Editing Paraguay (section)

===Independence and rule of Francia===
{{main|Independence of Paraguay}}
[[File:José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia.jpg|left|thumb|upright|[[José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia]], Paraguay's first dictator]]
Paraguay overthrew the local Spanish administration on 14&nbsp;May 1811. Paraguay's first dictator was [[José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia]], who ruled Paraguay from 1814 until his death in 1840 with very little outside contact or influence.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Britain and the Paraguayan dictatorship, c. 1820-1840* |url=https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:3b1cd500-6c0f-4b17-8569-5fcd753d00da/files/rx633f1701}}</ref> He intended to create a [[utopia]]n society based on the [[Geneva]]n theorist [[Jean-Jacques Rousseau]]'s [[The Social Contract|''Social Contract'']].<ref>{{cite web |title=War of the Triple Alliance |website=War of the Pacific (warofthepacific.com) |url=http://warofthepacific.com/warofthetriplealliance.htm |access-date=14 November 2010 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140807073919/http://warofthepacific.com/warofthetriplealliance.htm |archive-date=7 August 2014}}</ref> Rodríguez de Francia was nicknamed ''El Supremo''.

Rodríguez de Francia established new laws that greatly reduced the powers of the Catholic church (Catholicism was then an established state religion) and the cabinet, forbade colonial citizens from marrying one another and allowed them to marry only blacks, [[mulattoes]] or natives, in order to break the power of colonial-era elites and to create a [[mixed-race]] or mestizo society.<ref>{{cite news |last1=Romero |first1=Simon |date=12 March 2012 |title=In Paraguay, indigenous language with unique staying power |newspaper=[[The New York Times]] |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/12/world/americas/in-paraguay-indigenous-language-with-unique-staying-power.html |access-date=5 October 2015 |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150930235457/http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/12/world/americas/in-paraguay-indigenous-language-with-unique-staying-power.html |archive-date=30 September 2015}}</ref> He cut off relations between Paraguay and the rest of South America. Because of Francia's restrictions of freedom, [[Fulgencio Yegros]] and several other Independence-era leaders in 1820 planned a ''coup d'état'' against Francia, who discovered the plot and had its leaders either executed or imprisoned for life.<ref>{{cite encyclopedia |title=Colonial period |department=Paraguay |encyclopedia=[[Encyclopedia Britannica]] |url=https://www.britannica.com/place/Paraguay|url-status=live |access-date=5 January 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201225183757/https://www.britannica.com/place/Paraguay |archive-date=25 December 2020 }}</ref>