Republic or Death! (40 page)

It would not infrequently occur that one of them would be surrounded by a dozen of the enemy all calling for him to surrender [but he would fight until] killed [or] if by chance he was made a prisoner, he would take the first opportunity … to seize a musket and kill as many more as possible until he was himself knocked senseless.

Towards the end of the war, so many men had died and the country was so desperate, that women were fighting with broken bottles, their nails and teeth, while Mariscal López forced 10,000 boys into service, painting beards on them to make them appear older, and giving them pieces of wood shaped like muskets in the hope it would scare anyone from engaging them in combat. When Mariscal López was eventually caught his final words were ‘I die with my country', although his supporters argue that it is a misquote and he actually said, ‘I die for my country.' Whichever it was, the first seems more appropriate; when peace was signed in 1870, some 300,000 Paraguayans were dead, from disease and starvation as well as fighting. There were only around 150,000 left. The country had lost 90 per cent of its adult male population. Brazil and Argentina had taken a quarter of its land. Paraguay had come very close to choosing death.

*

There are conflicting views on just how important the anthem was around that time. Miguel Ángel Verón Gómez, an expert in the Guarani language (he kindly spoke to me in Spanish, a language he normally refuses to speak), insisted it was banned as soon as the fighting began, both because it was in Spanish and because it was written by a Uruguayan. But Diego Sánchez Haase, one of the country's leading conductors and music historians, was less certain that it disappeared so completely, wondering aloud if such a perfect symbol of Paraguay's spirit could have just disappeared overnight (although he did admit the country went back to Dr Francia's original anthem for those war years).

However, there is little argument that over the next few decades it became a proper anthem, as we would understand the term today, used in efforts to reinvent the country and move it on from its past. The Great War, as they call it, was not a defeat, the country's politicians and historians said, but unquestionable evidence of Paraguayan heroism; Mariscal López was not a madman whose name should never be uttered louder than a whisper, he was the one true patriot. The anthem played into both those myths. By the 1920s, the Instituto Paraguayo, the country's leading cultural body, was even taking the time to create an official version of it to stop the ‘anarchy' that often occurred when it was played, there being so many different versions, all in different keys and time signatures, that half the time audiences would just throw each other confused looks as if they weren't quite sure what was going to come next (the institute's version, by composer Remberto Giménez, was officially adopted in 1934).

During that decade, and the early 1930s, the country's pride needed to be restored quickly because Bolivia was making increasingly aggressive moves on the Chaco region, which makes up much of the north and west of Paraguay. The two countries both thought the area contained oil (it still hasn't appeared), and ended up fighting a three-year war over its arid land from 1932 to 1935. Accounts from the time make it sound like the most hideous of conflicts – soldiers used to shoot themselves in the throat because they couldn't take the thirst any more, or beg their commanders to urinate in their mouths so they could have something – anything – to drink. Paraguay emerged victorious, but at the cost of around 40,000 Paraguayan lives. You'd have thought the government would have seen this as a national tragedy; but they seem to have focused more on the fact the country had at last won a fight.

*

The anthem really came into its own, though, during the time of Paraguay's fourth dictator, General Alfredo Stroessner, who ruled from 1954 all the way until 1989. He had leathery, tanned skin, a receded hairline and a tightly clipped moustache, and always wore a military jacket. He looked, in short, like every other Latin American dictator of that time. You could have put him next to Chile's Augusto Pinochet and you would have struggled to tell the difference.

Stroessner acted like those other dictators too, clamping down on all opposition under the guise of fighting communism, often with American support. Sometimes he even clamped down on people who weren't opposed to him, just to help boost his anti-communist credentials. In March 1955, just six months after he had been inaugurated as president, a colony of Ukrainians, Poles and Belarusians who had fled Stalin organised a celebration in the town of Fram, inviting every local dignitary they could think of. They sang the Soviet and Paraguayan anthems as a welcome, which turned out to be a mistake, given that they were already under suspicion for receiving letters in their native languages. Stroessner quickly turned the singing into evidence of a communist plot, and its ‘ringleaders' were arrested, beaten, and tortured by having blocks of ice tied to them and being given electric shocks.

