On Rafael Barrett: A Radical Voice in a Dispossessed Land

Latin America  •  December 19, 2024  •  Michael D. Yates

Michael D. Yates (MY): William, I suspect that most people here in the United States know little about Paraguay. Can you give us a summary of the economic and political conditions there today?

William Costa (WC): First of all, thank you very much for the opportunity to do this interview, Michael.

I don’t wish to sound overly pessimistic, but Paraguay is currently in the midst of a very worrying period. The latest incarnation of the ruling right-wing Colorado Party – which has been in power almost without interruption for nearly 80 years, including the terrible 35-year authoritarian dictatorship of General Alfredo Stroessner (1954-89) – is a faction that is firmly set on further deepening the extractivist economic model that has gripped Paraguay since before Rafael Barrett’s day.

The government of the president, Santiago Peña, who came to power in 2023, is continuing to back the country’s dependence on agribusiness, principally GM soya and cattle ranching. These sectors have been environmentally disastrous over recent decades and have intensified the concentration of wealth in a small sector of the population, a dynamic aided by a highly unjust and criticized tax system. On top of this, the government is putting its weight behind new forms of extractivism – especially those pushed as forming part of a “green transition” – such as cryptomining, using Paraguay’s abundant hydroelectric energy, eucalyptus monocrops, cellulose production, green hydrogen, and the sale of questionable carbon credits. As always, foreign investors and business as well as a small Paraguayan elite stand to gain.

While this model has led to overall GDP growth – with Peña currently touring the world to promote Paraguay as an economic miracle – the benefits do not reach most of Paraguayan society. There is very large inequality and a severe lack of access to basic services, such as education and healthcare, especially for rural indigenous and campesino communities, who are also denied their legal rights to land. As agribusiness has taken ever stronger control of the countryside, families have been continually expelled toward urban poverty belts, where they now face very precarious working conditions.

The Paraguayan left, mainly represented by the Frente Guazú alliance of parties, was all but eliminated from Congress in the 2023 elections. Now, the lack of any real parliamentary opposition, in addition to a large Colorado majority in both chambers, is providing conditions for a slide into increasingly authoritarian policies across all branches of the state. Most recently, the government aggressively pushed through a law to impose arbitrary checks on the financial activities of civil society organizations. Numerous Paraguayan and international institutions have expressed strong concerns over this move.

Furthermore, Paraguay is becoming an increasingly important country for drug production and transport. As organized crime groups gain ever more economic and political power, Congress has become dominated by the phenomenon of “narcopolitics”: numerous government legislators have been shown to have strong links to organized crime. Many state institutions are being filled with actors from sectors linked to organized crime. Paraguay was ranked as having the fourth-highest level of criminality in the world on the 2023 Global Organized Crime Index.

It is within this context of great adversity that the inspiring work of Rafael Barrett – which was also produced during a period of turmoil – is experiencing something of a revival.

MY: Tell us something about yourself. You live in Paraguay. How did you come to take up residence there, and how did you become interested in Rafael Barrett?

WC: I first visited Paraguay as part of a very formative cycling tour in my early twenties. Later, after finishing my undergraduate degree in London – about eight years ago – I came back to the capital, Asunción, to do a short internship with Amnesty International. During that time, I became involved with several social organizations and mutual aid projects – mostly centered around rural communities – which were a good starting point to learn about social dynamics and issues in Paraguay. These experiences, alongside a growing number of valuable friendships and Asunción’s very interesting cultural scene, led me to become slowly more embedded in life here and to eventually apply for residency.

I started to work as a freelance journalist and translator, which have been my main sources of income since, alongside doing work for social organizations and NGOs. These have been effective ways of continuing to learn about Paraguay and – I hope – of supporting the many people who are pushing for meaningful change in the country.

I remember being made aware of Rafael Barrett quite soon after arriving. Along with several of his descendants, he is a rather legendary figure in leftist circles here. Friends spoke of him in very high terms, and I saw his name mentioned in books on twentieth-century Paraguayan history. However, despite having a very positive reputation, copies of his texts are not overly common in Asunción – this has begun to change in recent times – and it was not until much later that I actually began to read his work. As I know has been the case for many people, my first encounter with Barrett left a strong impression. I’ve often been surprised to hear people speak of the deep connection they feel to his work.

