On 21 March 1965, a group of nearly 100 Paraguayans gathered along the shores of the Paraná River, the waters of which formed the physical border with neighbouring Brazil. This contingent included high-ranking figures from the Stroessner dictatorship, various government authorities and a large gathering of school children. In the shadow of the majestic Guaíra waterfalls that would later be destroyed as a result of this unfolding geopolitical drama, the group proceeded to raise the Paraguayan flag, sing the national anthem and give rousing speeches about the pride and sovereignty of their nation.Footnote 1 The choice of location reveals the visit's true purpose, as this region had been a heavily disputed frontier zone for nearly a century. In response, Brazilian soldiers occupied the exact same spot and in late October they arrested a group of Paraguayan officials. This cascading series of events embroiled Brazil and Paraguay in a fifteen-month geopolitical stand-off that ended on 22 June 1966 with the signing of the Act of Iguaçu.Footnote 2 This agreement marked the first official step toward what became the Itaipu dam, at the time the largest hydroelectric plant in the world.
At its core, this conflict was about territorial sovereignty in the Guaíra region: What were the limits of the international border? How did it divide the waters of the Paraná River and its famous waterfalls? Who had the right to redraw its boundaries? These issues had been current since the late nineteenth century, but only in the 1960s did questions of topography and geographic demarcation result in a prolonged geopolitical crisis. Although scholars agree that Brazil emerged during this period as the major power in the Southern Cone, they have yet to fully acknowledge the central role of the Guaíra conflict in Brazil's ascent. Given this historiographic oversight, we must ask how a territorial dispute in a long-ignored border region helped change the geopolitical landscape of the Southern Cone. What were the underlying factors of the border crisis? How did they reflect shifting alliances, both within the region and with the United States? And what does its timing in the Cold War climate of the 1960s reveal about the emergence of a new political era?
With the backing of the United States, Brazil's military regime refused to recognise Paraguay's historical claim to the frontier zone. Although the Paraguayan government did benefit from entering Brazil's sphere of influence – through participation in a binational dam project – it did so only on the terms stipulated by Brazil, one of its greatest historical rivals. Brazil's actions throughout the border stand-off also served to marginalise Argentina, whose own borders lay downstream on the same Paraná River.
This article argues that the Guaíra border conflict served as a catalyst for Brazil's rise to power. The geopolitical roots of the Itaipu dam are presented in three main parts. First, there is an overview of how, over the past one hundred years, Brazilians and Paraguayans have formed diverging interpretations of their shared border. The second section then chronicles the fifteen-month stand-off that lasted from March 1965 to June 1966. During this time the two military regimes engaged in a series of diplomatic exchanges, threats, popular mobilisations and battles of public opinion. Discussion of these events revolves around an analysis of how each government used its particular interpretation of the border to legitimise its actions and stake a claim to the development of the Paraná River. The article concludes at the 1966 signing of the Act of Iguaçu, where the first binational framework of the Itaipu dam helped entrench a new geopolitical hierarchy.
The context of the Cold War also shaped the Guaíra border crisis. Especially after the Cuban Revolution of 1959, Latin America served as an important battleground for the global Cold War, and the United States initiated a number of programmes intended to stem the tide of communism in the western hemisphere.Footnote 3 These included public programmes like the Alliance for Progress that incentivised moderate reforms, and also covert plans to put in powerful leaders who would defend US interests.Footnote 4 The dictatorships of Brazil and Paraguay saw themselves as important Cold War allies of the United States: each government framed its political legitimacy around a rigid brand of anti-communism and both sent troops to support the US invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965 – an action that Argentina never took. Although the US government maintained a positive relationship with Paraguay, it considered Brazil its most important partner in Latin America and thus saw Brazil's growth as part of its own geopolitical vision. The Cold War discourse of development and modernisation resonated strongly with Latin American dictatorships. In Brazil, the military's Doctrine of National Security focused heavily on industrial development, and Paraguay's General Stroessner sought to build an industrialised nation that could earn the approval of the United States and its global allies.
To fulfil these development goals, both military regimes looked to the disputed borderlands and the untapped hydroelectric potential of the Paraná River. In an exercise of geopolitical posturing, the Brazilian regime foresaw that despite its overwhelming political and economic strength, it would have to allow its smaller neighbour to participate in a binational development project. Yet the Brazilian government concealed its willingness to collaborate and instead strong-armed Paraguay as a means to unilaterally dictate the terms of how Itaipu's energy and wealth would be distributed.Footnote 5 Additionally, its advances in the frontier zone must be seen as an effort to gain access to Paraguay's fertile eastern border region for Brazilian agricultural migrants known as brasiguaios – an amalgam of the Portuguese words for ‘Brazilian’ and ‘Paraguayan’.Footnote 6 The Stroessner regime, for its part, aimed to consolidate political legitimacy and become a stronger ally of the United States – even if this meant a rapprochement with Brazil. The border crisis occurred exactly one hundred years after the War of the Triple Alliance (1865–70), and Stroessner used the legacy of the war to resurrect the image of Brazil as an unjust invader. Paraguayan efforts to deflect internal opposition toward an outside force only partially succeeded, as popular dissent formed against both the Brazilian ‘invasion’ of the border and Stroessner's complicity in ‘selling out’ the Guaíra waterfalls. Even with this domestic tension the government's nationalist rhetoric meant that despite the concessions made to Brazil, Stroessner still claimed the construction of a Paraná dam as a victory for the Paraguayan people.
The timing of the border conflict was particularly significant. Paraguay had been ruled by the Stroessner dictatorship since 1954, and by the mid-1960s the government began to move the country away from its traditional alliance with Argentina (its neighbour to the west) in favour of Brazil (its neighbour to the east). Brazil, meanwhile, had just seen the overthrow of democratically elected João Goulart in April 1964. Determined to transform the country into a global power, the new military regime manoeuvred to surpass its Latin American neighbours in regional and hemispheric dominance. The Argentine government worried that an upstream Brazil–Paraguay dam would limit its own energy and commercial interests. Even before the 1965 saga began, Brazil had already begun to overtake Argentina as the region's major power.Footnote 7 Argentina's backlash against what became the Itaipu dam did not take place until the 1970s, when it repeatedly denounced Brazil before the United Nations. The river rivalry, however, was fortified in the 1965–6 border crisis.
