Paraguay turned 199 today. Something tells me next years celebration should be a little more extravagant, but I’m not putting money on it just yet.

It also happens to be Mother’s Day here – a strange, if not apt coincidence. To claim that every country doesn’t owe it’s existence to the mother’s within it would be an untruth that is rarely considered. But for Paraguay that truth stands out a little bit greater. A little history might explain.

Paraguayan’s, for all the insularity of the place, have heard of most events beyond it’s borders. (Hearing of, and understanding are two different things, but let’s not split hairs). They know about the Civil War (ours, that is) and both World Wars, despite their non-involvement in all three. And of course they hear all about this latest one in the Middle East whose name I can no longer keep track of. Chances are though, even your star World history student in any high school in Boston or San Diego or anywhere in between, has never heard of the Chaco War or the War of the Triple Alliance, even though it might be one of the cooler-named world conflicts. Paraguayan’s, the grandfathers at least, know all about them – and rightfully so.

In 1864 some less then stellar foreign policy lead to what can only be described as a three-sided ass-kicking of this small country that when the dust settled would be even smaller. Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay proved to be more then their inland neighbor could take on – but that didn’t stop 300,000 people from dying while trying. After the war the population stood at an incomprehensible 70% of what it had at the onset. The male population was reduced from around 215,000 to 28,000 (for what, no one seems to have figured out yet). Numbers like that put a population on the edge of simply fading away. Extinction seems like a harsh word, but it doesn’t get that much closer. (By comparison, France lost just over 4 % of its population in WWI; the Union, 10% of its male population (30% for the Confederacy) in the American Civil War). Seventy percent is simply an astonishing figure. A country of children and women remained, in some places outnumbering the men 20 to 1. A country of mother’s would follow shortly behind to keep it all from slipping away.

Just some 62 years later – what’s that 2 1/2 generations if your on top of things – it became time to fight the one neighbor that got left out on the first go around. From 1932 to ‘35 Paraguay spent it’s energies fighting Bolivia over a 200,000 sq km scrap of desert – one of the harshest and remotest places in the hemisphere – for some oil that turned out not to exist. (This one should probably be taught in the history class…). The war was a groundbreaker: the first use of tank warfare in the Americas; the first real presence of aerial warfare in the Americas – all commanded by men on horseback. This time Paraguay came out the victor, sort of. They won the bulk of the territory that now comprises the western half of the country, but lost the mineral-rich track of it’s northern edge (which you’ll be reading about in the next 10 years once Bolivia figures out it sits on the new petroleum – lithium – and as the world learns batteries aren’t as clean as they thought – but that’s for another day, and hopefully not another war). So they got scrub desert and all it’s would-be fantastic birding, but paid the price of another 57,000 lives. A population barely recovered from it’s last conflict took another blow.

The civil war of 1947 get glossed over for complicated reasons – tyranny and dictatorships do these kinds of things – not only to textbooks, but to the would-be storytellers memories’. I don’t have figures, but more folks died. And no small few of them simply up and left – sometimes enough is enough. The most telling fact of this is the youth population that makes up the country today – 37 percent (on par with places like Pakistan, Eithiopia, the West Bak – your typical vacation spots…). A boatload of kids may be Catholicism’s gift to the farm but it’s also a survival mechanism. Ramped infidelity and what any Norte would see as the exploitation of minors (girls that is – I’m trying to be polite here) as unsavory a practices as they are, are no doubt holdovers from a time, not all that long ago mind you, when such things very well may have contributed to saving a fledgeling republic that seemed hell bent on snuffing itself out.

Which brings us back to the mothers. A country is made up of borders, but more so by the people within it. Where the armies deserve much of the credit for having come so close to losing the country, the women – the mothers – deserve much of the credit for somehow keeping it alive – literary. Looking around at the parade today I wondered if the coincidence of the holiday scheduling was lost on most of the crowd. I like to thing at least one recognized just how appropriate it’s become.

Happy Mother’s Day (again).

kb

(written yesterday)