Jump to content

Paraguayan War

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by NekoDaemon (talk | contribs) at 07:26, 24 December 2005 (Nyaa! Categoryredirect: Category:South American historyCategory:History of South America). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

War of the Triple Alliance

The bloodiness of the battle of Tuyutí embodied the rest of the War of the Triple Alliance, in which possibly as many as 1 million people died.
Date1864-1870
Location
Result Complete Paraguayan defeat
Belligerents
Paraguay Uruguay,
Argentina,
Brasil
Commanders and leaders
Francisco Solano López Bartolomé Mitre, Duke of Caxias
Strength
at the beginning of the war ca. 50,000 at the beginning of the war ca. 26,000
Casualties and losses
ca. 300,000 soldiers and civilians ca. 125,000 soldiers

The War of the Triple Alliance, also known as the Paraguayan War, was fought from 1864 to 1870, and was the bloodiest conflict in Latin American history, and the second bloodiest conflict that occurred on the American continent. It was fought between Paraguay and the allied countries of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay.

The start of the war has been widely attributed to causes as varied as the after-effects of colonialism in Latin America, the struggle for physical power over the strategic River Plate region, the Brazilian and Argentinian meddling in internal Uruguayan politics, British economic interests in the region, and the expansionist ambitions of Paraguayan dictator Francisco Solano López[1].

The outcome of the war was utter Paraguayan defeat. After the Triple Alliance defeated Paraguay in conventional warfare, the conflict turned into a drawn-out guerrilla-style resistance that would decimate the Paraguayan population, both military and civilian. One estimate places total Paraguayan losses - through both war and disease - as high as 1.2 million people, or 90 percent of its pre-war population.[2] A perhaps more accurate estimate places Paraguayan deaths at approximately 300,000 people out of its 500-525,000 prewar inhabitants[3].

It took decades for Paraguay to recover from the chaos and demographic imbalance in which it had been placed; what had been by name one of the first South American republics only chose its first democratically-elected president in 1993. In Brazil, the war helped bring the end of slavery and moved the military into a key role in the public sphere. The war would lead to the modernization of Argentina. For Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina would no longer take such an interventionist role in its internal politics.[4]

The setup

Paraguay before the war

Historians have long considered that Paraguay under José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia (1813–1840) and Carlos Antonio López (1841–1862) developed quite differently from other South American countries. The aim of Francia and Carlos López was to encourage self-sufficient economic development in Paraguay by imposing isolation from neighboring countries.[5] But historiography is ever-changing: in the 1960s and 70s, many historians claimed that the War of the Triple Alliance was caused by pseudo-colonial influence of the British. In recent years such views have been abandoned in light of the work of writers such as Francisco Doratiotto.[6]

The regime of Francisco Solano López was characterized by a harsh centralism without any room for the creation of a true civil society. There was no distinction between the public and the private sphere, and the López family ruled the country as it would a large property estate.

The government controlled all exports. The yerba mate and valuable wood exported maintained the balance of commerce. Paraguay became extremely protectionist, never accepting loans from the outside and, through high tariffs, refusing the entrance of foreign products. Francisco Solano López, son of Carlos Antonio López, replaced the father as president-dictator in 1862, and generally continued the political policies of his predecessors.

In the area of the military, however, Solano López modernized and expanded. More than 200 foreign technicians, hired by the government, installed telegraph lines and railroads to aid the steel, textiles, paper, ink, naval construction and gunpowder industries. The Ibicuí foundry, installed in 1850, manufactured cannons, mortars and bullets of all calibers. Warships were built in the Asunción shipyards.

Paragauyan president and dictator Francisco Solano López

This growth required contact with the international market, but Paraguay was landlocked. Its ports were river ports and ships had to travel down the Río Paraguay and the Río Paraná to reach the estuary of the Río de la Plata and the ocean. Solano López conceived a project to obtain a port in the Atlantic Ocean: he intended to create a "Greater Paraguay" by capturing a slice of Brazilian territory that would link Paraguay to the coastline.

To maintain his expansionist intentions, López began to prepare Paraguay's military. He encouraged the industry of war, mobilized a large quantity of men for the army (mandatory military service already existed in the Paraguay), submitted them to intensive military training, and built fortifications at the mouth of the Río Paraguay.

Diplomatically, Solano López's wanted to ally himself with Uruguay's ruling Blancos Party. The Colorados were tied to Brazil and Argentina.

