From the Reform Movement to Insurrection: the Paraguayan Left and the New National Ideary (1929-1931)

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to recover the history of the New National Ideario (NIN), a name that synthesizes a political movement of the Paraguayan left that emerged in the late 1920s and of short existence, but which represents an original political experience in the country, both in its most general programmatic aspects as well as in the identified political strategy. According to them, it is difficult to frame this phenomenon in any of the classic political currents (anarchists, socialists and communists), although, obviously, it finds part of its root in them. Located within the heterogeneous range of Latin American political movements and experiments that emerged in the process of the University Reform that began in Córdoba in 1918, the NIN was the uniting space for a new worker-popular radicalism that led to an insurrectional movement whose most daring action it was called Toma de Encarnación, on February 19, 1931, a city that for sixteen hours was converted into a “libertarian commune”.