Don't Cry: The Enlhet History of the Chaco War (2024)

Hispanic American Historical Review (2023) 103 (2): 366–368.

Bolivia and Paraguay fought the Chaco War (1932–35) in a frontier region that neither state fully controlled. The history of this region's multiethnic Indigenous population is a vital part of the war's story that has gained focus only in the early twenty-first century. Don't Cry is a vital contribution to this history, overturning much of what scholars thought they knew. The book does this through the testimony of the Enlhet peoples, whose ancestral territory became the main battleground between Bolivian and Paraguayan forces.

Don't Cry is an indictment of the Paraguayan forces and their genocidal actions toward the Enlhet. The book also puts into question the Mennonite narrative about the Enlhet, which asserts that the Mennonites, who colonized the region, were their saviors. The work provides evidence against the emerging bibliography that established that while all Indigenous peoples in the Chaco suffered greatly in the war, the Paraguayans were more...