Analyses of Paraguayan diplomatic history run the spectrum from multiple volume memoirs to hard-hitting political defenses. A few studies, like Efraím Cardozo’s continuing series, Hace Cien Años: Crónicas de la Guerra de 1864-1870 and León Pomer’s La Guerra del Paraguay: Gran Negocio, are recent well-executed portrayals of the complexities of Paraguayan battlefield history. Too many bias-based discussions, however, have overshadowed a meaningful and accurate depiction of struggle—political, economic, military, and diplomatic—in the “land of lace, lakes, and legends.” With the intention of filling a particular gap of scholarly presentations of the period from the end of the War of the Triple Alliance through the Chaco War, Salum-Flecha, historian-diplomat, offers a person-place-event chronology of diplomatic negotiations rather than historical analysis.
Although Salum-Flecha’s intention is to compress into a single volume one of the most complex interludes of Latin American international relations, with all its machinations and intrigues of alliance formation and balance-of-power construction, Historia Diplomática del Paraguay loses its scholarly forcefulness because of a failure to put facts into a defined and carefully constructed framework. Beginning with the 1869 foreign occupation and the period of provisional government, events are traced through the formulation of the Constitution of 1870, a document which, with amendments, would remain the pattern of organization for seventy years. The epoch is characterized as transforming a creative and constructive Paraguayan mentality into one of dependence and defeat. The constitutional system, in turn, rather than providing affirmation of the need for prompt solutions and the organizational machinery for dealing with crisis situations, institutionalized an attitude of indifference at a time of war-spoils prostration. Bilateral negotiations with Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, as well as the corollary post-Triple Alliance War dealings with Bolivia, repeat time after time the erosion of an effective diplomacy and the toll of defeat: “The old country, the country of independence, the country of the Guaraní and the Paraguayan, has died. Now Paraguay is governed by conquerors, agents, merchants, and commerce-paid politicians.” Only the lingering issue of the Saltos del Guairá, and the conflicting Cardozo and Soler theses, are brought to contemporary diplomatic perspective.
Salum-Flecha’s study then develops the period of national reconstruction under the effective administrations of generals Bernardino Caballero and Patricio Escobar through the revolutions and coups d’etat that again brought a festering anarchy that would eat away at the defenses of Paraguay and invite the advancement of Bolivian penetration into the territory of the Chaco. The concluding presentation focuses upon the extensive period from the turn of the century to the conclusion of a Chaco War peace. The impact of domestic political reorganization is portrayed in the character of agreements with Argentina and Brazil as well as the movement toward a state of war with Bolivia.
Although the sequence of diplomatic negotiations is enhanced by parenthetical chapters dealing with a review of the Chaco War campaigns and the domestic political happenings, Salum-Flecha too hurriedly closes his study with an abrupt and non-conclusive ending, leaving the impression that Historia Diplomática del Paraguay is strong on chronology and faltering in analysis. The conclusion-substitute “epilogue,” in turn, while repeating the highlights of the defensive and restrictive diplomacy of the period 1869-1938 as reflective of national constraints and a week diplomatic corps organization, offers only a passing argument for the ways and means of current Paraguayan concern to reorganize contemporary diplomatic structures on the basis of analyzed historical diplomatic experience. Lessons from history are decidedly more meaningful when analyzed rather than merely chronicled, and Historia Diplomática del Paraguay, consequently, leaves a wider gap than it might pretend to have narrowed.
