Paraguay - The Gran Chaco

In searching for Paraguay's version of Bayan-Olgii (the remote province of western Mongolia) I've come up with the Chaco. The difference between Paraguay's remote province though, and that of other countries, is that it takes up 60% of Paraguay's total land area. Despite the fact that only 2% of Paraguay's population lives there.

It sounds like a place where nature remains untamed by man, a place of thick, thorny jungles, dangerous snakes and spiders, remote forest tribes, salty earth and Mennonites clad in black.

Despite all of this, Paraguay seems determined to hold on to the Chaco, even fighting a war over it, with Bolivia, in the 1930's.  One of the Chaco's main gateway towns is called Villa Hayes, after the 19th US President, Rutherford B Hayes, who was asked to arbitrate, by Argentina, after the War of the Triple Alliance. Argentina was hoping to gain the Gran Chaco, as part of its territory, but Hayes decided it should remain with Paraguay. Not remembered for much in his own country (and most of that negative) Hayes has gone down in Paraguayan history as a national hero.

Having been persecuted in Europe and fleeing conscription in the various different homelands, it's not really surprising that the only Europeans who would settle on a terrain as hostile as the Chaco, would be the Mennonites. The Mennonites are defined by their pacifism, but also their religious extremism, choosing uncomplicated, traditional lives over the unholy commercialism of the modern age.

I've come across some of their descendents before, in Uzbekistan. Originally being invited by the Russian Tsars to live peacefully and farm along the Volga River, Stalin had them moved to Central Asia during the Second World War. Being mostly of German and Dutch origin, they were considered to be 'internal enemies' of the Soviet state. Many of them fled to North and South America and the Paraguayan government sold vast tracks of the Chaco to settlers and gave them a certain amount of autonomy so that, until this day, the Mennonites of Paraguay live in a 'state within a state'.

Without sounding too negative, I can't help wondering how sustainable Paraguay's control over the Chaco is. Like the Russians in Siberia, or the British in the Falklands, sustaining a population and sovereignty over the Chaco, might prove difficult for Paraguay. Already a lot of the land in the Chaco's eastern border has been bought up by Brazilians and some of the Chaco's main smuggling towns, like Pedro Juan Caballero, have more to do with the economy and cultural influences across the border, than with far-away (and difficult to get to) Asuncion.

Image credits

The picture of the villagers in El Chaco was provided by flickruser Fiona L Cooper - Fiona is originally from Newcastle-upon-Tyne, but has been teaching English and teacher training in Paraguay for the last few years.  You can find out more about Fiona and her life on her blog http://fionalouisecooper.blogspot.com/

Paraguay - Jesuits and Guarani

I'm doing my first South American country and I'm really excited about Paraguay because, being a big fan of travel magazines like Wanderlust and Lonely Planet Magazine, I've read a lot about Paraguay's neighbours: Bolivia, Brazil and Argentina.  Paraguay, on the other hand, is a country I know absolutely nothing about!

Looking at Paraguay on a map, it looks relatively small compared to either Brazil or Argentina. Finding out that it is only a little bit smaller than both California and Sweden, helps put things in perspective. It's quite a sparsely populated country and most people seem to live in the East, between the Paraguay and Parana rivers. The western Chaco is already intriguing me, with its remoteness and its history, bringing Paraguay into conflict with Bolivia in the 1930's and leading, ultimately, to 35 years of dictatorship under Stroessner, and Paraguay's self-imposed isolation from world affairs.

Apart from Stroessner's years in power, the two things that immediately jump out at me, in relation to Paraguay, are the influence of the Jesuits and the status of one of Paraguay's two official languages, Guarani (the other being Spanish).

I'm just beginning to realise how different Guarani is from other native languages of the Americas. I spent a lot of time last month researching the Native American cultures and languages in the US and I think any of these would love to have the status that Guarani has, with its estimated 5 million speakers and the support and resources of the Paraguayan government. Guarani is classified as a member of the Tupi-Guarani language family and is the only native American language that has also been adopted by non-native American speakers, namely the European ancestors of Paraguay's majority mestizo population.

It's also unusual in that it has a strict system of nasal harmony, not just in affixes, like many African languages but, in fact, the whole word will be nasalised, including all vowels and consonants. When Europeans came to South America, they decided that all native American languages were more or less the same and belonged to one big language family. This seems like academic apathy to me and I'm much more excited about hints that Guarani might be traced back to places in Central Asia. To Guarani we owe words like Jaguar, Tapir and Piranha. 

So why did Guarani thrive when other native languages were eclipsed by Spanish, Portuguese and English? The easiest answer is - the Jesuits! Founded by the Spanish-Basque, Ignatius of Loyola, the Society of Jesus, more commonly known as the Jesuits, became a sort of 'defenders of the faith' sect, within the Catholic church, stopping Protestantism from spreading to places like Poland and Lithuania, later spreading the Catholic faith as religious missionaries to Asia and the New World.

The Jesuits strongly believed in and promoted use of the vernacular (as opposed to Latin) and their universities became famous as centres of study for lawyers and civil servants. Also, when the Jesuits came to South America as missionaries in the 16th and 17th centuries, they used Guarani to spread the word of God and established 'reductions', which were Christianised native communities, that gave the native people some protection from the excesses of colonisation that were so common elsewhere.

So great was the Jesuit influence, in Europe and the rest of the world, that they were eventually banned by most European countries, seeking refuge, ironically enough, in the only country that would tolerate them, Catherine the Great's Russia!

I've only hit the tip of the iceberg with these two themes and it's fascinating, but too much to blog about in one go. Reading about the Jesuits, in particular, has filled in another jigsaw piece for me, in the puzzle of world history.

I'm going to leave you with a short clip from Al-Jazeera, available through YouTube, so we can learn a little bit more about Guarani and (most exciting of all), hear the spoken language. Enjoy!



Image credits

The image of the man on the road is by flickruser Olmovich (Olmo Calvo Rodriguez) from Madrid, who is a part of a journalist co-operative that highlights the work of social movements and publishes an interesting (Spanish language) periodico called Diagonal.  To find out more, check out their website http://www.diagonalperiodico.net/

The image of Ignatius of Loyola is a reproduction of a painting by Rubens, from Wikimedia Commons, and is copyright free.