ROBERT CARVER
Paradise with Serpents
TRAVELS IN THE LOST WORLD
OF PARAGUAY

Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by Harper Perennial 2007

Copyright © Robert Carver 2007

Map © HarperCollinsPublishers, designed by HL Studios, Oxfordshire

Robert Carver asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Source ISBN: 9780002570961

Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2016 ISBN 9780007370351

Version: 2016-01-12

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

Praise

From the reviews of The Accursed Mountains:

‘A memorable debut. Robert Carver has fulfilled the dream of every travel writer to find somewhere strange, remote and unvisited, and to pin it to the printed page. The Accursed Mountains is a tale at once endlessly diverting and profoundly tragic’

WILLIAM DALRYMPLE

‘One of the most exciting travel books for a generation’

Spectator

‘A classic’

JUSTIN CARTWRIGHT, Books of the Year, Observer

‘A dazzling account of a journey – always bizarre, often comic, and increasingly nightmarish – through one of the most dangerous backwaters currently to be found anywhere’

PETER HOPKIRK

‘A splendid account of a courageous journey’

DERVLA MURPHY

‘Required reading’

PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR

‘Enviable writing skills … fresh horrors on every page’

JUSTIN WINTLE, The Times

‘A gripping account of Albania in the 1990s’

JAMES OWEN, Daily Telegraph

Dedication

Dedicated toSt Antony of Padua

Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes

Epigraph

Unhappy is the nation in need of heroes

Bertolt Brecht

Cada uno hace su propia aventura Everyone makes his own fortune

Miguel Cervantes de Vedra

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Epigraph

Map

I VOICES IN THE DARK

1 The Silver of the Mine

2 An Ambassador is Born

3 Counting Paraguay

4 Du Côté de Chez Madame Lynch

5 Paraguay, Champion of America

6 An Ambassador is Uncovered

II PLOUGHING THE SEAS

7 The Gigantic Province of the Indies

8 MAMBFAK

9 Piranha Soup

10 Up River

11 Smuggler’s Paradise

III FLOWERING CANNON

12 Rumble in the Jungle

13 The Book of Complaint and Enticement

14 Southern Exposure

15 Du Côté de Chez Voltaire Molesworth

16 The Strange Case of the Missing Pictures

17 Gran Chaco

18 Sol y Sombra

19 El Día de la Virgen de la Merced

20 Endgame

21 Charlie Carver’s Gold Watch

Some Sources and Further Reading

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

Map

I VOICES IN THE DARK

‘When I first came to Asunción from Spain, I realised that I’d arrived in paradise. The air was warm, the light was tropical, and the shuttered colonial houses suggested sensual, tranquil lives. At night we’d go out walking the streets and I’d be aware of two things; the smell of jasmine and the sound of voices in the dark. But like any paradise, this one had serpents.’

Josefina Plá, Spanish poet

One
The Silver of the Mine

In the closing years of the 19th century a forgotten man returned to his home town in the Midlands of England, after an absence of more than thirty years. He had long been given up for dead. His father had been a wealthy man, an industrialist who owned lace factories and coal mines. This man had two sons, one who stayed at home and entered the family businesses, the other who went off to seek his fortune in the United States of America; he was never heard of again, and when the head of the family died his great fortune was left to both of his sons, in equal parts, though one of them had vanished, apparently for ever. In his will he had specified that advertisements in every English-language newspaper around the world should be run, each week, for a year, to inform the lost son of his new fortune, so that he could return to claim it, if he was still alive. At the end of that period, if the missing son had not appeared, his half of the family fortune was to go to charity, to found a theatre and a public hospital. His will was done. No one stepped forward to claim half of the great fortune. As a result, at the end of the year, the Nottingham Playhouse and the Nottingham Free Hospital came into being, founded and funded by half this man’s wealth.

Then, years later, sensationally, a man returned from abroad, claiming to be the missing son. My grandfather Roy, at the time a schoolboy, recalled this event vividly. In his sixties, in the 1950s, Roy told me about this prodigal returned: a tall, massively built man who dressed in ‘the American style’, with broad-brimmed hat, long coat, embroidered high-heeled boots, silver Mexican spurs, and a fancy multicoloured waistcoat. He spoke with a marked American drawl, though spoke little but listened attentively to what others said. This man was Charlie Carver, my great-great-grand-uncle. He had returned home, at last, and he had a very strange tale to tell.

He had left England as a restless young man, determined to seek his fortune in the post-1845 gold and silver diggings of Western America. He had taken ship for San Francisco, and had arrived safely. Several letters had been received by the family back in England. Then nothing – silence for over thirty years. What had happened was as follows: in a bar-room brawl Charlie had been hit over the head, and was knocked unconscious. When he came to he could not remember who he was. He had been robbed and had no papers or possessions to give him any clues as to his identity. He found that he had been shanghai-ed and was on board a sailing clipper bound for Australia, enrolled by persons unknown for a bounty, as a common seaman. For the next five years he served, first as an ordinary seaman, then as ticketed mate, on board the big sailing vessels that crossed the Pacific. For all this time he still had no idea who he was, nor where he came from. He acquired an American accent and mannerisms. Then, tiring of the sea, and taking his savings, he disembarked in the States, determined to seek his fortune on land. He tried many trades and moved from town to town, one of the legion of homeless men drifting around the West in the 1970s and 1980s as the frontier closed in. Finally, he found a good position as a mining supervisor, south of the border, in Mexico. He still had no idea who he was, and was known to many simply as ‘Jack’, or el hombre sin nom – the man with no name. One day, inspecting a shaft deep inside the mine, a distant rumble was heard; it could mean only one thing – a fall. The miners, including Charlie Carver, alias ‘Jack’, all rushed for the distant pinpoint of light that was the entrance. They were too late. Dust, rock, pit props rained down upon them. Amid curses and cries of terror they fell to the ground, crushed under the weight of debris. More than twenty men died in that fall, but Charlie Carver was not one of them. He had a broken wrist and a dislocated shoulder, was bruised and cut about the head, but when the rescue party finally managed to dig the survivors out of the rubble, a shocked, semi-delirious voice cried out, in English, for he could no longer recall any Spanish, ‘I’m Charlie Carver from Nottingham – what am I doing here?’ The blows to his head caused by the rockfall had brought back his knowledge of who he was – and erased his memories of the previous thirty years. He had no idea at all what he had done or where he had been in the missing decades. His last memory was of a fight in a low saloon on the Barbary Coast of San Francisco. This time, however, there were clues – his bankbook, his mate’s ticket and discharge papers, his clothes with their tell-tale maker’s labels from San Francisco and Sydney. And there were people at the mine who had known where he had been, where he had worked before, because he had told them before the accident.

After he recovered his health he became a detective on the trail of his own past. He retraced his steps, back to San Francisco. There, in the shipping offices and newspaper stacks where the back-numbers were kept, he was able to trace his life as an anonymous seaman from the arrivals and departures of the grain ships, the muster lists and crew signings-on; on his mate’s ticket he was described simply as ‘Jack of England, Full Mate and Master-Mariner’. He had made his mark on the ticket, not signed it, indicating that in that other life he could not write. Somewhere in his travels he had learnt to use a knife and revolver. He found a keenly whetted blade in a leather sheath hidden in his left boot, and a pair of old, battered, but very serviceable Navy Colt .45 revolvers wrapped in oilskins. On his own body he found scars which he had a doctor examine: they were from the cat-o’-nine-tails, from fist fights, from knife wounds, and at least two puckered scars were old bullet wounds. On his back the doctor also discovered a tattoo of a Polynesian type then only found in Tahiti, made with native ink. It was in the newspaper offices in San Francisco that he saw the advertisements placed for him all those years ago, after his father died. He said afterwards, when he returned to England, that this was the only moment he lost himself, when, alone and surrounded by mounds of yellowing newsprint, he broke down and wept uncontrollably. He said he could still remember the bay rum lotion his father had used after shaving, the memory of it driving him to despair in his loss and pain.

He was now two men. In his mind he was still the young, foolhardy, naive Englishman Charlie Carver, who had only just got off the boat in San Francisco to seek his fortune, but in his body he was the scarred, muscular, hard-bitten middle-aged man who had lived rough across the Pacific for decades, an experienced seaman who had lived under the lash, and a silver mining engineer to boot. The latter persona had been illiterate, nameless and left-handed; the former discovered he had genteel manners, was well-spoken and wrote in a fine, educated hand. He even recalled French poetry and Latin oratory he had learnt at school. He had saved some money – not a fortune, but enough to return to England. He had spoken fluent, colloquial Spanish after his years in Mexico, Texas and California, but the blows to his head in the mine accident had erased all that – and he had become right-handed once again. But he still spoke English with an American accent – and he could still use his weapons. My grandfather Roy was one of several family members who were shown his prowess as he blew a line of empty bottles off the top of a wall, using both his revolvers. He had not missed a single bottle, my grandfather recalled – twelve bullets had hit twelve bottles.

