José Félix Estigarribia
José Félix Estigarribia was president of Paraguay from August 1939 to September 1940, when the plane carrying him to a weekend at his ranch crashed in the hills near Altos and killed him, his wife and the pilot. He was the general who had commanded the country's army through the Chaco war against Bolivia and won it, the only war a South American state has won in the twentieth century, and the marshal the country had made him for it. He was a Guaraní-speaking farmer's son from Caraguatay who had been an agronomy student before the military academy and the staff college at Saint-Cyr. The war of 1932 to 1935 was his: forty thousand Paraguayans against a Bolivian army twice the size with German advisers, in the scrub of the Chaco Boreal, without water. He won it by manoeuvre. There were the sieges of the Bolivian forts at Boquerón and Nanawa in 1933, the encirclement of the whole Bolivian army at Campo Vía in December 1933, twenty thousand prisoners, and the advance to the foothills of the Andes in 1935 and the Bolivian counter-attack at Villamontes that stopped it. There was the ceasefire of June 1935 that gave Paraguay three quarters of the Chaco, which the treaty of 1938 confirmed, and which turned out to have no oil. The Liberal government sent him to Washington as minister after the February revolution of 1936 had removed it. When the Liberals came back they made him their candidate in 1939, unopposed. The thirteen months were the ones in which he decided that the parties could not govern the country the army had saved. He dissolved the Congress in February 1940, took power by decree with the Liberals' consent. He had a constitution written that gave the president most of it, promulgated in July 1940, under which he meant to govern for a term and under which Morínigo, whom he had made war minister, governed for eight years instead. He was born in Caraguatay. The body was brought back to Asunción by a crowd that the country had not seen since López. It lies in the Panteón de los Héroes beside López. That is the company the country keeps him in, the general who won and did not live to find out what his constitution was for.
- Lived: 1888 CE – 1940 CE
- Nationality: Paraguayan
- Roles: president, general, marshal
