Abstract

CORBO, Tomás Sansón. Carlos Pastore and “The general of the Virgin Sword”. Memory and national destiny in Paraguay. Rev. hist. Am. [online]. 2020, n.159, pp.161-178.  Epub Mar 05, 2021. ISSN 2663-371X.  https://doi.org/10.35424/rha.159.2020.643.

Carlos Pastore Goiburu (1907- 1996) was an outstanding Paraguayan intellectual, affiliated to the Liberal Party, who used the historical knowledge as an instrument of political fight and of ideological resistance. During his exile in Montevideo he published two emblematic works: El Paraguay y la tiranía de Morínigo (1947) and La lucha por la tierra en el Paraguay (1949). In them he left testimony of his militancy against the dictatorship that was reigning in his country and tried to explain some of its structural matters. He supported epistolary links with intellectual and contemporary politicians. In this exchange of correspondence, his historiographical convictions can be traced.

The aim of this article is to analyze Pastore’s thought on the writing of the history and on the political uses of the past in the context of the production of the intellectual liberals in the exile. I try to do it across the examination of Pastore’s extensive letter sent to the colonel Arturo Bray in 1959, whose copy remains in his private file guarded in the Paraguayan Academy of History. The study of this missive allows us to know the thought of liberal historians about the exclusionary nationalism of Juan O'Leary and reveals the discursive and ideological strategies leaded to face it.

Keywords : Historiography; Paraguay; liberals; dictatorship; Carlos Pastore.