Stroessner, Paraguay’s Enduring Dictator, Dies (original) (raw)
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Paraguay's President Alfredo Stroessner, left, and Spanish dictator Francisco Franco at a ceremony in Madrid in 1973.Credit...Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
- Aug. 16, 2006
Gen. Alfredo Stroessner, the former president of Paraguay whose 35-year hold on power made him South America’s most enduring dictator during the cold war, died today in exile in Brazil. He was 93.
General Stroessner had developed pneumonia after a hernia operation, The Associated Press reported. He had lived in Brazil since 1989, moving there after his ouster by Gen. Andrés Rodríguez, a relative by marriage and his second-in-command.
Formally, General Stroessner was a fugitive from justice, wanted by the Paraguayan courts for trial on charges of homicide. Despite an extradition treaty between Brazil and Paraguay, however, there were never any serious moves to bring the general to justice in his home country, where his cabinet members and associates remained the stewards of government.
Under the terms of his asylum in Brazil, General Stroessner was forbidden from involvement in politics, and he unfailingly stuck to his part of the bargain. He and his son, Gustavo Adolfo, split their time between a gated house by the South Lake in Brasília, the capital, and a ranch outside Belo Horizonte.
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.
One former American ambassador to Asunción, Robert E. White, remembered General Stroessner as darkly brilliant at profiting from the mistakes others made. Once, Mr. White recalled, the Paraguayan ambassador to Buenos Aires had gambled away the embassy’s entire budget. Immediately, the ambassador was summoned to Asunción and handed a confession to sign. Then General Stroessner promoted him to foreign minister.
“He could never have an independent thought or deed after that,” Mr. White explained.
General Stroessner’s takeover in 1954 put an end to decades of instability, in which presidential faces seemed as fleeting as the pictures on a slot machine. In the 27 years before his coup, his small landlocked nation had had 22 presidents, and no experience of a democratic transition of power in its 143-year history.
Paraguay was an underpopulated, backwater nation the size of California, with a penchant for impossible wars that would swallow its male population in battles of dubious, if operatic, purpose. Among the worst of these was a disastrous war Paraguay waged simultaneously against Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil from 1865 to 1870, which shrank its population from 525,000 to 221,000, and left the nation with only 28,000 men.
The 1930’s and 40’s were a period of turmoil for Paraguay, which had suffered 100,000 dead in the Chaco war with Bolivia, which was fought over a swampland that ultimately had none of the mineral resources the two sides imagined was there. It was in the Chaco War, however, that Alfredo Stroessner distinguished himself and was promoted to second lieutenant of artillery. By the time the war ended, he had been promoted again to first lieutenant.
The son of a German immigrant from Bavaria and his Guarani Indian wife, Alfredo Stroessner was born Nov. 3, 1912, in the Paraguayan town of Encarnación, on the Argentinean border southeast of Asunción. His father, Hugo Stroessner, owned a brewery. President Stroessner seldom spoke of his parents, and his official biography listed no siblings.
His studies geared young Stroessner for a military life. He completed his basic education in Asunción and in Rio de Janeiro, entering the Asunción Military College in 1929. Before completing his studies there, he joined the war effort against Bolivia. In 1940, he traveled to Brazil for artillery training, and in 1943, then Captain Stroessner was honored with a nomination to Paraguay’s Superior War College, graduating in 1945.
He profited well from the power grabs that surrounded him, typically backing and then betraying the presidents he served, according to Paul H. Lewis, author of the 1980 book, “Paraguay Under Stroessner.” He climbed from commander of an artillery regiment to commander in chief of the army in 1951.
Between 1948 and 1954, six presidents of Paraguay were overthrown through military takeovers. After his own successful coup, General Stroessner repelled two attempts to unseat him, one in 1955 by Epifanio Mendez Fleitas, president of the Central Bank and a friend of President Juan Domingo Peron of Argentina, and another in November 1956 by Rafael Franco, a former dictator.
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.”
Mr. White, who served in Asunción from 1977 to 1979, could still recite the opening of each night’s newscast 20 years later: “El Señor Presidente de la República, Jefe de la Brigada, Don Alfredo Stroessner . . .” He described General Stroessner as “dour and crotchety, and amoral and in love with power.”
Mr. White said that when he arrived in Paraguay, the Stroessner regime was holding 1,700 political prisoners, and he spent much of his time as ambassador winning their release. By the time he left, he said, it was holding only three.
George Landau, who preceded Mr. White as the American ambassador, recalled that General Stroessner treated his cabinet roughly, and said, “He was God to them.” For his part, Mr. Landau described the Paraguay of General Stroessner as “benign, as dictatorships go,” and said those arrested could usually win release if they had friends in the right places. He said that many times, President Stroessner complained that he wanted only to retire to a life of fishing and hunting, but that his country needed him.
“He believed, as most dictators do, that he was absolutely irreplaceable,” Mr. Landau recalled. “He talked himself into a sense of duty.”
President Stroessner got his chance to retire in February 1989, when a military faction led by General Rodríguez seized power in a coup. General Rodríguez, who was nicknamed “The Tiger,” pounced when he appeared to be losing his standing in the battle for succession after President Stroessner’s death.
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.
“What you have is Stroessnerism without Stroessner,” Mr. Landau said in an interview in 1999. “Not in terms of civil liberties, but in terms of corruption.”
Once in exile, General Stroessner never traveled openly outside of Brazil, perhaps fearful of sharing the fate of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who traveled to London for medical care and ended up fighting extradition to Spain to face trial for his acts as dictator of Chile.
Mr. Landau said General Stroessner wrote him around 1997, asking for help in securing authorization to visit the United States for a gall bladder operation. The ambassador advised the general to stay away, warning he could become the target for a lawsuit by Paraguayans. General Stroessner ended up having the operation in São Paulo, Mr. Landau said.
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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, he said, 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.
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