By William Costa, November 11, 2024
When the Spanish anarchist writer Rafael Barrett was smuggled back into Paraguay near the small town of Yabebyry in 1909, he was unrecognisable as the young newspaper correspondent who had arrived in the troubled nation five years earlier to cover an armed revolution.
Physically, he was being consumed by a tuberculosis infection that would kill him the following year. Ideologically, he had been transformed by immersion in what he called “Paraguayan sorrow”, shedding the remnants of his youth in Madrid’s bourgeois elite to embrace anarchism and the labour movement.
Writing in the Paraguayan press, Barrett became the foremost voice denouncing the terrible conditions and state violence still ravaging the population decades after the apocalyptic War of the Triple Alliance (1864-70), which had seen half the populace killed and foreign imperialist interests take hold.
