Washburn and Diplomacy “Under Difficulties”

Though he was hardly comfortable in Paraguay, Washburn had no idea that he would be accused of masterminding a plot against the nation's government.Footnote ³ The fifth son of a prominent Republican family from Maine, he had been named by President Lincoln as commissioner to Asunción in 1861, with the position subsequently upgraded to minister. Although the promotion gave Washburn the political weight he craved, the post was no plum—Paraguay was surely the most obscure of the South American republics. Nonetheless, he acted with unusual verve once he arrived in the Paraguayan capital. He offered to mediate between the marshal's government and the Triple Alliance, gave protection to foreign residents on several occasions, and expressed unsolicited opinions about Paraguay's political future whenever the mood hit him. Washburn's cheek earned him resentment from López, who nevertheless refrained from cancelling the minister's authority in such mediations.

Even before the war, López had overseen the frankly despotic regime he inherited from his father in 1862, and he had steadily extended his powers since the war began. He was offended by foreigners who put on airs while in Paraguay and placed the US minister under surveillance. For some months, the police took an avid interest in the New Englander, reporting his every move. Then, as the war went from bad to much worse, their reports became more convoluted. If Washburn had been the diplomat he thought he was, he might have seen that López's patience had grown thin by 1867. Having failed to stop the Alliance's advance on Humaitá, he was demanding ever greater sacrifices from his own people; it was not the time to test him. Although it might be expected that the US minister would by now have accustomed himself to the despotic atmosphere of the country, the nervousness expressed by his Paraguayan friends relayed a different story, betraying a sense of immediacy that seemed more desperate than it had the year before.

The conflicts associated with the war had in fact grown far worse than Washburn realized. Saturnino Bedoya, the former treasury minister (and brother-in-law of Marshal López), died of dysentery on the night of May 17, 1868. Bedoya had spent some time under arrest, and while in detention he confessed to participating in a revolutionary conspiracy against López. The details he supplied (or invented) had the ring of truth, at least to the marshal, and as the outline of the conspiracy took shape in his mind, he looked around for an obvious ringleader. He found him in Washburn.Footnote ⁴

In his memoirs, Paraguayan general Francisco Isidoro Resquín summarized the government's official version of what had unfolded up to this point. Washburn had met with the Marquis of Caxias during one of the former's periodic visits to the Alliance camp to discuss mediation. Each of the men had been biding his time while making an effort to enlist powerful co-conspirators. The two had been approached by Bedoya, who, according to Resquín, presented Washburn with gold pilfered from the treasury. Additional monies were supposedly provided by Benigno, the Brazilians, and the US delegation. As the enemy closed in on Humaitá, and the Paraguayan resistance there started to wane, this cash reward grew more attractive in the eyes of the plotters. Foreign Minister José Berges, General Vicente Barrios, and the two López brothers eventually threw in their lot with Washburn, whom Resquín firmly believed was working to coordinate an uprising to coincide with an assault on Asunción by the Alliance forces. When the assault failed to materialize, Washburn rescheduled the rebellion for July 1868, or whenever the Brazilians could overwhelm Paraguayan positions further south. The timing would have to be near-perfect to make this rather intricate plot work, but the conspirators felt optimistic.

The marshal's spies purportedly intercepted a letter from Benigno to the Marquis outlining the plan and presenting incriminating evidence against more than 80 suspects.Footnote ⁵ On the surface, however, the accusation of conspiracy was based on a pastiche of poorly digested information derived from tendentious sources that fed the marshal's fears. Like a great many people, López found vast falsehoods more credible than small ones. There is no question that the different elements in the account compel our attention, but they hang together poorly. For one thing, though Washburn made little secret of his aversion to López, he likewise had little sympathy for Caxias, Benigno, and the other men who had purportedly lent their support.Footnote ⁶ The accused Paraguayans, moreover, lived in uncertain circumstances in the capital city and knew from experience that their most innocent gestures and remarks were always reported to the police. They might share Washburn's distaste for the marshal, but they would have found it impossible to unite in any revolutionary committee, with or without the US minister. Even the theory that Washburn provided indirect aid for their efforts, eschewing a central role for himself, was ruled out by the simple fact that he could never keep his mouth shut.

In both his memoirs and his formal testimony before the US Congress in 1870, Washburn denied a connection to any plot against the government to which he had been accredited as minister. He maintained that his previous efforts at mediation between Paraguay and the Alliance countries had always been disinterested, and that his defense of resident foreigners was fully consistent with proper diplomatic practice. Not every diplomat in South America would have endorsed this interpretation of international law, however, and even many North Americans thought the man a blowhard.Footnote ⁷ Conspirators are rarely fashioned from such clay. Even so, many doubts hovered around the minister. Two diametrically opposed views have emerged in the historical literature to explain his conduct.

