BA - burial architecture
I went to BA’s famous Recoleta cemetery. I know a lot of people who would like it very much. It has three purposes:
1.) A place where people mourn their lost loved ones. I think, at least. I saw memorial plaques here and there, but no actual mourners. The live humans were all carrying cameras and park maps. Hardly any flowers in the joint, and most of those are tacky fake ones on Eva Duarte de Peron’s grave. How fitting.
2.) Who’s who of dead Argentinos. There hasn’t been a non-military pauper buried here since about 1890.
3.) World’s largest amusement park for black-and-white photography afficionados.
The tombs are all above-ground monuments of granite and marble. Lots of epic, baroque, and heroic architecture, writ small enough to fit in the viewfinder of your favorite point-and-click. Brooding statues. Draping garlands. Stolid pillars. Arcane ornamentation. Weeping cherubs. You know the genre.
But it’s fun to go and wallow anyway.
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And last but not least, here’s an oddball. The monument posted below is to those Argentinos who fell in a 19th century war called the Triple Alliance War if you ask a Paraguayan or “the one with Paraguay” if you ask anybody else in South America.
I’ve spent two years hearing all about this from the Paraguayan side of things, which is just an eensy bit biased.
It’s *the* defining event in Paraguayan history, when the craziest of their many batshit-loco dictators (one Mariscal Fransisco Solano Lopez) picked a fight against Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay. Paraguay postured belligerently, built up its military, invaded territory it had no claim to, and then almost got wiped off the map. They lost almost all their adult men to the fighting and more than half of their total population to disease, looting, pillaging, etc.
Now no doubt about it, Mariscal Lopez had his ignoble end coming, and worse besides. And if your country is being invaded by a large army, you’ve got a right to defend yourself. But spending six years trying to kill every hostile man, woman and child was not the right response to the situation. A “decapitation strike” is not supposed to start at the enemy’s left little toe and work its way up from there.
You can make a reasoned argument that Paraguay never actually recovered from the impact. Come to it, you can make a credible argument that people would be better off today if Brazil and Argentina had gone all the way into their proverbial Baghdad, divided up The Territory Formerly Known as Paraguay, and held a nice thorough occupation. The “poor” La Boca sector of Buenos Aires that this morning’s tour passed through looks about like a “middle class” sector of Asunción and “an unattainable pipe dream” in Paraguay’s countryside.
But instead, the Alliance leadership spent years obsessing over one unhinged pissant dictator, killed everyone they could find, got distracted by other concerns, and then left the place in ruins. Now this sordid incident is a modest monument at the back of Argentina’s Recoleta cementary, and still at the center of Paraguay’s national identity.
