Monday, Sep. 01, 1947
Nick of Time
A fortnight ago, the Paraguayan rebels seemed to have all but won the war. They had made a bold move in abandoning their base in Conception (TIME, Aug. 18), to strike down river against the capital of Asuncion, 130 miles to the south. But as they smashed into the city, Dictator Higinio Morinigo's army got an unexpected shot in the arm: new arms and munitions.
A Clue. In Buenos Aires, Radical Deputy Raul Uranga thought he knew who had given Paraguay's dictator the hypo. He and his fellow opposition deputies had proof, said Uranga, that Peron had helped Morinigo. He wondered out loud if there was a connection between the arms for Morinigo and a new appropriation earmarked for "other expenses." Uranga set off an uproar in the Chamber of Deputies, but no Peronista answered him.
The commander of the rebels, Colonel Rafael Franco, onetime Provisional President of Paraguay, did not stop to investigate the source of Morinigo's new arms. He fled by seaplane last week to Argentina. His two gunboats, the Paraguay and Humaitd, soon followed. Six months of civil war were sputtering to a close.
In Asuncion, Morinigo's police chief asked factories, stores and banks to open for business. Indian women, riding burros sidesaddle and shielding their heads with umbrellas, began to move toward the markets with food for the hungry capital. Little boys resumed their sale of stuffed, varnished frogs. But Paraguay, too poor to afford a sewage system or central water works for its capital, would be a long time recovering from the latest revolution, its 27th in 41 years. Much of the nation's bumper crop of cotton, earlier estimated at 40,000.tons, had gone unpicked because workers feared conscription. Cattle had been slaughtered or driven away; production of quebracho extract, an export staple used in tanning, had dropped.
A Prediction. At the Rio Conference (see The Hemisphere), Morinigo's Foreign Minister, Dr. Federico Chaves, fresh from dining with Peron, .said that the elections, which Morinigo had been promising for six years, would be held immediately. He could and did predict the winner: the Colorado Party, headed by Morinigo. In this forecast, plain Paraguayans could find one consolation: if the rebels had won the war, it would only have meant swapping one dictatorship for another.
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