Part Two: Francisco Solano Lopez: The Worst Military Leader In Human History

Robert continues telling James Stout about the story of the worst military leader in human history: Francisco Solano Lopez. Also known as 'El supremo', he nearly annihilated his own country through sheer incompetence. Sources: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26494384?googleloggedin=true&seq=22 https://www.jstor.org/stable/26494384?googleloggedin=true&seq=22 https://www.historyisnowmagazine.com/blog/2021/11/22/the-paraguayan-president-who-brought-his-country-to-military-catastrophe-part-1-francisco-solano-lopezs-earlier-life https://www.historyisnowmagazine.com/blog/2021/12/8/the-paraguayan-president-who-brought-his-country-to-military-catastrophe-part-2-the-start-of-the-war-of-the-triple-alliance#. YcJFwy2cZAY= https://www.historyisnowmagazine.com/blog/2021/12/23/the-paraguayan-president-who-brought-his-country-to-military-catastrophe-part-3-devastating-battles-for-both-sides#. Yd9N0i2cZAY= https://www.historyisnowmagazine.com/blog/2022/1/12/the-paraguayan-president-who-brought-his-country-to-military-catastrophe-part-4-how-the-war-ended#. Yd9N0i2cZAY= https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/war-of-the-triple-alliance-bloodbath-in-paraguay/ https://www.thecollector.com/francisco-solano-lopez-paraguayan-war/ https://countrystudies.us/paraguay/10.htm https://mitpressbookstore.mit.edu/book/9780742537552 See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Robert Evans?

  Welcome back once again to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where we tell you everything you don't know about the worst people in all of history. And this week, we're telling the story of Francisco Solano Lopez, the dictator of Paraguay, probably the worst military leader in all of history, the only person I've ever read of who was so bad at being a general that he got his entire country genocided. It's, I shouldn't be laughing. It's a really terrible story. People suffer horribly, but the level of incompetence is just like, it's honestly like almost awe inspiring. Like, I've never read about anyone doing this badly at war. And that includes Hitler. Anyway, James Stout, welcome back to the show. Sorry to say Hitler.

• 0:45Speaker 01

  Thank you, Robert, before introducing you. I'm excited to see, to hear about so many people dying. Always what I expect when I come on here.

• 0:52Robert Evans?

  Always a good time. Always a good time. Human death and misery. That's, that's the James Stout. I don't know. James, you have a podcast?

• 1:00Speaker 01

  I do, yeah. I have, I have, thanks, Robert. I have covered human death and misery for many years. But when I'm not, unfortunately, covering horrible things, I like to go outside, touch a bit of grass. And my new podcast is called Natural Causes, and it's about going outside and the politics behind going outside.

• 1:20Robert Evans?

  Excellent.

• 1:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, gonna get to the bottom of Mike Lee, and why is he like this?

• 1:26Robert Evans?

  Why is Mike Lee like this? What does everyone get wrong about fire suppression? All the important stories. Yeah.

• 1:34Speaker 01

  Who's evicting the buffalo from public lands?

• 1:36Robert Evans?

  Who's evicting the buffalo, right? And in, and in their defense, buffalo haven't paid rent in a long time.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  It's true that they predate the concept of rent. Yeah.

• 1:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah, they don't understand money also.

• 1:47Speaker 01

  Should we be calling them buffalo? So I'm sure somebody, somebody has strong opinions, and they're already logging on to Reddit to tell me that they're called bison.

• 1:54Robert Evans?

  I don't know. All I know is that there's cows and bigger cows and smaller cows. And all animals are one of those three things, including sharks. Anyway, let's continue talking about Francisco Solano Lopez.

• 2:05Speaker 02

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• 2:12Robert Evans?

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• 3:11Speaker 04

  I'm Melissa Jelton, host of the What Happened to Her podcast. We're kicking off the season with the Sandra Birchmore story, a case the police wrote off as a suicide in a snowstorm. Her family never bought it, and the man they suspected wore a badge.

• 3:26Speaker 05

  You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform.

• 3:32Speaker 04

  And you can get access to all episodes 100% ad-free with an iHeart True Crime Plus subscription exclusively on Apple Podcasts, available only to iHeart True Crime Plus subscribers. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts, search for iHeart True Crime Plus, and subscribe today.

• 3:49Speaker 06

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• 4:09Speaker 03

  Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network.

• 4:13Speaker 06

  And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 4:19Robert Evans?

  So I just said Francisco, but we're still in the, in the reign of his father, Carlos Lopez. And as I said last episode, Carlos Lopez is, for the most part, a relatively peaceful, he's certainly peaceful, he's entirely peaceful. He does not start shit beyond his borders, really. And he's generally, even at home, a pretty retiring and almost tolerant, semi-tolerant tyrant. Again, tyrant still, but semi-tolerant. Because he's lazy. He doesn't like to do much. And while every single, I mean, he works hard, but he doesn't like to, he's not like an active suppressor of the people. That takes a lot of work, you know? He likes to outsource some of that. He doesn't like to go too hard. Because he,

• 5:03Robert Evans?

  I think he understands also, if you crack down on people too much, it fucks him over. Because one of the things, I've just talked about how kleptocratic the Lopez regime is. And under Carlos, they are stealing like 25% of every dollar off the top at least. But everyone's also making shitloads more money than they ever had before. Because he just opens the country up, and that's really good for the economy, no longer being a hermit kingdom. Like, that helps a lot. So people don't mind, generally, right? That both that there's secret police, and that he's routing a lot of the money through his, like, family, because things are so much better than they were under the last dictator. And people don't tend to think in terms of absolute, like, is this fair or not? They think like, well, the last guy, we were all poor as shit, and now I have some money.

• 5:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, I can buy shit. It's a powerful argument.

• 5:49Robert Evans?

  Now, again, these still are not nice people, because one of the chief ways the Lopez family plundered Paraguay was through trafficking enslaved people. Benignio Lopez, Francisco's younger brother, had a thing for purchasing children of Afro-Indigenous extraction. And he is believed to have been a pederast at a pretty massive scale. Like, he is buying kids from the government to molest, is kind of what Sager insinuates, right? That's not as uncommon as you want it to be in, like, world history. Many of these slaves, specifically, this is always bad, but one of the things that makes this even a little grosser is that most of the slaves Benignio buys are of a, and Francisco's buying slaves too. I don't think he's raping them as much, but he's still buying a lot of slaves. And most

• 6:32Robert Evans?

  of the slaves they both buy, because they're cheaper, are called liberto. Like, that's a legal category of slave. And liberto slaves, you're supposed to free them when they hit 24 or 25, depending on whether they're male or female. And the Lopez family just doesn't do this. They're just buying these slaves because they're cheaper and kind of breaking what's supposed to be the law. Now, I should also note that because no one else is allowed to take payment from, like, the Lopez brothers for the slaves they buy from the government, they're pretty much just free slaves, as far as I can go.

• 7:00Speaker 01

  They do it for the love of the game. They're doing it for the love of the game.

• 7:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Jesus Christ. So Carlos, again, not a nice man, but his documented moments of direct violent evil are few. And the worst of them were committed as acts of nepotism in support of his fuckhead son, Francisco Solano. After Lopez returned from Europe, he's the clear frontrunner to his aging, to be his aging father's successor, right? There'd been a little bit of debate still, I think, beforehand, because people wondered, well, if he's incompetent enough, they could still bring in, like, Benignio maybe. But after he gets all these treaties signed, everyone realizes, like, oh, it's definitely got to be Francisco. So the two Lopez's put together a plan to bring European immigrants into Paraguay. Now, there's some racism in this. They want to people the Chaco, which is this, like, desolate region of the country. And there's indigenous people there, but they think

• 7:49Robert Evans?

  they're an inferior kind of native, right? Filling the region with Europeans would improve the prestige of Paraguay and the honor of the Lopez's. The problem was, the Chaco's a terrible place to farm. Like, even the indigenous people who'd lived there for a long time had kind of mostly given up farming, because it's a really bad place to, if you have any other option, you don't want to farm in the fucking Chaco.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:09Robert Evans?

  So about 500 Europeans do agree to move there and start farming with Paraguayan governmental support. But these volunteers are, per historian James Sager, gullible French citizens without the necessary skills. So they don't know how to farm. They don't know what they're doing at all. And they settle in, like, the worst territory to farm in the entire country. The colony collapses, and the settlers who don't go home wind up strewn across Paraguay, and in many cases, are arrested by Carlos for breach of contract. Because he's like, you said you were gonna farm.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  Okay, that's a pretty douchey thing to do right there.

• 8:42Robert Evans?

  And they're like, but you said you were gonna support us as farmers. And he said, well, there's no judiciary, so no one's gonna hold me to that, really.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, a contract only works one way. It reminds me of the Scots who tried to establish a colony in the Darien, and like,

• 8:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah, not a good idea.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, northern European people in jungle. It's not our natural habitat.

