Chaco Echoes

Although the U. S. and its big South American neighbors prevailed upon Bolivia and Paraguay to stop fighting in the Gran Chaco two years ago, the Chaco Peace Conference, meeting intermittently in Buenos Aires ever since, has yet to produce a permanent peace pact. Prime difficulty lies in the fact that the skeleton Bolivian and Paraguayan armies (limited to 5,000 men apiece) have each moved back only a few miles from the positions they held at the time of the armistice, when Paraguay had pushed into 50,000 sq. mi. of the Chaco. This has seemed as natural to Paraguay's Provisional President Colonel Rafael Franco as it has seemed intolerable to Bolivia's Provisional President Colonel Jose David Toro, both professional fire-eaters who got into power by convincing their respective countrymen that the exhausted governments which signed the armistice had betrayed them.

Last week, just as the Peace Conference thought it had pushed negotiations to the point of re-establishing Bolivian-Paraguayan diplomatic relations which have been severed since 1932, Bolivia and Paraguay again began spitting at each other like a pair of jaguars. Under strong pressure from the Conference, Colonel Franco had agreed to accept the five-month-old recommendation of a neutral military commission that Paraguay move its troops back off a 50-mile road connecting Bolivia's Chaco headquarters with her rich Santa Cruz de la Sierra agricultural district. To soften the blow of this news at home, his Foreign Minister Juan Stefanich delivered a three-hour harangue at Asuncion explaining that Paraguay would have "free transit" over the road. Shrieking that this was a lie, the Bolivian Cabinet angrily voted not to name a minister to Asuncion. This passage threw the Paraguayan Army into such a frenzy that they refused to obey Provisional President Franco's order to retreat from the disputed road, threatened a general revolt unless he withdrew the order. With Colonel Franco's fall expected hourly, the Army began to rally behind rabidly anti-Bolivian General Geronimo Zubizarreta for the presidency. Sanctimoniously the Bolivian Cabinet declared: "We decline any responsibility for possible perturbations created by Paraguay. . . ."

A flareback to the Gran Chaco war was the jailing last week at La Paz under 80,000,000 bolivianos bail ($6,400,000) of British Munitions Suppliers Anthony Ashton and John W. Webster on charges of having bilked Bolivia.

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