Paradise With Serpents: Travels in the Lost World of Paraguay

The son of a First World War German officer, Lt-Col. Koenig was given charge of the body, and he showed it to a delegation of Peronist CGT trades unionists to show that the military had not outraged her body. After this the mummy was hidden in various military barracks: but the people always found out where she was cached, and flowers, candles and votive offerings appeared as if by magic outside each new hiding place. For a long time Colonel Koenig refused to bury the mummy of Eva: some said he had fallen under her spell and used to sit up at nights talking to her as if to a lover, perhaps indeed having fallen in love with this masterwork of the embalmer’s art. Eventually, under mysterious circumstances, the mummy was exhumed and smuggled out of the country to the Vatican by an Argentine priest, Father Rotger, aided by a posse of Italian priests well versed in the black arts of corpse vanishings. Finally, it seems, Koenig had managed to force himself to put to earth the mummy of Eva. ‘I buried her standing because she was male,’ he said later, and this vertical interment was confirmed, for when the mummy was examined in Rome the feet had been destroyed by the weight of the body forcing down on them. It was rumoured that even when buried, Eva had been consulted on various occult matters by the military, and burying her standing up made such consultations easier – the casket only had to be opened at the top, with a sort of cat-flap on hinges. Originally, Eva’s mummy had been exhibited in a glass casket to her adoring public, her hands holding a rosary given her by the Pope; now her body vanished into limbo, finding its way by unknown means into Juan Perón’s hands again in Madrid. After Eva’s death, Juan Perón had made her brother Juancito fly to Switzerland and sign over her numbered accounts into his own, Perón’s name; following this Juancito was conveniently killed in a car accident in Buenos Aires, and his skull ended up being used as a paperweight by Captain Grandi, a military official. Torture and bullfights had both been banned in Argentina in 1813, after the Spanish had been expelled. Perón reintroduced torture, including for women, especially to the genitals. His chief torturer was one Simon Wasserman, a Jewish police official. Like Stroessner, Perón was half-Indian. His mother was so dark that in the racially prejudiced Argentina of the era, she could not be presented in public. Perón had a sense of humour, however; when criticized for living with an actress – Eva was a famous star of the Argentine radio and cinema – he replied, ‘Who do they expect me to sleep with – an actor?’ He was just about to confiscate all the Catholic Church’s property in Argentina, and turn the Cathedral in Buenos Aires into a social centre for trades unionists when he was overthrown. His antecedent – also of part-Indian descent – was Dr Francia, the first dictator of Paraguay after independence from Spain who successfully nationalized Church property, and said, ‘If the Pope cares to come to Paraguay I shall do him no greater honour than to make him my personal confessor.’ Dr Francia got away with it because he had eliminated all opposition from his rivals, and because Paraguay was so far away and so difficult to get to. Many people in Europe still do not know where the place is, including, presumably, the editors of the Penguin History of Latin America, who give the country a complete miss.

Stroessner observed all of Perón’s antics and travails from up the river, and carried many of the murkier aspects of Peronism into practice himself in later years, particularly torture and the cult of the personality. There was even a ‘Don Afredo Polka’, the polka being the national dance, though nothing like a polka anyone in Europe has ever heard. Though the Paraguayans do not like you to say so, Paraguayan history sometimes seems to be a grotesque parody of what has already occurred down south. If the saga of Juan and Eva Perón reads to European eyes as a bizarre excursion into Grand Guignol, something from the pages of a magical realist novel by Gabriel García Márquez, it is worth noting that Márquez himself worked when a young man as a journalist on the Buenos Aires newspaper Clarín during the Perón years. To those who know South America at all, Márquez’s fiction is closer to reality in that continent than many Europeans would credit.

The Paraguayan attitude to their neighbours the Argentines was both complex and paradoxical. They professed to dislike and distrust them, but also, at some level, they admired and aped them. Their slang insult for them was ‘pigskins’, possibly because they were pink-skinned and hairy, like pigs; the Argentines responded by calling the Paraguayans ‘redskins’ and ‘savages’, but there were, of course, many intermarriages between the two peoples. Gabriella’s mother had been an Argentine. ‘¡Cuidado!’ she warned me, her voice rising. ‘Be careful! ¡Chantar! You know this word? To boast, to brag, to bullshit, to bluff- all Argentines are the world’s experts at chantar.’

