Falling Off the Map (20 page)

During the thirty-five-year reign of Alfredo Stroessner, in which, every sixty days, the president had dutifully renewed a state of siege, Paraguay had all but seceded from the world and turned into a kind of bad playwright’s version of a sleepy, crooked military despotism, a Central Casting vision of chicanery. When Paul Mazursky wanted to make a spoof of Latin American corruption, he called his movie
Moon Over Parador
, peopled it with figures called Strausmann, Dieter Lopez, and Madam Loop, and portrayed Paraguay as a kind of Shangri-la in reverse, an invert’s paradise (“One day in New York is like a year in Parador,” says Richard Dreyfuss). The only trouble was, reality put Hollywood to shame. As fast as the other Latin countries moved toward democracy in the eighties, Paraguay slipped ever deeper into torpor and a criminal dictatorship. In 1989, Stroessner, the longest-ruling tyrant in the world, except for Kim Il Sung (whom he was coming to resemble—the one
so far to the right and the other so far to the left that they almost seemed to meet), was visiting his favorite mistress for his usual Thursday afternoon siesta when he heard that he had been ousted by his protégé, and the father-in-law of his son, General Andres Rodríguez. During the coup, the elite corps’ tanks were unable to move because the man who had the keys to them was out of town. After the coup, the red-tied Colorado Party faithful who had previously danced the Don Alfredo Polka quickly changed their steps to do the Rodríguez Polka (with lyrics that ran: “May God help you and also the Armed Forces!”).

Paraguay, in fact, mocked soap opera’s gaudiest inventions. But there was more to its mystique than simple heavy-handedness: Paraguay had the reputation of being the darkest country on the planet. Colombia, of course, was a contender, with its blue-black clouds hanging over Bogotá, its international conferences on witchcraft, its schools for pickpockets, and its second city boasting the highest murder rate in the world. But Colombia also had ruins and beaches and museums, a patina of civilization. Nigeria and Indonesia were said to be the world leaders in corruption; but they at least were huge nations with lots of oil. Paraguay, by comparison, was a kind of minor-league, farm-team, up-and-coming criminal—“like Madame Tussaud’s,” as one friend said, “except all the figures are living.” This was the place where deposed dictators found a new home (Somoza from Nicaragua, Perón from Argentina). This was the place where fugitive Nazis received a hearty welcome—Eduard Roschmann, “the Butcher of Riga,” allegedly died here; Josef Mengele, “the Angel of Death,” was a Paraguayan citizen for much of the time he was the world’s most wanted war criminal; and Martin Bormann lived just across the border. This was also the place where Italian neo-Fascists gave lectures, Croatian thugs trained security details, Chinese tong kings picked up tips, and the new president himself—the “clean” one—was
associated with drug kingpins who’d made $145 million in shipments of heroin. When Nietzsche’s sister wanted to set up an Aryan colony with her husband, “the professional anti-Semite” Bernhard Förster (I read in Ben Macintyre’s engaging book,
Forgotten Fatherland
), where did they come—where could they come—but Paraguay?

In California, I knew of a Retirement Home for Performing Animals; Paraguay sounded like a Retirement Home for Performing Criminals.

My first taste of the mutant state, across from Iguazú Falls, had not been disappointing. Throughout our visit, my driver, a friendly family man from Argentina, had darkened the afternoon with tales of Paraguayan lawlessness. “Can’t the police do anything to stop the crime?” I asked. He laughed bitterly. “The police are the ones who are performing the crime!” Throughout the trip, too, he refused to leave the car, on the safe assumption that it would almost certainly be stolen. He visited Paraguay almost every day, and his wife was Paraguayan, but he was not about to take any chances. “And this is daytime,” he said as I took in the unholy chaos. “At night, it is not even safe to leave your room.”

Perhaps the ultimate depiction of the land of corpses laureled in orange petals, however, had come from Graham Greene. For Greene, the moral ironist, Paraguay was the end of the line, spiritually speaking, the place where all roads terminate. In
Travels with My Aunt
, he delivers the definitive portrait of a land where crooks wear pictures of the General, and a Czech is hoping to import two million plastic straws. “The only old beautiful building … proved, as I came closer to it, to be the prison,” says Greene’s mild-mannered narrator, Henry Pulling. Later, we learn that “They don’t have coroners in Paraguay” and that smuggling is a national industry. “In this blessed land of Paraguay,” says a war criminal, “there is no income tax and
no evasions are necessary.” Greene could no more leave Paraguay than he could leave loneliness, or flight, or the question of evil.