• 9:03Robert Evans?

  Always works. I was just reading a book that was like a countervailing narrative to the explorer Percy Fawcett's life. And one of the things this guy, he reads a quote from, like, I think it was in, like, the 50s or 60s, like, an ad for an Amazon cruise that's like, now you won't die coming. Like, we have antibiotics now. You'll probably live. Visit the Amazon.

• 9:21Speaker 01

  Perfect. Yeah, that's what I looked for on a holiday.

• 9:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So this contributed, uh, the uncertainty and anger is a result of like how this colony goes. And in general, the fact that a lot of these Europeans who come over realize the country's not quite as nice as they thought. It contributes to an undercurrent of resistance to the Lopez dictatorship that starts to brew through the 1850s as Carlos gets older. In 1858, several men are arrested for conspiring to assassinate the president. They probably weren't, it's probably more likely to say that these guys were mostly Europeans who pissed off the regime by causing problems for it, right? In part as a result of business disputes and stuff, and the Lopez's wanted to get rid of them. I think that's more what was going on. One RST was James Canstat, who is a British citizen with Uruguayan citizenship as well. He's like mixed race.

• 10:11Robert Evans?

  And I think the issue is that he'd been in some sort of business relationship with a Lopez that soured. And the same was true of the Deco brothers, one of whom worked for Francisco Lopez, and then embezzled money and fled the country. Now, his brother, Carlos Deco, had done nothing wrong, but he had gotten engaged to a woman that Francisco had a crush on, and she'd turned the future dictator and current vice president down, and he'd gotten enraged. Sager describes what happened next. "It was widely believed that the government persecuted young Deco at the insistence of Francisco, who liked to flower young women of the best families of the nation, not a breach of the honor code. His position made him unaccustomed to rejection. Thus, the Lopez's had the Decos executed. Perhaps the only great atrocity committed during the reign of Lopez I, is how it's often described."

• 10:56Robert Evans?

  I know that I'd say only, but that's like kind of the most visibly bad thing he does.

• 11:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's like a textbook dictator, evil dictator shit right there.

• 11:05Robert Evans?

  Right. And the fact that he does his first real textbook evil dictator thing to support his son wanting to like rape ladies shows you how the Francisco Lopez regime has got to go in a lot of ways, right? Now, James Canstat, the British guy, stays alive because the British government protests immediately and says, "Well, if he's done something illegal, he needs to have a fair trial," which can't exist in Paraguay because the Lopez's are the dictator, right?

• 11:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:29Robert Evans?

  And so that conflict brews, and Carlos, as this is kind of like going on, Carlos sends his son overseas, well, not quite overseas, but sends his gun, his son to Argentina in 1859 to secure what would prove to be Francisco's greatest diplomatic achievement. So for most of the last couple decades, Argentina had been quarreling with Brazil for regional dominance, often over Uruguay, where both nations had intervened militarily at least once and through other means constantly. Both Argentina and Brazil also disputed their borders with Paraguay. Brazil thought they were entitled to parts of North Paraguay and kept moving settlers over to try to claim it because Brazil's attitude towards like borders is, "Well, if we have people there, then it's ours," right? That's kind of the argument Brazil's making.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:13Robert Evans?

  Right?

• 12:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, an argument that would never again be made in history.

• 12:17Robert Evans?

  Never again be made. It's not relevant to today's politics. Uh, no settlers doing that anywhere. So Argentina wanted some of southern Paraguay and refused to give them unrestricted river access. Partly, this is a broader fuck you to the Brazilians because like, "Well, if you're letting Brazilians into your waters, Paraguay, then we can't give you control of the river because you could let Brazilians into Argentina," I think is kind of, kind of the issue. I'm not an expert on plot of politics in this period. This is, I'm trying to give you the overview here. Um, so in 1852, Argentina has a split because there's also a lot of disagreement and instability within the nation of Argentina. And there's like a civil split between the capital, Buenos Aires, and a bunch of provinces

• 12:59Robert Evans?

  that are united under a guy named Jose de Orquiza. In 1859, the dispute between these two sections of Argentina escalates to civil war. And after some very bloody battles, both sides decide to bring in a neutral intermediary. And for reasons that never really make a lot of sense, Francisco Lopez gets the job. He does surprisingly well. There's a temporary treaty that secures peace, and everyone seems to say like, "He did a pretty good job helping to negotiate it, actually. He's not bad," you know? Um, Lopez, though, is proud of this achievement way out of proportion to what it represents because it's good to help broker peace between two sides that don't want to go to war anymore. But if they've already decided, they're kind of done being at war.

• 13:42Speaker 01

  When they've asked for arbitration, I do feel like the biggest hurdle has been crossed that they've stopped killing each other.

• 13:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah, if they've already wanted to, well, they're not going to keep to that. But Lopez is really proud. And when Orquiza, the Argentina, Argentinian leader, offers him his sword, Francisco insists, "Your thanks are the only reward that I need." And then when he gets home, he has a gold medal made for himself and he puts it on the display in the capital.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  Perfect. He's such a funny little man. Because he didn't think it was sufficiently blingy enough. It didn't have enough gold brain.

• 14:15Robert Evans?

  What are you looking at this thing? It's got scrapes on it. It's been used. No, thank you.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  Using that shit? That's not what that's for. Is it gold? No, thank you.

• 14:23Robert Evans?

  It's not all gold. In 1861, the treaty collapses. So just after two years, and Argentina goes back to war with herself. So not, not the best treaty ever either.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, real peacemaker shit.

• 14:33Robert Evans?

  Still, for a couple of years, it's a big success, and it's marred only slightly by the fact that as he's trying to leave Argentina, and he's in, he's in Buenos Aires, trying to go back to the flagship of his entire navy, and the British Navy sails in and impounds it.

• 14:52Robert Evans?

  You're like, "No, you're not getting on this boat. Sorry, we're taking this fucker." We're the British Navy. Have you heard of the Royal Navy in 1859?

• 15:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, they are not to be fucked with. I bet he wished he had the sword.

• 15:04Robert Evans?

  No.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  Could have gone on there, given it some personal bravery like Napoleon.

• 15:08Robert Evans?

  You, you want to, you want to fuck with us? Oh, okay, sure. Well, we'll just take, we'll shake out literally the change in our wallets and blow you out of the fucking sea with it. We're the Royal Navy in 1859. Um, now, obviously, the British are pissed because of the arrest of that British Uruguayan dude, right? And so they're taking his capital, his flagship hostage to be like, "Look, we won't give your fucking boat back unless you let our man go," which is pretty effective power politics to give the British Empire credit.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. Back in the day, they went hard for that shit.

• 15:39Robert Evans?

  They sure did. And they're in the right here, right? This guy probably did nothing wrong. Francisco's a giant asshole.

• 15:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:46Robert Evans?

  In what has to be, and again, this should say something about the kind of asshole Francisco Lopez is, that like the British Empire are consistently like the most reasonable people in this story.

• 15:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:58Robert Evans?

  The British Empire and the Brazilian Empire are like consistently rational actors here. Um, so, uh, in what had to have been a humiliating scene, though, Francisco is forced to order James's release. And, you know, this is, this is a massive L for, for Paraguay and for him. But he gets his big stupid boat back, even though it's outdated at the time and not very good anymore. Um, now, by the time this all goes down, that he's negotiated this treaty and kind of the 1850s or ending the 1860s are starting, Francisco Lopez has developed a new theory of South American geopolitics. And because of all of the conflicts Brazil and Argentina had had over Uruguay, he comes to see Uruguay

• 16:39Robert Evans?

  as he calls it, "The great Gordian knot that's like locked in all of the political machination of the powers of the plateau region of South America, which is where Paraguay, Uruguay, Brazil, and Argentina are either inhabit or touch. All of them are kind of wrapped up in Uruguay. It's this Gordian knot, and if you can cut it, then you can take real power, right? You know, that's kind of his, his idea. And I think he believes this mainly because Brazil and Argentina can't stop fucking with Uruguay in politics. And previously, like his dad doesn't seem to really want to get involved. Dr. Francia certainly didn't. But he's going to be convinced that like, "Well, if Paraguay wants to be a player, we got to start fucking around with Uruguay."

• 17:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, there must be something that is worth it.

• 17:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And this is, this gives us another beautiful moment of shade from Sager's book. Although no executive before or since has thought that Uruguayan affairs were so essential to Paraguay's security, Francisco saw Brazil's intervention there as an insult to his nation and himself. Like the only man who ever considered this important.

• 17:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:38Robert Evans?