The majority of those who supported the US minister in print during his lifetime had at one time or another fallen victim to his excesses, and while everyone agreed that he was brash, they understood that they owed their lives to his intercession. A good example of the contradictions provoked by the US minister is an incident involving George Frederick Masterman, a British pharmacist who administered one of López's hospitals and later worked at the American legation. Masterman expressed considerable gratitude to the US minister once he got safely out of Paraguay, but even as he did so his words were tempered with doubts about the man's comportment. Washburn “did talk most imprudently,” he observed, and while “among ourselves it was all very well to say what we thought of the war and the character of López . . . he used, in his blundering Spanish, to tell things to natives . . . which, perfectly right in themselves as mere personal opinions, became treason and conspiracy if the point of view were shifted a little.”Footnote ⁸

There were of course those who insisted on Washburn's complicity, and, like his defenders, they had something in common with each other: they had a great deal to conceal about their own comportment during the war. If they could ascribe the country's downfall to the influence of foreign imperialists and local backstabbers, they might keep themselves safe in the short run and perhaps even secure their reputations for years to come.

The Marshal and His Suspicions

Amid this rat's nest of blame and counter-blame, we can see in May and June of 1868 that the one man whose opinion mattered—Marshal Francisco Solano López—had yet to make up his mind about the US minister and his hypothetical co-conspirators. No doubt, López shared with others serious concerns about Washburn's capacity for intrigue, but he felt no less uncertain about the other foreign representatives or his brothers Benigno and Venancio and most of the others, whose names he had already circled as undependable.

Accustomed to the exercise of absolute power, the marshal was the pampered son of a dictatorial president, and had been sent by his father as a young man to Europe to procure weaponry for his fledgling army. He returned with an Irish mistress, Eliza Lynch, and vastly increased authority, as war minister. Along the way, he also developed an attitude of contempt for government functionaries who had never left the country. Perhaps this feeling reflected some personal insecurity. In any case, once he became President in 1862, he surrounded himself with spies and toadies, whose fine words fell upon him like raindrops in a summer storm. And as the air filled with adulation, López developed a paradoxical attitude: to mistrust everything he heard and suspect plots where none existed. By 1868 this sense of uncertainty had increased greatly. On a few occasions, the marshal was able to convert his minimally supported suspicions into rock-hard convictions, and appeared willing to summarily execute suspected traitors with the same alacrity with which he had once shot defeatists or incompetent military commanders.Footnote ⁹ At other times, he preferred to wait and see if his officials might still be reined in. Witnesses could discern no consistent pattern in López's behavior; his wavering may have issued from design or it may have reflected a fundamental uncertainty about what to do next. In either case, it places the consideration of the 1868 events in an ambiguous light.

In July 1868 came another incident that corroborated the marshal's worst suspicions. On July 24, his birthday, three Brazilian warships struck at the breastworks that the Paraguayans had established near the confluence of the Paraguay and Tebicuary Rivers. It was not much of an engagement and interfered little with the birthday celebrations on land. The Alliance vessels did manage to score several direct hits on positions south of San Fernando, but the marshal's gunners drove them back with little bother. In his account of the day's events, the British-born Col. George Thompson noted a striking incident: as the Brazilian warships steamed past, three men stuck their heads out of the turret of one vessel, and one of their number shouted at the marshal's soldiers, who glared back at them from the riverbank. Col. Thompson, who had been in the Paraguayan service for several years, gave this report describing the exchange:

The marshal, it seems, had come to doubt his British subordinates. He also seemed to think that traitors in the pay of the Marquis de Caxias were signaling their confederates in his own army. This could only mean that the culmination of all the plotting against his regime was drawing near, and that the turncoats were about to make their move. López now moved speedily. On August 2, 1868, he issued a decree invoking the old Laws of the Indies and establishing a series of two-man tribunals to investigate and prosecute those accused of treason. In fact, the government had already suppressed the colonial legal codes, during the early 1840s, but the regulations concerning treason, as first defined for Spain in medieval times under the Siete Partidas, were still in force. Under this medieval code, the monarch's subjects were required “to acknowledge, love, fear, honor, and protect the king by the command of God whose place he occupies on earth”; any individual failing in such duties would necessarily be guilty of treason and would be “put to death on this account; and if he could not be found, he must lose all his property and be forever banished.”Footnote ¹¹ The military ordinances of Charles III had updated these medieval notions of loyal comportment in the 1760s but kept their tenor, not only by prescribing capital punishment for treason, mutiny, or sedition, but insisting also that any commander who failed to prosecute malefactors would himself suffer severe penalties.Footnote ¹² Thus it was in López's Paraguay.

