend hours in archives working through the vast amount of written sources available. The same applies to twentieth- and twenty-­ first-century conflict sites. Although these sites are more recent, they are not automatically better preserved. On the contrary, younger sites are frequently situated closer to the earth’s surface and thus at a greater risk of destruction. In many cases, sites of conflict are deliberately sabotaged or hidden from view during or immediately after conflict situations in order to cover up war crimes and/or construct an acceptable post-­war narrative. Moreover, being recent in date means that twentieth- and twenty-­first-century conflict sites often fall outside of what is considered old enough to be of archeological value and worth saving. On many occasions, war debris is seen as exactly that: industrial junk not worthy of consideration. Once they have ended, modern wars such as the Chaco War leave in their wake scarred landscapes, rotting body parts, and a sea of industrial junk, which requires description and analysis using the practical and theoretical framework of modern conflict archeology, with a special focus on material culture studies.3

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure It is often our trash that can reveal the everyday and often seemingly irrelevant or hidden stories of humankind.4 As the site of Fortín Nanawa has shown, one can still stumble across war material in remote corners of the Chaco bush today. Nonetheless, the bulk of metal debris was cleared in the years after the war by the military, the Mennonites, and the indigenous population. In fact, the industrial litter proved to be a welcomed source of metal for the indigenous and Mennonite inhabitants of the area, who up until then had been largely dependent on local natural resources. Both groups began collecting the discarded objects and one man’s trash thus became another man’s treasure. The assembled bits and pieces of army vehicles, oil canisters, barbed wire, and empty shell cases were recycled into practical items for everyday use.5 The removal of war debris was, however, not without its dangers, as many of the shells and grenades would have still been volatile. Once considered safe for reprocessing, the object was often reshaped in order to adapt it to its new usage. Occasionally, a metal item was melted down, rendering it formless in both

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meaning and matter, before it was reshaped into a new object with a completely novel purpose. Debris is thus not inert matter without any social and/or economic value. On the contrary, the recycling, re-­use, and re-­interpretation of material constitute part of a continuing social process that is “open to varied forms of expression and entanglement.”6 In the case of recycled war debris, much of it can be considered as belonging to a category of items known as “trench art.” Nicholas J. Saunders has defined the concept of trench art as “any item made by soldiers, prisoners of war and civilians, from war matériel directly, or any other material, as long as it and they are associated temporally and/or spatially with armed conflict or its consequences.”7 For the purpose of this chapter, I will focus on one kind of trench art—the decorated artillery shell case as an example of “three-­dimensional testaments to the experiences of war” that reveal themselves as “objectifications of the self ”8 and act as a “resource for the exploration of meaning in objects.”9 People’s physical creation and manipulation of these objects result in the materialization of their emotional, spiritual, ideological, esthetic, and economic values. Man-­ made objects are thus culturally constructed entities bestowed with what Igor Kopytoff termed a “cultural biography.”10 Like human biographies which are continually changing throughout people’s lives, the values attached to objects are in constant flux too, creating the notion of different things mean different things to different people at different times. Objects thus have their own form of “communicative agency”11 and people’s interaction with them can alter the message they convey.

The Chaco War in a shell case At the end of the war, thousands of artillery shell casings littered the Chaco scrubland. A number of empty shells were collected by Mennonites from Colonia Fernheim and transformed into agricultural implements such as cow bells. Practicing pacifism, it is somewhat ironic that members from this religious community turned an object originally produced to kill into a tool employed in the cultivation of land and, subsequently, life.12 While countless spent shell cases were left in the bush, a small number were picked up by soldiers during the war. Stuck in trenches for weeks on end without any actual fighting, the men were often left with little to do to pass their time. As resources were limited, they were forced to become inventive. With war debris all around them, the soldiers began to recycle the material and attach new meanings

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Figure 8  Mennonite cow bells made from Chaco War shell cases. Source: Photo taken by author.

to them. In his memoir, ex-­combatant Anibal Zotti, for instance, remembers soldiers fabricating card games from thick cardboard ammunition boxes and preparing their scarce breakfast inside used gas canisters.13 Because of both their availability and physical properties, empty artillery shell cases acted as readily available substitutes for paper, while bayonets and knives served as pens. Their smooth surface permitted men to express their experiences in carving, making their transformation both physical and symbolic. Ironically, the precise object that caused so much fear and grief on the battlefields and in the trenches now presented a temporary escape from exactly those horrors. The interplay between human being and shell case thereby grants the latter a new meaning. The shell is no longer just a hollow instrument of death but an objectification of personal memories. Decorated Chaco War artillery shells boast a diverse range of decorative motifs, ranging from floral and faunal designs to human representations and religious symbolism. The re-­occurring motif of the Paraguayan coat of arms indicates that most modified shell cases seem to have been made by Paraguayans. Many of the shells are also dated and carry place names, signatures, and dedications, facilitating a possible identification of the artist. The decorated shell case is undoubtedly the most iconic (and ironic) of all trench art objects.14 Highly explosive, the artillery shell was, and still is, produced to kill. During the First World War, it became the embodiment of the destructive powers of industrialized armed conflict. Due to the nature of its trench warfare and the horrors that enfolded inside them, the Chaco War turned into a South American version of the Great War. Bruce W. Farcau called the 1933 bloodbaths of Nanawa the “Verdun of the Chaco,” a “meat grinder” that took the lives of countless young men.15 At the start of the Chaco War, neither Bolivia nor

