Holidays in Paraguay

Official national public holidays. Regional and religious observances may vary by area.

About Time in Paraguay

A Hundred and Fifty Years, Ended by a Single Decree

Beginning around 1609, Jesuit missionaries established a network of self-governing communities for the Guaraní people across what is now Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil, known as reducciones. At their peak, roughly thirty of these settlements housed more than 100,000 people, each built around a church, workshops, farms, a school and a hospital, with the Guaraní electing their own local officials and maintaining militias that defended the communities against slave raiders from Portuguese Brazil. Closed to ordinary Spanish settlers, the reductions preserved Guaraní language and much of Guaraní culture even as they introduced European agriculture, craft and music, an arrangement historians have often described as one of the more genuinely unusual social experiments of the colonial Americas.

The entire system ended almost overnight. King Charles III of Spain signed a decree ordering the expulsion of the Jesuits from all Spanish territories, and although the order was kept secret at first to prevent resistance, it reached colonial officials in the Río de la Plata region by mid-1767, with implementation carried out across Paraguay that July. Roughly 450 Jesuits were arrested, stripped of their Spanish nationality and shipped out of South America within weeks, and the reductions, deprived of the missionaries who had organised them for a century and a half, declined rapidly afterward. What remains today are the ruined stone churches and plazas of missions such as Jesús de Tavarangüé, designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1993, monuments to an experiment that a single royal signature was enough to end.

The War That Emptied a Country

Between 1864 and 1870, Paraguay fought a war against the combined forces of Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, an alliance that gave the conflict its name, the War of the Triple Alliance. What began as a regional dispute over Uruguayan politics escalated, under the leadership of Paraguayan dictator Francisco Solano López, into a war fought to near-total national exhaustion, generally reckoned the deadliest conflict in South American history and among the most demographically catastrophic wars fought anywhere in the nineteenth century.

Historians' estimates vary, but most place Paraguay's total population loss at somewhere between sixty and seventy percent, with losses among adult men reported as considerably higher still, following years of combat, disease and famine that persisted even after conventional resistance had collapsed into a drawn-out guerrilla campaign. The war finally ended in March 1870, when López himself was killed at the Battle of Cerro Corá, but the country he left behind had, by most accounts, been depopulated so severely that its demographic profile, its economy and its political institutions took generations to recover, a single six-year war leaving a mark on Paraguay's population structure still visible to historians more than a century and a half later.

A State of Emergency Renewed Every Ninety Days for Three Decades

Alfredo Stroessner seized power in a coup on 4 May 1954 and formally assumed the presidency that August, beginning what would become, by the time it ended thirty-five years later, the longest unbroken rule by a single individual in South American history. Almost immediately, he placed the entire country under a state of siege, suspending civil liberties and granting the government the power to detain anyone indefinitely without trial and ban public gatherings outright.

What made the measure so enduring was not any single sweeping law but a bureaucratic routine: the state of siege was formally renewed every ninety days, over and over, for the better part of thirty-three years, with only one brief interruption in 1959, before it was finally allowed to lapse in 1987. Stroessner was reelected seven times, typically unopposed or against token competition permitted to win no more than a token share of the vote, and was finally removed only by a coup from within his own military on 3 February 1989. He lived out his remaining seventeen years in exile in Brazil, dying in 2006 without ever having faced the courts in the country he had ruled, by that ninety-day cycle of renewal, for longer than any other twentieth-century leader in the region except Fidel Castro.

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