Peace Without Victory
Practically unnoticed by the U. S., a wave of clear delirious joy last week swept the entire southern half of the Western Hemisphere. The great Latin American States of Argentina, Brazil and Chile declared national holidays. In half a dozen capitals the voice of the crowd rang out in the winter air, "Firmose la paz," "The peace is signed." The bloody, three-year Gran Chaco war between Bolivia and Paraguay was over.
When the Spanish and Portuguese South American Empires broke up into great modern states in the early 19th Century, two bobtail leftovers were Bolivia and Paraguay. Portuguese Brazil did not bother to annex the lazy, primitive Guarani Indians sweltering in the low plateaus and lagoon-lands between the Paraguay and Parana Rivers. After Paraguay became an independent nation, the Spanish family of Lopez took it over and willfully plunged it into the "heroic" war of 1864-70, reducing Paraguay's population from 1,337,000 to only 221,000, of whom 28,000 were men. Dyspeptic, diar-rehic, goitred and leprous, the Indians had multiplied to 800,000 by 1932, living chiefly on maize and mandioca bread, exporting yerba maté tea, tinned meat and tannin from the Gran Chaco's quebracho tree.
The Bolivian Indians are Andes highlanders who know how to handle llamas, have never won a war. They work in Simon Patino's tin mines, producing one-quarter of the world's tin, avoid the flooded bottomlands of eastern Bolivia and, 3,000,000 strong, have sense enough to rebel periodically against their 250,000 white overlords.
Small-fry Bolivia and Paraguay started quarreling in 1879, went to war in 1932 over a worthless pestilential land lying between them.
The Gran Chaco is rated a "green hell" by romantic Author-Explorer Julian Duguid. Actually it is a great variegated basin extending from northern Argentina to eastern Bolivia. The disputed section is a liver-shaped area bounded by the Paraguay and Pilcomayo Rivers. At the Paraguayan edge it is grassy and open, the soil sandy and dry. Farther west the jungle swamps and lagoons begin, follow the sluggish, unnavigable Pilcomayo to the south, dot the drowned lands to the north. Still farther west, verging into Bolivia's Andean foothills, the land changes again to open woodland, broken by fertile plains. White men's investigation of the Chaco has been resisted by the savage Indians, ihenni flies, carnivorous piranha fish, anacondas, rattlesnakes, jaguars, skunks, vampire bats, alligators and the fact that good water holes are far apart, even in the rainy season (December through February).
To a North American such a wild terrain does not seem economically worth fighting for. Perhaps it has oil. Perhaps Bolivia, cut off from the Pacific by Chile 52 years ago, needs an outlet across the northern Chaco to the navigable Paraguay River. However, landlocked Bolivia already has far better outlets: by railroad across Chile to the coast; by railroad to the navigable reaches of the Amazon in Brazil. The Gran Chaco War was wholly a peoples' war, begun by a rousing pair of national inferiority complexes.*