The return of Charlie Carver caused a sensation. His family recognized him immediately: he had changed, of course, but was still in essence the same man in voice and body. When the two brothers saw each other for the first time in three decades they both spontaneously burst into tears. Charlie was now more or less broke. His half of the great fortune had long ago been disbursed to charity, but his brother Bertie then made an outstandingly generous move. He split his own half of the inheritance in half, and gave one half to his brother.

There, by rights, the story should have ended. Now a wealthy man, with enough money to last him the rest of his days, Charlie Carver should have settled down to comfortable provincial obscurity. But he didn’t. He was still gripped by the fever of the silver mines. He had become convinced, like many others, that there was still a hidden Inca city lost in the jungles on the borders of Bolivia, Paraguay and Brazil, a city founded on the wealth of one of the richest silver mines in the Americas. In the 1780s the revolt of Tupac Amaru, a direct descendant of the last Inca rulers, caught the Spanish authorities by surprise. The whole eastern province of what is now Bolivia, then part of the viceroyalty of Peru, was closed to the Spanish for several years. Systematically, the rebels destroyed the extensive gold and silver mines of the region, the survivors retreating eventually into impenetrable jungle to escape the revengeful Spanish. There they founded an Inca city-state which had as its currency and metal of utility the great hoard of gold and silver that the rebels had seized. Iron and copper had they none, so their plates, their knives and forks, their tools and implements were all made of either silver or gold; they also blended these two elements, making that precious metal known to the ancients as electrum. The Spanish never found the lost mines. Those who had known of their existence had been murdered in the rebellion, and the rebels had hidden and destroyed the entrances to these once profitable enterprises. Unlike El Dorado, these mines were not a myth – they had been producing gold and silver under Spanish tutelage before Tupac Amaru’s rebellion. Using old maps, a North American had found one of these hidden mines in the late 19th century, which when opened up began to produce huge quantities of rich gold ore. So, if the quest was a fantasy, it was a least a fantasy with a strong basis in factual history.

Charlie Carver had acquired a map. He would not show it to anyone, would not tell anyone where he had got it, nor would he even say in which London bank vault he had deposited it. He made his plans calmly and carefully. Now, thanks to his brother’s generosity, he had the money to equip a serious expedition. He interviewed a number of candidates for his proposed venture into the jungle to search for Tupac Amaru’s lost city, sometimes called Paititi. One of the young hopefuls was a certain Fawcett, later to be known as Colonel Fawcett, who was to lose his life in the South American jungles looking for just such a lost city of gold. The two did not hit it off. Charlie Carver found Fawcett excessively romantic – a dreamer caught up in a web of fantasy involving a lost Atlantis in the depths of the South American rainforest. Also, and perhaps as pertinently, Fawcett had no money to contribute to the expedition. Eventually a suitable, tough, hard-bitten American was found, equipped with dollars instead of romance, and the two of them set off for Buenos Aires by ship, then up the Paraguay and Parana rivers on the Mihailovich steamer to Asunción, Concepción and eventually up into the tropical wilderness, still unmapped, right on the borders of Bolivia and Brazil.

The old pattern repeated itself. At first, regular letters were received by the family at home in England – then silence, nothing. A long, an overlong silence. Enquiries began to be made by anxious relatives and the British Embassy in Asunción was stirred into action. There was no news. Once again, Charlie Carver had simply vanished into the blue. This time, though, there was to be no miracle, no reprieve. The last people who had seen Charlie and his American partner alive were a small group of Spanish Catholic missionaries, working with Indians only just contacted by whites, on the very edge of known territory. The two explorers had stayed with the priests for several days before departing for the interior, into a region no whites were thought to have ever penetrated before. The smoke of their camp fires had been seen in the distance, coiling up into the sky for several days – then nothing. Some six months later, newly contacted semi-Christianized Indians appeared at the mission with several objects of European manufacture, shreds of cloth, buttons, and a smashed gold-plated, full-hunter pocket watch – manufactured in New York, with Charlie Carver’s name engraved inside it, together with his family address in England. It was all that remained of the expedition. Somewhere in the interior the two men had been killed by hostile Indians. The Indians who brought in the pathetic remains did not even know the tribe which had carried out the attack – they had traded the objects with another tribe, who had had them from yet another. The watch was returned to England, and was even repaired. My grandfather Roy showed it to me when I was a young boy, flicking open the front to show me Charlie’s name engraved in Victorian copperplate script. It still had many dents and bruises on its shell which no amount of repair could ever redress. Somewhere in the jungle the remains of Charlie Carver and his partner lay for ever lost to the outside world. Like so many Europeans they had searched for treasure in America only to find death.

That, too, should have been the end of the story. But it wasn’t quite. Colonel Fawcett, the rejected candidate, got a job as a boundary surveyor in South America, and after his experiences there returned again and again to try to find the lost city of gold and silver, until he too lost his life in the attempt. But before he died he told his great friend the author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle about his theories, about a lost Atlantis in the jungle, Phoenician traders on the River Amazon, about the lost city of Paititi, and about Charlie Carver and his expedition. This information, as we shall eventually see, Conan Doyle eventually put to very good use.

After my book on Albania had been published the distinguished author and former Times foreign correspondent Peter Hopkirk, who had been instrumental in getting my first book published, asked me ‘Where are you going next? You can go anywhere now, you know.’ I replied that I was going to go to Paraguay. ‘Why?’ I explained to him about my great-great-grand-uncle Charlie Carver. ‘To do an “in-the-footsteps-of” book, then?’ he asked skeptically. ‘The trail will be a bit cold after, what, a hundred years.’ No, I replied, not at all. I had no interest in ‘in-the-footsteps-of’ travel books. Besides, Charlie’s footsteps were only too well known – he walked into virgin jungle and was killed by Indians, end of story. What I was interested in were the half-made, half-abandoned places in the world, like Albania and Paraguay – and one could see Paraguay as a sort of South American Albania – lawless, piratical, bandit-ridden and corrupt, where neither tourists nor travel writers usually penetrated. And there was something else. South America had attracted the Spanish and countless other European adventurers who hoped to make their fortunes out of the river of silver and gold that had flowed, at such cost in human misery and suffering, after the Conquest. Yet quite another vision of America had also seized the imagination of the European mind. America could become a place of redemption, a place where the human spirit could be reborn, remade and refined. From its first discovery America had been a realm where imaginary Utopias could be set, and a place European dreamers could actually set sail for, arrive in and set up ideal communities which would, it was hoped, become beacons to mankind. Paraguay, from the first, had been a place which attracted Utopians and idealists. First the Jesuits had experimented with their Reducciones, theocratic communities of Christianized Indians ordered by a multinational caste of Jesuit priests; later 19th-century German nationalists, fin de siècle Australian communists, Mennonites, Moonies, and even renegade Nazis had all tried to set up their colonies in Paraguay. You could make a case that what New England was to Cotton Mather – a place where the exiled English Puritans could attempt to build the City Upon a Hill, which would be a light to lighten the gentiles – so was Paraguay the South American equivalent. In a strange sense the bifurcation of the human mind was reflected in the European’s Manichean obsession with America – a place from which to loot and steal gold and silver, to pillage, rape and plunder, and a place to found ideal communities which would redeem mankind, straighten the crooked timber of humanity, and to build the Perfect City.

Both Charlie Carver and I were heirs to this dual, paradoxical, contradictory tradition, for we were both descended, after all, from John Carver, a Puritan gentleman from the English Midlands who in 1620 procured a vessel in Holland that was renamed the Mayflower, and who was then elected Master of the company of Pilgrims for the voyage, and on arrival in New England was elected first Governor of Plymouth Colony, Massachusetts. Though the English settlement eventually prospered, the first Governor did not. He was shot with an arrow by an Indian while out ploughing the land and died of his wound, leaving behind his wife and children, and his brother who had accompanied him on the Atlantic crossing, one Robert Carver. His descendant, Jonathan Carver, a captain in the Massachusetts Militia, had taken the Union flag of Great Britain to its furthest point west in the years immediately before the Revolution of 1776. He had been the first anglophone to overwinter with the Lakota Sioux, had made detailed plans to cross the Rockies and reach the Pacific coast, and whose travel book – published in London on his return – had proved a sensation all over Europe, translated into at least seven languages. He became a figure in literary London and at Court, and never returned to America. He was a disciple of the French philosophes, and in his tolerant appreciation of Indian culture and moeurs was a century and a half ahead of his time. Our family, I argued, had made a habit of going to America on quests – mine would be in the tradition.