The foundational Treaty of Itaipu was not signed until 1973 and the dam did not begin to produce electricity until 1984. Yet its long-term impact was first set in motion in the context of the 1960s Cold War. Despite Itaipu's importance, almost no attention has been given to its bellicose beginnings. This makes it all the more necessary to examine the tense history that paved the way for what was widely referred to as ‘the project of the century’.
Existing literature on the 1965 border conflict is relatively thin. Although no study has as yet focused explicitly on its history, various works reference the Guaíra stand-off in relation to other processes, including the presence of Brazilian farmers in eastern Paraguay;Footnote 8 Stroessner's relationship with Brazil;Footnote 9 the political history of the Paraná River;Footnote 10 and the role of Itaipu in Paraguay's national security regime.Footnote 11 Although the works centre on different aspects of the border crisis, they make little attempt to see how the above-cited threads are part of a single, mutually constructed narrative. Additionally, a number of political figures in both Paraguay and Brazil produced first-hand accounts written during the crisis,Footnote 12 and memoirs afterwards.Footnote 13 These books contain intimate details on inter-governmental relations, yet they are constrained by the same nationalistic blinkers that defined the 1965 saga itself. Given the limitations of this scholarship, the present article aims to contribute the most thorough examination to date of the border crisis.
Archival and ethnographic research for this article was conducted at multiple locations in both countries.Footnote 14 In Brazil, the ‘Memórias Reveladas’ project at the National Archive in Rio de Janeiro presented recently declassified documents from the dictatorship's surveillance and security programmes. Equally important were the holdings of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Brasília (usually known as ‘Itamaraty’ after the palace where it is housed), in particular a lengthy dossier on the secret ‘Operation Sagarana’ that until now has been unknown to scholars and offers unparalleled insight into the logistics of Brazil's border actions. In Paraguay, the holdings of the Ministry of Foreign Relations were especially useful, as was the ‘Archive of Terror’ housed in the Ministry of Justice.Footnote 15 In addition, interviews were conducted with surviving political figures, and nearly a dozen newspaper sources were consulted. Furthermore, the role of the United States was analysed through two digital archives of State Department files.Footnote 16 Considering that so much of the conflict consisted of back-and-forth allegations over the exact events along the border, the methodology used for this article enables a side-by-side comparison of each country's narrative. Only in doing so can we make sense of what transpired between March 1965 and June 1966, and why it led to a new era of power relations in the Southern Cone.
One Border, Two Interpretations
To properly contextualise the actions and rhetoric that both nations would deploy throughout the 15-month stand-off, one must first understand why Brazil and Paraguay had such radically different perceptions of their shared border (Figure 1). This difference of interpretation originated in the 1872 Treaty of Loizaga-Cotegipe that followed the War of the Triple Alliance. Signed by the government of Paraguay and the empire of Brazil – and against the desires of both Argentina and Uruguay – the treaty designated the Guaíra waterfalls as the dividing line between nations. Paraguay referred to them collectively as the Salto de Guairá, implying an understanding that all seven of the falls belonged to one singular body of water. Brazilians, on the other hand, called these the Sete Quedas (‘seven falls’), implying that each was unique from the others.Footnote 17 This distinction is critical because the Treaty of 1872 stipulated that the border between Brazil and Paraguay would stretch from the Mbaracajú mountain range toward ‘the waterway or canal of the Paraná River … to the Great Fall of the Seven Falls’.Footnote 18 Paraguay thus interpreted the treaty to mean that the border stretched to the northern end of the waterfalls and encompassed all of them, while Brazil considered the frontier to bisect at the fifth fall – the tallest of the seven cascades.
Contested Border and the Guaíra Waterfalls before the Dam was Built
In the context of Cold War ambitions to harness the untapped energy of the Paraná, Paraguay's understanding that the waterfall (singular) belonged to both countries protected its claim to participate in any development project that included any portion of the falls. For Brazil, however, the belief that the border bisected the waterfalls (plural) justified building a hydroelectric dam on its section of the river that would completely circumvent Paraguayan waters. In the 100 years since the War of the Triple Alliance, Paraguay consistently emphasised that the 1872 Treaty had left a 20 km ‘no man's land’ west of the Guaíra waterfalls. Brazil, in contrast, recognised no such ambiguity and refused to acknowledge Paraguay's claims. From 1872 through to the early 1960s, dozens of bi-national meetings discussed unresolved border issues, many of which made reference to the 20 km of the un-demarcated Mbaracajú Mountain range west of the Paraná River.Footnote 19
A parallel controversy implicated Argentina, a country with an equally important claim to the Paraná. Although the river originates in Brazilian territory, its downstream flow forms the border with Paraguay and Argentina before finally flowing into the basin of the River Plate and the Atlantic Ocean. Throughout the twentieth century, Argentina encouraged river-use regulations based on the principle of ‘prior consultation’ in order to protect itself from any damage from upstream development – specifically targeting Brazil. In the first half of the century, when Argentina's regional superiority was more evident, its proposals for river regulation were respected.Footnote 20 As Brazil's influence grew, however, it rejected Argentina's attachment to prior consultation and instead cited the 1895 Harmon Doctrine – named after the former US Attorney General – to claim that it had no obligation to share water with any downstream nations.Footnote 21