Around three years ago I wrote an article – and shortly afterwards co-produced a podcast series – on yerba mate production in Paraguay, with a focus on a campesino association that uses agroecological techniques to produce the stimulating leaf in the south of the country. These projects prompted me to have a much closer read of Barrett’s series of articles “The Truth of the Yerba Mate Forests,” which is an essential text for understanding the cruel history of the yerba mate industry in early-twentieth-century Paraguay. This led to further explorations of Barrett’s work and, eventually, contributed to the decision to attempt a translation of Paraguayan Sorrow, his posthumously published compilation of articles and speeches on Paraguay.

As I have continued to study his work, which was almost all produced over his short years of frenetic activity in Paraguay, I have also been fascinated by the vast number of topics that he takes on from a large range of disciplines and from different regions around the world.

MY: In his book Open Veins of Latin America, Eduardo Galeano tells us that in the early nineteenth century, under the direction of three autocratic rulers, Paraguay enjoyed a period of autonomous development, with the people enjoying greater prosperity and control of the lands they worked. Tell us a little about this period, and more importantly, explain how it came to an end in the deadly War of the Triple Alliance.

WC: Paraguay’s nineteenth-century history differs quite markedly from that of other surrounding countries. Soon after independence in 1811, the country was effectively sealed off from the outside world by its first leader, the stoic and hard-handed dictator Dr. Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia. Francia looked to protect Paraguay from threats from its giant neighbors Argentina and Brazil, which didn’t recognize the smaller nation’s independence. Francia also implemented policies to suppress the privileges of the colonial elites and introduced a system for campesinos (small-scale family farmers) to access the enormous amount of state-owned land.

The following leader, authoritarian president Carlos Antonio López, implemented a program that saw Paraguay enjoy a period of notable development, with some industrialization, militarization, the arrival of infrastructure such as a railway, and an international scholarship program.

However, during the rule of López’s son, Francisco Solano López, Paraguay was drawn into the apocalyptic Triple Alliance War against the combined forces of Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay in 1864. This was one of the bloodiest conflicts in the last 200 years, with around half the Paraguayan population, including Francisco Solano López, left dead by the time Paraguay was finally defeated in 1870. The conflict was borne of crumbling regional geopolitical relationships and was underpinned by the territorial ambitions of Brazil and Argentina, which ended up annexing large sections of Paraguay.

This was followed by a six-year Brazilian military occupation that saw puppet governments installed, the nation’s nascent industries destroyed or sold off, most of the surviving population left in horrendous conditions, and the country brought in line with the imperialist dynamics that had already spread through Latin America.

It must be said that, while Galeano offers a brilliant exploration of the context of the conflict, he does play into the nationalist myth that was solidified by a number of the Paraguayan intellectuals of Barrett’s day. This myth posits that the country was a regional powerhouse in the pre-war nineteenth century, creating the idea of a Paraguayan golden age. While the country had an extremely interesting autonomous development model, most current scholarship is very cautious to not overstate the extent of this development.

This myth has not been harmless: it was a cornerstone of the Stroessner dictatorship and still holds much sway today. It is currently being used in the discourse of President Peña – especially during his frequent trips abroad – to position his own disastrous political project as a recuperation of that lost nineteenth-century grandeur. It is some ways reminiscent of the dynamics of “Make America Great Again.”

However, Galeano – who was an admirer of Barrett and mentions him in at least two short texts – offers a sharp analysis of the installation of foreign interests in Paraguay after the war. Paraguay fell entirely under the interests of Brazil and Argentina, as well as those of British companies. Enormous amounts of the public land were sold off to cover the war debt – and enrich politicians – which allowed foreign companies to become owners of giant enclaves used for the extraction of wood and yerba mate through a system of debt bondage.

The strong presence of imperialism – now mainly from the US – subimperialism – now mainly from Brazil – and extractivism have been constants ever since the war.

MY: Rafael Barrett has much to say about the Great War, although he doesn’t often mention it by name. What impact did it have on him and how did it influence his writing? Would you agree that those who experience the direct effects of war, whether soldiers or civilians, endure a lifetime of emotional and, often enough, physical traumas?

WC: When Barrett arrived in Paraguay from Buenos Aires as a newspaper correspondent in 1904 to cover a successful armed uprising by the Liberal Party, the country was still engulfed in the shadow of the terrible war. Beyond the enormous cost paid in blood, the entire economic and social structure of the country had been altered, leaving an overwhelming proportion of the population excluded from the land and facing dreadful conditions. As Barrett wrote, “What can a mere thirty years do to heal wounds like these?”

