Abstract

DE CHAZAL, Agustina. The visual politics of the Chaco War (1932-1935): territorial appropriation, national construction and disputes of meaning through photography in Paraguay. Folia [online]. 2022, n.45, pp.91-126. ISSN 0325-8238.  http://dx.doi.org/10.30972/fhn.0456301.

The Chaco War (1932-1935) was a political-military conflict in which Bolivia and Paraguay disputed their sovereignty over the Chaco boreal. In this article, in order to investigate the politics and war narrative constructed in Paraguay during the conflict, we analyze the official photography commissioned by the Paraguayan army's Command-in-Chief. The focus will be on understanding the homeland consequences of the war for Paraguay, and how it became a campaign of territorial occupation carried out by the armed forces. The aim is to understand the Paraguayan war photography as a visual policy which constructed a Chaco reality that allowed and showed as necessary the entrance to the territory in the name of national sovereignty, progress and the modernization of the republic. To this end, the images will be analyzed in terms of what they show us, to reconstruct their historical density, later. We will also address the current use and circulation of the photographs in order to analyze how they mediate the memory of the war when they are recovered from the present.

Keywords : Chaco war; War photography; National colonization; Memory.

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