History of Paraguay

thumb|Paraguay|alt=A political map of Paraguay's modern day territory

thumb|Guaraní ceramics|alt=A museum display of 8 old Guaraní ceramics of various sizes

The history of Paraguay encompasses thousands of years of human habitation. Both agricultural and nomadic Guaycuruan lived in the region at the time of the Spanish Conquest. It became a relatively neglected part of the Spanish Empire due to its isolation and lack of mineral wealth; nonetheless, a small group of Spanish settlers came to reside in the area, increasingly intermarrying with native women to produce a mestizo population. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Jesuit missionaries organized the natives into planned communities known as reductions, and the experiment gained notable attention in Enlightenment Era Europe.

In the early nineteenth century, Paraguay participated in the Spanish American wars of independence, and, newly independent, came under the domination of José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, who in his absolute rule almost entirely cut off the new nation from the world. After Francia's death in 1840, Paraguay came under the rule of Carlos Antonio López and, later, his son Francisco Solano López, who proceeded to embroil the nation in a war against Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay between 1864 and 1870 which culminated in a Paraguayan defeat with massive human and territorial losses. Paraguay became a flawed democracy, in a regime imposed by its enemies.

In the 1930s, Paraguay had its territory encroached and soon found itself in the Chaco War with Bolivia, which ended in a Paraguayan victory. General Alfredo Stroessner, a veteran of that conflict and a key leader in the governmental victory in the 1947 Civil War, came to power in 1954 through a coup, and governed until 1989, a year in which another coup moved the country towards being a multi party democracy, with a new constitution adopted in 1992. Since then, Paraguay has to a certain extent avoided the political strife and strong-man rule that characterized much of its history, though the Economist Intelligence Unit rates the country as a "hybrid regime" as of 2024.

Colonial era

Native peoples

In the 16th century, the Guaraní people were dispersed throughout the forests of the Río de la Plata Basin. Their pre-Columbian population is estimated at between 300,000 and one million. With the arrival of Europeans, their population rapidly decreased due to epidemics of European diseases. The Guaraní were united only by language and cultural similarities; no political structure existed above the village level, and they were a semi-sedentary agricultural people.

Although the Guaraní initially resisted Spanish incursions into their lands, two characteristics influenced their early cooperation with the Spanish and missionaries. First, the Guaraní were themselves warlike, but they were threatened by hostile tribes around them and by slave raiders. The Spanish, especially Christian missionaries, offered a degree of security to the Guaraní. Second, the Guaraní had a custom of exchanging women among themselves and with outsiders to cement alliances. This facilitated a proliferation of sexual relations of Guaraní women with Spanish men. As the colony expanded after the abandonment of Buenos Aires in 1541, this practice gave way to the rancheadas—violent mass deportations of indigenous women who were traded as commodities and exported as slaves to Portuguese settlements on the Atlantic coast; modern scholars characterize the resulting mestizo society as a product of sexual and economic coercion rather than mutual exchange. The mestizo offspring of Spanish/Guaraní unions had the legal rights of Spaniards, and the Spanish, together with them, subjected the Guaraní population to the encomienda system of forced labor after 1556 and the reductions of Christian missionaries beginning in the 1580s.

The Gran Chaco, a semi-arid flatland west of the Paraguay River, was the home of the Guaycuru peoples. The most important of the Guaycuru in Paraguay were the Payaguá, a riverine people ranging for up and down the Paraguay River, and the Mbayá who lived in northwest Paraguay. The Guaycuru tribes were nomadic and warlike. The Mbayá developed a horse culture in the 17th century while the Payaguá made travel up and down the Paraguay River dangerous. These tribes frequently raided the Spanish settlers and Guaraní farmers. They resisted the reductions and Christianity of the missionaries and were a threat to the Spanish and other native peoples for more than 300 years.

Early explorers and conquistadors

Much of the earliest written history of Paraguay comes from records of the Spanish colonization, beginning in 1516 with the Juan Díaz de Solís' failed expedition to the Río de la Plata. On the home voyage, after Solís' death, one of the vessels was wrecked off Santa Catarina Island near the Brazilian coast. Among the survivors was Aleixo Garcia, a Portuguese adventurer who acquired a working knowledge of the Guaraní language. Garcia was intrigued by reports of "the White King" who supposedly lived far to the west and governed cities of wealth and splendor, a reference to the Inca Empire.