River Plate politics

Since Brazil and Argentina had become independent, the fight between the governments of Buenos Aires and of Rio de Janeiro for hegemony in the River Plate basin profoundly marked the diplomatic and political relations between the countries of the region. Brazil almost entered into war with Argentina twice.

The government of Buenos Aires intended to reconstruct the territory of the old Viceroyalty of the River Plate, enclosing Paraguay and Uruguay. It carried out diverse attempts to do so during the first half of the 19th century, without success—many times due to Brazilian intervention. Fearing excessive Argentine control, Brazil favored a balance of power in the region, helping Paraguay and Uruguay conserve their sovereignty.

Brazil, under the rule of the Portuguese, was the first country to recognize the independence of Paraguay in 1811. While Argentina was ruled by Juan Manuel Rosas (1829–1852), a common enemy of both Brazil and Paraguay, Brazil contributed to the improvement of the fortifications and development of the Paraguayan army, sending officials and technical help to Asunción. As no roads linked the province of Mato Grosso to Rio de Janeiro, Brazilian ships needed to travel through Paraguayan territory, going up the Río Paraguay to arrive at Cuiabá. Many times, however, Brazil had difficulty obtaining permission to sail from the government in Asunción.

Brazil carried out three political and military interventions in Uruguay - in 1851, against Manuel Oribe to fight Argentine influence in the country; in 1855, at the request of the Uruguayan government and Venancio Flores, leader of the Colorados, who were traditionally supported by the Brazilian empire; and in 1864, against Atanasio Aguirre. This last intervention would be the fuse of the War of the Triple Alliance. These interventions were aligned to the English desire for the fragmentation of the River Plate region to stop any attempt to monopolize the region's minerals.

Intevention against Aguirre

In April of 1864, Brazil sent a diplomatic mission to Uruguay led by José Antônio Saraiva to demand payment for the damages caused to gaucho farmers in border conflicts with Uruguayan farmers. The Uruguayan president Atanásio Aguirre, Blancos Party, refused the Brazilian demands.

Solano López offered himself as mediator, but was turned down by Brazil. López subsequently broke diplomatic relations with Brazil - in August 1864 - and declared that the occupation of the Uruguay by Brazilian troops would be an attack to the equilibrium of the Río de la Plata region.

In October of the same year, Brazilian troops invaded Uruguay. The followers of the Colorado Venancio Flores, who had the support of Argentina, united with the Brazilian troops to depose Aguirre.

The War

The war begins

On November 12, 1864, the Paraguayan ship Tacuari captured the Brazilian ship Marquês of Olinda which had sailed up the Río Paraguay to the province of Mato Grosso. Paraguay declared war on Brazil on December 13 and on Argentina three months later, on March 18, 1865. Uruguay, already governed by Venancio Flores, aligned itself with Brazil and Argentina.

Sodiers of the Brazilian Volunteers for the Fatherland Corps

On May 1, 1865, Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay signed the Treaty of the Triple Alliance in Buenos Aires, allying the three River Plate countries against Paraguay.

At the beginning of the war, the military force of the Triple Alliance was inferior to that of Paraguay, which counted more than 60,000 well-trained men and a squadron of 23 vapores and five river-navigating ships. Its artillery included about 400 cannons.

The troops of Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay were less than a third the total size of the Paraguayans. Argentina had approximately 8,000 soldiers and a squadron of four vapores and one goleta. Uruguay entered the war with less than 3,000 men and no navy. Only 8,000 of Brazil's 18,000 troops were located in its southern garrisons at the beginning of the war. The Brazilian advantage, though, was in its navy: 42 ships with 239 cannons and about 4,000 well trained crew. A great part of the squadron already met in the River Plate basin, where it had acted, under the Marquis of Tamandaré, in the intervention against Aguirre.

In truth, Brazil was unprepared to fight a war. Its army was unorganized. The troops used in the interventions in Uruaguay were composed merely of the armed contingents of gaucho politicians and some of the staff of the National Guard. The Brazilian infantry who fought in the War of the Triple Alliance were not professional soldiers, but Volunteers for the Fatherland - citizens who presented to fight. Many were slaves sent by farmers. The cavalry was formed from the National Guard of the Rio Grande Do Sul.

According to Treaty of the Triple Alliance, Bartolomé Mitre, president of Argentina, would be the supreme commander of the allied troops.

Paraguayan offensive

During the first phase of the war, Paraguay took the initiative. The armies of López defined the fronts of initial battles - invading Mato Grosso in the north in December 1864, Rio Grande do Sul in the south in the first months of 1865 and the Argentine province of Corrientes.

