Paraguay, officially the Republic of Paraguay, is a landlocked country located in the central region of South America. It borders Bolivia to the northwest and north, Brazil to the northeast and east, and Argentina to the southeast, south, and west. Paraguay has access to the Atlantic Ocean via the Paraná–Paraguay Waterway, a system of navigable channels shared by five countries. The country is governed as a unitary presidential republic composed of a capital district and seventeen departments. Its capital and largest city is Asunción. It dates its independence from Spain to 1811.
The indigenous Guaraní had been living in eastern Paraguay for at least a millennium before the arrival of Spanish conquistadores in 1524. The city of Asunción was founded in 1537 as the first capital of the Governorate of the Río de la Plata within the Spanish Empire. During the 17th century, Paraguay was the center of Jesuit missions, where the natives were converted to Christianity and introduced to European culture. After the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spanish territories in 1767, Paraguay increasingly became a peripheral colony.
Following independence from Spain in the early 19th century, Paraguay was ruled by a series of authoritarian governments. This period ended with the disastrous Triple Alliance War (1864–1870), during which the country lost half its prewar population and around 25–33% of its territory. Paraguay prevailed in another major conflict in the twentieth century, the Chaco War with Bolivia (1932–1935). It subsequently came under a succession of military dictators, culminating in the 35-year regime of Alfredo Stroessner. He was overthrown in 1989 by an internal military coup, marking the beginning of Paraguay's current democratic era.
Paraguay is a developing country, ranking 99th in the Human Development Index, with the seventh highest GDP (PPP) per capita in South America. As of 2024, it had one of the fastest growing economies in the Western Hemisphere, driven by beef and soybean exports, manufacturing, and construction. Paraguay is one of the world's leading exporters of hydroelectricity; the Itaipu Dam on the Paraná River border with Brazil is the third-largest hydroelectric dam in the world in terms of produced energy. Paraguay is a founding member of Mercosur, the United Nations, the Organization of American States and the Lima Group. Additionally, the city of Luque, in metropolitan Asunción, is the seat of the South American Football Confederation. Ciudad del Este is Paraguay's second-largest city and hosts many of the country's consulates-general.
The majority of Paraguay's 6 million people are mestizo, and Guarani culture remains widely influential; more than 90% of the population speak various dialects of the Guarani language alongside Spanish, the highest rate of fluency in an indigenous language in Latin America. In a 2014 Positive Experience Index based on global polling data, Paraguay ranked as the "world's happiest place", and in 2024, placed 24th in the progress rankings of the World Happiness Report.
Etymology
The origin of the word "Paraguay" is uncertain. One version postulates that the name is from the Guaraní language paraguá ("feather crown") and y ("water"): thus, paraguaí ("feather crown of waters"). Other versions state that the name derives from the Guaraní name for the Paraguay River, Payaguá-y ("river of the Payaguá people"). Yet another version states that the names comes from the Guaraní words para ("sea") + gua ("originates") + y ("river"): thus, "sea which originates from the river".
History
Pre-colonial era
The indigenous Guaraní had been living in eastern Paraguay for at least a millennium before the arrival of the Spanish. Western Paraguay, the Gran Chaco, was inhabited by nomads of whom the Guaycuru peoples were the most prominent. The Paraguay River was roughly the dividing line between the agricultural Guarani people to the east and the nomadic and seminomadic people to the west in the Gran Chaco. The Mbayá nomads were known for their warrior traditions and were not fully pacified until the late 19th century. These indigenous tribes belonged to five distinct language families, which were the bases of their major divisions. Differing language speaking groups were generally competitive over resources and territories. They were further divided into tribes by speaking languages in branches of these families. Today 17 separate ethnolinguistic groups remain.
Colonial era
The first Europeans in the area were Spanish explorers in 1537. The Spanish explorer Juan de Salazar de Espinosa founded the settlement of Asunción on 15 August 1537. The city eventually became the center of a Spanish colonial province of Paraguay.