In 1524, Garcia joined a Guaraní invasion of the Inca Empire. Garcia's group discovered Iguazú Falls, crossed the Río Paraná and arrived at the site of Asunción, the future capital of the country, thirteen years before it was founded. At Asunción, the Guaraní gathered an army of 2,000 men and penetrated the outer defenses of the Inca Empire on the eastern slopes of the Andes. After Garcia's murder by his Indian allies, news of the raid reached the Spanish explorers on the coast. The explorer Sebastian Cabot was attracted to the Río Paraguay two years later. Cabot was sailing to Asia in 1526 when he heard of Garcia's exploits. He decided that the Río de la Plata might provide passage to the Pacific, and, eager to win the riches of the Incas, became the first European to explore that estuary. Finding silver amongst the Guaraní there, he renamed the river Río de la Plata.

Cabot returned to Spain in 1530 and told Emperor Charles V about his discoveries. Charles gave permission to Pedro de Mendoza to mount an expedition to the Plata basin. The emperor also named Mendoza governor of the Governorate of New Andalusia and granted him the right to name his successor. Mendoza proved to be unsuitable as a leader, and his cruelty undermined the expedition. Choosing what proved to be a terrible site for the first Spanish settlement in South America, in February 1536 Mendoza built a fort at a place of poor anchorage on the southern side of the Plata estuary on an inhospitable dead-level plain. Dusty in the dry season, a bog in the rains, the place was inhabited by the fierce Querandí tribe, who resisted the Spaniards. The Spanish named the outpost Buenos Aires (Nuestra Señora del Buen Ayre).

Juan de Salazar de Espinosa and Gonzalo de Mendoza, who had been part of Mendoza's expedition, explored the Paraguay River after Mendoza's departure. They descended the river, stopping at ananchorage. They commenced building a fort there on 15 August 1537, the date of the Feast of the Assumption, and called it Asunción. Asunción would be the province and later Paraguay's capital thenceforth.

thumb|A statue honoring Juan de Salazar y Espinoza in Asunción

Within 20 years, the new town had a population of about 1,500. Transcontinental shipments of silver passed through Asunción en route from Peru to Europe. Asunción became the center of the Governorate of Guayrá in 1617, a province of the Spanish Empire which also encompassed present-day Paraná; Asunción was the base for the colonization of this part of South America. Spaniards moved northwestward across the Chaco to found Santa Cruz in present-day Bolivia; eastward to occupy the rest of present-day Paraguay; and southward along the river to re-found Buenos Aires, which had been abandoned by its inhabitants in 1541 in favor of Asunción. The Liberals had disbanded the army when they came to power and organized a completely new one. Much of its equipment had been lost during the course of the 1904 Revolution. Nevertheless, by 1910 army commander Colonel Albino Jara felt strong enough to stage a coup against civilian president Manuel Gondra. Jara's coup was the opening act for an anarchic two-year period, in which every major political group seized power at least once, and in which a civil war took place. The radicales, a branch of the Liberal Party, invaded from Argentina, and when the charismatic Eduardo Schaerer became president, Gondra returned as Minister of War to reorganize the army once more. Schaerer became the first president since Egusquiza to finish his four-year term.

The new political calm was shattered, however, when the radicales split into Schaerer and Gondra factions. Gondra won the presidential election in 1920, but the schaereristas undermined his power and forced him to resign. Another full-scale civil war between the factions broke out in May 1922 and lasted fourteen months. The Gondra faction won and held on to power until 1936. The Great Depression would worsen economic conditions, but the Chaco War and the nationalistic fervors that accompanied it would allow them to stay in the saddle for a few more years.

thumb|Eduardo Schaerer

Chaco War

A dispute with Bolivia over the Chaco, brewing for decades, would erupt in the 1930s. Wars and poor diplomacy had prevented the settling of boundaries between the two countries. Although Paraguay de facto held the Chaco, the country did little to develop the area. Aside from scattered Mennonite colonies, nomadic tribes, and some firms dedicated to quebracho exploitation, few people lived there. Bolivia's claim to the Chaco gathered more force after it lost its sea coast to Chile during the War of the Pacific in the late 19th century. Bolivia wanted to absorb the Chaco and expand its territory up to the Paraguay river in order to gain a river port. In addition, oil had been discovered in the Bolivian Chaco by Standard Oil in the 1920s, and people wondered whether there was oil lying beneath the entire area.