After simmering as a persistent yet relatively uneventful issue for nearly a century, the question of how to use the Paraná River was thrust into the spotlight at the beginning of 1964. On 19 January, Alfredo Stroessner (Paraguay) and João Goulart (Brazil) met to discuss the river's hydroelectric development. Given the political context at the time, this meeting might have seemed impossible: Goulart was a leftist social reformer while Stroessner was a military dictator at the head of a violent regime. Yet their mutual desire to harness the industrialising power of the river motivated the two leaders to put aside their opposing political views. Goulart's vision for a border dam differed drastically from that of the Brazilian dictatorship that would eventually make the project a reality. After his meeting with Stroessner, Goulart stated that Paraguay's participation would be ‘a sincere, total, and absolute collaboration’ – a concession that Brazil's dictatorship, soon after overthrowing Goulart, would make only nominally and as a diplomatic gesture.Footnote 22 Goulart also mentioned that Argentina and Uruguay would be consumers of the dam's energy, an indication that he saw a hydroelectric project as a means to strengthen the geopolitical unity of the Southern Cone.Footnote 23 Brazil's military government used Itaipu for the exact opposite purpose, and instead saw a bi-national dam as a way to enhance its own power at the expense of neighbouring countries. Moreover, rumours suggested that Goulart would fund the dam with loans from the Soviet Union – a fact that surely incensed the anti-communist sectors in Brazil that were already plotting regime change.Footnote 24
The United States was similarly opposed to Goulart. Although the US government did not have a direct hand in the eventual Brazilian coup, it did systematically undermine Goulart's presidency – in what one historian has called a ‘quiet intervention’.Footnote 25 Looking through the prism of the Alliance for Progress, both the Kennedy (1961–3) and Johnson (1963–9) administrations saw Brazil as essential to winning the Cold War in Latin America. As noted in a 1963 State Department memo, ‘If US policy fails in Brazil, it will become extremely difficult to achieve success elsewhere in Latin America.’Footnote 26 Yet Goulart remained a steady thorn in the side of US interests as he renewed diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and resisted Kennedy's efforts to isolate Cuba from the rest of the hemisphere.Footnote 27 Moreover, Goulart's brother-in-law Leonel Brizola, the governor of Rio Grande do Sul, nationalised the US company International Telephone and Telegraph.Footnote 28 As Goulart continued to unveil increasingly progressive policies – including a vision for large-scale agrarian reform – the United States closely monitored the possibilities for military intervention. On the cusp of the 1964 coup, Secretary of State Dean Rusk informed Lincoln Gordon, the US ambassador in Brazil, of the commitment to seeing the overthrow of Goulart's ‘communist dominated dictatorship’.Footnote 29
Late in the night of 31 March, a coup deposed Goulart and established a military regime that would rule Brazil for 21 years. Although the United States did not have a direct hand in the coup of 31 March, declassified documents from the Joint Chiefs of Staff indicate that if needed by Brazil's army, a package of weapons was in reserve at McGuire Air Force base, a carrier ship was waiting in nearby waters and oil shipments were ready for delivery.Footnote 30 Lincoln Gordon would later compare the importance of Goulart's downfall to ‘the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Blockade … and the resolution of the missile crisis in Cuba’.Footnote 31
The Johnson administration recognised the new government within 18 hours of the coup, and soon thereafter gave Brazil an emergency US$50 million loan. In the remaining years of the 1960s, Brazil's dictatorship received US$1.2 billion from the United States, making it the largest recipient of Alliance for Progress funds in the western hemisphere.Footnote 32 In the initial stages of the new military regime – before glaring human rights abuses forced the United States to reduce its support – Brazil's dictatorship proved to be a very beneficial investment for the US government. In particular, Brazil took a leading role in the US invasion of the Dominican Republic, thereby helping legitimise an intervention that was otherwise unpopular among most Latin American nations.Footnote 33 An analysis of US financial support to Paraguay and Argentina during the 1960s further reveals shifts in the region's geopolitical landscape. Paraguay was the first nation in Latin America to request aid from the Alliance for Progress, and its package of US$80 million amounted to almost 25 per cent of its entire gross domestic product.Footnote 34 Among other initiatives, US economic aid helped construct a 200-mile highway connecting the Paraguayan capital Asunción to the Brazilian border. This US-funded road gave Paraguay a new commercial trade route to the Atlantic Ocean, further reorienting Paraguay's economic and political compass away from Argentina and toward Brazil. Frank Mora and Jerry Cooney write that the United States supported Stroessner's growing ties with Brazil largely because the US State Department was increasingly suspicious of Argentina's civilian president Arturo Illia (1963–6).Footnote 35 Illia had vowed to cancel all foreign oil contracts in Argentina, while significantly increasing commercial ties to the Soviet Union.Footnote 36 Consequently, US economic aid to Argentina decreased from US$135 million in 1963 to US$21 million in 1964.Footnote 37 These trends accelerated Brazil's continued rise as the major force in the Southern Cone.
Despite these emerging financial and political alliances, the relationship between Brazil and Paraguay was far from simple. Both countries were ruled by military regimes with similar worldviews, yet it was exactly that overlap in geopolitical ambition that soon incited a major crisis. Even the names of their policies were disquieting: in Paraguay, Stroessner called his realignment away from Argentina the ‘March to the East’, and starting in the 1930s, Brazil's own vision for territorial and ideological expansion had been known as the ‘March to the West’. Each government set its sights on the energy potential of the Paraná River and began to press its claims to the border region around the Guaíra waterfalls. For nearly a century the diverging interpretations of the border had existed rather benignly, but the Cold War climate of the 1960s strengthened national security concerns for both the Brazilian and Paraguayan dictatorships. A report from Brazil's National Intelligence Service described Paraguay's ambitions as ‘entirely absurd, a perversion of legal-historical fact … by a pseudo-geographic worldview’.Footnote 38 Paraguay, for its part, considered its stance to be ‘completely solid’ and ridiculed Brazil's assertions that the border had been ‘definitively and fully demarcated since 1872’.Footnote 39 It was in this context of mutual distrust that the simmering border conflict began to boil over.
