This monograph centers upon one of Latin America’s most fascinating and neglected historical epochs. As Professor Williams states, during the period from 1800 to 1870 Paraguay “changed from an imperial backwater, half forgotten by Madrid, to a dynamic, dictator-directed, semi-industrialized, semi-militarized, financially sound nation” (p. ix). While this thesis is fundamentally correct, the heavy reliance upon questionable secondary sources leaves these conclusions largely unsubstantiated.
Accepting contemporary partisan diatribes as primary sources, Williams falls into the same errors as his predecessors. He reports many of the same tired myths that have been propagated by traditional historians and by enemies of Paraguay’s popular regimes. One example is the description of Dr. José Gaspar de Francia (1814–40) by “a European visitor” as having “the misfortune to be subject to fits of hypochondria, which sometimes degenerated into madness” (p. 43). What is not explained is that this particular European visitor was Swiss naturalist Johann Rudolph Rengger, a colorful character who pandered to French imperial designs by regularly sending to his home government compromising information on the Paraguayan leadership. As a consequence, he was held captive by Francia during the last four years of his six-year stay in Paraguay.
Repeating another staple of the “madman theory” of Paraguayan history, the author portrays Francisco Solano López (1862–70), head of state during the devastating War of the Triple Alliance (1864–70), as a vainglorious megalomaniac. As Williams contends, López “showed astonishing ignorance of the gravity of the regional problem” (p. 202), and his comportment during the war amounted to the “actions of a man who on his journey through life has left reality far behind him” (p. 221). Regardless of this bias, one does not have to agree with Williams’s analysis to enjoy and learn much from this well-written book. It should be emphasized that this work does present some previously unpublished archival documentation and offers, for the first time in English, much information that has been available only in the original Spanish.
