The phrase “it is necessary to kill the Paraguayans from the womb of the mother” is popularly attributed to Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, but an investigation published by Última Hora indicates that it was not written by the former Argentine president. The passage appears in a political pamphlet attributed to Luís Alves de Lima e Silva, the Duke of Caxias, whose authorship and authenticity have also not been established.
Sarmiento, who died in Asunción on September 11, 1888, became associated with the statement through a shortened version taken out of context and not entirely faithful to the original wording. The text appears in a 13-page pamphlet preserved in the Library of the Mitre Museum in Buenos Aires, titled “Private dispatch from the Marquis of Caxias, Marshal of the Army in the war against the Government of Paraguay, to His Majesty the Emperor of Brazil, Don Pedro II.” The document is dated Tuiucué, November 18, 1867, during the War of the Triple Alliance.
In the complete passage, Caxias supposedly asks how much time, how many men, lives and resources would be needed to turn the entire Paraguayan population into “smoke and dust,” “killing even the fetus in the woman’s womb.” The wording appears as a rhetorical question within a reflection on the cost and duration of the war, rather than as an explicit military order to exterminate.
The pamphlet also praises the bravery of Paraguayan soldiers and states that gold would not be enough to defeat the population’s patriotism while it remained under the influence of Francisco Solano López. The text was reproduced by Julio José Chiavenato in the book American Genocide, published in 1979.
Chiavenato, however, acknowledged that the original manuscript of the alleged dispatch was unavailable. He suggested that the document might have disappeared among the many wartime records that were burned, stolen, destroyed or misplaced. In addition, the pamphlet has no colophon—editorial identification—or printing date, important reservations when establishing its provenance.
The Última Hora report that investigated the case and consulted institutions responsible for the collections also recovered two documentary responses. In an official letter dated November 6, 1979, the director of the Mitre Museum stated that the material was not a handwritten letter from Caxias, but a political pamphlet produced by opponents of Bartolomé Mitre and falsely presented as the work of the Brazilian commander, classifying it as “apocryphal.”
The Imperial Museum of Petrópolis, in turn, reported that it did not possess the letter after a request from the Brazilian Army’s Directorate of Cultural Affairs. The information was published in Revista Militar Brasileira in May 1980, volume 116, page 125.
The pamphlet itself reinforces the hypothesis that it was political propaganda by attributing to Caxias an accusation against Mitre: that the general had agreed to throw cholera-contaminated corpses into the Paraná River to affect populations in Corrientes, Entre Ríos and Santa Fe. This allegation is not supported by the available material.
Thus, there is no identifiable basis for attributing the phrase to Sarmiento. What exists is a political pamphlet with no proven authentic authorship, no original manuscript and no complete editorial information, later reproduced in a work about the war. These documentary limitations prevent it from being treated as an authenticated historical letter from Caxias.