Silver, Sword, and Stone

by Marie Arana

  But Bolívar had also opened the hearts and minds of Latin Americans to what they might become. He had been inspired by the Enlightenment, Thomas Paine’s electrifying Rights of Man, the fundamental principle that no human being should be owned or subjugated by another. It was Bolívar, after all, who, with a higher moral instinct than Washington or Jefferson, saw the absurdity of embarking on a war for liberty without first emancipating his own slaves. Bolívar’s war of independence took twice as long as the American Revolution, from 1810 to 1824, and, in the course of its staggering violence, he was beaten back, exiled twice—but he always returned, more fierce after the failures. “The art of victory is learned in defeat,” he liked to say. Indeed, with every rout by a highly trained, vastly more equipped Spanish army, his improvised corps became stronger.

  In time, improvisation became his most valuable weapon. Bolívar’s charismatic appeal—his insistence on riding with his soldiers, sleeping alongside them on the ground, inspiring them to unimaginable heroism—became widely known as he swept from battle to battle, mustering recruits. Eventually he brought a formidable army to the task. They were black, Indian, mulatto slaves, merchants of the seas, pirates of the Caribbean, wild cowboys of the plains, invalids in hospitals, boy soldiers as young as eleven. Having declared an end to slavery a full half century before Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, Bolívar aimed to enlist a slave’s rage. The vast underclass of urban and rural laborers didn’t respond immediately, but eventually, moved by his eloquent exhortations about the rights of man, they flocked to join the army of liberation. They came to his ranks with no discipline, often bearing little more than a hoe or stick. Others came from across the sea—unemployed British veterans of the Napoleonic Wars in elaborate uniforms—paid to liberate America. Or they came from wealthy, white, disgruntled Creole families that had never known the merest sacrifice. But they had this much in common: they were all inspired by the Liberator’s rhetoric and vision and, like him, were willing to apply a rabid violence to purging the land of “goths.” They would be unstoppable.

  By the end of that fierce and chastening war, Bolívar would single-handedly conceive, organize, and lead the liberation of six nations: Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Panama—a landmass the size of modern Europe. The liberation that José de San Martín executed so brilliantly at the same time in Argentina, Chile, and the capital of Peru had to be finished, little by little, by Bolívar’s march through the inhospitable Andes. Working his way down the continent, he was ruthless about meeting brutality with brutality. By then, like-minded revolutions were ripping furiously through the Southern Cone—in Uruguay, under the valiant leadership of José Artigas, and in Paraguay, which pitted itself not only against the Spaniards but against the Argentines who wanted to annex it. The carnage would be staggering.

  It didn’t take long for the colonized to realize that the revolutions they had declared would be costly. By 1812, the Latin American people had seen much, absorbed the terrible calculus of victor and victim. But it would grow worse. In 1813 Bolívar’s War to the Death captured and eliminated whole battalions of Spanish soldiers. One year later, José Tomás Boves—a barbarian of epic proportions, chieftain of a formidable horde of seven thousand roughriders—proclaimed his preference for Spain and massacred eighty thousand rebels. Unlike Boves, Bolívar was not inherently a violent man: killing sickened him. But, like his royalist foes, he well understood the uses of fear. The very kind of revolution that his aristocratic comrades wanted and thought they had started—quick, easy, well argued, and civilized—was now ending in extremes of savagery. Bolívar admitted openly that all Spaniards he encountered on his first successful campaign “almost without exception were shot.” That uncompromising policy had not sprung from a vacuum: a year before, King Ferdinand’s commanding general had issued a royal order that called for the extermination of all rebels, without exception. It was akin to Tupac Amaru’s desperate insurrection, mounted three decades before and met by Spain’s chastening scourge. It was an all-or-nothing game. There would be no compromises. Only one side would survive. The result was a bloody conflict that reduced civilian populations in Latin America by a third. Whole cities were wiped off the map. The countryside was ravaged. The despoliation was complete. A Spanish official put it succinctly: “There are no more provinces left. Towns that had thousands of inhabitants are now reduced to a few hundred or even a few dozen. In some, there are only vestiges of human habitation. Roads and fields are strewn with unburied corpses; entire villages have been burnt; whole families are nothing but a memory.”

