Francisco Solano Lopez

Francisco Solano López took Paraguay into a war against three neighbours and lost about sixty per cent of its population. He was the son of Carlos Antonio López, who had governed Paraguay as a personal estate and had built it into an unusual state — an iron foundry, a railway, a telegraph, no foreign debt, and no press. Francisco was made a general at eighteen, spent eighteen months in Europe buying arms and observing the Crimean War, and came home with a French mistress, Eliza Lynch, and a conviction that he was a South American Napoleon. He succeeded in 1862. The war began in 1864 over Brazilian intervention in Uruguay, which he treated as a threat to the regional balance; he seized a Brazilian steamer, invaded Mato Grosso, and then asked Argentina for permission to cross its territory and invaded anyway when refused. Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay signed a secret treaty of alliance. Paraguay had perhaps half a million people against eleven million and fought for five and a half years, latterly with an army of boys wearing false beards. López executed his own brothers, his brothers-in-law, hundreds of officers and two bishops on suspicion of conspiracy, and had his mother flogged. He was killed at Cerro Corá in March 1870 refusing to surrender. Paraguay lost a quarter of its territory and most of its men, and he is a national hero there and a monster in the neighbouring capitals. The revisionist reading of him began in Paraguay in the 1930s and made him the defender of national sovereignty against British-backed neighbours, which is where the school curriculum stands. Eliza Lynch buried him with her own hands and was reburied in Asunción as a national heroine in 1961.

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