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Paraguay had a domestic weapons industry. Both governments acquired a vast amount of weaponry, including artillery shells, from Europe and North America.16 The deafening sound of and continuous threat from artillery shells became integral parts of the soldiers’ existence in the Chaco. In his war diary, Paraguayan soldier Felino Paniagua uses a musical metaphor to recount the auditory experience of shellfire: “The artillery and mortars ejected their grenades and shells that spread death, horror and terror in a roaring symphony.”17 In their constant struggle to stay alive in the deadly blend of natural and industrial forces, the men thus had to be alert at all times. Bolivian soldier Emilio Sarmiento has described their ears as “little antennae” that detected every sound and intrusion.18 The menacing sound of artillery fire kept haunting the men beyond the battlefields. Although weeks and months spent inside filthy trenches dulled the soldiers’ senses, the cries of war had lingered on inside of the men only to suddenly resurface at night long after the war had finished as Bolivian writer and Chaco War veteran Augusto Céspedes vividly remembers: “[. . .] far away from the war, all the noises deposited in my nerves woke up during the middle of the night, followed me in my delirium, like the noise of a train.”19 The impact artillery shells had on soldiers is furthermore engraved in a 75 MP.M/928 Schneider shell casing dated 1929. The object belongs to a private collection that totals sixty-­three Chaco War shell cases now located in the USA. The collector received the shells from a fellow trench art aficionado whose Paraguayan friend had saved them from a garbage dump. They now form part of an extensive trench art collection that includes pieces from different conflicts all over the world. The obverse side of this shell case depicts the Paraguayan coat of arms complete with lion, staff and liberty cap, wrath and “Paz y Justicia” (Peace and Justice). It also names Fortín Nanawa as a place and May 5, 1933 as a date. The reverse side of the shell case shows a depiction of a field gun with five soldiers dressed in uniform kneeling behind it. Below the field gun, the artist engraved a protective shield sheltering three more soldiers. The men are kneeling around an ammunition box from which they are passing artillery shells to their comrades loading the field gun. The attention to detail and artistic skills reflected in the engraving suggest a strong personal dedication on behalf of its creator. Decorating this shell case would have been time- and energy-­consuming, as well as a technical challenge. The choice of motif would therefore have been unlikely to be random. For one reason or another, the soldier who depicted the field gun felt strongly about this piece of artillery. Was he one of the men loading or firing it? Or is the decoration on the shell case a silent reminder of the deafening noise that undoubtedly announced death to numerous of his comrades?

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Figure 9  Details on reverse side of decorated shell case. Source: Photo taken by author.

Considering the richness in artistic talent and the diversity in decorative motifs and messages, it is perhaps surprising that the Chaco War’s engraved shell cases have so far been completely overlooked. The exhibition areas of national museums such as the Museo de la Defensa Nacional in Asunción, the Museo Fortín Boquerón in the Chaco, and the Museo Histórico Gral. Div. Enrique Duarte Alder in Paraguari are crammed with different kinds of weaponry, uniforms and all sorts of other paraphernalia dating from the Chaco War. Although each museum has a number of shell cases on display, none revealed decorations on closer inspection. Three engraved artillery shells were, however, stacked on top of a cupboard in a little room away from the exhibition area in the museum in Paraguarí. Similarly, the Museo Fortín Boquerón revealed a further decorated artillery shell case hidden inside a cardboard box inside the museum’s storage room. Why those trench art pieces do not form part of the general exhibition remains open for debate. People might simply not know what to make of the shells, as they do not belong to any familiar category of wartime objects. As the artistic skills applied to the various shell cases vary greatly, some of the objects might not be deemed “pretty” enough to go on display. On the other hand, shells that are adorned with floral designs may not be considered suitable reflections of the masculine culture embedded within Paraguayan military ethos. Yet, when it comes to uncovering the stories inscribed in the shells, one needs to transcend the purely military nature of the decorations to reveal the person, not just the soldier, behind the engravings. This issue is illustrated by another decorated shell case from the private collection located in the United States. The example is a 1911 75mm Schneider shell case with the inscription:

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To my unforgettable and beloved grandmother/Republic of Paraguay/Souvenir from your grandson EC [?].20

The inscriptions are made up of tiny zig-­zag lines, which were most likely produced with a bayonet or other type of knife. The dedication to a beloved grandmother evokes the image of a young homesick soldier engraving the shell case somewhere in the remoteness of the Chaco. Separated from his loved ones by hundreds of miles of dense bush, the thought of his grandmother must have filled the man with a sense of melancholy for a better, safer life far away from the deafening sound of artillery fire and the smell of rotting bodies. Thousands of young men swapped their ploughs for rifles, determined to defend their beloved “patria Guaraní.” On the shell case, this deep-­seated devotion to homeland and Guaraní heritage21 is expressed in the depiction of the national coat of arms with its olive and palm branch wreath surrounding a five-­pointed star. With the possibility of a premature death constantly looming over the soldiers, the initials on the shell might represent the artist’s intention to preserve part of himself in the shell case that, unlike him, may some day find its way to his grandmother’s home. The most evocative decoration on the shell case is perhaps the butterfly depicted on the reverse side of the case. Strikingly, the delicate beauty of the butterfly stands in stark contrast with the destructive power of the artillery shell itself. Consistent with the other imagery, the simple yet appealing insect design is made up of tiny zig-­zag lines. Butterflies are common in the Chaco, and the artist might have simply engraved what he observed in the Chaco bush. Maybe his grandmother had a special liking for these winged creatures and the latter came to act as a reminder of family members left behind? In his memoir, Paniagua recalls an episode in which himself and his comrades had been walking under the burning Chaco sun without a drop of water for a whole day when they suddenly saw thousands of butterflies fluttering around in front of them. He describes the yellow and white swarm as a “carpet interwoven with the attractive colors of these fragile creatures of nature.”22 The men soon realized that the butterflies were hovering over a puddle of water. Beside themselves with thirst, the soldiers imitated the butterflies and threw themselves to the ground, crushing some of the insects in the act. Desperate, the men tried to soak up the foul water with a dirty tissue or the corner of their mosquito net.23 The butterfly on the shell case might be the embodiment of a similar harrowing experience suffered by the artist. Like the butterflies in the Chaco, moments like these must have been abundant. Unless remembered in personal diaries such as Paniagua’s, these ephemeral episodes often slip through the cracks of time and go unmentioned

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Figure 10  Reverse side of decorated shell case. Source: Photo taken by author.

in general history books. Discussing trench art pieces, Saunders argues that they “increasingly emphasize the common soldier’s experience of war.”24 Decorated artillery shells thus act as unconventional recording devices that allow personal experiences to be materialized in objects.