I mentioned to her later that there was a possibility that an Argentine guide might be willing to take me into the interior in his jeep. ‘He will cheat you,’ she had said, though she didn’t know him, and had heard nothing against him. To be an Argentine was enough. Not that she, nor anyone else I ever met had any enthusiasm for the Paraguayans, either. ‘We overvalue foreigners, particularly Europeans,’ Gabriella had told me. ‘We Paraguayans do not trust each other. This is a land of false smiles and forced laughter. Many foreigners are taken in by this – the happy, smiling Paraguayan, true child of nature, and so on. Bullshit.’ I had already noticed that everyone I spoke to had quite naturally disparaged the local climate, food, people and products. Nothing, it seemed, was as good as in Europe. Yet as an outsider this did not seem at all accurate to me. Few of the people I spoke to had actually been to Europe, and when I told them a few facts about the place they were alarmed, even horrified, and often even openly disbelieving.

The first, most obvious natural advantage Paraguay possessed was its mild sub-tropical climate, in which palms, bananas, oranges, lemons, limes, pineapples, sugar cane and hundreds of other exotic flowers, ferns and orchids flourished. The second was the great sense of space, and the complete absence of any sense of urgency or haste. The country was the size of Germany or California, and had very few people in it, mostly concentrated within a hundred kilometres of the capital; a third of the land area was still virgin forest, the rest agricultural or bush. Away from the towns you could stand on the top of a gentle hill – the country was very flat – and gaze around you 360 degrees and see nothing but forest and fields as far as the eye could see – no people, no houses, no roads. When I told Paraguayans that this was almost impossible in Europe, that we were densely packed, crammed in on top of one another, they were very surprised. When I told them also that in many places the government had the power to tell you what colour you could paint your front door, what type of windows you could or could not have in your house, what sort of tiles you could put on your roof, they were both amazed and indignant. ‘That is tyranny!’ they exclaimed. ‘No Paraguayan would ever accept that. We may have a rotten political class, but they would never dare interfere with our private lives or property like that.’ Many showed me by their expression that they were skeptical about what I told them of European restrictions and regulations – that you could not smoke in buses, trains or many restaurants, that the police photographed your car number plate and sent you a fine later if you went too fast, that the Customs in England could confiscate and crush your car if they felt you were bringing back goods from France they thought you might sell. ‘Don Roberto, with courtesy and respect, of course, you must surely be mistaken – these things are impossible, inconceivable in a great continent of culture like Europe.’ I told them that I lived in such a place of intense restrictions. It was called a Conservation Area, and any changes at all to the outside of my house – paint, door, windows, tiles – had to be approved by the local government council, in order to preserve the character of the area. ‘How can you live like this? It is like being in a prison! No wonder so many poor Europeans come to Paraguay to live! We are free! We do what we want. Your house is not your own – it is the government’s, evidently.’ And moreover, I added, in Britain it was illegal for any private citizen to own a handgun. If you were caught with one you went to prison for three to five years. This was always the straw that broke the camel’s back. I was obviously engaged in high-level chantar. Not to be able to own a pistol to protect your family from criminals? It was like saying to an Englishman that the ownership of handkerchiefs carried a three- to five-year gaol sentence, the two items being about as common as each other repectively in Paraguay and England.

After barely suppressed looks of complete disbelief someone would always ask, But why do people tolerate such restrictions – why do they not make a revolution? ‘Because they – we are used to such government restrictions. The State is incredibly powerful in Europe, and it takes on more powers every year. The few that object sell up and leave quietly – they are welcome to go. For the rest they accept, they complain, they grumble – but they accept.’ At this there would be shakings of heads and sighings of disapproval. ‘Never in Paraguay – never in South America!’ they always concluded. Indeed, the contrast between Europe and Paraguay could not be sharper. Paraguay was still in essence an 18th-century state, with a very small and almost completely powerless government. Life was dangerous, often violent, and there were many assaults and robberies, but there were very few constraints upon the individual’s freedoms, including the freedom to starve, be unemployed, and live with no social security or health service. You could buy land, put up any sort of house, fly in and out of the country in your own plane, own firearms, pay no income taxes – and precious few other ones either. Private property was sacrosanct. To enter another’s land without asking was to risk being shot as dead as a potential malviviente. Bureaucratic interference in people’s lives was minimal. The state bureaucrats only turned up at the office once a month to collect their salaries. You could park, piss, smoke and drive where and how you wanted to.

