Michael Batson

Asuncion is the capital and largest city of landlocked Paraguay, a country rarely on the radar and for most, off the beaten track. Steamy tropical heat, tin-pot dictators, violence, tragedy and cultural melting pot, Paraguay seemed to fulfil stereotypical views for many of Latin America.

True, during its history, Paraguay has suffered cataclysmic wars and during one period over two dozen dictators came and went in almost as many years. It’s been the hangout for Nazi war criminals, arms merchants, drug traffickers, and deposed dictators.

It’s a 250 kilometre ride by bus from Resistencia in northern Argentina along Route 11 through the wonderfully named Formosa, to the border with neighbouring Paraguay and Asuncion. Resistencia nestles the Parana River, South America’s second-longest waterway, and neighbours Corrientes, the setting for the Graham Greene thriller, The Honorary Consul, which has a Paraguayan sub-plot.

In a bar in Resistencia the locals poured scorn on their northern neighbours, a backward country they said, where it’s not safe, “you should be careful there.” A caution reinforced with a knowing nod of the head, though they admitted none of them had actually been to Paraguay.

I knew some history of Paraguay. I’d also seen the film of Greene’s book with Michael Caine in the title role supported by an unlikely Richard Gere. Anthony Hopkins’ first project after the acclaimed Silence of the Lambs was a film for television about a doctor set in Paraguay, One Man’s War, based on a true story and set against the backdrop of brutal repression and endemic corruption.

In the 1880s the sister of German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, together with her husband had gone to Paraguay to start an Aryan settlement, Nueva Germania. They failed, the husband committed suicide, and Therese Nietzche-Forster returned to Germany where eventually the Nazis picked off aspects of Nietzche’s writing to suit their own ends. Historian and Times correspondent Ben MacIntyre documented the whole strange episode in his book Forgotten Fatherland.

Asuncion is one of the oldest cities in Latin America, and longest continually inhabited site in the whole River Plate Basin. The Spanish founded a fort here in 1537, and using it for a base set forth to found other cities in the region, so it also called the “Mother of Cities”. As the fort was founded in August it was named for the nearest religious festival, Nuestra Señora de la Asunción (Our Lady of the Assumption), honoring the feast day of the Assumption.

The city centre is modern with skyscrapers colloquially known as “Asunhattan”, for its skyline. The suburbs, or barrios, are quiet and leafy, spread in rectangles over low-lying hills, and then there are the slums. The city’s population has boomed due to internal migration first because of the economic boom in the 1970s, and later because of economic recession in the countryside.

With the river for a backdrop is the white-washed neo-classical edifice, the Palacio de Lopez, Paraguay’s seat of government, named for the Lopez dynasty which dominated Paraguay’s military, history and politics from 1844 until 1869, including the disastrous War of the Triple Alliance. The palace looks resplendent on the postcards, all of which fail to take in the neighbouring shanty towns, a view that encapsulates the extraordinary gulf in living standards of the country’s six million residents.

My hotel was owned by a Korean family, not unusual they told me, for there were many Koreans in Asuncion, a fact I was entirely unaware of. Since the 1960s, a Korean diaspora to Latin America had seen many take advantage of the instant visas offered by Paraguay, and its larger neighbours, Brazil and Argentina.

The hotel had a pleasant courtyard and you could while away a hot afternoon during siesta and watch the foot traffic. Many of the rooms were rented by the hour, largely by young couples who, presumably unmarried and still living at home, resorted to such clandestine encounters here in this conservative Catholic country.

One of the guests was CJ from Chicago. He was about two-metres tall and lived in Paraguay during the basketball season, as he had a contract with a local team. He seemed disappointed when he asked if I played, and I said "no". He said the league was quite good but not up to the standard of other Latin American countries, but that it was improving. Tall African-Americans from Illinois and Koreans, Asuncion was throwing up all kinds of surprises.

Even more curious are the Mennonites who come to town and stand on street corners selling their wares wearing their distinctive dungarees and Stetsons. Tall, fair-skinned, often blond and blue-eyed, these immigrants from Russia, Canada and Germany have created productive farming communities up-country in the Chaco region. Sometimes escaping political and other repression in their native countries, Paraguay welcomed these migrants to populate the deserted regions of the country depopulated as the result of Paraguay’s wars with its neighbours.