The Border Takes Centre Stage
The day before the contingent of Paraguayans gathered near Guaíra on 21 March 1965, General Alfredo Stroessner visited the border in person. According to Paraguay's Minister of the Interior, Stroessner wanted to ‘survey and measure the geopolitical potential of the area’ and left instructions to assemble the local population in order to inform them of ‘our frontier divisions and our rights [in] the region’.Footnote 40 The following day nearly one hundred Paraguayans gathered along the shores of the Paraná for a ceremony that included the raising of the Paraguayan flag, the singing of the national anthem and a series of patriotic speeches (Figure 2).Footnote 41 According to the evidence of Brazil's Operation Sagarana, one speaker declared that ‘Paraguay would recuperate this territory that was stolen from them after the War of the Triple Alliance’.Footnote 42 A series of investigative reports published in the Jornal do Brasil reveal that three Brazilian citizens who lived nearby witnessed these actions and one even ran home to get a camera. Once the Paraguayans had left, all three Brazilians went to the nearest military office to hand over the film negatives and give official testimony to what they had seen.Footnote 43
Paraguay's Flag-raising Ceremony, 21 March 1965. Major Meza Guerrero Addresses the Crowd along the Border
A few weeks later, Coronel Otávio da Silva Tosta, as head of the National Security Council's Special Border Commission (Comissão Especial da Faixa da Fronteira), visited the region to plan Brazil's response. On this visit Coronel Tosta began formulating what would become Operation Sagarana, a secret collaboration between Itamaraty, the army and various government ministries. With the explicit goal of occupying the border region militarily, Operation Sagarana sought to link the frontier zone to the adjacent Brazilian states of Paraná and Mato Grosso do Sul, a process also intended to curb Paraguay's influence in the area. Coronel Tosta returned to Rio de Janeiro and presented his report to the National Security Council. He finalized the details of Operation Sagarana in meetings with General Artur da Costa e Silva, the Minister of War, and Vasco Leitão da Cunha, the Minister of Foreign Relations.Footnote 44 With the operation's framework in place, the government authorised deployment of the Brazilian military to the exact location where the Paraguayans had held their ceremonies.Footnote 45
Two months later, on 17 June, a detachment made up of a sergeant and seven soldiers crossed the Paraná River and set up camp just south of a small outpost known as Porto Coronel Renato.Footnote 46 More than any other aspect of the 15-month border conflict, this presence of Brazil's military caused the most controversy. For Paraguay, this ‘act of aggression’ constituted a complete violation of territorial sovereignty.Footnote 47 Brazil, on the other hand, considered Porto Renato to be within its own national boundaries and thus saw Paraguay's previous actions in March – and not its own movement in June – as the actual invasion. The Brazilian government deployed a Cold War rationale by saying it sent the detachment only to protect against communist terrorism along the border.Footnote 48 Over the course of the following year, Brazil routinely downplayed both the size and importance of these soldiers, referring to the group as nothing but ‘a tiny detachment’ or describing their presence as merely ‘symbolic’.Footnote 49 Internal documents, however, indicate that Brazil explicitly sent the detachment in order to ‘counteract Paraguay's growing presence in the region’.Footnote 50
News of Brazil's garrison in Porto Renato quickly made its way to Asunción, where the Paraguayan authorities began to apply diplomatic pressure for the removal of the troops. Chancellor Raúl Sapena Pastor (head of the Cancillería, the Paraguayan Ministry of Foreign Relations) met routinely with Jaime Souza Gomes, the Brazilian ambassador, and even General Stroessner himself made personal appeals to his colleagues in Brazil. Having made little progress in Asunción, Chancellor Sapena Pastor travelled to Brasília in early July to make his appeal directly to Brazil's Foreign Minister.Footnote 51 For nearly two months Brazil gave no response, nor did it officially acknowledge that it had even sent troops across the Paraná River. On 1 September Brazil's president, General Humberto Castelo Branco, finally sent a letter to Stroessner in which he stated that the group in Porto Renato ‘cannot represent anything inconvenient or harmful for either country, and that its presence can by no means indicate a strategy of pressure, coercion or repression on the part of the Brazilian Government’.Footnote 52 Nowhere in his note did Castelo Branco refer to the appeal to have the troops removed. The dismissive tone of this letter must have incensed Paraguay's leaders – one report noted that Stroessner himself was left ‘totally unsatisfied’ – and the Ministry of Foreign Relations spent the next three weeks preparing a lengthy response.Footnote 53 This marked the beginning of a back-and-forth exchange between the foreign ministries that one Paraguayan official referred to as ‘a veritable paper war’.Footnote 54 As this conflict unfolded in the sphere of diplomatic communication, it also began to materialise on the ground itself.
In the middle of October, Paraguay received reports that Brazil was constructing barracks, roads and even an airstrip on the lands adjacent to Porto Renato – the early results of Operation Sagarana. In response, Chancellor Sapena Pastor delivered a letter to Ambassador Souza Gomes hoping that Brazil would confirm its increased presence along the border. Expressing his disappointment in how unresponsive Brazil had been over the previous month, Sapena Pastor also indicated that he had just commissioned a group of important Paraguayan authorities to travel to the ‘un-demarcated zone’ to report back personally to him.Footnote 55 On the morning of 21 October 1965 – exactly seven months after Paraguay's previous trip to the border region – five men boarded a plane in Asunción and after landing on an empty road because of a lack of airfields, drove in a jeep to the Brazilian detachment. This group consisted of Emilio Meza Guerrero, the army major pictured in Figure 2 giving a speech during Paraguay's flag ceremony on 21 March; Pedro Godinot de Villare, the Undersecretary of Foreign Relations; Carlos Saldívar, the Chancellor's legal advisor; Conrado Pappalardo, Stroessner's Chief-of-Staff; and an accompanying photographer. The group arrived in Porto Renato in the early afternoon and began taking pictures of the newly constructed facilities along the western shore of the Paraná River. A truck carrying Brazilian soldiers quickly appeared and detained the group for several hours.
What happened next depends on the perspective of the story teller, as each government presented a version for the sake of their own geopolitical objectives. The importance of these actions, however, lies not in distilling the exact course of events. Rather, we must trace how these competing stories were re-told and disseminated by each nation, quickly becoming a central hub on which the border conflict would revolve.