Two bodies of Paraguayan troops invaded Mato Grosso simultaneously. Due to the numerical superiority of the invaders, the province was captured quickly.

Five thousand men, transported in ten ships and commanded by the colonel Vicente Barros, went up the Río Paraguay and attacked the fort of Nova Coimbra. The garrison of 155 men resisted for three days under the command of the lieutenant-colonel Hermenegildo de Albuquerque Port Carrero, later baron of Fort Coimbra. When the munitions were exhausted, the defenders abandoned the fort and and withdrew, above the river, to the border of the cannonry Anhambaí, in direction of Corumbá. After they occupied the empty fort, the Paraguayans advanced north, taking the cities of Albuquerque and Corumbá in January 1865.

Argentine boy soldier

The second Paraguayan column, which was led by Colonel Francisco Isidoro Resquín and included four thousand men, penetrated a region south of Mato Grosso, and sent a detachment to attack the military frontier of Dourados. The detachment, lead by Major Martín Urbieta, encountered tough resistance on December 29, 1864 from Lieutenant Antonio João Ribeiro and his 16 men, who died without yielding. The Paraguayans continued to Nioaque and Miranda, defeating the troops of the colonel José Dias da Silva. Coxim was taken in April 1865.

The Paraguayan forces, despite their victories, did not continue to Cuiabá, the capital of the province. Augusto Leverger had fortified the camp of Melgaço to protect Cuiabá. The main objective was to distract the attention of the Brazilian government to the north, as the war would lead to the south, closer to the River Plate estuary. The invasion of Mato Grosso was a diversionary maneuver.

The invasion of Corrientes and of Rio Grande do Sul was the second phase of the Paraguayan offensive. To raise the support of the Uruguayan Blancos, the Paraguayan forces had to travel through Argentine territory. In March of 1865, López asked to the Argentine government permission for an army of 25,000 men (led by General Wenceslao Robles) to travel through the province of Corrientes. The president—Bartolomé Mitre, an ally of Brazil in the intervention in Uruguay—refused.

In the March 18, 1865, Paraguay declared war on Argentina. A Paraguayan squadron, coming down the Río Paraná, imprisoned Argentine ships in the port of Corrientes. Immediately, General Robles's troops took the city.

In invading Corrientes, López tried to obtain the support of the powerful Argentine caudillo Justo José de Urquiza, governor of the provinces of Corrientes and Entre Ríos, and the chief federalist hostile to Mitre and to the government of Buenos Aires. But Urquiza assumed an ambiguous attitude towards the Paraguayan troops—which would advance around 200 kilometers south before ultimately ending the offensive in failure.

Along with Robles's troops, a force of 10,000 men under the orders of the lieutenant-colonel Antonio de la Cruz Estigarriba crossed the Argentine border south of Encarnación, in May 1865, driving for Rio Grande do Sul. They traveled down Río Uruguay and took the town of São Borja on June 12. Uruguaiana, to the south, was taken on August 5 without any significant resistance. The Brazilian reaction was yet to come.

Brazil reacts

The Brazilian army in their camp at Guiuzú, September 20, 1866, by Cándido López

Brazil sent an expedition to fight the invaders in Mato Grosso. A column of 2,780 men led by Colonel Manuel Pedro Drago left Uberaba, in Minas Gerais, in April 1865, and arrived at Coxim in December, after a difficult march of more than two thousand kilometers through four provinces. But Paraguay had abandoned Coxim by December. Drago arrived at Miranda in September 1866 - and Paraguay had left once again. In January 1867, Colonel Carlos de Morais Camisão assumed command of the column, now only 1,680 men, and decided to invade the Paraguayan territory, where he penetrated as far as Laguna. The expedition was forced to retreat by the Paraguayan cavalry.

Despite the efforts of Colonel Camisão's troops and the resistance in the region, which succeeded in liberating Corumbá in June 1867, the Mato Grosso remained under the control of the Paraguayans. They finally withdrew in April 1868, moving their troops to the main theater of operations, in the south of the Paraguay.

Communications in the River Plate basin traveled only along rivers; few roads existed. Whoever controlled the rivers would win the war, so the Paraguayan fortifications had been built on the edges of the lower end of Río Paraguay.

File:BatalhadoRiachuelo.gif
Artist's conception of the battle of Riachuelo, by Victor Meirelles

The naval battle of Riachuelo occurred on June 11, 1865. The Brazilian fleet commanded by Francisco Manuel Barroso da Silva won, destroying the powerful Paraguayan navy and preventing the Paraguayans from permanently occupying Argentine territory. The battle practically decided war on behalf of the Triple Alliance, which controlled, from that point on, the rivers of the River Plate basin up to the entrance to Paraguay.