While Paraguayans were busy fighting among themselves during the 1920s, Bolivians established a series of forts in the Paraguayan Chaco. In addition, they bought armaments from Germany and hired German military officers to train and lead their forces. Frustration in Paraguay with Liberal inaction boiled over in 1928 when the Bolivian army established a fort on the Paraguay river called Fortín Vanguardia. In December of that year, Paraguayan major (later colonel) Rafael Franco led a surprise attack on the fort, and succeeded in destroying it. The routed Bolivians responded quickly by seizing two Paraguayan forts. Both sides mobilized, but the Liberal government felt unprepared for war, so it agreed to the humiliating condition of rebuilding Fortín Vanguardia for the Bolivians. The Liberal government also provoked criticism when it forced Franco, by then a national hero, to retire from the army. As diplomats from Argentina, the United States, and the League of Nations conducted fruitless peace talks, Colonel José Félix Estigarribia, Paraguay's deputy army commander, ordered his troops into action against Bolivian positions early in 1931, aiming to secure an advantageous position before the Bolivian general mobilization could take place and their superior numbers came into full effect.

thumb|Chaco war map

thumb|Paraguayan soldiers in the Chaco|alt=A large group of Paraguayan soldiers stand at ease, bearing arms.

By July 1932, when war was formally declared, the Bolivians were confident of rapid victory. Theirs was a wealthier and larger country, able to spend much more money than Paraguay in purchasing weapons, aircraft, and tanks. The Chaco question had been the primary issue in Paraguayan political discourse, however. The average Paraguayan soldier was highly motivated, and better able to deal with the Chaco's harsh climate than the average Bolivian, which mostly came from the cold Altiplano. They easily infiltrated Bolivian lines, surrounded outposts, keeping them from water, and captured precious supplies. Long supply lines and overall weak logistics, further hampered by Paraguayan disruption, impeded any major Bolivian advances. The Paraguayans proved more politically cohesive than the Bolivians, as President Eusebio Ayala and Colonel Estigarribia worked well together, and Bolivian president Daniel Salamanca, meanwhile was toppled by the military in 1934.

After the Paraguayan victory at Campo Vía in July 1933, Bolivia seemed on the verge of surrender, and requested a truce, which President Ayala agreed to. This was, however, a ruse; Bolivia used the time bought by the truce to regroup its disorganized forces and set up a new defensive line. The war would end only July 1935. Although the Liberals had led the country into victory, they had exhausted their political capital in doing so. In many ways, the Chaco War acted as a catalyst to unite the political opposition with workers and peasants, who furnished the raw materials for a social revolution. The government offended the enlisted soldiers by refusing to fund pensions for disabled veterans in 1936 while awarding a pension of 1,500 gold pesos a year to Estigarribia. Colonel Franco became the leader of the nationalists inside and outside the army. The final spark to rebellion came when Franco was exiled for openly criticizing Ayala. On 17 February 1936, units of the army from a garrison near Asunción marched to the capital and forced the president to resign, ending thirty-two years of Liberal rule.

Military dictatorships

February Revolution

During its 18 months of existence, the Febrerista governmnent, led by war hero Franco, showed that it was serious about social justice by expropriating more than 200,000 hectares of land and distributing it to 10,000 peasant families. In addition, the new government guaranteed workers the right to strike and established an eight-hour work day. The reforms ended up being somewhat restricted in scope, however; the new government did not have enough power to exporpriate land owned by foreigners (since the 1880s, mostly Argentines). Though one of the febreristas's parties in the government, the Revolutionary National Union (Unión Nacional Revolucionaria) called for representative democracy, rights for peasants and workers, and socialization of key industries, it failed to broaden Franco's political base.

The remaining liberals in country constantly agitated with the Army for it to overthrow the revolutionaries. When their government ordered its troops to abandon the advanced line held in the Chaco since the truce in 1935 in mid-1937, the army rose up and returned the Liberals to power.

Even after this there were, still, nationalist and fascist elements in the army who remained dissatisfied with the Liberals. Several attempted coups served to remind the newly-installed President Félix Paiva (the former dean of law at the National University) that some of the ideals of the February Revolution still remained. The peace treaty signed with Bolivia on 21 July 1938 further aroused the opposition's passions when it fixed the postwar border at a lesser point than the Paraguayan troops controlled in the Chaco.