The only two still-surviving members of the group of arrested Paraguayans, Saldívar and Pappalardo, presented their versions of what took place in Porto Renato during interviews with the author. Both recall that the Brazilian sergeant refused to provide a reason for their detention. Saldívar remembers feeling particularly anxious because, to him, the previous months ‘had felt like a war … we knew what had happened [in the War of the Triple Alliance], and our arrest could have started another one’.Footnote 56 Above all, Pappalardo remembers when Meza Guerrero refused to hand over his gun, claiming that it was his right as a Paraguayan to defend himself whenever necessary. Trying to deflate the situation, Pappalardo told his compatriot, ‘Emilio, my dear friend, hand over your pistol to this sergeant, and tomorrow I'll buy you five new ones back in Asunción.’ At this point, according to Pappalardo, Brazilian reinforcements arrived in the form of an army major, a captain, two lieutenants and a company of ‘heavily armed soldiers’ who assumed ‘combat positions’ and treated them with ‘total incivility’.Footnote 57 A Paraguayan press release emphasised these details, accusing Brazilian authorities of ‘mistreatment’.Footnote 58 For the remainder of the afternoon, the Paraguayans sat outside – on tree stumps, according to Saldívar – until General Tavares do Carmo, the commander of Brazil's southern army, arrived and gave the authorisation to release the five men.Footnote 59
In Brazil's recounting of these events, ‘the Paraguayan commission was never at any point detained’ and the matter simply involved needing to wait until the proper authorities arrived.Footnote 60 Brazil's narrative claimed the following sequence of events. When initially approached by the Brazilian soldiers, the Paraguayan authorities refused to give their names, and when instructed to hand over their photography equipment, Meza Guerrero refused and acted in an increasingly threatening manner. The Brazilian sergeant then told the photographer to stay where he was until the commanding officer, Capitão Gildon Pinto de Madeiras, could come to sort out the situation. Meza Guerrero asked if they were being arrested and the sergeant told him no, that only the photographer needed to stay put. According to one version disseminated in the Brazilian press, the Paraguayan authorities then voluntarily ‘turned themselves in’ as an act of solidarity with their detained photographer.Footnote 61 When Capitão Madeiras arrived, he advised the Paraguayans that they were not permitted to take photographs of Brazil's military presence, and moreover, that they had intruded 2 km into Brazilian territory. Outraged at the suggestion that this land belonged to Brazil, Meza Guerrero drew his gun and threatened to ‘send an armed squadron of Paraguayans to trap the Brazilian soldiers’. The situation quickly de-escalated once Meza Guerrero handed over his weapon. According to the Jornal do Brasil, ‘everything ended with a perfect understanding, with normal farewells’ and Meza Guerrero even extended a cordial invitation to the Brazilian officers to spend the December holidays with their families in Asunción.
The Porto Renato incident raised the stakes of the border conflict by sparking new narratives of colonialism, national pride and violence. And whereas the early months of this stand-off had mostly taken place in the realm of inter-embassy exchanges, the events of 21 October attracted widespread media attention and inaugurated the battle for public opinion that played out over the following year. Paraguay in particular seized on this new theatre of conflict and routinely portrayed Brazil as the aggressor. According to Christine Folch, the Paraguayan public saw Brazil's presence in Guaíra as ‘nothing less than a provocation to war and an affront to Paraguay's national sovereignty. Speeches and letters to the editor in repudiation of Brazilian aggression were an almost a daily feature in October and November 1965.’Footnote 62 News of the 21 October arrests circulated widely and sparked debate over the possibility of international mediation as Argentina, Uruguay and even the United Nations were proposed as potential arbiters.Footnote 63
On 24 November, Stroessner had two different meetings with foreign leaders to discuss the simmering border conflict. First, he spent the late morning with Dean Rusk, the US Secretary of State who was on his way back from giving a speech in Rio de Janeiro. The transcript of this meeting reveals the depths of Stroessner's desire to be respected by world leaders: after emphasising how well his soldiers had done in supporting the US invasion of the Dominican Republic, Stroessner complained that Paraguay received far less economic aid than other Latin American countries. He then boasted that many foreign dignitaries, including French president Charles de Gaulle, ‘had assured him that he was a great president presiding over an exemplary government’. Stroessner ended the meeting with an appeal that bordered on neediness, imploring Rusk to give Paraguay ‘more attention at the top and more favorable treatment in general’.Footnote 64 Despite the United States’ positive leanings toward Paraguay – Richard Nixon would later praise Paraguay ‘for opposing communism more strongly than any other nation in the world’Footnote 65 – the meeting with Secretary Rusk left little doubt about Brazil's status as the preferred partner of the United States.
In the afternoon Stroessner then met with the Brazilian general Golbery do Couto e Silva, one of the most influential officials of the military regime.Footnote 66 As the ideological architect of the dictatorship's Doctrine of National Security (Doutrina de Segurança Nacional, DSN), Couto e Silva played a key role in mediating the border situation. Formed during his tenure at Brazil's Escola Superior de Guerra (Higher War College), Couto e Silva's vision for the DSN included theories of war and of Brazil's potential as a world superpower, and a development model that combined Keynesian economics and state capitalism.Footnote 67 Industrialisation was key to achieving the goals of the DSN, yet Brazil's industrial progress had been slowed by a lack of reliable energy sources.Footnote 68 A hydroelectric dam on the Paraná River thus presented Couto e Silva and his colleagues with the prospect of enough energy to power a new era of industrialisation. Additionally, Couto e Silva surely saw the Guaíra stand-off as a perfect opportunity to fulfil the idea of ‘fronteiras vivas’ (living borders). This ideology linked Brazil's global prowess to the development of its borders – in the sense both of physical fortification, and also of Brazil's ideological ascent beyond the boundaries of its nation-state.Footnote 69 Under Couto e Silva's guidance in the 1960s, these development ideologies eventually made the Itaipu dam the paragon of state development. It also set in motion the movement of brasiguaio farmers from Brazil across the Paraguayan border and the establishment of new agricultural colonies.
