The Centro de Artes Visuales/Museo del Barro in Asunción hosts the launch of the book Para otra historia de la guerra del Chaco: Colección de documentos y relatos sobre la ocupación militar de los territorios indígenas del Chaco boreal (1910-1960), by researchers Luc Capdevila and Nicolás Richard, on May 26 at 6:30 p.m. The free event will feature comments by anthropologists José Braunstein and Ticio Escobar.
The Chaco War (1932-1935) is traditionally narrated as a conventional conflict between Bolivia and Paraguay over possession of a vast and supposedly uninhabited territory. The work proposes to challenge this view by restoring the perspective of the indigenous peoples who inhabited—and still inhabit—the boreal Chaco.
The result of more than a decade of historical, anthropological, and archival research, the book brings together a vast collection of written, visual, and oral sources: indigenous testimonies, military diaries, photographs, sound recordings, correspondence, ethnographic reports, and documents scattered in archives in Paraguay, Bolivia, Argentina, and Europe. The work reinterprets the war not only as an interstate conflict but as a long process of military occupation, territorial reorganization, and violent transformation of the Chaco indigenous worlds.
From the recapture of Pitiantuta to the death of Rojas Silva, through the founding of Fortín Esteros, the bombing of Bahía Negra, and the consolidation of the neo-national order, the documents offer an unprecedented view of multiple episodes of the conflict. At the same time, they portray with particular rawness the indigenous experiences of the war: forced displacements, epidemics, territorial dispossession, compulsory labor, and profound reconfigurations of social and territorial relations in the boreal Chaco.
The work incorporates an open-access digital device: through QR codes integrated into the book, readers can directly access more than 90 hours of indigenous testimonies in their original language, with Spanish subtitles, as well as sound archives, audiovisual materials, photographs, and historical documents associated with the research.
Nicolás Richard is an anthropologist, PhD in Social Anthropology from EHESS (Paris), and researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), working at the French Institute of Andean Studies (IFEA) in Bolivia. Luc Capdevila is a historian, professor at Université Rennes 2, and researcher at the Arènes laboratory (CNRS), specializing in contemporary political and cultural history of Latin America.