I am tired of hoping

Understanding our indigenous cultures is fundamental to understanding Paraguayan culture as a whole, unlike other countries in my continent, yet I shall not delve too much into it. The truth is that, as long as the original settlers of Paraguay fulfilled certain prerequisites—have developed agriculture, be mostly peaceful, be divided into different tribes instead of an empire like the Incas or Aztecs—the Paraguayan struggle would have remained unchanged regardless of who occupied our lands before the arrival of our Iberian colonizers.

The Tupi-Guarani tribes whose culture deeply permeates every aspect of Paraguayan life once occupied everything between the Amazon rainforest and Córdoba, Argentina. Paraguay was first settled around 10000 years ago, and while the identity of our first settlers has remained a mystery we do know that by the time the Spaniards arrived, most of our ancestors were part of the Guarani branch of the Tupi-Guarani language family—however, not all of them. The Maká, a tribe that has, against all odds, survived with their cultures virtually unaltered to this day, are the biggest indigenous culture group in contemporaneous Paraguay, despite not being Tupian-Guaranitic—, better known for their language and being the first humans to domesticate yerba mate, cassava and pineapples.

The Guaranis were peaceful—the history curriculum at Paraguayan schools will tell you they were savages, which is very off-brand for a country that takes so much pride on their Guaranitic ancestry but very on-brand for Paraguay and its almost mythical history of contradicting itself—and sedentary. This is the main reason their culture has survived as the foundations for everything Paraguay has been and done in the past half a millenia, but of course, not the only one. To further understand their enduring legacy, let's jump to the first Great Regime.

The first Great Regime in Paraguayan history was not Paraguayan at all. It was the Spanish Empire: a vast colonial machine that stretched from the Andes to Manila, bloated with gold, obsessed with God, and engineered for extraction. Paraguay entered history not as a protagonist, but as a periphery—la provincia marginal, a humid, landlocked fragment of the Vice-royalty of Peru, too far from silver, too close to the jungle, too small to matter. And yet, like all things Paraguayan, it mattered anyway.

Spanish colonization here did not follow the blueprint of conquest seen in Mexico or Peru. There was no Moctezuma to defeat, no Atahualpa to ransom. There were only scattered villages, dense forests, and the riverine lifeline that would become our geography’s spinal cord; the Paraguay River. The result was not an epic conquest but a slow sedimentation of power—Jesuit missions, military outposts, and miscegenation on a scale so profound that Paraguay would become, within a century, the most mestizo nations in the hemisphere.

What began as subjugation evolved into symbiosis. The Jesuits, controversial as they were, laid the groundwork for a unique societal model, one that blended Catholic dogma with Guarani social structures, and Iberian architecture with indigenous cosmology. For over 150 years, the reducciones (Jesuit missions) functioned as semi-autonomous theocratic settlements, where Guarani language and culture were not only tolerated but integrated into religious and educational systems. These missions were not utopias, but neither were they pure instruments of domination. They were, in hindsight, paradoxically protective—shielding indigenous communities from the worst predations of colonial exploitation, at least until the Jesuits were expelled in 1767 by a Spanish Crown that feared their growing power more than it cared about native lives.

The Jesuits’ departure marked a turning point. The protective scaffolding was gone. What followed was the slow but certain reassertion of direct colonial control; land seizures, forced labor, military conscription. The Guarani were no longer subjects with negotiated rights but pawns in an empire that had grown tired of compromise. Still, they resisted—not with swords, but with stubborn survival. They held onto their language. Their myths. Their plants. Their songs. 

Meanwhile, the rest of Latin America moved. Haiti rebelled. Bolívar dreamed. Buenos Aires broke chains. But Paraguay remained still. Or rather, it brewed. In the same way its rivers flood silently until they devour everything in their path, Paraguayan nationalism formed quietly beneath the surface of Spanish neglect.

By the time independence reached our borders in 1811, the continent was ablaze with Enlightenment fervor and republican idealism. But Paraguay chose a different path. Neither liberal nor monarchist, neither entirely indigenous nor entirely European. It birthed its own strange species of postcolonial sovereignty—led not by cosmopolitan elites but by self-made authoritarians who understood the land, feared the outside world, and believed that isolation could be the cure for dependency.

And thus emerged the second Great Regime: the Francia dictatorship.

“I, the Supreme Dictator of the Republic, order that on the occasion of my death my corpse be decapitated; my head placed on a pike for three days in the Plaza de la República, to which the people are to be summoned by the sounding of a full peal of bells.”

