Republic or Death! (39 page)

For the sons of the mighty Bolivar

have sworn, thousands upon thousands of times,

to die rather than see the country's

majestic banner humiliated.

Of course there are countries outside South America whose anthems do this too – Italy's repeats ‘We are ready to die, / Italy has called' so many times you worry that singing it counts as a binding contract – but in no other continent's anthems is this message so common.

The anthem that does it best of all, though, is Paraguay's. ‘Republic or Death', it says in its very title, a message that could not be clearer if the anthem were called, ‘Step On My Land and I'll Slit Your Throat'. ‘¡República o Muerte!', to use the Spanish, is three words that say more about what is meant to be at the heart of nationalism than entire books on the subject do. They encapsulate that desire to fight and die for your land; that putting up of barriers against others; that need to keep what's yours for ever, no matter how arbitrary or recent a creation your country actually is. It's because of those three words that I decided I had to go to Paraguay. I wanted to see if that message could still mean something today, when most other countries would baulk at singing anything like them (even most other South American countries, which now ignore the bloodier verses of their original anthems in an effort not to seem like they still hold grudges). The fact that those three words sum up everything there is to do with nationalism is also why, in a way, I knew this book had to be named after this song. Well that, and because it was the only national anthem that worked as a book title.

*

If you spend a few days walking around Asunción, there are some things you can't help but notice. The colours, for a start, especially on the buses, their windows decked out with Jesuses, their sides painted like rainbows as if the decoration is more likely to attract customers than any destination. There's also the almost clichéd pace of life: no one here ever seems too busy to turn down a chat over
tereré
– the ice-cold tea everyone drinks, rapidly sucking it up a metal straw then handing the cup back for a refill, in need of hydration (the temperature's normally over 30°C) as much as caffeine. And there's the poverty too; the shacks you find right outside the city hall, children openly having bucket showers in between them while music blares from stereos that have been illegally connected to the electricity supply.

But there is one thing you're only likely to pick up if you start talking to people: the fact that history is closer to the surface here than in practically any other country you could visit. If you ask someone why all the graffiti around the city seems to feature a flabby-cheeked, bearded man, his eyes burning at passers-by, they'll be happy to tell you it's Mariscal López, one of the country's former dictators and the national hero. ‘Why wouldn't we want him on our walls? He's an example to everyone.' Ask someone else where they're from, they'll reply something like, ‘Piribebuy – you know, where the Brazilians burned down the hospital with everyone in it.' Or if you ask them about politicians today they'll tell you they wish Dr Francia would come back, since he was the last politician who wasn't corrupt; you'll go back to your hotel, look up Dr Francia and discover he died in 1840. It's rather like walking up to someone in London, asking directions to a pub and suddenly finding yourself in a conversation about what Henry VIII would do if he were still in charge. But then few countries have a history as dramatic as Paraguay's, every move of which seems to play into the story of its anthem.

Most histories of the country start with the Jesuits, who arrived in 1607 and didn't just try to convert the existing population, most of whom spoke a language called Guarani, but also tried to take them out of the Spanish colonial system, which had been treating them as a source of labour and women. The Jesuits set up
reduccións
– villages, effectively – where as well as being taught about the glory of Jesus they were taught skills including music. Non-Jesuit Europeans were banned from entering. The Spanish eventually came to see these enclaves as such a threat to their imperialist project that the Jesuits were expelled from all of South America in 1767, the
reduccións
left to decay into picturesque ruins.

Other histories begin with the day Paraguay got independence, on 14 May 1811, when a handful of men slipped out of an alleyway in the middle of Asunción, took control of the main army barracks, then pulled eight of its cannons to the governor's house and demanded that he give up power. Like most people faced with eight cannons would, he promptly did so. The fact it only took a small group to achieve this, and they didn't even have to fire a shot, tells you all you need to know about what a backwater Spain considered this country.

