The history of Paraguay encompasses thousands of years of human habitation. Both agricultural and nomadic Guaycuruan lived in the region at the time of the Spanish Conquest. It became a relatively neglected part of the Spanish Empire due to its isolation and lack of mineral wealth; nonetheless, a small group of Spanish settlers came to reside in the area, increasingly intermarrying with native women to produce a mestizo population. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Jesuit missionaries organized the natives into planned communities known as reductions, and the experiment gained notable attention in Enlightenment Era Europe.
In the early nineteenth century, Paraguay participated in the Spanish American wars of independence, and, newly independent, came under the domination of José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, who in his absolute rule almost entirely cut off the new nation from the world. After Francia's death in 1840, Paraguay came under the rule of Carlos Antonio López and, later, his son Francisco Solano López, who proceeded to embroil the nation in a war against Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay between 1864 and 1870 which culminated in a Paraguayan defeat with massive human and territorial losses. Paraguay became a flawed democracy, in a regime imposed by its enemies.
In the 1930s, Paraguay had its territory encroached and soon found itself in the Chaco War with Bolivia, which ended in a Paraguayan victory. General Alfredo Stroessner, a veteran of that conflict and a key leader in the governmental victory in the 1947 Civil War, came to power in 1954 through a coup, and governed until 1989, a year in which another coup moved the country towards being a multi party democracy, with a new constitution adopted in 1992. Since then, Paraguay has to a certain extent avoided the political strife and strong-man rule that characterized much of its history, though the Economist Intelligence Unit rates the country as a "hybrid regime" as of 2024.
Pre-Columbian and Colonial eras
Native peoples In the 16th century, the Guaraní people were dispersed throughout the forests of the Río de la Plata Basin. Their pre-Columbian population is estimated at between 300,000 and one million. With the arrival of Europeans, their population rapidly decreased due to epidemics of European diseases. The Guaraní were united only by language and cultural similarities; no political structure existed above the village level, and they were a semi-sedentary agricultural people.
Although the Guaraní initially resisted Spanish incursions into their lands, two characteristics influenced their early cooperation with the Spanish and missionaries. First, the Guaraní were themselves warlike, but they were threatened by hostile tribes around them and by slave raiders. The Spanish, especially Christian missionaries, offered a degree of security to the Guaraní. Second, the Guaraní had a custom of exchanging women among themselves and with outsiders to cement alliances. This facilitated a proliferation of sexual relations of Guaraní women with Spanish men. As the colony expanded after the abandonment of Buenos Aires in 1541, this practice gave way to the rancheadas—violent mass deportations of indigenous women who were traded as commodities and exported as slaves to Portuguese settlements on the Atlantic coast; modern scholars characterize the resulting mestizo society as a product of sexual and economic coercion rather than mutual exchange. The mestizo offspring of Spanish/Guaraní unions had the legal rights of Spaniards, and the Spanish, together with them, subjected the Guaraní population to the encomienda system of forced labor after 1556 and the reductions of Christian missionaries beginning in the 1580s.
The Gran Chaco, a semi-arid flatland west of the Paraguay River, was the home of the Guaycuru peoples. The most important of the Guaycuru in Paraguay were the Payaguá, a riverine people ranging for up and down the Paraguay River, and the Mbayá who lived in northwest Paraguay. The Guaycuru tribes were nomadic and warlike. The Mbayá developed a horse culture in the 17th century while the Payaguá made travel up and down the Paraguay River dangerous. These tribes frequently raided the Spanish settlers and Guaraní farmers. They resisted the reductions and Christianity of the missionaries and were a threat to the Spanish and other native peoples for more than 300 years.
Early explorers and conquistadors
Much of the earliest written history of Paraguay comes from records of the Spanish colonization, beginning in 1516 with the Juan Díaz de Solís' failed expedition to the Río de la Plata. On the home voyage, after Solís' death, one of the vessels was wrecked off Santa Catarina Island near the Brazilian coast. Among the survivors was Aleixo Garcia, a Portuguese adventurer who acquired a working knowledge of the Guaraní language. Garcia was intrigued by reports of "the White King" who supposedly lived far to the west and governed cities of wealth and splendor, a reference to the Inca Empire.
In 1524, Garcia joined a Guaraní invasion of the Inca Empire. Garcia's group discovered Iguazú Falls, crossed the Río Paraná and arrived at the site of Asunción, the future capital of the country, thirteen years before it was founded. At Asunción, the Guaraní gathered an army of 2,000 men and penetrated the outer defenses of the Inca Empire on the eastern slopes of the Andes. After Garcia's murder by his Indian allies, news of the raid reached the Spanish explorers on the coast. The explorer Sebastian Cabot was attracted to the Río Paraguay two years later. Cabot was sailing to Asia in 1526 when he heard of Garcia's exploits. He decided that the Río de la Plata might provide passage to the Pacific, and, eager to win the riches of the Incas, became the first European to explore that estuary. Finding silver amongst the Guaraní there, he renamed the river Río de la Plata.
