BOLIVIA-PARAGUAY: Kundt to War

Last week marked an anniversary. For exactly five months Bolivian and Paraguayan soldiers have been fighting and dying in the steaming swamps of the Gran Chaco without an official declaration of war. Trustworthy reports from the front have been rare, one fact apparent: Slowly Paraguayans have been pushing Bolivians back.

Defeats brought political crisis to Bolivia. Mobs paraded the streets of La Paz, shouting against the Government for not declaring war, for not pushing the campaign harder. Wrathful patriots locked Bolivia’s deputies out of the Congress building and hung a “To Let” sign on the door. The Government was forced to send to Berlin for the man Bolivia exiled in 1930—General Hans Kundt, late of the Imperial German Army, for many years commander-in-chief of the Bolivian Army. In New York last week on his way to La Paz, General Kundt did not deny that he has been recalled to assume charge of the Bolivian army, parried questions by talking about a scheme to settle German, Austrian and Polish emigrants in the Upper Amazon.

Meanwhile in La Paz something had to be done to take the citizens’ mind off the war last week. The Government put on an exciting celebration of the 400th anniversary of the fall of the Inca Empire.

In Asuncion, capital of Paraguay, officials admitted that Bolivian resistance in the Gran Chaco has recently grown stiffer but claimed that Fort Saavedra, in the strategic sector of the Chaco, would fall within a fortnight. Paraguay’s Minister of War, Pastor Benitez. declared that half the officers and staff officers of Bolivia have been either killed, wounded or captured in the past four months. Bolivia’s war department retorted that 2,000 Paraguayans had been killed in the first seven days of the attack on Fort Saavedra.