As you say, he doesn’t often make direct reference to the war itself, instead opting to speak of its influence on the people and situations he observed around him. He provides detailed and compassionate descriptions of both rural and urban dwellers facing poverty, dispossession, and state violence.

This context of hardship would be instrumental in changing his own worldview. As he became immersed in “Paraguayan sorrow”, he left behind his liberal (in the classical sense), elitist values to become a committed defender of the oppressed through the lens of anarchism. He had also been outraged by the unfulfilled promises of the 1904 Liberal Revolution, which had promised political change but, instead deepened existing dynamics of corruption and pandering to imperialist interests. Reflecting on his transformation, he wrote that Paraguay was “my only country, which I love dearly, where I became good.”

Barrett’s socially engaged stance was extremely different from that of prominent Paraguayan intellectuals of the day, many of whom did little to denounce and analyze the social ills around them. Instead, the focus of those writers was on crafting the aforementioned nationalist myth from the events of the nineteenth century as a way of restoring Paraguayan identity and pride. This myth has been influential on both the left and right of the political spectrum – for better or worse.

I, fortunately, haven’t experienced war but can speak of the lasting impact that armed violence – prompted by an unholy confluence of drug cartels, state forces, and a nominally Marxist insurgency – is currently having on people in the north of Paraguay. The testimonies given by affected people show the effects of lasting physical and psychological trauma. The impact is very notable in the highly vulnerable rural Indigenous and campesino communities of the region. The experiences of the many victims of the Stroessner dictatorship also leave no doubt as to the lasting effect of the terrible abuses inflicted on the population – the efforts of the victims to seek justice are brave and highly commendable in spite of the unfavorable political context.

In Paraguayan Sorrow, Barrett himself examines the trauma left by the war. In one of the rare texts where he speaks directly of the conflict, he shares the testimony of a veteran, emphasizing the silence and ghosts that haunt the old man as he narrates his intensely harrowing experiences. He also writes of Panta, a female servant at a remote ranch, whose severe mental health issues appear to be a product, at least in part, of her experiences of the war.

He puts strong emphasis on the intergenerational transmission of trauma, claiming that he observed a deep sadness in Paraguayan children: “They have inherited the disdain and resigned skepticism of so many defrauded and oppressed generations.” It was this intergenerational emotional damage that Barrett claimed must be “cured.” As a believer in an ethical revolution that would bring about a new world, the education and well-being of children was something he was very concerned about.

MY: Rafael Barrett has been categorized as an anarchist. He certainly had much to say about the corruption of the Paraguayan state. For example, he wrote, “You would like to understand what happens in the chambers of government, but the administrative mechanism is so wonderful, so complicated, that the eloquent speeches reach your backs transformed into the foreman’s whip. And you, arduously, shrug your shoulders …” This is so perfect! However, Barrett’s anarchism seems to merge with a radical socialist vision of what life should be like. Can you comment on his political perspective?

WC: There is undoubtedly strong influence from anarchist thinking in Barrett’s writing. As he left behind the liberal values of his youth, his work rapidly began to show hallmarks of an anarchist viewpoint: he rejected the state, coercive law, and private property. For example, he writes: “A fertile politics exists: not doing politics. An effective way of gaining power: fleeing from power and working at home.”

The influence of anarchism on Barrett is not surprising. At that point in time, there was a large and effective anarchist movement in different parts of South America’s Southern Cone, which was greatly driven by the enormous numbers of working-class European immigrants arriving in the ports of Buenos Aires and Montevideo. Paraguay was not excluded from this phenomenon: the country’s first anarchist manifesto had been published in 1892 and, in addition, the FORP, Paraguay’s first central labour organization, which was created during Barrett’s stay in Paraguay, was anarcho-syndicalist.

However, Barrett does show his disagreement with the incidents of deadly violence that were being employed by anarchists in Argentina and other countries at the time; that said, he states that he understands why these measures would be used as a response to the much greater violence of the state.

