Chaco War

Abstract

Between 1932 and 1935 Bolivia and Paraguay went to war over the desolate Chaco Boreal region. The Grand Chaco region extends over 250,000 square miles from the foothills of the Andes in the west, the Paraguay River in the east, Mato Grosso in Brazil, and the Argentine provinces of El Chaco and Formosa. The Chaco Boreal is a smaller, yet still large expanse in what is today Bolivia and Paraguay. The Bolivians famously hired the Prussian general Hans Kundt (b. 1869–d. 1939) to command their forces during the early part of the war. The Paraguayans, on the other hand, found their military leader among their own in Mariscal José Felix Estigarribia (b. 1888–d. 1940). The causes have been attributed to oil, Paraguayan and Bolivian nationalism, and poor diplomatic negotiations. A definitive history of the causes and military engagements from the perspective of either nation has yet to be written. Additionally, the military archives in both Paraguay and Bolivia have yet to be mined, although this situation is bound to change, as a group of young American, European, Paraguayan, and Bolivian historians have begun to research the topic more extensively. However, the historiography is a bit more complete in that the returning veterans from Bolivia were responsible for revolutionary agitation and a separatist movement in lowland Bolivia. In Paraguay, the return of soldiers from the Chaco directly led to the 1936 February (Febrerista) Revolution. At the end of the war in 1935 the Bolivians were the clear losers in the conflict, as they did not achieve their goal of securing a port on the Paraguay River. For the Paraguayans, the situation was a bit more nuanced. While outside observers clearly deemed the Paraguayans the victors, many Paraguayans did not view the conflict as a success, as they did not achieve what some perceived as a fundamental goal of the conflict, the Bolivian city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra. This question is considered in the section titled Eyewitness Accounts: Paraguay. What is certain is that the war caused the death of approximately 100,000 Paraguayans and Bolivians during the height of a global depression.