Monday, Mar. 02, 1936

Peace Without Victory (Cont'd)

The Bolivian generals who lost the three-year Gran Chaco War for their country dropped into harmless obscurity after the Peace Without Victory wangled by seven American nations (TIME, June 24). Not so last week the Paraguayan colonels who won the war for theirs.

To illiterate Paraguayan veterans, the shining fact was that Corps Commander Colonel Rafael Franco, 39, had led them victoriously in person to the very border of Bolivia proper. Something seemed wrong when their commanding officer, General Jose Felix Estigarribia, marched them home to poverty-stricken Paraguay, when Foreign Minister Luis Riart signed a modest peace protocol with Bolivia, when the Paraguayan Congress approved it and when President Eusebio Ayala ordered the Paraguayan Army demobilized and Bolivian prisoners returned to Bolivia. The Army had won the war; the politicians were throwing away the victory. Last month General Estigarribia charged Colonel Franco with organizing a so-called National Front of 42,000 War veterans and planning a coup d'etat. Franco was exiled to Argentina. Last week two Franco friends, Colonels Federico Weddell Smith and Camilo Recalde, ran off as neat a revolution in Paraguay as anyone would like to see.

In the early cool of one morning, an army corps of jungle veterans mobilized around the chief square of Paraguay's capital of Asuncion. At 7 o'clock they seized the railway station and two radio stations, broke off telephone, telegraph and rail communications and advanced on the Government forces in the nearby police headquarters. Against the veterans President Ayala had only the police and the crews of the Paraguayan Navy's five gunboats. The gunboats dropped shells into the square. The veterans replied with their old trench mortars. That night the President fled to a gunboat whence he radioed his resignation. He was confined in the marine barracks. More dangerous, Estigarribia and Presidential Candidate Luis Riart were arrested. Next afternoon Colonel Franco stepped out of an Argentine plane at Asuncion, made himself Provisional President, set up a Government.

Franco's Foreign Minister Juan Stefanich promptly fired all the old regime's Ambassadors, Ministers and diplomatic attaches abroad.

Already in the streets was a Franco manifesto packed with high Latin bombast: "The War was won despite the Government and the encyclopedic ineptitude of the army high command, thanks to the heroism and abnegation of the people. . . . The new Government will arrange a just peace with Bolivia, cede to the homeless the lands now owned by the wealthy, colonize the country with Paraguayans instead of undesirable foreigners, grant subsidies to war widows and mutilated veterans. . . ."

Inasmuch as the Gran Chaco peace protocol, ratified by the Paraguayan Congress, and the international South American declaration in 1932 that "military conquest grants no sovereignty," are now part of Paraguay's national law, Franco could do nothing last week but agree to abide by those treaties.

To the South American nations that had wangled the peace protocol and had just accepted President Roosevelt's invitation to a great Pan-American Peace Conference in Buenos Aires, Colonel Franco was last week a piercing pain in the neck.

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