The idea for this book came about after a tragic event in recent Paraguayan politics. On June 15, 2012, eleven peasants and six police officers were murdered in a conflict over land occupation. The Massacre of Curuguaty , as the tragedy would come to be known, set off the expedited trial of then-president Fernando Lugo, whose 2008 electoral triumph had stirred great enthusiasm among the popular sectors. Lugo’s breakthrough on the national stage as part of a coalition of leftist political sectors grouped under the Alianza Patriótica para el Cambio (Patriotic Alliance for Change, APC) had put an end to over sixty years of the Armed Forces’ and Colorado Party’s joint hegemony in the country. This coalition paved the way for a potential reconfiguration of Paraguayan politics outside the institutional channels that were consolidated following the fall of Alfredo Stroessner ’s regime in 1989 and throughout the so-called democratic transition. However, one week after the massacre, and in less than forty-eight hours, the National Congress succeeded at impeaching the president and removing him from office based on the charges of “poor performance,” incompetence, and negligence in his handling of the chain of events that culminated in the incidents at Curuguaty. 1 In the aftermath of this “parliamentary coup,” the responsibility of governing was entrusted to liberal vice president Federico Franco with whom the traditional elites’ historical dominance was reestablished. 2
The massacre and the immediately ensuing destitution of Lugo not only awakened the specter of military coups that had proliferated throughout Latin America during the second half of the twentieth century, but also marked a rupture with a democratic electoral process that was almost without precedent in recent Paraguayan history. As Milda Rivarola noted, the overthrow of Lugo “shattered the entire social contract entered into by Paraguayan society following the fall of the dictator Stroessner .” 3 In addition, and despite the differences in context, this political juncture sanctioned a return to the authoritarianism which historically had left deep scars in the social fabric of the country.
It was this tragic episode and its historical ramifications that we took up in 2013 when we met at the Annual Congress of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) in Washington D.C. to reflect upon and investigate the “roots of authoritarianism” in Paraguay. Our purpose was to inquire about the political and cultural stakes in the recent suspension of a democratic horizon in process of consolidation. Some of us who had taken part in this debate decided to prepare and edit a collective volume that would offer participants the opportunity to expand on the thoughts that had begun to emerge in those initial discussions. The project was subsequently enriched thanks to the contributions of other colleagues whose work and interests converged on the cultural history of Paraguay from a variety of perspectives that included sociology, visual culture, gender studies, cultural studies, and political theory. Two considerations clearly guided our approach to this volume. One is that the episode at Curuguaty could not be considered as an isolated incident or as exclusive to the Paraguayan context. The other is that the very political forces condensed around the massacre required us to adopt a broader horizon of critical inquiry capable of accounting for the connections between authoritarianism , cultural history, and political resistance throughout the Paraguayan national experience. As a result of this trajectory, this book responds to both the necessity of understanding the complexity of these connections and the desire for another Paraguay and another Latin America.
In writing a collective volume on the interactions between culture and politics in Paraguay, one must contemplate from the outset a series of challenges and tensions. Considering that our approach requires reassessing the discourses that have organized the country’s cultural history, this collective volume aims to signal a geographic and social space that is often overlooked in Latin American studies. The problem resides in the continued perception of Paraguay as an exception compared to the rest of Latin America: an isolated and forgotten country, cataloged as both empty and absent. As Peter Lambert and Andrew Nickson argue in their introduction to the recently published The Paraguay Reader, “Paraguay is a country defined not so much by association as by isolation … It is exceptional in the degree to which it has been defined by isolation and difference from its neighbors, from Latin America, and from the wider world.” 4 This commonly held perception has been predicated on a set of factors which include the country’s landlocked geographical condition; its consolidation as an independent republic within the geopolitical power struggles in the Southern Cone; and even the fact that one of its official languages, Guaraní, is an indigenous language. 5 It would nevertheless be difficult to characterize these factors as having always and in every instance been exclusive to Paraguay. Other Latin American contexts could equally reveal similar examples of geographical reclusion, bilingualism, and historical–political exceptionalism which typically support the notions of national foundation and providentialism. The frequently incurred generalizations so common in the discourses that make up the Paraguayan “archive” have ended up cloaking these features in an aura of “myth,” “stereotype,” and “cliché” in ways that simplify a highly complex reality. 6