While López ordered the retreat of the forces that occupied Corrientes, the Paraguayan troops that invaded São Borja advanced, taking Itaqui and Uruguaiana. A separate division (3,200 men) that continued towards Uruguay, under the command of the major Pedro Duarte, was defeated by Flores in the bloody battle of Jataí on the banks of the Río Uruguay.

The allied troops united under the command of Mitre in the camp of Concórdia, in the Argentine province of Entre Ríos, with the field-marshal Manuel Luís Osório at the front of the Brazilian troops. Part of the troops, commanded by the lieutenant-general Manuel Marques de Sousa, baron of Porto Alegre, left to reinforce Uruguaiana. The Paraguayans yielded on September 18, 1865.

In the subsequent months the last Paraguayan advances into Argentine territory were recaptured: the cities of Corrientes and São Cosme. By the end of 1865, the Triple Alliance was on the offensive. Their armies counted more than 50,000 men and were prepared to invade Paraguay.

Invasion of Paraguay

The invasion of the Paraguay followed the course of the Río Paraguay, from the Passo da Pátria. From April 1866 to July 1868, military operations concentrated in the confluence of the rivers Paraguay and Paraná, where the Paraguayans located their main fortifications. For more than two years the advancement of the invaders was blocked, despite initial Triple Alliance victories.

Artist's conception of the battle of Tuyutí (painted 1876-1885 by Cándido López)

The first stronghold taken was Itapiru. After the battles of the Passo da Pátria and of the Estero Bellaco, the allied forces camped on swamps of Tuyutí, where they were attacked. The first battle of Tuyutí, won by the allies on May 24, 1866, was the biggest pitched battle of the history of the South America.

Due to health reasons, in July 1866 Osório passed the command of the First Corps of the Brazilian army to General Polidoro da Fonseca Quintanilha Jordão. At the same time, the Second Corps—10,000 men—arrived at the theater of operations, brought from Rio Grande Do Sul by the baron of Port Alegre.

To open the way to Humaitá, the biggest Paraguayan stronghold, Mitre attacked the batteries of Curuzu and Curupaity. Curuzu was taken by surprise by the baron of Porto Alegre, but Curupaity resisted the 20,000 Argentines and Brazilians, lead by Mitre and Porto Alegre, with support of the squadron of admiral Tamandaré. This failure (5,000 men were lost in a few hours) created a command crisis and stopped the advance of the allies.

After the Curupaity disaster, many Brazilian military leaders left their commands. Between them, the heroes of Tuyutí: General José Luís Mena Barreto; Brigadier General Antônio de Sampaio, protector of the infantry weapons of the Brazilian Army; Lieutenant Colonel Emílio Luís Mallet, head of the artillery; and even Osório, head of the cavalry. In addition, Lieutenant Colonel João Carlos of Vilagrã Cabrita, head of weapons of engineering, died in Itapiru.

Caxias in command

Assigned on October 10, 1866 to command the Brazilian forces, Marshal Luís Alves de Lima e Silva, marquis and, later, duke of Caxias, arrived in Paraguay in November, finding the Brazilian army practically paralyzed. The contingent of Argentines and Uruguayans, devastated by disease, were secluded from rest of the allied army. Mitre and Flores returned to their respective countries due to questions of internal politics. Tamandaré was replaced in command by the admiral Joaquim José Inácio, future viscount of Inhaúma. Osório organized a 5,000-strong Third Corps of the Brazilian army in Rio Grande do Sul. In the Mitre's absence, Caxias assumed the general command and restructured the army.

Between November 1866 and July 1867, Caxias organized a health corps (to give aid to the endless number of injured soldiers and to fight the epidemic of cholera) and a system of supplying of the troops. In that period, the military operations limited itself to skirmishes with the Paraguayans and to bombarding Curupaity. López took advantage of the disorganization of the enemy to reinforce its stronghold in Humaitá.

The march to flank the left wing of the Paraguayan fortifications constituted the basis of Caxias's tactics. Caxias wanted to bypass the Paraguayan strongholds, cut the connections between Asunción and Humaitá, and finally circle the Paraguayans. To this end, Caxias marched to Tuiu-Cuê.

