Paraguayan War casualties

The Dutch human geographer Jan Kleinpenning thought that Paraguay lost between a quarter and a half of its population, but much higher and lower estimates have been made.

[5] During this warfare every male Paraguayan capable of bearing arms was forced to fight, whole regiments being formed of boys from 12 to 15 years of age.

Even women were used as beasts of burden to carry ammunition and stores, and when no longer capable of work were left to die by the roadside or murdered to avoid any ill consequences occurring from their capture.

During the retreat of the Paraguayans the dictator ordered every town and village passed through to be razed to the ground, and every living animal for which no use could be found to be slaughtered.

In the modern mainstream media, the view that the loss in life was likely around half the population has been expressed by, among others, the current Encyclopædia Britannica entry[6] (last revised in 2001) and a 2012 article in The Economist.

[12]The traditional view was challenged even more strongly by historian Vera Blinn Reber in 1988 in 'The Demographics of Paraguay: A Reinterpretation of the Great War, 1865–1870'.

[13] Noticing that, even with the most sophisticated weapons of military destruction available after 1914, population losses in war were never remotely of the 50% order,[14] she examined the traditional estimates with some scepticism.

In particular, a supposed 1857 census, relied on by earlier historians, and which gave Paraguay a population of 1.3 million, was illusory and had never taken place, being mere government propaganda of the time.

She accepted John Hoyt Williams's estimate for 1846, then created a curve by applying the technique of log-linear least squares regression to those four censuses, and achieved a best fit with an annual population increase of 1.48%[17] (which, she argued, was compatible with what was known of other 19th century Latin American growth rates).

In a footnote in an article in the Journal of Latin American Studies Mario Pastore said that Whigham and Potthast, in attacking Reber's estimate, had misrepresented it; but, on the other hand, had failed to notice one of its weakest points, namely, "that it was based on a non-linear regression with very few degrees of freedom".

First, they argued that John Hoyt Williams’ population estimate based on the 1846 census needed to be raised; he was working with incomplete data (missing parishes, and undercounting of some ethnic groups and children).

[28] Summarising his criticism, Professor Kleinpenning wrote:To conclude, it appears that Whigham and Potthast have too readily considered the 1870 census results reliable data, enthusiastic as they were about having found a new source of information on Paraguay's postwar population.

This range is less than the 60 to 69 percent suggested but still perfectly in line with what always has been said: when the War of the Triple Alliance ended, Paraguay had lost about half its population.

The Allied Powers (Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay) had established a provisional government in Asunción, and Paraguay was in the process of creating a new constitution.

Brazilian troops did not evacuate Paraguay until June of 1876… Even assuming that it was in the interest of the Allied Powers to conduct a census, to what degree would Paraguayans have cooperated?

that a census carried out by defeated Paraguayans on the orders of a provisional government upheld by the occupying Allies was unlikely to be reliable, and that its count implied an unfeasible population increase in the ensuing sixteen years.

To the first of those points Whigham and Potthast offered the following reply: Reber speculates that "previous Paraguayan experience with military recruitment may have led the people to avoid cooperating with any government in census taking".

No villager could mistake the head-counting of a locally known individual for the brutal incursions a press-gang, In this instance, Reber is fishing in a dead pond.

[36]The Whigham-Potthast and Kleinpenning papers did not address Allied losses, but Reber noted: The problem of evaluating military mortality in the War of the Triple Alliance is complicated by the unrealistic estimates of Argentine, Brazilian and Uruguayan troop size.

Given the small number of troops that Argentina fielded at any given time, a recent estimate of 30,000 or 1.6 percent of total prewar population is clearly unrealistic.

[38][39] In the years 2021 - 2023, a special committee was established within Parlasur to study the real extent of the damage caused by the Paraguayan War.

The authors, with a "maximalist approach" favorable to the Paraguayan position, claim that the population of Paraguay in the year 1864 when the War broke out, was around 1,200,000 inhabitants.