I explained all this over several cups of cappuccino in a London coffee bar to Peter Hopkirk. He thought about it and gave a slight smile of approval. ‘It does sound like an interesting quest. But remember, two Carvers have already been killed by American Indian arrows. Just make absolutely sure you are not the third. Always remember, you can’t write a book if you are killed while researching it. Jonathan Carver is clearly the one to emulate. Steer well clear of silver mines, I should.’ This was very good advice, and I often thought about it later when I found myself in much hotter water than I would ever have thought it possible to get into – and then get out of alive.

Two
An Ambassador is Born

At Sao Paulo airport the passengers in the transit lounge slumped forward like the dead, eyes shut, their heads resting downwards, caught in metal and canvas cradles, motionless, their arms hanging limply beside them. Above, around, and all over them hovered lean, lithe, intense young girls dressed in white t-shirts and jeans, with bare suntanned midriffs, their fingers, fists and elbows kneading their clients’ skulls, backs, shoulders, torsos and feet. This service, unlocking flight-tautened muscles and imparting spiritual calm, cost five US dollars, and took place in full view of everyone; a whole line of these modern penitents were slumped as if in prayer between the coffee stall and the newspaper stand. The newspapers and magazines on sale were all from the Americas – from all over Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Peru, Bolivia and Venezuela, as well as Mexico and the US. There was nothing from Europe – and nothing, of course, from Paraguay: sometimes known optimistically as the Switzerland of the continent, it was more like the Tibet. You could get no information on the place anywhere. I was in a new continent, a new hemisphere, and a New World – and one in which my destination was as invisible as it had been in England.

The transit passengers, mostly Brazilians waiting for internal flights, whether upright, prone or at all angles between, were uniformly young, elegant and beautifully dressed. Wasp-waisted black men, ranging from double espresso to palest café au lait, drifted past me dressed in impossibly stylish suits of pastel hues. They were shod in elegant patent shoes which looked like Milan goes Carnival in Rio. There was a calm, almost Zen atmosphere to this hyper-modern airport, hi-tech tranquillity, luxe, calme and volupté. By definition, only the richest could afford to fly in this huge but deeply divided society. The chaos, the colour, the poverty of the favelas was nowhere in evidence. Problems? What problems? you might ask yourself. But the newspapers reminded you every time you glanced at their headlines. Argentina, Brazil, much of South America was in deep crisis. Argentina had withdrawn from its commitment to value the peso on par with the dollar. Foreign currency reserves had vanished in unexplained circumstances. The banks had shut their doors. Now outside the angry protesters, already known as los ahorristas, hammered at the roller-shutter doors with sticks and batons, while the police looked on sympathetically – they too had lost their savings: this was a middle-class and middle-aged protest. They wanted their money back. They had trusted their government but their government had, in effect, stolen their money, promising to honour an exchange rate, then reneging, then closing the banks by fiat, refusing to allow savers access to their own money. Who would ever trust their money to an Argentine bank again? How could you run any sort of economy when the banks were untrustworthy and closed the doors on their own customers? Argentina could not, would not service its international debts. It had borrowed and borrowed and borrowed, but the money had all been stolen or wasted. No new loans could be negotiated until the country agreed to start repaying the interest on its old loans. There were already food shortages, medical supplies running out, layoffs and bankruptcies. Kidnapping and gunlaw had proliferated. The demonstrations in the streets against the government were turning ugly. One of the richest – in theory at least – countries in the world was behaving like one of the poorest. In Brazil the situation teetered on the edge of crisis. And what of Paraguay? It was hard to find anything out about that secretive and isolated country. I would simply have to go and find out for myself.

Initially, I had favoured the classic approach into the country – via Argentina – to Buenos Aires, and up the River Plate and River Paraguay to Asunción. It was the route everyone had always taken from the first Spanish conquistadors to the exiled Argentine President Perón. But the old Mihailovich steamers had passed out of service, and Paraguay itself had started to look away from Argentina, from the south and its past, instead looking east to Brazil, and north to Miami and the USA. So I decided to fly to Asunción via Sao Paulo. There was another reason, apart from chaos, that I did not want to go via Argentina. It is no secret that the relations between Paraguay and Argentina have always been poor. Every Argentine I had met in London – and I had met dozens of them – had expressed a low opinion of Paraguay and Paraguayans. I was not going to get any helpful information from such entrenched and biased enemies of the country I wanted to explore. They seemed to regard the Paraguayans as backward natives, Indians in tents, almost savages. Their contempt was palpable.

From time to time, from the tannoy, a soft, sibilant voice would whisper departures in Brazilian-accented Portuguese to destinations from a poet’s lexicon – Manaos and Rio de Janeiro, Bahia de San Salvador and Cartagena de las Indias, Valparaiso and Tegucigalpa. However, there was just one flight to Paraguay and I would have to wait six hours for it. I found the departure gate and read the notice posted in front of it in Spanish, Portuguese and English: ‘Passengers are advised that all revolvers, automatics, rifles and other firearms must be unloaded with ammunition and packed inside luggage that has been checked in. No person carrying loaded or unloaded weapons will be allowed on to the plane. Thank you for your co-operation.’

With a sinking heart I realized that this was an official indication of what I had been warned of before – that Paraguayans have a love affair with powder and shot, pistol and lead, that knows no bounds. ‘Do they all carry pistols?’ I had asked a seasoned old Paraguay hand in London. ‘Well, I wouldn’t say all – no, not by a long chalk. However, it is fairly common. I mean, there are shootings all the time – I mean every day, everywhere. And knife fights, of course. It’s as well to be very polite to people. That generally pays off. Unless they want to kill you, in which case no amount of politeness would help.’ This was useful advice, I suppose: I had made a mental note to be more than usually polite. In the event, there might have been some Paraguayans I met during my eventful trip who were not armed with some sort of pistol, sub-machine gun, machete or knife, but I couldn’t actually swear to it. Often we find ourselves the embarrassed witness of other people’s intimate little moments when they think they are not being observed – the surreptitious scratch of the groin, the furtive pick of the nose, the fart eased out apparently unnoticed. In Paraguay these moments always revolved around someone’s jacket falling open to reveal a gleaming or matt-black automatic peeping out coyly from waistband or shoulder holster; a drawer opened by mistake to display a cluster of Uzi sub-machine guns, a brace of pump-action sawn-off shotguns, or a vintage Luger with an embossed swastika on the wooden handle. As tea is to China, chocolate to Switzerland or red wine to France, so are firearms to Paraguay.

The first group of Paraguayans I saw, clearly waiting for the same flight as myself, were obviously vaqueros or gauchos – cowboys in jeans and stetson hats, sprawled on the bench seats near the departure gate. Each of them had a tan cowhide grip out of which protruded the butts of their rifles. They all wore empty leather pistol holsters and belts with empty bullet holders. They had obviously read the same notice I had and would check their luggage in when the counter opened. I was tempted to go and talk to them, but didn’t. They looked tired, many of them actually kept falling asleep. They had clearly driven a herd of cattle across the border from Paraguay to Brazil, and were now returning home the quickest way possible. They would have sold their horses along with the cattle – it would make no sense to ride them back. Besides a certain natural diffidence in pushing myself forward into such an uncompromising bunch, there was a question of language. If the word ‘Indian’ did not convey political incorrectness, one would have said these were Indians. They had coppery skins and hooked noses, dark lank hair and tight, compact bodies. They were cholos, campesinos or indigenos, though, that was what one called them. Indio was considered by many a term of abuse and never used politely, though the first morning I walked through the central square in Asunción a very drunk man approached me from the favela below the Presidential Palace, cackling and swaying – ‘Yo soy indio, señor,’ he shouted at me. It was 7.30am and he was well away.

There was also the question of what language one should use in speaking to people. Graham Greene, who had visited Paraguay in the depths of the Stroessner dictatorship, had been warned that if he spoke in Spanish in the countryside, he might be assumed to be being patronizing and so run the risk of being shot. On the other hand, if he spoke Guarani, the language of the predominant ethnic group, he might be assumed to be insulting, considering them to be low, ignorant fellows. There was a third lingo, too, called Jalape, which was a mixture of Spanish and Guarani, just to make things clear as mud. I asked my Paraguay expert in London about this. ‘Well, you could always try speaking to them in English – that wouldn’t cause any offence. Not that they’d understand you, of course. In the Chaco the locals speak a version of 17th-century plattdeutsch. They learnt it from the Mennonites who farm out there. So you can find this chappie who knows where the alcalde’s office is but the only language he can give you instructions in is his own tribal palaver and 17th-century Low German. I suppose you speak that fluently, of course?’ I mumbled something about French and Italian. ‘Well, those won’t be much use. The other Germans, the Third Reich lot, don’t actually say “Heil Hitler” any more, but rather “Grüss Gott”. You could manage that, I suppose?’ Surely now that Stroessner, the half-Guarani, half-Bavarian dictator who had had a signed photograph of Hitler in his office and wore a pair of Goering’s boots, had been expelled from the country, things were rather better? ‘Rather worse, if anything. He ran a tight ship, did Don Alfredo. If you were a communist he had your balls cut off with a chainsaw to the sound of Guarani harp music. But if you were white, reasonably prosperous looking and apolitical he gave you no grief. Asunción in those days was a frightened town but a safe one. Now it’s frightened and very unsafe. No one is really in charge, no one has been paid for months, in some cases for years. Tempers are short, so is cash, and with the poor even food. In the last year things have gone downhill badly. There’s talk of a coup in the offing – or a revolution. Keep your head down is my advice.’ Advice I fervently hoped I was going to be able to keep.

