When the Spanish anarchist writer Rafael Barrett was smuggled back into Paraguay near the small town of Yabebyry in 1909, he was unrecognisable as the young newspaper correspondent who had arrived in the troubled nation five years earlier to cover an armed revolution.
Physically, he was being consumed by a tuberculosis infection that would kill him the following year. Ideologically, he had been transformed by immersion in what he called “Paraguayan sorrow”, shedding the remnants of his youth in Madrid’s bourgeois elite to embrace anarchism and the labour movement.
