Word: chaco
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Justice for Chaco...
...that "the Gran Chaco is rated as a 'green hell' by romantic Author-Explorer Julian Duguid." This popular conception of the Chaco undoubtedly has been created by Duguid's Green Hell. The truth, however, is that Duguid's Green Hell is not the Chaco. He has never been in the Chaco proper and consequently any conclusions derived from a reading of his book are very misleading if they are applied to the Chaco Boreal...
...Gran Chaco is rated a "green hell" by romantic Author-Explorer Julian Duguid. Actually it is a great variegated basin extending from northern Argentina to eastern Bolivia. The disputed section is a liver-shaped area bounded by the Paraguay and Pilcomayo Rivers. At the Paraguayan edge it is grassy and open, the soil sandy and dry. Farther west the jungle swamps and lagoons begin, follow the sluggish, unnavigable Pilcomayo to the south, dot the drowned lands to the north. Still farther west, verging into Bolivia's Andean foothills, the land changes again to open woodland, broken by fertile plains...
...North American such a wild terrain does not seem economically worth fighting for. Perhaps it has oil. Perhaps Bolivia, cut off from the Pacific by Chile 52 years ago, needs an outlet across the northern Chaco to the navigable Paraguay River. However, landlocked Bolivia already has far better outlets: by railroad across Chile to the coast; by railroad to the navigable reaches of the Amazon in Brazil. The Gran Chaco War was wholly a peoples' war, begun by a rousing pair of national inferiority complexes...
Results: Killed, as far as could be determined in a conflict which has had less honest press coverage than any war of modern times, have been about 100,000; wounded about the same. The mysterious Gran Chaco has at last been explored, even to some extent developed and colonized. Economically, Paraguay is no better off than Bolivia; both are financially exhausted. Simon Patiño's mine stocks were up last week. And last week in Asuncion there was earnest talk of rewarding Paraguay's able General Estigarribia with the rank of Marshal, a title last held...