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Decoding these embodied experiences is not always straightforward as adornments on shell cases often appear to have mere esthetic qualities. As already noted, the butterfly engraved on the Chaco War artillery shell might not be purely ornamental. The butterfly is a highly symbolized creature, and the butterfly motif has been widely used across different times and cultures. The ancient Greeks, for example, saw the butterfly as a representation of the human soul.25 Due to its metamorphosis from egg to caterpillar to pupa, from which it finally emerges complete in its winged splendor, the butterfly is often considered a symbol of rebirth and transformation.26 During the Chaco War, the soldiers underwent a change comparable to that of the insect. In numerous cases, this was a physical transformation at the end of which the soldiers, like the butterflies, emerged unrecognizable. The destructive power of industrialized warfare wreaked havoc on the human body and left countless men with missing limbs and disfigured faces. Although not every soldier returned with serious physical damage, each man suffered a severe psychological transformation. Since the end of the war, Paraguayan historians and members of the military have written a myriad of books about the

Figure 11  Butterfly detail on reverse side of decorated shell case. Source: Photo taken by author.

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conflict and the national military. Many of these are highly subjective and interwoven with nationalism. This has resulted in a romanticized view of the soldier’s emotional transformation. In the eyes of the nationalist, a man’s bravery, pride, loyalty, and love for his “patria” turned him into the supreme Guaraní soldier who was not afraid to die for his country. This glorification of the Guaraní soldier and his at times almost superhuman qualities undermine the true nature of mechanized wars and their effects on the human mind. Although most of the young men were undoubtedly devoted to the defence of their homeland, they were certainly not prepared for the inhospitable nature of the Chaco bush and the horrors of modern warfare that they were to face. The appalling conditions in the trenches and the massacres on the battlefields were deeply traumatic experiences that transformed carefree young men into empty shells of their former selves.

Concluding comments Zotti observed that “The man in the battle deserves more respect than the battle itself.”27 By looking at engraved Chaco War artillery shells as pictorial testaments of industrialized war, modern conflict archeology allows us to see beyond the shell’s mere practical military function and reveal the human beings and their stories hidden within the carvings. In fact, the shells act as objectifications of the feelings of those who experienced war. They form tangible memories that are often excluded from history books. However, the personal stories of hope and dreams, loss and affection, constitute just one of many layers that make up the shells’ cultural “biography.” For almost a century, these biographies have remained in flux. Produced in European and North American ammunition factories as objects of death and destruction, the artillery shells have become platforms of self-­expression, war souvenirs, valued collectables, secondary museum exhibition pieces, and archeological case studies. Finally, the Chaco War was a war of matériel, and the study of its physical remains therefore constitutes an integral part in our understanding of not only the conflict itself but the people involved.

Notes 1 For a detailed study of modern conflict archeology, see Gabriel Moshenska, The Archaeology of the Second World War: Uncovering Britain’s Wartime Heritage

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(Barnsley: Pen and Swords Books, 2012); Nicholas J. Saunders, “Worlds Apart: Modern Conflict Archaeology and Battlefield Archaeology,” Arheo 27 (2010): 45–55; Nicholas J. Saunders, Killing Time: Archaeology and the First World War (Stroud: Sutton, 2007); Nicholas J. Saunders (ed.), Beyond the Dead Horizon: Studies in Modern Conflict Archaeology (Oxford: Oxbow, 2012); Colleen M. Beck, William Gray Johnson and John Schofield (eds.), Materiél Culture: The Archaeology of TwentiethCentury Conflict (London: Routledge, 2002); John Schofield, Combat Archaeology: Material Culture and Modern Conflict (London: Duckworth, 2005). 2 Gastón R. Gordillo, Landscapes of Devils: Tensions of Place and Memory in the Argentinean Chaco (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 3 For a detailed introduction to the field of material culture studies, see Tilley et al. (eds.), Handbook of Material Culture (London: SAGE Publications, 2006). 4 William L. Rathje and Cullen Murphy, Rubbish!: The Archaeology of Garbage (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001). 5 Esther Breithoff, “The Many Faces of the Chaco War: Indigenous Modernity and Conflict Archaeology,” in Beyond the Dead Horizon: Studies in Modern Conflict Archaeology, edited by Nicholas J. Saunders (Oxford: Oxbow, 2012), 146–158. 6 Joshua Reno, “Your Trash Is Someone’s Treasure: The Politics of Value at a Michigan Landfill,” Journal of Material Culture 14, 1 (2009): 30, 43. 7 For a definition and extensive study on the trench art from the First World War, see Nicholas J. Saunders, Trench Art: Materialities and Memories of War (Oxford: Berg, 2003). 8 Saunders, “Worlds Apart", 51. 9 Saunders, Trench Art: Materialities and Memories of War, 163. 10 Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process”, in The Social Life of Things, edited by Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 64. 11 Christopher Tilley, “Introduction: Metaphor, Materiality and Interpretation,” in The Material Culture Reader, edited by Victor Buchli (Oxford: Berg, 2002), 25. 12 Esther Breithoff, “The Many Faces of the Chaco War,” 156. 13 Anibal Zotti, Siempre Vivos: Memorias de un ex-Combatiente de la Guerra del Chaco (Asunción, Paraguay: Imprenta Militar de la Dirección de Publicaciones de las FF.AA. de la Nación, 1974), 123, 150. 14 Saunders, Trench Art: Materialities and Memories of War, 53. 15 Bruce W. Farcau, The Chaco War: Bolivia and Paraguay, 1932–1935 (New York: Praeger, 1996), 103. 16 Mathew Hughes, “Logistics and the Chaco War: Bolivia versus Paraguay, 1932–1935,” The Journal of Military History 69, 2 (2005): 415. 17 Felino Paniagua, Con los pies descalzos: entre el polvo y la sed (Asunción, Paraguay: Ind. & Com., 1994), 155. Author’s translation.

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18 Emilio Sarmiento, Memorias de un Soldado de la Guerra del Chaco (Buenos Aires, Argentina: el cid editor s.r.l., 1979), 70. Author’s translation. 19 Augusto Céspedes, Sangre de Mestizos: Relatos de la Guerra del Chaco (La Paz, Bolivia: Librería y Editorial “Juventud,” 1973), 108. 20 A mi inolvidable y querida abuela/Republica del Paraguay/Rdo. de su nieto EC [?] Author’s translation. It is difficult to discern the exact initials. EC is the author’s guess. There are a further four undiscernible initials engraved in the shell case. Two of them (U or V and M or NJ) are separated by an olive branch-­like plant. 21 For an extensive study on the roots of Paraguayan nationalism and the concept of the Guarani soldier, see Bridget María Chesterton, The Grandchildren of Solano López: Frontier and Nation in Paraguay, 1904–1936 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013). 22 Felino Paniagua, Con los pies descalzos: entre el polvo y la sed, 44. 23 Ibid., 44, 45. 24 Nicholas J. Saunders, Trench Art: Materialities and Memories of War, 13. 25 Gene Kritsky and Ron Cherry, Insect Mythology (Lincoln: iUniverse.com, Inc., 2000), 9. 26 Ibid., 7–9. 27 Anibal Zotti, Siempre Vivos, 84.