  The devastation reechoed throughout Latin America. It sped like a fulgent flame, provoking a population that had been assaulted and dominated for three hundred years. Hostility, suspicion, abominations became the norm. All of Spain’s ire—learned in generations of war—had turned with a fresh fury against the Americas. And now all the accumulated rage of the colonized soared to meet it in kind. When the Spanish expeditionary force finally limped home in 1824, it was a fraction of the colossal fleet that had arrived a decade earlier.

  THE KILLING THAT WOULD NOT STOP

  They are children of the devil, not of the Moon and Sun, our deities, for they go from land to land killing, pillaging, plundering everything in sight.

  —Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, 1605

  The furor was such that it never truly receded. Even after winning independence from Spain in 1819, Venezuela went on in unabated frenzy to sacrifice a million more lives in skirmishes that lasted for seventy years, into the twentieth century. Mexico lost more than a half million in its bid for independence from Spain (1810 to 1821), only to carry on a brutal civil war against the Mayans that lasted thirty years more and claimed three hundred thousand more dead. One-quarter of its population perished in the course of those conflagrations. In the scant thirteen years between 1847 and 1861, almost half a million more Mexicans were lost to war, bringing the total carnage to a million and a half souls in the course of fifty years. The violence continued through the early twentieth century until it culminated in a second Mexican revolution, led by disgruntled peasants who realized with perfect clarity that their postrevolutionary masters would be more of the same: unfailingly white, dominated by foreign interests, and cruelly heedless of the colored masses. For all the liberty they had been promised, a century of independence had offered little but discord and conflict.

  Between 1910 and 1920, the Mexican population was reduced in a fury of bloodletting. The evidence was there for all to see: corpses dangling from trees, civilians mowed down in the streets, mass graves in the desert. It had been an ongoing escalation of unimaginable cruelty; murder, executions, decapitations, torture, mutilations, and kidnappings were now the law of the land. No one was immune to the violence, even the apolitical—even immigrants who were uninvolved in the white-brown belligerence. To wit: the dawn of Mexico’s century-long romance with the illicit drug trade began when landowners drove out or killed Chinese railroad laborers in order to seize the laborers’ lucrative opium fields for themselves.

  For all the uprisings and bloodshed, the violence never seemed to advance the colored masses. As Mexico entered the twentieth century, a full half of the peasant class—more than 80 percent of them indigenous—were still working on plantations of the rich or toiling for foreign bosses. Almost the entire population outside of Mexico City was landless and indigent. And restless. They still are. One hundred years after Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata stormed the capital to take over the presidential palace—two hundred years after Hidalgo ignited a bloody war for independence with his galvanizing shout from the plaza of Dolores, “el Grito de Dolores”—Mexico remains one of the ten most dangerous places in the world. It shares that distinction with Honduras, Guatemala, Colombia, Venezuela, and Brazil.

  * * *

  Indeed, postrevolutionary carnage was seen in almost every newly liberated republic. But perhaps none reached the intensity of killing that ravaged Paraguay in the
nineteenth century. In that budding nation, whose revolution had reduced it drastically from capacious province to tiny landlocked state, José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, a virtual unknown, rose to absolute power. The enigmatic son of a Brazilian tobacco planter and a locally born mother—three of whose siblings were certifiably deranged—Francia grew up with a marked grudge against the established, moneyed classes. He seized the presidency soon after independence in 1811, proclaimed himself “El Supremo,” Supreme and Perpetual Dictator of Paraguay, and immediately set about stripping the colonial elite of their power. He was an irredeemable eccentric, to say the least: a tall, gaunt, saturnine figure of a man who demanded that citizens turn their backs or prostrate themselves when he passed, so as to pose no threat to him. To answer his paranoid fantasies, windows in the houses of Asunción clacked shut as he passed by. Citizens trembled with fear lest they be singled out for one of his purges. He had never forgotten that the parents of a Spanish girl with whom he had been infatuated as a young man had rejected his overtures and accused him of being a mulatto: as dictator, he forbade the Spaniards of Paraguay from marrying whites.

