Peace Without Victory

Peace Without Victory

Practically unnoticed by the U. S., a wave of clear delirious joy last week swept the entire southern half of the Western Hemisphere. The great Latin American States of Argentina, Brazil and Chile declared national holidays. In half a dozen capitals the voice of the crowd rang out in the winter air, "Firmose la paz," "The peace is signed." The bloody, three-year Gran Chaco war between Bolivia and Paraguay was over.

When the Spanish and Portuguese South American Empires broke up into great modern states in the early 19th Century, two bobtail leftovers were Bolivia and Paraguay. Portuguese Brazil did not bother to annex the lazy, primitive Guarani Indians sweltering in the low plateaus and lagoon-lands between the Paraguay and Parana Rivers. After Paraguay became an independent nation, the Spanish family of Lopez took it over and willfully plunged it into the "heroic" war of 1864-70, reducing Paraguay's population from 1,337,000 to only 221,000, of whom 28,000 were men. Dyspeptic, diar-rehic, goitred and leprous, the Indians had multiplied to 800,000 by 1932, living chiefly on maize and mandioca bread, exporting yerba mate tea, tinned meat and tannin from the Gran Chaco's quebracho tree.

The Bolivian Indians are Andes highlanders who know how to handle llamas, have never won a war. They work in Simon Patino's tin mines, producing one-quarter of the world's tin, avoid the flooded bottomlands of eastern Bolivia and, 3,000,000 strong, have sense enough to rebel periodically against their 250,000 white overlords.

Small-fry Bolivia and Paraguay started quarreling in 1879, went to war in 1932 over a worthless pestilential land lying between them.

The Gran Chaco is rated a "green hell" by romantic Author-Explorer Julian Duguid. Actually it is a great variegated basin extending from northern Argentina to eastern Bolivia. The disputed section is a liver-shaped area bounded by the Paraguay and Pilcomayo Rivers. At the Paraguayan edge it is grassy and open, the soil sandy and dry. Farther west the jungle swamps and lagoons begin, follow the sluggish, unnavigable Pilcomayo to the south, dot the drowned lands to the north. Still farther west, verging into Bolivia's Andean foothills, the land changes again to open woodland, broken by fertile plains. White men's investigation of the Chaco has been resisted by the savage Indians, ihenni flies, carnivorous piranha fish, anacondas, rattlesnakes, jaguars, skunks, vampire bats, alligators and the fact that good water holes are far apart, even in the rainy season (December through February).

To a North American such a wild terrain does not seem economically worth fighting for. Perhaps it has oil. Perhaps Bolivia, cut off from the Pacific by Chile 52 years ago, needs an outlet across the northern Chaco to the navigable Paraguay River. However, landlocked Bolivia already has far better outlets: by railroad across Chile to the coast; by railroad to the navigable reaches of the Amazon in Brazil. The Gran Chaco War was wholly a peoples' war, begun by a rousing pair of national inferiority complexes.*

Campaigns. Starting fast in 1932, the Paraguayans, under French-trained General Jose Estigarribia, slogged victoriously across the jungle Chaco to a Bolivian keypoint, a hut on a hummock called Fort Saavedra. At that point the Bolivians put German General Hans Kundt in command. By classic flanking tactics, he pushed the Paraguayans back nearly to the Paraguay river with tanks and flamethrowers. At the end of the first year, the Paraguayans officially declared war and went to work. In another year they pushed General Kundt back again to Fort Saavedra, slaughtered some 15,000 Bolivians. General Kundt was dismissed in disgrace. A popular Bolivian named Colonel Enrique Penaranda del Castillo took over,, failed to keep Paraguay from taking Fort Munoz but halted her before Fort Ballivian, which lies in the open western plains. Forced into the open, the Paraguayan bushfighters died by thousands when they charged out of their shallow trenches into machine-gun fire.

Last year shrewd General Estigarribia played a master stroke. As Bolivian elections came on, he moved north from "impregnable" Fort Ballivian, launched a gaudy offensive. Bolivia's President Daniel Salamanca needed victories to help elect a successor of his own party. He counterattacked in the north, leaving Fort Ballivian unprotected, won his victories and his election. But a few days later Estigar-ribia appeared before Fort Ballivian, summarily took it and slogged on into Bolivia proper. Disastrously outwitted, Salamanca was booted out of the Presidency by a beet-nosed banker of the peace-loving Liberal party, Jose Luis Tejada Sorzano (TIME, Dec. 10).

On paper, Paraguay, once out of the hot, thirsty jungle into the cool Bolivian foothills, should have gone on to unconditional victory. But in fact the Paraguayans, who prefer the heat, could not stand the cool autumn and winter nights in the foothills. Estigarribia lost a few battles, fell back, moved once more to the hotter north to start a new offensive far from his real objective. Actually the war had reached deadlock.

At least 17 mediation attempts had been made by the League of Nations, by the U. S.. by the ABC powers. An arms embargo had been laid down by the U. S., another by the League. Neither slowed the war down in the slightest. Paraguay had indignantly announced her resignation from the League. But last month, with military deadlock, the time seemed right for one more decisive peace effort. The two nations were utterly exhausted. Paraguay had won on the map but Bolivia was far from finished.

Peace without Victory was what the U. S. State Department wanted, what the Latin American nations had meant in 1932 when they declared that ''military conquest grants no sovereignty." Once more the diplomats of the U. S. and of the five dominating Latin American republics (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Peru, Uruguay) assembled last month in Buenos Aires. Bolivia sent its Foreign Minister Tomas Manuel Elio, Paraguay its Luis A. Riart. Once more the party was about to break up in hot Spanish gesticulation when the U. S. Ambassador to Argentina, grave, able Career Diplomat Alexander Wilbourne Weddell, urged everybody to sit down and settle the war on the spot. Miraculously they did so last week, subject only to ratification by the Parliaments of Bolivia and Paraguay.

Terms of the arbitration formula applied chiefly to how to stop fighting. A neutral military commission was appointed to survey the actual position of the armies on their 530-mile front, to set the armies back from it. Firing was to stop when the commission arrived at the front. A twelve-day truce was to be extended again & again as required. Armistice begins when the armies withdraw to their assigned positions, begin to demobilize to 5,000 men apiece, while the neutral commission patrols the strip between. Meanwhile, under the eye of the neutral peace conference, Bolivia and Paraguay will try again to settle their territorial argument by talk. Assuming that they fail again, the controversy will automatically go for arbitration to the World Court.

Peace. One noon last week the planes of the commissioners soared over the foothills' front. The commanders in the trenches below signaled "Cease firing" to their troops. The little brown men dropped their guns, picked up drums and horns to serenade one another. In La Paz and Asuncion, the women conning the casualty lists for the last few days of the war, had plenty to read. In Bolivia the Government, faced with the return of soldiers who had been led to defeat, looked shaky.

Results: Killed, as far as could be determined in a conflict which has had less honest press coverage than any war of modern times, have been about 100,000; wounded about the same. The mysterious Gran Chaco has at last been explored, even to some extent developed and colonized. Economically, Paraguay is no better off than Bolivia; both are financially exhausted. Simon Patino's mine stocks were up last week. And last week in Asuncion there was earnest talk of rewarding Paraguay's able General Estigarribia with the rank of Marshal, a title last held by the great Tyrant Lopez, as well as a life income of 1,500 gold pesos and his regular pay as a General.

*The fantastic theory of most Latin Americans was and is that the U. S. was behind Bolivia; Great Britain behind Paraguay. To complicate this nonsense, Englishmen and Germans rallied to the Bolivian cause, Frenchmen and White Russians to the Paraguayan cause.

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