The Chaco War

Bolivia and Paraguay both claimed the Chaco Boreal, a vast scrubland west of the Paraguay River. After years of border clashes, open war broke out in 1932. Bolivia, much larger and richer, sent a well-equipped army, but Paraguay under General Jose Felix Estigarribia outmaneuvered it. A truce was signed in June 1935, and a treaty in 1938 gave Paraguay most of the disputed area.¹²

Bolivia had lost its Pacific coast to Chile in the War of the Pacific and sought a river route to the Atlantic. Paraguay, having lost most of its men in the war of 1864 to 1870, was determined to hold the Chaco. Rumors of oil there, and the presence of Standard Oil in Bolivia, fed the idea that foreign companies drove the war, but historians say the evidence for this is weak. The fighting itself took place in heat, thirst and thorn scrub that killed as many soldiers as bullets. About 100,000 people died in total, by common estimates, many from disease and thirst, from small populations. Bolivian soldiers, many of them Aymara and Quechua highlanders sent to a hot lowland, suffered greatly. The war discredited Bolivia's old elite and led to the radical movements that produced the revolution of 1952. In Paraguay the victory strengthened the army's role in politics.²