"...British naval cutter that sailed from Montevideo to Buenos Aires flying the Naval Jack as well as the white flag of peace; Muller's presence in Buenos Aires was not publicized by the government for fear of unrest, though by evening on February 3rd the news that at least a Brazilian envoy of some kind was in the capital to request a ceasefire had spread and there was a mix of trepidation, excitement and anger, depending on one's political persuasions.
The war had strained and polarized Argentine society in some ways while uniting it in others, and Drago for better or worse was an independent president in every sense of the word. His pragmatism, humility and personal propriety during the hard years of tumult had endeared him to many Argentines who had feared that he would be a return to the pre-1890 oligarchy which he was still suspected of representing, but his nomination as an inoffensive compromise to prevent the Civic Union from tearing itself apart in 1910 meant that he was a President both with nobody to whom he owed any particular favors (especially as he was, after two and a half long, ugly years of war, looking forward to a quiet and peaceful retirement) yet also no natural political constituency save career diplomats at the Foreign Office who admired him. Conservatives reviled him as a puppet of Alem, while progressives found his moderation and disinterest in public policy alienating. Navigating the end of the war was thus, perhaps even more so than the prosecution of the war itself, the greatest challenge Drago had thus faced as he looked out over a country eager to end the fighting but also now with a blood feud against Brazil.
Thankfully, Drago's background as a talented diplomat lent itself well to the task ahead. The Muller peace mission had been arranged largely at the behest of the British Foreign Office to bring the fighting in Mesopotamia to an end, with fear in London high that the rapidly fraying situation in Brazil after the Revolt of the Recruits would end in a revolution and civil war not unlike the simmering three-sided conflict in neighboring Chile and that perhaps something similar could occur in Argentina, too. Drago was well aware that Britain, especially its beleaguered Foreign Secretary Sir Ian Malcolm, needed any kind of win to point to after the failures of the Niagara Conference and its co-effort with France to negotiate a conclusive end to fighting between the United States and Confederate States the previous summer, and to this effect when the British had communicated via their ambassador ahead of Muller's arrival he had already mapped out terms he would find agreeable. While many in his government, or the government's immediate supporters such as Alem himself, had not forgotten that Muller had spent most of the last two years traveling between European capitals trying to delay an intervention in order to maximize Brazil's hand, Drago accepted the offer of a negotiated settlement "that could satisfy both parties" and an agreement was made to order a ceasefire effective February 7th, even though no real fighting had occurred for months, especially not after the Revolt. Drago and his ambitious young foreign minister, Leopoldo Melo, would soon thereafter depart for the most suitable neutral site available to the two combatants to bury the hatchet and find what was hoped to be a lasting peace - Asuncion, capital of Paraguay..."
- The Radical Republic
"...site steeped in a certain deep historical symbolism, national mythology and, Drago drily noted in his comprehensive wartime diaries, more than a dash of irony. It had been an alliance between Argentina and Brazil that had come together to smash Paraguay in the disastrous War of the Triple Alliance that destroyed the small, landlocked nation and left it impoverished, demographically gutted and diplomatically isolated for decades to come. Being a conduit for trade during the Great American War, especially for goods traveling through Bolivia and Peru to Argentina prior to Chile's exit from the war a year earlier, had helped it begin the process of recovery, and under President Eduardo Schaerer who would leave office soon after the Peace of Asuncion had enjoyed peaceful domestic politics and coherent governing policies despite the chaos on either side of the country. That it would be Paraguay brokering as neutral party the treaty between Argentina and Brazil was thus a set of circumstances lost on no-one.
Eusebio Ayala, the Foreign Minister of Paraguay and Schaerer's close confidant, was one of the chief architects of the peace, which was to Brazil's chagrin. Schaerer's Liberal Party, known domestically as the Azules, may have been to the right of the Alemist regime in Buenos Aires but nonetheless viewed the Civic Union's domestic program as something of a blueprint, especially for delivering political peace, and there were few in Schaerer's orbit who did not have a strong preference bordering on open bias for Argentina's position (indeed, Ayala had been one of the most prominent Azules to support Schaerer's desire to remain neutral, against many who had hoped to enter the war on Argentina's side). Accordingly, correspondence between Buenos Aires and Asuncion before Muller's peace feelers had already established an unwavering baseline that over the ten day Congress which Ayala arbitrated came very close to the final peace terms.