An attempt to create an autonomous Christian Indian nation was undertaken by Jesuit missions and settlements in this part of South America in the eighteenth century. They developed Jesuit reductions to bring Guarani populations together at Spanish missions and protect them from virtual slavery by Spanish settlers and Portuguese slave raiders, the bandeirantes, in addition to seeking their conversion to Christianity. Catholicism in Paraguay was influenced by the indigenous peoples: The syncretic religion has absorbed native elements. The reducciones flourished in eastern Paraguay for about 150 years, until the expulsion of the Jesuits by the Spanish Crown in 1767. The Jesuits were suppressed partially due to accusations by various European royal houses of prioritizing poor natives over Imperial interests. The ruins of two 18th century Jesuit Missions of La Santísima Trinidad de Paraná and Jesús de Tavarangue have been designated as World Heritage Sites by UNESCO.
In western Paraguay, Spanish settlement and Christianity were strongly resisted by the nomadic Guaycuru and other nomads from the 16th century onward. Most of these peoples were absorbed into the mestizo population in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Independence and rule of Rodríguez de Francia
Paraguay overthrew the local Spanish administration on 14 May 1811. Paraguay's first dictator was José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, who ruled Paraguay from 1814 until his death in 1840 with very little outside contact or influence. He intended to create a utopian society based on the Genevan theorist Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Social Contract. Rodríguez de Francia was nicknamed El Supremo.
Rodríguez de Francia established new laws that greatly reduced the powers of the Catholic church (Catholicism was then an established state religion) and the cabinet, forbade colonial citizens from marrying one another and allowed them to marry only blacks, mulattoes or natives, in order to break the power of colonial-era elites and to create a mixed-race or mestizo society. He cut off relations between Paraguay and the rest of South America. Because of Francia's restrictions of freedom, Fulgencio Yegros and several other Independence-era leaders in 1820 planned a coup d'état against Francia, who discovered the plot and had its leaders either executed or imprisoned for life.
Rule of the López family
After Francia's death in 1840, Paraguay was ruled by various military officers under a new junta militar, until Carlos Antonio López (allegedly Rodríguez de Francia's nephew) came to power in 1841. López modernized Paraguay and opened it to foreign commerce. He signed a nonaggression pact with Argentina and officially declared independence of Paraguay in 1842. After López's death in 1862, power was transferred to his eldest son, Francisco Solano López.
The regime of the López family was characterized by pervasive and rigid centralism in production and distribution. There was no distinction between the public and the private spheres, and the López family ruled the country as it would a large estate.
The government exerted control on all exports. The export of yerba mate and valuable wood products maintained the balance of trade between Paraguay and the outside world. The Paraguayan government was extremely protectionist, never accepted loans from abroad and levied high tariffs against imported foreign products. This protectionism made the society self-sufficient, and it also avoided the debt suffered by Argentina and Brazil. Slavery existed in Paraguay, although not in great numbers, until 1844, when it was legally abolished in the new constitution.
Francisco Solano López, the son of Carlos Antonio López, replaced his father as the President-Dictator in 1862, and generally continued the political policies of his father. Both wanted to give an international image of Paraguay as "democratic and republican", but in fact, the ruling family had almost total control of all public life in the country, including church and colleges.
Militarily, Carlos Antonio López modernized and expanded industry and the Paraguayan Army and greatly strengthened the strategic defenses of Paraguay by developing the Fortress of Humaitá. The government hired more than 200 foreign technicians, who installed telegraph lines and railroads to aid the expanding steel, textile, paper and ink, naval construction, weapons and gunpowder industries. The Ybycuí foundry, completed in 1850, manufactured cannons, mortars and bullets of all calibers. River warships were built in the shipyards of Asunción. Fortifications were built, especially along the Apa River and in Gran Chaco. Following the death of Carlos Antonio López, these projects continued under his son Francisco Solano.
In terms of socio-economic development, the country was dubbed "the most advanced Republic in South America", notably by the British judge and politician Sir Robert Phillimore.
