The Man Who Ghosted the Most Famous Scientist on Earth

José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia held a doctorate in theology, read Voltaire and Rousseau in the original French, and was widely considered the most educated man in Paraguay. In 1814, he was elected dictator. In 1816, he had the title upgraded to Supreme and Perpetual Dictator. He held the position for twenty-four years, which suggests the "perpetual" part was not decorative.

He then sealed Paraguay shut like a jar.

Francia banned foreign trade, closed the borders, and abolished every university in the country — redirecting the funds to his military and offering, as a substitute for higher education, his personal bookshelf. He decreed that European-born men in Paraguay could no longer marry women classed as “Spanish” — the local white/elite category — only Indigenous or mixed-descent Paraguayan women, a marriage rule as extreme as it was specific. He slept with a pistol under his pillow and had every tree along his riding routes uprooted so no assassin could hide behind them. Pedestrians were required to prostrate themselves as he passed.

Then came the yerba mate incident. A French botanist named Aimé Bonpland — who had spent five years exploring Latin America alongside Alexander von Humboldt — planted a mate plantation near the Paraguayan border. Francia sent soldiers, burned the plantation, and arrested Bonpland as a spy.

Humboldt, then the most celebrated scientist alive, wrote to Francia personally, appealing in the name of human science for his friend's release.

Francia made no answer. For nine years.