The flight was all but empty. I had been earnestly quizzed by the security staff about my armoury. Was I certain I didn’t have any little amuse-gueules tucked away in my boots, sleeves, or hat? No little derringer pistols, ladies’ handguns, odd trifles I might in my haste have forgotten? No plastic guns, like the Glock, which wouldn’t have shown up in the X-ray machine? We were all frisked and turned over, very politely, three times before we were allowed on board. The group of cowboys sat at the front and got merry on beer. I sat at the back and concentrated on Argentine red wine. The plane went on afterwards to Cordoba in Argentina – Paraguay was just an embarrassing little stop to be got over as quickly as possible. The flight seemed very quick. Before I knew it we were banking over the river, below us a tropical city of low-rise redroofed houses, much dark green foliage, and a few taller buildings in the centre. My stomach knotted up tightly. Why on earth was I going into one of the most dangerous countries on Earth? I let the cowboys – indeed let all the other passengers – get off first, then I ambled slowly in late-afternoon tropical heat across the tarmac. The airport building was shabby concrete, low and small. You walked to the terminal on foot. I had had to fill in an old-fashioned white immigration card, exactly the same size and type as I’d filled in as a child in colonial Cyprus. ‘I’ve flown back into the 1950s,’ I thought, as I made for the Customs Hall.

Inside, under a high ceiling, a strange scene was being enacted. Several passengers with open suitcases were in deep argument with uniformed Customs officials. Between them were being passed a collection of automatics, pistols, rifles, sub-machine guns and boxes of ammunition that had clearly come out of the luggage. They were arguing, politely but forcefully about how much duty should be paid on these items. All the Customs men were engaged in this task. I kept walking.

A young woman in a smart uniform darted forward and smiled at me. ‘¿Diplomatico?’ she asked.

This threw me. ‘Yo soy inglés,’ I stammered.

‘¡Bravo!’ she said. ‘¡Bravo – el embajador británico!’ even more loudly, and started to applaud me, clapping her hands. The Customs men looked up at me from their deliberations, and gave me great big smiles. Unnervingly, they and their clients with the weaponry all started to applaud me, clapping their hands and calling out. ‘¡Bravo … ! ¡Bravo! ¡El embajador británico!’ I had only a small bag on wheels: I bowed to the left and to the right of me, and gave what I thought might pass as an ambassadorial benediction with my free hand, and kept on my way.

Another man stepped forward, took my immigration card, stamped my passport, and gave me a smart salute. ‘Any firearms, Your Excellency?’ he asked in Spanish.

‘No, señor, nada de nada,’ I replied. ‘Pasar, pasar, Excelencia,’ he said, motioning me with his hand. I moved out into the arrivals hall, which was already all but empty. I was in Paraguay, reborn as an ambassador. I kept walking until I saw the aseos [toilets], and then darted in. I was now in a muck sweat, and it wasn’t the heat. I had arrived all right, but what the hell had I got myself into?

The queue at the Cambio was short but the wait interminable. In front of me was a young North American banker and his girlfriend, here on business. ‘She speaks German so we should be OK,’ he told me. We exchanged cards. They were staying at Madame Lynch’s old estancia, now the best hotel in Asunción. Eliza Lynch is one of the few people connected with Paraguay known to the outside world. She was the mistress and éminence grise of the mid-nineteenth-century dictator López, who ruined the country with his insane war against Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay all at the same time.

When my turn came I asked the cashier behind the counter to change US$100 into guarani. He look at me as if I was crazy. ‘You want to change all of this into guaranis?’ His expression told me that whatever else Paraguay was going to be it was not going to be expensive. My glance fell lightly on the automatic pistol in a shoulder holster under his arm, and a large revolver he was using as a paperweight to hold down mounds of ancient and dirty bank notes from being blown all over the place by the fan. My eyes slid, unavoidably, to the security guard who was sitting on a chair, the chair high on a desk, at the far end of the room. He was in uniform and had a bazooka on his shoulder. It was pointed straight at me. There was a heavy metal grill between me and the man counting and re-counting hundreds of thousands of guarani notes, but the bazooka and the man’s stare made it hard for me to concentrate on the transaction. I did have the wit to ask for one of the ten thousand notes to be broken down into thousands. I hate the airport taxi rip-off, and always get the bus into town if there is one. I knew already the bus driver wouldn’t be able to change a thousand guarani note. The man with the bazooka wasn’t South American theatricals, I later discovered. The current method of bank robbery in Paraguay and Brazil was with an armoured car; these military vehicles simply ploughed into the banks and smashed through whatever bars were there. Bitter experience had taught the Paraguayans that a man with an antitank weapon was the only way of stopping these heists. Every bank I went into had one of these characters, as well as the run-of-the-mill fellows with sub-machine guns, pistols and grenades. Bank robberies were as common as thunderstorms and as violent. One of the current scandals in the papers, I discovered, was the use of a Paraguayan army armoured car in a bank robbery just across the border in Brazil. The Minister of Defence and the President were accused of having rented out the armoured car to the mob who carried out the raid, in return for a share of the proceeds. The Brazilians claimed they had photos of the armoured car during the raid, and then afterwards, back in its army park in Paraguay. They claimed US$15 million had been stolen, but the Paraguayan press claimed this was an exaggeration – more like $8 million, they thought. When asked why he robbed banks, Butch Cassidy had replied: ‘It’s where they keep the money.’ He had been gunned down in Bolivia, eventually, just next door to Paraguay.

I evaded the lurking taxi-drivers who I knew might cheat – and possibly rob me – and walked out to the bus stop. A couple of obviously quite poor locals were waiting for the bus into town. They eyed me cautiously, but then looked away. A more hopeful fellow carried a briefcase, wore a smart watch and had a shirt with a tie. I fell into conversation with him, and explained I was new to the country – did one buy a ticket on the bus, from a driver, or from a kiosk? He was helpful and informative and I was pleased to discover that I understood his Spanish and he understood mine. The bus arrived, empty, and my new friend helped me get my ticket. We sat together, and I asked him about the state of things as we rolled towards town.

Luis Gonzalves was a Customs official, just coming off duty. Mercifully he had missed my apotheosis as fake ambassador. He gave me a thorough rundown on everything. Things were very bad. Fifteen banks had gone bust taking almost everyone’s savings with them. The government was both weak and deeply corrupt. You could trust neither the police nor the army – both were corrupt and criminal. Civil servants hadn’t been paid for six months, some not for a year. The police hadn’t been paid for three months, and if they weren’t paid soon there would be a revolution. Foreigners were leaving the country in droves – every plane out was packed to capacity, every plane in virtually empty. The only people making money were the cocaleros who exported cocaine, and the mafia who stole from everyone. What about crime? Very bad, he said, and getting worse. Buses held up and the passengers robbed, even in central Asunción, every day. Shootings and kidnappings. Bank robberies and stick-ups. Everyone was sick of it. Many wished Stroessner was back in power. ‘That was a paradise then, but we didn’t know it,’ he said, a view I heard echoed by almost everyone I met. No one I spoke to stood up for what passed for ‘democracy’ in Paraguay.

As he talked and I plied him with questions I looked out through the window, intrigued by my first sight of Paraguay on the ground. The earth was deep, laterite ochre red, the road pitted and ancient tarmac. As we came closer to the centre of Asunción the gardens grew lusher with tropical foliage, glossy green, sometimes studded with bright flowers. There were fine stucco houses of an Italianate style with red tile roofs, though everywhere was an air of decay and dereliction. The cars were surprisingly modern and the traffic busy. My premonition at the money changer at the airport that the bus fare would be tiny was correct. The fare turned out to be 1,300 guarani – about 25 US cents. Luis had told me that a 5,000 guarani note was ‘too big’ to expect the driver to change for a ticket. In the end Luis had put in 100 guaranis of his own money for my ticket, as I had only two hundreds.