Yet it was not always so. When I went to my hometown library to look up books on Paraguay, the kind of titles I found were
The Lost Paradise, A Vanished Arcadia, Picturesque Paraguay
. For decades, even centuries, Paraguay—like any country, perhaps, where people can derive something out of nothing—had been regarded as a utopia just waiting to be realized, an empty space waiting to be converted into a private paradise. “When I first came to Asunción from Spain,” wrote the Paraguayan poet Josefina Plá, “I realized that I’d arrived in Paradise. The air was warm, the light was tropical, and the shuttered, colonial houses suggested sensual, tranquil lives.” Even G. K. Chesterton, who never saw the place, more or less rehearsed the conventional wisdom when he wrote: “Ye bade the Red Man rise like the Red Clay … And man lost Paradise in Paraguay.”

The whole of eastern Paraguay, among the best-watered areas in the world, resembled a luxuriant tropical Eden; the west lacked even running water. In both areas, however, Paraguay seemed a place of absolutes. Voltaire was fascinated by this notional Arcadia, which he described as both Elysium and its opposite; Thomas Carlyle wrote an entire book on Dr. Francia, who ruled over his homemade land with a kind of mythic force (decreeing that no one could look at him in the street). That Paraguay was a byword for the Possible—more Paradise than Parador—was best suggested by the fact that Robert Southey, the British poet laureate at the time, called his longest poem
A Tale of Paraguay
(“For in history’s mournful map, the eye/ On Paraguay, as on a sunny spot,/ May rest complacent”).

In fact, in history’s mournful eye, Paraguay was perhaps the most sunless place on earth, its history a sad tale of what men
will do with the prospect of paradise and what follies they visit upon a virgin land. The story of Paraguay is the story of the vanity of human wishes, one utopian chimera following another. First came the Spaniards, who promptly availed themselves of the friendliness of the local Indians, setting up harems in which each
conquistador
kept twenty native wives, or more (the “Father of the Nation,” Governor Irala, earned the title in part by fathering at least eight
mestizos
). Then came the Jesuits, who organized the artistically minded Guarani into
reducciones
, or crafts-based communes, which crumbled as soon as the Jesuits left. Then came the strongmen who, like Dr. Francia, scribbled their initials all over the open country. And finally there followed the steady stream of refugees from Germany or Australia or Italy who sought to build a new Arcadia here and founded their own custom-made utopias in Nueva Germania, Nueva Australia, Nueva Italia.

In almost every case, the dream went sour. Dr. Francia began by sealing off all the country’s borders, expelling all foreigners and committing the country to solitary confinement. Carlos López, who came next, was described as “more utterly alone than any man in the world.” His son, Francisco, ended up fleeing through the countryside, to the town still known as Isla Madama, taking along his mother and his sisters in wooden cages. By the end of the War of the Triple Alliance, Paraguay had lost the Iguazú Falls, and its national anthem was written by a Uruguayan.

In 1932, just as the wounds from the Triple Alliance were beginning to heal, Paraguay promptly got involved in another war, with Bolivia, over a piece of land that neither of them wanted. Some 85,000 men were killed, and Paraguay found itself on the bleeding end of two of the three major wars fought on the continent (while the Chaco, over which the battle had raged, was revealed to be an entirely desolate and inhospitable
scrubland without resources of any kind). A little later, the country entered a civil war, in which roughly a fifth of its people fled into Argentina. Meanwhile, Paraguay saw thirty-one presidents in fifty-years—seven between 1910 and 1912 alone—in a cycle of instability that ended only when Stroessner took over. Thus the melancholy pattern dragged on: the country either had no government at all or a government that saw itself in block capitals. “Dictatorship is to Paraguay what constitutional democracy is to Scandinavia or Britain,” says the U.S. Library of Congress survey.

The Stroessner regime was the same old story, a tale of good intentions gone awry and of a man who started out industrious, instituted reforms, brought constancy to the economy—twenty-two years without inflation—but gradually became more and more caught up in power and isolation, until he ended up lost in a hall of golden mirrors, his country turned into a cemetery. The monomania, the public mistresses, the brutal elimination of enemies, the commissioning of books in which he was called “THE LUMINOUS LIGHTHOUSE”—no one could deny that Stroessner was faithful to Paraguayan tradition.

If Paraguay is a paradise today, it is mostly one for ironists. For it offers absurdities almost too good to be true and schools its residents in the higher forms of sarcasm. “Anything,
anything
you can get here is illegal,” a delightedly “polluted” academic told me. In the central market of town, he said, almost gleefully, “No one can go in, not even the police. It’s entirely lawless there. The people pay no taxes, nothing is registered, anything can happen.” Argentine goods are cheaper in Paraguay than in Argentina, but Paraguayan sugar is cheaper outside Paraguay. Paraguay exports soya beans, but it has no soya crops. When paychecks are delivered, receptionists routinely loot the envelopes before they can be handed out. And when the opposition newspaper
ABC Color
was closed down by the government
in 1984, many government bigwigs came to the publisher in secret and offered to sell him paper mills on the cheap.

