No. 64.
Mr. Partridge to Mr. Fish.
(Petropolis,) Rio de Janeiro, May 22, 1872. (Received June 19.)
Sir: I beg to acknowledge the receipt of your No. 37 in regard to the treaty lately made between Brazil and Paraguay.
By my No. 47, inclosing the only form of copy of those treaties hitherto to be had, you will have learned their provisions.
Here those treaties have been regarded by the opposition as a sort of surrender by Brazil; or, at any rate, as a failure to exact what they could rightly (in their opinion) have demanded. They were denounced in Buenos Ayres on a different ground; not because they contained provisions which might hereafter be made available for any absorption of Paraguayan territory, but because negotiated separately, and not in connection with the others of the allies; and especially because, by these treaties, Paraguay having acknowledged the frontier of the Apa with Brazil, had secured Brazilian support against the demands of the Argentines for the possession of the “Gran Chaco.”
The provision which looks most like a cover for Brazilian pretensions hereafter is the acknowledgment of liability to Brazil for war indemnity. But from what has been said here since, it would seem that this is looked upon as a nominal because clearly impossible thing to be realized, and is meant, perhaps, as an impediment hereafter to the claims or intentions of the Argentines to absorb or annex Paraguay.
Brazil, even under a different form of government, would oppose such annexation by the Argentines, because it would give them the command of the navigation, by which the interior (Brazilian) province of Matto Grosso is reached; and in view of the fact that any attempt by Brazil at present to absorb Paraguay is recognized by themselves as hopeless, and as only leading to complications and difficulties with nations they would gladly conciliate, it may be said that for these reasons, as well as for others I have mentioned, there is really at present a desire to respect the independence and sovereignty of Paraguay, coupled with an intention to maintain Brazilian influence there, greater at least than Argentine, and a resolution to prevent, so far as they can, any absorption of Paraguay an territory by the Argentine republic.
I have already in conversing with the minister of foreign affairs made to him the intimation as directed in your dispatch.
I am, &c,