Paraguay has been called the least-known country in Latin America, an island surrounded by land, and the "South American Tibet." For many years, foreign writers and journalists described it as an enigmatic land where a peculiar people endured calamities and Nazis sought refuge. Tomas Mandl spent 2016 to 2020 traveling through the country, meeting leading minds and sifting through data. Drawing on more than 40 interviews with historians, political scientists, economists, journalists and diplomats, this book provides a timely assessment of Paraguay's strengths, challenges and developmental outlook, and their implications for the world.

Presents a photographic introduction to the land, history, government, economy, people and culture of the South American nation of Paraguay.

This unique collection of multidisciplinary essays explores recent developments in Paraguay over the course of the last thirty years since General Alfredo Stroessner fell from power in 1989. Stroessner’s strong authoritarian legacy continues to exert an impact on Paraguay’s political culture today, where the conservative Colorado Party continues to dominate much of the political landscape in spite of the country having transitioned into a modern democracy. The essays in Native Peoples, Politics, and Society in Contemporary Paraguay provide new understandings of how Paraguay has become more integrated into the regional economy and societies of Latin America and changed in unexpected ways. The scholarship examines how the political change impacted Paraguayans, especially its indigenous population, and how the country adapted as it emerged from authoritarian traditions. Each contribution is exemplary in the scope and depth of its understanding of Paraguay, especially its indigenous peoples, politics, women’s rights, economy, and natural environment.

Hemmed in by the vast, arid Chaco to the west and, for most of its history, impenetrable jungles to the east, Paraguay has been defined largely by its isolation. Partly as a result, there has been a dearth of serious scholarship or journalism about the country. Going a long way toward redressing this lack of information and analysis, The Paraguay Reader is a lively compilation of testimonies, journalism, scholarship, political tracts, literature, and illustrations, including maps, photographs, paintings, drawings, and advertisements. Taken together, the anthology's many selections convey the country's extraordinarily rich history and cultural heritage, as well as the realities of its struggles against underdevelopment, foreign intervention, poverty, inequality, and authoritarianism. Most of the Reader is arranged chronologically. Weighted toward the twentieth century and early twenty-first, it nevertheless gives due attention to major events in Paraguay's history, such as the Triple Alliance War (1864–70) and the Chaco War (1932–35). The Reader's final section, focused on national identity and culture, addresses matters including ethnicity, language, and gender. Most of the selections are by Paraguayans, and many of the pieces appear in English for the first time. Helpful introductions by the editors precede each of the book's sections and all of the selected texts.

This volume provides the researcher with an excellent tool for investigating the history, politics, and culture of Paraguay. Although various libraries, museums, and archives in the U.S. contain documentary collections of interest to Paraguayanists, they are little known and thus underutilized. Whigham and Cooney help correct this problem. Not only do they describe the most famous collections in such libraries as the University of Texas at Austin, the Library of Congress, and the Oliveira Lima Library at Catholic University, they have also uncovered some obscure materials. From the Museum of Russian Culture in San Francisco to the Mennonite Archives at Bethel College in Kansas, they have run the gamut of available resources. This guide discusses diplomatic correspondence, genealogical materials, missionary records, political reports, and unpublished personal reminiscences. The authors also offer hints and advice on working in the various repositories and suggest research themes that might be developed using particular collections. An attractive format and a thorough subject index make this volume easy to use as well as informative.

Land-locked Paraguay is one of the smaller nations of Latin America, whose global image is now changing very rapidly. In the process, the tired stereotype of a “forgotten” country comprising only military dictators, Nazis, and steam trains is being rapidly discarded. Indeed Paraguay is now no longer off the map and its unique history is attracting growing interest. This third edition of Historical Dictionary of Paraguay covers its history through a chronology, an introductory essay, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 1000 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Paraguay.

The first serious biography of Francisco Solano L pez in English for decades, this richly researched book tells the dramatic story of Paraguay's most notorious ruler. Despite the heroic stature he gained after his death, L pez was a monumentally flawed leader who made the disastrous decisions in 1864 and 1865 to invade Paraguay's powerful neighbors, Brazil and Argentina, initiating the most devastating interstate conflict in South American history. Drawing on a trove of primary sources, James Schofield Saeger offers a critical analysis of L pez's personality and often-irrational persecution of enemies, adherents, and siblings. He traces L pez's preparation for high public office, work habits, control of his nation and army, propaganda, and execution. Concluding with an examination of L pez's posthumous rehabilitation, Saeger shows how the tyrant who ruined his nation became its most highly honored hero, crowning a campaign by revisionist publicists from 1870-1936, and a useful symbol for later authoritarians. Still largely unchallenged in Paraguay today, this glorification of a martial president is definitively put to rest in Saeger's meticulous study.

A wildly humorous account of the author's travels across Paraguay–South America's darkly fabled, little-known “island surrounded by land.” Rarely visited by tourists and barely touched by global village sprawl, Paraguay remains a mystery to outsiders. Think of this small nation and your mind is likely to jump to Nazis, dictators, and soccer. Now, John Gimlette’s eye-opening book–equal parts travelogue, history, and unorthodox travel guide–breaches the boundaries of this isolated land,” and illuminates a little-understood place and its people. It is a wonderfully animated telling of Paraguay's story: of cannibals, Jesuits, and sixteenth-century Anabaptists; of Victorian Australian socialists and talented smugglers; of dictators and their mad mistresses; bloody wars and Utopian settlements; and of lives transplanted from Japan, Britain, Poland, Russia, Germany, Ireland, Korea, and the United States. The author travels from the insular cities and towns of the east, along ghostly trails through the countryside, to reach the Gran Chaco of the west: the “green hell” covering almost two-thirds of the country, where 4 percent of the population coexists–more or very-much-less peacefully–with a vast array of exotic wildlife that includes jaguars, prehistoric lungfish, and their more recently evolved distant cousins, the great fighting river fish. Gimlette visits with Mennonites and the indigenas, arms dealers and real-estate tycoons, shopkeepers, government bureaucrats and, of course, Nazis. Filled with bizarre incident, fascinating anecdote, and richly evocative detail, At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig is a brilliant description of a country of eccentricity and contradiction, of beguilingly individualistic men and women, and of unexpected and extraordinary beauty. It is a vivid, often riotous, always fascinating, journey.

The Chaco War was massive territorial war between Bolivia and Paraguay, which cost almost a 100,000 lives. An old fashioned territorial dispute, the contested area was the Gran Chaco Boreal, a 100,000-square mile region of swamp, jungle and pampas with isolated fortified towns. The wilderness terrain made operations difficult and costly as the war see-sawed between the two sides. Bolivian troops, under the command of a German general, Hans von Kundt, had early successes, but these stalled in the face of a massive mobilization programme by the Paraguans which saw their force increase in size ten-fold to 60,000 men. This book sheds light on a vicious territorial war that waged in the jungles and swamps of the Gran Chaco and is illustrated with rare photographs and especially commissioned artwork.