For the proceedings against traitors, jueces fiscales (judges with prosecutorial power) were chosen from among those clerics and functionaries the marshal still considered reliable. He placed the bull-necked General Resquín in charge of arraigning the defendants and executing whatever sentences the special courts determined. Scores, perhaps hundreds, of suspects were arrested at the front, and Resquín lost no time in arguing that they suffer the third degree. The general, who knew how to demonstrate loyalty to a tyrant, always acted with harshness, whether the marshal wished him to or not. López initially refrained from the use of torture, arguing that Paraguay was too civilized a country to allow such procedures. He soon came around, however, to the idea that coercion was necessary in legal procedures during wartime.Footnote ¹³ The stakes were too high.

Many individuals had already been taken into custody. Former foreign minister José Berges was arrested at his country estate in the isolated town of Salinares; the Bolivian-born Tristán Roca, editor of the marshal's newspaper El Centinela, was arrested in another town, Areguá. López's two sisters were also detained, as was the French chancellor and the honorary consul of Portugal.Footnote ¹⁴ Almost all the civilian officials and militia commanders in central Paraguay, some 200 individuals in all, were held incommunicado in the small town of Luque, only slightly less isolated than the others.Footnote ¹⁵ Most were eventually brought south by steamer to San Fernando.

Prisoners of both sexes arrived at the latter camp daily. The detained women, nearly all upper class in origin, enjoyed the “privilege” of remaining unshackled, with each receiving a cured hide for a bed. Otherwise, they had to suffer in the open air like the men and consume the same poor fare of unsalted beef in portions even smaller than those doled out to the troops. Once a day, the prisoners received a cow-horn of water from the nearby lagoon, but they were permitted to visit it only to answer the call of nature. Given the prevalence of dysentery in camp, and the reluctance of guards to escort the prisoners from their place of confinement, it was inevitable that many of the accused had to squat in their own filth. At night, all of the prisoners were chained, though the men's circumstances were more difficult than the women's. Lassos were stretched between heavy poles driven into the earth, and to these ropes the men were tied with leather thongs in groups of 20 to 30, placed “in rows, stretched on the damp, slimy ground, [where] they rested, suffered, and slept.”Footnote ¹⁶ Thus assembled, these accused conspirators, already thin, rapidly sunk. Many died.

The surrender at Humaitá came three days before the trials began, and cast a noticeable pall over the proceedings at San Fernando. It also ushered in the marshal's most egregious demonstration of brutality. The garrison commander at Humaitá, Col. Francisco J. Martínez, had joined his starving men in Alliance captivity, and was now beyond López's reach. His young wife, Juliana Ynsfrán, however, was among those who had been evacuated to the Paraguayan interior, and her fate was far from enviable. Doña Juliana was first cousin to Marshal López and one of the more privileged members of his family. She had resided for some time at the country house of Eliza Lynch, López's mistress, secure from the challenges most evacuees faced, but still ignorant as to what had happened in the south. Then, one night in early August, two teenaged soldiers appeared at her door, rapping forcefully and demanding that she present herself for arrest. No sooner had she dressed than they forced her to march the eight miles to Asunción, driving her through the mud like an animal, whipping her with the flat edges of their sabers. They took pleasure in wreaking pain upon a superior, but never explained to her what rule or ordinance she had purportedly broken. Arriving disheveled in the capital, she was transferred to another party of soldiers who proved similarly impudent and cruel. They loaded her with heavy fetters and escorted her onto a steamer bound for San Fernando, where she joined the growing ranks of the accused.Footnote ¹⁷

Now the hunt began in earnest. The two-man teams of jueces fiscales were ordered to scour the republic for any traitors not yet apprehended. We may well doubt the efficacy of the Paraguayan government in delivering foodstuffs and in containing the threat from cholera, but on this matter of internal repression the state did an exemplary job. But unlike some other Latin American dictators who summarily shot hundreds of enemies without trial, López sought to maintain the legalistic forms at San Fernando. So did his associates, who interpreted their duties faithfully, though in the most repugnant manner imaginable.

