The horror of Stroessner
There has been many dictators around the world whose names and faces have been etched to our minds: Hitler, Stalin, Tito, Pol Pot, Mussolini etc...
I want to inform you about a dictator who ruled in Paraguay and about whom my host mother talked to me about with sadness and but also with joy. Not for the squeamish.
General Alfredo 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 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.
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.
Rebel troops attacked the presidential guard and ended the Stroessner era, after one-third of a century, with eight hours of combat that caused numerous casualties. Paraguayans celebrated in the streets as General Rodríguez spoke of democracy and human rights. But he promoted himself to president the day after the coup, and was voted into the job three months later. It was not until 1993 that Paraguayans could elect a civilian president.
President Stroessner did not leave in disgrace, but flew out of Asunción airport, after a ceremony that Paraguayans who watched it on television remember as being more suitable for a statesman embarking on an overseas visit than a fleeing dictator.
His ouster came through military jockeying, rather than from a democratic groundswell, and little changed in Paraguay once he left. Civil liberties eventually returned, but citizens were so disconnected from the political system and so conditioned to fear that they had little to say . The same acceptance of corruption prevailed, and even the faces of the leaders remained the same, with only one of them gone.
Martín Almada, a schoolteacher imprisoned during the 1970's as an "intellectual terrorist," said that General Stroessner's legacy was "terror and corruption." Mr. Almada's wife died at the age of 33, after security agents played her a tape of his screams under torture. In 1992, Mr. Almada discovered a trove of government documents that came to be known as the Archives of Terror, which detailed the political arrests of thousands of Paraguayans, and unveiled the workings of Operation Condor. "Fear became our second skin," Mr. Almada remembered.
-Johanna