However, the place Paraguay's history
really
begins is when José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia y Velasco – Dr Francia for short – was voted to power in 1814 and soon afterwards became El Supremo, Paraguay's first dictator and the first of a long line of rulers who most people outside the country saw as lunatics. Maybe people should have seen it coming. Dr Francia had a long nose and cloak and would have looked more at home sweeping vampirically through the halls of some crumbling castle than living in the centre of South America.

Dr Francia acted in the impulsive way you expect of a dictator: he established a secret police to crack down on opposition; he banned anyone from standing within six paces of him, to foil assassination attempts; and he decreed that prostitutes should wear golden combs in their hair (both to show what a noble profession it was – Dr Francia being a great advocate of sex before, outside and instead of marriage – and to mock Spanish women who wore such combs as fashion accessories).

But he also went further than most dictators do and closed Paraguay off from the world. Literally. He shut its borders and banned anyone from going in or out, like a nineteenth-century North Korea. He was helped in this by Paraguay's geography – the tangled forests that then dominated its north, the deep rivers to its south whose currents few wanted to tackle, the arid Chaco to its west. He did it, most people think, because he wanted to create a self-sufficient nation, one that could survive without any influence from its giant neighbours, Argentina and Brazil, both of whom had designs on the country (Argentina didn't recognise Paraguay's independence until 1852). He did his best to achieve that aim, taking land from the aristocracy and Church and giving it to the poor, and diversifying the country's agriculture. If you were a Spanish merchant, you would have hated him for it, but if you were an illiterate peasant, what was not to like?

Dr Francia also put in place policies to ensure Paraguay's culture flourished, banning Spaniards from marrying each other so they had to integrate with the locals, and forcing people to speak Guarani. Those measures also apparently included declaring a song, ‘Tetã Purahéi', as the country's first anthem. Some say the music for it has been lost, and that it must have sounded like a Paraguayan folk tune – one of the sad ballads known as
guaranias
. Others say it sounded like any other military march, apart from its chorus, which weirdly jumped into a waltz.

Regardless of the music, the lyrics have survived. They are in Guarani rather than Spanish, Francia apparently saying to a poet, ‘I don't want it in the language of the Spanish foreigner; write it in the people's language,' but they are perhaps most important as evidence that Paraguay's culture has always been one based on fearless self-sacrifice. ‘Our arms, our lives, are due to this country,' it starts, ‘slaves we'll never be.' ‘Brave Paraguayans, / Will you suffer insults / And lose your name and glory, / Or die a thousand times?' asks one verse. ‘Die! Die! Die!' comes back the answer a verse later. In the late 1820s, Dr Francia was so worried about Argentina's designs on the country that he even had that message written into Paraguay's flag, ordering the words ‘Long live the Republic of Paraguay. Independence or death!' to be embroidered on to all of them. It was stamped on to all official documents too.

Dr Francia became ill in 1840. Knowing he was to die, some say he burned all his papers and refused medical aid. After he died, some of the country's old Spanish families apparently stole his body, cut it up and threw it in a river, but by then the Spanish and Guarani populations were so entwined, there was no going back.

*

Just four years after Dr Francia's death, Paraguay got its second dictator, Carlos Antonio López. He was obese – ‘a great sea of meat' – with more chins than most portrait painters would feel safe tackling. He had the looks, in other words, of a man who would take Dr Francia's legacy and build something genuinely cruel out of it. But he actually did the opposite, opening the borders and calling in experts from across the continent and Europe to help modernise the country. He became a president of firsts, building Paraguay's first railway, its first shipyard and foundry, and giving it its postal service. He boosted its intellectual and cultural life too, opening its first theatre and its first secondary school. He was a builder more than a tyrant, in other words. And is he remembered for his achievements today? Barely, it seems. I found one mural of him in Asunción, featuring him staring out sternly from the site of the country's first newspaper, the
Independent Paraguayan
(another thing he set up). No one was giving it a moment's notice.