The Redoubtable Father Maíz

The most remarkable of the jueces fiscales to emerge from these “tribunals of blood” was Fidel Maíz, a clear-eyed, effeminate 40-year-old priest from the tiny hamlet of Arroyos y Esteros. With a surname that evoked the countryside, Maíz could nonetheless reasonably claim to be the most cultured Paraguayan of his generation. He earned lavish praise from his contemporaries for his oratorical skills and piety and occasionally dabbled in poetry, geography, and the sciences, as well as theology. He wrote in a Latin as sophisticated as that of the pope, and spoke the native Guaraní in a remarkably nuanced way.Footnote ¹⁸ In addition, Maíz was ambitious. Despite the isolation and backwardness of his home parish, he strove to maintain close relations with lettered members of the Paraguayan elite, not excluding members of the presidential family. These efforts brought many rewards, and at the end of the 1850s he received the signal honor of being chosen as confessor for the future marshal's mother, Juana Pabla Carillo, and tutor to her children.

Maíz metamorphosed into a strikingly conceited man, much enamored of his own learning. Unfortunately, there were those who envied his reputation and way with words. The future bishop Manuel Antonio Palacios, who could be as coarse and mercurial as his rival was cool and refined, omitted no opportunity to berate Maíz, whose idealism too often took the form of sophisticated homilies delivered before an adoring public. The rustic Palacios had little time for pretended saintliness and contrived to challenge Maíz's pedantries. He even schemed to profit from the other man's vanity by taking over his favored place with the López family.Footnote ¹⁹

When in 1862 the tame Paraguayan congress named Francisco Solano López to succeed his father, Maíz felt secure enough in his own position to suggest that such a move was illegal. He pointed out that the 1844 constitution was written to prevent the state's becoming the patrimony of a single family.Footnote ²⁰ Maíz was not the only one to raise this objection, but his cheeky introduction of liberal doctrine into an authoritarian political environment could bring only one result: he was arrested and sent to jail for nearly five years. He was probably tortured. More to the point, he soon learned that the role of martyr little suited him, nor did he relish being insulated from the tremendous challenges that Paraguay had endured during his captivity. Eight of his ten brothers had died as the war against the Triple Alliance unfolded. The Alliance armies had crossed the Paraná and throttled his country at the battles of Tuyutí and Boquerón in 1866, and still he remained a prisoner, unable to come to her defense. Many years later, after lengthy reflection on his situation, Maíz fatuously compared himself to Galileo, who likewise chose to give in to official pressure rather than see his work suffer. As Maíz saw it, his work could help save the republic.Footnote ²¹

Paraguay's victory in an important engagement at Curupayty in September 1866 put López in a generous frame of mind, which may have saved Maíz. Instead of facing the firing squad, he was urged to seek the intercession of the marshal's patron saint and compose a petition asking for clemency. As written, this unctuous appeal could well serve as a model of blasphemous adulation: Maíz actually compared López to Jesus Christ, to the latter's disadvantage. Any reader who lived outside Paraguay during the 1860s would have thought the petition nauseating, but its publication in the principal state gazette earned the cleric his freedom.Footnote ²² Afterward, he worked for the newspaper Cabichuí and served as chaplain to the presidential guardsmen.Footnote ²³

Maíz remains a controversial figure. No one can doubt his brilliance as a writer and orator, but for a man of the cloth to oversee the torture of accused traitors requires explanation, and, at this distance, more than a little conjecture. His comportment at San Fernando had a distinctly Faustian quality: having for so long cringed in pain in the marshal's jails, he jumped at the chance to redeem himself in López's eyes. At the same time, he could not fail to notice that the Paraguay of 1868 no longer reflected the antebellum world into which he had been born. The Guaraní-speaking peasants of the interior districts—the land of his youth—had lately gained an ascendancy, even strength, in the service of Marshal López. Through them, Maíz sought to uncover and stimulate some hope for his nation.

This turnaround in the political fortune of the peasantry might be thought to foreshadow a new destiny for Paraguay—if the republic could survive the Alliance campaign. Maíz had to do his best to defend the country as a Christian champion of the poor; this meant fighting as a Judas Maccabeus, against all her enemies foreign and domestic.Footnote ²⁴ We might argue in this that Maíz looked at the San Fernando proceedings not for what they were but for what they were likely to become. He calculated that any violent persecution of the established elite would reinforce the patriotism that López was trying to resuscitate. In whipping the upper classes into line, the state could thus draw attention to the contrasting loyalty of the country people, who stood fast in this extremity.Footnote ²⁵ Maíz's status as a cleric is essential to understanding this attitude. His reading of scripture gave him all the casuistry he needed to fight treason. He recognized a common thread between the social status of his peasant parishioners and the message of the Gospels that proclaimed the good news, not just for the elites but for all people. If his actions at San Fernando served to suppress the ignoble ambitions of the traditional landowners—and separate them from the Baals of foreign materialism—then they might also promote Christian interests in Paraguay. In trying to isolate the candle-flame that guided his motivations, we can do little better than speculate, but it is reasonable, however, to portray Maíz's deeds as an effort to combat the sins of the Paraguayan upper classes, an effort basic to his vocation as a priest. By treating his duties at San Fernando with the utmost seriousness, he could help restore virtue to the patria. Murky though this goal was, it would have appeared attractive to Maíz. It came as no surprise that he took to the task zealously, as if his spirit were guided by an avenging angel and his brain saturated with bile. As with any number of earlier and later Torquemadas, he saw himself as doing God's bidding.

