Chapter IV
Paraguay: Perpetual Dictatorship
Dr. Francia—The opinion of Carlyle—The two Lopez—Tyranny and the military spirit in Paraguay.
Paraguay, a child of the old régime, has preserved seclusion and absolutism. In other republics independence was a violent condemnation of the colonial methods. Freed from Spanish tutelage, the Paraguayan democracy none the less maintained its retired life under paternal monarchs. Its evolution is original; showing neither continual anarchy, as in the tropics, nor the perpetual quarrels of caudillos, disputing territory and wealth. Dictators and tyrants imposed their inviolable will on the inland nation. Autocracy levelled classes and races, and prepared the way for the appearance, in isolated Paraguay, of a new caste, formed of the fusion of Guarani Indians and Spaniards. The dictators of Paraguay professed a rigid Americanism; they expelled strangers, and with arrogant patriotism wished the republic to be self-sufficing. Their ideal was essentially Spanish; a democracy governed by Cæsar.
Dr. Francia was the first dictator in the Republic founded by the Jesuits. A gloomy personality, of an intense inner life, like Garcia-Moreno, he seemed one of Cromwell's Puritans. Taciturn and solitary, truthful and punctual, methodical, like the Anglo-Saxons, and ambitious, but without passion or exaltation, he admired Bonaparte, and like him became consul and emperor.
He was born in 1758. He was the son of a Portuguese or Brazilian, Garcia Rodriguez Francia. He studied theology in the colonial university of silent, austere Cordoba. When General Belgrano fomented the rebellion of the Paraguayans against the Spanish rule, and a governmental junta was installed, Caspar Rodriguez Francia was a member of the latter. The little republic elected triumvirs and consuls in the Roman manner. A Congress assembled in the same year decreed the independence of Paraguay. The country freed itself not only from Spain but also from Buenos-Ayres. No longer recognising the limits of the ancient vice-kingdom, the junta refused to treat with Belgrano unless he recognised the autonomy of Paraguay.
The Congress of 1813, at which a thousand deputies were present, continued to parody Rome; it appointed Francia and Fulgencio Yegros consuls, and promulgated a political system. Cæsar and Pompey became the names of the new magistrates, who were alternately in power. The liberty of Paraguay was consolidated, and the consuls refused to send delegates to the Congress of La Plata, which the haughty metropolis convoked at Buenos-Ayres. These magistrates condemned Argentines and Spaniards to civil death, and forbade them to marry Paraguayan women of white race. In a third Congress (1814) Francia and Yegros demanded a temporary dictatorship.
Yegros was ignorant and popular. Francia, energetic, learned, and a born dissembler, was obedient to classic memories and to the Napoleonic tradition; he aspired to absolute power. He was appointed dictator for three years, and soon obtained supreme power. He improvised his policy upon reading the ancient history of Rollin; the republicans of Rome served him as constant models, whose energy and austerity he imitated.
Educated for the priesthood, he became an advocate. He knew the law and theology like a lettered colonial, subtle and dogmatic. Before becoming consul he had filled various municipal offices; first he was secretary to the municipality, then mayor. He studied local needs, and prepared to govern as a nationalist.
He made use of religion, as did Garcia-Moreno and Portales, in order to render his political actions more efficacious. He was tolerant in respect of beliefs, but condemned atheism; he felt that the Church was the only moral force in a disturbed democracy.
He would accept no international religion; he wanted a Paraguayan, American cult, in which also he resembled Guzman-Blanco. He declared himself head of the national Church, and disregarded the authority of the Holy See; he suppressed the seminary and the monastic orders of the Franciscans, the Dominicans, and the Sisters of Mercy, and proceeded to appoint vicars and curates himself. The Inquisition was abolished, processions were forbidden, and the number of holidays was reduced to a minimum. Francia ordered the payment of tithes, protected religion, and extended the rights conferred by patronage on the Spanish kings; he sold the goods of the Church to build schools and barracks. In short, he aspired to govern a Christian republic freed from clericalism.
Religion consecrated his authority; the Paraguayan Church taught that all power, even tyranny, was in its essence divine. When moral activity did not suffice, Francia, like Rosas, appealed to terror. Conspiracies against his tyranny were numerous; the Dictator shot the rebels. His punishments revealed an Oriental cruelty. In 1821 he executed the representatives of the Paraguayan nobility. He levelled his subjects, and governed without ministers, surrounded only by informers and prætorian guards. In 1860 a Congress conferred perpetual dictatorship upon him, and he dissolved the Congress. He suppressed the cabildos, or municipalities, and replaced them by juntas selected by himself; he annihilated all hierarchy and all privilege, and assassinated Yegros, his companion in the Consulate. His enemies he imprisoned, exiled, or killed. His ambition was to cut off every head that raised itself above the level of the uniform, anonymous, and laborious crowd.
He established internal order under his autocracy. "Quarrels," he said, "paralyse industry, and injure the prosperity of the nation."
He created a Church and a Fatherland. To ensure his work, he expelled the Spaniards and isolated his country. He protected all foreigners who did not come from Spain, closed the ports to trade, and barred the rivers to free navigation.
