PARAGUAYAN SORROW

LATIN AMERICA | HISTORY
iving in a landlocked nation at the heart of South America at the turn of the twentieth century, the young Spanish essayist, Rafael Barrett, was gripped by what he later titled Paraguayan Sorrow. Thirty years prior to his arrival in Para-guay, an apocalyptic war had wiped out half the population, and as the new century began a ferocious pattern of capitalist imperialism had taken hold. While skirmishes between Paraguay’s national elites pushed the country from one military uprising to the next, Barrett’s prolific articles in the capital city’s press broke the silence on deep social, economic, and political problems playing out in urban and rural areas.
All he had witnessed prompted him to shift his politics dramatically to the left. He discarded the vestiges of his past as an upper-class liberal dandy in Madrid and became a key ally of the growing Paraguayan anarcho-syndicalist movement.
Barrett paid a dire price for his metamorphosis, facing banishment from the nation’s intelligentsia, poverty, and exile while battling a tuberculosis infection that would soon end his life at the age of thirty-four. He left behind the manuscript of his striking book Paraguayan Sorrow, which, with its vivid landscapes, precise analysis, and bold anarchist denouncements, provides a vital, compassionate account of the troubled and dispossessed Paraguay of the era. This first-ever English translation includes Barrett’s brave exposé of the horrors committed against Paraguayan workers by powerful international companies that extracted the leaf of the yerba mate tree from the depths of enormous enclaves of forest. This attack on the state-backed system of debt slavery positioned him as a forerunner of anti-neoco-lonial writing in Latin America and contributed to his status as a legendary figure in Paraguayan, Uruguayan, and Argentinian leftist circles. He continues to be one of the most notable voices to have spoken out against the rampant imperialism permeating the region.