THE RIVER WAR.

Evening Star, Issue 21216, 24 September 1932, Page 12

THE RIVER WAR.

Seventy-two fatalities on the Bolivian side in two weeks’ fighting for a blockhouse in the Gran Chaco scarcely seems like warfare in these modern days. It is hardly made more impressive by the consideration that this is the Paraguayans’ official report; their own losses' for two reasons can be assumed to have been heavier. The first is that the Paraguayans were the attackers, and the second that they have not yet reported their losses. Both sides, we can believe, are willing enough to do each other much greater damage; the armies are large enough and mutual reports of atrocities have vied with the best traditions; but Nature does not assist. The land between the two rivers, the Paraguay and the Pilcomayo, is covered with swamps and forests, so that it is only small parties that can come easily to grips. Nevertheless, even this war is attractive. There have been volunteers offering for it as far away as England. The excitement and the eagerness in La Paz and Asuncion, distant about 900 miles from each other, have been much more, it is to be gathered, than at most parts of the front. The simple people of Colombia, a great deal further north, have been been made so envious that some of them have been doing their best to get up a war of their own against Peru. “ War’s sweet,” says Edic Ochiltree, ‘‘to them that never tried it.” The rights and wrongs of this quarrel might be difficult to assess, but the dispute that lies at the root of it has lasted for sixty years, flaring Up in fighting at intervals. A vague boundary between the new State of Bolivia and the old State, Paraguay, was fixed by an American President in the seventies. It was never surveyed. According to an English writer who once visited the country, the Bolivians from an early time made attempts to define it in their own interests by building blockhouses. He has no doubt that the Bolivians are the aggressors in this warfare. A port on the Paraguay River is all they want, by which their minerals in the eastern foothills of the Andes would be most readily exported. But they do not want to pay for it, nor to pay the Customs dues which Paraguay would naturally exact if they leased it., The Paraguayans have always declared that they would grant Bolivia a port if she asked for it, but Bolivia preferred to claim it as a right. In that way she would escape the payment of dues. Opinions differ as to whether a railway is required in this country. To some minds, water transport offers all tho facilities required. War would not be sweet to tho Paraguayans if they remembered what their fathers suffered in tho struggle of the little .State (by South American standards) against Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay in the sixties of last century. Almost all its men and most of its women perished. There arc claims and counter-claims in the territorial issue. The Washington Government prefers that the combined Governments of South and

Central America, along with itself, and not the League of Nations, should decide them. The combined Governments have been sadly unsuccessful so far m their intervention, possibly because two or three of them have their own conflicting interests in the struggle. It looks as though in the League, which has been shut out hitherto, will be found the only impartial arbitrator, though a new principle which is being urged now by the Washington Administration, as a support for the Kellogg Pact, has some promise of influence. The principle is that no gains of territory which are made in the Pact's defiance will be recognised by the United States.