Whenever the religious imperative failed him, Maíz could take refuge in politics. Having previously assumed a “liberal” posture, he felt now that he could help to foster a future tolerance in Paraguay only by endorsing authoritarian rule. By destroying the traitors at San Fernando, he hoped to reset the clock to make his earlier liberalism a more palatable option in a nation reborn. Pursuing this approach clearly required a somersault in reasoning, but it did allow him to regard his actions as necessary and commendable.Footnote ²⁶ Whether he cloaked himself in an all-encompassing Catholic faith, or in an equally powerful patriotism, he intended to do his conscientious duty as a Paraguayan fiscal.

The “Trials”

There was much self-deception in Maíz's character, but he was hardly alone in seeking to make the ends justify the means at San Fernando. Juan Crisóstomo Centurión, a handsome staff officer who had once overseen the “scientific” restructuring of Guaraní orthography and who left to his descendants one of the most detailed memoirs of the war, barely missed being accused of plotting himself.Footnote ²⁷ He responded by contributing to the crusade against the internal enemy.Footnote ²⁸ So did Col. Silvestre Aveiro, the former private secretary of the marshal's father; José Falcón, the sometime director of the National Archive; and Justo Román, another army chaplain with long experience at the altar.Footnote ²⁹ All four were well-read men who had been seduced by power, and there were many others. The 20 to 30 jueces fiscales named by López to investigate those charged with treason could recognize the absurdity of many accusations, yet they could never act on or even whisper of their doubts. To question the process was tantamount to questioning the cause. Any show of defeatism or negativity in regard to the investigations, as previous events had demonstrated, could bring about a juez fiscal's own arrest.

Dark rumors, infighting, and alternate interpretations of Paraguay's military decline came to coalesce at San Fernando, and the fiscales saw no advantage in trying to stop them if it meant taking personal risks. Besides, acting as judges in these circumstances presupposed certain advantages. In a setting that had hitherto reserved absolute authority to one man alone, the fiscales saw a new chance to exercise the power of life or death over many men, and they could not resist the corruptive influences that power conveyed. One can depict them as bureaucrats doing an unpleasant but necessary service, as hard-bitten nationalist fanatics, or as hirelings who wished to guarantee their own survival by doing their master's bidding.

Curiously, López kept his distance from the proceedings at San Fernando and later expressed surprise that many loyal people had ever been detained.Footnote ³⁰ Though he remained the judge of last resort (and evidently perused all the depositions), he rarely bothered to exercise his rights of confirmation, commutation, or pardon.Footnote ³¹ Col. Thompson even claimed that during the trials the marshal “used to go out with his children to fish in a lagoon near his headquarters,” so little did he care—or affect to care—about the proceedings.Footnote ³² Meanwhile, Maíz and the others enforced what the law demanded. They exhibited none of the marshal's pretended detachment and performed their tasks with a diligence that they could never live down in later life.Footnote ³³ They adopted procedures that were frankly inquisitorial, questioning the prisoners in a most exacting manner, asking about their connections to the Washburn conspiracy before anyone had even demonstrated its existence. They permitted no testimony that professed ignorance or asserted a palpable defense and called no witnesses who might have supported an accused person who claimed to have been absent from the scene of the supposed crime. The fiscales looked for subtle motives as they elucidated every case of anti-government plotting. In pointing out instances of defeatism, they never granted that decisions made by Paraguayan officials might be based on practicality rather than conspiracy. By degrees, they convinced themselves that the rumors of revolutionary plots must be true. These judges (or prosecutors, for martial law made no provision for defense attorneys) struggled to construct a consistent version of the facts, often resorting to the most contorted measures to make the different accounts cohere.Footnote ³⁴

The fiscales were assisted by squads of regular soldiers delegated from among the marshal's guards. As with a procession of acolytes who keep their heads low, these adolescents went about their work in a respectful manner, as if the hearings were taking place in a cathedral. Their behavior may have drawn in equal parts from reserves of sadism and fear of punishment—either way, they did their duty. The knotted rope was their chosen instrument, which they employed in response to a mere glance from the fiscales. Most of the time, however, the young soldiers sat glumly in the background feigning indifference, for they knew better than to show any emotion.

