The Unlikely Protagonist - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 24

South America, Brazil. There was the frisson of the omnipresence of women in the bat-
tlefields as combatants or camp followers, and guerrilla warfare that defied the norms of
European contest. Though strangely primitive in some ways, the Paraguayan War was
ahead of its time in the use of earth battlements against rifles and cannons and aerial re-
cognizance (with balloons). Both technologies were used in the First World War some
fifty years later. 44
In discussions of the origins of the war, the usual casus belli of much of South Amer-
ica's history is invoked: imprecise boundaries, regional power disequilibria, a meddling
international actor (in this case, Great Britain). Brazil craved free access to its cities on
the Paraná River in Mato Grosso, which required sailing through areas controlled by
Paraguay. The capture of the governor of Mato Grosso on the river was the precipitating
incidentoftheconflict,followedbyParaguayaninvasionofMatoGrosso.Itwasfoolish
for Paraguay with a population of 450,000 to take on a country with a population of ten
million, but President Francisco López was given to grandiose impulses and had faith
in his British munitions industries and his Guaraní guerrilla fighters' familiarity with
wilds of the Mato Grosso outback; further, his standing army was four times the size of
Brazil's.
Both sides framed the Paraguayan War as a crusade of civilization against barbarism.
An assault on “power-mad” President López and his savage Guaraní Indians was one
version, 45 and few statements encapsulate the vicious perception better than that of the
Argentine statesman Domingo F. Sarmiento, whose Facundo: Civilization and Barbar-
ism was one of the political literary icons of the nineteenth century: “It is providential
that a tyrant caused all those Guaraní to die. It was necessary to purge the land from
that human excrescence.” 46 Paraguayan pamphlets viewed Pedro II as an incompetent
poseur, the officers as buffoons, and Brazilians as reactionary and ruthless, wed to espe-
cially unsavory and unmodern forms of government (monarchy) and labor mobilization
(slavery—which Paraguay had abolished in 1842). They ridiculed the Brazilian army as
one of “black apes.” 47
Guerrilla warfare wasthepreferred indigenous practice, andLópez'sParaguayans did
hold out in spite of staggering losses, with the campaign fought in its final two years by
starvingoldmen,women,andboys. 48 AsDionisioCerqueiranoted,“Itwasnofunfight-
ing against so many children.” 49 Sir Richard Burton, who seems to have been every-
where in the nineteenth century, in this case as British envoy to Rio, described the war
in its grinding detail and despaired at the “thought of so much wasted heroism.” 50 He
documentedthefirstmilitaryuseofballoonstospyoutthepositionsoftheParaguayans,
who proceeded to burn soggy grass and hide under a mantle of smoke.
Arguments about territorial hegemony, frontier boundaries, and frail treaties are part
of the story, but there does appear to have been a deeper economic and cultural clash.