René D. Harder Horst.The Stroessner Regime and Indigenous Resistance in Paraguay.:The Stroessner Regime and Indigenous Resistance in Paraguay

Abstract

This impressive study explores some interesting scholarly territory in a focused and synthetic way. On the surface, René D. Harder Horst examines how the authoritarian political culture of Paraguay treated the most underprivileged class in the country and how those native peoples fought back. But the tale is even more intriguing. While scholars have certainly given indigenous groups in South America a great deal of attention, only rarely does their chosen chronology permit some useful conclusions about the recent past or offer thoughts on current policy. Also, while historians have finally started to examine the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner (1954–1989) in detail, they have mostly limited themselves to spotty and rather stale biographical accounts or analyses of foreign relations. Horst, by contrast, tries to see the dictatorship through Indian eyes, and ends up making a decidedly nuanced contribution. His is a most edifying, if tragic, story. Paraguay is basically a mestizo nation in which Spanish shares the linguistic base on a near-equal footing with the Guaraní Indian tongue. Examples of true bilingualism are rare anywhere on the planet, and, given the Paraguayan government's oft-stated pride in the country's native past, one might think that indigenous people would enjoy a place of honor in today's world. Not so. The historical relation between the Indians and greater Paraguayan society has been fractious and bloody since the time of first contact in the 1500s, and throughout the colonial and early national period, it improved little if at all. Certain areas of the country, most notably the Gran Chaco wasteland in the west, served as perennial battlegrounds between the two groups. These were lands that the Jesuit writer Martin Dobrizhoffer described “as a theater of misery for the Spaniards and for the Savages, as their Palestine and Elysium.” Despite the ongoing conflicts, however, real change proved elusive. The stark physical character of the Chaco and the forested areas in the east of the country imposed a kind of historical stasis, wherein a final reconciliation between Indians and Paraguayans could be postponed indefinitely.