The armies of the Triple Alliance began to invade Paraguay. They defeated the Paraguayan army at the battle of Estero Bellaco on 24 May, 1866 and the Paraguayans were so emaciated that their bodies would not burn. Seemingly determined to turn this rout into an even greater disaster, Lopez had every tenth officer and man among the survivors executed for “cowardice under fire”.
A truce was offered, but a precondition was that Lopez go into exile in Europe. He refused. Instead, he began imprisoning, flogging, torturing and executing as many of his own people as he could get his hands on. Not content with having three powerful neighbours aligned against him, Lopez turned his tender mercies on foreign residents and the U.S., Great Britain, France and Italy all sent gunboats.
Madame Lynch tried to keep things going by using her not inconsiderable charm to woo envoys and to reassure Lopez that the disasters that had befallen him were not his fault. They were the fault of the conspirators who surrounded him, and who Lopez mercilessly sought out.
After another military fiasco, Lopez was forced to evacuate Asuncion. He had already tortured and executed his two brothers and his sisters were imprisoned in covered bullock carts. Occasionally, they were let out to crawl into their brother’s presence, make fresh confession and submit themselves to be flogged. He also sentenced his mother to floggings, although she was over seventy.
Madame Lynch tried to carry as much of her booty with her as she could, but she had to abandon her piano in what is now the village of Piano, Paraguay.
Lopez withdrew into the jungle when he signed treaties with the Indians, but the Brazilian army pursued him relentlessly. Hours before the last attack, Lopez condemned his mother and sisters to death, though the sentence was not carried out.
While his men made a human shield against the enemy, Lopez tried to escape on horseback, but his horse got stuck in the mud of a river bed. When the Brazilians caught up with him, they were ordered to take him alive, but he pulled a gun and they had no choice.
“I die with my country,” he said as he expired.
Madame Lynch tried to escape in her carnage with her children, but they were caught by a Brazilian cavalry detachment. Juan Francisco tried to fight them off and was run through with a lance. Eliza was taken to see Lopez’s body. She and her remaining sons dug a grave for him and Juan Francisco with their bare hands.
When news of Lopez’s death reached Asuncion, there were scenes of wild joy. A celebration ball, which matched anything that Eliza had put on, was organized.
Madame Lynch and the Lopez ladies travelled back to Asuncion together on board a Brazilian gunboat. There, Doña Juana and her two daughters were allowed to return home. Madame Lynch was kept on board, under guard, for her own safety. The Provisional Government charged her with extorting money and jewellery for her own use, on the pretext that it was going towards the war effort, and wantonly conspiring in the murder of tens of thousands of Paraguayans in an unwinnable war.
The Brazilians rejected the petition and Madame Lynch and her four surviving sons were taken to Buenos Aires where they were put aboard a ship for Europe.
During her time in Paraguay, Madame Lynch had managed to deposit four thousand ounces of gold in the Bank of England, taken there by the Italian consul and an American minister who had taken her fancy. The Brazilians were similarly kind to the fair Eliza, allowing her to take a vast inventory of booty with her into exile.
She sent her children to school in England and began litigation to try to recover more of her loot. When the Paraguayan government seized her assets, she returned to Paraguay to pursue the matter in the courts there. Her presence was so divisive that the government asked her to leave.
She went to live in Paris again, dying there in 1886. She was buried in Pere Lachaise cemetery but, seventyfive years later, she was disinterred and her remains were shipped back to Paraguay where she now lies, an unlikely national heroine.
10. DON’T CRY FOR ME, ARGENTINA
Argentina’s most famous dictator of modern times was Juan Domingo Peron. He was born on 8 October, 1895 in Lobos, a small town in the Pampas about sixty miles south-west of Buenos Aires. His parents were Creole and unmarried. At the age of fifteen, he went to military school. Far from the warmth of his family, his first sexual experiences were with prostitutes. He recalled later: “In the era when we were boys, we weren’t accustomed to going to social parties, and it would not have occurred to us to go to a home and make love to a family girl.”
In 1928, at the age of thirty-three, he married schoolteacher Aurelia Tizon. She was a modest soul. Her only contribution to his career was her translation of some English military textbooks for him. Though it seems to have been a loving marriage, he seldom mentioned her in later years. She died in 1938, leaving no children.
In 1939, just months before the outbreak of the war in Europe, Peron was appointed military attache in Rome, where he witnessed Mussolini’s methods at first-hand. Peron travelled through Hungary, Austria, Germany, Spain and Portugal, observing Fascism at work. In Spain, he had an affair with an Italian woman. After they parted, he discovered she was pregnant, but was never able to find her or the child again.
While Juan Peron learnt his Fascism from the European master, he would never have been able to put it into practice if it had not been for his second wife, the redoubtable Evita A second-rate actress and right-wing ideologue, she was South America’s Ronald Reagan.
Born Marma Eva Duarte in Los Toldos on 7 May, 1919, she was the fourth child of Juanita Ibarguren, the mistress of the local landowner, Juan Duarte. At the time, any man with wealth or station in Argentina was expected to keep a mistress. Wives accepted it, provided the husband did not flaunt his mistress in their social circles.
Men would maintain a garconniere, or bachelor apartment, where they would entertain women and even the smallest town would have its amoblados, or love hotels, where rooms could be rented by the hour.
The best a peasant girl like Evita’s mother could expect was to become the mistress of a man wealthy enough to keep her. She and Duarte were together for fifteen years until suddenly, when Evita was seven, Juan Duarte died. After that, to support her children, Evita’s mother ran what was said to be a boarding house, but was probably a brothel.
Los Toldos was a poor town in the middle of the Pampas, 150 miles from Buenos Aires. Prospects there were bleak for a girl like Evita. At fourteen, she agreed to sleep with tango singer Jose Armani if he would take her to Buenos Aires. Later, she claimed that the better-known singer Agustin Magaldi was her first lover.
Although it is popularly supposed that she worked as a prostitute when she first arrived in Buenos Aires, she probably never walked the streets. She certainly worked as a photographic model and posed for pornographic pictures; and she picked up rich and powerful men who could help raise her status.
At fifteen, she became the mistress of Emilio Kartulovic, publisher of the movie magazine Sintonia. His contacts gave her the perfect springboard into society.
She was fairly tall for a Latino — 5 feet 5 inches — with brown eyes and dyed blonde hair, and she longed to become an actress. Using her charms on Rafael Firtuso, the owner of the Liceo theatre, she was cast in one of his productions. Ironically, her first provincial tour was in a play called The Mortal Kiss. It was about the evils of sexual promiscuity, financed by the Argentine Prophylactic League who thought that a rousing melodrama would cut down Argentina’s soaring illegitimacy rate.