Paraguayan War

There's going to be a few shorter episodes, some even quite short, but seven main episodes.

Okay, so we've done the Jacobite Wars, the Imjin War, the Crimean War, the Philippine War, the Paraguayan War, the Soviet-Afghan War.

This is the seventh series and the biggest bite I've ever taken.

It's a risk.

And the Crimean War is a big lead-in to this series.

Some of the same characters show up.

And this war happens during the Paraguayan War.

Like, the Paraguayan War and the German Wars of Unification happened on almost exactly the same time scale.

And there were more heterodox adherents of positivism, who didn't buy into the religious aspects of it, such as Benjamin Constant Botelho de Magalhães, an army officer who taught Comte's ideas, including anti-militarist ideas, to his students at the Brazilian Military Academy.

In the aftermath of the deadly Paraguayan War, shout out chapter 52, a greater ambivalence of traditional society began to take root in Brazil.

Positivism spread within the army, and with it a growing skepticism toward the nation's monarchy.

Then, on November 15th, 1889, Army Marshal Deodoro da Fonseca led a coup overthrowing Emperor Pedro II and establishing the first Brazilian Republic.

Later, rulers opened the country somewhat and invested in infrastructure and military development, and then Paraguay entered a war that nearly destroyed it.

There was a Paraguayan War from 1864 to 1870, fought between Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and called the War of the Triple Alliance.

Never heard of that.

The Allies invaded Paraguay and eventually devastated the country.

Go, uh, Goldie shows him a map and he says, "It's full of blank spaces," and explains that Bolivia, Brazil, and Peru are all up in arms over the precise extent of their borders.

Now, we just did episodes on the dictator of Paraguay, Francisco Solano López, and the War of the Triple Alliance that occurs not far from here, and it's h- a border dispute it l- helps lead to it.

In Grann's book, The Lost City of Z, Grann wrongly writes, "The boundary issues between Paraguay and its neighbors caused the war." That's, that's not true.

There were boundary issues that were inherent to conflicts between those countries previously, but the war was caused because Francisco Solano López was a fucking maniac who wanted to get involved in Uruguayan politics, and then invaded Brazil, Argentina, and tried to invade Uruguay.