Paraguayan War casualties

The number of people who died in the Paraguayan War (1864–1870) is unknown. Widely diverging estimates have been made. "Determining the size of Paraguay's population has always been an exercise in frustration." However, there is a widespread impression that the casualties (military and civilian) were immense; there was also some population loss from non-lethal causes such as migration. The Dutch human geographer Jan Kleinpenning thought that Paraguay lost between a quarter and a half of its population, but much higher and lower estimates have been made. No academic demographic scholarship makes it less than 7% (including migration) or greater than 69%.
The traditional estimate was that the War cost Paraguay at least half its population including military and civilian casualties (the latter mainly owing to disease, dislocation and malnutrition) and that 90% of males of military age died. Assuming that to be so the Paraguayan War must have been 10 to 20 times more lethal than the slightly earlier American Civil War. The traditional estimate was based partly on anecdotal evidence and partly on a supposed census of 1857 (which, according to Reber, never took place) according to which Paraguay had a prewar population of about 1.3 million; implying an utterly catastrophic decline in the subsequent War. The following extract from an unsigned article in the 1911 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica: is illustrative of the spurious precision of the era.
On those figures, since shown to be false, Paraguay lost 84% of its population.
In the modern mainstream media, the view that the loss in life was likely around half the population has been expressed by, among others, the current Encyclopædia Britannica entry (last revised in 2001) and a 2012 article in The Economist. In 2015, the BBC and Reuters stated Paraguay "lost more than half of its population", and the Los Angeles Times stated "at least 70% of Paraguay's male population was killed". The Paraguayan war casualties have been listed in Guinness World Records as the highest percentage of a country's dead toll from war.
The first step in modern research was realising that prewar Paraguay's population could not possibly have been 1.3 million.
In 1976 John Hoyt Williams published 'Observations on the Paraguayan Census of 1846'. He analysed 20,000 pages of documentation surviving from an 1846 census of Paraguay ordered by the dictator Carlos Antonio López. Correcting the raw figures for missing returns, he arrived at an estimated population of the order of 240,000 for the year 1846. To estimate the population for the year before the War (1864) he assumed various growth rates, yielding a range between about 373,000 (annual growth rate 2.5%) to about 575,000 (annual growth rate of 5%). He remarked that “even the highest figure is far short of what is usually claimed by historians not utilizing hard data”. In his opinion the most likely growth rate was 3%, implying a population of about 407,000. He concluded:
The traditional view was challenged even more strongly by historian Vera Blinn Reber in 1988 in 'The Demographics of Paraguay: A Reinterpretation of the Great War, 1865–1870'. Noticing that, even with the most sophisticated weapons of military destruction available after 1914, population losses in war were never remotely of the 50% order, she examined the traditional estimates with some scepticism.
She noted that, hitherto, mortality estimates had depended on comparing various censuses of the Paraguayan population before and after the war. However, she claimed that the census data that had been used were not reliable. In particular, a supposed 1857 census, relied on by earlier historians, and which gave Paraguay a population of 1.3 million, was illusory and had never taken place, being mere government propaganda of the time. For Reber, there were only four Paraguayan censuses of even relative accuracy: 1792, 1846, 1886 and 1899. She accepted John Hoyt Williams's estimate for 1846, then created a curve by applying the technique of log-linear least squares regression to those four censuses, and achieved a best fit with an annual population increase of 1.48% (which, she argued, was compatible with what was known of other 19th century Latin American growth rates). She thus estimated the Paraguayan population on the eve of the war as of the order of 300,000.
As a separate and distinct point, an examination of the sex ratio after the war provided further evidence that mortality was lower than often assumed. The census of 1886 reported that there were 3 female Paraguayans for each male over 30 years old – not the 10:1 ratio often suggested.
Her conclusion was:
According to Reber's estimates, not all of the Paraguayan population loss during the war was caused by mortality. Some must have been owed to migration or loss of territory. Her estimates were as follows.
Reber was challenged by Whigham and Potthast in 'Some Strong Reservations: A Critique of Vera Blinn Reber's "The Demographics of Paraguay: A Reinterpretation of the Great War, 1864–70"'. They did not take issue with Reber's finding that the supposed 1857 census was spurious. But they said that there was no reason to assume the Paraguayan birthrate was the same as in other Latin American countries, because the Paraguayan culture was unique. They asked what could have caused the 'traditional' population loss estimates to be made, and argued that even if the evidence was anecdotal it could not simply be ignored. In a brief reply, Reber in effect said the Whigham–Potthast critique, by failing to embrace demographic techniques, was non-responsive.