  Francia was a strong-arm despot in the most dire sense. No sooner had he taken power than he sealed borders, confiscated all foreign property, nationalized the Church’s assets, cut all its ties to Buenos Aires and Rome, and proceeded to purge the country of foreigners, educated officials, public intellectuals, even teachers. His goal was to achieve a fully self-sufficient economy with no need of capital or ideas from the outside world. As historian Thomas Carlyle, his contemporary, put it in the 1830s:

  Here, under our own nose, rises a new tyrant! Precisely when constitutional liberty was beginning to be understood a little, and we flattered ourselves that by due ballot-boxes, by due registration courts, and bursts of parliamentary eloquence, something like a real National Palaver would be got up in those countries,—arises this tawny-visaged, lean, inexorable Dr. Francia; claps you an embargo on all that; says to constitutional liberty, in the most tyrannous manner, Hitherto, and no farther! . . . The ships lay high and dry, their pitchless seams all yawning on the clay banks of the Paraná; and no man could trade but by Francia’s license. If any person entered Paraguay, and the Doctor did not like his papers, his talk, conduct, or even the cut of his face,—it might be the worse for such person! Nobody could leave Paraguay on any pretext whatever. It mattered not that you were man of science, astronomer, geologer, astrologer, wizard of the north. Dr. Francia had a gallows, had jailors, law-fiscals, officials; and executed persons, some of them in a very summary manner. Liberty of private judgment, unless it kept its mouth shut, was at an end in Paraguay. Paraguay lay under interdict, cut off for above twenty years from the rest of the world, by a new Dionysius.

  Paraguay became an impermeable island, free from alien influence, a bastion of isolation—“the only Latin American country that foreign capital could not warp,” as one historian put it. Ironically, for all the tyranny, by the end of Francia’s rule, Paraguay had become one of the strongest economies in South America. The poverty and disease so rampant elsewhere were nonexistent within its closely guarded borders. Illiteracy had been eliminated. Francia’s obstinacy and neuroses had succeeded in making Paraguay a bulwark of resistance against foreign encroachment—the region’s most progressive country. Nestled at the very heart of the continent, facing trespass from every side, it was proving it could survive without its neighbors, without European or North American investment, without the privileges of free trade. In time, that inviolability rankled the foreign bankers and corporate moguls who had made profitable inroads in South America and engaged in vigorous commerce with Argentina and Brazil, just across Paraguay’s frontiers. A considerable animus against Paraguay began to build in the peripheral universe of Brazil, Argentina, and Bolivia, and the British bankers who were financing those fledgling countries.

  Francia died and was buried in 1840. His remains were later exhumed, defiled, absconded with, and ultimately discovered in a shabby box of dry noodles, his skull sent off to live on as a relic in the Museum of History. His reign was followed by confusion and turmoil, and three subsequent leaders were overthrown willy-nilly, in lightning succession. But by 1841, Francia’s nephew Carlos Antonio López had stormed the presidential palace and taken the dictatorial perch. Short, stout, and deeply corrupt, “El Excelentísimo” proceeded to build an army of sixty-four thousand, by far the largest military force in South America. Enriching his own personal coffers, he ensured that when the presidency eventually passed to his son, Francisco Solano López, the López family was among the wealthiest, most powerful landowners in Paraguay. In time, the young, petulant Solano López turned on his own kin in a fit of paranoia. In a chilling move, fearing a secret plot against his rule, he ordered the execution of his own brothers. To satisfy lingering suspicions, he had his mother tortured and his sister shot.

  But the real plot against Solano López turned out to be brewing well beyond the nation’s borders. Argentina and Brazil had long had their eyes on Paraguay, yearning to carve up its territory and gain access to the Paraguay River, giving them access to fertile land and, farther north, the riches of the Amazon jungle. Toward this purpose, Brazil began encroaching on Paraguay’s northeast farmlands. Argentina, in turn, goaded by British commercial interests, brazenly invaded Uruguay, which was just to Paraguay’s south, and installed a puppet government there. Bolivia, which had long been an irritant, seemed poised to make a move of its own.