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Index Abente, Diego 136 Aceval–Tamayo Treaty (1887) 4, 6 Acre War (1899–1903) 2 activism cross-occupation 58 by culinarias 57–8 in indigenous neighborhoods 52 labor 46, 52, 54, 55–6 La Paz 52, 54, 56–9 union/before Chaco War 47–9 Alberdi, Juan 72 Alexander, Robert 11 Alihuatá 7 Alvarez, Carlos 27 anarchism 50 Anglican missionaries 4 Anglican missions 127 anthropological investigations, of Fiebrig 102 Apostolic Nuncio 28 Arancibia, Cristóbal 23, 24, 27 Arce fortín 7–8 archeology, of the Chaco War 177–9 Areguá 29 Argentina and the Chaco 117 economic control of the Chaco 126 Indian/creole relations 120–1 and indigenous labor 129 indigenous resistance to 123 infrastructure/agricultural expansion of 69–70 and Paraguay 120–1 state oil company (YPF) 135, 159, 165, 166 sugar plantations 120, 124–5, 126, 127, 129 artillery fire 182 artillery shell cases, decorated 180, 181, 182–6 Arze, Silvia 23 assimilation policy, of Paraguay 129

Asunción Botanical Garden (see Botanical Garden in Asunción) prisoners of war 24, 25, 26, 28 Ayala, Eusebio 11 Aymara people 51, 58, 60–1 Bahía Negra 151 Ballivián 9 Banzer, Carlos 103 Barrios, Graciela 50 Bavillián 9 Belaieff, Juan 91, 105–6, 122–3, 129 Beltrán, Arturo 29 Beltrán, Julio 30 Belyaev, Ivan. See Belaieff, Juan Benítez–Ichazo Treaty (1894) 4, 6 Benítez, Ruth Alison 178 Bertoni, Moisés 97, 100, 137, 154 n.8 Bloomgreen, Johny 139–40 Bocángel, Max Murillo 58 Bogarín, Juan Sinforiano 26–7, 29, 30, 35 Bolivia claim to the Chaco 2 class 53–4, 167 construction workers’ union 46, 61 economy 53, 158, 164 elites 11, 43, 44, 46–7, 53, 54, 60, 159, 161, 164 energy independence of 168, 171 extermination policies of 123, 126–7, 129 Gas War 2003 172 imports 53, 166 and indigenous labor 129 labor laws 60 labor reforms 44 Law 922 1929 162 military coup 1930 162 mining 116, 159–60 nationalism 12

210

Index

National Revolution (1952) 11, 82, 165, 171 oil production 168 petroleum industry 159, 160 policies towards indigenous peoples 117–18, 123, 126–7, 129 political organization 43–7, 53, 61 post-war realignments 53–6 printers’ union 46, 48, 55 production crisis 25 reform 47 suffrage 43, 44, 64 n.46 tin sector 53, 158, 162, 164 transportation lines 158, 159 unionization 46, 54, 58, 59 Bolivian Creoles, colonization of Chaco Boreal 118 Bolivian military 4–5 Bolivian soldiers, capture and imprisonment of 22–4 Bolivia–Paraguay relations 4 Boquerón fortín 7, 22, 74 borders and changes in balance of power 115–17 formation of in the Chaco 114, 123, 128 Botanical Garden in Asunción building of 91, 94–5, 97, 107 n.17 design of 98–101 Maká Indians in 105–6 nationalist intention in the building of 97, 98, 99 opening of 97 port 91, 93, 97, 99 and prisoners of war 25, 33, 101–4 as representation of Paraguayan nation 15, 97–8 scientific agricultural work 105 Yboty-Rendá 96–101 zoo 101 Buenos Aires 69 Busch Becerra, German 55, 60, 72, 166, 167 Caacupé fortín 151 Calvo, Carlos 169 camba nationalism 104 Cambio Grande camp 29, 30

Cambio Guazú 29 Camiri oil refinery 163, 168 Campaign of the Desert (1881–1882) 123 Campamento no. 2 fortín 151 Campaña arqueológica Fortín Nanawa 178 Campo Grande 8, 10, 22 Campos, Daniel 118 Campo Vía 8, 9, 22 canal/Santa Cruz to the ocean arguments for 71–4, 76–80 and the Chaco War 75 petition of Rodriguez 69–71, 73 Rodriguez’s plan 14–15, 67, 68–9 Capdevila, Luc 13 Capriles, José L. 10 Cariaga, Mario 30 Carlos Casado Ltd. 12, 127 Casabianca, Ange-François 5 Catholic missionaries 4 Catholic missions 115, 127 cattle economy 116, 119 cattle ranches 118, 127 cattle-ranching, Paraguay 148 Céspedes, Augusto 182 Chaco Boreal 1, 4. See also Chaco region; Gran Chaco Chacón, Gustavo 166 Chaco region. See also Chaco Boreal; Gran Chaco constructions/presentations of 137–8 economy 116–17 environmental appropriation of 137–9 landscape of 152 petroleum reserves 158 Chaco War lessons of 81–4 major engagements of 1932–1935 5–10 root causes of 12 understanding the war 10–17 Chaco War: Bolivia and Paraguay, 1932–1935, The 12 Chaco War novel 81–4 Chamacoco people 115, 123 Chané people 116 Chesterton, Bridget María 12, 122, 136 Chiavenato, Júlio José 12