Despite the presence of many notably anarchist elements in his work, commentators have pointed out that Barrett does not engage much with anarchist theoretical debate. Instead, he presents what historian Martín Albornoz has called “a minimal anarchism… a portable anarchism.” As part of this stance, Barrett envisions societal change through the possibility of ethical transformation, solidarity, and intense action. He does not define in great detail what these changes – or the new world they will bring about – will be but shows an almost religious faith that humanity will inevitably bring them into being.

Elsewhere, writers such as Spanish journalist Gregorio Morán have claimed that Barrett was not in fact anarchist, but rather a socialist.

I personally do perceive Barrett as anarchist, but I can see how he blurs lines between these two visions. While he also does not engage with socialism either in theoretical terms – with the exception of his essay “The Social Question,” where he makes critiques of Marx – he does write about it in very positive terms. He also befriended and closely collaborated with socialists, such as the Argentine José Guillermo Bertotto, and published articles by socialists in the short-lived weekly paper Germinal that he published with Bertotto. Barrett expressed his hope for a reconciliation between anarchists and socialists, pointing to syndicalism as an ideal meeting point.

It should be noted that many of Barrett’s descendants went on to be key members of the Paraguayan Communist Party, enduring exile and resisting the Stroessner dictatorship.

MY: Many, even on the left, have disdain for peasants, seeing them as backward people with little to offer the modern world. When some of us praise them, we are accused of wanting to go backward in time and give up the wonders of modern civilization. Barrett offers many essays in which he examines and comments upon the folk myths, the common sense, and the belief system of Paraguay’s peasants. Like Antonio Gramsci – who chastised the Northern Italian workers’ movement for its disdain of Southern Italian peasants – he respected the many commendable aspects of peasant life, including the language most used in rural Paraguay, Guarani (Remarkably, Guarani is the most spoken language today in Paraguay). How did Barrett come to know the peasants od Paraguay? Why was he impressed by them, while at the same time appalled by what had happened and was happening to them at the hands of their multiple oppressors?

WC: A number of the essays in the first part of Paraguayan Sorrow are focused on recording campesino culture and knowledge. This was quite uncommon at a time when many aspects of popular culture had come under attack from Paraguayan intellectuals or had even been banned, such as ponchos and the poguazú cigars commonly smoked by women.

Paraguay was overwhelmingly rural at that point in time, and it seems that Barrett became familiar with campesino culture through his residence in San Bernardino, a lakeside town not too distant from Asunción, and through his work further afield in Paraguay as a land surveyor. He would later renounce this profession, viewing the task of measuring property as contradictory to his ethics.

Barrett pays great attention to rural people’s detailed knowledge of plants and animals, especially the legends attached to them. It must be noted that knowledge of medicinal plants continues to be a strongly present element of Paraguayan popular culture to this day. While much of this cultural knowledge is drawn from the intimate historical links between Paraguay’s peasant and Indigenous cultures, Barrett doesn’t write about the Indigenous peoples of Paraguay themselves.

Barrett was also a defender of the heavily stigmatized Guarani language at a time when other intellectuals saw it as a cause of “backwardness” in Paraguay. While it seems unlikely that Barrett himself was proficient in the language, he writes of its value in very strong terms and even foresaw the situation of diglossia that is common today between Guarani and Spanish. While Guarani is still Paraguay’s most spoken language, it continues to be greatly stigmatized, is absent from the state institutions and the media, and is quickly losing ground to Spanish.

While Barrett showed strong admiration for many elements of popular culture, he also highlighted the terrible conditions in which much of the population lived and worked, exploring their exclusion from land ownership and the abuse they suffered from the authorities. While he hoped that this situation would change, his position was relatively paternalist at first: he envisioned that selfless intelligent men from the capital would be needed to take redemption to the rural oppressed. Toward the end of his life, this developed into a belief that the popular classes could only be saved through their own actions: “It is the ‘educated’ class that murders them.”

MY: How did Barrett come in contact with and ultimately make common cause with the nascent Paraguayan labour movement? The book includes three speeches he gave to Paraguayan workers. The second of these, titled “Strike,” is one of the best things I have ever read about the collective withholding of labour.

WC: As Barrett’s socially engaged stance led him to drift away – or be pushed away – from Asunción’s bourgeois intellectual class, he became closer to a Paraguayan labour movement that was going through an important period of expansion: there had been a marked increase in the number of strikes and organizations over the period. Barrett must have felt this change in the air in Asunción.