The individual egotism and selfishness of the country could be gauged by its completely anarchic and manic driving on the roads. No one stopped for pedestrians or for any other reason either. If the police wanted to halt traffic they had to erect a barrier that would seriously damage vehicles if they drove into it. There were no safety nets to protect the old, the young or the infirm. The street children of Asunción had formed a Union, and they demonstrated frequently – on the streets, of course – for ‘dignity and respect’, and protested against a recent law which had sought to ban children under 14 from working. This edict caused great resentment, and thousands of children had protested that they were being denied the chance to support themselves. Like everything else, age in Third World countries and the West carried an entirely different freight of meanings. In Paraguay, as in Spain, the age of consent for sexual activity for girls was 12. In Paraguay, young ladies ‘came out’ on their fifteenth birthday – there were photographs in the local papers of these belles dressed up in white gowns and squired by their fathers at full dress Society balls. Life expectancy, so long we in the West are almost like Swift’s Struldbruggs, and so short in the Third World, created quite different demands on people. In the West sexual activity among young people is discouraged for as long as possible, and seen by progressive middle-class adults as a bad thing, while in Paraguay it was encouraged and hastened in a land where a large family was one’s only chance of survival in old age, and early, unexpected death was a frequent reality. To be a mother at 12 or 13, so shocking as to be seen as a social problem in the industrial West, was a simple reality of life in countries like Paraguay. In the moral panic that surrounds children’s sexuality for many adults in England it is often forgotten that once England was itself a Third World country, where people bred early and died young. Shakespeare’s Romeo was 14, one recalls, and Juliet 12 when their love affair took place. The Elizabethan audience had not been shocked. This had represented late-medieval reality.

Gabriella was the first Paraguayan I had met who had lived for an extended period in Europe, and who knew both cultures intimately. She had worked for the BBC World Service in London and her husband had worked in import-export. They had managed to save enough money to buy a small flat in a remote suburb of outer London. This, she told me, they rented out to a fellow South American. Like so many people from unstable economies with erratic currencies all over the world, a small stake in British real estate was a hedge against uncertainty at home. I asked Gabriella how she managed in Paraguay now that most of the local banks had collapsed. ‘I only use my bank account in London,’ she replied. ‘I have never had an account here. I wouldn’t trust any South American bank. When I want cash I put my UK plastic in the hole in the wall here, and draw out US dollars in cash.’ This, I learnt, was quite common for middle-class South Americans in Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil. You had your bank account in Miami, in Dallas, in London, New York or the Cayman Islands; all your money you kept out of the local economy, because neither the currency nor the banks could be trusted. Those who had ignored this simple rule of financial security in Argentina and had trusted the government’s one-peso-equals-one-dollar policy had lost their money when the government defaulted, devaluing the peso and freezing bank accounts.

The government had, in effect, stolen the people’s money by reneging on their promise of parity. For the last two centuries South America had been a sink for capital. You could make money fast, but if you trusted the local banks or the local currencies you lost the lot, eventually. The ideal export product was cheap to make in South America and very expensive to sell for dollars or pounds abroad – hence the huge popularity of cocaine and marijuana as cash crops, and the fortunes made by processing and exporting these drugs in Paraguay and elsewhere. The whole country was dotted with illicit, hidden airstrips in remote places, where light aircraft – avionettas – landed and refuelled, carrying out drugs, contraband liquor and cigarettes, and carrying in guns, dollars and essential spare parts. These strips were constantly being discovered by the police, though very rarely were any planes intercepted. With extended fuel tanks fitted the standard light plane could reach Miami or Dallas – or private airstrips in the desert in Texas or Arizona – without having to land to refuel. The rich – and the criminal – all had private planes.

