Between 1932 and 1935, Paraguay and Bolivia fought a devastatingly modern war over an isolated, low-lying, desert plain that many observers described as a ‘green hell’. The Chaco War was the deadliest interstate conflict in twentieth-century south American history, with significant political and economic consequences for both countries. After winning the war, however, the Paraguayan state did little to develop the region. What drove two poor, underequipped, landlocked countries to go to war over the Chaco? How did Paraguay defy international expectations and secure its claim to most of the contested territory? This new volume on the conflict, edited by Bridget María Chesterton, does not offer definitive answers to these still-contested questions. Instead, it makes a valuable contribution by assembling a range of ‘lesser-known narratives’ on the war's environmental and sociocultural dimensions (p. 17).
Several contributors offer insightful perspectives on human relationships with the environment. Carlos Gomez Florentin shows how difficulties in accessing oil drove Paraguay to ‘build an organic army’ that relied heavily on pack animals, oxen-drawn flatboats and canoes (p. 136). While Bolivia's more sophisticated army struggled with logistical issues, Paraguay's apparent ‘backwardness’ proved advantageous. Stephen Cote examines the rise of what he terms ‘oil nationalism’ in Bolivia. During and after the war, some Bolivians embraced the idea that oil reserves should benefit the nation, helping to justify the nationalisation of Standard Oil's operations in 1937. Ben Nobbs-Thiessen focuses on a proposal by Bolivian engineer Manuel Rodríguez to build a canal ultimately linking Santa Cruz de la Sierra to the Atlantic Ocean. This idea failed to gain traction during the war, but Nobbs-Thiessen identifies it as a precursor for post-war engineers who shared Rodríguez's ‘faith in the transformative power of science to re-shape landscape and generate development through infrastructure’ (p. 69). Esther Breithoff reminds readers that ‘the Chaco landscape remains littered with war debris’ (p. 178). She draws on the methods of ‘conflict archaeology’ to explore how soldiers expressed themselves by decorating discarded shell cases.
Other chapters address the war's impact on class, ethnic and national identities. Elizabeth Shesko offers a fascinating portrait of the experiences of approximately 20,000 Bolivians who were held as prisoners of war in Paraguay. Well-educated officers lived in relative comfort in the capital, using their connections to keep in touch with family members and secure privileges, while indigenous soldiers from the highlands endured abysmal living and working conditions. Surprisingly, many Bolivian prisoners lived in private homes, where they helped to compensate for the absence of local men by providing agricultural or domestic labour. Shesko contends that nationality mattered little to many non-elite soldiers, who confronted similar abuse as soldiers in Bolivia and as prisoners in Paraguay. Luis M. Sierra considers the war's impact in poor neighbourhoods in La Paz, where union activists drew on overlapping notions of indigenous, working-class and national identity to oppose discrimination. He draws on evocative evidence from the Taller de Historia Oral Andina (Andean Oral History Workshop) about working women's memories of the war and their experiences as activists. A chapter by Chesterton and Thilo F. Papacek on the German naturalist Carlos Fiebrig argues that foreigners contributed to Paraguayan nationalism. Fiebrig designed the Botanical Garden in Asunción as a ‘botanical model’ of Paraguay, where visitors could encounter flora and fauna from all of its regions, including the Chaco (p. 97).
Although many military histories of the war have described the Chaco as an empty desert, the region was inhabited by more than 40,000 indigenous people in the 1930s. As Chesterton notes in her introduction, several recent publications, most notably Nicolás Richard (ed.), Mala guerra: Los indígenas en la guerra del Chaco, 1932–1935 (Museo del Barro, ServiLibro and CoLibris, 2008), have explored native people's experiences during and after the war. Richard and others show that the war unleashed widespread violence, epidemic disease and mass displacement. They also highlight lowland natives’ contributions to both Bolivian and Paraguayan military efforts. This ground-breaking literature has been published mostly in Spanish and French, and deserves more attention among historians writing in English. The only chapter in this volume to consider the experiences of lowland indigenous people is by Erick D. Langer, who surveys native relationships with the Argentine, Bolivian and Paraguayan states and settlers over the decades preceding the war. Langer stresses the importance of these earlier encounters to the history of the war itself, contending that Paraguayans had better relationships with indigenous people than Bolivians did. His intriguing hypothesis merits further research.
Chesterton deserves commendation for bringing together an interdisciplinary group of experts with novel perspectives on the war. The volume will be of particular interest to environmental historians, and to anyone who might want to incorporate new angles in teaching about the Chaco War. Its efforts to analyse regional history ‘in a broad transnational context’ are especially significant, because Bolivian and Paraguayan historiographies on the war are rarely in conversation with one another (p. 13). In keeping with this emphasis on transnational analysis, it would be useful to know more about Argentina's role in the conflict, the war's impact on the international boundary at the Pilcomayo river, and international flows of migration. All told, this is a valuable contribution that should inspire additional research on an understudied conflict.
