Paraguay

República del Paraguay Tetã Paraguái
Flag	Coat of Arms
Capital	Asunción
Government	Constitutional Republic
Language	Spanish, Guaraní (official)
President	Nicanor Duarte Frutos
Area	157,047 sq. mi.
Population	6,158,000 (2005)
GDP per capita	$4,555 (2005)
Currency	Guaraní

Paraguay is a landlocked republic of South America. It has an area has an area of 157,048 square miles (406,752 sq km) and a population of 5.2 million (2000). The capital city is Asuncion and the national languages are Guarani and Spanish.

History

Asuncion was founded by Spanish colonialists in 1537 and the surrounding area became a Spanish province. Jesuit missionaries has special privileges in Paraguay and founded a large number of mission-settlements in the southern part of the present-day nation. Paraguay declared independence from Spain in 1811; from 1816 to 1840 it achieved stability under the despotic rule of Jose Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia (Dr Francia), and from 1840 to 1862 under Carlos Antonio Lopez. Lopez was succeeded by his son, Francisco Solano Lopez, who harbored megalomaniacal fantasies about becoming a South American Napoleon. In 1865 he launched Paraguay on the catastrophic War of the Triple Alliance by attacking Brazil which was involved in a dispute with Uruguay. By the end of the war in 1870, with Uruguay and Argentina drawn in on the side of Brazil, Lopez was dead, shot down in a jungle bolt-hole; the nation was in ruins, and 90 per cent of the male population over the age of twelve years had died.

Paraguay again went to war between 1932 and 1935, with Bolivia over the disputed territory of the Gran Chaco. The cause of the Chaco War was the suspected oil reserves under the Chaco's hot, dry and inhospitable surface. Paraguay 'won' in that it gained most of the territory; but losses were severe, and there was no oil.

A Chaco War veteran, the semi-Bavarian General Alfredo Stroessner took over the government in 1954 and ruled to 1989 through a mixture of intimidation (including the torture and murder of political opponents), cronyism and graft. During this period Paraguay was notorious as a haven for fugitive Nazis, including Dr Josef Mengele. The country's economy depended to an almost unprecedented state on smuggling; one of the largest centres for this was the new town of Ciudad Stroessner (now Ciudad del Este), close to the massive Itaipu dam - the world's largest hydro-electric power scheme - on the Parana River dividing Paraguay and Brazil.