Part Two: Francisco Solano Lopez: The Worst Military Leader In Human History

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Call zone media.

**Robert Evans** (0:05)
Welcome back once again to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where we tell you everything you don't know about the worst people in all of history. And this week, we're telling the story of Francisco Solano Lopez, the dictator of Paraguay, probably the worst military leader in all of history, the only person I've ever read up who was so bad at being a general, that he got his entire country genocide.
I shouldn't be laughing. It's a really terrible story. People suffer horribly. But the level of incompetence is just like, it's honestly almost awe-inspiring. Like I've never read about anyone doing this badly at war, and that includes Hitler. Anyway, James Stout, welcome back to the show. Sorry to say Hitler right before introducing you.

**James Stout** (0:47)
I'm excited to hear about so many people dying. Always what I expect when I come on here.

**Robert Evans** (0:53)
Always a good time. Human death and misery. That's the James Stout.
I don't know. James, is what I gave him. You have a podcast?

**James Stout** (1:00)
I do, yeah. I'm sorry.
Thanks, Robert. I have covered human death and misery for many years. But when I'm not, unfortunately, covering horrible things, I like to go outside, touch a bit of grass, and my new podcast is called Natural Causes, and it's about going outside and politics behind going outside.

**Robert Evans** (1:21)
Excellent.

**James Stout** (1:22)
I'm going to get to the bottom of Mike Lee and why is he like this?

**Robert Evans** (1:26)
Why is Mike Lee like this?
What does everyone get wrong about fire suppression? All the important stories.

**James Stout** (1:34)
Who's evicting the buffalo from public lands?

**Robert Evans** (1:36)
Who's evicting the buffalo?
In their defense, buffalo haven't paid rent in a long time. It's true.

**James Stout** (1:43)
They predate the concept of rent.

**Robert Evans** (1:45)
They don't understand money also.

**James Stout** (1:47)
Should we be calling them buffalo? I'm sure somebody has strong opinions and they're already logging on to Reddit to tell me that they're called bison.

**Robert Evans** (1:54)
I don't know. All I know is that there's cows and bigger cows and smaller cows, and all animals are one of those three things, including sharks. Anyway, let's continue talking about Francisco Solano Lopez.
I just said Francisco, but we're still in the reign of his father, Carlos Lopez. And as I said last episode, Carlos Lopez is for the most part a relatively peaceful, he's certainly peaceful, he's entirely peaceful. He does not start shit beyond his borders, really. And he's generally even at home a pretty retiring and almost semi-tolerant tyrant. Again, tyrant still, but semi-tolerant because he's lazy. He doesn't like to do much. And while every single, I mean, he works hard, but he doesn't like to, he's not like an active suppressor of the people. He takes a lot of work, you know? He likes to outsource some of that. He doesn't like to go too hard. Cause I think he understands also, if you crack down on people too much, it fucks him over. Cause one of the things, I've just talked about how kleptocratic the Lopez regime is. And under Carlos, they are stealing like 25% of every dollar off the top at least, but everyone's also making shitloads more money than they ever had before. Because he just opens the country up and that's really good for the economy, no longer being a hermit kingdom. Like that helps a lot. So people don't mind generally, right? That both that they're secret police and that he's routing a lot of the money through his like family, because things are so much better than they were under the last dictator. And people don't tend to think in terms of absolute, like, is this fair or not? They think like, well, the last guy, we were all poor as shit and now I have some money.

**James Stout** (3:34)
Yeah, you know, I can buy shit. Yeah, powerful argument.

**Robert Evans** (3:38)
Now, again, these still are not nice people because one of the chief ways the Lopez family plundered Paraguay was through trafficking enslaved people. Benigno Lopez, Francisco's younger brother, had a thing for purchasing children of Afro-Indigenous extraction. And he is believed to have been a pederast at a pretty massive scale. Like, he is buying kids from the government to molest is kind of what Sager insinuates, right? That's not as uncommon as you want it to be in, like, world history.
Many of these slaves, specifically, this is always bad, but one of the things that makes this even a little grosser is that most of the slaves Benigno buys are of a, and Francisco is buying slaves too, I don't think he's raping them as much, but he's still buying a lot of slaves. And most of the slaves they both buy because they're cheaper are called liberto. Like, that's a legal category of slave. And liberto slaves, you're supposed to free them when they hit 24 or 25, depending on whether they're male or female.