User:Lecen/Paraguayan War

Paraguayan War

Territorial disputes
Since their independence from Portugal and Spain in the early 19th Century, the Empire of Brazil and the Spanish-American countries of South America were troubled by territorial disputes. All nations in the region had lingering boundary conflicts with multiple neighbors. Most had overlapping claims to same territories. These issues were questions inherited from their former metropoles, which, despite several attempts, were never able to resolve them satisfactorily. Signed by Portugal and Spain in 1494, the Treaty of Tordesillas was proved ineffective in the following centuries as both colonial powers expanded their frontiers in South America and elsewhere. The outdated boundary lines did not represent actual occupation of lands by Portuguese and Spanish.

By the early 1700s, the Treaty of Tordesillas was deemed all but redundant and it was clear to both parties that a newer one had to be drawn based on realistic and feasible boundaries. In 1750, the Treaty of Madrid separated the Portuguese and Spanish areas of South America in lines that are mostly consisted to present-day boundaries. Neither Portugal nor Spain were satisfied with the results, and new treaties were signed in the following decades that either established new territorial lines or repealed them. The final accord signed by both powers, the Treaty of Badajoz (1801), reaffirmed the validity of the previous Treaty of San Ildefonso (1777), which had derived from the older Treaty of Madrid.

The territorial disputes became worse when the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata collapsed in the early 1810s, leading to the rise of Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia and Uruguay. "Imperial Spain bequeathed to the emancipated Spanish-American nations not only her own frontier disputes with Portuguese Brazil," says historian Perlham Horton Box, "but problems which had not disturbed her, relating to the exact boundaries of her own viceroyalties, captaincies general, audiencias and provinces." Once separated, Argentina, Paraguay and Bolivia quarreled over lands that were mostly uncharted and unknown. They were either scarcely populated or settled by indigenous tribes that answered to no parties. In the case of Paraguay with her neighbor Brazil, the problem was to define whether the Apa or Branco rivers represented their actual boundary, a persistent issue that also confused Spain and Portugal in the late 18th Century. The region between both rivers was depopulated, except for some tribes that roamed the area attacking nearer Brazilian and Paraguayan settlements.