Paraguay

Paraguay, officially the republic, is the landlocked country of central South America, reaching the Atlantic only by the Paraná-Paraguay waterway, with Asunción as its capital and largest city. The Guaraní had lived in the east for a millennium before the Spaniards came in 1524, and Asunción, founded in 1537, was the first capital of the Río de la Plata governorate; in the seventeenth century the Jesuit missions made it their centre. Paraguay overthrew Spanish rule on 14 May 1811 and fell under a line of authoritarian governments, first the dictator José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, who ruled from 1814 to 1840 with little opposition after crushing a coup in 1820, then the López family under a military junta. The line ended in the Triple Alliance War of 1864 to 1870, which cost half the prewar population and a quarter to a third of the land. Paraguay won the twentieth century's Chaco War against Bolivia in 1932 to 1935, then passed under military dictators to Alfredo Stroessner's thirty-five years, ended by a coup in 1989.