While politicians and military officials worked behind the scenes, popular forces began to mobilise their own responses. On 27 November the youth sections of the Revolutionary Febrerista and Christian Democrat opposition parties organised a demonstration in Asunción. In defiance of Paraguay's Law no. 294 that outlawed almost all forms of public protest, the crowd wound its way through the city centre, stopping only at targeted locations: protestors burned a Brazilian flag in front of the Commerce Office of the Brazilian embassy, threw Molotov cocktails through the windows of various Brazilian-owned business, lit smoke bombs across from the Centre for Brazilian Studies and painted graffiti on the walls of the Brazilian Military Offices proclaiming: ‘Paraguay sí, bandeirantes no: fuera los mamelucos’ (‘Paraguay yes, invaders no: out with the bastards’).Footnote 70 The Paraguayan police descended on the protestors, dispersed the crowd violently and arrested 15 students.Footnote 71
Stroessner attempted to spin the protests in his favour by holding them up as a sign that the entire country rallied behind his government. Over the following months, a specific narrative was related continuously in the state-sponsored media, suggesting that for the first time since Stroessner took power in 1954, all political factions in Paraguay could unite around a common cause.Footnote 72 The opportunity to deflect criticism toward an external target allowed Stroessner to declare that
All sectors of public opinion in Paraguay have expressed their outrage at the occupation of the non-demarcated border zone by Brazilian forces. All of the centres, associations, clubs, students … the unions, [the] cultural, social and political groups, the veterans …, the Army Reserves, everyone without exception has spontaneously denounced the hostile attitude [of Brazil].Footnote 73
Yet the Asunción protest was evidence to the contrary, since it targeted both the Brazilian occupation and Stroessner's own complicity. Not only did this demonstration indicate the willingness of Paraguay's youth to defy a repressive dictatorship, it also belied the myth propagated by Stroessner that the entire country rallied behind his government to oppose Brazil. As a high school student during the demonstration, Ricardo Caballero Aquino remembers a central rallying cry of the protest: that the dictatorship had sold out the Paraguayan people in order to allow Brazil to take over Guaíra. Caballero Aquino recalls speeches from that day in which student leaders spoke of how Stroessner had gone to military school in Rio de Janeiro in the 1940s and ‘has been in love with Brazil ever since’.Footnote 74 Stroessner did, in fact, study in Brazil and maintained close ties with the Brazilian military. Keenly aware of this situation, Brazil's Foreign Ministry sought to exploit Stroessner's need to balance ‘his personal feelings with the official stance of the Paraguayan government’.Footnote 75 Despite Stroessner's declarations of Paraguay's unity against the border occupation, he proved very willing to appease Brazil at key moments. Less than a week after the anti-Brazil student protests, the Stroessner regime officially apologised to the Brazilian government and offered full compensation for the damage incurred.Footnote 76
Tensions continued to mount and according to Mario Gibson Barboza – the newly appointed ambassador in Asunción – 1966 began in a climate of ‘enormous difficulty. Brazil found itself on the brink of war with Paraguay … The conflict was strong and violent, the impasse deep and insurmountable … and all over the great problem of sovereignty, that magical word for which people kill and are killed.’Footnote 77 Seeking to win the support of the international community, Paraguay's Ministry of Foreign Relations began sending out to embassies and foreign ministries all over the world copies of its previous communication with Brazil.Footnote 78 In February, Chancellor Sapena Pastor wrote to Ambassador Barboza to express his ‘energetic protest’ in light of news that Brazil had recently built new roads along – and potentially across – the border, and also that its presence in the region now included a battalion of over 600 men.Footnote 79 Comparing multiple versions of this letter offers a window into the minutiae of the border conflict. Although Brazil eventually received a fully edited copy, rough drafts can be found in the archive of Paraguay's Ministry of Foreign Relations. In several instances the original draft referenced the waterfalls as ‘los saltos’ (the falls) only to have hand-written notes in the margins change the wording to ‘el salto’ (the fall). This inconsistency suggests that even within the government, great attention had to be given to putting forth a unified message. With so much depending on each country's ability to defend its particular view of the border, even the slightest mistake could be disastrous.
With funding from the Ministry of War and the Foreign Ministry, the early stages of Operation Sagarana built up Brazil's presence along the border. After the detachment of troops in June fulfilled the first objective of occupying the region, Operation Sagarana moved on to its second phase and constructed multiple airstrips and a vast network of roads, housing complexes and electricity lines that connected Porto Renato to the city of Guaíra. Additionally, Coronel Tosta used his connections with the Brazilian Institute for Agrarian Reform (Instituto Brasileiro de Reforma Agraria, IBRA) to help secure land titles throughout the region. These holdings eventually accomplished the longer-term goals of building schools, hospitals and residences to support an expanded military population.Footnote 80 While both governments jockeyed for political and diplomatic leverage in the ongoing border debate, Operation Sagarana steadily reinforced Brazil's physical claim to the area.
