The Stupid War July 19, 2020
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The Stupid War July 19, 2020 You are now homeland, Chaco, of the dead deep in your belly in search of the soul that does not exist at the bottom of your wells. Sangre de Mestizos, by Augusto Cespedes (1936) ©2020 Epsilon Theory 1 All rights reserved. There are proxy wars. And then there is the Chaco War. Una guerra estupida, as Bolivian war journalist Augusto Cespedes would later call it. And it was. It was not a stupid war only in the way that all wars are stupid, in the way that precious few of the things we are told are worth dying for truly require us to do so. Neither was it stupid because the rights and claims of the belligerents were somehow false or illegitimate. They were not. The Chaco War was a stupid war because it was an unnecessary war, exploiting the claims of the people to further the unrelated aims of others. It was a stupid war because it exposed its participants – Paraguayans and Bolivians alike – to a breathtakingly bloody decade, all for a miserable strip of land and to satisfy stories of resistance against landlocked decline and imperialist ambition. It was a stupid war because its proximate cause – the question of whether incursions into a disputed territory constituted the violation of an agreed-upon status quo – should have been easily resolved during a subsequent 6-year period during which both countries delayed open warfare so that they could accumulate enough weaponry to make a real show of it. Even if the stakes for most of us today are nowhere near as dire as all that, narrative missionaries haven’t given up inspiring us to fight in their stupid wars. Maybe we aren’t being called to march into a shooting war, although we shouldn’t delude ourselves into thinking that we never will again. But we are also compelled to fight in political, cultural and social struggles. The narrative missionaries remind us of our rights and claims, then demand we defend them. It is only later that we discover that, whatever the battlefield, the war we were fighting in defense of our claims and interests was not our own. And yet somehow, the casualties always are. If you have never been to Gran Chaco, the namesake of the Chaco War, you are not alone. Frankly, if you are an American and you have never heard of it, you are not alone. In 1927, when a Bolivian unit captured a Paraguayan patrol and shot its escaping lieutenant in the shadow of a makeshift mud hut along the marshes of the stagnant Rio Pilcomayo, few Paraguayans or Bolivians had ever been there either. By the latter, the events leading up to the shooting were perceived and promoted to the public as an ordinary series of encounters linked to mutual probes of a disputed area. By the former, as the aggressive violation of a status quo agreement prohibiting such incursions. Whether the status quo agreement was real or fiction, however, all sides would reluctantly agree that the region it ostensibly covered was remote, sparsely populated and inhospitable. In its furthest reaches to the east along the Rio Paraguay, the Chaco is tolerable enough. Certainly for agriculture, at any rate. Cattle ranches are common, as are the small towns that serve as homes for the permanent laborers that work the ranches for their typically absentee landowners back in Asunción. The same is true far to the west in the foothills of the Andes, ©2020 Epsilon Theory 2 All rights reserved. where in some places it resembles some of the grasslands of the bordering semi-arid Pampas of north-central Argentina. There, the waters of rivers and tributaries flow regularly and the rising altitude moderates the otherwise oppressive heat. In between, however, the rivers that visit the Chaco are slow and tend toward swampy bends and marshes that grow outward into a foul, barely traversable morass during the rainy season. During the dry season, it is well and truly dry, and the hard ground shrivels into a dustbowl that confounds all but heavily industrialized agriculture. At least in terms of climate, there are few places in the world quite like it. Such as they are, most lie somewhere between tropical semi-arid savanna and true deserts. The northern half of the stretch of highway between Darwin and Alice Springs in the Northern Territory would feel like this. The southwest coast of Madagascar, too. That’s about it. An image from Filadelfia, the largest town in the Paraguayan Chaco Its residents, as it happens, are probably not who you would expect, either. If you enter the Chaco Boreal from the Paraguayan side today, the last city of any real size is Concepción. It sits outside the periphery of the region, and while it is stiflingly hot more or less year-round like most of the Chaco, at least it rains. It is by no means a wealthy city, but the ©2020 Epsilon Theory 3 All rights reserved. 