The Lopez dynasty ruled Paraguay as their personal fiefdom. In an attempt to break tariffs imposed for river traffic, President Solano López conceived of a plan to obtain sea ports. For this and other reasons Paraguay came into conflict with the Triple Alliance - Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina. Solano Lopez had delusions of Napoleonic grandeur, and was spurred along by geo-strategic impulses and by his Irish mistress “La Lynch”. Lynch bore Solano Lopez five sons and became the largest landowner in Paraguay after Solano Lopez transferred most of the country and portions of Brazil to her name, but she died a pauper.

The resulting war between 1864 and 1870 caused more deaths than any other military conflict in South America, and devastated Paraguay with estimates up to 90 percent of its population died and tracts of territory forfeited or depopulated.

Sympathetic Paraguayan nationalists and foreign revisionist historians have portrayed Solano Lopez as a patriot who resisted Argentine and Brazilian designs on Paraguay. His family tomb in Asuncion can be visited and has since become a shrine. Whatever the opinion of him, history records that it took decades for Paraguay to recover from the chaos and demographic imbalance in which it had been placed.

During the 1930s Paraguay also went to war with Bolivia over the semi-arid northern Gran Chaco, mistakenly thinking it was full of oil. The war pitted two of South America’s poorest countries both having previously lost territories to neighbours in 19th century wars. It was a bloody affair finally settled by a ceasefire with Paraguay being awarded 52,000 square kilometres of territory that cost the lives of two Paraguayans and three Bolivians for every square mile.

The military in Paraguay permeates all manner of life. In a restaurant in Asuncion I met Claudio on his lunch break. Claudio was a meat inspector, though he informed me that he was in fact employed by the military. He was keen to show his signature, a distinctive pattern of four lines divided into quarters each with its own square, “to prevent counterfeiting” he told me. In fact, most people in the restaurant that day worked for the military. When I told him I also worked for the government, he was surprised that I too was not employed by the military.

For 35 years Paraguay was ruled by the despot General Alfredo Stroessner, whose reign marked an uninterrupted period of repression in the country. Through voting fraud, even the dead voted for him, Stroessner was elected every five years with near-universal approval that he took for a clear mandate.

With a network of informants and the backing of the military, he tortured dissidents, both real and perceived. He kept his country in what he called a constant “state of siege”, and was supported by the US because of his staunch anti-communist stance.

All the while, the country became astoundingly corrupt. Payoffs were essential to all commerce, with much going to top military officers. Paraguay became a sanctuary for misfits and mercenaries; smugglers in arms, drugs and everyday goods such as whiskey and car parts much of it accessed through Stroessner City on the border with Brazil. Even today the border is a stream of traffic carrying all manner of items.

In a noxious twist on Latin hospitality, Stroessner provided refuge for French-born international heroin dealer Auguste Ricord; strongmen such as Argentina's Juan Perón and Nicaragua's Anastasio Somoza; and war criminals, including Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor known as the “Angel of Death”.

Somoza was assassinated by a Nicaraguan hit-squad in the city just months after his three-generational despotic rule was overthrown by the Sandinistas. Somoza died when his Mercedes was hit by rocket fire, machine gun and assault rifles. In a tribute to German engineering, it was reported the Mercedes’ engine kept on running even after the rocket explosion!

Until recently Asuncion was known for a tourist steam train which ran 23 kilometres to nearby Aregua. The train was unique as one of the few wood-powered locomotives still running. Trouble was the cinders were blown back into the carriages burning clothes and smarting the eyes, so you were advised not to wear smart dress.

Paraguay only got its first democratically elected president in 1993, and since 1948 every head of state, dictator or not, as been a member of the Colorado Party that is, until now. Fernando Lugo represents the Patriotic Alliance for Change. Lugo is a former priest known as the “bishop of the poor” whose father was imprisoned 20 times for opposing Stroessner, and survived.

I had seen one president in town on an official visit, arriving in a motorcade in front of what appeared to be an entire regiment of conscripts wearing the highest jackboots I’d ever seen.

Lugo was the first politician to beat the Colorado’s in 61 years, and in 2008 appointed the first ever indigenous person to serve in Cabinet.

Handing rule over based on the will of the people is still a relatively new practice in Paraguay, so each president only serves one term, a virtual lame-duck. But may be things are finally changing in Paraguay.