My God, I was reading up on my Brazilian history, and was just thinking to myself about how most South American wars have been relatively minor, when I looked up The Paraguayan War and saw the figures.
The war, known in Paraguay as the “War of ’70” or the “Great War”, was among the worst military defeats ever inflicted on a modern nation state. According to Thomas Whigham of the University of Georgia, as much as 60% of the population and 90% of Paraguayan men died from combat or, more often, from disease and starvation. Other researchers put the figure considerably lower—but still atrociously high. Federico Franco, Mr Lugo’s successor, recently called the war a “holocaust”. Yet it is little known outside the region. Even in Paraguay its moral ambiguities have caused generations of leaders to shroud it in myth.
One estimate places total Paraguayan losses—through both war and disease—as high as 1.2 million people, or 90% of its pre-war population. A different estimate places Paraguayan deaths at approximately 300,000 people out of its 500,000 to 525,000 prewar inhabitants. According to Steven Pinker the war killed more than 60% of the population of Paraguay, making it proportionally the most destructive war in modern times.
According to the post-war census only 29,000 males over the age of 15 remained, meaning a 4:1 ratio between females and males (20:1 in some places).
Compare that to the Second World War with only around 2.5% of the world's population killed (with Poland's casualties in proportion to its pre-war population being the highest at around 17%).
From what I've read so far, most of these losses were from attrition and disease (with cholera taking a massive toll) during the drawn out guerrilla conflict that followed the defeat of the Paraguayan army.
Just staggering figures, thought I'd share because, well I don't know really, this just completely surprised me and the war seems to be largely neglected today. Probably due to it being rather poorly documented, here are some paintings by Cándido Lopez, Argentine soldier turned painter (after he lost his arm in the war), who left the only visual record of the war. They depict the
Battle of Curupaytí one of the few Paraguayan victories of the war.
