Chaco War

Abstract

For twenty-seven months between 1932 and 1935, Bolivia and Paraguay fought an active war over the Chaco Boreal. Sparsely populated by Indigenous groups, the disputed area lay north of the Pilcomayo River, where the two countries share borders with one another, Argentina, and Brazil. It was a punishing landscape for war, with few water sources except during the rainy season, when scrubland turned to mud and made the region virtually impassable. The conflict’s origins lay in boundaries that had been poorly defined during the formation of these nation-states in the nineteenth century, but the proximate cause was nationalist efforts to develop the region and improve export routes. Fought in the interwar period with the tools of modern warfare, the Chaco War holds important lessons for military historians. Airpower played a role, but it was primarily an infantry war because the terrain made cavalry and tanks of little use. The Chaco War was the deadliest interstate conflict in 20th-century Latin America. The belligerents depleted their coffers, mobilized between 10 and 15 percent of their populations, and suffered at least 25 percent casualty rates. Bolivia’s forces had three commanders during the war, including German General Hans Kundt (b. 1869–d. 1939), while Paraguay was capably led by Mariscal José Félix Estigarribia (b. 1888–d. 1940). Paraguay was the clear victor, gaining more territory than it claimed prior to the war but less than it held at the end of the conflict. In both countries, the war had profound effects and led to the end of the liberal period. In Paraguay, Colonel Rafael Franco (b. 1896–d. 1973) overthrew President Eusebio Ayala (b. 1875–d. 1942) in February 1936, in what is known as the Febrerista Revolution, and established a populist administration emphasizing veterans’ needs. Bolivia’s postwar period was characterized by instability until the 1952 Revolution by the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR), which emphasized wartime sacrifice. The literature on the Chaco War is extensive, but most publications are Spanish-language firsthand accounts and partisan histories. This bibliographic guide contains most of the English-language scholarship available along with some of the more important and widely available titles in Spanish. Much work remains to understand this conflict and the impact of veterans on these societies, but scholars have begun to mine military archives to offer less nationalistic accounts and have made significant headway in revealing the impact on the region’s Indigenous inhabitants.