Severe, dutiful and solemn, black-eyed with a penetrating and suspicious demeanour, often wearing his official uniform of blue-laced coat, waistcoat, breeches and white stockings, the doctor lived in his tiny, bungalow palace with just his widowed sister, two mixed-race maids (occasional mistresses), a young black barber-valet, a creole doctor and three Guaraní guards, trusties occasionally accused of treason and executed.
Francia was almost singlehandedly responsible for Paraguay, named after a Amerindian tribe, the Payaguá, which had resisted the early conquistadors. The remote Spanish territory Provincia Gigante de Indias was a backwater where a tiny elite of semi-educated creoles (Francia was one of only two university-educated doctors in the whole country) ruled
El Supremo ruled the nation with barely a minister, observing the stars with astrolabes, studying and sketching botany, smoking his cigar and sucking up the national delicacy, the stimulating
The creoles were heavily intermarried with the Guaraní but defended their racial superiority with touchy arrogance. When he entered public life in a bid for the chair of theology at the seminary, Francia, son of a creole officer and cruel estate manager, was accused of being mixed-race but insisted on his
An obsessive micromanager, he was determined to create a Rousseauesque state of racial equality and national virtue. He controlled the trades of sugar cane, tobacco, cigars and
This sociological experiment created the most orderly nation in South America, which would endure under a quasi-monarchy for sixty peaceful years. Francia gloated over the disorder in the rest of the continent: ‘My policy for Paraguay’, he said, was ‘a system of non-intercourse with other Provinces of South America’ to prevent ‘contamination by that foul restless spirit of anarchy and revolution that has desolated and disgraced them all’.
MANUELA, THE LIBERATOR AND KING COTTON
In Peru the other Liberator, Bolívar, was watching the advance of a rival warlord. José de San Martín, commander of the Army of the Andes, dispatched by the rulers of Río de la Plata, had liberated Chile and advanced into Peru. But there he had run out of supplies. In July 1822, in a prickly meeting of titans, Bolívar outplayed San Martín. High in the Andes, Bolívar defeated the Spanish and then fell in love like never before.
Riding into Quito (Ecuador) the Liberator looked up at a balcony to see a young woman, Manuela Sáenz, who was watching his arrival. Soon afterwards they met at a ball. Manuela, an aristocrat’s illegitimate daughter married to a dull English merchant, was a gorgeous life force who now joined her life to his. She fought beside him in battle: ‘If my soldiers had your marksmanship,’ said Bolívar, promoting her to colonel, ‘we’d have routed Spain long ago.’ She served as his secretary, but infuriated him with her erotic adventures, taking female lovers including her two maids, black ex-slaves whom she dressed as Mamluks. Her passion exhausted him. ‘I want to answer, most beautiful Manuela, your demands of love,’ he begged. ‘My passion for you is wild,’ but ‘Give me time.’ In August 1824, leading his men into the mountains, Bolívar drove out the Spanish and was elected dictator of Peru and president of a new country named for himself, Bolivia. But Peru ‘contains two elements that are the bane of every just and free society’, said Bolívar, ‘gold and slaves. The first corrupts all it touches; the second is corrupt in itself.’
He might have been talking about America.