Cabot returned to Spain in 1530 and told Emperor Charles V about his discoveries. Charles gave permission to Pedro de Mendoza to mount an expedition to the Plata basin. The emperor also named Mendoza governor of the Governorate of New Andalusia and granted him the right to name his successor. Mendoza proved to be unsuitable as a leader, and his cruelty undermined the expedition. Choosing what proved to be a terrible site for the first Spanish settlement in South America, in February 1536 Mendoza built a fort at a place of poor anchorage on the southern side of the Plata estuary on an inhospitable dead-level plain. Dusty in the dry season, a bog in the rains, the place was inhabited by the fierce Querandí tribe, who resisted the Spaniards. The Spanish named the outpost Buenos Aires (Nuestra Señora del Buen Ayre).
Juan de Salazar de Espinosa and Gonzalo de Mendoza, who had been part of Mendoza's expedition, explored the Paraguay River after Mendoza's departure. They descended the river, stopping at ananchorage. They commenced building a fort there on 15 August 1537, the date of the Feast of the Assumption, and called it Asunción. Asunción would be the province and later Paraguay's capital thenceforth.
Within 20 years, the new town had a population of about 1,500. Transcontinental shipments of silver passed through Asunción en route from Peru to Europe. Asunción became the center of the Governorate of Guayrá in 1617, a province of the Spanish Empire which also encompassed present-day Paraná; Asunción was the base for the colonization of this part of South America. Spaniards moved northwestward across the Chaco to found Santa Cruz in present-day Bolivia; eastward to occupy the rest of present-day Paraguay; and southward along the river to re-found Buenos Aires, which had been abandoned by its inhabitants in 1541 in favor of Asunción.
Jesuit missions among the Guaraní
The Guaraní of eastern Paraguay and neighboring Brazil and Argentina were in crisis in the early 17th century. Recurrent epidemics of European diseases had reduced their population greatly and the forced labor of the encomiendas by the Spanish and mestizo colonists had made virtual slaves of many. Franciscan missionaries began establishing missions called reductions in the 1580s. The first Jesuits arrived in Asunción in 1588 and founded the mission (or reduction) of San Ignacio Guazú, their first, in 1609. The objectives of the Jesuits were to Christianize the Guaraní, impose European values and customs on them, and isolate and protect them from European colonists and slavers. These relations were troublesome, with the case of India Juliana, who killed a Spanish colonist, confessed to it, was set free, and later executed, being particularly symbolic as regards them.
In addition to recurrent epidemics, the Guaraní were threatened by the bandeirantes from Brazil, who captured natives and sold them as slaves in modern Brazil. Initially, the richly populated Jesuit missions had few defenses against the slavers and thousands of Guaraní were captured and enslaved. Beginning in 1631, the Jesuits moved their missions from the Guayrá province (present day Brazil and Paraguay), about southwest to the three borders region of Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil. About 10,000 of 30,000 Guaraní in the missions chose to accompany the Jesuits. In 1641 and 1642, armed by the Jesuits, Guaraní armies defeated the bandeirantes and ended the worst of the slave trade in their region. From this point on the Jesuit missions enjoyed growth and prosperity, punctuated by epidemics. At the peak of their importance in 1732, the Jesuits presided over 141,000 Guaraní (including a sprinkling of other peoples) in about 30 missions. The missions are controversial, with their detractors accusing them of enslaving the Guaraní and taking away, or at least changing, their way of life.
The Comunero Revolt (1721–1735) was a serious protest by Spanish and mestizo Paraguayans against the Jesuit missions. The residents of Paraguay violently protested the pro-Jesuit government of Paraguay, Jesuit control of Guaraní labor, and what they regarded as unfair competition for products such as yerba mate, as the Jesuits did not have to pay any taxes to the Spanish crown. Although the revolt ultimately failed and the missions remained, the Jesuits were expelled from institutions they had created in Asunción. In 1767, Charles III of Spain expelled the Jesuits from the Americas. The expulsion was part of an effort in the Bourbon Reforms to assert more Spanish control over its American colonies. In total, 78 Jesuits departed from the 30 remaining missions leaving behind 89,000 Guaraní.
Most Guaraní initially welcomed the expulsion of the Jesuits. Spanish authorities made promises to Guaraní leaders and gained their support. Within two years, however, the financial situation of the former missions was deteriorating and Guaraní began leaving them seeking both freedom and higher wages. A decree in 1800 freed the Guaraní still in the missions from their communal obligation to labor. By 1840, the former missions were in ruins. While some Guaraní were employed outside them, many families were impoverished. A growing number of mestizos occupied what had formerly been mission lands. In 1848, Paraguayan President Carlos Antonio López declared that all Indians were citizens of Paraguay and distributed the last of the missions' communal lands.
Colonial decline