This was from an English-language version of El Pais, tucked into my IHT; I don´t see the story on-line:
Official estimates state that seven out of 10 children in Paraguay are only registered with their mother´s last name — in Mexico the rate is one out of six.
A bit of googling turns up a second and related estimate, namely that in Paraguay 6.5 children out of ten are not registered to receive social services.
This is probably a lingering effect from the war of the triple alliance. It completely hosed up relations between the sexes .
War of the Triple Alliance? Gosh, that’s a long long time ago (roughly the time of the US Civil War) in a land far, far away.
But I see from Wikipedia that “One estimate places total Paraguayan losses — through both war and disease — as high as 1.2 million people, or 90% of its pre-war population.[2][3] A different estimate places Paraguayan deaths at approximately 300,000 people out of its 500,000 to 525,000 prewar inhabitants.[4]“
Err, Kathleen, I think the imbalance would be corrected in the next generation. If women gave birth primarily to women then we’d be in trouble…
Do you mean that the strange social set-up which governed a 7-to-1 society won’t entirely have gone away?
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