If any substantial amount of our population has memorized any quote from a book, I would bet my life it's this one. This is the opening line to Augusto Roa Bastos' masterpiece “I, The Supreme”, a novel about two of the Great Regimes. It is, truly, just about one—the fourth and last, the Stronato, published as its contemporary while Roa was himself exiled in Buenos Aires—but written under the guise of the second one to more freely criticize the Paraguayan government. This passage is supposed to be a joke, a note found by the dictator which would later cause him to have someone killed, imprisoned, or face severe repercussion otherwise, though many people misinterpret it given that only a fraction of those attempting to read the book actually get past this passage. El Supremo, or The Supreme in English, was our second Great Regime; ruthless, radical, a foundational myth.

Paraguay’s first real leader was not a father of the nation, but its warden. Dr. José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia ruled as Supreme and Perpetual Dictator of the Republic of Paraguay (his actual legal title) from 1813 until his death in 1840, and in those twenty-seven years, he did what no one else on the continent dared to do: he cut his country off from the world.

It is often said that Francia made Paraguay itself through his isolationist measures; a landlocked nation, surrounded by the biggest independence colony in the continent on one side, the Portuguese Empire on the other and the long shadows of Hispania overcasting us. There is truth to that. But dignity without agency curdles into submission. And that is precisely what Francia institutionalized: submission disguised as survival. He abolished the elite, only to become the elite himself. Closed the borders for everyone both ways, imprisoned our other founding fathers, outlawed intermarriage between white people (peninsulares and criollos), and confiscated land from the Church and the aristocracy. He did not build a nation of citizens, he built a fortified monastic state, a solitary island surrounded by enemies, real and imagined. Paraguay became a country where silence ruled, letters went unsent, and hope was not a virtue but a threat. He governed like an oracle, omnipresent yet unreachable; to dissent was treason.

This is how it began, our national fatigue. Not with war, not with hunger, but with waiting. Decades of quiet waiting. A country paused mid-sentence, suspended in an eternal now. And when Francia died, nothing rushed in to fill the vacuum, because the people had been trained to expect nothing. We became a nation whose foundational myth is not liberation, but containment. Argentina had San Martín crossing the Andes. Mexico had Hidalgo ringing the bell. We had a doctor in a coat scribbling decrees, locking the doors, and telling us it was for our own good; even now, Francia is spoken of with reverence. Not love, not even fear anymore, just weary respect. Like a stern grandfather who never hugged you, but built the house you live in. He kept us safe, people say. Safe from whom? Safe for what? At what cost?

Because yes, he preserved Guarani, but by accident more than design. The Jesuitic model had already solidified its use in spiritual and domestic life. Francia merely inherited a reality too ingrained to undo. He did not elevate our language, he froze it. And freezing is the defining verb of his regime.

He froze foreign trade. He froze the aristocracy. He froze political life. He froze the future.

So we learned, slowly but deeply, that dreaming is dangerous. That asking questions invites punishment. That hoping for more than what is given to you is a risk not worth taking. And these lessons did not die with him, they calcified into culture. They seeped into our institutions, into our stories, into our pedagogy. The idea that rebellion is noble? We never imported it. The idea that governments are accountable to the governed? We never digested it. Not really.

Francia didn’t just build a regime. He built the architecture of obedience.

And to this day, we carry that in our bones. The colorados may be in power now, but they are children of Francia’s logic. Every regime since him has been an echo—louder, bloodier, more cynical—but an echo nonetheless.

If Francia immobilized the country, the López dynasty detonated it. Where The Supreme cautioned against the world, Carlos Antonio López opened the gates. His rule, beginning in 1844, marked Paraguay’s first encounter with modernization on its own terms; he built schools, imported engineers, established international treaties, developed foundries and naval fleets, railways were laid, industry bloomed in silence, and Paraguay—landlocked and forgotten—started to look like a country that might defy its geography.

Progress, however, was never democratic, but inherited, and Carlos Antonio López did not build a republic; he built a dynasty. Upon his death in 1862, he handed the country to his son, Francisco Solano López, whose arrogance would remake the nation into a monument and a mausoleum at once. Solano López was fluent in the aesthetics of empire. He wore imperial regalia modeled on Napoleon’s, he lined his court with marble, commissioned European artists, surrounded himself with Frenchified military elites. He was young, theatrical, and enamored with power; not just his own, but Paraguay’s imagined future as a sovereign, mighty state amid a continent dominated by imperial maneuvering. He built an army that rivaled the rest of South America, he turned the nation into a barracks. Everything was conscripted: resources, speech, men, boys. A country of a million was armed to the teeth and convinced it could withstand any enemy. And then came 1864.

The War of the Triple Alliance was not inevitable, but it was foretold in every brass button and marble façade Solano López commissioned. Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, uneasy neighbors with imperial interests, did not need much provocation. López gave them plenty; in 1864, Paraguay invaded Brazilian territory to defend Uruguayan sovereignty. By 1865, we were at war with the continent. By 1870, we were a nation of corpses.