In a footnote in an article in the Journal of Latin American Studies Mario Pastore said that Whigham and Potthast, in attacking Reber's estimate, had misrepresented it; but, on the other hand, had failed to notice one of its weakest points, namely, "that it was based on a non-linear regression with very few degrees of freedom".
In 1999 Whigham and Potthast returned to the fray. Their new paper contained two strands.
First, they argued that John Hoyt Williams’ population estimate based on the 1846 census needed to be raised; he was working with incomplete data (missing parishes, and undercounting of some ethnic groups and children). Furthermore, 1846 was only two years after a smallpox epidemic which must have reduced the population anyway. Accordingly:
The second strand was the recent discovery (by a Major Hugo Mendoza) in the Paraguayan national archives of a census for the year 1870. This census had been ordered by the Provisional Government i.e. the government in Paraguay that operated under the occupying Allied armies. Whigham and Potthast hailed this discovery as the ‘Paraguayan Rosetta Stone' and called their article 'The Paraguayan Rosetta Stone: New Insights into the Demographics of the Paraguayan War, 1864 -1870'.
After considering the data they said as follows:
This paper attracted criticism from the Dutch human geographer Jan Kleinpenning in his paper 'Strong Reservations about “New Insights into the Demographics of the Paraguayan War” '. Kleinpenning asked how they knew that the census was reliable seeing that in 1870 “Paraguay was a thoroughly damaged and disorganized country”. Unless one assumed an unfeasible large growth rate its figures conflicted with later censuses. He also criticised the paper for failing to use certain population data, long available in German language sources, including an 1873 census that put the population at 221,079. Summarising his criticism, Professor Kleinpenning wrote:
However, despite those criticisms, while not able to support the more extreme figures traditionally claimed, Kleinpenning concluded as follows:
In her own response 'Comment on “The Paraguayan Rosetta Stone”' Professor Reber did not have a high opinion of this Rosetta Stone.
The 'Rosetta Stone' seemed even more dubious in the light of the ensuing census:
In their reply 'Refining the Numbers: A Response to Reber and Kleinpenning' Whigham and Potthast attacked Reber's paper. Here we summarise their responses to her two main points, viz. that a census carried out by defeated Paraguayans on the orders of a provisional government upheld by the occupying Allies was unlikely to be reliable, and that its count implied an unfeasible population increase in the ensuing sixteen years.
To the first of those points Whigham and Potthast offered the following reply:
To her second point (it was also made by Kleinpenning) they replied:
The Whigham-Potthast and Kleinpenning papers did not address Allied losses, but Reber noted:
In a 2016 trip to Israel, Paraguayan President Horacio Cartes told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Paraguay "has had a Holocaust", stating that Paraguay lost "practically all our population" in the Paraguayan War.
In the years 2021 - 2023, a special committee was established within Parlasur to study the real extent of the damage caused by the Paraguayan War. The hearings (15 in total) took place mainly in Paraguay but also in Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil.
These hearings caused favorable repercussions in Argentina, Uruguay and especially in Paraguay. However, the hearings were considered "questionable" and "inaccurate" by Brazil.
The results of the hearings were analysed and published in a Special Report in 2023. According to this report, Paraguay suffered "severe, massive and systematic war crimes and crimes against mankind", and this was approved by representatives of Parlasur from Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay, but it was vetoed by representatives of Brazil.
According to this Special Report, the Paraguayan population prior to the War was "minimally" around 700,000 inhabitants and the loss of life estimated at around 500,000 - 550,000 Paraguayans who died during the conflict.
Another investigation, closely related to this "Special Committee" of Parlasur, was published in Paraguay. The authors, with a "maximalist approach" favorable to the Paraguayan position, claim that the population of Paraguay in the year 1864 when the War broke out, was around 1,200,000 inhabitants. They assert in most research about Paraguayan losses during the Paraguayan War, the suffering of the Paraguayan population is largely neglected (especially during the "Occupation period" of 1869 - 1879) and "hundreds of thousands" continued perishing during those subsequent years because of diseases, starvation and other sufferings.