"...under heavy fire and losing significant men as the Brazilian army coalesced around their collapsing position, the Argentineans were nonetheless able to evacuate across the Rio Ibicuy to San Pedro under the cover of protected cruisers sailed up into the river to defend the crossing. With the fighting retreat from Ciudad Parana three days earlier on February 20th and subsequent fending off of Brazilian attempts to secure the marshy island from behind the tributary Rio Colastine, the last Argentine positions east of the Rio Parana with the exception of Corrientes and Bela Vera west of the impassable Ibera wetlands had been abandoned, with severe losses to both sides.
Had Brazil's overarching strategic objectives been narrower - and perhaps depending on one's point of view, reasonable and realistic - the conclusion of the Mesopotamian Offensive would be regarded as a remarkable success. In tandem with the successes in Uruguay, the Brazilian Army had successfully driven Argentina from its fertile northeastern provinces behind the Parana, which was as much a barrier for a viable Argentinean counter-offensive as it was an obstacle for further Brazilian drives west. There was a small but influential minority position in Brazil at this point that argued in favor of offering Argentina terms, indeed fairly favorable ones - the demilitarization of the Mesopotamia, the permanent neutrality of Paraguay and most crucially the acceptance of Uruguay as a protectorate and vassal state of Rio de Janeiro. These terms were not entirely dissimilar to those eventually accepted by both parties in two years time when the South American front concluded, only hundreds of thousands of young Brazilian men would have been spared their deaths had Brazil put out feelers at this point, and the political system of prewar Brazil would have remained much more robust and those terms could indeed have been sold as a victory foisted upon Argentina, rather than a begrudging peace accepted when the Empire's forces had been bled white time and time again upon the Parana and with their chief geopolitical ally in Chile defenestrated. Chiefly concerning both the military and civilian "peace factions" in Brazil was the daunting task of trying to cross the Parana in force under the fire of Argentinean guns on both land and water (and, soon enough, in the sky) and a general awareness of the geographical constraints both sides were about to face in the next phase of the war.
Of course, Brazil's objectives were not limited to the largely achievable, which had already at the half-year mark of the war been achieved. The final aim of Brazil was the destruction of Argentinean radicalism as an ideology, one it saw as an export of Buenos Aires to other states, chiefly Uruguay and to a lesser extent Paraguay and possibly even Peru and Bolivia in time. Only the annihilation of alemismo and the establishment of a subservient Argentine state on the south bank of the Rio Plate, possibly with territorial annexations up to the Parana, would suffice for the increasingly radicalized clique around Hermes da Fonseca which the conservative government of Pinheiro Machado and even the Emperor Luis I was increasingly reluctant to stand against, out of fear of a military coup.
But there was also no denying that the Mesopotamian Campaign had not gone how Fonseca had hoped, which perhaps served to explain the increasingly strident, violent and apocalyptic tenor of his rhetoric. Brazil had been slow to mobilize and had suffered disproportionate losses to the Argentineans, despite being able to pin the enemy in Uruguay and the fact that Buenos Aires was fighting a low-intensity war in the Andes with Chile's mountaineer division. The nearly-finished rail lines to the Rio Uruguay did little once supplies needed to be transported across, and the inability to defeat the Argentine Navy on the Rio Plate the previous autumn meant that the enemy could harass shipping at will on that river and had total control of the "blue wall" of the Parana. The summer fighting season was drawing to a close with the rainy, wet fall to come, creating a number of hurdles; Brazil, objectively, needed to have defeated Argentina much more decisively during the "December window," rather than be ground down across vast amounts of territory by a tactically sound Fabian approach.
Regrouping ahead of the cooler, drier winter was thus approved as a strategy by Fonseca, who for all his public bluster understood the value of consolidating Brazil's gains. The autumn lull of much of 1914 ahead of planned offensives in the "July window" would give time for Fonseca and his staff to restock supplies, rotate fresh men onto the banks of the Parana to backfill physically exhausted and numerically depleted armies, see to it that the railheads actually reached the Uruguay, and build public support for the next push. It would be needed; the task ahead was genuinely daunting, as Brazil faced a front from Goya, their northernmost outpost on the river, to the mouth of the Parana on the Rio Plate that stretched nearly four hundred and fifty miles, a front that was impossible to burst across in full. Rather, the focus of the upcoming strike once July approached would have to be Rosario, Argentina's second city and located roughly on the midpoint of the front, home to the second-most railheads in the whole of the Republic and thus the lynchpin of the Argentine defense. Brazil would certainly have time to plan how exactly they planned to seize it in the Great Lull..."
- War in the Cone
