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http://graphics8.nytimes.com.nyud.net:8090/images/2006/08/16/obituaries/16cnd_Strossner.600.jpg Agence France-Presse/Getty Images Paraguay's President Alfredo Stroessner, left, and Spanish dictator Francisco Franco at a ceremony in Madrid in 1973. ~snip~
General Stroessner, a tall, husky artilleryman proud of his crisp military bearing, seized power in Paraguay in 1954, through a surgical coup that took only one life at its start: that of Roberto Le Petit, a police chief who also served as minister of agrarian reform and who was in charge of redistributing land to the poor. Soon, however, General Stroessner won American help in establishing his secret police, and hopes that his dictatorship would give way to democracy faded before a string of elections in which he faced token or no opposition and that were generally considered to be fraudulent. Today, Paraguay remains the country with the most uneven distribution of land and wealth on the planet, followed by Brazil.
Under General Stroessner, Paraguay’s security forces became so efficient at intimidating potential opposition figures that eventually fear itself — fear of arrest, torture, exile and murder — became one of his prime levers for staying in power. The country became a haven for Nazis on the run, with new passports and visas sold for a price. Among those it sheltered was Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death” who selected victims for the gas chambers at Auschwitz and conducted medical experiments on humans. In addition, hundreds of political prisoners and their families were imprisoned at concentration camps like Emboscada, about 20 miles outside the capital city of Asunción, in the 1970s.
The other keys to General’s Stroessner’s longevity as president were his alliance with the Colorado Party, which has run Paraguay uninterrupted for more than a century, his grip on the military and his skill at exploiting the weaknesses of others. The general also found help in Paraguay’s past, which has effectively paved the way for dictatorship by one figure or another.
“He didn’t break any prior democratic tradition, as existed in other countries,” said Alfredo Boccia Paz, an Asunción physician who has written several books on the Stroessner era.
President Stroessner was never one for understatement. His name, written in neon, flashed nightly over the Asunción cityscape during his reign, and his face was plastered daily in newspapers and on television. He was known for turning up in his powder blue military uniform every Thursday at the general staff headquarters of the armed forces, driving home his authority as commander in chief.
~snip~
In 1959, General Stroessner briefly experimented with lifting a state of siege that had been in force since 1930, and restoring constitutional liberties. But when student protests over trolley fare hikes broke out, so did the reflexes of the iron hand. General Stroessner restored the state of siege, and the police put an end to the demonstrations with the wholesale arrest and torture of the protesters.
“Were it not for an occasional headless body floating down the Parana River, it might be possible to consider the gaudily uniformed and medaled dictator of Paraguay — the last of the breed in South America — a character out of Gilbert and Sullivan,” Joseph P. Lash wrote in The New York Post in 1961.
But General Stroessner surprised the political pundits and held on through seven successive elections marked by rigged voting. In time he became the prototype for a new crop of South American dictators friendly to American interests. Backed by the United States, military rulers later seized power in Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Bolivia.
Security forces in these countries worked closely together, formalizing their cooperation in a joint intelligence plan called Operation Condor. Though Condor’s official goal was to target Marxist or terrorist threats to the dictatorships, in practice it served to uproot almost any political opposition or stirrings for democracy in its member nations.
Condor also coordinated the assassination of opposition figures abroad, and was believed responsible for the car-bomb killing of Orlando Letelier, a former Chilean ambassador to the United States, and Ronni Moffitt, his staff associate, on Washington’s Embassy Row in 1976; the death of Chile’s former defense minister, Carlos Prats, and his wife on a Buenos Aires street, and the attempted assassination of Senator Bernardo Leighton of Chile in Rome.
General Stroessner’s harshest repression occurred in the 1950’s and the 1970’s. Senator Carlos Levi Rufinelli, the leader of the opposition Liberal party, had been imprisoned 19 times and tortured six times by 1975.
“Most of the time I did not know what they wanted,” he told The New York Times that year. “They did not even know what they wanted. But when they put the needles under your fingernails, you tell them anything. You denounce everybody, and then they say: ‘See, you were lying to us all the time.’”
President Stroessner enjoyed all the trappings of dictatorship — guaranteed victories at election time, an absence of checks and balances, unremitting public adulation and regular kickbacks. Nonetheless, he bridled at being called a dictator.
“So, you have come to see the dictator,” he once told a reporter who had come to interview him in the 1960’s. “He was unsmiling, and there was flat sarcasm in his voice,” his visitor noted.
An official biography of President Stroessner in 1968, distributed by the Paraguayan Foreign Ministry when he visited Washington, underscored his thirst for legitimacy. It noted every foreign trip the general had made and every visiting head of state or award he had received, from the United Arab Emirates’ “Collar of the Nile” prize in 1958 to the “Civil Medal,” awarded by the Inter-American Press Association three years later. The resume made no mention of his coup, but it gave election results listing total votes cast for General Stroessner and the other “candidates” in each election since 1954.
General Stroessner frequently complained that the international press overlooked the advances he had brought Paraguay. His most ambitious modernization project was the Itaipu Dam, whose construction Brazil financed in exchange for the right to purchase electricity at reduced rates for several years. Throughout his decades in office, he made a practice of personally inaugurating every new school or filtration station that opened, and inviting the entire diplomatic corps to watch.
John Vinocur, writing in The New York Times Magazine in 1984, offered this snapshot of Paraguay as its army goosestepped down the boulevards to celebrate General Stroessner’s 30 years in power:
“A continual state of siege over the entire period that literally places the president above the law; people with occasionally uncontrollable urges to fall into rivers or jump from planes with their arms and legs bound; serenades in front of the presidential palace featuring the ever-popular ‘Forward, My General’ and ‘Congratulations, My Great Friend’; foreign thieves, brutes and madmen hidden at a price; an economy administered so corruptly it is officially explained away as the ‘cost of peace’; a United Nations voting record on so-called key issues more favorable to the United States than any other ‘ally;’ a party newspaper that prints six front-page color pictures of the general every day.” More: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/16/world/americas/16cnd-stroessner.html?pagewanted=all
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