Estigarribia

thumb|José Félix Estigarribia

In 1939 the Liberal politicians, recognizing that they had to choose someone popular with the various powerful groups in the country to be president if they wanted to keep power, picked General José Félix Estigarribia as their candidate on 19 March 1939. The commander of the Army during victory in the Chaco conflict was serving as an envoy to the United States, and on 13 June Estigarribia and US Secretary of State Cordell Hull signed the Export-Import Bank loan of US$3.5 million. This greatly increased US influence in the country where Nazi sympathies were common. On 15 August 1939, he assumed the presidency and soon realized that he would not be able to revert decisions taken during the period of the February Revolution if he was to avoid political anarchy. He began a program of land reform that promised a small plot of land to every Paraguayan family. He reopened the university, implemented monetary and municipal reforms, balanced the budget, financed the public debt and drew up plans to build highways and public works with the loan from the United States.

Estigarribia faced sharp criticism from the conservative Catholic intellectuals and their newspaper El Tiempo as well as leftist febrerista student activists in the university. After anti-government demonstrations broke out in Asunción, the army suppressed them and arrested Catholic and febrerista leaders. This led to a withdrawal of Colorado support for Estigarribia, and an attempted coup on 14 February 1940 broke out in Campo Grande military base.

On the same day Estigarribia proposed to establish a temporary dictatorship. This proposal split the Liberal party leadership, many of whom supported this idea, and on 18 February 1940 he established a temporary dictatorship, dismissing the 1870 Constitution and promising a new Constitution.

On 10 July the project of the new Constitution was published and on 4 August 1940, approved in the referendum. The new Constitution was based on the 1937 authoritarian Constitution of Brazil's Estado Novo and established a corporativist state, dismissing the need for elections and greatly expanding the power of the executive branch. The Constitution of 1940 promised a "strong, but not despotic" President and a new state empowered to deal directly with social and economic problems. It greatly increased the powers of the Presidency, eliminated the vice-presidency, created a unicameral parliament, and increased the state's power over individual and property rights. It also gave the military the duty to protect the Constitution, thus giving it a role in politics.

Moríñigo

thumb|Higinio Moríñigo

The era of Estigarribia's New Liberals came to a sudden end on 7 September 1940, when the President and his wife died in an airplane crash. The military, ignoring both Liberal factions, chose the Minister of the Army, General Higinio Moríñigo, as president.

The apparently genial and unambitious Moríñigo quickly proved himself a shrewd politician. Having inherited Estigarribia's near-dictatorial powers provided by the new 1940 Constitution, Moríñigo quickly exiled leading Febreristas and Liberals and clamped down drastically on free speech and individual liberties.

Paraguayan (symbolic) participation on the Allied side in World War II, and overall Allied victory, convinced Moríñigo to liberalize his regime in 1946. Paraguay experienced a brief period of openness as he relaxed restrictions on free speech, allowed political exiles to return, and formed a coalition government with Liberals and febreristas. Moríñigo's intentions about stepping down were unclear, however, and he maintained a de facto alliance with Colorado Party hardliners and their right-wing Guión Rojo (Red Banner) paramilitary group led by Juan Natalico Gonzalez, which antagonized and terrorized the opposition. This led to a failed coup in December 1946 and full-scale civil war by March 1947. Led by the exiled dictator Rafael Franco, the revolutionaries were an unlikely coalition of febreristas, Liberals and Communists, thrown together in their will to topple Moríñigo.

The Colorados helped Moríñigo crush the insurgency, with the crucial aid of the General Brúgez Artillery Regiment and its commander, Lieutenant Colonel Alfredo Stroessner. When a revolt at the Asunción Navy Yard put a strategic working-class neighborhood in rebel hands, Stroessner's regiment soon destroyed the area. When rebel ships threatened to dash upriver from Argentina to bombard Asunción into submission, Stroessner's forces fought and damaged them before they could.

By the end of the rebellion in August 1948 the Colorado Party had almost total control in Paraguay. The fighting had simplified politics by eliminating all other parties and by reducing the size of the army. With Moríñigo's backing, González used his Guión Rojo forces to intimidate those favourable to democracy, and gain his party's presidential nomination. He ran unopposed in the long-promised 1948 elections. Suspecting that Moríñigo would not relinquish power, a group of Colorado military officers, including Stroessner, removed Moríñigo from office on 3 June 1948. After a short term, González joined Moríñigo in exile and Chaves assumed the presidency on 10 September 1949.

