Higinio Morínigo
Higinio Morínigo was president of Paraguay from September 1940, when the cabinet made the war minister provisional president after Estigarribia's plane crashed, to June 1948, when his own party removed him. He was the general who was expected to hold the office for two months and held it for eight years, through the world war, the civil war of 1947, and the fascism he took up when it was in fashion and put down when it was not. He was a Chaco veteran from Paraguarí, a colonel of no politics whom the Liberals and the army agreed on because he seemed to have none. Within a year he had dropped the Liberals, dissolved their party in 1942, banned the others, and governed with the constitution of 1940 and the Guión Rojo, the Colorado militia, the army's nationalist officers, the Frente de Guerra, and a police that the country's exiles in Buenos Aires described to anyone who asked. The war was the balance. The country's Germans and the army's admirers of the Axis on one side and Washington's money on the other. The Lend-Lease was taken, the German legation's radio was tolerated. The diplomatic relations were broken with the Axis only in February 1945, when the war was over, and the declaration of war came the same month, for the United Nations seat. The opening of 1946, under American pressure, was the exiles amnestied, the parties legalised and a coalition cabinet of Colorados and Febreristas, which lasted five months before the Febreristas walked out. Then the Liberals, the Febreristas and the Communists rose together in March 1947 under the garrison at Concepción. The civil war of five months was won by the government, with the Colorado militia and with the young Stroessner's artillery at the Tebicuary crossing, at a cost of the third of the population that went into exile. It left the Colorado party the only party, which it has been since. The Colorados then removed him in June 1948, two months before the end of his term, having decided they did not need him. He went to Argentina, where he lived for thirty-five years. He came home in 1983 to die, at eighty-six, in the Asunción that Stroessner, who had fought his civil war, ran. He was born in Paraguarí. The two things he left were the one-party state and the officer who kept it.
- Lived: 1897 CE – 1983 CE
- Nationality: Paraguayan
- Roles: president, general, politician