Barrett quickly became an important member of the movement. He gave classes to workers and delivered impressive speeches at meetings and conferences. With his friend Bertotto, he eventually started the short-lived weekly paper Germinal, which looked to provide a voice for workers and the oppressed during the period of the violent coup and highly oppressive new government of 1908. Barrett was described by Francisco Gaona – a key historian of the Paraguayan labour movement – as “the first doctrinaire of our labour movement during its early development”. However, it should be noted that the Paraguayan labour movement had already produced its own publications.

Barrett’s support for workers was a radical departure from his younger days, when he had denounced the labour movement and demonized strike action. As Barrett’s increased ideological coherence led him to abandon his other sources of income and dedicate himself solely to writing, he underwent a process of “proletarianization” that would see him move much closer to workers in terms of living conditions. He came to eventually perceive himself as a member of the working-class: “a manufacturer of ideas.”

Due to their work in Germinal, both Barrett and Bertotto were arrested and deported as part of an enormous round-up of workers after the 1908 coup. While Barrett would soon have himself smuggled back into Paraguay, his worsening tuberculosis infection would stop him from continuing with his former activities in the labour movement. A touching surviving photo shows labour movement members surrounding a notably frail Barrett in San Bernardino.

It is also important to add that Barrett was highly internationalist and wrote about the need for a fraternal and united working-class across borders.

MY: Although Barrett’s language is often typical of his times, with “men” standing in for everyone, he seems especially sympathetic to women, who, because of the deaths of most of the country’s men during the War, were critical to any possible rebirth of the nation but who suffered enormous abuse. What accounts for his atypical view of women?

WC: Barrett was certainly sympathetic toward women in a way that few male intellectuals in Paraguay were at that point in time. He showed sharp awareness of the profound level of oppression suffered by women, in part linked to the extreme machismo unleashed by the Triple Alliance War. He uses one of the speeches in Paraguayan Sorrow, “The Sexual Problem.” to implore male members of the labour movement to improve their treatment of their female companions and colleagues.

Barrett also denounced the heightened oppression suffered by women under capitalism, writing that “For the capitalist, woman is merely a beast that is cheaper than man.” This sympathy extended beyond the women of Paraguay, with Barrett writing of the terrible conditions endured by the exploited women of Europe.

These views were not common in the highly conservative Paraguay at the time – in fact, it was the last country in South America to allow women to vote, in 1961. It is hard to say what led to Barrett having a different perspective: perhaps his youth in the cultural elite of Madrid, alongside his time in Paris and Buenos Aires, had equipped him with a more progressive view of gender relations. In his surviving personal letters, he can be also seen to be very loving and supportive of his young wife.

However, it must be noted that, even as Barrett spoke of the need for improved conditions for women, he still held a belief in intrinsic differences in the capabilities and roles of men and women. It was not until near the end of his life that he left this perspective behind to adopt a much more egalitarian view. The same is true of his views on race.

MY: I was taken by Barrett’s essay on the hatred of trees, especially by those with economic means. It reminded me of those in my hometown in Pennsylvania who cut down the shade trees between the street and the sidewalk so that they could park their cars there. You say in the Introduction that Barrett was an early environmentalist, who believed that labour and the earth are the true sources of wealth. What was his view of nature?

WC: Barrett clearly found wonder in nature, writing beautiful passages about the power and mystery of the subtropical forests that dominated Paraguay at that time. He saw the importance of the intricate relationship between humans and the rest of the natural world, emphasizing the value of the unknown for the spiritual wellbeing of men and women – his appreciation of Paraguayan popular culture’s strong link to nature appears to be connected to this belief. However, as Rogelio Luque-Lora recently wrote, he did not see nature as an idyllic, benign force, but rather, perceived the notable, necessary violence that governs natural cycles.

Given his vision of the importance of nature, he questions the absolute and widespread faith in science-driven progress, which looked to dominate the natural world. While seeing science as a potential tool for liberation – even going as far as to say that it is innately anarchist – he distrusts its tendency to be used to impose total control on the natural world.

Barrett writes that the land is the source of all wealth, and that only labour can draw out – harvest – that wealth. As such, he believed that the guardianship of the land should be in the hands of those that work. Foreshadowing ideas such as those of Emiliano Zapata, he writes: “The land is for all men, and the wealth of each man should be in relation to the amount that he works”. Within this framework, the large landowners of Paraguay were the nation’s greatest scourge: “Let us be outraged at the landowner. He is the usurper. He is the parasite. He is the trespasser.”