Index Chiriguano peoples 4, 102, 115, 116, 117–18, 123, 125, 126 Chiriguano rebellion 1892 118 Chorote people 118 Christianity, conversion to 4 citizenship rights, of indigenous people 51 class Bolivia 53–4, 167 and race 58 climate of the Chaco 1, 139–40 Colonia Fernheim 180 colonialism German 96 Spanish 115–16 colonial missions 114–15 Colonia Rivadavia 120 colonization by Bolivian Creoles 118 European 2 commodity fetishism 157 communicative agency, of objects 180 Concordancia government 54 Confederación Socialista Boliviana (CSB) 165 Conservative political parties, Bolivia 46–7 constitutionalism 47 construction workers, La Paz 51–2 construction workers’ union, Bolivia 46, 61 Cornejo, Muñoz 58 Corumbá 151 Cote, Stephen 12, 136 creole-indigenous relations 124 Creole societies, power relations 115–16 Crevaux, Jules 118 Crítica 29, 32 cruceño conspirators, Liberation of Santa Cruz 104 cruceño independence, Paraguayan campaign for 104 cruceño people 33–4, 103, 104 Cuadros, Augusto 23 Cuéllar, Manuel 158 Cuerpo Nacional de Minas (National Mine Corps) 159 culinarias’ union 46, 49, 50, 51, 56, 57–8, 59, 60, 61 cultural biography 180 cultural traditions, and the war 13

211

Cumbay from Ingre 116 Dalla-Corte, Gabriella 136 Decoud–Quijarro Treaty (1879) 4, 6 “Defamed Land, The” 137 dehydration, of soldiers 10, 23. See also water resources De la Pedraja, René 8 Delegación del Gran Chaco 119, 123 dependency theory 164 development Argentina’s model of 69–70 and infrastructure projects 84 diplomatic solutions, failure of 4, 12 disciplining, of prisoners 31 discrimination indigenous peoples 45, 51 racial 60–1 against women workers 51, 56–7, 58 Dittman, Alden 91 Duguid, Julian 1 economic boom, and railroads 117 economic crisis, Bolivia 53 economics, and infrastructure 73 economy Bolivia 53, 158, 164 cattle 116, 119 Chaco 116–17 ranching 127 sugar 125–6, 127 El Alto 171 El Carmen 9, 22 Elder, Guillermo 166 El Diario 56 El Diario Dominical 102 elites Bolivian 11, 54, 60, 164 Bolivian and oil 159, 161 Bolivian and politics 43, 44, 46–7, 53, 159 Paraguayan 93, 96, 97, 101 prisoners of war 29–30, 33–4, 101–4 of Santa Cruz 104 El Oriente 83 El País 162 El Tiempo 76 Encarnación Cathedral, prisoners of war in 24

212

Index

energy independence, of Bolivia 168, 171 energy regimes, built on oil/water 136 engineering as military tactics 78–9 patriotic 15, 67, 76, 77, 83 engineers, importance of 82–3 Engler, Adolf 94 Enlhet/Eenlhet people 115 environmental appropriation, of Chaco region 137–9 environmental consciousness, in Paraguayan people 138 environmental determinism 138–9 environmental issues, and military strategy 151 environmental nationalism 137 environmental soundness, of Paraguayan military 151–2 Espinoza Saute, Dionilio 31 Estigarribia, José Felix 5, 7, 8, 9, 11, 23 European colonization 2 exploitation, of indigenous people 51 exports, Paraguayan 5 extermination policies, Bolivian 123, 126–7, 129 Farcau, Bruce W. 12, 181 Febrerista Revolution 1936 11, 104, 110 n.56 Federación Obrera de La Paz (FOL) 46, 48, 50, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56, 58, 59, 60, 61 Federación Obrera Femenina (FOF) 46, 49, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61 Fick, Ingeborg 96, 102 Fiebrig, Carl/Carlos 15, 91–2, 93–6, 97–8, 99–100, 101–2, 104–6 Fiebrig, Ortrun 91, 93 Filadelfia 127 Finot, Enrique 169 First World War 44 flooding, of forts 151 Foianini Banzer, Dionisio 166, 167, 168, 171 foreign economic interests 12 Formosa 34 fortínes (forts) 4 Arce 7–8 Boquerón 7, 22, 74

Caacupé 151 Campamento no. 2 151 flooding of 151 Galpón 151 Gondra 8 in Indian territory 119 Nanawa 7, 8, 178, 179, 181, 182 Nuevo Pilcomayo 121 Patria 151 Retén Isla Teyú 151 Rojas Silva 8 Tte. Fernández 151 Vanguardia 4, 5, 151 FOT 48, 53 Francia, José Gaspar Rodríguez de 116, 121 Franciscan missionaries 4 Franciscan missions 115, 116, 118, 120, 125, 126 Franco, Manuel 91, 94, 96, 107 n.17 Franco, Rafael 4, 8, 11 Frente Popular de Potosí 165 Gabinete de arqueología y paleontología, Paraguay 178 Galpón fortín 151 Gas War (2003), Bolivia 172 German colonialism 96 German Colonial School 96 Gertz, Anna 96, 97 Gigenho, Michelle 13 Gondra fortín 8 González, Juan Natalicio 137, 154 n.8 González Oddone, Beatríz R. A. de 10 Good Neighbor Policy, US 168 Gotkowitz, Laura 165 Gran Chaco. See also Chaco Boreal; Chaco region 1600s–1930s 2–5 claims to 2 map of 3 region 1, 114 Great Depression 158 Grether, Hans 83 Grubb, W. Barbrooke 138 Guaraní Avá people 102 Guaraní language 13, 99–100, 102 Guaraní people 2, 97, 184 Guaycurú people 2, 117

Index Gulf Oil 171 Gutiérrez, Julio A. 71, 72, 75, 159–60 health and sanitation identity cards 57–8, 65 n.65 Herrera, Romulo 74 Hijo de Hombre 10 Hoyos, Montero 83 Huacaya people 118 Hughes, Matthew 10, 136 hydroelectricity 152 Iberian-American Archive 105 Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut (IAI) 91 identity cards, women workers 57–8, 65 n.65 identity(ies) indigenous 45, 46, 49–53 labor 49–53 and language 61 Paraguayan 99 racial 52 social class 46 Iguembe 118 immigration. See also migration to the Chaco 4 of Mennonites 4, 127–8, 148, 180, 181 imports, Bolivian 53 import substitution industrialization (ISI) strategies, Bolivia 166 Inca Empire 2 indigenous groups, power of 117 indigenous identities 45, 46, 49–53 indigenous labor 124–8, 129 indigenous neighborhoods, La Paz 52 indigenous organizing, and Saavedra 48 indigenous peoples Aymara people 51, 58, 60–1 and the Chaco War 13, 113 Chamacoco people 115, 123 Chané people 116 Chiriguano peoples 4, 102, 115, 116, 117–18, 123, 125, 126 Chorote people 118 citizenship rights of 51 conversion to Christianity 4 different groups of 115 discrimination 45, 51 Enlhet/Eenlhet people 115