His efforts were contradictory. He hated Spain; he wished to abolish the privileges of the nobility and clergy, and he restored the colonial system; he even aggravated it, giving it an unheard-of severity. He restored absolutism, commercial monopoly, and the communism of the Jesuits; there were estancias known as "the Country's," whose products satisfied the requirements of the budget. He unwillingly conceded licences to trade or navigate on the rivers; he opened great magazines, which recalled the colonial fairs, for the sale of merchandise. Paraguay existed in a condition of prodigious isolation; commercial transactions declined, and money went out of circulation.
During this time the population increased. The Dictator favoured Creoles, stimulated the crossing of Indian and foreign blood by severe measures, and carefully chose foreigners for the improvement of the Paraguayan population by means of forced unions; in this way he continued the work of the Jesuits. A homogeneous democracy, a national conscience, was gradually formed.
Like all the great American dictators, he stimulated material progress, and rebuilt Assomption, the capital city. He constructed public works, and forts to stop the encroachments of Indians, protected agriculture, and created industries. His ideal was full autonomy in an isolation possibly barbarous. By successive regulations he forced proprietors to sow their lands, to extend the cultivated area; like the Peruvian Incas, he would have none idle in his kingdom; he distributed tasks and enforced their execution.
He ruled from 1811 to 1840, a long thirty years, a period attained by no other American dictator but Rosas. His work was rude and imposing; he created a race, and freed his threatened country in every sense, political, economic, and religious. A priest said once in an ardent panegyric: "The Lord, having cast a pitying glance upon our country, sent us Dr. Francia to save it." The tyrant thus became a redeemer, and is not without his strange legend. At seventy years of age he was regarded as a remote and divine personage. From a secret palace he governed a disciplined people. He had militarised the country and exalted patriotism, the strong national feeling of small nations, from Uruguay and Paraguay in America and Servia, to Bulgaria and Montenegro in Europe.
His long tyranny in no way debased the race. When he died Francia was mourned by his people, a people about to reveal in warfare a Spartan tenacity, a tranquil heroism. Paraguay was unconquerable; it was dispeopled, the masculine population disappeared, but the Republic remained erect and aggressive. Francia had formed a proud and warlike race. He was the most extraordinary man the world had seen for a hundred years, said Carlyle in one of his Essays—a Dominican ripe for canonisation, an excellent superior of Jesuits, a rude and atrabilious Grand Inquisitor. The Scottish historian praises the grim silences of Francia—"the grim unspeakabilities"—that mute solitude in which remarkable men commune with the mystery of things.
After thirty years of uniform dictatorship the Guaranian people might have revolted against autocracy. But here, contrary to that which passed in other republics, the monarchy was not the term of absolutism. Francia was replaced by new tyrants, the two Lopez, and Paraguay accepted perpetual dictatorship.
A "ricorso" exhibited the old round of evolution: the triumvirate, then the consulate, then dictatorship.
The last of the Lopez was better educated and more moderate than the previous tyrants; he militarised the country, created an army of thirty thousand men, and developed the fleet. Brazil and the Argentine had difficulties with Paraguay; these two countries were quarrelling for supremacy in La Plata. Paraguay and Uruguay, States rebellious to every yoke, provoked conflicts between these ambitious powers. Brazil demanded reparation for the attacks directed by Uruguay against Brazilians, and Lopez intervened as meditator in this conflict. He assisted Uruguay to maintain "the equilibrium of La Plata." The Empire refused his good offices, and the haughty tyrant declared war. He asked General Mitre, President of the Argentine Republic, permission to send his troops across the territory of Corrientes. The President refused permission, and protested against the accumulation of Paraguayan troops on the frontier. The belligerents were now three. Paraguay attacked two powerful States, the Argentine and Brazil. The war lasted five years (1865-70).
The war had all the grandeur of an ancient epic. The heroism of Paraguay overcame numbers, destiny, and death; she defeated the allies, and, hemmed in by superior forces, still held out under the leadership of Lopez, now transformed into a stern apostle of nationalism. He performed prodigies; he attacked without reserves, and, in a bellicose delirium, shot down those who criticised his actions, and continued the war on a territory dispeopled and steeped in blood. The allies seized Assomption, and Lopez himself fell in battle: the tragic personification of an irreducible people. The first of the Lopez had written to Rosas in 1845, "Paraguay cannot be conquered." The war confirmed this prophecy. In 1870 the Brazilian and Argentine victors found only a decimated country; the cities were deserted, and foreigners had taken possession of the soil; the solemn silence which Francia had dreamed of for his country reigned throughout. The women were accomplishing their funeral rites above unnumbered and innumerable tombs; they dug trenches, and, like Antigone in the Æschylean tragedy, carried in the folds of their mantles the maternal soil that was to cover the dead.
After this war nothing could be more monotonous than Paraguayan life; military presidents and civil presidents have succeeded one another with intervals of anarchy. The spirit of dictatorship is not dead. The intellectuals—Dominguez, Gondra, Baez—deny Lopez and Francia; but new tyrants reign over the midland Republic.
The principle of authority, exacerbated and tenacious, has created modern Paraguay. This nation confirms a law of American history. Dictatorship is the proper government to create internal order, to develop wealth, and to unite inimical castes.