Other countries' anthems may not have been heard much in Paraguay after that, but ‘República o Muerte' was, Stroessner relying on it to help heighten nationalist sentiment and to try to link his own image with those of both Mariscal López and Dr Francia (Stroessner was one for personality cults; his name flashed over Asunción at night, although he never sought to rewrite the anthem like, say, Kazakhstan's Nazarbayev has).

It is interesting talking to people about Stroessner's time and seeing how few seemed to get swept up by the nationalism he tried to encourage with the anthem, or if they did, how swiftly that feeling disappeared by the end of his rule. In the south of the country, I visited Santa María de Fe, a former
reducción
consisting of some simple white-walled adobe houses around a square with a church to one side. Trees soared in between the homes, each filled with bright green parrots, the occasional monkey. There I spoke to a middle-aged man called Isabelino Galiano, who was anything but fond of the anthem. He told me it was a ‘song for the military, not for the heart … During Stroessner's regime, every day you had to sing it – in schools, in the army, everywhere. And when you heard it, you had to sing the whole thing. You know it's got seven verses? You'd start it and you wouldn't be finished for fifteen minutes! The songbook was this thick, like a Bible.'

Isabelino's father was a member of the
Ligas Agrarias
, a religious peasant movement that tried to improve the lot of small farmers until Stroessner decided it was becoming too vocal and clamped down on its leaders. Isabelino's father was among those arrested, labelled a communist, tortured and jailed. Isabelino remembers police being stationed outside his house who demanded to know his every move and who warned people off talking to him. ‘If it hadn't been for the [local] priests, I wouldn't have spoken to anyone growing up,' he said.

He told me that the true anthem of the Paraguayan people is actually ‘Patria Querida' (‘Beloved Homeland'), a song written by a priest in the 1920s to a French dance tune that was originally about soldiers flirting with a waitress. It is a far more optimistic anthem, he said, singing its chorus for me. ‘Beloved country, we are your hope, / we are the flowers of your beautiful future.' I pulled out the lyrics and pointed out that the second verse was almost the same as ‘República o Muerte': ‘If unfortunately the bugle of battle calls us / … our breasts will be the wall that stops you being insulted / … The motto of the Paraguayan will always be, “Victory or death”', it goes. He didn't see that as a problem.

Another day, in Asunción, I spoke with Gabriela Ramos, a young artist who had once made a piece out of the anthem by putting question marks at the end of quotations from it, trying to make people realise just how absurd most of it is. ‘“
¿Nuestro brío nos dio libertad?
”' she said, giving an example. ‘“Our bravery gave us freedom?”
Really?
'

When I met Gabriela, I didn't actually mean to talk to her about Stroessner's time – she was in the womb when his dictatorship ended – but it turned out that her father had been a member of the army back then, one of the main people who took part in the coup to overthrow him, and had driven a tank through the middle of the city to fire on the presidential guard and the police headquarters. He got out of it at one point, just for a moment's air, and was hit by a piece of shrapnel. He thought it was only a minor injury, so held a piece of cloth to the wound, but it had actually burst his aorta. He fainted shortly afterwards and never got back up. He was the only high-ranking official to die that day. ‘So “República o Muerte” – my father really believed in it, lived it,' she said. ‘He even left us a little piece of paper saying, “What I'm doing is for my country and my children.” He really thought things would get better here with Stroessner gone. But for me, that phrase, I don't know if life has to be like that. Why are there only two choices?

‘I guess it's just too personal. It's … I don't know. Please ask me a different question.'