Brazilian oficial and soldier

But Mitre, who had returned to the command in August 1867, insisted on attacking by the right wing, a strategy that had previously been disastrous in Curupaity. By his order, the Brazilian squadron forced its way past Curupaity but was forced to stop at Humaitá. New splits in the high command arose: Mitre wanted to continue, but the Brazilians instead captured São Solano, Pike and Tayi, isolating Humaitá from Asunción. In reaction, López attacked the rearguard of the allies in Tuiuti, but suffered new defeats.

With the removal of Mitre in January 1868 Caxias reassumed the supreme command and decided to bypass Curupaity and Humaitá, carried out with success by the squadron commanded by the warship-captain Delfim Carlos de Carvalho, later baron of Passagem. Humaitá fell in 25 July, after a long siege.

En route to Asunción, Caxias's army went 200 kilometers to Palmas, stopping at the Piquissiri stream. There, López had concentrated 18,000 Paraguayans in a fortified line that exploited the terrain and supported the forts of Angostura and Itá-Ibaté. Resigned to frontal combat, Caxias ordered the so-called Piquissiri maneuver. While a squadron attacked Angostura, Caxias made the army cross on the right side of the river. He ordered the construction of a road in the swamps of the Chaco, upon which the troops advanced to the northeast. At Villeta, the army crossed the river again, between Asunción and Piquissiri, behind the fortified Paraguayan line. Instead of it advancing to the capital, already evacuated and bombarded, Caxias went south and attacked the Paraguayans from behind.

Caxias had obtained a series of victories in December 1868, when he went back south to take Piquissiri from the rear, capturing Itororó, Avaí, Lomas Valentinas and Angostura. On December 24 the three new commanders of the Triple Alliance (Caxias, the Argentines Gelly and Obes, and the Uruguayan Enrique Castro) sent a note to Solano López asking for surrender. But López turned it down and fled for Cerro Leon.

Asunción was occupied on January 1, 1869 by commands of Colonel Hermes Ernesto da Fonseca, father of the future Marshal Hermes da Fonseca. On the fifth day, Caxias entered in the city with the rest of the army and 13 days later left his command.

The end of the war

Command of Count d'Eu

The son-in-law of the emperor Dom Pedro II, Luís Filipe Gastão de Orléans, Count d'Eu, was nominated to direct the final phase of the military operations in Paraguay. He sought not just a total rout of Paraguay, but also the strengthening of the Brazilian Empire. In August 1869, the Triple Alliance installed a provisional government in Asunción headed by Paraguayan Cirillo Antonio Rivarola.

Solano López organized the resistance in the mountain range northeast of Asunción. In front of 21,000 men, Count d'Eu led the campaign against the Paraguayan resistance, the Campaign of the Mountain Range, which lasted over a year. The most important battles were the battles of Piribebuy and of Campo Grande (or Nhuguaçu), in which more than 5,000 Paraguayans died.

Two detachments were sent in pursuit of Solano López, who was accompanied by 200 men in the forests in the north. On March 1, 1870, the troops of General José Antônio Correia da Câmara surprised the last Paraguayan camp in Cerro Corá, where Solano López was fatally injured by a spear as he tried to swim away down the Aquidabanigui stream. His last words were: "I die with my homeland." It was the end of the war of the Triple Alliance.

Mortality

The Paraguayan people had been fanatically committed to López and the war effort, and as a result they fought to the point of dissolution. Paraguay suffered massive casualities, losing perhaps the majority of its population. The war left it utterly prostrate.

Paraguayan prisoners of war

The specific numbers of casualities are hotly disputed, but it has been estimated that 300,000 Paraguayans, mostly civilians, died; up to 90 percent of the male population may have been killed. According to one numerical estimation, the prewar population of approximately 525,000 Paraguayans was reduced to about 221,000 in 1871, of which only about 28,000 were men. Definitively accurate casualty numbers will probably never be determined.

Of the around 123,000 Brazilians that fought in the War of the Triple Alliance the best estimates say that around 50,000 died. Uruguayan forces counted barely 5,600 men (some of whom were foreigners), of whom about 3,100 died. Argentina lost around 18,000 of its 30,000 combatants.

The high rates of mortality, however, were not the result of the armed conflict in itself. Bad food and very bad hygiene caused of most of the deaths. Among the Brazilians, two-thirds of the killed died in hospitals and during the march, before facing the enemy. In the beginning of the conflict, most of the Brazilian soldiers came from the north and northeast regions of the country; the changes from a hot to cold climate and the amount of food available to them were abrupt. Drinking the river water was sometimes fatal to entire battalions of Brazilians - the source of the main cause of death during the war, cholera.