I asked Luis what he thought of the hotel I had selected. It was near the Plaza Independencia. He made a face. ‘Not good. A very bad area. Much crime, robberies, prostitution, drugs, alcoholics.’ I rapidly changed my plans. The Hotel Embajador met with slightly more approval. ‘A better area – near the business district.’ There’s nothing like local knowledge and a local warning. He was kind enough to get off the bus by the Embajador and show me where it was. We shook hands and he departed. Just before he left he said, ‘Oh, and by the way, tomorrow is the annual census. Everything will be shut – everything. Everyone has to be off the streets for the whole day. No buses run, no taxis, nothing.’ As we had been talking on the bus he had asked me casually ‘Which part of Brazil do you come from?’ I said, ‘I’m English. From England.’ He creased up his face as if in slight pain and waved his hand in front of his chest, ‘Ohh – so far away …’ First an ambassador, then a traveller from Brazil. Paraguay was very different to anywhere I had ever been before. It was quite simply one of the most remote countries in the world, about which almost no one knew anything, which almost no one went to, and almost no one came from – or indeed ever came back from. I felt heartened by this, but also daunted. I felt very much alone and friendless. If anything happened to me out here no one would know or care. Paraguay was a place in which one could disappear without trace.

Three
Counting Paraguay

The heat of the tropical night faded after midnight; the dull roar of traffic was replaced by an absolute calm. I slept fitfully and woke at dawn, faint pale light creeping down the yellowing wall of my room, the shutters casting a shimmering tracery of dark and pallid shadow, a mobile set of bars ominously like those of a prison. I dressed and went out into the open patio. The pot plants and creepers snaked up towards the pale, faintly azured sky, still star-flecked. Leprous walls peeled and sagged, dead plaster like the mummified flesh of a long-buried corpse. Old, decrepit chairs sprawled as if cast away in some deserted, abandoned Spanish posada of a hundred years ago. Dust lay thick on the tiled floor. The shutters’ grey-ochre paint had blistered and flaked, the colour bleached away by heat and sun. The air smelt cool and earthy; I could hear birds twittering.

The Hotel Embajador had seen better days. It felt like something out of a Graham Greene novel – a place in old West Africa, pre-war Liberia, perhaps. I seemed to be the only guest. This was the sort of place Scobie had committed suicide in, I reflected. There was no air-conditioning and the electric bulbs had no shades. The walls were smeared with squashed mosquitoes and I had itched all night; I suspected bedbugs.

The young lad who had booked me in the night before was asleep on a couch in the foyer, fully dressed, with his shoes off. The hotel was on the first, second and third floors of a city centre building. I tiptoed to the open window and glanced out – the shutters were pulled back and the window open. The street below was deserted. A large Paraguayan flag hung idly from a 19th-century Parisian-inspired corner-building opposite, and on the top of the flagpole squatted a vulture, hunkered down, apparently asleep. Inside the hotel, on the wall opposite, above the sleeping boy, hung a gold-coloured plastic representation of Don Quixote, Sancho Panza, and the Don’s horse Rosinante. Windmills were the backdrop. Wherever you travel in the Hispanic world, you are sure to meet Don Quixote, not just as wall decoration, but in person, and Paraguay was to prove no exception.

The lad awoke with a start and gave me a sleepy, friendly smile. I beckoned to the list of refreshments advertised on the wall. Coffee, rolls, cheese sandwiches, soft drinks – what was available, I asked? He looked sheepish. ‘The woman who does the coffee and rolls and sandwiches won’t be in today – because of the census. No one can move. I have to stay here all day.’ I tried to persuade him to make me a cup of coffee – surely that at least was possible? But it wasn’t. He didn’t know how, or where the things were. I settled for a Coca-Cola, then went downstairs and out on to the silent streets.

The capital of Paraguay was as empty as if a nerve gas strike had wiped out the entire population in their sleep. Not a soul stirred, not a car, not a bus or taxi moved. It was now 6.30am. On a normal day in such a tropical city the place would already be bustling. I took my black bag with me and my cameras. The best photographs I was ever going to get without being disturbed or harassed would surely be today.

It was by now 7.30, and the first groups of students carrying clipboards began to move about from building to building. These were the sharp-end censors who did the actual counting. On the corners of the blocks, soldiers and armed police had appeared, standing in pairs. Trucks drove around dropping them off. I noticed the soldiers were all small and dark, and when I strode by they avoided my eyes and instead looked at the ground or into the middle distance. With my purposeful air, my black bag and my camera, it was evident that they thought I was something to do with the census, and a figure of authority. Much later, when I asked Gabriella d’Estigarribia what impression I made on the local people she had smiled and said, ‘They think you are a German from the Technical Service. You stride about, and look angry, and stare at people. Johnny Walker! Very gringo and dangerous. You frighten them.’

This was a blow, I confess. I had thought I made a slightly better impression. The Technical Service was the euphemism given to the secret police who did the torturing under General Stroessner’s regime, and who had not gone away after his fall. What was evident on this my first morning’s walkabout was that at six foot I was very tall, and also very white, and the ordinary soldiers and police were very small and dark, and that the small dark people shrank from the tall white people in Paraguay, when they thought they had power. You wear your continent’s history on your face, in your build, and in your skin colour. Whether I was Brazilian, German or British did not particularly matter: I was a white European in a country and a continent that had been conquered by tall white people, and whose descendants still largely owned, controlled and dominated it to this day, along with much of the rest of the world. It was not a comfortable realization. However liberal, however multicultural one felt oneself to be, in this continent one’s safety, even one’s continued physical existence depended upon being defended by a corrupt and unjustifiably empowered regime’s police force, of which one felt afraid oneself. It is possible to forget you are white if you live in Europe: in the Third World it never is.

As I roamed about taking photo after photo, I wondered whether I, too, was supposed to be indoors along with everyone else. No one challenged me, but if they did I had a feeling that simply saying I was a gringo turista was not going to be a good enough excuse. But I wasn’t challenged, far from it – I was obviously avoided and ignored, and so I wandered about with increasing confidence. There simply were no tourists in Asunción, I realized, so my movements were interpreted as being in some inscrutable way official. Better not to ask, they would be thinking – I might make trouble for myself.

I had spent a long time looking for a café that was open where I might be able to get a coffee and some breakfast, but the whole city was completely shut – not so much as a kiosk or corner store open. Later, the next day, in the newspaper Ultima Hora, I had seen a cartoon of a shivering Paraguayan family indoors trying to hide from view their smuggled TV set, fridge, freezer, hi-fi and so forth. Outside was a burglar wearing a black mask and carrying a swag bag, knocking on their door. ‘No thank you – we know who we are,’ the head of the household was saying. In Paraguay, as in Turkey, the censors actually entered every house and counted the people in every room, and noted down all the things they possessed. Each property had a sticker pasted on the outside door to prove they had been inspected. ‘Smuggling is the national industry of Paraguay,’ Graham Greene had observed, when he visited the country in the stronato, as the Stroessner years were called. ‘Contraband is the price of peace,’ Stroessner had stated, defining it as official policy. With the second lowest per capita income in South America, Paraguay imported more Scotch whisky than all the rest of South America put together. It was almost all immediately re-exported to neighbouring Brazil, Bolivia and Argentina. Paraguay was sometimes known as ‘the Switzerland of South America’ not because of its non-existent mountains or ski slopes, but because it was the regional haven for hot money, millionaires on the run, shady enterprises of all kinds, numbered bank accounts and smuggled luxury goods. As in Switzerland, there were a lot of cows and a lot of pastureland – but you didn’t make much of a living out of those. ‘Switzerland is where all the big criminals come together to hide the profits of their swindles and thefts,’ Juan Perón, dictator of Argentina had said in the 1950s, before being ousted. He should have known: he had sent Eva Perón across to Europe in 1947 to bank their own ill-gotten gains in Geneva. The bankers had put on a special celebratory dinner for her. The British government had refused her a visa and denied her entry as a harbourer of fugitive Nazis and handler of stolen Jewish gold. It was estimated by the Allied Enemy Property Bureau after the Second World War that the Nazis laundered 80% of the loot they had stolen from the Jews and the countries they occupied through Switzerland, with the full knowledge of the Swiss, and the remaining 20% through Argentina, Paraguay, Egypt and Syria, all sympathetic to the Nazi cause. It was the Swiss authorities who had suggested the Nazis add a ‘J’ on to the passports of German Jews before the war, so the Swiss could tell who they were and refuse them entry. ‘Few things have their beginnings in Switzerland,’ observed Scott Fitzgerald, ‘but many things have their endings there.’ Seedier, poorer, more evidently corrupt and oppressive, Paraguay was a downmarket latino, South American tropical version, more like Albania in ambience. Already in my strolls around the city centre I had seen the empty shells of many monumental steel and glass banks, their doors locked and shuttered, beggars sleeping on cardboard under their massive porticoes. Inside you could see the desks and tables covered in dust, with empty cartons on the floors from where the computers and office equipment had been taken away. Like desecrated cathedrals, I thought, these were modern temples of money that had failed, abandoned by their priests, acolytes and devotees, who now worshipped abroad, in Miami and the Cayman Islands.