50,000 some-odd citizens of Concepción have experienced an upswing in prosperity since Big Ag brought its clear-cutting equipment to the region some years ago. If you were to drive 210 miles to the north and west, through the cattle ranches that the more consistent semi-arid savanna of the Rio Paraguay permits, you would enter the Chaco proper: the Paraguayan department of Boquerón. As soon as you turned right off the Transchaco highway toward the department capital of Filadelfia, you would note something peculiar about the place names. The first barely-even-a-village on your left is called Silbertal. Then Halbstadt. Kleinstädt (yes, with an umlaut). Grünfeld. You do have a choice, however: on your way to Filadelfia, do you take the road to the west that goes through Strassberg, Hochfeld or Blumengart? You see, both today and in the early 20th century, most of the largest settlements in the Paraguayan Chaco were actually settlements of Plautdietsch-speaking Mennonite immigrants from Northern Germany and the Netherlands, typically by way of Russia and Canada. The first of these – named Menno after that most influential of early Anabaptist writers – was founded by settlers in 1926 with the blessing of the Paraguayan parliament. And in the early 20th century (more so than today), many of the remaining settlements were small – that is to say, forced into reduction by Hispanic governments – communities of Guarani and Guaycuruan indigenous peoples. Photo Source: Cindy Servranckx By 1926, when the first influx of Mennonite colonists to the Chaco began in earnest, there were also early Hispano-Guarani mestizo settlers, would-be cattle ranchers and planters in what are now the eastern borders of Boquerón. But beyond what is today the town named after the Hero of the Chaco War and later President of Paraguay, José Félix Estigarribia Insaurralde, there was ©2020 Epsilon Theory 4 All rights reserved. practically nothing but hard, thirsty ground and hard, thirsty quebracho trees for hundreds of miles. From the Bolivian side, there is – and was – perhaps even less direct human connection to the region. The northeastern extreme of Bolivian settlements included a small river port and similarly small forts bordering the intersection of the Chaco and Brazilian Pantanal along the Rio El Pimiento, a tributary to the Rio Paraguay. Founded in the late 19th century, its establishment led to further incursions that yielded a diplomatic response from the Paraguayan parliament and a somewhat less diplomatic one from a Paraguayan gunboat, but Puerto Suárez itself couldn’t be wholly unseated. Perhaps a 700-mile drive to the southwest, in the more amenable climes of the Andes foothills, was another emerging town on the frontier of the Bolivian Chaco – Villamontes. And until around 1910 or so, that was about it. In between the foothills and the Pantanal was a pure wilderness. A wilderness mostly deemed unsuitable for permanent human habitation, lest we grow too sentimental. Around the turn of the first decade of the 20th century, Bolivia did establish a small number of military outposts in the Chaco proper, mostly on the east bank of the Rio Pilcomayo, not too far from the small current-day Argentinian town of Santa Victoria Este and San Agustin, Paraguay. They were purely minor military encampments – fortin they called them, the Spanish diminutive for fort. Other Bolivians, however, generally wanted nothing to do with the region. As Bruce Farcau wrote in The Chaco War: Bolivia and Paraguay, 1932-1935, “Bolivia…could not convince its highland Indians, fearful of the tropical diseases of the lowlands, to migrate there for love or money.” All that is to say that if the average Paraguayan citizen’s concern for the Chaco in the early 20th Century was limited at best, that of the average Bolivian was next to nothing, excepting perhaps some agitation at the idea of Paraguay consolidating control over it. As British commercial counselor R.L. Nosworthy wrote to his superiors in London in 1932, the average Bolivian had never been anywhere near the Chaco, and had not “the slightest expectation of visiting it in the course of his life.” Still, Villamontes had something else. Something new. Cattle ranches could exist on the periphery in both countries, to be sure (and in the Argentinian Chaco too, for that matter). And the ubiquitous quebracho throughout the region is a useful species, more than twice as hard as the standard northern red oak and high in tannins that made it useful for the leatherworking trade. On the edges of the Pantanal, rubber was a possibility. But in 1919, in Villamontes, they found something else.