*

Today, Paraguay is nothing like its past, of course, and that raises a big question for its anthem. What can ‘República o Muerte' mean at a time when the country no longer has dictators to sing the anthem for, or invading neighbours to sing it against? When Paraguay is just another developing country, filled with welcoming people and a fascinating culture, but beset by poverty and corruption? I think it is fair to say that for the majority of people its title, at least, does still, deep down, resonate. I asked all kinds of people if they would die for Paraguay, and pretty much all of them said they would, ‘if the cause was right'. Occasionally someone would instead say, ‘It's easy to die for your country, what's hard to do is to live for it,' but the only reaction I got apart from those two was a woman who said: ‘Why would I even want to think about the anthem's meaning? Could you imagine me explaining it to my children? We want you to
die
?'

But even if the majority say they would die for Paraguay, does that mean they actually identify with, or even like, the anthem itself; that they're stirred by its notes whenever it comes on TV? That I'm less sure about, and it didn't help that most people seemed to hold back from being totally honest with me. Paraguay is, after all, a place where it's frowned upon to be anything but patriotic – a country that still sees itself as put upon, a small country struggling for recognition in the shadow of its two giant neighbours. So when a foreigner asks you about your anthem, you have to be positive; you can't be seen to let the nation down. When I asked people to sing the anthem for me, they would often give the most stilted renditions, standing straight, facing forward, their eyes practically begging it to end, but afterwards they would tell me they loved it and couldn't think of a better song. It wasn't as if I had the element of surprise when talking to people about it either, as I learned one day while visiting some Jesuit ruins in the countryside. ‘You want to know about my anthem? That's crazy,' a security guard said when we got talking. ‘There's a British journalist who's named a book after our anthem and is over here talking to people about it. It's all over Facebook. You should look him up!'

*

‘No, no, no, they're lying to you – nobody likes the anthem,' says Diego Darío Florentín Sryvalin, slapping his desk at the Universidad Nacional on the outskirts of Asunción, his voice spiralling upwards in annoyance. ‘They say they like it because it's a patriotic symbol and they love their country – everybody loves Paraguay! – but they don't like the anthem. It's sad, it's long, it's too hard to sing. You need to be Plácido Domingo or Andrea Bocelli! Nobody even knows what it means!'

He pulls out a copy of the anthem's lyrics and points at the first two lines:

A los pueblos de América, infausto,

Tres centurias un cetro oprimió
.

‘The people of the Americas were unfortunately oppressed for three centuries by a sceptre,' it means, the sceptre a somewhat archaic reference to Spanish rule. Diego thwacks the words repeatedly with his thumb. ‘“
InFAUSto
”? Who knows the meaning of that? Nobody! “
CenTURias
”? Nobody knows what that means! We say
siglo
for “century”. “
Cetro oPRIMió
”? Nobody! Four words in the first two lines, nobody here understands! Four words! Nobody!'

The reason I arranged to meet Diego is that he's the only academic I have ever heard of having done a grammatical analysis of his national anthem. I'd spoken to him on the phone before visiting and he told me that he spent his childhood ashamed of not understanding the song, fearing it meant he wasn't actually patriotic. He'd also been regularly humiliated by it. ‘Every day we had to sing it at school,' he said, ‘and if you were late, they made you sing it alone in the middle of the school. It was torture! They punished you with this song.'

Despite that phone call, I wasn't expecting Diego to be quite so exasperated by the words that Francisco Acuña de Figueroa wrote 160 years ago. ‘Look at the grammar,' he booms, ‘nobody can work out what is the subject and what is the object, or what adjective goes with what noun. It's ridiculous!' He starts explaining the poetic concept of hyperbaton, which basically means swapping words around in sentences to appear clever, something the anthem contains lots of. ‘It's …' He flicks around on a translation program, looking for the English word to express his anger. ‘It's stupid!' he says. His two office-mates stifle smirks, but by this point even Diego's laughing at the absurdity of just how much annoyance the song causes him. ‘And look at this word, “
enalzaron
”. I had to contact the Real Academia Española [the guardians of the Spanish language] to ask what it meant. It's not in the dictionary. And they tell me it's from the 1300s. In a Bible. It's a name of God. Who's going to know that? No one knows!'