MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Bolivia and Paraguay seal peace and limits 74 years after the Chaco war

The three Presidents celebrate the event

Bolivia and Paraguay formally sealed Monday in Buenos Aires the end of an armed conflict dating back 74 years and which is considered the bloodiest of the last century in South America with over 100.000 killed.

At a ceremony in Argentina’s government house, Casa Rosada, Bolivian president Evo Morales and his peer from Paraguay Fernando Lugo received copies, from Argentina’s Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, of the Final Memory with the definitive and accepted international limits between the neighbouring countries.

The Chaco War was fought between South America’s two landlocked –and poorest countries--, Bolivia and Paraguay over control of a great part of the Gran Chaco region, which was thought to be rich in oil. The war lasted from 1932 to 1935.

Argentina acted as host and presented the documents in its role of president of the committee of guarantor countries of the 1938 Peace, Friendship and Limits treaty signed by both countries and which ended the conflict. The other members of the committee are Brazil, Chile, United States, Peru and Uruguay.

“This is a historic day for Bolivia and Paraguay, a time of peace and friendship, of solidarity among peoples”, said President Morales during the ceremony. “The war between Paraguay and Bolivia was not triggered by its peoples but by the transnational corporations after our natural resources”, he added thanking Argentina for its mediation and task with the experts from the limits’ committee.

President Lugo described the occasion as a “transcendental step” for both countries reflecting the spirit of “pacification and confraternity” and calling for integration.

“If this sincere attempt to have open borders is accomplished, if the potential can be developed by both countries with no sovereign intervention, it will also help both brotherly countries to implement an integral development”.

Mrs. Kirchner said that the war between Bolivia and Paraguay had “a strong smell of oil, and is no exception to so many wars from those times, and nowadays also”.

US Standard Oil and Royal Dutch Shell were indirectly involved behind Bolivia and Paraguay in the conflict over the Gran Chaco which was believed to hold huge deposits of hydrocarbons.

The Argentine president pointed out that “we are living an unprecedented moment in the region with the Union of South American Nations; most rulers in the region belong to social-popular movements and we’ve come to leave aside those which emerged from the Washington consensus, which imposed neo-liberal economic policies in the nineties”.

“We are seeing the end of an era of senseless confrontations that only benefited others, and which more precisely did not belong to South America”, she added.

While the Chaco military conflict ended with a comprehensive Paraguayan victory, from a wider point of view it was an economic disaster for both sides. By the time a ceasefire was negotiated on June 1935, Paraguay controlled most of the region.

This was recognized in a 1938 truce, signed in Buenos Aires, by which Paraguay was awarded three-quarters of the Chaco Boreal. Bolivia did get the remaining territory that bordered the Paraguay's River Puerto Busch.

Some years later it was found that there were no oil resources in the Chaco Boreal kept by Paraguay, yet the territories kept by Bolivia were, in fact, rich in natural gas and petroleum, these being at the present time, the country's largest exports and source of wealth.

The main mediator in the conflict was an Argentine politician, diplomat and jurist Carlos Saavedra Lama who was later awarded in 1936 the Nobel Peace Prize.

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