The night before, although tired after my 18-hour journey from London, I had gone out into the city centre, curious and impatient to get some first impressions. The broken pavements, sandy soil spilling out, potholed streets and grime-stained walls suggested a city down on its luck, and slipping into dereliction. Closed shops, broken windows, beggars, dirt, unpainted walls, shutters falling off their hinges: no one had spent any money on this city for a long time. There were armed police everywhere, hanging around, and the 19th-century stucco buildings suggested a derelict Andalucian provincial town in Spain during the early years of General Franco, just after the Civil War. But the Indian women crouched on the pavements selling tropical fruit and vegetables, herbs, potions and unknown fruit drinks were from the New World, not the Old. I had been recommended the nearby Lido restaurant by the hotel clerk. Right opposite the Pantheon of Heroes, this was an atmospheric 1950s-style soda fountain, with pink granite counter top at which one sat, huge fans churning the air above one’s head. The place was run by capable, sensible Paraguayan women of a certain age, who wore pink uniforms with little pink caps. I ordered a veal escalope à la Milanese, with salad and bread, and a Pilsen beer. I had inwardly groaned when the waitress had appeared carrying the beer, and a bucket of ice with a glass inside it. Ice in beer is a favourite – and disastrous – tropical invention I had experienced in Malaysia and Indonesia. But I need not have worried. The glass rim had not touched the ice, and the bottle of beer was opened and thrust into the bucket in place of the glass, up to its neck in frosty coldness, as if champagne in an ice bucket. This was a hot country where they understood cold beer. I had last tasted an iced beer glass straight from the freezer in Australia, a country where they also understand the needs of thirsty, heat-choked men. The Paraguayan beer, brewed to a German lager recipe, was very cold and very good. The food was excellent too: the salad had a flavour completely unavailable in Europe today unless you grow your own vegetables without pesticides and fertilizers. Native pessimism led me to abstract about a third of the escalope and secrete it inside a paper napkin in my bag, together with a couple of slices of bread. I had a feeling there would be no food available on the morrow for any price. I was right, too. Together with an apple I had left over from my flight, and some boiled sweets, this was all I had to eat until the day after the census.

It was dark by 6pm. The night fell suddenly, like a curtain. Wood fires started up, pinpricks of light, from the shanty town on the sandbanks by the river. A breeze from the river wafted up the characteristic Third World smell of sweat, smoke, excrement and spices. By day I had been in Franco’s Spain, but by night it was Java or Malaysia. There were small children everywhere, ragged, energetic, vociferous and hungry. The Lido had two private armed guards in khaki uniform, one inside by the cash desk, the other outside by the door. The children begged for coins as the customers left. There was a charity box by the cash desk which bore the printed label: ‘Give generously for the lepers of Paraguay’. I just hoped none of them worked in the kitchens. In England, I had asked my local medical centre what diseases were on offer in Paraguay, and what injections were required. It’s hard to impress a British National Health doctor, but Paraguay did it for my GP. ‘I say … malaria, dengue fever, yellow fever, blackwater fever, cholera, typhoid, jiggers, tropical sores, dysentery, plague, HIV, sleeping sickness, bilharzia … by golly, they’ve got the lot out there … it’s a complete Royal Flush. Why are you going, if I might ask?’

I muttered something about work. ‘Oh, and the llamas all have syphilis, due to the lonely herdsmen taking advantage of them in the altiplano …’ Surely not llamas, in Paraguay? I queried faintly. ‘Oh, sorry, my mistake, that’s Peru, next paragraph down. Oh and meningitis, leprosy, river fever, Lhasa fever … you know I think it’s easier to say what they haven’t got in jolly old Paraguay,’ he added jovially. ‘Ebola – they haven’t got that, it seems – yet.’ I’d had to go three times to his surgery for various shots over a couple of weeks. ‘Do please come back and see us again if … or I should say when you return,’ the doc had said cheerily. ‘The tropical medicine boys up in London like us to send up stool, blood and urine samples from people coming back from these sorts of places – you might pick up something really interesting, something new, even.’ Carver Fever, I thought, a hitherto unknown infection, carried by mosquitoes, incurable, causing paralysis, catalepsy, raging insanity, multiple organ failure and agonizing, lingering death by multiple spasm, also known as the Black Twitching Plague, after its gruesome effects. First brought back to Europe from tropical South America by the late travel writer Robert Carver, who was its first known victim, and whose body had to be cremated in an isolation hospital to avoid contaminating southern England … I could be famous: dead, and famous. I said I would stagger in on crutches, somehow, so he could apply his leeches to my depleted carcass. I thanked him, finally, after the last jab session, with thinly disguised insincerity and turned to go. ‘Oh, and I should take a plentiful supply of condoms – just in case any of those syphilitic llamas stray across the border … ha, ha, ha!’ His laughter echoed tinnily round the surgery. I gave him a weak smile, but I felt perhaps the joke lacked a certain good taste, or just simple fellow-feeling. On my first evening’s stroll in Asunción I was not particularly reassured to see a large sign with a vicious-looking mosquito on it in the Plaza Independencia, warning of dengue fever. ‘No hay remedio’ ran the Goyaesque rubric underneath – there’s no cure. Later, I was told that the dengue mosquito was slow and stupid and operated in Paraguay only by day, whereas the malarial mosquito was fast, intelligent and operated by night. The infectious dengue mosquito was male, the malarial female – make of that what you will. ‘Women are just as good as men, only better,’ observed D. H. Lawrence, who probably knew. The other Lawrence, T. E., contracted malaria while cycling in the south of France before the First War, while studying medieval castles. I had a great sack of anti-malarial and anti-every-other-damn-thing in my bags. If I had anything to say in the matter I was determined to avoid being immortalized in the medical history books.

The centre of old Asunción did have a certain faded elegance, reminiscent, especially after dark, of post-Baron Haussmann Paris, with tropical excrescences such as vultures perched on the telegraph wires, and impassive Indian women smoking coarse cheroots, squatting on the doorsteps. The park sported French 19th-century style wooden benches, white wooden slats held together by elaborate wrought iron, these boat-like contrivances designed for amatory ooh-la-la, even, perhaps, for complete copulatory performance, their arched backs swooning towards the grass. The palms rustled in the faint breeze, rats of impressive size scampering up and down the trunks with complete lack of pudeur, and groups of Indians in costume hunkered down for the night amidst the shrubbery, grouped around small, glowing fires on which they brewed their evening potations. By day, I later discovered, these impassive indigenos strolled about the town in loin cloths, amid the BMWs and Mercedes, proffering handicrafts, bows and arrows, and beadware, with very little evident enthusiasm or hope of a sale. These, I was told, were the Makká people, who had come in from the Chaco, the Paraguayan Outback that lay just across the river.

The old Post Office was the finest 19th-century stucco building I found, with a charming interior patio full of carefully tended tropical plants, and an elegant stone staircase up to the flat roof, where there was a café and an unrivalled view down across the square to the river beyond. Flags, of the Paraguayan variety, of all sizes, flapped energetically from many buildings in the strong evening wind that rose off the river, bringing the stink of the poor up into the centre of town. It was evident already that there were many poor, and they surrounded the city proper in their slums. A few of them slunk about furtively in the shadows, watched intently by armed police who carried shotguns, machine-guns and assault rifles, and wore six-shooters in black special-forces style low-slung holsters. I had been greeted jovially by a police officer as I walked about the square below the Post Office. He smiled elaborately and said that, with my permission, as I was evidently a foreigner, I would not mind if he gave me a few words of friendly advice. Under no circumstances was I to wander down the steps and into the favela – he used the Brazilian word for a shanty town – below us. The centre of Asunción was safe, he said, relatively safe even at night. The favela was not. I would be attacked, robbed and perhaps killed within minutes of going down there. It would be best if whenever I wandered around I kept an eye out for police and soldiers. If I could see police and soldiers I was probably all right – no one would attack me. If I couldn’t, then I was not safe. There was a great deal of crime at the moment, he told me, due to the unsettled conditions in the country. Not only foreigners were at risk, ordinary Paraguayans were attacked every day, even here in Asunción. I asked if everyone had identity papers, even the poorest of the poor, even in the favela. Everyone had papers, he said, absolutely everyone. Not to have papers was a criminal offence in itself. He wished me a good evening, smiled again and then strolled away. His warning and the slight chill in the air had suggested I should now retire for the night. I made my way back to the hotel and shuttered the windows tight. There were many mosquitoes on the wall and I spent half an hour killing them before turning in. I couldn’t really tell if these were the fast, intelligent variety or the slow, stupid ones. I rigged up my mosquito net, purchased in London, and crept under it. The bed was hard and uncomfortable. My room cost US$5 a night. I determined to move upmarket and out of the centre of town after the census was over.