213

exploitation of 51 extermination policies of Bolivia 123, 126–7, 129 fighting between 120 Guaraní people 2, 97, 184 Guaycurú people 2, 117 Huacaya people 118 Ishir people 115 Izoceños people 115 Izozog people 102, 103, 115 Maká people 105–6, 115 Mataco people 115, 116, 119, 120, 121, 125, 127, 129 (see also Weenhayek people; Wichí people) Mbyá people 121 in military 120 Nivaclé people 127 Noctenes people 118 othering of 31–3 Pilagá people 121, 122 and political participation 43–4 Quechua people 51, 58, 60–1 relations with Paraguay 113, 122–3, 124 resistance of 115, 117–24, 128 slavery of 102 social inclusion 46 Tapieté people 118, 119, 126 Toba people 115, 118, 119, 120, 121, 123, 125, 126, 127, 129 treatment of by other nations 15–16 and unions 44 Weenhayek people 115, 126 (see also Mataco people; Wichí people) Wichí people 115, 120, 121, 125 (see also Mataco people; Weenhayek people) indigenous societies, power relations 115–16 Infantes, Petronila 49–50 infrastructure and economics 73 and modernity 69 post-war era 83 roads 140 infrastructure projects and modernization 85 as progress 82, 84 Santa Cruz 85 state 82, 83

214

Index

Ingavi 9 International Conference of American States on Conciliation and Arbitration (ICASCA) 4 International Harvester Company 139 Inter-Oceanic corridor 85 Irendagüe 23 Ishir people 115 Isaenko, Anatoly V. 122 Isla Poi 24 Iturralde, Abel 160–1, 170 Izoceños people 115 Izozog people 102, 103, 115 Jesuit missions 114, 115 Jesuits, expulsion of 115 Jesús de Machaca uprising 1921 63 n.16 Journal of the Botanic Garden 105 Journal of the Scientific Society of Paraguay 97 Jujuy 124, 125, 127 Junta Nacional de Aprovisionamiento (National Supplies Commission), Paraguay 142, 145 Klein, Herbert 43, 81, 82 Kopytoff, Igor 180 Kundt, Hans 5, 7, 8, 9–10, 22, 75, 138, 139, 163 labor activism 46, 52, 54, 55–6 labor federations 45, 46, 59 labor force, women in 49 labor identities 49–53 labor, indigenous 124–8, 129 labor laws, Bolivia 60 labor movements, and Saavedra 48 labor reforms, Bolivia 44 La defensa del Chaco: Verdades y mentiras de una victoria 12 Lake Chuquisaca/Pitiantuta incident 5, 7 Lambaré 31 language Guaraní 13, 99–100, 102 and identity 61 La Paz construction workers 51–2 indigenous neighborhoods 50

labor activism 52, 54 labor and indigenous identities in 49–53 migration to 45, 49, 50 political participation of workers 43–4, 45 post-war worker activism 56–9 telegraph workers 48, 53 unions 45, 65 n.50 YPFB 168 La Razón 76, 77 Latin America, reform movements 44 Lavadenz, Jorge 167, 168 Lavadenz, José 166 Lavadenz, Luis 159, 167, 168 Law 922 (1929), Bolivia 162 League of Nations, and prisoners of war 28 Legion of Ex-Combatants (LEC) 165 Leguía, Augusto B. 62 n.13 Liberal political parties, Bolivia 46–7 Liberation of Santa Cruz 103 linguistic traditions, and the war 13. See also language literature, of Chaco War 81–4 Long, Huey 164 López, Carlos Antonio 91, 92, 96 Macharetí 118 Maciel 34 Maká people 105–6, 115 Mamani, Antonio 28 Mariaca, Guillermo 166 Mariaca Sanz, Oscar 119 market vendors, discrimination against 56–7 Marof, Tristán 12, 164 Martínez, Agustín 26 Marxism 157–8 Marx, Karl 157 Masamaclay: Historia politica, diplomatica y militar de la Guerra del Chaco 12 masculinity, new forms of 83 MAS (Movement Toward Socialism) 172 Mataco people 115, 116, 119, 120, 121, 125, 127, 129. See also Weenhayek people; Wichí people Mbyá people 121 memoirs, of Chaco War 81–4 Mendoza, Filiberto 24, 25, 31, 35

Index Mennonite immigrants 4, 127–8, 148, 180, 181 mestizo communities, social inclusion 46 mestizo culture 34 Migone, Luis 97 migration. See also immigration to La Paz 45, 49, 50 rural-to-urban 45, 49, 54, 61 Mihanovich Shipping Company 135–6 military Bolivian 4–5 dietary requirements of 148–50 indigenous peoples in 120 Paraguayan 5, 139, 141–8, 151–2 White Russians in Paraguayan 5, 151 Military Academy Prisoner Camp 29 military coup (1930), Bolivia 162 Military Socialism 61 Military Socialists 44, 45, 46, 53, 54, 55, 60, 63 n.14, 164–5 military strategy, and environmental issues 151 military tactics, engineering as 78–9 military technology, disparities in 128, 130 n.8 miners, discrimination against 51 mines, political organization in 45 mining, Bolivia 116, 159–60 Ministerio de Defenso Nacional, Paraguay 178 Ministry of Justice and Industry, Bolivia 159 Ministry of Mines and Petroleum, Bolivia 166 Miranda Condore, Felix 34 Miranda, Exaltación 50 missionaries 4 missions Anglican 127 Argentinian 120, 126 Catholic 115, 127 colonial 114–15 to control the natives 122 Franciscan 115, 116, 118, 120, 125, 126 Jesuit 114, 115 religious 4 Salta convent missions 120 and warfare 123 mobility, and the Chaco War 82, 83