Thus, the title of this volume posits a dual reference which acknowledges Paraguay’s cultural and political particularities while also evoking the shared rhythms and resonances that situate them within the broader sphere of Latin America. Our aim in “exposing Paraguay” is, therefore, shot through with the tension that such a phrase captures, framing the volume’s analytical conception. On the one hand, it attempts to show or make visible the specificity of a country whose register in Latin American studies and cultural critique (both in Latin America and beyond) has been intermittent at best. 7 On the other hand, it also points to how this relative silence is itself a form of representation and a sort of visibility that persistently portrays Paraguay—to recall an expression coined by Luis Alberto Sánchez—under the figure of the incógnita (mystery). 8
Taking this characterization as a starting point, it seems pertinent to interrogate the discursive regimes and the modes of visibility that have relegated Paraguay to a sense of time suspension, woven through (and herein lies the paradox) a constant return to specific events monumentalized by the historiographical record, such as the Jesuit Missions , Rodríguez de Francia’s perpetual dictatorship, the War of the Triple Alliance , and Stroessner ’s dictatorship. These are unavoidable events for any examination of the country’s historical–cultural process, and, as the reader will notice, we do not intend to ignore them. Nonetheless, the purpose of the contributions compiled here is to rethink and intervene these historical processes in ways that do not necessarily result in the reproduction of the crystal-clear narrative of national exceptionalism disconnected from broader contexts. The recurrent citation of these episodes typically operates as a gesture of return to origins and of rationalization of historical becoming. Therefore, the essays included in this volume respond to the challenge of integrating these events in broader conceptual matrices concerned with interrupting the hermeneutic privilege that has been bestowed upon them.
On the other hand, the so-called incógnita of Paraguay—which in itself denotes a mode of absence—is not solely an external representation as it also alludes to an internal dynamic that has been especially exemplified in the literary field. If, as Horacio Legrás argues, “the historical project of Latin American literature … entails the symbolic incorporation of people and practices in the margins of society or nation into a sanctioned form of representation,” in Paraguay, the consolidation of such hegemonic extension of the institution of literature has been significantly hampered. 9 Augusto Roa Bastos’s periodization is pertinent in this regard, as he considered that the production of Paraguayan narrative only began to organize this “symbolic incorporation,” in the form of a literary corpus, after the Chaco War (1932–1935). Roa Bastos , following Josefina Plá, argues that Paraguayan narrative had emerged as a “literature devoid of a past” in a country dominated by the diglossic condition between Spanish and Guaraní. 10 According to the author, this particular situation is at the root of a kind of “linguistic and cultural schizophrenia” that prevented Paraguayan writers—most of whom were the members of the high culture ensconced in Asunción —from adequately expressing the Guaraní stratum that laid the basis of the national bilingual experience. 11
Later on, Roa Bastos would coin the expression “absent literature” to refer to the lack of any “substantial production of novels in Paraguay, despite [the country’s] rich history” and to point to “the absence of a corpus of works qualitatively linked by common denominators.” 12 This expression provoked a polemic with the writer Carlos Villagra Marsal who criticized the term’s relevance and questioned the presumed absence to which it referred. 13 This debate eventually showed the relevance of the conceptualization of an “absent literature,” which came to be viewed as an alternative to the ideas of “literary system” and “transculturation” that Ángel Rama had developed to explain the way in which the “symbolic literary incorporation” of marginal sectors of society had taken place in Latin America. In fact, as Carla Benisz specifies, Roa Bastos “characterizes transculturation … as a lettered artifice, likening this operation (which Rama characterizes as an alternative to aesthetic dependency on metropolitan centers) to the practices of the lettered city” in which the margins of society (popular and indigenous cultures) are constantly subjected to appropriation, regulation, and resignification. 14 Paradoxically, Roa Bastos highlights the preeminence of the oral universe of Guaraní above the lettered culture associated with Spanish, while at the same time he asserts the category of “absent literature” by basing it on the novelistic genre, which is the modern lettered form par excellence. Yet, beyond the artificial overcoming of the dichotomy between the oral and the lettered proposed by the concept of transculturation, Roa Bastos ’s characterization of an “absent literature” is traversed by a problematic inherent to Latin American cultural critique, which Horacio Legrás has characterized as follows:
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