Tevego was founded by order of José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia in 1813 as a colony for mulattoes to defend the inhospitable northern borders of Paraguay.

From then on it became a prison camp, mostly for vagrant and petty criminal mulattoes[2] who willingly volunteered for hard labour to shorten their sentences.

However, as attacks became more frequent, Tevego was finally evacuated by de Francia, its inmates deported to prisons in the nearby city of Concepción.

The Scottish writer and merchant John Parish Robertson, who lived in Paraguay and worked closely with de Francia, mentions in his book Francia's Reign of Terror, Being the Continuation of Letters On Paraguay, that Tevego "is a place, of the atmosphere is one great mass of malaria, and the heat suffocating, - where the surrounding country is uninterrupted marsh - where venomous insects and reptiles abound, - and where the fiercest and yet unsubdued tribes of Indians are making continual in-roads.

No huts but those constructed in the boughs of trees, or by a few hides and mats, are to be seen; no provisions are to be obtained but those from the Portuguese, or the chase; and no protection is to be afforded but that of a small guard of militia, to awe and tyrannise of the colonists.