  So while he strategized, Lopez continued to obsess over his army. And he begins increasing conscription rates to a level that would have eventually made the state go broke. He starts conscripting so many people that like, "It is completely unsustainable, even as good as the economy's been." So if there isn't the war that's going to come, Paraguay would have gone bankrupt because of him building up his army to such an extent. And part of the reason why Paraguay's army becomes so abnormally large for its size is that Francisco hired a really incompetent asshole to do a census. And so he thinks Paraguay has like a million people in it, and it has maybe 450,000.

• 18:18Speaker 01

  I feel like that's got to burst, not pass the sniff test. At some point, you're going to be like, "I know this guy's not full of shit."

• 18:24Robert Evans?

  Maybe we should get somebody who can count better.

• 18:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:27Robert Evans?

  And he bases, like, one thing I've heard is that if Paraguay had like a million people, he would be conscripting too many of them for the state to be able to afford. And he's off by a factor of at least two. So he has, he's drafted way too many fucking dudes.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:43Robert Evans?

  Now, that said, he winds up with a really good army. Probably man for man, it's the best army in the region at, at this point, right? By like a meaningful level, you know? That said, one of the issues is it's still small in objective numbers. So even though it is a really good army for its size, if it starts suffering casualties, these really good soldiers are just not going to be there anymore. And there's no depth to the Paraguayan bench, right?

• 19:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:10Robert Evans?

  Because they've drafted so many of their men already.

• 19:13Robert Evans?

  That said, when it comes, if you're just objectively viewing, well, how did he do in terms of taking the Paraguayan military to where it was before and to where it was after? He does a pretty good job of modernizing the military, you know, just if you're just looking at it in military terms. He gets a bunch of modern cannon from Europe and he purchases both modern rifles as well as modern smoothbore muskets for his men. Unfortunately, as I said last episode, he's one of these rich kids who gets really excited by whatever arms merchant he happens to have talked to last. And so he buys a bunch of different calibers of rifles and smoothbore muskets. And so there's no effective standardization among the Paraguayan forces. And that's a really bad idea. Like in the US military, you have most guys in like a platoon of like actual fighting

• 19:56Robert Evans?

  infantry are going to have some version of like an AR, you know, that fire, that, that is chambered in 556. And they'll have a squad automatic weapon or two that's also chambered in 556. You know, you might have the odd marksman who's using like an AR-10 and 308, but most people's rifles, whether using a machine gun or an assault rifle, it's 556. Cause you want everyone as much as possible to have the same bullets. And anyone who has a handgun, they're nine millimeter. It doesn't matter that, is that the best absolute bullet? It matters, is that the bullet we can get the most of? And is it interchangeable between everybody? Cause you don't want to have to fuck with a bunch of different calibers. And so Paraguayan, like infantry units are going to have like so many different, guys can't just hand each other ammo, right? Which is a huge problem in a gunfight.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Again, to an old, uh, I, uh, my book I wrote about the Spanish Civil War and among the anarchists, they literally had, uh, no ammunition communality whatsoever.

• 20:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 20:50Speaker 01

  So they would be.

• 20:50Robert Evans?

  And it's a huge, huge problem.

• 20:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a huge issue. They'd have to run out after firefight and gather up all their brass so they could reload it, uh, because they.

• 20:58Robert Evans?

  Which is not, not what you want to be doing as a country.

• 21:01Speaker 01

  Suboptimal, yeah.

• 21:02Robert Evans?

  Not great. Um, and so this is going to be a problem for Paraguay too. He also starts construction of new iron foundries and an arsenal that gets named after his most effective deputy, a guy named Whitehead, who is going to purge not long after establishing the armory that his military is entirely reliant upon. Factories for producing modern steamship parts are also created. But most of these factories, whether they're making steamship parts or cannons, cannot make full steamships or full cannons without importing parts from Europe, which means that even though he's industrialized Paraguay, he has not made it like capable of autonomously arming and supporting its military in the field. It cannot even repair a lot of its guns on its own without taking things in from international areas. And it's, it's landlocked.

• 21:47Robert Evans?

  So if it were to be at war with Argentina and Brazil, the countries that border it, it would have no way to get the replacement parts it needs, right? So obviously, one thing you can think, if you're the leader of Paraguay is, well, under no circumstances could I ever allow myself to be at a war with both Brazil and Argentina. That's frankly unwinnable.

• 22:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:05Robert Evans?

  Right?

• 22:06Speaker 01

  One would assume.

• 22:08Robert Evans?

  For where we're going.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  We'll do a little callback later to that one.

• 22:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah, well, we'll talk about that some more later. Yeah. So, uh, it's also worth noting that even once he gets these factories going, he'll regularly have them like stop making weaponry and parts for the military to build fancy like wrought iron structures for his homes and for like the mansions of his relatives and his mistress. So it's like military production and/or producing luxury goods for just my family is like all of the military factories he builds.

• 22:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. That's what I've heard.

• 22:40Robert Evans?

  Exactly. So in the latter years of his father's rule, Lopez started employing journalists, both to write for local papers, which he edited, and to write articles for foreign papers. He would pay journalists to write puff pieces about him, to put them out in like British mainstream media, right? He would, he had mixed success with this because for one thing, the articles are so bad and so obviously full of shit that a lot of editors are like, well, I don't want to publish this. And he's getting, uh, this must've been a great gig if you're a journalist with no soul, because like one of the reporters who's writing a puff piece for him quotes as his like pay, he wants 150 ounces of gold for an, a propaganda article, which is a crazy rate per word by the way.

• 23:24Robert Evans?

  Like shit.

• 23:26Speaker 01

  I, I need to get up my game apparently.

• 23:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I think, I like, I've done better than most writers of my age, but I don't think I've ever gotten 150 ounces of gold for an article. That's a hell of a rate.

• 23:37Speaker 01

  I didn't think I've ever gotten any gold. I didn't think I could ever buy a, a single ounce with what I made from a single article.

• 23:43Robert Evans?

  I, I got paid in liquor once, but never gold. That said, this guy doesn't actually get paid with gold either. Lopez counteroffers with like a huge quantity of high quality yerba, uh, that's worth 150 ounces of gold. And the journalist says, yeah, so I guess the journalist has to learn the yerba trade or something.

• 23:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. How do you, how do you dispose of that much yerba?

• 24:02Robert Evans?

  Maybe he's just taking it all. Cheap coffee.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  I've done some working kind where I got like free bikes, but, uh, yeah, a bunch of, a bunch of yerba would be hard to get rid of.

• 24:11Robert Evans?

  Shitload of yerba. I'll take it, man. If any yerba companies want to advertise.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah, come at us.

• 24:16Robert Evans?

  Yerba mate, I don't have an issue with it. I think it does cause cancer, but what doesn't? Anyway. Email Sophie, she'll sort it out. Email Sophie, if you know what doesn't cause cancer.

• 24:27Speaker 01

  Oh, I was going to talk about selling the yerba mate. Okay.

• 24:30Robert Evans?

  Oh, either that, sure. Email Sophie for any reason you want. She loves emails.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  It's, uh, I, I write, okay.

• 24:37Robert Evans?

  That's right.

• 24:38Speaker 01

  On BSky.app.

• 24:40Robert Evans?

  That's her email, a blue sky address.

• 24:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, she doesn't use email. Everything's blue sky DMs. That's how we run this shit.

• 24:46Robert Evans?

  Everything's blue sky DMs. If you see my face, you've hit the right account. In 1862, Carlos Lopez died. It had already been decided for quite some time that Francisco would follow in his father's footsteps. There was a brief formal delay so Congress could convene and vote him president, but Congress only convened when Lopez ordered it. And he literally, people couldn't speak in Congress unless they were reading like a script that he'd had written for them. That's how Congress works this Paraguay under him.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  That is amazing, like Congress as a, as a play, like.

• 25:18Robert Evans?

  I, I would say not at all like our Congress, but actually these days it's a little like at least half of our Congress.

• 25:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, at least half of our Congress, right? Yeah, yeah, that's, uh, great. What a, what a perfect system.

• 25:29Robert Evans?

  This is pretty much just for show, the whole Congress convening.

• 25:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:32Robert Evans?

  This stuff, right? One of his first changes, once he's now the president, is to make his Irish mistress, Eliza, the official center of a Suncion High Society. Whether or not Ms. Lynch invited you to her home is how you knew you were in favor with the president, who could and increasingly did order people imprisoned for annoying him. A lot of people found out they were about to be imprisoned and eventually in some cases murdered because they'd get uninvited from like one of the regular parties Eliza would throw. And then it's like, okay, get your fucking will in order, man. Francisco's pissed. Yeah. Time to get the fuck out, although it's illegal to leave the country without explicit permission from him.

• 26:09Robert Evans?

  Lopez officially declared that attending parties and events that his family members and mistress threw was a patriotic duty.

• 26:17Robert Evans?

  If this lady I'm shup and throws a party, in order to be a proper Paraguayan patriot, you have to show up.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  Amazing.