During his reign, López also modernised the anthem, deciding it needed to be in Spanish. That was the language of the future in South America, he realised, and of diplomacy too. It was the one that foreigners understood – and they were, in many ways, the real audience for this song, the people who López needed to recognise the country's sovereignty as others tried to undermine it. He translated ‘Tetã Purahéi' himself, but, clearly unhappy, is said to have reached out to Vicente López y Planes, the poet behind Argentina's anthem, for words to act as a brand-new anthem. It seems a somewhat wild story – López contacting an Argentine who probably thought Paraguay should not exist – but Vicente is meant to have asked for 1,000 pesos, an unbelievably expensive sum at the time, and so the matter was dropped. Fortunately for López, a Uruguayan poet, Francisco Acuña de Figueroa, heard about Paraguay's search and sent some words of his own, free, ‘dedicated to the republic and its most worthy president' (he might have also been asked; the facts are disputed). He sent a whole seven verses, a song that somehow manages to take in tortuous references to Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, and include such direct lines as:

There is no middle ground between free and slave,

an abyss divides the two

…

Sound the cry, ‘Republic or death!'

In 1853, Carlos had the words printed in his newspaper. It is doubtful anyone realised just how prophetic they would turn out to be.

*

Paraguay's third dictator was López's son, Francisco Solano López – the man whose face you see sprayed across so many of Asunción's walls. His name is everywhere too – I got on several buses named the
Mariscal López
after him.

There are two things everyone will tell you about Mariscal López, who took charge after his father's death in 1862. The first is that his partner was an Irish prostitute, Eliza Lynch, who he met while in Paris trying to buy arms. Eliza's European ways were not welcomed by polite Paraguayan society, which in the twenty-two years since Dr Francia's death had not kept up his friendly attitude to prostitution. Madame Lynch's response to the elite snubbing her seems to have been to insult them right back. One day she invited dozens of Asunción's most notable women to a grand banquet on a boat then, just after it had set off, ordered all the food to be thrown into the river, the women forced to watch as the fish and meat, the sauces and fruit salads congealed across its surface, the food mocking them as they wilted in the sun.

Eliza also became infamous for throwing parties in the ballroom at her house, a room painted so it looked as if vines were crawling across the ceiling and flowers were blooming out of the walls (it is now the dining room of the Gran Hotel del Paraguay). It was at one of those parties that ‘República o Muerte' was sung publicly for the first time, on 24 July 1860 – a whole seven years after it was printed, the delay clearly showing that it had been conceived more for diplomatic purposes than anything else. A visiting French pianist played it, and the room erupted into cheers and applause, the noise apparently so loud dozens of locals were soon gathered outside the house's walls, clamouring to hear this new song that Eliza's patronage had instantly made the height of fashion.

Aside from his choice of partner, Mariscal López is also known for seemingly taking the title of ‘República o Muerte' as a mission statement. In 1864, Brazil backed a coup in Uruguay – a move he saw as dangerously altering the balance of power in South America. Mariscal López's father had always told him to solve problems with a feather, but he was stubborn, still acting like a spoilt child even as he approached middle age. He gave Brazil an ultimatum: to stop meddling in Uruguay's affairs or face war. Brazil unsurprisingly ignored him – it was a country of 12 million people, Paraguay one of 450,000 – and sent troops into Uruguay, but Mariscal López didn't come to his senses; instead he seized a Brazilian ship, then raided some Brazilian towns. He then sent troops to Uruguay, but Argentina refused to let them across their land, so he declared war on Buenos Aires too.

Paraguay soon found itself fighting three enemies (Uruguay by this point had declared war against it as well) hell-bent, in Mariscal López's words, on ending its existence. ‘I am disposed to continue fighting until God … decides the definite fate of the cause,' he wrote in a letter to his opponents after they asked him to stand down. He managed it for five years. Surprisingly, most of the country seemed to agree with him that they now only had two choices: republic or death. One US diplomat who witnessed the war summed up this Paraguayan spirit perfectly: