A Great Dictator?
Alfredo Stroessner wasn’t the deadliest Latin American dictator, but his 35-year rule left a legacy of violence and shameless cronyism on Paraguay’s political culture. Could his lasting reign be a blueprint of authoritarian governments to come?
Words M.O.R. Youkee
Illustration Jerome Masi
As the second of November becomes the third, a barrage of fireworks — more noise than light — launches into the wide Paraguayan sky. In the tree-lined plaza opposite the Club 3 de Noviembre Football stadium, a couple of hundred locals clutching bottles of lager look up and cheer. Paraguayan polka music twangs from the back of pick-up trucks. An elderly man draped in the red neckerchief of the Colorado Party paces the street holding aloft a framed portrait of a pale man in military uniform. November 3 is the fecha feliz, the happy date. It’s the birthday of the late Alfredo Stroessner, the ex-artillery officer who ruled the country from 1954 to ‘89.
The longest-serving leader in modern Latin American history, Stroessner preceded Pinochet, Videla and the gang of aviator-wearing despots that dominated the region in the 1970s and ’80s, and outlasted them. Bland and unremarkable, he had, according to Graham Greene, “the air of a fleshy, good-humoured and astute owner of a beer cellar who knows his customers well and can manage them.” What he lacked in charisma he made up for in plodding administrative work, methodically and tirelessly bringing all state institutions under his control. He kept the CIA onside and fostered the isolation of the landlocked country under the protective shell of his rule. So complete was his power that political scientists described his rule, the Stronato, as a form of “Neo-Sultanism,” solidifying the existent authoritarian streak in Paraguayan society and leaving an indelible mark on the political culture of the country.
Since winning independence from Spain in the early 19th century, Latin American nations have oscillated between democracy and authoritarianism, most recently in the form of left-wing populists that rode the “pink-tide” of Hugo Chavez’s election to the Venezuelan presidency in 1999. While right- wing nostalgia for military dictatorship still lurks in certain sectors of Latin American society, nowhere is it so widespread or open as in Paraguay. The 2015 Latinobarometro poll reported that 37% of Paraguayans expressed a preference for autocratic governments over democracy “under certain circumstances,” more than twice that of second-placed Nicaragua. In 2009 a poll by local daily Ultima Hora reported that that 40% of Paraguayans thought the country would be doing better if the dictatorship had continued.
Those celebrating the fecha feliz are happy to elaborate. A tall, dark-haired man in his fifties explains: “For us the Stronato was the best government this country ever had. We lived better back then. There was security where today there is none.” As well as being tough on crime, Stroessner is credited with growing the economy, particularly the hydroelectric dams which remain a major source of revenue. “He made all the public works,” says an elderly woman in a pink cardigan. “No one else could do that. He raised Paraguay from the dirt.” Two women in their twenties sit apart from the rest and reluctantly offer up the quintessential defence, “I wasn’t alive then, but my parents say that in those days you could sleep with the windows open.”
“While right-wing nostalgia for military dictatorship still lurks in certain sectors of Latin American society, nowhere is it so widespread or open as in Paraguay.”
In the 1990s the inhabitants of central Asuncion fled to new modern apartments in the fashionable neighbourhoods of Villa Morra and Mercedes. The old colonial centre gained a reputation for crime, the walls grew higher and were ramparted with broken glass. With tax evasion practically universal, there was little funding to preserve public spaces which have fallen into ruin. Pedestrians face a double challenge. To tread carefully in avoidance of the voids where manhole covers have been sold for scrap is to risk throttling by low-slung telephone cables.
In a cramped top-floor office I meet Rogelio Goiburu, who goes some way to explaining Paraguayans’ lack of civic spirit. “The dictatorship persists even today,” he says. “35 years of state terrorism instilled a culture of fear in Paraguay. People are still scared to speak out, they fear their neigbours will inform on them.” On the walls of his office hang photos of skeletons in blue overalls, buried like roots in shallow graves. As director of reparations and historical memory at Paraguay’s Ministry of Justice, Goiburu leads a tiny team with a shoestring budget, traversing the country in search of the remains of individuals who were ‘disappeared’ during the Stronato. His own father, a prominent anti-Stroessner agitator, was kidnapped by Paraguayan and Argentine agents in 1977 and never seen again.
“The dictatorship was a time of stability and it was necessary to repress those people who looked to undermine the regime.”
Goiburu’s father was one of approximately 420 Paraguayans disappeared over the course of Stroessner’s 35-year rule. That figure, while terrible in itself, pales in comparison to the estimated 2000 and 17,000 disappeared by the Chilean and Argentinian dictatorships respectively, in much shorter periods. Preferring exile to execution, Stroessner’s approach to dissidents was distinguished by calculated restraint. “He wasn’t a fanatic,” says Jose Carlos Rodriguez, one of the country’s leading sociologists. “He killed only those he considered a threat to the regime. He ruled a poor, overwhelmingly rural country, with no opposition and no free press. In this atmosphere of total power, the grotesque side of the regime found expression.”