• 26:23Robert Evans?

  If she's inviting you, yeah. Now, part of his goal, one of the things he's doing here is he's consciously building a ruling class for Paraguay, cause it hadn't had one. You know, it starts to get one under Carlos, but again, Dr. Francia like wipes out what had been there. So it's kind of a blank slate and he's able to, Francisco is able to make, cause he's also doing this during his dad's reign. He builds the new ruling class of Paraguay in his image and to be fundamentally subservient of him. The whole Paraguayan ruling class exists to recognize and proclaim the honor of Francisco Lopez. That's, that's what it's for.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:59Robert Evans?

  Might be better to be poor. It's not going to be better to be poor, cause he just drafts them into his military. So since the first dictator had left basically no ruling class behind, again, it's, what exists in Paraguay is entirely a creation of Francisco. Now, he becomes mildly annoyed in 1862, when Argentina concludes its civil war and makes a fellow named Bartolome Miter, uh, Miter, the president, M I T R E. Miter had congratulated Lopez during the negotiations in 1859 that he'd conducted. They'd have like a decent, uh, relationship back then, but Francisco cannot forgive this guy for the fact that like they go back to war after he makes a peace treaty for them

• 27:40Robert Evans?

  and that the guy he had liked most isn't the leader after this new war finally ends. It's this guy Miter, right? He never really, he considers this a stain on his honor. Like, and it's offensive that they went back to war and then made a different guy the president? Or they snubbed him?

• 27:55Speaker 01

  That a direct insult.

• 27:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:58Speaker 01

  What an incredible way of conducting yourself in the world. Like, like this tragedy, big tragedy here is that you guys snubbed my peace deal.

• 28:05Robert Evans?

  Sager will note, he's also really pissed that Argentina doesn't stop Great Britain or try to stop Great Britain from impounding his flagship back in 1859. And Sager thinks that probably was an insult by the Argentinian state. I don't, he knows more than I do certainly, but like, could Argentina have really done anything?

• 28:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:24Robert Evans?

  Could almost anyone? Yeah. Like in, in the Americas, maybe the US Navy, but I honestly, in 1860, I don't, yeah, probably in the Americas, in the Americas maybe, but not during the civil war, right? Which this is.

• 28:39Speaker 01

  Right, I was gonna say, they're about to start, uh, shoot each other, so.

• 28:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah. No one really wants to fuck with the Royal Navy at this point in time.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  It is peak Royal Navy.

• 28:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah, they're, they're kind of doing as well as they've ever done here.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, really good at boats.

• 28:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah, very good at boats. As Sager notes in his biography of the man, Francisco Solano Lopez was myopically obsessed with himself and his own honor to a degree unusual even among potentates. Quote, "Historians who spend their time reading correspondence between leaders of the Hispanic world, including monarchs, are struck by Francisco's excessive use of me, I, and my. Critical readers of his correspondence, without any other knowledge of his character, would judge him at least an outlandish egotist. Francisco proclaimed his honor, feeling correctly that he needed to remind others of it. Honor was a zero-sum game. It was a value system to which he'd clung in the absence of other personal qualities, such as pragmatism and common sense and empathy." Really hates this guy, Sager does.

• 29:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, he's motivated by a burning hatred.

• 29:41Robert Evans?

  My favorite kind of biographer, for sure.

• 29:46Speaker 01

  I can just see what it must have been like in grad school for this guy, just burning the midnight oil with duty fucking hates.

• 29:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah, Sager, if you happen to listen to this, first off, I hope I haven't fucked this story up too bad. And second, I hope you find another man to hate and write about because I want to read it. If you're still alive, you might be dead. I don't know. I think the book was published in 2007. Every negative aspect of Lopez's personality, including his obsessive reading of military theory and micromanaging the army, which convinced him he was a budding military genius, right? Like, he is, he is just absolutely sure that he's like a fucking like Napoleon in waiting, and he just needs a chance to like establish himself. And he's going to finally, in the early 1860s, get that chance. And I want to quote now from an article in The Collector by Ilyas bin Abdul Jalil, quote, "He established

• 30:32Robert Evans?

  an alliance with Uruguayan president Bernardo Barro of the Blanco Party. Lopez aimed to unite the smaller regional nations as a third force on the continental level and directly influenced the Rio de la Plata basin. This displeased Brazil, who then openly supported a rebellion of the Colorado Party in Uruguay in 1863. Despite Paraguay's threats of intervention, Brazil invaded Uruguay in 1864. Francisco Solano Lopez declared war in December of 1864, invading the province of Motogrosso." So that's how the war that we've been building up to starts, right? Lopez is pissed that Brazil and Argentina are bossing him and everyone else around. That's how he'd frame it. And so he wants to unite these smaller nations, starting with Uruguay, and like a third force. And like, then we can, we can compete. And by we, he means he, because

• 31:17Robert Evans?

  he wants to lead it with these great powers, right? He wants to turn Paraguay into a great power by uniting these smaller nations under its banner. And he does this by getting involved in Uruguay in politics. And then Brazil basically supports, you know, a rebellion in Uruguay and sends their army in. And he declares war on them. And he is going to invade Motogrosso, which is a province that's got a lot of minerals. This is if you're Paraguay and you want to be a more powerful nation, this is like the first place you'd want to invade, because it gives you the ability to actually start producing industrial products of your own in a way you currently can't. Now, that said, starting a war with Brazil as Paraguay, not necessarily a great idea, right?

• 32:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a bold move.

• 32:02Robert Evans?

  It's a bold move. Brazil in 1864 had between probably 10 and 12 million people, right? Paraguay's population is again, at most, maybe half a million, probably like 450 something thousand people.

• 32:14Speaker 07

  It's giving paper covers rock.

• 32:16Robert Evans?

  Now, that said, while this isn't a great idea on its face, there is some justification here, right? Brazil did intervene and basically push this rebellion in Uruguay. Like, they're kind of the dicks at the start, right? And so there's, there's an argument to be made, right? For why Paraguay would need to get involved here. And there's also the potential, when it's just Paraguay invading Motogrosso, there's the potential that this could end with some sort of negotiated thing that works out for Paraguay, right? If Paraguay can hand the initial Brazilian forces in the area, a substantial defeat, and then force them to make peace, or at least lock them into a war where Paraguay's kind of defending the territory they've taken, and they can make it too expensive, Brazil might sue for

• 32:59Robert Evans?

  peace, right? It's a chance, but that actually could have happened, right?

• 33:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:03Robert Evans?

  So in November of 1864, Lopez orders his men to seize a Brazilian merchant vessel anchored off of a sunsião. That's how he starts this war against Brazil, which is a really good move, because first, this thing is loaded with military equipment. There's a lot of shit that Paraguay needs desperately. So this is going to fuel their war effort. The fact that they've captured this boat and some other stuff they're going to capture in the early days of the war is what gives them the arms and armaments to be able to like fight. They also capture the governor of Motogrosso, who happens to be on board at the time, which is a great way to start your invasion by capturing the guy in charge of the province. Kind of found money, right? You're doing, Lopez is doing pretty good at the start of this. And they, when they invade, that Brazil seems, there's two armies,

• 33:45Robert Evans?

  I think, in Motogrosso, and the Paraguayans just absolutely smash both of these Brazilian armies, because these are like Brazilian frontier forces. They're meant for more police actions, and Brazil isn't really expecting to come into a pure conflict. And Paraguay's built a pretty good military. And so he just beats the fuck out of these early Brazilian forces and sacks the provincial capital of Cuaiba. And Lopez announces that Motogrosso is now part of Paraguay. He annexes it all. So again, if I'm like war gaming this, the smart thing to do would be fortify what you've taken and hold down and try to your best to keep really good relations with Argentina so that you can still get more supplies through trade.

• 34:28Robert Evans?

  You know, you would, you would hope maybe the fact that Argentina and Brazil have been at each other's throats so long is something you can take advantage of, right?

• 34:35Speaker 01

  A Cold War situation.

• 34:37Robert Evans?

  Right. And maybe, probably honestly, in the best case scenario, Brazil would sue for peace. And then in another 20 years, there would have been another war, and they might have, probably would have taken it back, right? It's just a much bigger country. I don't, I don't know that I see this ever have, would have worked out for them in the long term. But it could have worked out for Francisco Lopez during his lifetime. That wasn't impossible, right? But as soon as the fact that he beats, that, and he's like, he's not like leading, leading, but he's at the head, he's leading his army, he's there, right? The fact that he starts this war and it immediately goes so well, and his forces win two big battles, he, it goes to his head immediately. He loses his mind the second this happens. And you know who else loses their mind?

• 35:22Speaker 07

  Me?

• 35:22Speaker 01

  Is it the products?

• 35:23Robert Evans?

  Sophie, Sophie all the time.