215

modern conflict archeology 177, 178–9, 187 modernity and infrastructure 69, 85 Latin American 69 Montero Hoyos, Constantino 82, 83 Montero Hoyos, Sixto 82, 83 Morales, Evo 172 Mosconi, Enrique 165–6 Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR) 11, 44, 45, 72, 165 Muños 8 Muñoz Reyes, Jorge 166 Murray, William “Alfalfa Bill” 127 Museo Fortín Boquerón 183 music, Bolivian national 13 mutual aid societies 59 Nanawa campaign 163 Nanawa fortín 7, 8, 178, 179, 181, 182 Ñancorainza oil wells 164 nationalism and the Botanical Garden 97, 98, 99 camba 104 environmental 137 oil 12, 16, 136, 157–8, 159, 164, 165–70, 171, 172 Paraguayan 102, 103, 136 Paraguay/Bolivia 12 wartime 33 Nationalist Party, Bolivia 49 nationalization of foreign oil companies 171 of Standard Oil 157, 164, 165, 169, 170 National Revolution (1952), Bolivia 11, 82, 165, 171 nation-building, and discrimination 45 nature, and the war 75 Nava Parraga, Victoriano 21, 23 new oil nationalism 12. See also oil nationalism Nickson, Andrew Robert 13 Nivaclé people 127 Noctenes people 118 novels, Chaco War 81–4 Nuevo Pilcomayo fortín 121 oil

as cause of war 12

216 nationalism (see oil nationalism) supplies during Chaco War 163 oil-based army, of Paraguay 135–6 oil nationalism 12, 16, 136, 157–8, 159, 164, 165–70, 171, 172 oil production, Bolivia 168 oil shipments, to Paraguay 135 Orán 116 organic army, of Paraguay 136 Oruro 169 othering of the enemy 31–3 racial 31–3, 102 pack animals, use of 140–8 Paniagua, Felino 182, 184 Paraguay and Argentina 120–1 assimilation policy of 129 and the Chaco 121–3 claim to the Chaco 2, 138–9 elites 93, 96, 97, 101 exports 5 and indigenous labor 127–8, 129 nationalism 12, 102, 103, 136 oil-based army of 135–6 organic army of 136 and petroleum 135–6 relations with indigenous people 113, 122–3, 124 Paraguayan military 5, 139, 141–8, 151–2 Paraguayan nationalists, separatist movement 102 Paraguayan soldiers, dehydration of 10 Paraguay–Bolivia relations 4 Paraguay guazú 97, 99–100, 102, 103, 104, 106 Paraguay River 79, 151, 163 Parapetí River 115 Partidarios de la Frontera 116 Partido Obrero Revolucionario (POR) 64–5 n.49 Patón, Tomasita 50, 51 patria, concept of 78 Patria fortín 151 patriotic engineering 15, 67, 76, 77, 83 Paz Estenssoro, Victor 44, 54 peace treaty (1884) 118–19 Peñaranda, Enrique 8, 170

Index petroleum, and Paraguay 135–6 petroleum industry, Bolivia 159, 160 petroleum reserves, Chaco 158 Pilagá people 121, 122 Pilcomayo River 4, 115, 119, 120, 123, 124, 127 policies, towards indigenous peoples 117–18, 123, 126–7, 129 political organization Bolivia 43–7, 53, 61 workers in La Paz 45 political participation, and indigenous peoples 43–4 politics, development of mass in Bolivia 47 pollera skirts 49, 63–4 n.31 port, Botanical Garden in Asunción 91, 93, 97, 99 power of indigenous groups 117 political in Bolivia 43 power relations, indigenous and Creole societies 115–16 Pozo Cano, Raúl de 103 Pozo el Tigre 22 Pozo Trigo, Carlos 23 Prebisch, Raul 166 printers’ union, Bolivia 46, 48, 55 prisoners of war Asunción 24, 25, 26, 28 Bolivian 14, 15, 21, 22–4, 26–7, 35, 102 Bolivian and the Botanical Gardens 25, 33, 101–4 elite 29–30, 33–4, 101–4 in Encarnación Cathedral 24 escapees 34 indigenous 34 living conditions of 28–9, 31, 34 non-elite 30, 31 numbers of 22 Paraguayan 22 prisoner registration 28 quartering of Bolivian prisoners in private homes 26–7, 35 racialization of 31–4 repatriation of 35 requesting citizenship 35 saving of 23, 33 socio-cultural status of 27–31, 35

Index suffering of 23–4 suicide of 34 used as laborers 25–7, 34 “Problemas Ganaderos” 147 production crisis, Bolivian 25 progress, infrastructure projects as 82, 84 Protocol Relative to Nonintervention, US 170 proyectistas 80–1, 83, 84 public spaces, and women 51 public works, army participation in 72 Puerto Suárez 85, 103, 104 Quechua people 51, 58, 60–1 Querejazu Calvo, Roberto 12, 23 Quiroga, Ovidio 23 race, and class 58 race discourse, Bolivia 53–4 racial discourse, and indigenous peoples 45 racial discrimination 60–1 racial identity 52 racialization, of prisoners 31–4 racial othering 31–3, 102 racial theories 102 racism of Bolivian elites 161 Paraguayan 103 Radepa 39 n.49 rail links, to other countries 83 railways 85, 117 Ramos Jiménez, Leopoldo 136, 137–9, 154 n.8 ranching Argentinian 120–1 Paraguay 127 ranching economy 127 Razón de Patria (RADEPA) 35, 39 n.49 recycling, of war debris 179–80 Red Cross 28 reform, Bolivia 47 reform movements, Latin America 44 religious missions. See missions repatriation of prisoners, avoidance of 35 repression, of unions 48, 49, 53, 59, 63 n.16 Republican Party, Bolivia 45, 47 resistance, of indigenous peoples 115, 117–24, 128

217

resources loss of Bolivian 160 water 5, 10, 23, 76, 184 Retén Isla Teyú fortín 151 Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR) 11, 44, 45, 72, 165 Richard, Nicolás 13 Richmond Levering & Company 160, 170 rights, of ex-combatants 45 right to work, of women 43 Rio de la Plata 99 Río Grande river 67–8, 72, 79–80 Ríos, Angel F. 12 Rivadavia colony 123 Rivarola, Andrés A. 147 rivers, indigenous people fighting over 120. See also names of individual rivers Roa Bastos, Augusto 10 roads, in the Chaco 140 Rodríguez, Manuel 148–50 Rodríguez, Miguel 14–15, 67, 68–74 Rojas Silva fortín 8 Roosevelt, Franklin 168 Rostagno, Enrique 121 Royal Dutch Shell 12, 164 rural-to-urban migration 45, 49, 54, 61 Russell, Edmund 152 Saavedra, Juan Bautista 8, 44, 45, 46, 47–9, 52, 54, 59, 60, 63 n.16, 160, 161 Saavedra Suárez, Luís 104 Saeger, James 114 Salamanca, Daniel 7, 9, 53, 67, 70–1, 73, 74–5, 162–3, 164, 166 Salta 120, 124, 125, 127 Salta convent missions 120 San Bernardino 94 Sánchez Bustamante, Daniel 70 Sanchez de Lozada, Gonzalo 171 Sanchez, Fortunato 21, 35 Santa Cruz Estigarribia’s failure to capture 11 Guaraní heritage of 104 imperfect nature of 79, 80 infrastructure projects 85 Liberation of Santa Cruz 103 and Paraguay 103 prisoners from 33, 34 and the proposed canal 14–15

