ILPC 2026

The history of the Paraguayan working class remains inexplored. The work of early historian and labor leader Francisco Gaona (1967) launched the field of labor history in the country. Later historian Milda Rivarola (1993) told the story of the early formation of the Paraguayan working class (late 19th and early 20th centuries) working the documents in Francisco Gaona’s repository. Historian Roberto Céspedes Rufinelli (1989) put the role of state’s companies workers within the context of the democratic transition after the 1989 coup d’etat that ended Alfredo Stroessner’s long dictatorship (1954-1989). However, after a highly productive era that followed the ousting of Stroessner (1989), the field of labor history fell behind in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Only recently the field has reemerged with the work of Ignacio González Bozzolasco (2013), Jorge Coronel Prosman (2009; 2012; and 2014), and Carlos Pérez Cáceres (2017) among others. Céspedes Rufinelli, González Bozzolasco and Coronel Prosman pointed out the importance of the workers of the public sector in the transformation of the working class in the 1980s during the neoliberal reforms that lasted the following decades. This paper comes back to the 1970s to explore the role of constrution workers in the public sector during the building of the Itaipú Dam (1974-1989) to explain the making of the modern Paraguayan working class.

Usually the Paraguayan working class is presented as an outlier in the regional history of the modern working class. Unlike neighboring countries, the Paraguayan working class did not come out of the regional processes of industrialization by import substitution (ISI) in the 1940s – 1970s due mainly to its unfit internal markets. My goal here is to shed light on the process of transformation of the Paraguayan working class in a trasnational approach bringing the narrative to a less parrochial perspective. The building of the Itaipú Dam, the largest in the hemisphere, put in contact the Brazilian and the Paraguayan working class under military dictatorships in both countries. I explore here how both collectives influenced and reshaped each other during the 1970s and 1980s. My goal is to trace the transformation of many ‘campesinos’ into workers during the construction of the Dam. And the rise of a new working class in Paraguay that would play a decisive role in the democratic transition of the country during the 1980s. Through private and public repositories, interviews, company’s files, and newspapers, this paper returns to the building of the Itaipú Dam as a contested process that led to the rise of the modern Paraguayan working class.