The Role of the hostile Indian in nineteenth century Paraguay would be difficult to exaggerate, yet it is virtually unknown. The trail of agony so clearly expressed in the thousands of documents in the Asunción and other archives deserves to be better understood. This article can do little more than suggest the scope of the problem and describe how the Indian wars of the Paraguayan north did more to define and determine Paraguayan history during the years of the dictatorship of Dr. Francia (1814-1840), than has been previously noted by historians.

In 1810, Paraguay had as its real, if not legal border in the north, the Río Apa, a broad, sluggish tributary of the Río Paraguay, its banks choked in dense, humid vegetation. North of the river was a no-man's land claimed by both Portugal and Spain and thinly occupied by the former. West of the Río Paraguay was the Chaco, a region of desolate scrubjungle, where Spanish and hence Paraguayan claims were virtually unchallenged save by the Indians who lived there. Fort Borbón, in the Chaco, Paraguay's northern outpost, was situated some hundred miles north of the Apa border on the Río Paraguay.

In a personal letter dated October 1, 1953, to the President of the United States, Víctor Paz Estenssoro, President of the Republic of Bolivia, urgently appealed for both food and economic assistance for his nation. “Our availabilities in foreign currency,” Paz wrote, “have diminished so considerably through the fall in the price of tin and other minerals that we find ourselves in the insurmountable difficulty of not being able to provide food and other essential articles for the people, since in order to import them we need foreign currency.”

Never particularly stable, even by Latin American standards, the fragile fabric of the nation had been rent by the revolutionary change of April 1952 which brought the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario from underground and from exile to power. The MNR, led by Paz himself, had instituted rapid, radical modifications in the political, economic, and social structure of the country. These changes, however, exacted their toll. The most serious consequences were a decline in productivity of both minerals and foods. The nation, which had long depended on food imports, could not feed itself, and its foreign exchange earnings were insufficient to permit purchase of foodstuffs from abroad.

It’s easier to make a revolution, than it is to make a revolution work,” Fidel Castro once told a packed audience listening to him discuss the progress of Cuba. His remark, made with characteristic candor, expressed the challenge that confronts all rebels who manage to achieve power. For the Anti-reelectionists in Mexico, the revolution had been made in the victory over federal troops at Ciudad Juárez in May, 1911. It then fell to Francisco Madero to direct the program that would make it work. He intended to justify the violent overthrow of the porfirian dictatorship by invigorating Mexican politics as a means to restore democratic government and to establish the mechanism for responsive reform of the economy and society. The critical element in his proposal was the redemption of the authority of the state governors, to whom he delegated the responsibility and the opportunity to reconstruct Mexico. This policy represented no casual abdication of authority, but a carefully devised scheme of decentralization. Madero’s opposition to highly-centralized government resulted from his birthright as a son of remote Coahuila, the native state of Mexico federalism, his political convictions, including an abiding faith in the confederated government posited in the 1857 Constitution, and his philosophic precepts, based on the ideals of Karl Christian Friedrich Krause and a reaction to the governmental consolidation rationalized by Comtean Positivism (promoted in Mexico by the Positivists, the Científicos, and the dictator).

Enrico Martínez, an important but little known figure in New Spain, was an extremely talented man with a wide range of I interests. Interpreter for the Inquisition, Royal Cosmographer for the Consejo de Indias in Mexico, author, printer and cartographer, Martínez was also the architect and engineer of the drainage system (desagüe) of the Valley of Mexico.

