Vencer o morir

By Giovanna D. Preda Robertti 

The phrase we sing with our fists on our chests, eyes fixed on the grand tricolor waving on its mast. The battle cry, the ultimate test of courage and pride—for the homeland, for the people, for the tricolor.

Since the days of my childhood, running wild through the schoolyard, this promise has been ingrained in my idea of patriotism. The sacrifice of my short life in honor of the land and the people who birthed me: La raza paraguaya es vencer o morir. And we repeat this phrase, like the fine print in an unspoken contract of Paraguayity, from music classrooms to football pitches. It seems almost innate to the Paraguayan spirit—bloodshed, ours or someone else’s, in defense of the Guaraní people’s sovereignty.

Lately, I ask myself: would I really give my life for the country I left, without looking back, at the first real chance I got? And the answer, exasperating in its constancy, never changes: yes. I would give my life and more to keep from watching the country I love waste away, now lying an ocean away.

But vencer o morir doesn’t mean to me what it meant to the soldiers in the trenches of the Chaco War. I don’t miss the people, I don’t feel that deep, almost sacred longing of the Paraguayan exile who aches for red dirt roads and Sunday asados. And yet, I would conquer or die for my homeland.

Walking through the cemeteries of the old world, I admire the headstones that have stood undisturbed for over a century. It’s ordinary, it’s mundane, and yet it’s precisely the everyday permanence of it all that sparks something in me, an inexplicable fascination with this country I now call home. These people, whose lives only exist to me through history books, rest here, three meters beneath my feet, in silent permanence. They are here, their names immortalized in stone and marble, beneath the damp morning grass. These people are history.

Here, history lingers differently. It hums, quiet but constant. It does not need to be screamed to be heard.

In Paraguay, history is disposable. And that’s normal in countries like ours—young countries. We burn our history as thoughtlessly as we toss yesterday’s newspaper. We were taught to be ashamed of the past, to live as though we were the first and the last, with no roots to bind us or memory to haunt us. We don’t think we need history, and we’d rather forget the bitter taste of its shadow. But just like a teenager trying too hard to outgrow childhood, our still-brief history follows in every step we take, in every whispered word of fear for what’s to come.

And it’s undeniable that, between the endless Paraguayan struggle and our uphill battle toward modernity—both infrastructurally and intellectually—our national identity has been built on contradictions. We want to leave our pain behind, yet we romanticize the “pre-war power” that supposedly  threatened the British Empire and was condemned to the cruelest genocide in South America. We claim pride in Guaraní—the last bastion of linguistic and cultural dominance from a group of people who once made the whole continent tremble—yet we push it aside in favor of Spanish(1). We cry out against the injustices of Stroessner’s regime, yet we keep on voting red every five years(2).

I know I said Paraguayans don’t value history. Let me, in true Paraguayan fashion, contradict myself. We do value history—under strict conditions. We value it in tiny, curated fragments of truth. Just as the Guaraní told legends of Las siete cabritas and Tau ha Kerana, contemporary Paraguay invents its own myths of valor, sweetening collective suffering into more digestible truths—a paranoid dictator who killed adversaries and allies alike is repackaged as the father of national sovereignty; a mercurial leader who led us to genocide is rebranded as the honorable defender who died with his homeland; Stroessner, indefensible, becomes the despot who at least modernized the country’s infrastructure(3)—and, somehow, calls that history.

This is what vencer o morir represents: history, in its most mythological form. And the phrase, like my people, contradicts itself—it clings so tightly to the familiarity of the present that it ends up romanticizing the past. Vencer o morir is youthful fervor, the desperation to stay unchanged, to fight like a soldier for your identity. And in that fight, the country’s identity becomes static, losing any notion of change and misconstruing the Paraguay of today for that of Dr. Fancia and the Triple Alliance War as if they were the same thing, despite the fact that Paraguay has changed beyond recognition. But our country is still young, and like a flower in early spring, it has barely begun to bloom. Paraguay, and Paraguayan identity itself, are not only able to change, but they must do it. If we are not the same person we were in adolescence, why should Paraguay remain the same country of the Lópezes, Morínigo, and Stroessner?

Today, I want to reclaim this phrase and give it a new purpose. From now on, vencer o morir is a vision for the future, the yearning for something better. It is the hope that future generations will not have to abandon my country to build the lives they dream of. Because patriotism isn’t static, nor is it a blood debt; it is the lifelong fight for the country we deserve—even when it is an ocean away, unable to give us anything in return(4).

A true patriot is the one who conquers or dies so that the forgotten island surrounded by land, beating in the heart of South America, never feels too small for the child who dares to question it.

I am a patriot. I left the land that raised me in search of something more, something I could never find within its borders. I do not long for the Paraguay I left, and it eats away at me that I cannot. Amongst memories of lapacho trees and grand colonial buildings crying out for restoration, a sweet, painful patriotic epiphany seizes me—the nation I long for does not yet exist, but I would give my life to help build it. And if its fate is for the world to never hear its song, then at least let the echo of its idea tremble in the bones of those who dream of it.

1. I know it’s inherently hypocritical to complain about hispanic defaultism in an essay written in Spanish and translated into English, but I barely learned Guaraní as a child and can’t articulate anything beyond the most basic thoughts in it. That is, in part, the reason for my frustration with Paraguay’s linguistic landscape.

2. The whole “don’t vote by color” thing my generation loves is only partially right. Statistically speaking, the best—and likewise, the worst—Paraguayan politicians are Colorado. The problem with the ANR isn’t ideology or individuals; it’s the party’s total grip on the national psyche. Treating the Republican problem as an individual one solves nothing because the issue is systemic; for Paraguay to have real political plurality—where young people with political ambitions don’t have to join the ANR to fulfill their goals—its dominance must break.

3. Yes, Stroessner modernized our infrastructure. But he also obliterated miles of intellectual and cultural progress, which, to me, is far more damaging. And the quasi-Stronista argument of “not everything about the dictatorship was bad—just look at the hydroelectric plants!” is, at best, lazy, and at worst, a subtle attempt to romanticize his rule for future generations.

4. It pisses me off that emigrants are branded as traitors. Most of us love Paraguay, and many of us left precisely because we want to help build a better future for it. It is a catastrophic loss of both potential and culture that ambitious kids in Paraguay are either crushed or told “to achieve that, you have to go abroad.”