It’s common for Stroessner supporters to dismiss the human rights abuses of the dictatorship as a necessary evil. “The dictatorship was a time of stability and it was necessary to repress those people who looked to undermine the regime” says Alejandro, a 23-year-old engineering graduate. “If it was possible I would have Stroessner back as president.” But such views ignore the perversions and excesses of the Stronato. Torture was common. It is also known that Stroessner chose his lovers from the graduation ceremonies of girls’ schools, and witnesses testify that girls as young as nine were imprisoned and sexually abused by his inner circle. But the girls and their families were often bought off with cash or marriage to high-ranking soldiers. Female television celebrities from humble origins, now in their sixties, are rumoured to owe their careers to the patrimony of their former tormentors. “Despite the evidence of murder, torture, and sexual abuse, we live in a country where half the population still revere the Stroessner dictatorship,” says Goiburu.
Stroessner’s strength was to make people complicit in the regime. Using a system of kick-backs and favours the private sector, too, was co-opted. Agricultural land was sold off and consolidated to the extent that 2% of the population now own 80% of the country’s land, the most uneven distribution in Latin America. Smuggling — of cigarettes, liquor, cars and appliances — was allowed to flourish. Paraguay’s current president, Horacio Cartes, made his money at the tail-end of the Stronato selling local cigarettes to distributors who would then offload them at cut-price in Brazil, where tobacco taxes were higher. Each week new corruption stories surface in the Paraguayan press, but the three main media agencies report them selectively, to avoid alienating their own financial backers. The public reaction ranges from amusement to resignation. Corruption is so endemic and the professional class so small that few risk indignation lest the next scandal touch someone close to them.
Stroessner’s ultimate trick was to maintain the façade of democracy throughout his office, holding crooked elections in which he was repeatedly returned to power at the head of the Colorado Party, which he converted into the critical organ of the state. Today, you will find a conspicuously well-maintained building in every Paraguayan town, painted red and adorned with murals or statues of national heroes, and you will know you are at Colorado HQ.
With the continuation of Colorado rule, little has been done to assess the true extent of the dictatorship’s crimes or bring closure to its victims. In the wake of the 1989 coup that sent Stroessner into exile, a number of his closest lieutenants were locked up on lengthy sentences, but these were politically motivated. Even the 1992 discovery of a massive cache of police files outlining tortures, disappearances and collusion with Argentine and Chilean dictatorships only caused minor ripples. Into this vacuum, facts have been entwined with legend. During interviews with relatives of the victims of the regime, I heard how Stroessner would have the severed heads of his enemies delivered to his desk, or how he would bathe in children’s blood to cure a mysterious skin disease. One story, reported in the international press, went that Stroessner had listened over the phone while a prominent communist named Miguel Soler was dismembered by chainsaw. In August 2016 the remains of Soler were the first to be identified from those excavated from the grounds of an Asuncion police station. A member of the Argentine forensics team said over email that his injuries were inconsistent with death by chainsaw.
In October the heat builds day on day until the sky erupts into storm, shutting down the airport, tearing the tiles off of roofs and, all too frequently, plunging the city into darkness. This is the type of scenario Stroessnistas love to exploit. The democratic government is incompetent and in the breakdown of order criminals prosper. The motochorros, thieving duos riding motorcycles, have become the modern Paraguayan bogeyman.
The impression of lawlessness intensifies in the countryside. Since the turn of the century Paraguay has grown in importance both as a centre of marijuana cultivation and a transit route for cocaine from Bolivia to Brazil. In the streets of Pedro Juan, Brazilian drug gangs settle scores with public shoot-outs. Meanwhile in the forests and soya plantations surrounding the sleepy northern city of Concepcion, a mysterious Marxist guerrilla group calling itself the Paraguayan People’s Army has emerged. Since 2008, its activities have included kidnapping and assassinating prominent businessmen, politicians and state of officials. In August 2016 it launched its most deadly attack to date, ambushing and murdering eight soldiers in a settlement several hours north of the city.
The popular impression is of a country descending into chaos, and politicians are eager to capitalise. In the days following the EPP attack, Senator Carlos Nuñez addressed congress: “We must burn these delinquents alive in public squares. Unfortunately Stroessner is no longer with us, but I believe that if he was we could live in peace, we could sleep again with the doors unlocked.”
“Stroessner’s strength was to make people complicit in the regime. Agricultural land was sold off and consolidated to the extent that 2% of the population now own 80% of the country’s land, the most uneven distribution in Latin America.”
It’s possible that the shadow of the Stronato has delayed Paraguay’s transition to democracy, rather than mutilating it. There was a time when the fecha feliz, funded and supported by Stroessner’s grandson, Goli, appeared to have the potential to launch the heir-apparent’s political career. Instead, in 2016, November 3 saw the house of representatives pass a motion to remove all remaining plaques commemorating Stroessner from the country’s parks and public buildings. The most prominent homages to the general are long gone. In 1991, city administrators tore down the statue of Stroessner that overlooked Asuncion from a hill in the southern suburb of Lambare. It was subsequently encased in a block of concrete near the river, in a plaza renamed in honour of the disappeared. At knee level the block is cut away to show the mangled green remains of the original copper statue.
The sculptor’s implication is obvious: Stroessner as Ozymandias. Even apparently eternal and indestructible kingdoms come to ruin. But there is also something uneasy about the statue — Stroessner’s face is that of a drowning man but the nostrils remain above water. A pair of blank eyes addresses the onlooker and from the depths of the concrete, in search of redemption or mutual destruction, a cold hand stretches out.
This is article is from Weapons of Reason’s fourth issue: Power.
Weapons of Reason is a publishing project to understand and articulate the global challenges shaping our world by Human After All design agency.
