Paraguay

Paraguay was never a mass destination for Basque emigration. Those who came did so in small groups, far apart in time: a Gipuzkoan governor in the sixteenth century, a farming colony that failed in 1855, single families in the twentieth. Some of those arrivals left their mark on the history of the country, but none formed a colony that founded centres, and the exile of the Spanish Civil War did not leave an institution of its own either. The country’s only Basque centre was born very late and in an unusual way: with an advertisement in the press, in 1996, calling on the descendants of Basques to found it, which was also answered by people with no Basque ancestry.

The first came with the conquest. Domingo Martínez de Irala, a Gipuzkoan from Bergara, set sail from Sanlúcar de Barrameda on 24 August 1535 in the expedition of Pedro de Mendoza and reached the River Plate in January 1536. In 1555 he was appointed governor and captain general (see Basques in Paraguayan history).¹² Other Basques came after him, such as García Rodríguez de Vergara and Ochoa de Izaguirre, who arrived with Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca.² And in April 1573 Juan de Garay left Asunción at the head of some hundred men, most of them mestizos, to found Santa Fe on 15 November that year.⁴

Three centuries later it was Paraguay’s own rulers who went looking for settlers. On 4 January 1855 the steamship Aquitaine sailed from Bordeaux with people hired to settle the Chaco. According to the researcher María Victoria Benítez Martínez, those recruited included French Basques, Spanish Basques, people from Béarn and people from other regions of France. On the first voyage 419 people arrived. President Carlos Antonio López decreed the founding of the colony, Nueva Burdeos, on 14 May 1855, at the place called Melodía, today’s Villa Hayes. It did not succeed: a decree dissolved it on 13 June 1856, and in September 330 settlers left for Argentina.⁵

The next arrival on record is that of a single family, from Leintz-Gatzaga. The Gipuzkoan Sebastián Sasiain Zubillaga and his wife, Brígida Zubia Erostarbe, arrived in Paraguay in 1926 and settled in San Juan Bautista, in the department of Misiones.⁶⁷ His name became tied to the city’s cooking (see Basques in Paraguayan history).

For the exile of the Spanish Civil War, Paraguay was a dependency of Buenos Aires. In 1940 the Consejo Nacional de Euzkadi (Basque National Council) placed the representations in Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru and Brazil under the general delegation in that city. In 1942 a delegation in Paraguay was planned, but no documentation has been found that it was ever created.⁹