Both countries were desperate to exit the war what with hungry and agitated populations that were actively starting to riot, sputtering economies, and more than anything a simple exhaustion from the bloodshed. Argentina had been tested many times along the Parana but had held out every time, and it was fair to say that they had fought the war to a draw that, considering their expulsion from Uruguay in the opening weeks of fighting and frantic retreat through Mesopotamia thereafter. Whatever Brazil had hoped to earn coming into the war was now surely out of its grasp, and the peace terms would reflect that, but also entrench the early gains made by Rio de Janeiro as simple facts on the ground.
Argentina, as a fait accompli, recognized the Saraiva government in Uruguay and "denounced as a diplomatic policy" any attempts by the exiled Colorados to reestablish themselves in Montevideo, dismaying many more radical Alemists such as Hipolito Yrigoyen who had come to view Jorge Batlle's cause as a profoundly just one and moderate Civic Unionists and Drago as sellouts for abandoning them. There was, simply, no way for Argentina to do anything else seeing as how they'd been ejected from Montevideo in October of 1913, and even Alem had long ago made peace with the fact that Uruguay's dominance by its Lusophone, Brazilophilic minority and by proxy Rio de Janeiro was the price to pay for an end to the war.
Beyond that, though, Brazil had little to show for two years of bloody and disproportionate losses along the Parana. Rather than the full demilitarization of the Mesopotamia that it had mooted offering Buenos Aires in early 1914 - terms that Drago would likely have accepted - were watered down to simply demilitarizing the Uruguay River as a neutral border between the two countries, meaning that after two years of occupying the land between it and the Parana, Brazil would have to evacuate and watch Argentine soldiers triumphantly march across land in peace that they had failed to reclaim in war. At Ayala's insistence, no indemnities were paid by either side to the other, and all pre-war economic and trade privileges were restored on both sides - Brazil did not even reserve the right to dictate Uruguay's tariff policy against Argentina or, more worryingly, Britain.
Argentine reactions to this peace agreement were mixed but, considering the vast territories stripped from Chile and Brazil's evacuation from Mesopotamia and photos of triumphant soldiers raising the Argentine flag over their sovereign territory again in the weeks that followed the Peace of Asuncion, the majority of the country's citizens, many of whom had been fed into the meat grinder along the Parana at some point and come back haunted and broken by the experience, it was as good a peace as they could have imagined in the dark days of the winter of 1913-14. The country's politics were darker and less optimistic than they had been before, now, but they had come through the worst of it with more territory in Patagonia and the whole of the Tierra del Fuego and, most importantly, had their land back. Ambitions in Uruguay would have to wait for another day..."
- War in the Cone
"...even as Fonseca's nationalists rioted alongside socialists, syndicalists of the newly-formed Sindicato Geral do Brasil, and often simply flustered and bored veterans who needed something to do other than rot at home with their grief and guilt. Though it was patently obvious that Brazil had no other path forward, even Dom Agosto Leopoldo commented icily to his cousin that, "This is a surrender without suffering a defeat." Brazil would leave the war with worse gains than they could have demanded two years earlier, meaning that, in the eyes of many Brazilians, the entirety of 1914 and 1915 had represented nearly two hundred thousand men killed and hundreds of thousands more wounded for essentially nothing. If Fonseca had not been a villain before, he certainly was one now, but many turned their attention just as much to the establishment that had enabled him for years and allowed him to press on with his "blood-stained vanity" to produce his much-desired triumph. Monarchist newspapers tried to trumpet the Peace of Asuncion as a victory in that it prevented Argentine warships from entering Brazilian waters and that Uruguay no longer represented a "radical periphery," to which the hard right and hard left together scoffed and dismissed such claims as trying to put an optimistic spin on A Vitoria Mutilada - the Mutilated Victory.
Brazil was, for the first time since September of 1913, at full peace with her neighbor. Domestically, she would not know the antebellum peace she had enjoyed again for quite some time..."
- O Imperio do Futuro: The Rise of Brazil
(Obviously a lot going on in these updates, but this brings us to the end of the war in the Cone, and leaves USA vs CSA as the last front/theater of war)