Since the arrival of the Spanish, and even before, South America had been a place of plunder. The great empires of the Aztecs and the Incas had been based, too, on military conquest and the exploitation of subject peoples; both of these tyrannies had practised extensive human sacrifice, the victims taken from subject and defeated peoples. This continent had long been a place where people imposed their will and seized what there was – gold, silver, slaves, sugar, cocaine; the products changed, but the economy of looting continued. It was normal and natural for South Americans to go into exile when things went wrong. The concept of life was still colonial, with strident nationalism in local politics, mirrored by a furtive, clandestine export of capital away from local risks – instability, revolution and chaos. When the time came to flee the exiles already had their money, their houses, their other lives in safe havens prepared abroad in safer places. Gabriella and her husband lived in Paraguay – but only just. Their capital, their property was in London. They rented in Asunción because it was not secure to own. Everything in Paraguay was very cheap to buy by US or European standards, and everything was up for sale. In the past, people had put their money into real estate because they didn’t trust the local banks. Now they wanted to sell and go away again. Stroessner had been bad, but this pseudo-democracy where everyone was corrupt and everyone stole and no one was accountable was worse. You could buy houses, apartments in Asunción for half, for a third even of what people were asking, Gabriella told me. All the flights out to Miami and Dallas were booked up for months in advance, and the planes arrived all but empty. Gabriella and Hugo had shipped down some furniture from Miami when they came back. That could be sold quickly or shipped out again if things went wrong – Hugo had ‘Italian papers’ so they could always go to Italy, she told me. People in Paraguay talked of having ‘papers’, not of being a particular nationality. It was where you were allowed to live that counted. ‘Life is easy in Paraguay, it is cheap and there are servants, but it could all go wrong very soon,’ Gabriella told me. They had only been back a matter of months, and they were already thinking they might have to leave again. Almost unknown to the prosperous, secure peoples of the developed West, millions of the educated, the skilled, the able in the Third World live like this. In Sudan, in Albania, in Sierra Leone, Malaysia and Indonesia people watch nervously for the signs that some imminent collapse might be just round the corner. In Paraguay, the first casualty of any coup d’état would be the liberal media; there would be no place for a BBC reporter under a military dictator.

Before Stroessner came to power there had been a long, bitter civil war in Paraguay. As many as a third of the population had been killed – no one was sure how many had died. Lawlessness and banditry had been rife. Stroessner had taken over and enforced both peace and stability. Like Spain after the Civil War, the exhausted country had acquiesced. Yet with his peace came torture and institutionalized corruption, the eclipse of civic rights, and great injustice. As many as a third of the remaining population had fled abroad, mainly to Brazil and Argentina. Some had come back but many still stayed away. Paraguay was a risky place, but the safer countries they had fled to before, Brazil and Argentina were now themselves places of disorder, chaos and financial collapse. The press was full of massive banking scandals, directors who plundered their banks and then fled. In Argentina, the economic collapse had caused riots, kidnappings and massive unemployment. In a poll, 57% of young Argentines under 25 said they wished to leave the country as they had no faith in its future. The world was divided into those countries everyone wanted to leave and those everyone wanted to get into. The latter group was very small, and mostly run by Anglo-Saxons or Scandinavians. Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil were all immensely rich – but then so was the Congo. There was no use in great mineral wealth, skilled and talented people, and bountiful natural resources if there was corruption, if everyone stole from everyone else. In such places your money, and in the end you and your family, were only safe somewhere else.

All over Asunción there were large, unfinished tower blocks, now rotting with decay. They had been overambitious for the scale of the city, clearly. Why had anyone ever put money into starting to build them? The price of entry into Paraguay during the stronato was investment in the local economy, Gabriella told me. The high-ups in the Colorado Party had owned construction companies which took the investors’ money and ran up these partly completed structures, syphoning off most of the money into their bank accounts abroad, then simply abandoning them. Corruption under Stroessner became endemic and systematic. Even the very poorest had got into it. The ‘hormigas’ as they were called, the ants, plied to and fro across the border with Brazil, smuggling goods to and fro by hand, in bags and cases, bribing the Customs each time. ‘Contraband is the price of peace,’ Stroessner said. Smuggling, bribery, corruption and illicit activities of all kinds became the bedrock of the economy. The country began to forget how to work. Once oranges, bananas, tropical fruit of all sorts had been grown commercially and exported to Brazil and Argentina. Now all these products were imported from Brazil, from Colombia. Under Stroessner everyone had been able to become a small-time contrabandista. One of the reasons for the complete absence of any coherent collectivist left opposition was the petit-bourgeois, small capitalist mentality that reached right down to street traders and Indians selling vegetables in the streets. There was no local car industry to protect in Paraguay, unlike Brazil and Argentina, so shiploads of second-hand cars came up the river, bought in job lots in the southern USA. And stolen cars poured across from Brazil, driven in from Sao Paulo, the Customs officials on both sides bribed. The contrast between the beggars on the streets, the mendicant cripples, the unmade roads, broken pavements and leaking water mains in Asunción, and the massed ranks of brand new BMWs and Mercedes was marked. The President and his wife were both alleged to drive cars stolen in Brazil – a local newspaper had exposed the story and printed photos of them getting out of the hot cars which had been hijacked from the streets of Sao Paulo. I mentioned J. K. Galbraith to Gabriella – she was a journalist after all – and suggested that his dictum of ‘private affluence, public squalor’ applied to contemporary Paraguay. She had heard of neither Galbraith nor his well-known equation. It was Gabriella, also, who denied that she knew the meaning of the word ‘cacique’, a term used all over the Hispanic world for a local political boss, but which came originally from a South American Indian derivation. I saw it printed in the local Asunción papers many times. The previous President of Paraguay, Carlos Wasmozy, was in gaol for four years, for having embezzled US$4 million – that was all they could find, anyway: a year for every million stolen. Getting corrupt officials into court at all was hard. ‘Impunidad’ – impunity – was one of the problems. Bribery was so rife that a little well-spread money prevented much from coming into the open or, if it did come out, from anything being done to prosecute or convict. The ordinary policeman was paid US$100 a month – just $25 a week, the same as Gabriella paid her cleaning maid – and the police had not been paid for three months because the coffers of the State were empty, or so it was claimed. The prison guards had not been paid for a year. In the remote north of the country the press reported that these prison guards were being fed by the prisoners’ families, who also brought food in for the inmates, who otherwise would have starved, there being no official funds to feed them. Under such circumstances corruption and bribery were inevitable. Wealthy prisoners who by bad luck found themselves in gaol soon managed to bribe their way out again: the papers frequently reported on such cases.

