Hergé used "The Broken Ear" to allude to real events that had recently taken place in South America. The fictional countries of San Theodoros and Nuevo Rico were based on the real countries Bolivia and Paraguay, while the Gran Chapo War depicted in the strip was an allusion to the Chaco War (1932–35) that was waged between Bolivian and Paraguayan forces over lucrative oil fields in the Gran Chaco region. The name "Gran Chapo" was a pun on the French "grand chapeau", meaning "big hat", while the name Nuevo Rico was a pun on "nouveau riche" and the name of the Nuevo Rican capital city, Sanfación, was a pun on "sans façon", meaning "without manners". Hergé's character Basil Bazarov, of the Vicking Arms Company Ltd (Basil Mazaroff in the 1937 edition), was a thinly veiled allusion to the real-life Greek weapons seller Basil Zaharoff of Vickers Armstrong, who profited from the conflict by supplying arms to both Paraguay and Bolivia. Hergé had learned about the conflict and the western corporations profiting from it through two issues of anti-conformist Belgian magazine "La Crapouillot" ("The Mortar Shell"), which covered news stories ignored by the mainstream media. It is also likely that he had read Richard Lewinsohn's 1930 book "Zaharoff, l'Européen mystérieux" ("Zaharoff, the Mysterious European"), which had been referenced in "La Crapouillot".