Once the tribunals started their work, the fiscales regularly ordered the application of torture, knowing that López would endorse this course of action. The mildest form involved riveting three heavy irons to the legs, so that the accused individual was compelled to crab-walk into the “courtroom.” Another approach involved “stretching” (cuadro estacado), in which the accused had his face pressed to the ground with his hands and feet bound to leather cords attached to stakes and then pulled tight. This left the victim extended into the form of a St. Andrew's cross under the full rays of the sun.Footnote ³⁵ If a confession could not be compelled under that burden, the soldiers first withheld water and eventually used their whips. The most notorious method used to elicit confessions was the cepo uruguaiana: the victim was forced face down with hands lashed behind him; his knees were then raised and bound to the neck with leather straps, after which the soldiers loaded heavy muskets one after the other upon the victim's back.Footnote ³⁶ The procedure slowly dislocated the shoulders, tore the muscles along the ribcage and rendered one or both arms useless. The excruciating pain invariably drew out every confession required.

Torture has an inherently peculiar character. Its supposed function is to extract truthful testimony, but it produces something quite removed from the truth. The person undergoing physical coercion will say whatever his tormentors want him to say. They know that he knows that they know how unreal his words appear—and it does not matter. The “truth” is preordained, and like the final product in the mind of a sculptor, it has a lapidary shape.Footnote ³⁷ Those people who understood the elements in this theater also understood that “reality” was dispensable. All that was necessary was that accused men and women provide details to fill out the contours of the tale. It was especially tragic that a few of the accused did not know how to confess. One was Juliana Ynsfrán. It is hard not to agree with Minister Washburn when he ascribed her relentless torture exclusively to the marshal's vindictiveness:

Doña Juliana was told that her husband had communicated with Triple Alliance officers (indeed he had, but to insult their demands for surrender), and that she had countenanced his treason.Footnote ³⁹ In all her time under the lash, she never managed anything more than a bewildered cry. She escaped execution for several months, though not physical abuse, and when she was finally shot in December 1868, it came as a blessing.Footnote ⁴⁰

Many others preceded her. Several of the most outstanding figures of the pre-war elite were reduced to groveling idiocy in the process. Such was the fate of José Berges. The one-time foreign minister possessed a vision rare among Paraguayan functionaries and could appreciate the difference between what was desirable and what was possible. And he had a gift of blarney, a trait that had served his country well, both in negotiations with foreign powers and in his nimble administration of the occupied Argentine port of Corrientes in 1865. In fostering amicable relations in the port, Berges had bought his country considerable goodwill, while demonstrating that Paraguay preferred diplomacy over force.Footnote ⁴¹

The marshal had not initially discouraged this impression. After the Triple Alliance offensive of 1866, however, López wanted to appear impervious to pressure, and Berges sank into irrelevance. The once-voluminous correspondence the foreign minister had carried on with Paraguayan agents in Europe shrunk dramatically, and no one cared. Meanwhile, the official attitude towards his diplomacy grew frostier, and the marshal saw less need for a fat and pretentious civilian who failed to conceal his gifts behind the usual mask of servility. At San Fernando, Berges nervously tried to defend his record.Footnote ⁴² His interrogators, however, never swayed by carefully worded logic or the recitation of facts, had little interest in letting him speak. The mere charge of treason against the former official was enough to secure his conviction. Besides, the interrogators sensed that there existed a quota of victims to fill.Footnote ⁴³ The worldly Berges, who had fallen sick over the previous months, may have consoled himself with the realization that the world had gone crazy: nothing could have saved him.

Berges was only one of many high-placed Paraguayans “processed” at San Fernando during August 1868, and at other spots over the next several months. Among the others were Berges's brother Miguel, his successor Gumercindo Benítez, the López brothers Benigno and Venancio, Bishop Palacios and 11 other clerics, and many lesser officials.Footnote ⁴⁴ Though he had lost an eye as the result of a suicide attempt, the hapless Col. Paulino Alén, Martínez's predecessor as commander at Humaitá, managed to recover—only to be accused of treason at San Fernando and dragged before the firing squad. He protested his innocence to the end. The broad-bearded General Vicente Barrios, husband of another of the marshal's sisters, was next. He had attempted to emulate Alén's example by cutting his own throat with a razor on August 12, but his life was saved by quick medical attention.Footnote ⁴⁵ The marshal's praetorians kept Barrios under close guard for a number of months before finally shooting him in December.