The question as to why no public servants had been paid for so long was easily answered: the government had run out of money, and if they simply printed more banknotes, as South American governments had in the past, they would fuel inflation and cut off the IMF and International banks as potential donors for further hard currency loans. ‘You will have noticed how many of the waterpipes in the streets of Asunción are broken,’ Gabriella had remarked. I had noticed. There were leaks everywhere, spilling out into the streets, flooding the pavements, a side effect of which was vigorous tree, shrub and weed growth beside the roads, among the cracked pavements, and even in the potholes of the lesser used streets. Asunción had been hacked out of sub-tropical jungle, and given half a chance the jungle would reclaim it again.

‘The water company, State-owned, borrowed US$10 million for repairs from a US based international agency,’ she continued. ‘The construction company that got the contract was owned by the head of the water company’s brother. A $10 million hole was dug in the ground, achieving nothing. No leaks were repaired. The hole was abandoned. Obras inconcluidas – “abandoned works” – should be the Paraguayan national motto. The $10 million disappeared abroad into offshore bank accounts. The water company officials have not been paid for more than a year. Now we have a large, useless hole, a $10 million debt, and a leaking water system. About a third of all the water is lost through leaks and broken pipes. Scientific tests have shown that the water is seriously contaminated – cholera and typhoid among other infections are in the system.’ Before Stroessner there had been no piped water at all, just as there had been no airport, or paved, metalled roads. People had their own wells, or depended on water sellers who toured the capital with mule-drawn tanks. Now there were frequent electricity blackouts, and the petrol stations regularly ran out of fuel. Those who could afford them had emergency electricity generators. In spite of the fleets of stolen luxury cars, Asunción more closely resembled a decaying African city, falling apart after the European colonials left, than anywhere in Europe. Stroessner had attracted immigrants and capital because he accepted gangsters on the run, fraudsters, conmen, Nazi war criminals with stolen loot, and because he offered a stable, authoritarian government which built roads, created infrastructure, and limited corruption to himself and his cronies. Now he was gone what he built up was in no way maintained or replaced. Paraguayans had not paid for these things, foreigners had. They felt, like colonial peoples newly liberated, no debt to the past, no sense of possession. His successors were bent purely on looting the country and fleeing abroad with what wealth they could steal. According to a report in Ultima Hora, the only income the Paraguayan government now had was the monthly US$16 million from Brazil for hydroelectrical power Paraguay exported across the border. Without this sum the government would be completely bankrupt. Yet it was not enough to pay even the civil servants. There had been a plaintive letter published in the papers from Paraguay’s ambassadors abroad. They, too, had not been paid for a year, and the rents on their embassies and residencies were in default. Unless money was forthcoming, embassies and residencies could soon be repossessed. This was all a minor nuisance for the few very rich in Paraguay, with their money abroad in offshore havens, their houses with tall walls built round them manned by armed guards, or sequestered on 200,000-hectare ranches. For the great majority of the country, it made life a grinding misery. Paraguay was potentially a very rich country, fertile and replete with mineral resources, yet so badly was it managed, and so feebly was it cultivated that it imported even basic foodstuffs. The supermarkets were full of goods brought in from Brazil, Argentina and Europe that could easily have been grown domestically.