Caballero, Pedro Juan (1786–1821)

Pedro Juan Caballero (b. 1786; d. 13 July 1821), Paraguayan soldier and politician of the independence era. Born in Tobatí, Caballero spent his early youth in the Paraguayan countryside, where he learned to ride and, like many men of his class, to command small bands of troops in the colonial militia. He evidently participated in the Indian campaigns of the first years of the nineteenth century and by 1810 had attained the rank of captain.

The following year Caballero was catapulted into prominence. The revolutionary junta in Buenos Aires, seeking to gain Paraguay's adherence to the patriot struggle against Spain, had sent an expeditionary force to the province. Commanded by Manuel Belgrano, this small army anticipated little resistance. The Paraguayans, however, had no desire to be controlled from Buenos Aires, and their militia proceeded to defeat Belgrano in two separate engagements.

In the aftermath of these battles, some Paraguayan officers, Caballero included, actively fraternized with the defeated porteños, who convinced them that some form of independence was desirable. Together with colonels Fulgencio Yegros and Manuel Atanasio Cavañas, Caballero organized a conspiracy against the royal government in Asunción. When the plot was discovered in May 1811, Caballero acted in the absence of his associates, seizing the cabildo offices and arresting the governor at dawn on the fifteenth of the month.

The rebellion brought Paraguay independence but not political stability. Over the next three years a provisional junta composed of Caballero, Yegros, and three other notables ruled the country, though often in an erratic fashion. Their inability to govern effectively made possible the ascendancy of José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, the one outstanding political figure in Paraguay, and a man whom Caballero detested. In 1814, when Francia became dictator, Caballero wisely retired to Tobatí, but six years later he was implicated in a major plot against the dictator. Jailed by Francia's police, he committed suicide in his cell.

See alsoParaguay: The Colonial Period .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Louis G. Benítez, Historia de la cultura en el Paraguay (1976), p. 99.

John H. Williams, The Rise and Fall of the Paraguayan Republic, 1800–1870 (1979), pp. 27-53.

Carlos Zubizarreta, Cien vidas paraguayas, 2d ed. (1985), pp. 93-98.

Additional Bibliography

Jara Goiris, Fabio Aníb al. Descubriendo la frontera: Historia, sociedad y política en Pedro Juan Caballero. Ponta Grossa, Brasil: Industria Pontagrossente de Artes Gráficas, 1999.

                                      Thomas L. Whigham