Paraguay

From the Guarani world of the great rivers and the Spanish founding of Asuncion to the Jesuit missions, independence in 1811, the isolation of Dr Francia and the Lopez dynasty, the catastrophe of the Triple Alliance war, the Chaco War, the long Stroessner dictatorship, and a democratic, Guarani-speaking republic in the age of Itaipu.

Paraguay's history is rooted in the Guarani peoples of the Parana and Paraguay river basins, whose language remains co-official with Spanish and is spoken by most of the nation today. Spaniards founded Asuncion in 1537, the 'mother of cities' from which much of southern South America was settled, and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Jesuit missions gathered the Guarani into reducciones until the order's expulsion in 1767. Independence from Spain came in May 1811, followed by the long isolationist dictatorship of Jose Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia and the modernising rule of Carlos Antonio Lopez and his son Francisco Solano Lopez, whose War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870) against Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay devastated the country and killed a vast, disputed share of its population. The twentieth century brought the Chaco War with Bolivia (1932-1935), the thirty-five-year dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner (1954-1989), and finally a return to democracy and a new constitution in 1992, in an era defined economically by the binational Itaipu hydroelectric dam.