Over 60% of the population died. Eight out of every ten men; children, too, conscripted into battle. Our capital was razed, our economy obliterated. Solano López himself died in the jungle, saber in hand, still believing he was the chosen one; speared through the heart beside a creek in Cerro Corá, shouting “¡Muero con mi patria!” (“ I die with my fatherland!”) as if performance could still save him.

And what did we do?

We canonized him.

We built monuments over the bodies of conscripted children, we named boulevards after generals who sent twelve-year-olds to die with wooden rifles, we invented a mythology where the war was not a disaster but a crucifixion. The nation had not been destroyed, it had been purified by flame.

What followed was less dramatic but no less brutal: occupation, indemnities, foreign loans, and a century of economic subjugation. Paraguay, once the most industrialized country in the region, was transformed into a ghost of what it had tried to become. A failed experiment, a cautionary tale. And yet, we rarely speak of it that way.

To question López is heresy in some circles; entire political movements have been built on the nostalgia of his name. We called him a hero, a martyr, the last romantic, the Napoleon of the South. We painted him on stamps, named schools after him, taught children to revere his sacrifice. We swallowed the pain and turned it into pride. Because what else could we do? To admit we had been led into senseless slaughter would mean accepting that we had not lived in freedom; to choose not to fight, to rise against a tyrant. But his legacy is not complicated; it is ruin, spectacular, operatic, and final. 

This is the López legacy: not dictatorship, but delusion. A catastrophic romance with the idea of national greatness, inflated to the point of implosion. Where Francia taught us to fear hope, López taught us to worship it, even as it marched us into ruin. And like all lessons learned through blood, it stuck; in Paraguay, dreaming is either forbidden or fatal, there is no middle ground.

This is the third Great Regime: the era of grandeur turned to ash. Where Francia calcified the state in solitude, the Lópezes expanded it to death. Not quietly nor slowly, but with gunpowder, hymns, and declarations carved into stone.

After 1870, Paraguay was no longer a country, it was a wound. The Triple Alliance War, or Guerra Guasu, as we call it in our mix of languages, had left the nation depopulated, bankrupt, and occupied. The victors dictated indemnities. Foreign companies bought up land. Nearly half of the territory was either sold or ceded. But Paraguay did not disappear. It limped. It healed. Slowly.

The women who had buried their sons and husbands began to rebuild the country from the inside out; they ran households, tilled land, preserved language and song. Guarani, once a private tongue, became a national one, not by decree, but by necessity. The silence Francia had imposed, and the fire López had summoned, gave way to something else: stubborn continuity.

In the decades that followed, the state remained weak, but society was not. Education expanded, small industries appeared, waves of migrants began to arrive, drawn by the promise of untouched land and national reinvention. After the Guerra Guasu, Balkan immigrants, especially Croats and Slovenians, added their own layers to the multicultural weave of the capital and the interior. Italians came in the late 19th and early 20th centuries—merchants, craftsmen, stoneworkers, dreamers—and shaped much of the urban middle class in Asunción and the river towns. German communities, including Mennonites, settled in the Chaco, where the government saw opportunity in what had long been seen as inhospitable land. It was in that very Chaco where Paraguay would reassert itself, in perhaps its most improbable moment of modern heroism: the Chaco War (1932–1935).

Fought against Bolivia over the vast, arid Gran Chaco region, believed, mistakenly, to hold oil, the war became a defining crucible. Poorly equipped but deeply familiar with the landscape, Paraguayan troops fought and won against a stronger, wealthier opponent. It was brutal, 100,000 lives lost across both sides, but Paraguay emerged with pride, and with territory. The Chaco became ours, and for a brief moment, the country so used to mourning remembered what it was like to win.

The post-war years brought a fleeting sense of modernity. Cultural life blossomed; writers and thinkers emerged. Political parties gained new traction, with the Liberals holding power for much of the early 20th century. Newspapers multiplied, radios crackled with poetry and protest. There were still coups, as Paraguay is never without them, but there was also a sense of momentum, of possibility. Then came 1947.

The Civil War was short, just a few months, but devastating. The Colorado Party, until then one of many, emerged as the sole political force. They purged the military, the universities, the unions, the opposition, and by the end of it, Paraguay was effectively a one-party state. Those who could fled. Those who stayed learned to keep quiet.

The republic did not die in 1947. But it was disfigured—and waiting, unknowingly, for the uniformed shadow that would arrive in 1954.