In early March, Brazil's National Security Council convened to discuss the ongoing border conflict.Footnote 81 In attendance were President Castelo Branco, his entire cabinet, and every high-ranking government minister. The timing of this gathering was especially important since the Serviço de Segurança Nacional (SSN) – a branch of the military's secret police – had just submitted a report claiming that Paraguayan forces were planning to incite its border population to ‘infiltrate Brazilian lands and massacre the soldiers posted in Porto Renato in order to “cleanse their national honour”’.Footnote 82 No uprising ever occurred, and Brazil's top leaders probably never saw Paraguay's army as a credible threat. But the unfolding situation represented more than just potential border violence. At one point President Castelo Branco observed that the Guaíra conflict had serious implications for all of South America, emphasising above all that Paraguay played an essential role in limiting the hegemony of Argentina.Footnote 83
The changing geopolitical landscape impacted all governments in the region. In Paraguay, the Stroessner regime sought to leverage its position between Brazil and Argentina – both geographically and politically – to increase its own economic standing. A report from the US embassy in Asunción observed that ‘To bring pressure on Brazil … Paraguay is now playing up improved relations with Argentina.’Footnote 84 This eventually led Stroessner to negotiate a deal with Argentina for a second bi-national dam on the same Paraná River, a project that resulted in the Yacyretá hydroelectric station only 500 km downstream of the future Itaipu site. Paraguay thus played into the rivalry between Brazil and Argentina to stake a claim to two different hydroelectric projects along its borders. For Argentina, competition over the Paraná River belonged to what the former Argentine diplomat Juan Archibaldo Lanús referred to as the ‘hydroelectric saga’.Footnote 85 Along with threatening its own energy projects further downstream, a Brazil–Paraguay dam would cut off Argentina's shipping and commercial lines to São Paulo through the Paraná–Tietê river systems. More conspiratorially, Argentina would also claim that Brazil could use a dam as a ‘water bomb’ weapon that could flood Buenos Aires.Footnote 86
Support from the US government helps explain Brazil's willingness to antagonise neighbouring countries. At an economic forum held in Buenos Aires, Paraguayan delegates approached Lincoln Gordon – the former ambassador to Brazil and then Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs – to discuss the border conflict at Guaíra. Gordon acknowledged that he had indeed received all of the documents sent by Paraguay over the previous year – none of which received an official response – but indicated ‘that it would be very difficult for Brazil to remove its military forces’. Moreover, he voiced concerns about a ‘smear campaign’ in the Paraguayan media against Brazil. Although Gordon implied that his government sided with Brazil in the border conflict, he did convey US interest in the prospect of a hydroelectric dam built jointly by Paraguay and Brazil on the Paraná River.Footnote 87
During this impasse, both governments continued to lobby potential allies and rally domestic support. In early April Stroessner gave a lengthy speech to the Paraguayan House of Representatives denouncing Brazil's invasion of Guaíra and its failure to honour the legal and moral codes of ‘pan-Americanism that serve as the foundation of cooperation, solidarity, and friendship amongst the peoples of this hemisphere’. His description of Brazil as an imperialist nation juxtaposed his characterisation of Paraguay as a ‘generous, welcoming, and heroic’ country that harboured neither ‘a domineering spirit nor greed’.Footnote 88 The rhetoric of this speech reverberated almost daily in the pages of Paraguay's newspapers. Patria, the official print organ of Stroessner's Colorado Party, ran a month-long series of articles titled ‘Guairá in the Spotlight of America’.Footnote 89 Even opposition newspapers got swept up in wave of anti-Brazilian nationalism; El Pueblo, a paper connected to the Revolutionary Febrerista Party, changed its masthead to proclaim ‘The Guairá Falls are and always will be Paraguayan!’Footnote 90 International media also provided coverage, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, and other large-circulation dailies in Mexico, Chile, Venezuela, Panama and Argentina.Footnote 91
In Brazil, Juracy Magalhães consistently made brash and often belittling statements about Paraguay. In response to Paraguay's Chancellor Sapena Pastor having called Brazil ‘aggressive and expansionist’, Juracy Magalhães said, ‘All of the Americas are well aware of the situation of our two governments and knows which of the two must resort to fabricating artificial storylines.’Footnote 92 At a speech to the Chamber of Deputies in the middle of May, Juracy Magalhães spoke at great length about the Treaty of 1872 and justified Brazil's subsequent actions by declaring that ‘we have the duty to preserve the political legacy of our forefathers and the territory they left us’. Despite the political posturing that consumed most of his remarks, Juracy Magalhães concluded by appealing directly to Paraguay and hinted at the underlying current of the border conflict that would very soon take centre stage: ‘We hope that the Paraguayan government trusts in the genuine sincerity of our offer to meet together for the wellbeing of both of our friendly nations, in hopes of jointly developing all of the resources offered by the Sete Quedas waterfalls.’Footnote 93
The Act of Iguaçu and the Birth of Itaipu
On 21 June, representatives from both countries met in the border region for two intense days of negotiations that produced the Act of Iguaçu, a relatively short document laying the framework for a bi-national dam on the Paraná River.Footnote 94 Brazil's delegation consisted of 23 men from various ministries within the military regime, while Paraguay's contingent counted 20 individuals of similar positions – including all four of the political figures who had been arrested by Brazilian troops the previous October.Footnote 95 The meeting got off to a rocky start when Paraguay's delegation insisted on the creation of a neutral border zone and on a 50:50 split of all energy eventually produced – the exact criteria that Brazil had refused throughout the preceding months of behind-the-scenes diplomatic exchanges in the run-up to the meeting of 21 June.Footnote 96 Brazil argued that a neutral frontier zone would set a dangerous precedent by which any neighbouring country could, in theory, then challenge its borders.Footnote 97 This stalemate carried on into the afternoon and at one point Chancellor Sapena Pastor insinuated that both governments needed to reassess the Treaty of 1872. Juracy Magalhães replied that a treaty could only be renegotiated by another treaty or by a war; and since Brazil refused to discuss a new treaty, he asked if Paraguay was willing to start a war. Taken aback, Sapena Pastor asked whether the Brazilian chancellor was threatening Paraguay. Juracy Magalhães said that he was simply trying to have a realistic conversation based on facts.Footnote 98
At this peak of tension both parties agreed to call off the day's negotiations and reconvene the next morning. Privately, Juracy Magalhães commented that this impasse might prove insurmountable. Before leaving, however, Sapena Pastor and Juracy Magalhães exchanged proposals from their respective delegations. Each group deliberated deep into the night and returned the following morning with nearly identical documents. The main differences concerned two items that, as will be shown below, became the most important. The entire second day focused on the exact phrasing of these two articles.
At 7 pm on 22 June, in the presence of both delegations and various reporters, Juracy Magalhães and Sapena Pastor signed the final document. It consisted of eight articles, with numbers 3 and 4 being the critical pair that had demanded so much attention. Article 3 stated that Brazil and Paraguay agreed to jointly explore the hydroelectric potential of their shared waters; the Paraguayan delegation celebrated this recognition of equal access to the Paraná River as its greatest accomplishment.Footnote 99 Article 4 was the most controversial part of the final agreement. Although it proclaimed that the energy produced would be ‘divided equally between both countries’, it also stipulated that each nation maintained the right to buy the other's unused portion ‘at a fair price’. With a fraction of the population and energy needs of Brazil, Paraguay would never use its 50 percent share of the energy. Paraguay initially suggested selling its leftover energy ‘at cost price’ but gave in when Brazil threatened to end negotiations during the afternoon of the second day.Footnote 100 Brazil's insertion of the intentionally vague ‘fair price’ clause guaranteed its ability to reap tremendous profits from the Itaipu dam.Footnote 101
The final text also included a single memorandum. This document declared that although Brazil remained firmly convinced of its territorial rights as granted by the Treaty of 1872, it would remove its troops from the border as a sign of goodwill. The very next paragraph states that Paraguay also maintained its interpretation of the Treaty of 1872 and asserted its own sovereign claim to the exact same region occupied by Brazil's military. What appears to be a fundamental paradox – both countries using an alleged peace treaty to codify the exact reasons that nearly brought them to war – perfectly embodies the border conflict itself. Each government made public gestures of cooperation only because it helped lead to the development of a hydroelectric project. Yet neither changed its ideological approach and, in the end, the border conflict continued to fester for years to come.
