page_title: History of Paraguay
section_title: Francisco Solano López, 1862–70
hierarchical_section_title: History of Paraguay / Era of dictatorships (1814–1870) / Francisco Solano López, 1862–70
caption_attribution_description: English: Francisco Solano López, dictator of Paraguay.
context_page_description: The history of Paraguay is a result of development and interaction of varying cultures of indigenous peoples in Paraguay and overseas immigrants who together have created the modern-day Paraguay. Paraguay celebrates Independence Day on May 15, from 1811 to now.
  William E. Barrett wrote: "Paraguay is the country of prophecy. One of the two smallest nations [as of 1952] on the American continent, it was the first American communistic state, the first American nation to be governed by an absolute dictator."
context_section_description: Born in 1827, Francisco Solano López became the second and final ruler of the López dynasty. After his father's death the Paraguayan Congress elected him President on October 16, 1862. Solano López consolidated his power after his father's death in 1862 by silencing several hundred critics and would-be reformers through imprisonment.
  The government continued to exert control on all exports. The export of yerba mate and valuable wood products maintained the balance of trade between Paraguay and the outside world. The Paraguayan government was extremely protectionist, never accepted loans from abroad, and employed high tariffs against the importation of foreign products. This protectionism made the society self-sufficient. This also avoided the debt suffered by Argentina and Brazil.
  Solano López had a pampered childhood; his father raised him to inherit his mantle and made him a brigadier general at the age of eighteen. His 1853 trip to Europe to buy arms was probably the most important experience of his life. In Paris, Solano López admired the trappings and pretensions of the French empire of Napoleon III. He fell in love with an Irish woman, Elisa Alicia Lynch, whom he made his lover. "La Lynch", as she became known in Paraguay, was a strong-willed, charming, witty, intelligent woman who became a person of enormous influence. Lynch's Parisian manners soon made her a trendsetter in the Paraguayan capital, and she made enemies as quickly as she made friends. Lynch bore Solano López five sons, although the two never married. She became the largest landowner in Paraguay after Solano López transferred most of Paraguay and portions of Brazil into her name during the war. She buried Solano López with her own hands after the last battle in 1870 and died penniless some years later in Europe.
  Observers sharply disagreed about Solano López. George Thompson, an English engineer who worked for the younger López (he distinguished himself as a Paraguayan officer during the Paraguayan War, and later wrote a book about his experience), called him "a monster without parallel". Solano López's conduct laid him open to such charges. In the first place, Solano López's miscalculations and ambitions plunged Paraguay into a war with Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. The war resulted in the deaths of half of Paraguay's population and almost erased the country from the map. During the war, Solano López ordered the executions of his own brothers and had his mother and sisters tortured when he suspected them of opposing him. Thousands of others, including Paraguay's bravest soldiers and generals, also went to their deaths before firing squads or were hacked to pieces on Solano López's orders. Others saw Solano López as a paranoid megalomaniac, a man who wanted to be the "Napoleon of South America", willing to reduce his country to ruin and his countrymen to beggars in his vain quest for glory.
  However, sympathetic Paraguayan nationalists and foreign revisionist historians have portrayed Solano López as a patriot who resisted to his last breath Argentine and Brazilian designs on Paraguay. They portrayed him as a tragic figure caught in a web of Argentine and Brazilian duplicity who mobilized the nation to repulse its enemies, holding them off heroically for five bloody, horror-filled years until Paraguay was finally overrun and prostrate. Since the 1930s, Paraguayans have regarded Solano López as the nation's foremost hero.
caption: López as a military leader, 1866
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