When the nations of Spanish South America won their independence from Spain, they were left with a number of boundary disputes with one another, and with Portuguese Brazil.
During the 19th century, it took negotiation, and a few wars, to sort out those disputes. By the early twentieth century, only one border question remained unsettled: the Chaco Boreal, claimed by both Paraguay and Bolivia. In 1932, they would go to war over the territory.
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Fanfare
Opening Theme
“National Anthem of Paraguay”
Unknown composer. Public domain.
Performed by The United States Navy Band. Public domain recording. Source.
Closing Theme
Except when otherwise indicated, the contents of this podcast are © and ℗ 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 by Mark Painter, all rights reserved. Some music and sound effects used by arrangement with Pond 5.
Hello Mark. I want to say that you have the best history podcast that I have ever listened to. I like the fact that you cover topics that I have never heard of before such as the war of thirst. I always learn something new every episode. I look forward to you covering upcoming topics such as the dust bowl and WWII in detail.
Hi there!
here’s some odd thing I came across, regarding the mennonites in the Chaco. I’m Frisian, which is a native Dutch people. Once upon a time I entered “friesland radio” into my search engine, but instead of “Omrop Fryslan” it gave me Friesland Radio. https://friesland.com.py/de/radio/
I listened in, and it wasn’t in Frisian…. it was in German. If you tune in right now, you’ll hear there’s trouble at the Chaco aquaduct, btw. Anyway, I was puzzled; what Germans would honour Friesland? They named it their colony. Some thoughts later I figured out indeed it must’ve been mennonite colonists.
Little correction, if you’ll indulge me: the mennonites weren’t allways peacefull; they started out as socialist revolutionairies. They were up to quite some trouble in 1534 and 1535, running around naked, saying all property should be held in common, that jezus of nazareth would be back, and committing coups in my city Amsterdam and Muenster. But yeah. That’s 400 years in the past, indeed, now they’re the most cuddly christians one can find around.