New Evidence on the Demographics of the Paraguayan War: Revisiting Competing Estimates with Archival Draft Records

Abstract The demographic consequences of the Paraguayan War (1864–1870) remain among the most contested in Latin American history, with estimates of population loss ranging from under 20 percent to nearly 70 percent. This article revisits the debate by introducing newly digitized wartime administrative records from the Sección Nueva Encuadernación of the Archivo Nacional de Asunción, documenting draft-eligible males across forty-five districts in late 1867 and early 1868. Linking these records to prewar census benchmarks through a transparent projection methodology, I find that across the forty-two districts with a usable projected denominator, only 10,628 draft-eligible males aged twelve and older were observed against a projected male population of 100,692—roughly one in nine. The result is robust to alternative growth assumptions. Although male absence may reflect death, service, imprisonment, desertion, or displacement, the severity of late-war male scarcity is difficult to reconcile with low-loss interpretations and aligns closely with high-loss scenarios.