• 35:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah, because I gave everyone her email. But yes, also the products and services that support this podcast. All of them have been 51/50. They're not allowed to make any decisions for themselves. So you can get some pretty good deals on their websites right now.

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• 36:39Speaker 07

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• 38:48Robert Evans?

  And we're back. So, as I left off, Francisco Lopez has had like his first little hit of military victory, and then completely lost his fucking mind and decided, "I am the god of war and cannot be defeated."

• 39:02Speaker 07

  Oh, okay.

• 39:03Robert Evans?

  This is gonna go really badly for everybody.

• 39:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a good attitude to take into fighting two massive powers.

• 39:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah, so what's actually happened here is that because of unsustainable conscription in military spending, he had assembled an army way more powerful than Brazil was, Brazil's like forces in the area were prepared to put down. But Brazil has reserves and a population like 20 times it's, right? And like all authoritarian leaders who confuse themselves through military masterminds, Napoleon included, Francisco immediately oversteps. Before I talk about the next stage of this war, I want to show you all a map of the Plata region of South America where all of this shit is going down. So, if you, if you're listening and you can't see this, on, on the, you know, the east

• 39:49Robert Evans?

  side, you've got Brazil, big country, and on the west side, you've got Argentina, pretty big country. And then in the middle, it's almost like Brazil and Argentina are doing a yin yang thing, and then the dot, one of the dots in between the yin yang is Paraguay and one of them's Uruguay.

• 40:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:06Robert Evans?

  And one thing you'll notice is that Paraguay doesn't touch Uruguay, right? Like, they're kind of close, but they're not bordering each other, whereas Paraguay is completely surrounded by Brazil and Argentina.

• 40:19Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 40:20Robert Evans?

  Um, yeah, or pretty much completely surrounded by Brazil and Argentina. So, keep the, keep in mind the fact that Paraguay doesn't touch Uruguay, and the start of this war is because he's getting involved in Uruguay in politics and considers that to be the Gordian knot that he has to solve, you know, in order to become a regional power, right? Now, what this means, the fact that like, Paraguay isn't touching Uruguay, is that if he wants to, if Lopez wants to reinforce his allies that have just been overthrown in Uruguay, he's gonna have to go through Argentina to do so. And so after he beats these Brazilian armies and takes Madagroso, he reaches out and he says, "Hey, Argentina, can I like send an army into Uruguay through your territory so I can like, handle this whole situation?" And Argentina says, "No."

• 41:04Robert Evans?

  And Francisco, showing his true brilliance as a military leader, says, "Fine, I'll declare war on you fuckers too." And he declares war on and invades Argentina.

• 41:12Speaker 01

  Oh, god.

• 41:13Robert Evans?

  So, to keep in track, he has now declared war on and invaded the two countries that surround him, both of which are vastly larger than his own country. So, Argentina's population at the time is roughly 1.5 million, which is three times or so the population of Paraguay, in addition to the population of Brazil, to say nothing of the population of Uruguay, which is also going to get involved against fucking Paraguay. Lopez starts calling himself by the old dictator's nickname, El Supremo. He convenes Congress and he tells them to declare him Marshal of Paraguay. So, Napoleon was a marshal. Marshal is like a really fancy military rank, it's even better than general, so he's gotta be a marshal, since he's such a great military leader now and he has to direct this continental war. Yeah, his huge dub.

• 41:58Robert Evans?

  Um, so he's declared Marshal of Paraguay. Next, per an article in the Warfare History Network, "Lopez followed the declaration by capturing two Argentine naval vessels in the Bay of Corrientes, then occupied the sleepy little town of the same name. Not content with anointing himself the new master of the Corrientes province on the basis of this petty triumph, Lopez declared himself the new ruler of the adjoining province of Entre Rios as well. It was then that the would-be warlord's luck began to run out. By this time, the Flores faction had managed to come out on top in Uruguay, those are his opponents, whereupon the new regime promptly announced its intention to stand shoulder to shoulder with Argentina in its hour of need. On April 18th, Argentina and Uruguay declared war on Paraguay. Two weeks later, with its own axe to grind, Brazil secretly threw in with Argentina and

• 42:41Robert Evans?

  Uruguay, pledging to help bring all their forces to bear until the existing government of Paraguay should be overthrown, and no arms or elements of war should be left to it. The stage was now set for a wide-ranging South American war." So, Lopez's enemies now call themselves the Triple Alliance, and he has now started a three against one fight, where the population is more like 30, like 25 or so against one, something like that?

• 43:04Speaker 01

  He really brought people together. He's a great unifier of peoples.

• 43:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I, I think his enemies can call on between two and three dozen men for every single man he has in the country, not in the military, in the country.

• 43:17Speaker 01

  Jesus Christ, yeah.

• 43:18Robert Evans?

  Really bad idea.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, damn right, that's not advised.

• 43:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah. For, for, for like, uh, reference, in military strategy, and this has been going on for hundreds of years, the, the, the attitude up to the present day, really, is that if you want to be certain of victory in an offensive action, you want to have about three times the numbers of the defenders in wherever you're attacking. So, again, he's outnumbered 36 to 1, something like that, right? Not great.

• 43:44Speaker 01

  Not a great start.

• 43:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Um, so in April of 1866, the Triple Alliance launches an invasion across the Paránia, shattering a major Paraguayan fortress and battering Lopez's navy, which was now horribly outdated in a war of ironclads and modern cannon. The army Argentina sends, led by President Miter, Miter, or whatever, is 60,000 men on its own, more than 10% of the entire Paraguayan populace. So, he has invaded with an army that's 10% of all of Paraguay, more, really, than that, more like 15. Genius that he is, El Supremo counterattacks to the north and leads his men to the Battle of Tuyuti, which is an immediate and terrific military disaster, disaster. Now, it shouldn't have been.

• 44:28Robert Evans?

  He still has, going into this battle, the best army in the region. It is a better army pound for pound than the Brazilian army, and it's like a huge dense swamp thicket, and because of the situation, the smart thing, military historians agree, well, if he'd just have like, once he had the, the Brazilians kind of in the area and there was, they knew a battle was coming, he should have entrenched his forces and tried to get them to attack him. The smart thing to do, and the smart thing to do based on like the military tacticians that Lopez claimed to admire, was to kind of dig in and try to goad the enemy into a defensive battle. Lopez, though, is convinced that he can't be beaten, and so he orders a charge, and he sends this precious veteran army that he has painstakingly built and blooded, and

• 45:13Robert Evans?

  in two countries, and he sends them sprinting directly through a thick swamp into a line of guns.

• 45:20Speaker 07

  He thinks he's John Snow. He literally thinks he's John fucking Snow.

• 45:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah, but if John Snow wasn't against guys with fucking cannons.

• 45:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, swamp running is famously a really easy thing to do, and you want to be moved through a swamp.

• 45:36Robert Evans?

  Like, I've read a lot of, you know, I've seen a tiny amount of battle, and I've read a lot about battles, I can't imagine a worse situation than sprinting through a swamp into a gun line.

• 45:46Speaker 07

  That's horrible.

• 45:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've moved through a few jungles and, uh, it's, it's a lot easier to be sitting there shooting people.

• 45:54Robert Evans?

  And again, this is by any objective, a good army, they could have at least won, or at least pulled out a pretty close loss if someone competent had been in charge, but here's what happens, to continue with that article from the Warfare History Network. Blundering forward in a series of waves, the heat of the noonday sun beating down upon them, Lopez's troops doggedly slogged through the reed-choked thickets as their adversaries opened fire. For every yard they gained, the Paraguayan ranks were decimated by shot and shell. The closer they got to the allied positions, the more terrible the carnage became. Those few hardy souls who managed to get within reach of the allied positions found themselves blasted to pieces by withering volleys of rifle fire. Entire battalions were lost.

• 46:34Robert Evans?

  So, I don't, you're not ready for how bad this fucking battle goes. Lopez burns the pride of his army in a single day. More than 6,000 Paraguayan soldiers are killed. For an idea of how bad that is, the Battle of Antietam, which occurs close to the same time, is still the deadliest day in US military history. Fewer than 4,000 men die on both sides. When you, 6,000 Paraguayan soldiers died in this battle, and when you consider how small, sorry, you were saying?

• 47:08Speaker 01

  No, yeah, I was gonna say, a country that, that is like a fraction of the size of the US.

• 47:11Robert Evans?

  Exactly. 3% of the entire nation dies in a day on the battlefield.

• 47:16Speaker 07

  I was about to ask for how much of the population that was.

• 47:18Robert Evans?

  3% of the Paraguayan nation dies on the field in one day.

• 47:23Speaker 01

  That's mad.

• 47:24Speaker 07

  Dude is, dude is a terrible leader.

• 47:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, that is, dude, yeah.

• 47:30Speaker 07

  Tell me.

