There are claims that repeat like dogmas in Paraguayan history: that the heroes of May 1811 were directly inspired by the Revolution of the Comuneros (1717–1735) and that this feat was the germ of emancipation. Another, equally entrenched, holds that the idea of freedom was 'inoculated' into Paraguay by Argentine General Manuel Belgrano, after the defeats at Paraguarí and Tacuarí. Both theses, however, resist scrutiny of primary sources.
Bartolomé Mitre, in his History of Belgrano, stated that the Paraguay of 1810 was a submissive people, without moral energy, and that the idea of freedom was 'inoculated' into them by Belgrano. Refuting this thesis required demonstrating that the Paraguayan republic had its own roots. The Comuneros offered the perfect material for this, but the documentary evidence points in another direction.
The testimony of Pedro de Alcântara Antonio Somellera, legal advisor to royalist governor Bernardo de Velasco, is crucial. In notes written in 1841, Somellera reports that in the early hours of May 14–15, 1811, while debating the composition of the Provisional Junta, the officers opposed including José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, considering him contrary to the cause of Buenos Aires. Somellera then revealed that on July 24, 1810, in an Open Cabildo convened by Velasco, Francia had already argued that the Spanish government had lapsed — exactly the same legal-political doctrine that underpinned the May Junta of Buenos Aires. This occurred seven and a half months before the Tacuarí interview.
Another documentary piece is the transcript of the conversation between Belgrano and the chaplain of the Paraguayan army, José Agustín de Molas, on the day of the Battle of Tacuarí (March 9, 1811). When Belgrano asked why the provinces did not obey the Buenos Aires Junta, Molas replied: 'Because the people of Buenos Aires have no authority, as a capital, to subjugate the other provinces, but only to represent their peculiar rights, as each province has them; and the authority of the viceroy, which the people took, should not extend to the other provinces, because it had already ceased.'
Molas's response demonstrates that the doctrine of provincial sovereignty was already elaborated and available in Asunción before Belgrano's passage. It was not inoculated, but rather opposed. The Tapian conversation reverses the meaning of Mitre's account: Belgrano does not teach, he asks. And the Paraguayan response is a finished piece of legal-political theory.
Thus, primary sources suggest that Paraguayan independence was not the result of an external 'inoculation,' but rather of an internal process of political maturation, whose roots go back to the Revolution of the Comuneros and the thought of figures like Francia.