Consequences of the war

No individual total peace treaty was signed. Brazil did not accept Argentina's desire for a large part of the Gran Chaco, a Paraguayan region rich in quebracho (a product used in the production of the leather). The post-war border between Paraguay and Argentina was resolved through long negotiations, finalized in a treaty that defined the frontier between the two countries signed on February 3, 1876. The only region about which no consensus was reached — the area between the Río Verde and the main branch of Río Pilcomayo — was arbitrated by U.S. President Rutherford B. Hayes, who declared it Paraguayan. (The Paraguayan department Presidente Hayes was named after Hayes due to his arbitration decision.) Brazil signed a separate peace treaty with Paraguay on January 9, 1872, obtaining the freedom of navigation the Río Paraguay. Brazil received the borders it had claimed before the war. The treaty also stipulated a war debt to the imperial government of Brazil that was eventually pardoned in 1943 by Getúlio Vargas, in reply to a similar initiative of Argentina.

File:Cadaveresparaguaios.GIF
The Paraguayan dead await burial (1866).

In December 1975, when the presidents Ernesto Geisel and Alfredo Stroessner signed in Asunción a Treaty of Amity and Cooperation, the Brazilian government returned to Paraguay its spoils of war.

The war still remains a controversial topic - especially in Paraguay, where it is considered either a fearless struggle for the rights of a smaller nation against the aggressions of more powerful neighbours, or a foolish attempt to fight an unwinnable war that almost destroyed a whole nation. In Argentina as the war wore on, many Argentines saw the conflict as Mitre's war of conquest rather than defending from aggression.

The Paraguayan villages destroyed by the war were abandoned and the peasant survivors migrated to the outskirts of Asunción, dedicating themselves to the subsistence agriculture in the central region of the country. Other lands were sold to foreigners, mainly Argentines, and turned into estates. Paraguayan industry fell apart. The Paraguayan market opened itself to English products and the country was forced for the first time to get outside loans - totalling a million English pounds. In fact, England can be seen as the power that most benefited from the war: aside from exterminating the Paraguayan threat in South America, even Brazil and Argentina fell into massive debts that continue to this day.

The Argentina annexed part of the Paraguayan territory and became the strongest of the River Plate countries. During the campaign, the provinces of Entre Rios and Corrientes had supplied the Brazilian troops with cattle, foodstuffs and other products.

Brazil paid a high price for victory. The war was financed by the Bank of London and by the Baring Brothers and Rothschild. During the five years of war, the Brazilian expenditures arrived at the double of the amount of money loaned, causing a financial crisis.

In total, Argentina and Brazil annexed about 140,000 km² (55,000 square miles) of Paraguayan territory: Argentina took much of the Misiones region and part of the Chaco between the Bermejo and Pilcomayo rivers; Brazil enlarged its Mato Grosso province by claiming territories that had been disputed with Paraguay before the war. Both demanded a large indemnity (which was never paid) and occupied Paraguay until 1876. Meanwhile, the Colorados had gained control of Uruguay, which they retained until 1958.

Slavery was undermined in Brazil as slaves were freed to serve in the war.[7] The Brazilian army became a new and expressive force in national life. It transformed itself into a strong institution that, with the war, gained tradition and internal cohesion and would take significant role in the later development of the history of the country.

Notes

  1. ^ Miguel Angel Centeno, Blood and Debt: War and the Nation-State in Latin America, University Park, PA: Pennsyvania State University Press, 1957. Page 55.
  2. ^ Byron Farwell, The Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Land Warfare: An Illustrated World View, New York: WW Norton, 2001. Page 824.
  3. ^ Jurg Meister, Francisco Solano López Nationalheld oder Kriegsverbrecher?, Osnabrück: Biblio Verlag, 1987. 345, 355, 454-5.
  4. ^ Scheina, 331.
  5. ^ PJ O'Rourke, Give War a Chance. New York: Vintage Books, 1992. Page 47.
  6. ^ Mário Maestri, Revista Espaço Acadêmico, Guerra contra o Paraguai: Da Instauração à Restauração Historiográfica, Ano II, No. 2, January 2003. [8]
  7. ^ Hendrik Kraay, Journal of Social History, "'The shelter of the uniform': the Brazilian army and runaway slaves, 1800-1888" Spring 1996.[9]

References

Robert Scheina, Latin America's Wars: The Age of the Caudillo, 1791-1899, Dulles, Virginia: Brassey's, 2003.

External links

Template:Link FA