By the time Alfredo Stroessner took power in 1954, Paraguay had already buried two centuries of wreckage. We had learned to survive dictatorship, then to revere it, then to forget why it began in the first place. Stroessner didn’t build a new system, he simply refined the old one. Inherited the bones, polished the chains. He came in through a military coup, like so many others before him, and never left. Thirty-five years in power; The second longest dictatorship in Latin American history. Only Fidel Castro outlasted him—and Fidel didn’t have to hold elections every five years just to win them all by 90%. He was methodical, predictable, neat. His uniforms were pressed, his smile was rehearsed, he shook hands with bishops and businessmen, he posed for photos beside U.S. presidents, he built roads and hydroelectric dams. And beneath the surface, where no cameras reached, he crushed everything that moved too freely.

Dissidents disappeared, queer folk were hunted, indigenous communities displaced, intellectuals exiled. Every neighborhood had its informants, every family knew someone who had been “asked to come in for questioning.” Torture was institutionalized, not as spectacle but as administration. It happened in office basements, in military barracks, in cells under ministries where the air smelled of rust and bleach and someone else’s memory.

But Stroessner’s genius, if it can be called that, was not in violence. It was in normalization. He made tyranny feel dull, he embedded it into paperwork, into street names, into schoolbooks and utility bills. He did not demand loyalty so much as he offered stability. Cheap meat, full churches, and the illusion of order. The nation, broken and exhausted, accepted it; people don’t march in the streets when the buses are running on time.

And besides, the U.S. liked him. He was anti-communist, that was enough. While they armed juntas across Latin America, Paraguay remained a Cold War pawn, a small and useful dictatorship in the chessboard of hemispheric paranoia. Stroessner received weapons, aid, advisors, and in return, he made sure that Paraguay stayed docile, invisible, cooperative. For three and a half decades, that was our reality. The uniformed man on the posters, the whispers behind closed doors. The red party, the red flags, the red ink in the textbooks. Entire generations raised not to question, but to adapt; an aesthetic of fear so deeply woven into daily life it no longer needed to be enforced, just remembered. And then one day, it ended.

In 1989, General Andrés Rodríguez, Stroessner’s own confidant, turned on him. Another coup, another parade, another reshuffling of names. Stroessner fled to Brazil. Died quietly in exile. No tribunals, no truth commissions, no reckoning.

The red party remained.

Some ministers were recycled, others rebranded. But the architecture of obedience; built by Francia, mythologized by the Lópezes, and perfected by Stroessner, remained intact. Presidents changed, the scaffolding didn’t. The fourth Great Regime never truly collapsed. It just became harder to see.

My maternal grandfather was a socialist who read theory books at night and threw them down a latrine by dawn in fear of persecution, who hosted “chess meetings” to discuss Castro and Stalin and Nixon; my paternal grandfather was a fierce Colorado allied to Stroessner, mayor of their city, later displaced for lack of political fanatism and encouraging syndicalists around town. My maternal grandmother was a suffragist, the kind who served tea at chess meetings while discussing their next protest, founder of a “teachers for suffrage” movement and a primary school she still visits when she has the time; my paternal grandmother keeps the red scarf close to her chest to this date, but has slowly ceded to admitting that Stroessner was never the man he sold himself as.

My grandparents were raised within this regime. So were my parents, and my cousins. I am the first generation to be raised outside of the Stronato, although the vestiges of the fourth regime have obscured my idea of homeland so deeply I insist it is still alive. Paraguay granted suffrage to its women in 1961, the last country in the Americas to do so; when both of my grandmothers were my age they could not vote. I am part of the cellphone generation, a child of online high-school classes, social media and transatlantic FaceTime calls at dinnertime; I cannot believe my mom, who had MySpace in college, was the first woman in our bloodline who could vote upon turning 18.

Progress takes a long time to reach the South Atlantic, to make its way up North through our forgotten perennial basin and mighty sub-tropical rivers; we have learned not to take it for granted. I have been to pride parades in Asuncion every year since COVID, yet I would be lucky to see my friends gain the right to marriage within my lifetime. I have driven girls I barely know across the border so they could abort legally, without bleeding to death in some old woman's bathroom.

I know these are controversial topics, but I need to write them down, record them. There are so few people screaming for justice, that prose meant to teach foreigners about our history necessarily becomes propagandized out of need for space, for someone to see us and fight alongside us.

We have been sold the illusion of democracy, of freedom, yet this is but a trick of the lighting. Democracy is only real when the people's curiosity is not curbed to the will of those who govern them; without rebellion, without an overdue intellectual reform indebted to us by our very first warden, and carried through until the man in uniform passed down his scarf in theatrical violence to the next despot drunk on oligarchical opportunism, we will never be free.

I am tired of hoping, because we have never not been stagnated.

I am tired of fighting, because my country has never returned the favor.

But, what other choice do we have?

To remain silent is to sit complicit.

And to see the true face of our despair amongst deprived masses is, on itself, a privilege.