Letters from the Battlefields of Paraguay. Richard Francis Burton
and married in his adopted home. His son, however, never belied his Portuguese origin, or his descent from that noble city which has three times expelled the Jesuits — she will yet do it a fourth time — and which pushed her arms far as the Gaarani language spread, from the Plate river to the Amazons, from the Atlantic to the foot of the Andes. Viewed by this light, the high-minded and self-reliant, the disinterested and far- seeing, the sombre, austere, and ascetic character of Dic- tator Francia, becomes at once intelligible.
On May 1, 1816, the fourth Congress met at Asuncion and elected Dr. Francia perpetual Dictator of the Republic : he was no longer " Usia-' or " Vuestra Senoria / he became " Excelentisimo'-' and ^' El Supremo — in those times a recognised title. It is now quoted as if a little blas- phemous. The Dictator had attained the ripe age of sixty, when the fixed habits of a life show only a tendency to
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exaggerate themselves. The national mind had become torpid and paralysed under his reign of rigour,, and thence- forward he became a kind of modern Dionysius. He established a " Chamber of Truth" in which men were questioned. He supported every Creole against any *' old Spaniard/^ and he permitted the latter to marry only Negresses, China girls^ or " Indians." His administration was remarkable for its eternal suspicion^ even after he had slowly but relentlessly degraded all not sufficiently docile functionaries. Arrogating the right to nominate Cabildos, he had raised to power the blind instruments of his will. All his orders passed through an ^^ Actuario/^ or Prepose aux actes. This subaltern, who alone had access to the Dictator, became a " tyran fantastique/^ who refused to receive a petition, even if the ink did not please him, and who kept the petitioners awaiting an answer for months. The bruit of a conspiracy at times enabled him to order a cer- tain number of executions, and to fill with terror a people who, like the Egyptians, apparently love to be tyrannized over. He witnessed his own flogging-tortures and execu- tions, and he became intolerably fierce when the east wind blew. He never left his palace save on horseback, followed by a guard that made the citizens range themselves in re- spectful files, and the boys were forced to wear pour toute toilette straw-hats, with which he was to be complimented. And at last his orders drove all from the streets whilst his cortege was passing ; doors and windows were shut, and the Dictator traversed thoroughfares dreary and desert as those of Valparaiso on a dusty Sunday.
Yet he was wonderful in matters of detail : he knew exactly the cost of hoe or axe, and he used to count and measure the needles and thread necessary for a uniform. In 1829 he compelled, under heavy penalties, every householder to sow a certain quantity of maize, which con-
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tributed 4 per cent, to the revenue of the Republic ; and at all times, through the commandants of Partidos, he gave orders what to plant. His success bred a host of irrecon- cileable enemies, who could not forgive one that was more prosperous than themselves. In 1836 appeared myriads of Garrapatas, the Carrapato or Ixiodes of the Brazil, whence it probably came to Paraguay, and the bovine race suffered severely from the Epizootic complaint. The Dictator ordered all the infected to be shot by platoons, and was soundly abused for teaching the world our modern equivalent, the ^' Cattle Disease Preven- tion Act." With a similar rough vigour the King of Yemen resolved to extirpate the dreadful Helcoma by putting to death on a certain day all the sufferers ; and even now the Gallas spear the first cases of small-pox, and burn the huts over the bodies. In 1843 he suppressed the College of Theology with the dictum, '^ Minerva duerme cuando vela Marte," for he was nothing, if not classical. The very fair and impartial book by Messrs. Kengger and Longchamps, " Reign of Dr. Joseph Gaspard Roderick de Rodriguez de Francia in Paraguay" (London, 1827), tells us how the Dictator would not allow an English ship to break bulk until he had mastered sufficient of the language to under- stand her charter. To ridicule such a man is evidently absurd ; the attempt can only recoil upon those who make it. Dictator Francia^s system demanded complete isolation, and thus Paraguay, which had been temporarily thrown open by the Revolution of 1810, became a Darfur, a Waday. Commerce was prohibited, or rather was mono- polized, and sequestration soon annihilated a trade which, during the thirty years ending the last century and ten years of the present, had risen to upwards of $1,500,000 per annum, and employed several thousand hands in 750 ships of sizes, thirty of them exceeding 200 tons.
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The Dictator,, apparently impassive and phlegmatic^ was most sensitive to anything like a claim of predominance, superiority, or influence of strangers ; he poignantly felt every insult of the foreign press, and he was ever ready to attribute to contempt the most indifferent actions of the " tagues" — that is to say, all who are not Paraguayans. He therefore encouraged the prejudices of the people, who soon learnt to look upon itself as the first in the world, to whom all others would, if permitted, do homage.
Diplomatic relations with foreign powers were mercilessly cut off. In 1840 the Argentine Government again de- spatched to Paraguay an envoy directed to apply for deputies to attend the coming sessions of the General Con- gress. This agent wisely remained at Corrientes, and for- warded his credentials by an emissary, who was at once thrown into prison. The diplomatic representative of the Brazil also received his passports.
In order to complete the blockade it was necessary to prevent the ingress of traders and travellers who might bring with them pestilent books and doctrines. The town of El Pilar or Nembucu, 154 miles from Asuncion, was made the terminus of ship navigation and the 7ie plus ultra of the foreign voyager. As late as 1845, Colonel Graham, the United States^ Consul, Buenos Aires, when on a special mission to Paraguay, was here delayed by Dr. Francia some twenty days. The strip of country between S. Borja and Ytapua, now Encarnacion, was constituted the sole place ac- cessible to land import, especially to Brazilian commerce, and no Paraguayan could repair thither without leave ; thus the post became the " mutual factory of a second China."
All who entered the Republic without permission were straightway imprisoned. The explorers of the Rio Bermijo were not only placed in durance vile, they were also plundered of their journals. When M. Aime Bonpland
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(whose real name by-the-bye was the not euphonious Gou- jand)^ settling on land claimed by Paraguay, began impru- dently to cultivate the monopolized yerba, he was seized by order of the Dictator, and was carried prisoner across the frontier. This act has been held to be a violation of territory — has been called gross as the capture and execution of the Due d'Enghien. Francia, however, justified it, and detained the botanist ten years (1821-1831). For somewhat the same reason the Doctors Rengger and Longchamps enjoyed an obligatory residence of six years.
Yet the Dictator could at times do a generous deed. When (1820) his old and tried enemy, General Artigas, once Captain of Blandengues or horse-militia, and afterwards " Protector and Most Excellent Lord" of the Banda Oriental, was compelled by Ramirez to fly his country, he had recourse to Paraguay, where, by " supreme order,^' a small pension and a safe asylum at Caraguate were assigned to him. The Uruguayan Robin Hood was allowed to end his days in peace (1850) — other petty despots would have sent him at once to the banquillo, the shooting-bench.
At last Paraguay became to the political, travelling, and commercial world a terra incognita^ a place existing only in books and maps; it had been caused to disappear, as it were by a cataclysm, from the surface of the globe.
Dictator Francia excused himself by declaring that he had carefully proportioned liberty to civilization, and he defended his incommunicability by pointing in triumph to the disastrous revolutions and to the fratricidal wars with which federalism and a licence called liberty had dowered the conterminal republics. He could show to the world in the recluse kingdom of the Jesuits, the sole exception to republican anarchy, a tranquil and powerful, a contented if not a happy people j and he could declare bond fide this state of things to be the result of his
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non-intercourse policy. Hostile writers aver that the un- happy land lived embruted under a death-like peace imposed by ignorance and terror,, enduring a despotism of isolation and desolation more lethal and funest