Foreigners could claim no immunity. The European machinists and engineers who had come to the country in the late 1850s and early 1860s did so in anticipation of easy money. A few, like Col. George Thompson, had opted out of the limited opportunities back home in hopes that their Paraguayan sojourn would yield adventures worthy of a Clive or a Mungo Park. Their enthusiasm was short-lived, as they discovered that Paraguay was less a paradise than a dense thicket in which they were no better than improperly transplanted flowers. They might grow energetically for a time, but before long would shrivel into something unrecognizable.Footnote ⁴⁶ Those men who brought their wives and children with them fared best. But almost everyone picked up bad habits along with a bloated arrogance and a sense of dislocation that today's sociologists call culture shock. With the country now at war, these inclinations worked against them, for strangers, colleagues, and acquaintances among the Paraguayans found it easy to accuse outsiders who did not know how to behave or who had used their privileged status to assert superiority over locals. That Paraguayan officials also treated underlings with contempt could be ignored, but in any case Paraguay no longer seemed safe for foreigners.

James Manlove, a would-be privateer from Maryland, was executed in mid August, along with John Watts, a British machinist who had been decorated for his battle service with the Paraguayans. Several other foreigners of note were arrested in September, including the Englishman George Masterman and the American Porter Bliss, both of whom had worked for Washburn and who were now unceremoniously arrested and placed in the cepo. Bliss purchased a reprieve from the worst of this treatment by agreeing to write a florid (albeit imaginary) account of Washburn's criminal intrigues. He survived better than the Prussian major Maximilian von Versen, who aspired to the role of military observer and was imprisoned for his effrontery.Footnote ⁴⁷ Several of the marshal's British engineers faced an imprisonment similar to that of von Versen, and like him, managed to survive only thanks to the timely arrival of Brazilian troops.Footnote ⁴⁸ At least one other Briton was shot later that year, along with an Italian riverboat captain, two Uruguayan diplomats, several of the marshal's admirers from the Argentine provinces, and the Portuguese consul. Perhaps the most unusual foreigner to lose his life in punishment for these odd accusations was Eberhard Munck, an expatriate Swedish naturalist who had married into an important Paraguayan landholding family; he was condemned in early 1869 for “not having used his knowledge of witchcraft to promote Paraguayan victory.”Footnote ⁴⁹

Unanswered Questions

The “tribunals of blood” constituted an atrocious episode in an atrocious war, but there are still many unexplained aspects to the affair. Some witnesses, for instance, claim that the proceedings unfolded amid an atmosphere of palpable gloom at San Fernando.Footnote ⁵⁰ And yet a surprising number of people were unaware that anything out of the ordinary had happened in the camp itself. The explorer Sir Richard Burton, who visited the site after the Paraguayan retreat, believed that witnesses had exaggerated the incidence of atrocities and torture. As proof, he noted that those British employees of the Paraguayan state, though reckoned among the marshal's most ill-treated prisoners, in fact, usually spoke of such abuses from hearsay. US naval officers, who arrived from downstream about the same time, were similarly disinclined to believe the most horrific tales.Footnote ⁵¹ Even Col. Thompson, who was posted nearby, claimed to have known nothing of the treason trials, and grew suspicious only when his personal friend, the highly decorated general José María Bruguez, disappeared and no one could or would say where he had gone.Footnote ⁵²

The questions remain open. Did a conspiracy ever exist? If it did, was it justified? As to the latter, who could blame any Paraguayan for wanting to bring the disastrous war to an end?Footnote ⁵³ The country was practically destroyed, its population nearly decimated, and neither plots nor executions could lift the sinking morale. Dismay at the marshal's war policies permeated every corner of the nation, along with the sort of regular griping that always accompanies war. But there also existed a sure punishment for every ill-advised word uttered in anger or in the blackest despair. A preponderance of the evidence argues against the successful activation of any revolutionary plot. That Benigno López had had aspirations for power in 1862 was widely suspected, but that he could have somehow contacted Brazilian agents operating though the US minister seems decidedly fanciful. And though Washburn is often pilloried as the ringleader of an anti-López scheme, he seems a dubious candidate for the role. He was arrogant, over-sensitive, and brash in the presence of people he thought beneath his station. He demanded absolute recognition for his country's dignity, yet was oblivious to her political interests. He always insisted that he was in the right and that everyone else was either wrong or badly informed.

