This is volume II of a projected trilogy by one of Paraguay’s most interesting and prolific young historians. Beginning where volume I left off, on the eve of World War II, it follows the shifting tendencies of Paraguay’s foreign policy through the presidencies of José Félix Estigarribia and Higinio Morínigo. Basing his account largely on official archives in Washington and Bonn, as well as many private archives in Paraguay, then supplementing these with interviews, contemporary newspapers and journals, and secondary sources, Seiferheld does a good job of presenting a complex subject. He describes the rivalry between Germany and the United States to exercise supreme influence in Paraguay during the war, and the pressures they brought to bear on that government. This leads him to discuss how Paraguay’s military establishment, its political parties and factions, and its local communities of Germans, Italians, Japanese, Jews, and Russians became caught up in the struggle. The great value of the work stems from Seiferheld’s skill and objectivity in presenting his materials.
The most interesting aspect of the study, perhaps, is the interplay between foreign and domestic politics. Following Michael Grow’s excellent The Good Neighbor Policy and Authoritarianism in Paraguay (1981), Seiferheld’s book adds useful information to our knowledge about how Paraguay’s political parties and military factions align themselves with foreign actors, partly along ideological lines and partly out of pragmatism. Estigarribia, though a Francophile liberal and backed by much U. S. aid, was forced to tolerate the spread of Nazi and Fascist organizations in Paraguay because of the pro-Axis sympathies of so many of his military colleagues. Morínigo, an admirer of the Nazis, permitted them to operate their spy network on Paraguayan territory throughout the war, despite being forced by the U. S. to break diplomatic relations with the Axis in 1942. Much of the book recounts American attempts to use economic and military aid to pressure the Paraguayans to go further, and the latter’s means of evading such pressures. So long as the Axis was winning the war, the ultranationalists in Morínigo’s government simply stonewalled the Americans. With Germany’s defeat, however, Morínigo finally gave in, revamped his cabinet as well as the top military commands, and began a liberalization program.
Specialists on Paraguay’s politics and history will find this book essential, but it also will appeal to anyone interested in the general subject of Axis penetration of Latin America during the war.