The signing of the Act of Iguaçu invoked a sweeping discourse of modernisation and unity. Juracy Magalhães proclaimed that the agreement dissolved the tensions that had ‘sullied the longstanding friendship of Brazil and Paraguay’ and honoured the pan-American community by promoting ‘the peace and progress of our entire continent’. Sapena Pastor congratulated all involved for ‘finding solutions to the most difficult problems facing the relationship between Brazil and Paraguay in the twentieth century’.Footnote 102 Newspapers in both countries disseminated this triumphant narrative. In Asunción, La Tribuna celebrated the ‘positive and eloquent’ results of the meeting, and Rio de Janeiro's O Globo remarked on the unprecedented exchange of peaceful negotiations that paved the way to construct the world's largest dam.Footnote 103 Its symbolic achievements, however, would repeatedly be tested.
Less than a week later, an article in O Globo reported that Brazil had honoured its agreement by beginning to withdraw its soldiers from Porto Renato.Footnote 104 If true, this would have indicated Brazil's genuine interest in building a new period of mutual prosperity. Yet the Brazilian regime made no such efforts and the detachment remained firmly entrenched along the border. By September, Paraguay's government had grown so frustrated that it sent Sapena Pastor to New York to speak at the General Assembly of the United Nations to denounce Brazil for reneging on its promise. In response, Brazil said that although most of its troops had been removed, one sergeant and one corporal remained in order to guard the barracks and ‘dissuade contraband activities’.Footnote 105 Only on 3 December – nearly 18 months after its soldiers first arrived in Porto Renato – did Brazil finally withdraw its military forces.
Brazil's government did not remove its troops before making one final deal that it had been seeking for years: uninhibited access to the fertile agricultural lands of eastern Paraguay. In his analysis of the Paraná borderlands, Andrew Nickson writes: ‘In exchange for the withdrawal of Brazilian troops from the Falls, agreed in the Act of Iguazu, the Paraguayan Government removed existing restrictions on Brazilian colonization.’Footnote 106 Specifically, the Stroessner regime repealed the 1940 Agrarian Statute that prohibited the sale of land to foreigners within 150 km of the border. Although this law had previously been circumvented – Brazilian farmers had trickled across the border for decades – its abolition allowed for the open sale of land. Brazilians began to flood en masse into Paraguay's eastern frontier, setting off a wave of brasiguaio agricultural migration. In 1962, fewer than 2,500 Brazilian colonists lived in Paraguay's three main eastern border departments, but with the removal of legal restrictions that number soared to 29,000 in 1972, and 360,000 by 1983.Footnote 107 Currently, there are an estimated 450,000 brasiguaios, representing 60 percent of the border region and nearly 10 percent of Paraguay's entire population.Footnote 108 Brazil's manoeuvres during the border crisis therefore secured not only geopolitical prestige and access to unprecedented hydroelectric energy, but a monopoly on what would quickly become a thriving agricultural enclave. By refusing to remove its troops unless Stroessner granted unfettered access to new lands, the Brazilian government expanded its reach even deeper into Paraguayan territory.
Conclusion
In the mid-1960s a bi-national dam represented the chance to solve two problems at once: the governments of Brazil and Paraguay would harness the hydroelectric power of the Paraná River while also resolving a century-old border conflict. Over 1,300 km2 were flooded to create Itaipu's reservoir basin. This area included the Guaíra waterfalls themselves, meaning that the rising waters of Itaipu swallowed up the entire region around Porto Renato. After 100 years of geopolitical stand-offs, Brazil and Paraguay had finally found a way to make their border conflict literally disappear. As Brazil's Foreign Ministry described in a confidential report: the dam ‘should flood the entire disputed zone, and as such, would finally resolve this problem’.Footnote 109
Over the course of the Guaíra border crisis, the Southern Cone's geopolitical compass tilted dramatically. During the infancy of Brazil's dictatorship, its leaders stood firm against the demands of both Paraguay and Argentina, allowing the Brazilian regime to bolster its standing throughout the region. By seeking to fulfil the development ideologies of its Doctrine of National Security – and with the support of the US government – the Brazilian dictatorship gained control of both the waters of the Paraná River and the lands of eastern Paraguay. This process brought Paraguay into Brazil's sphere of power and minimised the influence of Argentina. And although marginalised by the stigma of being a secondary nation stuck in Brazil's shadow, Paraguay's actions at Guaíra guaranteed that it would benefit greatly from new sources of hydroelectric energy.
The Guaíra border stand-off was one of the most significant events in the formation of Latin America's current geopolitical landscape. Along with enabling the construction of the Itaipu dam, this process catalysed Brazil's ascent as the Southern Cone's major power. Rooted in the legacies of the War of the Triple Alliance, the conflict was reanimated a century later by the ambitions of two military regimes in the throes of Latin America's Cold War. For fifteen months between 1965 and 1966, the governments of Brazil and Paraguay attempted to defend their national sovereignty in a tense frontier zone. Each regime mobilised troops along the border and invoked the spectre of war, all to stake a claim to the hydroelectric potential of the Paraná River. When the dust settled, Brazil had secured almost complete control of what was to become the Itaipu project, and was well on its way to becoming the region's most powerful nation. On the 50th anniversary of this momentous – yet almost entirely overlooked – episode in Latin American history, revisiting the Brazil–Paraguay border crisis unearths the forgotten roots of the Itaipu dam while shedding new light on the geopolitics of the Southern Cone.