Four
Du Côté de Chez Madame Lynch

Gabriella d’Estigarribia sat in the shade under a palm tree by the swimming pool and sipped her grapefruit juice delicately. She had a wide-brimmed straw hat on, her face in deep shadow, yet already the sun had caught the pale, fair skin of her face.

‘Foreigners come to Paraguay, find they can do nothing with the people, become angry, then give up, eventually, and go away again in disgust,’ she said evenly, not looking at me, but rather at the hummingbird which hovered like a tiny helicopter over the swimming pool.

‘Why is it so hard to get things done, for foreigners?’ I asked.

‘Not just for foreigners, for everyone. Some say it is the mentality of the Guarani people, who used to be called “Indians” before they were converted to Catholicism by the Spanish. Then, by a sort of unexplained miracle they ceased to be Indians and became Paraguayans. People say the Guarani live entirely in the present – the past is forgotten, the future unimagined. Remembering things and making plans for the future are both of no interest to them. Promises are made, events planned, but nothing happens – inertia sets in. From the first the Europeans had to use authoritarian means – force, coercion – to get anything done. The Jesuits used to whip their converts on the famous, oh-so-civilized, we are told, Reductions, as well as the ordinary secular colonial overseers on the plantation.’

‘That was a long time ago, surely. What about today, in the new post-Stroessner democracy?’

‘His Colorado Party is still in power. He was displaced by an internal coup because he had grown old and flabby. He was arrested at his mistress’s house. She was called Nata Legal – nata being “cream” in Spanish – that makes her Legal Cream in English, no? What better name for a mistress. He tried to call out the tanks but the only man with the keys for the ignition had gone off to the Chaco for the weekend – so no tanks. There was an artillery duel in Asunción – you can still see the pockmarks in the buildings from the shells – then he was gone, bundled off to Brazil where his stolen millions had been sent ahead. Now we have mounting chaos because no one is frightened any more. Corruption is universal. Everyone takes bribes if they can. Before, under Stroessner, you paid your 10% in bribes to the Party and then you were left alone. Under this so-called democracy you are constantly being made to pay up by everyone, and still nothing is done, because no one is forced to do it any more. You must have noticed the city is falling apart from neglect.’

In her thirties, married and with two small children, Gabriella came from an old Paraguayan family which had been in the country, on and off, since the Spanish Conquest. Her ancestors had come from the Basque provinces of Spain, as had so many of the other conquistadors. Like many of her Paraguyan ancestors, she had spent years abroad in exile, in her case in Miami, in Italy and in England, during the decades of political repression. We were sitting outside in the lush tropical garden of Madame Lynch’s tropical estancia. Once this had been a cattle ranch in open country, belonging to the mistress of the dictator López, now it was a hotel, surrounded by a well-heeled suburb of Asunción, an hour’s walk from the centre of town. You could get a bus or taxi down Avenida España, which made the journey much shorter, but the spate of robberies on public transport meant that many, including myself, preferred to walk. The Avenida España had well-armed police at frequent intervals, as well as motorized patrols during daylight hours, and most of the shops and institutions on either side had highly visible private armed guards sitting outside in plastic chairs with pump-action shotguns or automatic rifles across their knees. At each petrol station there was an army patrol permanently stationed, two or three uniformed men with automatic rifles. This was the route to the airport from the centre of town. If there was a coup d’état or a revolution, this was the route the outgoing government would flee along: clearly they wanted to make sure there would be enough petrol available to get them to their planes. It was the petrol supply for Stroessner’s tanks that had been under lock and key, I later learnt, when the crunch had come, not the ignition keys. Clearly, this government didn’t intend to make the same mistake. Stroessner still gave maudlin interviews to journalists from time to time from his hideout in Brazil, where he bemoaned the fact that he was a much misundertood former dictator – but then they all say that, those that survive. An avowed fan of Adolf Hitler, his secret police, known as the Technical Service, were among the most feared in South America. Cutting up political opponents with chainsaws to a musical accompaniment with traditional Paraguayan harp music was a popular finale, the whole ghastly symphony played down the telephone for favoured clients. Like his local hero the Argentine dictator Juan Perón, Stroessner had a taste for young girls – very young, pre-pubescent. When a daring journalist had once asked Perón if it was true that he had a 13-year-old mistress, he replied, ‘So what? I’m not superstitious.’ His reputation among Argentines had soared after this was revealed, the ultra-young mistress being seen as a sign or both power and virility. The 13-year-old in question used to parade around Perón’s apartment dressed in the dead Eva’s clothes, to the slothful admiration of her ageing beau. Stroessner was reputed to favour the 8–10 age group. His talent scouts waylaid them outside school, from where they were taken to discreet villas to be enjoyed by the Father of his People. If they performed nicely they and their parents would be sent on a free holiday to Disneyland in Florida, the nearest Paraguayans can get to Heaven without actually dying first. Stroessner, the half-Bavarian, half-Indian dictator had sent a gunboat down the river for Perón, the mulatto dictator, when he had taken refuge in the Paraguayan Embassy, after his overthrow. Forced into exile, Perón had fascinated the young supremo by recounting his adventures and reminiscences. ‘They used to worship my smile – all of them!’ he cried. ‘Now you can have my smile – I give it to you!’ and here he had taken out his brilliant set of false teeth, and passed them across the table to the startled Stroessner. Perón had found Paraguay too dull, and he had to agree to abstain from political intriguing in Argentina, which was irksome, so after a short period of rustication up the river he had taken himself off to the Madrid of Generalissimo Franco, where he lived in exile with the mummified corpse of Eva Perón upstairs in the attic of his Madrid villa, surrounded by magicians and occult advisers. The mummifier, Pedro Ara, who had taken a year over his task, had used the ‘ancient Spanish method’ and had charged $50,000 for his work, a bill that was never paid. Throughout the last weeks of Eva’s agonizing illness the embalmer had stood close by on guard in an antechamber, night and day, waiting in anticipation, for he had to start the process of mummification the instant she died ‘to render the conservation more convincing and more durable’. Her viscera were removed entirely and preserving fluids were sent coursing through her entire circulatory system before rigor mortis set in. Some areas of her body were filled with wax and her skin was coated in a layer of hard wax. The complete process was slow, painstakingly slow. After the fall of Perón, the military mounted ‘Operation Evasion’ in which the body of Eva Perón was ‘disappeared’ to prevent her becoming the focus of a popular cult; for many people, particularly women and the poor, she has already become a saint.

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.

‘You cannot fire public servants in Paraguay,’ Gabriella had told me. ‘Once appointed, it is a job for life. Under Stroessner, the administration of the city of Asunción was carried out by 400 civil servants, who worked from 8.30am to lunchtime, then finished. They were all members of the Colorado Party. Although they worked slowly, and very easy hours, they did actually turn up and did actually work. Everything was kept in good repair, and new roads were laid, parks maintained and basic services ensured. Then, after Stroessner was ousted, the Radical Liberal Party managed to get into power in the Asunción local government. They could not fire the 400 Colorado Party civil servants, but they could hire 1,000 new civil servants – all Radical Liberal Party members. These are known as “gnocchis”. There is a tradition in the River Plate countries, Uruguay, Paraguay and Argentina, that civil servants eat gnocchi, the Italian potato-based pasta, on pay day every month, usually the 29th of the month. It’s an old tradition. In time, the civil servant who is purely a political appointee and merely turns up every month to collect his salary, became known as a gnocchi. This is how the political parties fund themselves – they reward their followers with civil service jobs when they are elected on the understanding that the party gets a kickback of between 50% and 90% of the placeman’s salary. The gnocchi can have several jobs of this sort as all they have to do is turn up once a month to get the salary. Well, the Colorado civil servants naturally didn’t turn up for work any more – they couldn’t be fired, and Stroessner didn’t frighten them now he was in exile. And the Radical Liberals didn’t turn up because they were gnocchi and paying much of their salary back to the Party. So there was no civic administration and nothing got done and things started to fall apart. The disgusted citizens of Asunción voted out the Radical Liberals after this happened, and voted in a minor party who immediately appointed 1,000 of their own members on the same gnocchi principle. The local government now has 2,400 employees, none of whom turn up except to get their salaries. And none of them can be fired. As a result no maintenance work is done, no local taxes collected, and the infrastructure of the city is falling apart. And as there are no taxes collected, none of the civil servants have been paid for at least a year, sometimes longer.’ The logic of all this, I had to admit, was inescapable.