Even if we accept that the US minister would have made a poor organizer for any conspiracy (and just as poor a follower), we can nonetheless recognize that he knew more than he let on. How could it have been otherwise? Washburn was acquainted with Benigno, Foreign Minister Berges, and every other highly placed person in the Paraguayan state hierarchy. Many were personal friends he visited regularly, often riding from the home of one to another, and he rarely bothered to tailor his conversations to wartime conditions and the presence of informants. He seemed to enjoy taunting the police.Footnote ⁵⁴ In 1867, for example, Washburn rejected López's order to relocate the US legation to a site outside Asunción. Since other foreign representatives acquiesced in the evacuation order, the American's refusal looked odd to everyone. So did his willingness to offer to safeguard the property of a great many private persons, and then to step in to arrange their money matters for them, and finally to take people in as if he were running a hotel for the rich.Footnote ⁵⁵ It is easy to understand why authorities felt justified in keeping him under surveillance. But that does not mean that he was involved in a plot.

Then there was the issue of his wife. Sallie Washburn emerges from the documentation as a smug, rather bigoted woman, unintelligent but boastful of her friendship with the men and women of the “better class.” Her stay in Asunción was taxing on her emotionally and when she finally left Paraguay on a US warship in September 1868, she may have had a nervous breakdown. In any case, while in a state of despondency, she blurted out to an American naval officer that a plan to transfer the presidency to Benigno had indeed taken shape—with her husband's consent and foreknowledge.Footnote ⁵⁶ The officer later reported what he had heard to higher authorities in the United States, and though Sallie claimed to have been misquoted, her subsequent testimony before a US congressional committee failed to clarify the situation.Footnote ⁵⁷ Indeed, if her earlier comments contained even a speck of truth, her husband's whole argument has to be reconsidered.

Both the French and Italian representatives reported that Washburn had been involved in a conspiracy, though at what level or in what capacity they refused to speculate.Footnote ⁵⁸ As we have noted, Washburn's former employee Porter Bliss produced an extensive report on the “plot,” in which he accused his former protector of all sorts of sinister machinations. Both he and Masterman, another former Washburn employee who was compelled to offer similar testimony, disavowed their words once they were free, yet their confessions merit attention from those in search of nuance in this already nebulous tale.Footnote ⁵⁹ Several of the US naval personnel who met both men later that year thought they had lied about their mistreatment and refused to accept their recounting of events. Some of the San Fernando confessions, these same officers concluded, “might be true.”Footnote ⁶⁰

And well they might have been. In leaving room for conjecture, it does seem likely that meaningful dissent in Paraguay was being gathered up and composed into something resembling a conspiracy, or to use Sallie Washburn's term, a “plan” for a world without Marshal López. More likely, there were various conspiracies, running the gamut from simple grumbling to an active evasion of orders, to stealing, hoarding, or thoughts of displacing the government—perhaps even assassination. The meetings of government officials that occurred in Asunción when López was absent at Humaitá proved that they could act without his guidance or orders. If Burton is correct, then their real purpose was “to perform the pleasant operation which is popularly called ‘belling the cat.’”Footnote ⁶¹

But the dissidents never got the chance. Over 500 men and women were shot, lanced, or bayoneted as a result of the San Fernando proceedings, and in subsequent months the names of still more individuals were appended to a long list of suspects marked for execution.Footnote ⁶² Despite what some have argued, the marshal's behavior at this time betrayed no hint of clinical paranoia, nor was it even neurotic when viewed in context. He was at the end of his tether both emotionally and politically, and he struck out at those around him for want of a more objectionable foe. Seen in this light, his fear of betrayal appeared rational, whether or not a conspiracy actually existed. No one doubted that López could act entirely from malice, as his persecution of Juliana Ynsfrán suggests. In general, however, he couched his brutality in terms of political necessity. More was the pity for his country, for he clearly misjudged the process he had set in motion. In attempting to smash a putative rebellion among his followers, the marshal made it more difficult for his people to continue their struggle against the Triple Alliance—precisely because the majority of those he had accused and executed had served him so well. They could not be replaced.

As Paraguayan resistance declined, there was no option for López. When he finally died, sword in hand, in March 1870, the words he growled at his Brazilian pursuers could just as easily have served as a eulogy for his nation: “I die with my country!” Such was the marshal's monument.Footnote ⁶³ And today it leaves us asking if those men and women tried and executed at San Fernando really were traitors? If so, what good could have come of their having stayed loyal if the price was the utter destruction of their country?