  Paraguay was suddenly beset on all sides. A stubborn, arrogant man, López Solano now prepared to defend his borders against the belligerents. He ordered his formidable army to expel the poachers in the Northeast, prompting Brazil to storm across the frontier and engage the Paraguayans in a full-scale war. To retaliate, Solano López ordered an attack on the villages of Mato Grosso, which his huge army was only too happy to oblige, ransacking houses, burning farmland, and raping the women. His neighbors’ riposte was fierce and immediate, almost as if it had been the desired goal all along: Brazil, Argentina, and the puppet government in Uruguay joined efforts, formed the infamous Triple Alliance, and mounted a punishing invasion of Paraguay. It was a genocidal war, even clearly articulated as such, and its goal was to eliminate the Paraguayan people entirely. The butchery was nothing short of savage. Even as the robust Paraguayan army was reduced to a ragged shadow—even while children as young as ten were sent out to fight with false beards glued to their faces—the killing continued. These struggling, fledgling American republics, like the mythological Saturn, were now devouring their own sons. Divvying up the spoils of the Paraguayan bloodbath, no one got richer than the British financiers—the Bank of London, Baring Brothers & Co., Rothschild & Co.—whose vaults had financed the incursion. Meanwhile, a nation of 900,000 had been brutally reduced to 221,000. Whole cities were empty of men; the overall male population plunged to 28,000. Paraguay became a ghost of itself—routed, emasculated—a land of women and girls. Striding away from the rubble and slaughter, the victors might have declared—as Huaya Capac had done almost four centuries before—“You are all children now.”

  The story was repeated, if less dramatically, in other fledgling Latin American countries. In centuries to come, dictators came in a multitude of varieties. But the trajectory was always the same, and “el dictador” became a necessary corrective in the public mind, a mythic creature homologous to the notion of the Latin American republic. Most began by touting the dicta of liberation, the voice of the people, the demands of revolution, the liberty at last from the depredations of colonialism. Eventually all headed toward the same end: the iron fist, the comforts of rigid rule, the routine familiarity of repression. As the Argentine writer Ernesto Sabato once said: “The most stubborn conservatism is that which is born of a triumphant revolution.” And that is precisely what came of the Latin American wars for independence, not least in Paraguay. If it wasn’t repression, dictatorship, and the heavy thumb, it was chaos and pandemonium.

&nbs
p; Peru, the jittery seat of a lapsed empire, proceeded to have twenty presidents in the twenty years after Simón Bolívar liberated it. Bolívar himself had decided that the Latin American countries he had freed from colonial rule just weren’t ready for democracy as his Enlightenment heroes had envisioned it. More than once, as he rode through the roiling hell of war, through the abattoirs of improvised military justice, Bolívar was forced to toss aside his ideals, make questionable decisions. The hard hand, he decided—la mano dura—was what was needed in the divided, infantilized continent Spain had wrought in the past three hundred years. His abandonment of democratic principles had started early: in Gran Colombia, Bolívar had arrogated all power to himself, attempting to avoid the fractiousness that had beset the early republic in Venezuela. Eventually Bolívar’s rigorous dictatorial rule in Peru set the stage for the region’s ongoing romance with dictators that would follow.

  As Bolívar feared, chaos soon followed every liberated republic he left behind. Violence was met with a higher violence; corruption with a more firmly entrenched corruption. In Bolivia, just after the revolution, a debauched president, known for his sexual excesses, alcoholic rampages, and graft, fled the country but was hunted down by his brother-in-law and killed in the heart of Lima. In Ecuador, a roundly hated religious fundamentalist despot who had installed himself for a third presidential term was butchered on the cathedral steps in the full light of morning. In Quito, a dictator who tried to seize power too many times was thrown in prison and then murdered, his corpse dragged through the cobbled streets like a bouncing sack of refuse. Blood trickles down streets in Latin American literature for a reason. It is part of the region’s legacy. It has been and continues to be so.