• 47:31Speaker 01

  Incredible stuff.

• 47:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah, like, catastrophic.

• 47:34Speaker 01

  That must have been horrific.

• 47:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah. From this point on, the war is unwinnable for Lopez. Like, it's no longer possible.

• 47:42Speaker 07

  I would say so.

• 47:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's got, he's got no dudes left.

• 47:46Robert Evans?

  No, very few. Well, yeah, he has a lot, quite a few dudes left. He has no more dudes who are like, of responsible age to fight left.

• 47:55Speaker 01

  Oh, god.

• 47:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, that's where we're headed. So, the Allies encircle his chief fortress, the Humaita, and in September of 1868, they finally managed to breach it, under the command of a Brazilian general, the Marquis de Casillas. This write-up from History is Now describes how Lopez prepared for and lost this battle. For the marquis, a pitched battle was what he wanted. He was simply unable to achieve it at this stage. Lopez knew his numbers were low, and he had limited prospects of getting more men. Pre-teen boys and old men were being conscripted into the Paraguayan army. These young men would prove some of the marshal's most devoted followers. The use of child soldiers would be one of the biggest stains on the marshal's record, and is one of the great controversies of the war. For the Paraguayans, they felt they had no alternative. According to the marshal's propaganda, the Allies were going to partition the country,

• 48:40Robert Evans?

  and the Brazilians were going to enslave them. As has been seen, Marshal Lopez was not one to sit and wait for anything to happen to him. He would make attacks during the siege, and at times, put the Allies back on their heels. Active defense seemed to be the tactic Marshal Lopez excelled at, but his army was also starving. A larger proportion of his soldiers every day was made up of children and old men. Weapons were outdated, ammunition and powder were short. It was amazing the Paraguayans held on as long as they did, but the marshal could feel the squeeze he was being put under. Slowly, steadily, month after month, the Allies strangled the Paraguayans. The Brazilians showed early in the siege, and that their ironclads were able to run the guns of the fortress and make it upriver, virtually defeating the purpose of the fortress at that location. With the fleet now able to go upriver and shell Paraguay in positions, Humaita slowly

• 49:24Robert Evans?

  became untenable. Small-scale counterattacks would not be enough. The Allies inexorably closed in. So, you know, it's a, at this point, it's not like obvious massive mistakes. It's just, he's made the war unwinnable for himself from the stage, right? Lopez abandons his positions and he takes the best of his men with him, leaving a starving rear guard to hold the fortress made up entirely of children and starving men who were dying. When they surrender, and the guys who surrender are known by the Brazilians as having like yellow skin that's just hanging off them because they're just nearly dead. They look like they just got out of a death camp, right? When they surrender, he has his spies hunt down the family of the officer responsible

• 50:05Robert Evans?

  and torture them because he's like, how dare you surrender when you were all about to starve to death to try to save the literal children that I left in your command. Cheers to that dude for trying to save the kids initially, I guess.

• 50:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's got one good officer left, I guess.

• 50:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah, not anymore. That guy's no longer in the army.

• 50:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, true. And his family are also tortured.

• 50:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah, tortured, murdered, all that good stuff. Lopez demands a, or asks for a brief parlay at this point. And there's like a peace negotiations between the triple alliance and Lopez, but their stance is like, you're done, right? You're done and there need to be consequences. And Lopez's stance is, nah-uh. So this doesn't really work out. The Allies eventually carry on in another attack and they assault his forces at a place called Curupati. And again, Lopez is as idiotic as he is in his grand decisions. When it comes to like tactical moves, he's not always awful, right? And the Paraguayans have good defensive positions like they should have had at the other battle we talked about, and they managed to throw back the Allies and inflict horrific casualties.

• 51:08Robert Evans?

  So many that like the Argentinian president quits the war entirely. He doesn't pull Argentina out, but he no longer has stomach for direct command.

• 51:18Robert Evans?

  And there's like a year-long lull where basically the Allies have to like recover and redress their militaries and whatnot and, you know, get them out of the, also everyone's sick and dying in the Allied army constantly because it's a war in the 1860s and that's just how shit goes.

• 51:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, everyone's sicking themselves and.

• 51:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah, the Paraguayans a bit less because it's their territory, you know?

• 51:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:42Robert Evans?

  For the next year, a small army of Brazilians augmented by an even smaller Uruguayan force, keep the Paraguayan military bottled up. It only takes four or 5,000 men to do that at this point in time, but they're not able to take any more territory. And while this is all going on, our boy Francisco Lopez is stuck in his capital, Asuncion, which he knows he's not going to be able to hold on to that much longer, getting angrier and angrier and crazier and crazier and taking his problems out on everyone else. In the early years of his reign, Lopez had publicly disdained torture. He didn't keep doing that for much longer. So I want to quote now from an article published in the Journal of the Americas titled Court of Blood by Thomas Wiggum. Court of Blood is what they called Lopez's like palace and whatnot, like his, um, his,

• 52:26Robert Evans?

  basically his like close friends, because he kills and tortures his friends and family during this period.

• 52:31Speaker 01

  Is that like, he's calling it that? He's like, you're invited to the court of blood?

• 52:35Robert Evans?

  It's the nickname that people develop because he kills all of his former buddies, basically. Here's Wiggum. "In 1868, he issued a decree invoking the old laws of the Indies and establishing a series of two-man tribunals to investigate and prosecute those accused of treason. In fact, the government had already suppressed the colonial legal codes during the early 1840s, but the regulations concerning treason as first defined for Spain in medieval times under the Siete Partidas were still in force. Under his medieval, this medieval code, the monarch's subjects were required to acknowledge, love, fear, honor, and protect the king by the command of God, whose place he occupies on earth. Any individual failing in such duties would necessarily be guilty of treason and would be put to death on this account.

• 53:17Robert Evans?

  And if he could not be found, he must lose all his property and be forever banished." So that's the attitude that he establishes, like if you are not loving and respecting and fearing and protecting me, then you die. And if you escape, I'll fucking kill your family is kind of how things go, right?

• 53:33Speaker 01

  The fear part, I think he's probably got locked down at that point. The other one's not so much.

• 53:38Robert Evans?

  Not so much the other ones. Now, the story goes that as Francisco is fleeing the Humaita, that fortress with some of his men before it falls, he learns that there's a coup brewing in the capital centered around his younger brother Benigno and the American ambassador, Charles Washburn. And there had been, from the time he got to power, there had, and this is another thing that contributes to him like getting increasingly angry at his brother Benigno. A lot of people thought Benigno should have been the president, not because he was smart or better, but because he was like dumber and less of an asshole. And people were, I mean, he's a pedophile monster. So like, that shows you how bad Lopez is, is that like the, the pederist is like, well, he's comparatively not, not nearly as evil.

• 54:21Speaker 01

  The less of two, yeah, great.

• 54:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah, oof, boy. So he hears about this coup that may or may not have actually been brewing and Lopez winds, gets really pissed. And so he arrests all these guys, including the American ambassador and his own brother. And he hosts a bunch of show trials and mass executions. He executes his brother Benigno. He executes Washburn after torturing all of these guys who are tortured horrifically. He executes dozens and dozens of highly placed and powerful Paraguayans and foreigners. I don't even know that we have like a good number for what becomes known as the San Fernando massacre, because they, it is big open air concentration slash death camp. There's a contemporary, semi-contemporary lithography, like an illustration illustrating San Fernando.

• 55:04Robert Evans?

  So you just see this picture, it's just like hundreds of people in this open air, fenceless camp being like whipped and stabbed and tortured.

• 55:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like one of those paintings of hell.

• 55:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's like, it, it looks almost like a Bosch painting. Yeah, like you can see the fucking, what must be vultures overhead for all the corpses. It's just an awful situation.

• 55:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, so he's now, he's pissed off the Americans now in addition to the, to Argentina and Brazil.

• 55:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and he pissed off the Americans a bit before with some of his fuckery. This really gets the Americans pissed off.

• 55:39Speaker 01

  Pissing the ambassador is a big one.

• 55:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah, the whole country gets pretty pissed off, or at least imprisoning the ambassador at this point. So the article I quoted from earlier by Wiggum includes a haunting description of how this open air death camp worked. "Prisoners of both sexes arrived at the latter camp daily. The detained women, nearly all upper class in origin, enjoyed the privilege of remaining unshackled, with each receiving a cured hide for a bed. Otherwise, they had to suffer in the open air like the men and consume the same poor fare of unsalted beef and portions even smaller than those doled out to the troops. Once a day, the prisoners received a cow horn of water from the nearby lagoon, but they were permitted to visit it only to answer the call of nature. Given the prevalence of dysentery in the camp and the reluctance of guards to escort the prisoners from their place of confinement, it was inevitable that many of the accused

• 56:25Robert Evans?

  had to squat in their own filth. At night, all of the prisoners were chained, though the men's circumstances were more difficult than the women's. Lassos were stretched between heavy poles driven into the earth, and to these ropes the men were tied with leather thongs in groups of 20 to 30, placed in rows stretched on the damp, slimy ground where they rested, suffered, and slept. Thus assembled, these accused conspirators, already thin, rapidly sunk. Many died."

