Paraguayan Sorrow: Writings of Rafael Barrett, A Radical Voice in a Dispossessed Land, translated and edited by William Costa, 2024, Monthly Review Press
A ghost haunts Paraguay and it points accusing fingers clutching the nib of a pen at the puppets of a murderous empire whose apocalyptic crimes go unpunished.
The ghost is that of anarchist journalist Rafael Barrett and the puppeteer was Britain—a capitalist behemoth whose genocidal avarice pulling the strings of local elites very nearly erased this small country in a distant continent.
Amid the cataclysmic aftermath of the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-70)—the enduring “sorrow” of the title of this book that followed South America’s most destructive conflict—Barrett became a pioneering voice of anti-imperialism.
The war utterly devastated Paraguay, but that was only the half of it—by doing so it empowered its remaining elites who, in nefarious league with imperialism, forced the country’s benighted peasants into the degradation of debt slavery.
This collection of Barrett’s writing confirms his growing recognition as a seer in his adopted homeland but is also a timely reminder of what is at stake in the recesses of Latin America as the region girds itself for a new phase of imperialism through Trump’s revived Monroe Doctrine.
Historians have assessed the War of the Triple Alliance in various ways but the strong consensus is that it can be seen as a clash between a weak Paraguay determined to pursue an independent, nationalistic path to development and British imperialism determined to transform it into an economic colony.
Manipulating the powerful alliance of Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, Great Britain sought to open Paraguay to profitable investment and create a market for its exports while gaining access to a commodity, cotton, at that time in short supply because of the US Civil War.
The War of the Triple Alliance claimed, according to the worst reports, up to 1.2 million Paraguayans—90 per cent of the prior population—who fell victim to fighting and disease. Even when revised down by critics of such figures to about 60 per cent, the war was proportionally the most destructive in modern history. Paraguay lost vast swathes of territory, its state and economy were destroyed, it was forced into subordination to Brazil, and it was saddled with an unmanageable debt.
The Spanish-born Barrett arrived in a postwar society still reeling from this calamity and he would become one of the most notable early voices speaking out against imperialism in Latin America.
A fascinating figure, he was until recently little known outside of anarchist circles in South America and among students of Latin American radical history. His work has not been widely read outside Paraguay, and until now has not been available in English.
That has all changed in recent years, and with the publication of Paraguayan Sorrow, the works of this eloquent and powerful writer are being given a new lease of life—and offer lessons from the past that are all too relevant for activists today.
Being a Spanish-born anarchist journalist, one might assume Barrett came from the great Spanish anarchist movement that spanned the 1860s to the late 1930s and that, until defeat in the Spanish Civil War in 1939, was the largest in the world.
He could have been part of the “transnational anarchism” that has been identified by scholars in recent years: the global network of anarchist activists that spread across national borders, oceans and continents—but that was not the case.
As William Costa, the editor and translator of Paraguayan Sorrow, makes clear in his extensive introduction to Barrett’s life and work, he came from the Spanish liberal tradition and, on arrival in Paraguay, was very much embedded in bourgeois society.
It was a political uprising of the Liberals that drew Barrett to Paraguay in 1904, and he soon became immersed in the intellectual circles of the new regime.
However, the scenes he witnessed in the country among the workers and campesinos who faced harsh exploitation led to his radicalisation. His privileged position could not obscure the poverty and repression he saw all around him.
As his radicalisation progressed, Barrett came into contact with the labour movement and the anarcho-syndicalist Paraguayan Regional Workers Federation, quickly building ties as he attended meetings and began giving speeches to workers.
However, it was through his powerful journalism that he documented the suffering of the Paraguayan people and built his reputation as a radical voice of the country’s oppressed.
It is among the collection of articles that make up Paraguayan Sorrow that we find arguably the most valuable work from his pen for a contemporary audience—exposing the brutal extraction of Paraguay’s natural resources by foreign-owned corporations.
Until the War of the Triple Alliance, yerba mate, a herbal tea popular across South America, had been a critically important cash crop in Paraguay, generating crucial revenues for the country—and so inevitably this commodity was a target of imperialism.
Most of the staggering 60,392 square miles lost by Paraguay to Argentina and Brazil was rich in yerba mate, meaning that by the end of the 19th century Brazil had become the main producer of the crop, but also weakening domestic production so much that foreign investors were able to enter the Paraguayan market and take control of what remained.
In “The Truth of the Yerba Mate Forest”, Barrett denounced this neocolonial exploitation in the most forceful way. Over the course of six articles, published in a major newspaper of the time, he attacked the Anglo-Argentine owned Industrial Paraguaya Company for its abuse of workers that harvested yerba mate.
The company owned some five million acres of forest in Paraguay and was responsible for extracting and destroying this natural resource, a plant that was also sacred to the indigenous Guarani people who had often been forced into indentured servitude in harvesting and dispossessed of their lands in the process.
Barrett was fierce in his criticism of the ecological destruction and the effectively legalised slavery and turned his pen against the Paraguayan elite—all the way up to the nation’s president. He paid the price for it through his arrest and deportation, narrowly avoiding assassination, actions almost certainly ordered by the yerba mate companies in response to his articles.
It is in such works that Barrett has come to be seen as a forerunner of the anti-neocolonial struggle against global capital that persists in Paraguay to this day.
In the past few years representatives of the Guarani people have been fighting at the United Nations against the corporations that have been responsible for the toxic contamination of their traditional lands.
In December 2021, 10,000 people demonstrated in Paraguay’s capital, Asunción, against the erosion of indigenous and campesino land rights, calling for an end to forced evictions of these communities.
In 2023, reports emerged of global financial institutions Santander and BlackRock increasing their investments in the Brazilian multinational Minerva, which has been accused of purchasing beef from ranchers linked to illegal deforestation. Some reports suggest as much as 5,000 football pitches worth of indigenous land in Paraguay have been stolen to graze cattle.
These contemporary struggles echo those that Barrett fought as an anarchist in Paraguay a century ago. Today, his reputation for speaking truth to power is being rediscovered by a new generation, which can learn valuable lessons from his writing.
Costa’s efforts in bringing Barrett’s work to a wider audience with the English translation of Paraguayan Sorrow is a critically important step in this journey.
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Categories: Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, South America, Uruguay