Colonial period

The first colonial settlements were established by Domingo Martínez de Irala in the period 1536–56. The first Spanish colonists, unsuccessful in their search for gold, settled peacefully among the Guaraní in the region of Asunción, the present capital of Paraguay. Those first settlers established their notorious harems of Guaraní women, and their ethnically mixed descendants gradually grew into the rural population of modern Paraguay, which still considers itself to be Guaraní in custom and habit. With Asunción as his principal base, Irala laid the foundations of Paraguay and made it the centre of Spanish power in southeastern South America. Irala’s colonization policy involved the delimitation of the boundary with Brazil through a line of forts against Portuguese expansion, the foundation of villages, the settlement of the Guaraní to provide food, labour, and soldiers, and extensive Guaraní-Spanish intermarriage. Rapidly, a national and fairly homogeneous amalgam of Indian and Spanish cultures came into being.

For more than 150 years from early in the 17th century, Jesuit communal missions in the Paraná and Uruguay basins of southeastern Paraguay governed the lives of 150,000 Indians in 30 reducciones (settlements). Those were centres of religious conversion, agricultural and pastoral production, and manufacturing and trade as well as strategic outposts against Portuguese expansion from southern Brazil. Isolated from the heart of Paraguay, which centred on Asunción, the missions became an autonomous military, political, and economic “state within a state,” increasingly exciting the envy of the Spanish landowners in the Asunción area. In the period 1721–35 the latter waged a struggle to overthrow the Jesuit monopoly of Indian trade and labour. Unaided, the settlements also had to defend themselves against slave raiders from São Paulo and, in 1754–57, a combined Spanish-Portuguese attack that was designed to enforce a territorial partition of the mission settlements. Defiance of such powerful groups paved the way for the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767. The settlements were abandoned; the Indians were absorbed by either the landed estates or the jungle; the settlements fell into ruin; and economic activity ceased.

In 1776 the new Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata was created, with its capital in Buenos Aires. That effectively made Asunción and all of Paraguay dependent on Buenos Aires and thus ended the region’s colonial dominance.

Struggle for independence

As the power of Buenos Aires grew, the leaders of Paraguay began to resent the decline in their province’s significance, and, although they had early challenged Spanish authority, they refused to accept the declaration of Argentine independence in 1810 as applying to Paraguay. Nor could an Argentine army under Gen. Manuel Belgrano enforce Paraguayan acceptance, as Paraguayan militia repulsed Belgrano’s forces in 1811. Later, however, when the Spanish governor sought assistance from the Portuguese in defending the colony from further attacks from Buenos Aires, he underestimated the nationalistic spirit of the Paraguayans. Under the leadership of the militia captains Pedro Juan Cabellero and Fulgencio Yegros, they promptly deposed the governor and declared their independence on May 14, 1811.

The Francia regime

A governing junta was soon established, led by Yegros but in reality dominated by a civilian lawyer, José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia. Francia proposed the idea of a confederation of equals to Buenos Aires. The city was hoping for eventual domination but settled for a vague military alliance, which was signed in October 1811. That constituted de facto recognition of Paraguayan independence, and, when Buenos Aires attempted to use the alliance to acquire Paraguayan troops for its own interprovincial quarrels, the accord became void. Buenos Aires’s response was to blockade Paraguay. In the face of regional fragmentation, Buenos Aires sent Nicolás de Herrera to Asunción to frighten, bluff, or bribe Paraguay into a union of unequals. Francia responded by convening a congress, which on October 12, 1813, formally declared Paraguay an independent republic and rejected further treaties with Buenos Aires. A consulate of two men, Yegros and Francia, was established to rule the republic for a year.

At the end of that year, a new congress met and proclaimed Francia supreme dictator of the republic for a period of five years. In 1816 a third congress made him perpetual dictator, and his will was the law in Paraguay for an additional 24 years. El Supremo, as he was known, prohibited any political activity, stripped the church of its holdings and power, confiscated the wealth of the small Spanish elite, abolished the municipal government of Asunción, and generally isolated Paraguay from its rather hostile neighbours. In 1820 El Supremo found out about a plot to depose him and restore the native elite to power. Hundreds of arrests were made, and in the following year at least 68 men of the traditional Paraguayan aristocracy (including Fulgencio Yegros) were executed. Their wealth in land and slaves became part of the national patrimony, and well before Francia’s death (1840) the state came to own a vast proportion of the country. With the borders sealed, Paraguay became of necessity almost self-sufficient; only a small carefully regulated commerce was permitted with Argentina and Brazil. Uninvited foreigners were often held for years under loose arrest in the interior.

The start of modernization

When Francia died, he left behind a quietly prosperous country that had adjusted well to what amounted to state socialism, but he also left a country of rustics with no political experience and a strong tradition of dictatorial rule. In 1841 a second consulate emerged from the chaos in the figures of a civilian, Carlos Antonio López, and a soldier, Mariano Roque Alonso. It was soon clear that López was the true ruler of Paraguay, and in 1844 a congress named him president. The same congress promulgated a constitution, notable for the great powers accorded the president and the absence of the word liberty from its text. López devoted much of his two decades in power to opening the country slowly to the wider world and to modernization. Doing so provoked international crises, and it was not until after the fall of the Argentine dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas in 1852 that Argentina recognized Paraguayan sovereignty and eased its stranglehold on the rivers leading to the sea.