• 56:49Speaker 01

  Jesus.

• 56:50Robert Evans?

  Cool stuff. Nice, nice man.

• 56:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Well, did he learn that one in his European trip? Sounds like he came up with some of that himself.

• 56:58Robert Evans?

  This is also maybe the first time I've heard of like, a lot of death camps, you know, sometimes people who used to be close to the leader wind up in the death camp. This is the first death camp that's like entirely populated by like his former friends and like buddies and family.

• 57:11Speaker 01

  It's like an upper class death camp.

• 57:13Robert Evans?

  He kills two of his brothers here.

• 57:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:16Robert Evans?

  Jesus. He has his own mom arrested and tortured for like allegedly having suggested that he might have been born out of wedlock to, I think, like a black woman. There's like rumors about that too, that he's not really, or his dad, that his dad's not the real father, I think actually was it? I forget exactly because there's a bunch of different rumors about his parentage, but like he has his mom, the fuck with his mom over this stuff.

• 57:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, that is psycho shit. Like that is.

• 57:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 57:41Speaker 01

  It's fully unhinged.

• 57:42Robert Evans?

  Something else. "Lopez, by this point, has been massacring, is massacring his own people at home, including members of the clergy and his own family. But the slaughter he wreaks on those closest to him pales in comparison to his continued insistence on waging a lost war now without a functional, professional, adult army, right? Because that is still going on."

• 58:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the other thing, right? He's got the meat grinder that he could put these people into, but he's taken the time to torture them at home instead.

• 58:11Robert Evans?

  Yes, exactly. And I should also note that, as I said, every time the Allied armies show up in like force, their camps are these filthy, disease-riddled hellholes, right? And that keeps spreading disease to the locals, right? Local Paraguayans also get cholera en masse and start dying in huge numbers, you know? Obviously, a lot of his soldiers die from that too, but like, his people are dying as a result of the war, not just because he's conscripting them and throwing them into a meat grinder, but because he started this war and now a bunch of the country is occupied, diseases become endemic and people are dying in fucking mass.

• 58:47Speaker 01

  Perfect. He's military genius.

• 58:50Robert Evans?

  He's, he's fucking brilliant. So the capital eventually falls after a renewed Allied assault in 1869. The rest of the war after this point is from, on like the Paraguayan side at least, is a series of, a bloody series of suicidal charges and attempted ambushes by armies of untrained child soldiers, flung in the way of the Brazilian army by Francisco Lopez just to protect him, right? He's just repeatedly having kids act as his like ablative armor, essentially.

• 59:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's just slowing them down with the bodies of children.

• 59:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah, wave after wave of his own men, no, not men, children.

• 59:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah, is that Branigan, but with like 13 year olds? So the summary of one such slaughter in the article, that article by the Warfare History Network is chilling, and I'm going to read that now. "Caballero, who is Lopez's general at this point, and about 4,000 of his troops withdrew, leaving the remainder, including a handful of middle-aged campesinos and a host of underage boys, to face the enemy. As the Marquis de Cahias and his soldiers reached the far end of the span, the desperate Paraguayans, down to mostly machetes and rusty bayonets, left their positions and rushed forward to meet the enemy head-on in a suicidal charge. From there, the action quickly degenerated into a vicious, murderous brawl. The Brazilian superior numbers and the simple fact that they still had bullets carried the day. In a matter of minutes, the fight at Yatororo was over.

• 1:00:11Robert Evans?

  Afterward, when the weary Brazilians began inspecting the enemy dead and realized that a sickening number of them were boys no older than 15, many of the soldiers wept." One thing that should tell you how horrible this is, is a major problem for the Allies is that their soldiers and officers keep breaking down because they're murdering so many children.

• 1:00:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:30Robert Evans?

  They just can't take it.

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

  They, yeah, it's, that's, uh, as far as talking to a soldier in Myanmar, fighter in Myanmar last week, it was telling me how, uh, how emotionally difficult it has been for them fighting, yeah, consecrate your children, same thing, no good for the human soul, actually.

• 1:00:45Robert Evans?

  It's just really bad to mow down tons of like 13 year old boys.

• 1:00:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, who don't want to be there.

• 1:00:50Robert Evans?

  Who don't want to be there. And like, you know that they're like, there's no, there's, one of the things interesting when you read quotes about this, there's no like bravado or like, you know, very little pride even, martially, in what's happening at this stage. It's just a lot of traumatized Brazilians. Arguably, there are more casualties at this point as a result of guys just getting their heads fucked up from killing kids than from actual enemy action.

• 1:01:13Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah. You're fighting the fucking child army.

• 1:01:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And that's, that's kind of the defining image of the war against the triple alliance. Brazilian soldiers getting traumatized to the point of shattering their own psyches because Francisco Lopez keeps hurling legions of kids into their guns.

• 1:01:30Speaker 01

  Jeez.

• 1:01:30Robert Evans?

  A few days after the Battle of Yatororo that I just related, the Brazilians attacked Lopez at a place called Beleta, under punishing rain. Caballero's army at this point is just old men and young children. There are multiple battalions of riflemen where no one is older than 13 or 14. And I called them riflemen. Number one, they're not men and a lot of them don't even have rifles. Most of them don't have shoes. But they're brainwashed kids. So they're pretty motivated in the way that like, kids can be when you brainwash them properly.

• 1:02:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, the, the brain isn't done making itself and joining up all the dots at that point, right? Kids can be dumb.

• 1:02:09Robert Evans?

  Shocking loyalty, you know, that is, it speaks very bleakly to the amount of brainwashing that's done to these kids. You know what else speaks to the amount of brainwashing done to children who are soon going to be sacrificed in a series of pointless wars? That's probably not a good way to throw ads.

• 1:02:24Speaker 01

  I'm not sure if they, uh, if they want us to say that about them. Well, we'll see.

• 1:02:28Robert Evans?

  I don't know. Maybe Lockheed Martin will be doing the ad. Who knows? Let's see if Raytheon wants, wants to give us some money. Fuck it.

• 1:02:36Speaker 03

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• 1:03:04Speaker 04

  I'm Melissa Jelton, and in my new podcast, What Happened to Her, I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. Stories about women whose deaths were too quickly ruled a suicide.

• 1:03:16Speaker 06

  She was starting to get worried and get scared for her safety.

• 1:03:22Speaker 04

  Stories of survival.

• 1:03:24Speaker 02

  The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck because by all rights, I should be dead.

• 1:03:30Speaker 04

  Cases that everyone else called closed. They can't convict her, right? Like, she has so much evidence. These stories all start in the same place, with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her. No child should ever experience that. And we were babies. She did all of these brave things and came out and spoke about it and he got a

• 1:03:55Speaker 06

  year. You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform.

• 1:04:02Speaker 04

  Listen to What Happened to Her on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:04:09Speaker 06

  Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast?

• 1:04:12Speaker 03

  Here's what you missed.

• 1:04:13Speaker 05

  And the argument is, do you want to win? If you don't win, you have no power.

• 1:04:21Speaker 06

  It's real.

• 1:04:22Speaker 05

  Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interests, and they complain about the very thing they're receiving.

• 1:04:28Speaker 03

  It's raw.

• 1:04:28Speaker 05

  I knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men.

• 1:04:37Speaker 03

  Roland Martin Unfiltered.

• 1:04:38Speaker 05

  I went off, I said, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Y'all gonna scream at Chanel, but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same vein.

• 1:04:48Speaker 03

  Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network.

• 1:04:52Speaker 05

  12 seats, those are moving south. So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 2030, you better be hitting the ground going hard in the south now.

• 1:05:02Speaker 06

  And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

• 1:05:07Speaker 03

  or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:05:13Robert Evans?

  And we're back. Sophie says Raytheon is now advertising on the pod. Raytheon,

• 1:05:20Robert Evans?

  aren't there too many kids? Anyway, uh, so, speaking of too many kids, Francisco Lopez still has a lot of children in his army. Pretty much nothing but children at his army. I'm going to continue with a quote from that article from the Warfare History Network. At Avahi, the adolescent volunteers struggled vainly for nearly four hours to throw, hold back the enemy in a contest they only partially understood. With all the obstinacy of youth, they would not yield. Refusing all quarter, they received no mercy. Only a few hundred of Avahi's defenders lived to see another day. The rest, numbering well over 3,000, were cut down. When the Brazilians entered Beleta, they found that Lopez had once again used his human shields to cover his escape. Cahias' army was joined by 4,000 troops

• 1:06:02Robert Evans?

  from Brazil's reluctant ally, Argentina, and another 600 Uruguayan's. Everybody, it seemed, wanted to be in on the kill. After he flees from Avahi, Lopez creates a new capital for himself in this tiny little town named Piriboy, and he and his Irish lover Eliza and an army that's now just women and children? Cause like, he's run out of old men pretty much by this point.