According to George Thompson, Lieutenant Colonel of Engineers in the Paraguayan Army prior to and during the war, López's government was comparatively a good one for Paraguay:
Probably in no other country in the world has life and property been so secure as all over Paraguay during his (Antonio Lopez's) reign. Crime was almost unknown, and when committed, immediately detected and punished. The mass of the people was, perhaps, the happiest in existence. They had hardly to do any work to gain a livelihood. Each family had its house or hut in its own ground. They planted, in a few days, enough tobacco, maize and mandioca for their own consumption [...]. Having at every hut a grove of oranges [...] and also a few cows, they were almost throughout the year under little necessity [...]. The higher classes, of course, lived more in the European way...
— George Thompson, C.E.
Paraguayan War (1864–1870)
On 12 October 1864, despite Paraguayan ultimatums, Brazil (allied with the Argentine Government under General Bartolomé Mitre and the rebellious Uruguayan colorados led by Gen. Venancio Flores) invaded the Republic of Uruguay in order to overthrow the government of that time (which was under the rule of the Blanco Party, an ally of López), The Paraguayans, in turn, led by the Marshal of the Republic Francisco Solano López, attacked Mato Grosso on 15 December 1864 and later declared war against Argentina on 23 March 1865. The Blanco Government was toppled and replaced by a Colorado government under General Venancio Flores on 22 February 1865. Afterward, the Argentine Republic, the Empire of Brazil and the Republic of Uruguay signed the secret Treaty of the Triple Alliance against the Paraguayan Government on 1 May 1865.
After a brief offensive in Argentine and Brazilian territory, the Paraguayans retreated to national territory where they put up a ferocious resistance. With the capture of Asunción, the Triple Alliance installed a provisional government. On 22 July 1869 the National Assembly elected the National Junta formed by Carlos Loizaga, Juan Francisco Decoud and Cirilo Antonio Rivarola. However, Solano López evaded capture and was leading a guerrilla campaign. The war ultimately ended with his death in 1870 in the Battle of Cerro Corá, where he refused to surrender and died in action. The real causes of this war, which remains the bloodiest international conflict in the history of The Americas, are still highly debatable.
Paraguay lost 25–33% of its territory to Argentina and Brazil, paid an enormous war debt, and sold large amounts of national properties to stabilize its internal budget. The worst consequence of the war was the catastrophic loss of population. At least 50% of Paraguayans died during the conflict, numbers to which it took many decades for the country to return. Of the disaster suffered by the Paraguayans at the outcome of the war, William D. Rubinstein wrote:
"The normal estimate is that of a Paraguayan population of somewhere between 450,000 and 900,000, only 220,000 survived the war, of whom only 28,000 were adult males."
During the Sacking of Asunción in 1869, the Imperial Brazilian Army packed up and transported the Paraguayan National Archives to Rio de Janeiro. Brazil's records from the war have remained classified. This has made Paraguayan history in the colonial and early national periods difficult to research and study.
20th century
In 1904, the Liberal revolution against the rule of Colorados broke out. The Liberal rule started a period of great political instability. Between 1904 and 1954, Paraguay had thirty-one presidents, most of whom were removed from office by force. Conflicts between the factions of the ruling Liberal party led to the Paraguayan Civil War of 1922–1923.
The unresolved border conflict with Bolivia over the Chaco region finally erupted in the early 1930s in the Chaco War. After both sides suffered great losses, Paraguay defeated Bolivia and established its sovereignty over most of the disputed Chaco region. After the war, military officers used popular dissatisfaction with the Liberal politicians to seize the power for themselves. On 17 February 1936, the February Revolution brought colonel Rafael Franco to power. Between 1940 and 1948, the country was ruled by general Higinio Morínigo. Dissatisfaction with his rule resulted in the Paraguayan Civil War of 1947. In its aftermath Alfredo Stroessner began involvement in a string of plots, which resulted in his military coup d'état of 4 May 1954.
Stroessner era, 1954–1989
A series of unstable governments ensued until the establishment in 1954 of the regime of dictator Alfredo Stroessner, who remained in office for more than three decades until 1989. Paraguay was modernized to some extent under Stroessner's regime, although his rule was marked by extensive human rights abuses.