PARAGUAY: Musical Chairs

In landlocked Paraguay, Dictator-President Higinio Morínigo could hardly be blamed for overlooking Admiral Mahan’s classic studies of the influence of sea power on history. There was less excuse for his forgetting the Clausewitz command to land fighters to concentrate the main force on the main enemy. Because he ignored both teachers, Morínigo last week was in a tough spot.

Throughout Paraguay’s five months’ civil war, the rebel base had been Concepcion, 130 miles up the Paraguay River from Morínigo’s capital, Asunción. Because the Dictator lacked the ships, he was unable to attack the rebels by the river route. Slowly his ill-equipped troops plodded across country. Just short of Concepción they were blocked by the Ypané River barrier, and not until last month did they sweep into Concepcion. Morínigo cried that the war was as good as over. In shabby Asunción, factory whistles shrilled salutes to victory.

But the Government troops had captured only an evacuated base. The main force of the rebels had escaped. While some fought a holding action, others crowded on to river barges and tugs, transferred the “Voice of Victory” radio station to the paddle-wheel steamer Itzuaingo and headed down, the Paraguay River in company with the armored gunboats Paraguay and Humaitá.

At week’s end the rebels were close to Asunción, and its garrison of raggle-taggle troops that Morínigo hopefully dubbed the “Second Army Corps.” His best force was still near Concepción. The rebels called for Asunción’s surrender. Morínigo retorted that the rebels would be squeezed to death between his two armies, ordered the capital to remain calm. Foreign diplomats did not take him seriously. A vanguard had already moved across the border to safety in Argentina.

In Rio, Francisco Negrao de Lima, the Brazilian diplomat who had tried unsuccessfully to mediate between Morínigo and the rebels, gave the Dictator only a few more days. Said he: “The end seems close.”