• 1:06:22Speaker 01

  He's gone woke out of necessity.

• 1:06:25Robert Evans?

  Really inclusive. Yes. The woke Paraguayan army. Um, so the mark he holds for like another 10 months while he reorganizes his army. And he's also, now that they've taken the urban areas of Paraguay where most people live, he's also trying to deal with a humanitarian crisis. Like, they're just trying to stop everyone from dying as a result of Lopez's actions. So he can't finish the war for like another year. But he attacks the next summer and he finally slaughters the last of Lopez's forces. Now, do you want to guess what Lopez does while the last of his army is being wiped out?

• 1:06:59Speaker 01

  Is he doing more with the gold braid? Is he decorating his outfits again?

• 1:07:02Robert Evans?

  No, no, no. He just uses them as human shields again and runs away.

• 1:07:06Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah, that is one of his tactical favorites, isn't it?

• 1:07:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Uh, he heads towards Bolivia, which is basically the only place that's not currently at war with him.

• 1:07:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. Yeah. He doesn't have many other choices, does he?

• 1:07:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And he's got this like rear guard that's trying to like hold back his retreat and they just get massacred trying to protect him. So again, he sacrifices yet another army to, to secure his, his flight. On March 1st of 1870, though, the Allies finally drag him down. Uh, they catch him at a place called the Akitaban River, which is close to the Bolivian border. All of his soldiers basically die kind of trying to protect him. Lopez, you'll find, some people say that he, and he finally died nobly, charging the enemy, you know, with a weapon in his hand. That's not true. He, he, he gets wounded by a lance and he jumps into the river to try to swim away and then he gets shot in the back.

• 1:08:01Speaker 01

  Appropriate. Like, yeah.

• 1:08:03Robert Evans?

  Uh, yeah, I'm not going to be sad for that. No. So after five years of war, the total death count of the war could be as high as 1.2 million in total. It kind of depends on how big Paraguay was. Some estimates say that 90% of the pre-war population of Paraguay dies in this war.

• 1:08:20Speaker 01

  Holy crap.

• 1:08:21Robert Evans?

  The lower estimates are just 300,000, which again is out of like 450,000. That's still like 70% of the fucking country or something dying.

• 1:08:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like two thirds, isn't it? Yeah.

• 1:08:31Robert Evans?

  At, at the end of the war, there are 28,000 adult male Paraguayans.

• 1:08:38Robert Evans?

  Like, that's, that's pretty bad.

• 1:08:43Speaker 01

  That's pretty, yeah, that's pretty fucking poor.

• 1:08:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah. It's, it's, it's one of the most like extensive genocides I've heard of entirely done kind of by accident by your own dude.

• 1:08:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, like auto genocide. Yeah. The level of incompetence.

• 1:08:59Robert Evans?

  Cause they are, but like, you made it happen. Yeah.

• 1:09:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. Like, it was, uh, yeah, just by like sheer incompetence.

• 1:09:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah, by sheer fucking idiocy.

• 1:09:09Speaker 01

  And you were saying those kids were volunteers? Like, they, they, they wanted in on the, okay.

• 1:09:14Robert Evans?

  You know.

• 1:09:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:09:15Robert Evans?

  Right. Yeah, that's putting it a little strong. Um, before we, I do want to read one last quote, uh, from the book, Francisco Solano Lopez, The Ruination of Paraguay by Sager.

• 1:09:26Speaker 01

  I can see now how he got to the title. It's a good title given, given me.

• 1:09:29Robert Evans?

  Ruination is putting it lightly, to be honest.

• 1:09:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:33Robert Evans?

  Lopez was buried at Cerro Cora by Lynch, his mistress, and Brazilian major and later president Floriano Pexodo. Panchito was buried there, too. Lopez's mother, Dona Juana, had been unable to protect her younger sons from the murderous Francisco, who had executed Benigno, her favorite child, and tortured to death another, Benancio. When Francisco died, she alleged that he was not the child of Carlos Antonio. His sisters thought him a monster. Their husbands had been persecuted and executed by their brother. They responded by joining his enemies.

• 1:10:01Speaker 01

  So, perfect. So Lynch survives, though.

• 1:10:06Robert Evans?

  Lynch does. She winds up back in Europe, poor, broke, but she lives.

• 1:10:11Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:10:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:12Speaker 01

  I think I'm less sympathetic to her than I was at the start.

• 1:10:15Robert Evans?

  After the whole genocide thing, yeah, kind of hard to be.

• 1:10:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:19Robert Evans?

  It's, he really fucked up pretty bad. Now, he has, his reputation has enjoyed what some will call a renaissance after. He's become in the last, like, I think, 50 years, sort of a, there's been an attempt to rehabilitate him as like a nationalist figure in Paraguay.

• 1:10:33Speaker 01

  By who?

• 1:10:34Robert Evans?

  I guess people who aren't very well informed about his regime.

• 1:10:38Speaker 01

  People, the fucking child catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Like, who hates children that much?

• 1:10:44Robert Evans?

  I think that they're really focused on the trains. Like, really focused on the trains.

• 1:10:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, many, yeah, people who love to rehabilitate dictators do love to go to trains to do it.

• 1:10:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah, he made the trains. Not even a run on time. He just made them.

• 1:10:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, he made the trains. Yeah, that's worse to talk.

• 1:11:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:02Speaker 01

  Anyway, James, you got any pluggables to plug? I do, yeah. I mentioned my book earlier, so plug that. It's called Against the State. It's out now. You can find it anywhere the good books are sold and in your library. If you don't want to buy it, you can go to your library and ask for it. Published by AK Press. And I have a new podcast, which is starting on the 17th of August. It's called Natural Causes. You can find it wherever you found this podcast. And it is about going outside. We're going to talk about the Endangered Species Act and why people hate it. We're going to talk about drilling in the Arctic Plain. And we're going to talk about a lot of oil drilling, actually. There'll be many oil drilling episodes, unfortunately, which will also be comically evil, just like this.

• 1:11:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Well, check out James's new show. And check out Paraguay. I mean, I'd like to. It seems like a great place when it's not starting, having a dictator star of war of choice with everyone else.

• 1:12:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, it'd be nice to go.

• 1:12:04Robert Evans?

  It's almost like trying to do the, what, I'm a little guy, strategy. But instead, like, you never say, what, I'm a little guy. You just keep starting fights with, like, men five times your size.

• 1:12:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then getting battered, and then somehow, or getting someone else battered on your behalf.

• 1:12:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah, like, the best case scenario is that he got, like, 60 to 70% of the country killed, and it may have been over 90%, pretty bad, pretty bad.

• 1:12:25Speaker 01

  That is wild.

• 1:12:26Robert Evans?

  Anyway, be careful who you let run your country, folks, you know?

• 1:12:31Speaker 01

  Some good advice there, Robert.

• 1:12:32Robert Evans?

  Maybe don't let anyone do that, arguably. Bad idea. All right, well, enough of my radical anarchist propaganda. Go away.

• 1:12:40Speaker 07

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit Remind Me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips and our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com/AtBehindTheBastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking.

• 1:13:15Speaker 04

  I'm Melissa Jelton, host of the What Happened to Her podcast. We're kicking off the season with the Sandra Birchmore story, a case the police wrote off as a suicide in a snowstorm. Her family never bought it, and the man they suspected wore a badge. You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform. And you can get access to all episodes 100% ad-free with an iHeart True Crime Plus subscription exclusively on Apple Podcasts, available only to iHeart True Crime Plus subscribers. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts, search for iHeart True Crime Plus, and subscribe today.

• 1:13:56Speaker 06

  Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast?

• 1:13:59Speaker 05

  Here's what you missed. People wake up and go, oh, damn, wait, hold up. They changed all of that? Yes.

• 1:14:05Speaker 06

  It's real.

• 1:14:06Speaker 05

  This is a wholesale attack. It is targeting black people in every federal agency. It's raw. White folks have never allowed that reckoning to last more than a decade. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network.

• 1:14:19Speaker 06

  And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If anyone wanted to commit a murder, up here would be the greatest place in the world to hide the body. But soon they'll find it. He acted friendly. He talked friendly. He sounded friendly. They all knew that I did the scary boogie stuff, and they said, maybe she'll find out where this girl is. I saw him violent. Backhanded her. Pow! Listen to The Devil's Quarry, Season Two, in the Bone Valley feed, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:15:04Speaker 06

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