The Paraguayan party system, centered on two 132-year-old parties seemingly poised to remain alive and well for years to come, constitutes an anomaly in Latin America. This chapter discusses the evolution of the Paraguayan traditional parties highlighting their changes and continuities in two different historical settings: the nondemocratic period, which includes a semi-competitive (1870–1940) and a dictatorial subperiod (1954–89) and the post-1989 democratic period. The findings point to three distinctive features of the Paraguayan party system: the ability of the traditional parties to plant deep roots into the country’s social structure facilitated by historic and institutional factors; the capacity of the parties to aggregate in a clientelist mode the interests of a population that lacks strong collective actors, made possible by a socioeconomic societal matrix; and the versatility with which parties have coordinated interests, both in semi-democratic as well as in democratic settings, which includes electoral mobilization but also civilian recruitment for armed uprisings. Finally, the chapter discusses possible future trends in light of the growing influence of illegal financing and recent changes to the rules governing elections mandating the system of “open lists.”

Chapter 3 reads Ronan Bennett’s The Catastrophist, a Graham Greene-style thriller set in Lumumba’s Congo, and Anne Enright’s The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch, a neohistorical romance set in nineteenth-century Paraguay. Bennett’s work unsettles late imperial English realist conventions to contest the apolitical apathy that characterizes much contemporary fiction about Africa and offers a related critique of Irish revisionism. Enright’s experimental novel explores the meaning of ‘female adventure’ and ‘emancipation’ in a catastrophic wartime setting. Both novels express anxieties about whether the novel as form can offer something more than just passive or compromised testimonies to violence in the Global South. In both instances, new modes of Irish political fiction struggle to release themselves from inherited colonial discourses.

Chapter 4 addresses the role of the classical rhetorical tradition in bolstering Iberianized Catholicism among native converts in Paraguay and Portuguese India. By taking a connected and comparative approach to the application of the classical rhetorical tradition by Jesuit missionaries and its reception by native audiences both in the Americas and in coastal western India, this chapter argues that classical rhetoric shaped Konkani-language missionary oratory much more than Nahuatl, Quechua and Guarani examples, and offers a possible explanation based on the social and caste structures of the two contexts. In so doing, this chapter places Latin American ethnohistory in a new meta-geographical context, and argues for the important constitutive role played by non-European languages, peoples and cultural practices in the Iberian World.

After detailing the tensions created by the lawsuit in US–Paraguayan relations, this chapter reveals that in the late 1970s and early 1980s the commercial Paraguayan press used the case to challenge the Stroessner regime. Where the US courts emphasized the responsibility of a cruel individual torturer, the Paraguayan commercial press insisted that the case also implicated the police and the judicial system; the defendant was presented as an ordinary, not demonized, individual; and the victims were construed as agents. Documents from the Paraguayan police’s secret police archive further reveal that high-ranking officials perceived the commercial press coverage of the case as threatening. The chapter offers overlapping explanations for the divergence between the representations of the case produced by US courts and the press in Paraguay, and draws particular attention to the opportunities created by features of tort litigation as well as processes of local reinterpretation.

Chapter 1 follows the movement of voluntary migrants from the Russian Empire to Canada to Paraguay between 1870 and 1926. It shows that members of this cohort underwent a contentious process of integrating state citizenship and Mennonite unity into their collective narratives or rejecting it in favor of local narratives that prized religious separation. The chapter makes three contentions: First, it shows that Canadian officials transitioned from identifying Mennonites as enterprising and valuable German-speaking settlers in the 1870s – when they were promoting a narrative of Canadian national expansion – to identifying them as insular and subversive German-speaking dissidents in the 1920s – when they were promoting a narrative of Canadian national cohesion. Second, it demonstrates how Canada’s Mennonites developed contrasting narratives about Canadian citizenship. Associative Mennonites believed that God willed them to carve out a place within Canada’s national narrative. Separatists believed that God willed Mennonites to accept perpetual migration as a necessary burden of faith. Third, it contends that separatist Mennonites harnessed modern transnational technologies – such as transportation, communication, and financial systems – to secure the transchronological goal of living as early-modern subjects. In other words, separatist Mennonites used the tools of nationalism and modernity in an attempt to flee from them.

Chapter 3 examines the colonies’ evolving group narratives through three lenses: their interpretations of the Gran Chaco, their actions during the Chaco War (1932–35), and their interactions with indigenous peoples after the war. The Menno colonists arrived in the Chaco with a stable and coherent group narrative. They drew on biblical stories with comic plot progressions to interpret their situation. A comedic plot takes the narrative shape of a U, wherein a period of hardship is followed by a happy resolution. They believed the toils of resettlement were essential tests of their faithfulness to scripture. By contrast, the Fernheim Colony was formed out of a group of disparate refugees and arrived with a tragic understanding of their group narrative. This type of story takes the shape of an inverted U, which rises to a point of crisis before plunging to catastrophe. Fernheim colonists therefore debated how they would give their tragic narrative a happy resolution – whether independently, collectively, or with the aid of outsiders (the Paraguayan government, indigenous people, or Mennonites abroad). This chapter argues that each colony’s collective narrative – as faithful nomads and as displaced victims – led them to make profoundly different choices and kept them separated throughout the 1930s.

Chapter 5 compares the colonies’ opinions about the Nazi Party in Germany and its bid for transnational vösch unity, which I label “(trans)National Socialism.” The Menno Colony’s communal understanding of Germanness made vösch propaganda about Hitler’s “New Germany” unappealing. They rejected all forms of nationalism as worldly attempts to thwart their cultural-religious isolationism. The refugees of Fernheim Colony, by contrast, shared little communal unity owing to their diverse origins and looked to Nazi Germany and its overseas aid organization, Volksbund fä Deutschtum im Ausland (VDA), for inspiration. They believed that the highest goal of vösch unity was promoting communal unity, and created a youth group, called the Jugendbund, and a newspaper called Kämpfende Jugend. Resembling other German–speaking communities in Latin America, the two colonies – which seemed identical to visiting Nazi observers ’ held vastly different interpretations of völkisch nationalism at the height of the Nazi bid to establish transnational German unity in Latin America. Latin America, for its part, presents a unique context for studying the Nazis relationship to Auslandsdeutsche because it held the allure of being the last prospect for German cultural and economic expansion, but was impossible for the German state to invade.

Chapter 4 looks abroad – to Canada, Germany, and the United States – to examine how the Mennonite colonies found themselves in the crosshairs of a range of competing Mennonite nationalist narratives. In particular, the chapter focuses on the US-based aid organization the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), which helped relocate the Fernheim colonists from Germany to Paraguay. The MCC viewed the colonies as an opportunity to create a Mennonite territory that was theologically and organizationally connected to a global Mennonite confession. In its evolving idea of “Mennoniteness,” the basis of this linkage involved Mennonites sharing a few, definitive tenets – such as mutual aid and nonviolence – that could be historically justified and concisely articulated to non–Mennonites. Yet there were competing interpretations of the “Mennonite nation.” Mennonite intellectuals in Germany and Canada advanced notions that Mennonites should fuse their narrative with a German nationalist narrative. Yet Paraguay’s Mennonite colonists also elicited the fear that far-scattered Mennonites would lose their Mennonite or German-Mennonite heritage or refuse to join a Mennonite or German–Mennonite nation. The term “Mennonite,” as this chapter demonstrates, represented more than a religious confession during the interwar years, but stood alongside other nascent nationalisms vying to win the loyalties of an often–indifferent constituency.