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Paraguay El Supremo Dictador
Francia, described by a historian as "the frail man in the black
frock coat," admired and emulated the most radical elements of the
French Revolution. Although he has been compared to the Jacobin
leader Maximilien de Robespierre (1758-94), Francia's policies and
ideals perhaps most closely resembled those of François-Noël
Babeuf, a French utopian who wanted to abolish private property and
communalize land as a prelude to founding a "republic of equals."
Francia detested the political culture of the old regime and
considered himself a "revolutionary."
In essence, the government of Caraí Guazú ("Great Señor," as
Francia was called by the poor) was a dictatorship that destroyed
the power of the elite and advanced the interests of common
Paraguayans. A system of internal espionage destroyed free speech.
People were arrested without charge and disappeared without trial.
Torture in the so-called Chamber of Truth was applied to those
suspected of plotting to overthrow Francia. Francia sent political
prisoners--numbering approximately 400 in any given year--to a
detention camp where they were shackled in dungeons and denied
medical care and even the use of sanitary facilities. In an
indirect act of revenge against people who had discriminated
against him because of his supposed "impure blood," Francia forbade
Europeans from marrying other Europeans, thus forcing the elite to
choose spouses from among the local population. Francia tightly
sealed Paraguay's borders to the outside world and executed anyone
who attempted to leave the country. Foreigners who managed to enter
Paraguay had to remain there for the rest of their lives.
Paraguayan commerce declined practically to nil. The decline ruined
exporters of yerba maté and tobacco. These measures fell most
harshly on the members of the former ruling class of Spanish or
Spanish-descended church officials, military officers, merchants,
and hacendados (large landowners).
In 1820, four years after a Paraguayan congress had named
Francia dictator for life with the title El Supremo Dictador
(supreme dictator), Francia's security system uncovered and quickly
crushed a plot by the elite to assassinate El Supremo. Francia
arrested almost 200 prominent Paraguayans and eventually executed
most of them. In 1821 Francia struck again, summoning all of
Paraguay's 300 or so peninsulares (people born in Spain) to
Asunción's main square, where he accused them of treason, had them
arrested, and led them off to jail for 18 months. Francia released
them only after they agreed to pay an enormous collective indemnity
of 150,000 pesos (about 75 percent of the annual state budget), an
amount so large that it broke their predominance in the Paraguayan
economy.
One of Francia's special targets was the Roman Catholic Church.
The church had provided an essential ideological underpinning to
Spanish rule by spreading the doctrine of the "divine right of
kings" and inculcating the Indian masses with a resigned fatalism
about their social status and economic prospects. Francia banned
religious orders, closed the country's only seminary, "secularized"
monks and priests by forcing them to swear loyalty to the state,
abolished the fuero eclesiástico (the privilege of clerical
immunity from civil courts), confiscated church property, and
subordinated church finances to state control.
The common people of Paraguay benefited from the repression of
the traditional elites and the expansion of the state. The state
took land from the elite and the church and leased it to the poor.
About 875 families received homesteads from the lands of the former
seminary. The various fines and confiscations levied on the
criollos helped reduce taxes for everyone else. As a result,
Francia's attacks on the elite and his state socialist policies
provoked little popular resistance. The fines, expropriations, and
confiscations of foreign-held property meant that the state quickly
became the nation's largest landowner, eventually operating fortyfive animal-breeding farms. Run by army personnel, the farms were
so successful that the surplus animals were given away to the
peasants.
In contrast to other states in the region, Paraguay was
efficiently and honestly administered, stable, and secure (the army
having grown to 1,800 regulars). Crime continued to exist during
the Franciata (the period of Francia's rule), but criminals were
treated leniently. Murderers, for example, were put to work on
public projects. Asylum for political refugees from other countries
became a Paraguayan hallmark. An extremely frugal and honest man,
Francia left the state treasury with at least twice as much money
in it as when he took office, including 36,500 pesos of his unspent
salary, or at least several years' salary.
The state soon developed native industries in shipbuilding and
textiles, a centrally planned and administered agricultural sector,
which was more diversified and productive than the prior export
monoculture, and other manufacturing capabilities. These
developments supported Francia's policy of virtual economic
autarchy.
But Francia's greatest accomplishment--the preservation of
Paraguayan independence--resulted directly from a
noninterventionist foreign policy. Deciding that Argentina was a
potential threat to Paraguay, he shifted his foreign policy toward
Brazil by quickly recognizing Brazilian independence in 1821. This
move, however, resulted in no special favors for the Brazilians
from Francia, who was also on good, if limited, terms with Juan
Manuel Rosas, the Argentine dictator. Francia prevented civil war
and secured his role as dictator when he cut off his internal
enemies from their friends in Buenos Aires. Despite his
"isolationist" policies, Francia conducted a profitable but closely
supervised import-export trade with both countries to obtain key
foreign goods, particularly armaments. A more activist foreign
policy than Francia's probably would have made Paraguay a
battleground amid the swirl of revolution and war that swept
Argentina, Uruguay, and southern Brazil in the decades following
independence.
All of these political and economic developments put Paraguay on
the path of independent nationhood, yet the country's undoubted
progress during the years of the Franciata took place because of
complete popular abdication to Francia's will. El Supremo
personally controlled every aspect of Paraguayan public life. No
decision at the state level, no matter how small, could be made
without his approval. All of Paraguay's accomplishments during this
period, including its existence as a nation, were attributable
almost entirely to Francia. The common people saw these
accomplishments as Francia's gifts, but along with these gifts came
political passivity and naïveté among most Paraguayans.
Data as of December 1988
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