Paraguay remembers Pres. Rutherford 'Baller' Hayes; still scarred by 1860s war, Paraguay nears election

RBH & I at the Museo Municipal de Villa Hayes, Paraguay.
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

UPDATE, May 10: The incumbent Colorado Party prevailed in the Paraguayan presidential election on April 30.

The tie between 19th-century U.S. President Rutherford B. Hayes and the distant South American nation of Paraguay endures there today, resonating at the heart of issues in the upcoming Paraguayan presidential election.

Presidential Ballers

Comedian Stephen Colbert joked in October 2022 about Rutherford B. Hayes, bringing to mind a President of curious and far-ranging legacy.

Former President Barack Obama had released a get-out-the-vote video in which he informed young voters who he is and boasted of "the best jump shot in White House history." "He has the best jump shot," Colbert conceded in his Late Show monolog. "But not the best dunk. That was President Rutherford B. Hayes. The 'B' stands for baller."

Colbert showed an amusingly doctored image of a bearded and head-banded Hayes dunking (video below via Internet Archive).

The Real Rud B.

In reality, the "B" was for Birchard, the maiden surname of Hayes's mother, Sophia. She raised Hayes and his sister as a single mom. Hayes's father died before Hayes was born.

An Ohioan, Hayes was a lawyer and abolitionist. He made a name for himself with vigorous and creative representation of fugitive slaves. Hayes was shot while fighting for the Union in the Civil War. His military service was lauded by President Ulysses S. Grant (whose 201st birthday is upcoming), whom Hayes succeeded in the presidency in the Compromise of 1877, resolving the contested election of 1876. Part of the compromise involved withdrawing federal forces from the South, which did no favor for people emancipated from slavery. Hayes can be credited, though, for appointing "the great dissenter" of the Reconstruction era, John Marshall Harlan, to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The flag of Departamento de Presidente Hayes, Paraguay.
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Villa Hayes

It happened, also in October 2022, that I visited a distant legacy of President Hayes, a city and department in Paraguay named for him. Departmental capital Villa Hayes, north of Asunción on the Paraguay River, is in the Gran Chaco region. The region was at the heart of the territorial conflict in the War of the Triple Alliance. The devastating and brutal guerilla conflict, the worst of its kind in Latin American history, embroiled Paraguay in war with neighbors Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay.

Hayes exhibit at the Museo Municipal de Villa Hayes, Paraguay.
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

After the war ended, in 1876, Argentina and Paraguay disputed their post-war border and asked U.S. President Hayes to arbitrate. Though Argentina had substantially prevailed in the war, Hayes sided with Paraguay in the border dispute and awarded the country the bulk of the Gran Chaco.

To the present day, the region speaks to the arbitrariness of war. Beautiful as it is, the dry and sparsely populated Chaco has struggled to achieve agricultural and economic productivity. Moreover, the region was never really controlled by any of the modern nations that contested it, rather by the indigenous people who knew how to survive there and still do.

There is a parallel between this tribute to Hayes in Paraguay and the monument to President Grant in Guinea-Bissau that I saw and last wrote about in 2020. President Joe Biden recently having marked the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement in Belfast, it occurs to me that in modern times, the custom has ended of sitting presidents being enlisted personally in dispute resolution abroad.

Paraguayan Presidency

Relative to neighboring Argentina and Brazil, Paraguay lags in development, a long lingering effect of the War of the Triple Alliance. The settlement of the conflict left Paraguay as a buffer between the two Latin American powers. 

Paraguayans are frustrated by the chronic corruption and bleak jobs market that now threaten the long-running rule of the incumbent Colorado Party in the presidential election upcoming at the end of April. Still, the party, in the person of candidate Santiago Peña, an economics professor, has a sound shot at retaining power. Long historical experience with dictatorship manifests as distrust of challengers. Primaries in the fall were marred by a suspicious fire at election headquarters in Asunción. 

Polling in late March in the plurality-takes-all contest showed a narrow and probably statistically insignificant lead by attorney Efraín Alegre, a center-left candidate representing a coalition of more than 20 parties determined to displace the Colorado Party. Apropos of my recent lamentation on Chinese influence in Latin America, Alegre pledges to cut Paraguay's diplomatic ties with Taiwan to smooth the way for Paraguayan soy and beef exports to China.

