Chaco War (19321935)

Bruce Farcau

As in many conflicts in the formerly colonial world, the roots of the Chaco War lay in the casual demarcation of borders between what had once been provinces of a single empire. The boundary between what would become Bolivia and Paraguay was rather arbitrarily set at the confluence of the Paraguay and Pilcomayo rivers, which caused no trouble since the area comprises some of the most inhospitable terrain on the planet: desert most of the year covered with thick thorn scrub and populated by scorpions and army ants, and swamp the rest of the year when rains turn the ground into sucking gelatinous goo. Most of the Chaco remained both uninhabited and unexplored well into the twentieth century. But nation-states have patrimony to defend, and when outposts of the two rivals began to bump up against each other in the wilderness, conflict ensued. Bolivia had vague hopes of establishing a connection between its population centers in the Andean highlands to the navigable portion of the Paraguay River, and thence to the sea, having lost its Pacific coast to Chile half a century earlier, although such a project was unlikely to be feasible across the wastes of the Chaco. Paraguay had begun to settle the eastern portion of the Chaco, which began right across the river from the capital of Asuncin, and to sell the marginal agricultural land to pay off the massive debts incurred during the War of the Triple Alliance in which Paraguay took on (and lost to) Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay. Consequently, both nations began pushing forward their outposts in an effort to lay claim to as much real estate as possible. It should also be mentioned that, for Bolivia, this would essentially be a colonial war, far from the population centers and for marginal gain. Still, it was wildly popular initially as Bolivia had been humiliatingly defeated in the War of the Pacific against Chile in the 1870s and again by Brazil near the turn of the century, both wars resulting in substantial loss of territory. It was assumed that tiny Paraguay was at least an opponent that Bolivia could take and possibly redeem some national pride. For Paraguay, conversely, the Chaco War was seen as an existential threat. The nation had nearly been extinguished in the 1860s in the War of the Triple Alliance, losing some 90 percent of the adult male population and half of its originally claimed territory. Another serious defeat, it was believed, would be unsustainable, and the remaining patch of land would undoubtedly be divided up among Paraguays neighbors. This differing view of the war may have had something to do with the enthusiasm with which the two armies fought. The actual outbreak of fighting occurred in June of 1932 in a dispute over a water source, a vital commodity in the desert, in which the local commanders of both sides appear to have falsified reports to their superiors, possibly in hopes of the rapid promotion that war would bring, so blame for the war is shrouded in mystery. It would have appeared that Bolivia was the favorite to win, having three times the population and more than double the wealth of Paraguay, but the Paraguayans enjoyed much shorter supply lines to the scene of the fighting as well as a team of gifted commanders under the leadership of Flix Estigarribia, while Bolivia muddled along with mediocrities such as Enrique Pearanda and the German expatriate, World War I veteran Hans Kundt.

In the opening skirmish, the Bolivians were driven out, causing President Daniel Salamanca to demand a reprisal. This came in the form of the seizure of a Paraguayan fort, Boqueron, which, it was assumed, would assuage Bolivian pride and form the basis for a negotiated settlement, or, failing that, the base for a future offensive across the Chaco. Estigarribia, however, mobilized quickly and surrounded the Bolivian garrison, while the ponderous Bolivian army finally arrived and battered away unsuccessfully at the siege lines for more than three weeks until the garrison ultimately surrendered, with heavy casualties for both sides. By this time, October 1932, the Bolivian army had fully mobilized and, under Kundts command, launched a series of offensives aimed at driving to the Paraguay River. Battering futilely at the Paraguayan defenses at Kilometer 7 and Nanawa, Kundt demonstrated that he had learned nothing about the value of machine guns and trenches during World War I as Bolivians fell in droves, despite the introduction of a few tanks and aircraft, which the Paraguayans could not match but which did not break the stalemate throughout 1933. What did break it was a decisive double envelopment mounted by Estigarribia and his volatile lieutenant, Rafael Franco, which surrounded a Bolivian division at Campo Via, forcing a precipitous retreat by the remainder of the Bolivian army, now hopelessly outflanked. This loss was symptomatic of the Bolivian problem throughout the war in that, apart from the heavy losses that both sides suffered in frontal assaults against fortified positions, the surrounding and capture of large Bolivian forces at Boqueron, Campo Via, and other, later battles meant that Bolivia kept fielding new armies of rookies while the Paraguayan survivors gained in combat experience and fieldcraft, which greatly augmented their chances for victory and helped compensate for their usually inferior numbers. Kundt was cashiered after the disaster of Campo Via, to be replaced by Pearanda, and the two armies settled down at the beginning of 1934, now in the center of the Chaco, as the Bolivian army rebuilt and the Paraguayans consolidated their gains. Field command of the Bolivian forces was divided between General Bilbao Rioja, the only truly capable officer on that side, to whom the Bolivian command tended to turn when in dire straits, and General David Toro, a political manipulator who constantly demanded the lions share of men and resources for his costly and generally ineffective offensives. By mid-1934 Toros forces had nearly succeeded in surrounding Francos II Corps; however, unlike Bolivian troops in similar conditions, the Paraguayans did not surrender but continued to claw their way to freedom. Meanwhile, Estigarribia launched an offensive of his own, pocketing another large Bolivian force at El Carmen. When Bolivian relief forces punched through the Paraguayan ring, they did not hold open an escape corridor but continued on into the trap themselves, resulting in over 2,500 Bolivian dead and 4,000 captured. Toro was forced to break off his own offensive and hurriedly withdraw to the west. In the face of continuous defeats, one might have expected the wholesale sacking of the Bolivian officer corps. Instead, it was Pearanda and his commanders who sacked President Salamanca, seizing him during a strategy meeting near the front and forcing him to sign a letter of resignation. When he initially refused, the generals threatened a shameful surrender to Paraguay that forced his hand, physical threats being useless given Salamancas long-time illness which had inured him to pain.