In a country that now has one of the highest concentrations of land ownership in the world and that has experienced some of the world’s highest levels of deforestation in recent decades, Barrett’s words feel all too relevant.

MY: The last part of the book is devoted to the horrors of life and labour in the Yerba Mate forests. It is difficult in a short space to do justice to Barrett’s reports on these and the courage it took to write them. Why was it so essential to end the book with these essays?

WC: The six articles that make up “The Truth of the Yerba Mate Forests” are probably Barrett’s most well-known work. He included them as part of the original manuscript of Paraguayan Sorrow, but due to an editorial decision, they were not printed in the first edition, leading them to be perceived a separate piece. It was essential for them to be included in the English edition of Paraguayan Sorrow, firstly, to fulfil Barrett’s vision of his book, and, secondly, because they are an integral part of his legacy and readings of imperialist dynamics in Paraguay.

“The Truth of the Yerba Mate Forests” attacks the heart of imperialist power in Paraguay at the time Barrett wrote. The articles attack the international companies that controlled enormous enclaves – bought in the selloffs of state land in the aftermath of the Triple Alliance War – where they employed indentured labour and shocking abuse to extract yerba mate, wood, and tannin from the forests for international markets.

Barrett aimed his exposé on the exploitation perpetrated by the Anglo-Argentine Industrial Paraguaya Company, a yerba mate company that possessed almost 5.3 million acres in the east of Paraguay. The company was firmly embedded in Paraguayan elites – one of the main shareholders was a former president of the Republic. Barrett uses graphic images of the inhuman conditions endured by workers in the depths of the forests – many of these descriptions were inspired by the accounts of French writer and former yerba mate worker Julián Bouvier – and added a sharp analysis of the Industrial Paraguaya’s system of exploitation, underscoring the complicity of state officials and lawmakers. He held no punches, giving dates, figures, and the names of specific individuals.

The publication of “The Truth of the Yerba Mate Forests” brought harsh consequences for Barrett, as powerful figures moved against him. He was banned from certain institutions, barred from publishing in many of Asunción’s newspapers, and there was even an attempt made on his life by men believed to be on the payroll of the yerba mate companies.

MY: Finally, in the end a book such as this, if it is to resonate with modern readers, must speak to their own lives. How does Barrett speak to the workers, peasants, and their allies, of today?

WC: It is almost a cliché in Paraguay to say that Barrett’s writing still feels extremely relevant. The weight of imperialism and the corruption of national elites continue to scourge the country. Although the products that are exported have changed, they continue to only benefit foreign companies and tiny numbers of Paraguayans.

As part of this process, the concentration of land ownership has continued, leading the country to have one of the least egalitarian distributions of land in the world. While large numbers of peasant families are landless and lack access to the most basic of services, foreign nationals, especially Brazilians, control enormous swathes of the country that they use for GM grain production and ranching, leaving a trail of environmental destruction. In addition, just as in Barrett’s day, the urban population is subjugated to highly unjust working conditions.

Furthermore, other issues that Barrett explored, such as exacerbated gender-based violence, continue to be acutely felt in Paraguay.

Although the party in power is now the Colorado Party – not the Liberal Party that controlled the state back in Barrett’s day – the arbitrariness and corruption of the Paraguayan political sphere continues. As the current government continues to intensify its current authoritarianism – reminding many of the Stroessner dictatorship of which the Colorado Party was the backbone – the lack of access to justice is especially notable, as is the current government’s attempts to pull civil society apart.

Within this difficult context, many Paraguayans continue to protect and cherish the ancestral cultural knowledge that Barrett admired.

I believe that these factors are contributing to a resurgence of Barrett’s work in Paraguay and beyond. He is a figure that provides an urgent message that feels entirely relevant for present-day Paraguay and Latin America more broadly.

MY: Thank you so much for doing this interview.

WC: Thank you very much, Michael. And enormous thanks to you and the rest of Monthly Review Press team for the opportunity to work on this project and for all the support – it’s very gratifying to know that Paraguayan Sorrow is now available for English-speaking readers. News of the English-language edition has been very well received in Paraguay, and several of Barrett’s descendants have expressed that they are very pleased with the publication. •