As Jacoby talk commemorates Kristallnacht, Ukraine recurs in historical record of flights from oppression

An upcoming talk on Kristallnacht, a recent experience in the Paraguayan Chaco, and the ongoing war in Ukraine have me thinking lately about cultural and religious freedom.

In commemoration of Kristallnacht, award-winning Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby will speak at the S. Joseph Solomon Synagogue of the Maimonides School in Brookline, Massachusetts, on Sunday at 7 p.m. The talk will be livestreamed.

Jacoby's father was the sole survivor of his family at Auschwitz. 

"He didn’t hate God for what he had lost and didn’t abandon the Judaism in which he had been reared," Jacoby wrote of his father. "On the contrary, he deepened it with observance, study, and prayer."

Last week I had the privilege of visiting Mennonite communities in the Chaco region of Paraguay. Mennonites arrived in Paraguay in three waves, circa 1875, 1930-32, and 1947. Each time, they sought refuge from regimes that wished to extinguish their religious freedom, if not their lives.

Restored "Koloniehaus" at Filadelfia, Paraguay
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

On a world map at the Fernheim Colony House in Filadelfia, I was struck in particular by one remarkable line tracing Mennonite migration. The journey ran eastward from Ukraine, then Austria-Hungary, to Siberia in 1908; then further east to China, turning south to Indonesia in 1927; then turning back westward across the Indian Ocean and isthmus of Suez, to Europe; and at last on to Paraguay to join the end of the second migration there in 1932.

Besides the astounding odyssey it represented, the line resonated with me both because of the current conflict in Ukraine and because my own grandfather's Jewish family fled what is today western Ukraine at about the same time.

Map at the Filadelfia Mennonite Museum,
similar to the one at the Colony House
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
with no claim to underlying work

As has been widely reported, one Russian strategy in the present war in Ukraine is the forced relocation of Ukrainians, especially children, to Russia, whether to be given passports and politically and culturally Russified, or, in the case of dissenters and combatants, to be condemned and disappeared in remote parts. The strategy is not new.  Just before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February, I wrote about the forced relocation of Polish ethnic minorities, such as the Lemkos, from western Poland to Soviet Russia in 1947.

The parallels are not coincidental.  The Mennonites fled increasingly unstable Austria-Hungary for Russia before the outbreak of World War I. Then, scarcely a decade after the Russian Revolution, rising nationalism rendered even Siberia inhospitable, prompting the exodus of the late 1920s. After World War II, Mennonites remaining in an eastern Germany about to be gifted to the Soviet Union departed in another migratory wave, in 1947. They were not alone; justifiably afeard Christians of other sects departed as well.

Engrossed in the map in Paraguay, I muttered something unkind about Putin. Standing nearby, Fernheim archivist Gundolf Niebuhr said quietly, "History repeats itself."

Niebuhr and I talked about the complex relationship of the contemporary Mennonite Paraguayans with their Latino and indigenous neighbors.  They work closely together, literally, on farms, in schools, and in governance.

But the legacy of repeatedly fleeing oppression, Niebuhr told me, is that even in prosperous and peaceful times, people are dogged by a lurking anxiety over the inevitable impermanence of the idyll. To look around, the Mennonites and their partners have defined the unique cultural identity of the human Chaco. Yet are the Mennonites still only visitors? Will the day come when Asunción says, assimilate, or else? And it will be time to move on again.

Struggle and perseverance are enduring themes in Jewish identity. The former seems inescapable, as expressions of antisemitism abound. Hate simmers now in the Twitter scandals of Kyrie Irving and Kanye West.  Last week, mourners marked the fourth anniversary of the Pittsburgh synagogue attack. Yet the Jewish tradition teaches that anxiety is counter-productive. God will light the way, as always he has. That seems to have been the remarkable faith walk of Jeff Jacoby's father. Still, there are scarce few among us who do not struggle to eschew fears and doubts.

The Jewish people have a strong claim to unrivaled familiarity with persecution. But assimilation and expulsion of the other seems well ingrained in the human mode of operation, regardless of the nature of the otherness. An elder of my Christian church reminded me yesterday that being Christian is not supposed to be easy. The "Good News" might offer salvation, but leisure and luxury are not part of the methodology, at least not in this life.

I live without fear of being alienated in, or exiled from the only home I know. That is a blessing. All of us possessed of that blessing owe open hearts to anyone who loses it, whether in Pittsburgh, Paraguay, or Ukraine.