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Paraguay Francisco Solano López
Born in 1826, Francisco Solano López became the second and final
ruler of the López dynasty. He had a pampered childhood. His father
raised him to inherit his mantle and made him a brigadier general
at the age of eighteen. He was an insatiable womanizer, and stories
abound of the cruel excesses he resorted to when a woman had the
courage to turn him down. His 1853 trip to Europe to buy arms was
undoubtedly the most important experience of his life; his stay in
Paris proved to be a turning point for him. There, Solano López
admired the trappings and pretensions of the French empire of
Napoleon III. He fell in love with an Irish woman named Elisa
Alicia Lynch, whom he made his mistress. "La Lynch," as she became
known in Paraguay, was a strong-willed, charming, witty,
intelligent woman who became a person of enormous influence in
Paraguay because of her relationship with Solano López. Lynch's
Parisian manners soon made her a trendsetter in the Paraguayan
capital, and she made enemies as quickly as she made friends. Lynch
bore Solano López five sons, although the two never married. She
became the largest landowner in Paraguay after Solano López
transferred most of the country and portions of Brazil to her name
during the war, yet she retained practically nothing when the war
ended. She buried Solano López with her own hands after the last
battle in 1870 and died penniless some years later in Europe.
Solano López consolidated his power after his father's death in
1862 by silencing several hundred critics and would-be reformers
through imprisonment. Another Paraguayan congress then unanimously
elected him president. Yet Solano López would have done well to
heed his father's last words to avoid aggressive acts in foreign
affairs, especially with Brazil. Francisco's foreign policy vastly
underestimated Paraguay's neighbors and overrated Paraguay's
potential as a military power.
Observers sharply disagreed about Solano López. George Thompson,
an English engineer who worked for the younger López (he
distinguished himself as a Paraguayan officer during the War of the
Triple Alliance, and later wrote a book about his experience) had
harsh words for his ex-employer and commander, calling him "a
monster without parallel." Solano López's conduct laid him open to
such charges. In the first place, Solano López's miscalculations
and ambitions plunged Paraguay into a war with Argentina, Brazil,
and Uruguay. The war resulted in the deaths of half of Paraguay's
population and almost erased the country from the map. During the
war, Solano López ordered the executions of his own brothers and
had his mother and sisters tortured when he suspected them of
opposition. Thousands of others, including Paraguay's bravest
soldiers and generals, also went to their deaths before firing
squads or were hacked to pieces on Solano López's orders. Others
saw Solano López as a paranoid megalomaniac, a man who wanted to be
the "Napoleon of South America," willing to reduce his country to
ruin and his countrymen to beggars in his vain quest for glory.
However, sympathetic Paraguayan nationalists and foreign
revisionist historians have portrayed Solano López as a patriot who
resisted to his last breath Argentine and Brazilian designs on
Paraguay. They portrayed him as a tragic figure caught in a web of
Argentine and Brazilian duplicity who mobilized the nation to
repulse its enemies, holding them off heroically for five bloody,
horror-filled years until Paraguay was finally overrun and
prostrate. Since the 1930s, Paraguayans have regarded Solano López
as the nation's foremost hero.
Solano López's basic failing was that he did not recognize the
changes that had occurred in the region since Francia's time. Under
his father's rule, the protracted, bloody, and distracting birth
pangs of Argentina and Uruguay; the bellicose policies of Brazil;
and Francia's noninterventionist policies had worked to preserve
Paraguayan independence. Matters had decidedly settled down since
then in both Argentina and Brazil, as both countries had become
surer of their identities and more united. Argentina, for example,
began reacting to foreign challenges more as a nation and less like
an assortment of squabbling regions, as Paraguayans had grown to
expect. Solano López's attempt to leverage Paraguay's emergence as
a regional power equal to Argentina and Brazil had disastrous
consequences.
Data as of December 1988
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