Despite recent setbacks and political instability, Toro still commanded the massive Cavalry Corps (without horses due to the lack of water, but with an abundance of modern weapons and supply) and substantially outnumbered his Paraguayan opponents. To turn the tide once and for all, Estigarribia ordered the elderly General Eugenio Garay to lead a picked force of infantry on a forced march of over 50 km through a gap in the Bolivian lines (since the opposing armies tended to be channeled along the few usable roads in the Chaco) to seize the wells at Irendague, cutting off two of Toros divisions. To make matters worse, the division commanders were away from their units, miles to the rear, discussing politics with Toro, and the resulting retreat turned into a rout with thousands of Bolivians surrendering or dying of thirst. The Bolivians were driven back to the very foothills of the Andes at the town of Villa Montes, the railhead for the Chaco. Here Bilbao Rioja was once more given command, and he organized a meticulous line of defensive works. Now it was the Paraguayans, who had also suffered heavy losses all along from combat and disease, who had supply lines stretching hundreds of kilometers over trackless wilderness while the Bolivians were now with their backs to what they considered their true homeland. Repeated Paraguayan assaults were beaten off bloodily, and the reinforced Bolivians eventually went over to the offensive until negotiations finally brought an end to the war in 1936. The fact that Villa Montes was also near Bolivias modest oilfields gave rise to a myth about the war as being one for oil. The story was that Standard Oil, the American conglomerate that operated the Bolivian fields, wanted to construct a pipeline across the Chaco to the Paraguay River to better market its production, but Royal Dutch Shell, which had the concession for oil in Paraguay, blocked the move out of spite. Thus it was allegedly these two oil giants that forced the subservient governments to fight a war for their interests alone. Actually, a pipeline across the Chaco would never have been feasible from an engineering point of view, and, more importantly, Standard already had one leading from Bolivia south into Argentina. The story did not even emerge until the 1950s when Bolivian politicians sought a way of demonizing Standard Oil to justify the nationalization of their assets during the revolution of 1952. The fact that there is no mention of oil as a factor in the war in any of the speeches or confidential documents of either government at the time of the war (or any credible testimony from any of the hundreds of persons who must have been involved in the 70 years since) implies that it was simply national pride that resulted in a pointless war in which over 100,000 men on both sides died. A broader lesson that might have been taken from the conflict was the implication for the League of Nations. Even though the two belligerents were arguably the two poorest countries in the hemisphere, both landlocked, and neither with the means of producing any of the material necessary to wage a modern war, and even though no great power had any interest whatsoever in the conflict, still the League, at the height of its powers and prestige, was totally unable to shorten the war by so much as a day. The fighting broke out, escalated, and continued until both sides were simply too exhausted to carry on. Then it stopped. Suggestions of arms embargoes were unevenly and weakly applied, and the confusion over who had started the war, who was the aggressor, made it impossible to impose the rules of collective security to end the

fighting. That being the case, any faith in the League being able to moderate a conflict that did involve one or more of the great powers could clearly be seen to be misplaced. Apart from the terrible human cost, the war left the belligerents with a legacy of instability for decades to come. In Paraguay, the victorious little army, since Paraguay ended up in possession of territory that doubled its pre-war size, or at least its officer corps, took on a glow of infallibility, overthrew the democratic government, and kept the country in a state of suspended animation for years. In Bolivia, although both Pearanda and Toro would assume the presidency in turn, the revolution of 1952, one of the few true social revolutions in the hemisphere (along with the Mexican and the Cuban revolutions), would be led, not by officers, but by enlisted veterans of the war, disillusioned both with the incompetent officer corps and with the political system that had bowed to them. Their leadership would hardly be without fault, but they at least offered the chance for political evolution that the country so desperately needed.

SEE ALSO: League of Nations; Pacific, War of the (18791883); Paraguayan War (18641870).

Further Reading Farcau, B. (1996) The Chaco War: Bolivia and Paraguay, 19321935. Westport, CT: Praeger. Scheina, R. (2003) Latin Americas Wars: The Age of the Professional Soldier, 19002001. Washington, DC: Brasseys. Wood, B. (1966) The United States and Latin American Wars, 19321945. New York: Columbia University Press. Zook, D. (1960) The Conduct of the Chaco War. New Haven: Bookman Associates.