Stroessner

thumb|Alfredo Stroessner

As one of the few officers who had remained loyal to Moríñigo during the civil war, Alfredo Stroessner became a formidable player after the conflict, given that most of the country's officer corps had defected to the rebels during the conflict. On 4 May 1954, Stroessner enacted a coup d'état against then-President Federico Chaves. Fierce resistance by the police left almost fifty dead.

Over time, Stroessner built a harshly repressive government, designed to keep all possible opposing forces from politics, including Liberals, Febreristas, and, crucially, the country's few communists. Beyond the financial and technical support he received from the United States – which supported his anti-communist struggle, given the context of the Cold War – Stroessner's dictatorship was characterized by corruption and the distribution of favors among what was known as "the trilogy": the government, the Colorado Party and the armed forces. Smuggling – geographically favoured by Paraguay's location between Brazil, Argentina and Bolivia – became one of the main sources of income, from alcohol and drugs to cars and exotic animals. Some estimate that the volume of smuggling was three times the official export figure, and Stroessner used some of that money, as well as slices of major infrastructure works and the delivery of land, to buy the loyalty of his officers, many of whom amassed huge fortunes and large estates. Most Latin American dictatorships of the era regularly instituted extrajudicial killings of their enemies; Paraguay, which participated in Operation Condor, was no different.

Brazil's financing of the US$19 billion Itaipú Dam on the Paraná River between Paraguay and Brazil had far-reaching consequences for Paraguay; it had no means of contributing financially to the construction, but its cooperation, including controversial concessions regarding ownership of the construction site and the rates for which Paraguay agreed to sell its share of the electricity, was essential. Itaipú gave Paraguay's economy a new source of wealth. The construction produced a tremendous economic boom, as thousands of Paraguayans who had never before held a regular job went to work on the enormous dam. From 1973 (when construction began) until 1982 (when it ended), gross domestic product grew more than 8% annually, double the rate for the previous decade and higher than growth rates in most other Latin American countries. Foreign exchange earnings from electricity sales to Brazil soared, and the newly employed Paraguayan workforce stimulated domestic demand, bringing about a rapid expansion in the agricultural sector. President Rodríguez instituted political, legal, and economic reforms and initiated a rapprochement with the international community. In the municipal elections of 1991, opposition candidates won several major urban centers, including Asunción.

Modern Paraguay

thumb|A view of contemporary Asunción|alt=An aerial view of downtown Asunción, showing some high-rise buildings and a lot of greenery.

The June 1992 constitution re-established democracy and fundamental rights in a way unseen in Paraguay since the 1940 Constitution had been instituted. In May 1993, Colorado Juan Carlos Wasmosy was elected to the presidency; he was Paraguay's first civilian president in almost 40 years, in what international observers deemed fair and free elections. The newly elected majority-opposition Congress quickly demonstrated its independence from the executive by rescinding legislation passed by the previous Colorado-dominated Congress.

General Lino Oviedo, who in 1996 had attempted a coup, became the Colorado candidate for president in the 1998 election, but when the Supreme Court of Paraguay upheld in April his conviction on charges related to said coup attempt, he was not allowed to run and remained in confinement. His former running mate, Raúl Cubas, became the Colorado Party's candidate and was elected in May. In December 1998, Paraguay's Supreme Court declared these actions unconstitutional; Cubas defied the court, however, and did not order Oviedo to be arrested again.

In this tense atmosphere, the murder of vice president and long-time Oviedo rival Luis María Argaña on 23 March 1999 made the Chamber of Deputies impeach Cubas the next day. The 26 March murder of eight student anti-government demonstrators, widely believed to have been carried out by Oviedo supporters, made Cubas resign on 28 March. Senate President Luis González Macchi, a Cubas opponent, was sworn in as president that day. Cubas left for Brazil the next day and received asylum. Oviedo fled the same day, first to Argentina, then to Brazil. Macchi, through the remainder of Cubas' term, was accused of corruption several times as he tried to build a coalition government. In 2003, Colorado Nicanor Duarte was elected and sworn in as president.

As a result of the 2013 elections, Colorado Horacio Cartes was elected president. Cartes wanted to amend the constitution to allow for presidential re-elections, but widespread protests and political opposition led him to abandon this goal and he agreed to not seek another term. In August 2018, Colorado Mario Abdo Benítez sworn in as his successor after winning the 2018 presidential election. The 2023 elections resulted in Santiago Peña, also from the Colorado Party, being elected.