218

Index

separatist movement 102, 103 transportation issues 82 Santa Cruz de la Sierra. See Santa Cruz Santisima Trinidad 91 Sarmiento, Emilio 182 Saunders, Nicholas J. 180 Scavone Yegros, Ricardo 4, 12 Schaerer, Eduardo 101 Schenoni, Manlio 135 Schmidt, Max 95–6 Secretaría Nacional de Cultura, Paraguay 177–8 Seiferheld, Alfredo 12 separatist movement Bolivian 102 Paraguayan nationalists 102 settlement Argentinian 120–1 Bolivian 118 in the Chaco 73 Paraguayan 121–3 sex workers 57 Sherman Anti-Trust Act, US 173 n.24 Siles Reyes, Hernando 49, 54, 70, 161–2 slavery, indigenous peoples 102 social class identities 46 social differentiation, Bolivian prisoners of war 27–31, 35 social inclusion, mestizo and indigenous communities 46 social realist novels 82 social traditions, and the war 13 socio-cultural status, of prisoners of war 27–31, 35 Solano López, Francisco 2, 12 soldiers dietary requirements of 148–50 emotional transformation of 187 space, Paraguayan 99 Spanish colonialism 115–16 Spanish–Guaraní miscegenation 103, 104 Spanish-speaking women, activism of 58 Standard Oil Company 12, 16, 157, 160, 161–4, 165, 167, 168–71, 173 n.24 state oil company, Bolivia 166 state oil company (YPF), Argentina 159, 165, 166 Staudt and Compañía 127 Sucre 158, 162

suffrage, Bolivia 43, 44, 64 n.46 sugar economy 125–6, 127 sugar plantations 117, 120, 124–5, 126, 127, 129 suicide due to dehydration 23 of prisoners 34 surrenders, mass 22 Taller de Historia Oral Andina (THOA) 51 Tapieté people 118, 119, 126 Tartagal 125 Teapot Dome Scandal 173 n.24 technical class, Bolivia 167 Tejada, José Luiz 77 Tejada Sorzano government 55 telegraph workers, La Paz 48 telegraph workers’ union 53 territorial losses, Paraguay/Bolivia 12 Territorios Ignorados 82 tin sector, Bolivia 53, 158, 162, 164 Toba people 115, 118, 119, 120, 121, 123, 125, 126, 127, 129 Toro, David 55, 72, 166 Torres, Manuel Ignacio 26 tram prohibition, women workers 56–7 Trans-con highway 85 transportation issues amphibious solutions 151 climatic issues 139–40 Paraguayan solutions to 151 use of pack animals 140–8 transportation lines, Bolivia 158, 159 treaties, failed 4, 6 trench art 16–17, 180, 181, 182–6 trench warfare 181 Trigo, Leocadio 119 Tte. Fernández fortín 151 Tucumán 117 Última Hora 76, 77 unionization, Bolivia 46, 54, 58, 59 unions activism before the war 47–9 construction workers’ union 46, 61 culinarias’ union 46, 49, 50, 51, 56, 57–8, 59, 60, 61 FOT 48, 53

Index and indigenous peoples 44 La Paz 45, 65 n.50 and Military Socialists 44 post-war mobilization of 56 printers’ union, Bolivia 46, 48, 55 repression of 48, 49, 53, 59, 63 n.16 and social lives of workers 52, 59 telegraph workers’ union 53 women’s involvement in 43, 46 United States Good Neighbor Policy 168 imperialism of 12 Protocol Relative to Nonintervention 170 Sherman Anti-Trust Act 173 n.24 Upper Plata 2 urban labor activism 46. See also activism Urquista, Andrés 27 Vanguardia fortín 151 Vanguardia incident (1928) 4, 5 Vásquez Machicado, Humberto 166 Velilla, Benjamín 103–4 Victorica expedition (1884) 121 Villafañe, Benjamín 125 Villamontes 9, 127 Villarroel, Gualberto 45, 46, 54, 56, 60 war debris, recycling of 179–80 War of the Pacific (1879–1883) 2, 4, 12, 160 War of the Triple Alliance (1864–1870) 2, 4, 12, 98, 99, 117, 120, 122 wars Acre War (1899–1903) 2 First World War 44 Gas War (2003) 172 War of the Pacific (1879–1883) 2, 4, 12, 160 War of the Triple Alliance (1864–1870) 2, 4, 12, 98, 99, 117, 120, 122

219

water resources, and the war 5, 10, 23, 76, 184 weaponry 116, 182 Weenhayek people 115, 126. See also Mataco people; Wichí people Weston, Charles 11 “What is the Chaco?” 105 White Russians, in Paraguayan military 5, 151 Wichí people 115, 120, 121, 125. See also Mataco people; Weenhayek people Winichajul, Thongchai 99 women. See also Federación Obrera Femenina (FOF) activism of 57–8 discrimination against workers 51, 56–7, 58 in labor force 49 and public spaces 51 right to work 43 street vendors in La Paz 49 and unionization 43, 46 workers identity cards 57–8, 65 n.65 worker activism, La Paz post-war 56–9. See also labor activism worker schools 50 workers, discourse of Saavedra on 47–9 Yacimientos Petrolíferos Federales (YPF), Argentina 135, 159, 165, 166 Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales Bolivianos (YPFB) 165, 166–7, 168, 170, 171, 172 Yakovleff, Vasilio 151 Yboty-Rendá 96–101 zoo, Botanical Garden in Asunción 101 Zook, David 4 Zotti, Anibal 181, 187