2023-05-24 03:20:50
Perhaps it is the most dramatic and painful date in all of Argentine and Latin American history. However, here it is hardly remembered.
157 years ago, the May 24, 1866, the battle of Tuyutí was fought in fields and forests in the south of the Republic of Paraguay, on the other side of the impressive meeting of the homonymous river with the Paraná, that confluence that is a natural wonder in front of what is now a tourist town called Paso de la Patria, in the province of Corrientes.
There, on the banks of the Paraná and in front of the mouth where it receives the waters of the Bermejo and Paraguay rivers, which form an extraordinary water confluence, was fought what many historians consider the most horrible and also shameful battle in Argentine history, as an expression of a model of colonization at the service of foreign powers that reaches –it can be said that aggravated– to the present day.
There are many testimonies and sources that agree that in Tuyutí was the bloodiest battle in South American territory. Putting together versions, according to Wikipedia, some 40,000 soldiers with 60 cannons of what historiography continues to call Triple Alliance, against 23,000 Paraguayans who only had 4 cannons, but who with extraordinary courage sustained the combat for many hours, despite which they were defeated. Some calculations later established that that single day produced more than 30,000 deaths.
In Tuyutí the Paraguayan troops under the command of the General Francisco Solano Lopez They were finally defeated by the army of that Triple Alliance commanded by the then Argentine president Bartolomé Miteralthough waging that battle had not been an Argentine decision, or not only.
The truth is that liberal historiography misinformed and/or denied the horror of Tuyutí for a century and a halfand that is why a new Sovereign Argentina It should be reminiscent of that horrendous episode with truth that has rarely been experienced on this continent.
Some chronicles –of the many that existed and can still be consulted in Paraguayan, Argentine and Brazilian sources– testify that the Paraguayan troops were on the verge of a victory that would have been disastrous and final for the allies, but they had to withdraw for the havoc caused by the Brazilian artillery, dominant from the moderate elevation of Isla del Cerrito, today a tourist municipality in the province of Chaco, and where Miter had authorized the Brazilian army to station itself, in perhaps the first of its salon military nonsense, as they told him.
In any case, Tuyutí is the emblematic battle of that war that was called the Triple Alliance, which in a few horrific hours devastated the Paraguayan military elite, and which at the same time condemned this historical milestone to an absurd “oblivion”, perhaps because the victors needed to hide forever the shameful reason for that war provoked by the governments of Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil, united in ominous defense of the interests of Great Britain, whose imperialist voracity already at that time did not admit that a small nation in the interior of South America successfully attempt an own and autonomous model of industrial development with self-determination and above all with success.
That was inadmissible for the British crown, which always played its game. But the embarrassing thing was that three sepoy governments did all the dirty work for him and they destroyed what Juan Bautista Alberdi (an Argentine lovingly recognized in contemporary Paraguay) defined as “emblems” of that Paraguay that had developed its own lines of steam navigation, power and electric telegraphs, metallurgical foundries, shipyards and arsenals, and to his own railway.
Felipe Pigna wrote years ago that –under the governments of Carlos Antonio López and his son Francisco Solano– “Most of the land belonged to the State, which also exercised a kind of monopoly on the commercialization abroad of its two main products: yerba and tobacco. Paraguay was the only nation in Latin America that had no external debt because its resources were enough.
That was a war of devastation that lasted 6 years (1865 to 1870) and in it Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina fulfilled a infamous sepoy role serving the interests of the British crown who decided to put an end to the first autonomous development model, the Paraguayan, which was already a “bad example” for the rest of America.
The conflict originated in 1863, when Uruguay was invaded by a group of Uruguayan liberals commanded by General Venancio Flores, who overthrew the white, federal government and Paraguay’s only ally in the region. That invasion-provocation had been hatched in Buenos Aires and with Brazilian approval. And when Paraguay wanted to intervene in defense of the Uruguayan government, which was its ally and had been deposed, and declared war on Brazil, Miter did not allow the passage of Paraguayan troops through the port of Corrientes, which led Solano López to declare war on Argentina as well.
Strategic error and measurement of power itself, when the Treaty of the Triple Alliance was signed in 1865, the fate of that independent and developed Paraguay was sealed. And between 1865 and 1870 it was practically emptied of men, adults and children, and it was left in ruins. And so the country that Pigna well defined as a “bad example for the rest of Latin America” was forever condemned to underdevelopment and poverty.
The unpopularity of that war in Argentina was enormous: to the traditional conflicts generated by the porteño hegemony, uprisings by caudillos in Mendoza, San Juan, La Rioja and San Luis were added. Opposition to the war manifested itself in various ways, including the attitude of the shipyard workers from Corrientes, who they refused to build boats for the allied troops. And it was also appreciated in the preaching of thinkers like Alberdi and Jose Hernandez, who strongly supported Paraguay. And the catamarcan caudillo Felipe Varela He called for rebellion and not to participate in a fratricidal war: “To be a porteño,” he declared, “is to be an exclusive citizen, and to be a provincial is to be a beggar without a country, without freedom, without rights. This is the policy of the Mitre government”.
The war ended in the year 70, when Sarmiento assumed the presidency and among his first measures he ordered it to end just when the “allies” managed to take Asunción. Paraguay was destroyed decimated its population, devastated its development and occupied its territory.
Tuyutí was more than a first and horrible battle; was the announcement of conduct that in various ways Latin America and our Argentina have suffered many times. And that they are still alive, in command and obedient.
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