I didn’t take the celebrated “Tour of the Houses that Corruption Built,” which is the first stop of almost every foreign journalist in Paraguay. But still, I found, one cannot drive around the city without receiving a crash course in the popular folklore. This was the place where Somoza was gunned down, this was the house where the Argentine hit men lived for a year while tracking him. This was the house where Stroessner’s favorite mistress lived—the daughter of his former mistress—and this was the house that Stroessner promised to his illegitimate daughter. This was Stroessner’s own home (a massive park that goes on and on and on for more than two blocks, with a police station next door and, across the street, the U.S. embassy—“the largest in the world,” by some accounts—waiting to polka with the dictator). The newest highlight of the circle tour is the home of General Rodríguez, just off Avenida General Genes, in a thicket of satellite dishes and generals’ palaces, opposite a Chinese gangster’s pagoda, and within sight of the Central Bank (a twenty-five-acre spread big enough to house a university, its massive buildings sitting like
Titanics
stranded in a vacant lot, and equipped with an Olympic-size swimming pool).

Paraguay today, therefore, has the equivocal aspect of a whole country decorated like a closing sale—All Stock Must Go! Positively Last Prices!—and governed by rules that run counter to those of the world at large. “If you brought the Queen of England to Paraguay, she would run contraband too,” the secretary of the new president had memorably declared. “Paraguay is full of witches,” a sorcerer had told Norman Lewis. More serious charges had been brought by human rights activists and scholars, who claimed that Paraguay was home to slavery, child brothels, and genocide as recently as the seventies. At the very least, there was a sense that this was a place where anything
could be bought—passports, identities, babies. Everyone had a price in Paraguay, and usually it was radically discounted.

Thus the TAP “Guide to Paraguay” began, pointedly: “On visiting Paraguay, tourists may have several aims, in addition to recreation, resting and renewing energy.” The only trouble was, there were no tourists in Paraguay. The “Land of Sun, and of Adventures,” as its official slogan has it, maintains not a single tourist office around the world; the only office within the country consists of a sullen man sitting (occasionally) at a desk under a stairwell and telling you not to take more than two of the dusty brochures in front of him. “Asunción is home to hundreds of places worth visiting,” the book in my hotel room hopefully suggested; unfortunately, even the ever-diligent Lonely Planet guide could find only three “things to see” in Asunción—and one of them was a double bill of bad American movies at the cinema. During all the time I spent in Paraguay, I met only one other sightseer—a fantastically merry
peronista
from Buenos Aires named Daniel Ortega, with whom I dined in the hotel where Nietzsche’s brother-in-law committed suicide. (“There is a book in Buenos Aires, a best-seller,” said Sr. Ortega, a student of the human comedy, “that was written by Bush’s dog!” In the very next sentence he was telling me that there was a hole in Belém, in Brazil, that reached to the center of the earth—he had read this in another Argentine best-seller, by Charles Berlitz.)

Yet as I spent more time in the country, I began, very slowly, to fall into its rhythm and its spell, and to see more and more advantages to being neglected by the world. I took to relaxing in the sauna of a five-star hotel with a copy of
Business Week
only three years old, and to inching through the side streets on a Saturday night in a ’72 Chevy, which gave out at every corner, all the warning lights on its dashboard flashing at once and parts
of the car rolling around beneath me while the radio throbbed, “Gonna take you into the danger zone!” And as I started to talk to foreign experts on the place, I began to find that Paraguay was a kind of cult favorite among many old Latin American hands, the hidden (costume) jewel of South America. “Oh, Paraguay, my favorite country in the continent!” said Laura López, the longtime
Time
bureau chief for the whole of South and Central America. She liked it? “I love it—the way you’d love an orphan, or a bird with a broken foot.” Paraguay was something of an Ur-land, untamed, undeveloped, abandoned by history, wood-paneled streetcars still clattering through its streets, and electricity and running water arriving only a president ago. “It’s a crazy country, wistful and surreal and forlorn,” said a highly engaging American journalist who had lived there for three years. “But it’s magical—like Macondo in Gabriel García Márquez.” “The air is so pure,” added her husband, a Spanish writer. “And the streets are full of orange trees and jacarandas and lapachos. When you arrive in Stroessner Airport, you feel as if you are in one of the last corners of the world.”