Mirrors (53 page)

While the United States and Japan pursued their independence, another country, Paraguay, was annihilated for doing the same.

Paraguay was the only country in Latin America that refused to purchase lead life jackets from the merchants and bankers of England. Its three neighbors, Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, had to tutor it on “the ways of civilized nations,” as the English-language daily
Standard
of Buenos Aires put it.

All the combatants ended up in a bad way.

The student, exterminated.

The teachers, bankrupt.

They had claimed Paraguay would get its well-deserved lesson in three months, but the course lasted five years.

British banks financed the pedagogical mission and charged very dear. By the end, the victorious countries owed twice what they had owed five years previous, and the vanquished country, which had owed not a cent to anyone, was obliged to inaugurate its foreign debt: Paraguay received a loan of a million pounds sterling. The loan was for paying reparations to the winners. The murdered country had to pay the countries that murdered it for the high cost of its murder.

The tariffs that protected Paraguay’s industry disappeared;

the state companies, public lands, steel mills, one of the first railroads
in South America, all disappeared;
the national archive, incinerated with its three centuries of history,
disappeared;
and people disappeared.

Argentina’s president, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, an educated educator, declared in 1870:

“The war is over. Not a single Paraguayan over ten years old is left alive.”

And he celebrated:

“It was necessary to purge the earth of all that human excrescence.”

TRADITIONAL DRESS

South America was the market that always said yes.

Here, everything from England was welcome.

Brazil bought ice skates. Bolivia, bowler hats that now form the traditional dress of indigenous women. And in Argentina and Uruguay the traditional garb of gauchos was made in Britain for the Turkish army. At the close of the Crimean War, English merchants sent the thousands upon thousands of leftover baggy pants to the River Plate, and they became the gauchos’
bombachas
.

A decade later, England dressed the Brazilian, Argentine, and Uruguayan troops in the very same Turkish uniforms to carry out its errand to exterminate Paraguay.

HERE LAY PARAGUAY

The Empire of Brazil was inhabited by a million and a half slaves and a handful of dukes, marquises, counts, viscounts, and barons.

To achieve the liberation of Paraguay, this slave state placed in charge of its troops Count d’Eu, grandson of the king of France and husband of the next in line to the throne of Brazil.

In his portraits, receding chin, nose held high, breast thick with medals, the Field Marshal of Victory was unable to hide the disgust he felt for this unpleasant matter of war.

He knew enough to always remain a prudent distance from the battlefield, where his heroic soldiers faced ferocious Paraguayan children wearing false beards and armed with sticks. And from afar he pulled off his greatest feat: when the town of Piribebuy refused to surrender, he had his troops shut the windows and doors of the hospital filled with the wounded, and burn it down with everyone inside.

He was at war for a little over a year, and upon his return confessed:

“The Paraguayan War evoked in me an invincible repugnance for any prolonged effort.”

ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE

Amid so much death, birth survived.

Guaraní, the original language of Paraguay, survived, and with it the certainty that words are sacred.

The oldest of traditions has it that on this earth the red cicada sang, the grasshopper sang, the partridge sang, and then the cedar sang: from the soul of the cedar burst forth the song which in Guaraní called the first Paraguayans into being.

They did not yet exist.

They were born from the word that named them.

ORIGIN OF FREEDOM OF OPPRESSION

Opium was outlawed in China.

British merchants smuggled it in from India. Their diligent efforts led to a surge in the number of Chinese dependent on the mother of heroin and morphine, who charmed them with false happiness and ruined their lives.

The smugglers were fed up with the hindrances they faced at the hands of Chinese authorities. Developing the market required free trade, and free trade demanded war.

William Jardine, a generous sort, was the most powerful of the drug traffickers and vice president of the Medical Missionary Society, which offered treatment to the victims of the opium he sold.

In London, Jardine hired a few influential writers and journalists, including best-selling author Samuel Warren, to create a favorable environment for war. These communications professionals ran the cause of freedom high up the flagpole. Freedom of expression at the service of free trade: pamphlets and articles rained down upon British public opinion, exalting the sacrifice of the honest citizens who challenged Chinese despotism, risking jail, torture, and death in that kingdom of cruelty.

The proper climate established, the storm was unleashed. The Opium War lasted, with a few interruptions, from 1839 to 1860.

OUR LADY OF THE SEAS, NARCO QUEEN

The sale of people had been the juiciest enterprise in the British Empire. But happiness, as everyone knows, does not last. After three prosperous centuries, the Crown had to pull out of the slave trade, and selling drugs came to be the most lucrative source of imperial glory.

Queen Victoria was obliged to break down China’s closed doors. On board the ships of the Royal Navy, Christ’s missionaries joined the warriors of free trade. Behind them came the merchant fleet, boats that once carried black Africans, now filled with poison.

In the first stage of the Opium War, the British Empire took over the island of Hong Kong. The colorful governor, Sir John Bowring, declared:

“Free trade is Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ is free trade.”

HERE LAY CHINA

Outside its borders the Chinese traded little and were not in the habit of waging war.

Merchants and warriors were looked down upon. “Barbarians” was what they called the English and the few Europeans they met.

And so it was foretold. China had to fall, defeated by the deadliest fleet of warships in the world, and by mortars that perforated a dozen enemy soldiers in formation with a single shell.

In 1860, after razing ports and cities, the British, accompanied by the French, entered Beijing, sacked the Summer Palace, and told their colonial troops recruited in India and Senegal they could help themselves to the leftovers.

The palace, center of the Manchu Dynasty’s power, was in reality many palaces, more than two hundred residences and pagodas set among lakes and gardens, not unlike paradise. The victors stole everything, absolutely everything: furniture and drapes, jade sculptures, silk dresses, pearl necklaces, gold clocks, diamond bracelets . . . All that survived was the library, plus a telescope and a rifle that the king of England had given China seventy years before.

Then they burned the looted buildings. Flames reddened the earth and sky for many days and nights, and all that had been became nothing.

LOOTIE