Despite his important governmental positions and the Spanish obsession for record-keeping, Martínez’ national origin remains undetermined. One major documentary source relative to the desagüe states that his true name was Henrí Martin, that he was of French origin and that he later Hispanicized his name to enter Spanish territories legally; however, other sources ascribe his nationality to various other countries. Interested in solving this discrepancy, Joaquín García Icazbalceta stated in a letter to Nicolás León on April 23, 1883, that he had searched for data on Martínez but “was unable to find any material that determined his origin. Nevertheless Francisco de la Maza, author of the introduction to a modern edition of Martínez’ Reportorio de los tiempos e historia natural de Nueva España and his principal biographer, stated that Martínez was definitely German and that his true name was probably Heinrich Martin. According to Maza, Martínez was born in Hamburg between 1550 and 1560 and was probably a Protestant because Hamburg was one of the first German cities to become involved in the Reformation. Martínez spent his first eight years in Hamburg, then journeyed to Sevilla possibly at the request of the Martins, probably German relatives who were printers. Although no definite documentation has been located, it is reasonable to presume that if he were in fact Protestant he must have converted to Catholicism during his stay in Spain, a sine qua non for his immigration to New Spain and for his appointment as translator for the Inquisition in later years. Martínez remained in Sevilla until he was nineteen, returning then to Hamburg for a year and one-half, and at age twenty, he traveled throughout Europe, spent enough time in Paris to graduate with a degree in mathematics, and then traveled on to Poland. From eastern Europe, Martínez returned to Spain where he resided in Madrid, Toledo and Sevilla; and in 1589 he sailed to New Spain on the same fleet as his protector and friend, Luis de Velasco, newly appointed Viceroy of New Spain and Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, later author of a comedy entitled, El Semejante a sí mismo which mentions the desagüe of Mexico.

This article examines the data contained in the last volume of our five-part index of 16th Century Spanish emigrants to the New World. Originally entitled the Indice geobiográfico de 40, 000 pobladores españoles de América en el siglo XVI, the series in fact now furnishes biographical data on a total of roughly 55,000 individual men, women, and children, known to have emigrated to the Indies before 1600, whose birthplace we have identified from contemporary records. So far we have found publishers only for the first two of these five useful reference volumes, however a series of articles in both Spanish and English have presented our findings on each of the roughly twenty-year periods into which we have divided that all-important century during which Spanish colonial society was first taking shape. Though in conducting this basic research our primary goal has always been a linguistic one, i.e., to shed light on the early dialect differentiation of New World Spanish, the work is designed to be of use to historians and sociologists also.

The debate over the granting of petroleum concessions to foreign enterprise was one of the most significant areas of contact between the United States and Colombia after World War I. The official United States response to the plight of American interests involved in the development of the Barco concession exemplifies the nature of United States Latin American policy in the transition from the Coolidge to the Hoover administration. State Department actions in the Barco instance underline the growing awareness in American circles of the need to fashion a policy which would protect American enterprise as well as the principle of foreign investment against nationalist sentiment in Latin America.

Late in April, 1917, students of Preparatory Studies in Montevideo, Uruguay, declared a strike against the authorities of their school and organized a public demonstration on the steps of the Faculty of Law of the University. Thus a decade of calm in the university student movement of Uruguay was abruptly shattered by students who were in the last years of secondary education preparing for entry into the University. In a brief but violent struggle with police, troops, and firemen the angry young men of Preparatory Studies kindled a new spirit of protest and rebellion that would soon spread to the University and awaken the dormant student movement.

Although several Colombians of varying prominence had suggested the possibility of an imminent Isthmian revolt, it seems that the events of and immediately after November 3, 1903, took most of their countrymen by surprise. Certainly there is no evidence of significant prior planning for such a contingency. The achievement of Panamanian independence was followed, in turn, by a Colombian failure to establish a consistent and coherent policy designed either to regain the lost province or to implement terms by which the loss could be made more acceptable. This is not to say that Colombians, officially and unofficially, did nothing in response to the Panamanian separatist movement. Yet what is impressive is not what happened, but what did not happen: There was no sustained military movement against the Isthmus, no break in diplomatic relations with the United States, no serious reprisals against Americans and Isthmians, or their property, in Colombia, and no vigorous protest against the incumbent Colombian political leadership. Panama was apparently not a major issue even during the Presidential campaign and election of 1904. The lack of preparation alluded to above was surely a factor in determining this limited response, but it was a small factor and offers, at best, an incomplete explanation. In fact, the mildness of the Colombian reaction was the product of the unique interaction of domestic and international, contemporary and historical conditions which this article seeks to illuminate.