Word: chaco
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...left the country little strength for nation building. In 1864 Paraguay blustered into the suicidal, six-year War of the Triple Alliance against Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay; out of a population of 525,000, only 220,000 survived, and only 28,000 of these were men. Again in the Chaco War of the 1930s, Paraguay took on Bolivia and won 20,000 sq. mi. of wilderness borderland-at a cost of one Paraguayan life for each square mile. Thus the prize won in 1954 by Stroessner, a veteran of the Chaco War, was a sleepy backwater, 600 miles by river...
...1800s, when the country needed farm hands to help bring in its beef and wheat crops. Before long, thousands of Italians-giddy with romantic tales of the Argentine pampas-were hurrying across the Atlantic. In the mid-1800s, some 200 Italian families set up a silk-spinning industry in Chaco province; later they began a cotton industry. When Argentina constructed a new Congress building, it was an Italian architect who designed it, an Italian company that built it. And who became the incarnation of the Argentine tango and Argentine Gaucho? None other than the handsome young Italian boy Rudolph Valentino...
...Plainclothes cops still lounge near opposition homes. Cells are still packed with political prisoners. The army, so far, backs Stroessner resolutely. Some 300.000 Paraguayans-one-sixth of the population-live in exile; hundreds of others waste away in concentration camps that he maintains in the "Green Hell" of the Chaco jungle...