Acceso usuarios
Michael K. Huner
This article follows the sojourns of five Paraguayan youths sent by their government to study in Europe and be trained as lettered officials there. It subsequently explores the tensions that they faced upon returning to Paraguay and serving as publicists for the Francisco Solano López regime in the years immediately preceding the Triple Alliance War (1864-1870)—the largest international conflict in the history of South America. The article finds that the young men, filled up with the exuberance of the cultural liberalism of the age, crafted an image of a modernizing liberal republic for their country and its autocratic regime as promoted to much of the rest of Latin America and the North Atlantic world. It further alters the historical understanding of pre-war Paraguay from as, often thought, a hermit state steeling itself against the onslaught of modern economic and political forces, to rather a state that was anxious to engage those forces on its own terms. And, upon doing so, the article encourages a rethinking of the general depiction of the war itself.
