Don't Cry: The Enlhet History of the Chaco War

Abstract

Bolivia and Paraguay fought the Chaco War (1932–35) in a frontier region that neither state fully controlled. The history of this region's multiethnic Indigenous population is a vital part of the war's story that has gained focus only in the early twenty-first century. Don't Cry is a vital contribution to this history, overturning much of what scholars thought they knew. The book does this through the testimony of the Enlhet peoples, whose ancestral territory became the main battleground between Bolivian and Paraguayan forces.Don't Cry is an indictment of the Paraguayan forces and their genocidal actions toward the Enlhet. The book also puts into question the Mennonite narrative about the Enlhet, which asserts that the Mennonites, who colonized the region, were their saviors. The work provides evidence against the emerging bibliography that established that while all Indigenous peoples in the Chaco suffered greatly in the war, the Paraguayans were more attuned to Chaco Indigenous groups. According to the literature (including some of my own work), it was the Bolivians who were more brutal toward the Chaco's Indigenous groups because their soldiers came from a different culture and saw the Chaco peoples as savages.The testimonies that the book's editors, Hannes Kalisch and Ernesto Unruh, collected among the Enlhet show the opposite. The narratives that the Enlhet informants provide show that the Paraguayan soldiers killed the Enlhet on sight, raped the women, and captured the children to keep as servants. When Indigenous families were able to approach the forts or when Paraguayan forces found villages that they did not massacre, they forced the men to work for them and sexually abused the women in front of the men. This led to a type of prostitution in which the women and girls were forced to provide sexual favors for the soldiers in return for food or trinkets. The editors argue that initially, in the 1920s, the Paraguayans behaved better, as they were still weak, but the massive mobilization of soldiers in the 1930s brought about the genocidal actions.These disasters were not the only ones visited upon the Enlhet. At the beginning of the war, in 1932–33, a devastating smallpox epidemic wiped out a majority of the Indigenous population. This brought about widespread suffering, social disorganization, hunger, and a weakened ability to countenance the war. As the editors argue, the few Enlhet who received vaccination lived close to the Paraguayan and Bolivian forts, which meant that the Enlhet groups that were most dependent survived, whereas the Enlhet groups that tried to remain independent were wiped out by the disease.The Mennonites, who began to colonize the region in 1927, also come under withering criticism. The Mennonites assert that they saved the Enlhet from extinction because they provided food and work for the Indigenous population. The book shows that this was not the case. Few Mennonites provided food for the starving and traumatized Enlhet, and they conspired with the military to take over Enlhet lands. Rather than saving the Enlhet, the Mennonites used the war and its aftermath to appropriate for themselves most Indigenous territory, marginalizing the aboriginal inhabitants on their own lands. They also transformed the territory into industrial farms that destroyed the Chaco environment on which the Indigenous peoples depended for their sustenance. By the 1950s, after a long Mennonite proselytization campaign, the Enlhet converted to Christianity en masse, thus, according to the editors, surrendering completely to the interlopers on their territory.The Bolivians, in turn, come off much better. The editors cite testimony from the Enlhet that shows that those at the Bolivian forts sprinkled throughout Enlhet country before the war generally were kinder and more considerate to the Chaco inhabitants.In addition to these novel insights, the book has a unique organization. It is divided into sections, of which the testimonies are only a small part, though they constitute the heart of the book. One of the editors, Hannes Kalisch, provides much of the analysis, and this takes up the bulk of the book. The other editor, Ernesto Unruh, an Enlhet, is the translator of the testimony from Enlhet to Spanish. The last part of the book is Kalisch's reflections on the role of the Enlhet, their conception of history, and their current predicament. He accuses historians of being incapable of fully engaging with Enlhet history. This is a bit unfair, given that he does not take into account ethnohistory and other subdisciplines that have tried hard to take into account Indigenous views.The book created an earthquake in the Paraguayan view of the Chaco War when it was first published in Paraguay in 2018. It is good that McGill-Queen's University Press has provided a well-translated English version by Nicholas Regan. This important book substantially revises our understanding of the Indigenous history of the Chaco War and its aftermath.