A wave of nostalgia was now spreading for the ‘good old days’ of Stroessner when the firm hand had meant a degree of order and efficiency, and a level of corruption that now seemed positively moderate. ‘Ya seria feliz y no sabia’ I had seen as a printed car rear-window sticker all over the city – ‘then we were happy and we didn’t know it’. Liberalization brought street crime, robberies, rapid inflation and a collapse of the infrastructure as well as the banks. Diphtheria, cholera, malaria, yellow fever, dengue and leprosy were all on the increase. There was no foreign exchange to import necessary drugs and medicines. Even the water supplies in the hospitals were polluted. ‘Will you stay in Paraguay or go abroad again?’ I asked Gabriella. She thought for a long time and gazed away from me into the middle distance. ‘I don’t know. We’d like to stay. It’s much easier here than Europe. But if the chaos grows … I don’t know.’ ‘Easier’ meant cheaper, with servants, in a pleasant climate. ‘Where would you live if you could?’ I asked. ‘Miami,’ she replied without hesitation. ‘It’s a terrific city – culturally Hispanic but run by Anglo-Saxons, so everything runs properly. And so safe.’

Everything is relative. In England, Miami is a byword for violent crime, drugs, gangs and disorder. But from the perspective of Asunción it seemed as appealing as Switzerland. ‘We need a government of honesty, austerity, and lack of corruption,’ one Paraguayan had said to another in an Ultima Hora cartoon. ‘That is to say, a foreign government,’ his friend had replied. Gabriella gave me a list of useful contacts, people who would help give me an insight into the country – a radical priest, a German settler, a US drop-out living with a Paraguayan girl, and many others. ‘Don’t get too hopeful,’ she cautioned me. ‘You will be promised many things in Paraguay, and none of them will come to pass. There is much talk and almost no action. Everything that works here is run by foreigners – it has always been the case. This hotel is an island of German efficiency. If the Germans left Paraguay – and one in forty are of German descent – the country would go back to the jungle. And they are leaving, the foreigners, for Brazil, and Bolivia, those who can. The civil service wages bill consumes 87% of the government budget even when they have any money, which at present they don’t. What the private sector doesn’t provide simply doesn’t get done. Government here equals a parasitic class which provides nothing.’

My own observations walking round Asunción confirmed the dereliction. In the municipal gardens there had been a man in rags sweeping leaves off the path with a cut palm branch. He wore no shoes and looked more like a tramp than a public servant. He took care not to disturb the beggars sleeping on the wooden slatted benches, on the grass, under the palm trees. There were very small children, from four upwards, who strolled about trying to sell chewing gum and sweets from cardboard trays. Lunatics from the local asylum wandered about aimlessly, cackling and grinning, dressed incongruously in old-fashioned evening dress – tailcoats, striped trousers, spats but no shoes – as a result of international charity clothing donations. The asylum had no money to feed the inmates, so they had been turned loose to wander the city and fend for themselves, scavenging rotting vegetables from the gutters, left by the Indian street sellers. They capered and loped about, these lunatics, distinctive in tailcoats stained by diarrhoea, adding a carnivalesque, grotesque note to the tropical dirt of the Central Business District. Neither the police nor anyone else paid the slightest bit of attention to them: like the vultures hunched on the telegraph wires, watching for a stray dog that had escaped attention, and the Makká Indians from the Chaco who drifted about in loincloths and painted cheeks, trying to sell bows and arrows, they were simply part of Asunción’s dusty, stinking reality. In the air hung the smell of foetid, fermenting human excrement and urine; all these people were living, eating and eliminating in public, in a hot, humid tropical climate. They, like the street children and the beggars, slept in the parks. In daylight the streets were full of European-looking businessmen and their BMWs. At dusk these vanished to the suburbs, and the town centre became an ill-lit Indian-haunted place where pistoleros and whores roamed about and the police stayed mainly inside their fortified barracks. If the police had withdrawn completely the city would be given up to looting and uncontrolled violence: and the police had now not been paid for several months, and were extremely disgruntled. If the government could find no money to pay the police they would not suppress the next pro-Oviedo demonstration. And then there would be a revolution, democracy would be closed down, and a hard-line dictatorship set up again. Liberalization led to chaos and riot and so back to dictatorship again. It was like the ancient Greek city states, an endless swing between repression and licence.

All of this swirling, picturesque, smelly chaos was kept out of the Gran Hotel by high brick walls, 20 foot or more, and an armed guard at the entrance to the grounds with a machine-gun and stern glance who kept would-be intruders at bay. I had negotiated the room-rate down from US$100 a day to $40 a day, and thought I had done well. When I told Gabriella what I was paying she snorted, and went to harangue the middle-aged woman, once an ambassador’s wife it was said, who managed the front reception. After a short altercation in Spanish, Gabriella informed me that as from today my room rate had been reduced from $40 to $30 a day, and when I went off into ‘the interior’ as the rest of the country was quite unironically referred to by the people of Asunción, the hotel would keep my room for me and all my luggage in it, ready for my return, at no charge to me. This was quite usual, Gabriella told me. ‘There is almost no one staying here. They have dozens of rooms and almost no guests. They are lucky to have you.’ The hotel was a pleasing old colonial affair in the Spanish style, with loggias and white stucco Tuscan columns, dark oxblood-red walls, roman tile roofs over verandahs. The windows had white-painted louvred shutters and the ceilings of the rooms were high, to keep the air cool. Each room opened out on to a courtyard garden planted with banana and citrus, bougainvillea and palms; ferns and bright orchids hung in baskets. The soil was dark red and the white-clad Indian gardeners moved about slowly, directing water, pruning, hoeing, weeding. When a guest passed them they stopped work, turned to face the passer-by and, smiling, said quietly, ‘Buenos días, señor’. This is how it must have been throughout much of Paraguay under Stroessner – calm, obsequious, well-ordered, the peons knowing their place. Now the Gran Hotel was an island of tranquillity in a sea of chaos and disorder. Behind the swimming pool lay a dusty tennis court, and beside this, shaded by trees, a tall metal cage which held two brightly coloured green parrots: at dusk these birds gave off terrible shrieks, as if heralding the end of the world. They were fed with cut-up fruits by the gardening staff – oranges, bananas, mangoes, and fresh leaves from tropical trees. They perched on one claw and slowly, delicately, nibbled at the fruit held in the other. There was also a large toucan in a separate cage on the other side of the swimming pool. This bird clambered up and down the wire, as if imprisoned in an adventure playground. He too lived on fruit provided twice a day, and was shy: if you looked at him, he avoided your gaze and trundled off, embarrassed, getting out of your eye line. Birds in cages always make me feel sad and depressed: not only do I feel sorry for the imprisoned birds, but it also reminds me of our own incarceration. I had felt oppressed and imprisoned in Europe, and now I felt oppressed and imprisoned in the gilded cage of this luxurious hotel and its grounds in Asunción. In Europe I could sit on a park bench in public, unnoticed and unthreatened – I was invisible. In Paraguay I felt unsafe in all public spaces. The eyes that searched me over were not friendly. It was noticeable that Paraguayans of European extraction spent as little time as possible in public spaces, passing through them in cars, usually, whereas the mestizo and Indian population, on foot, seated or sprawled on the ground, lived at ease in these spaces. My race, my pale skin made me an intruder.

Behind my room, in a small courtyard garden into which one could wander, was another prison, a small menagerie with hoopoes, cranes, two small monkeys in a cage, a couple of miniature deer of the muntjak type, and a large terrapin. As menageries go this was deluxe – leafy, calm, shady and private – but like the hotel, it was still a prison. The trees and shrubs in this small haven were dense and in deep shadow for much of the day. The birds and animals were so well hidden that you could be almost on top of them before you saw them. And everywhere, in the gardens, in the air, all around one, was Paraguay’s spectacular birdlife – on the wing, perched in trees, darting between bushes, a rich burble of song. Like Manaos in the Brazilian Amazon region, Asunción was a small city in a clearing in the middle of the jungle. For thousands of miles in every direction there was nothing but largely empty countryside – empty that is of human activity. For the birds flying across Asunción, or attracted by the food, the several acres of gardens the hotel offered to them was just more native jungle as a convenient stop-over. Living in the depleted, overpopulated Northern Hemisphere where any signs of wildlife are rare and fugitive, I found the explosion of bird noise in Paraguay startling and sobering. It was evidence of what we had lost by our overbreeding. Perhaps Europe had been like this in the Middle Ages. It was a real pleasure just to sit in a cane chair outside my room looking at and listening to the birds. The only thing I can compare it to is being inside a tropical aviary at a zoo. Tiny hummingbirds smaller than the first joint on my thumb, rainbow coloured with iridescent green the dominant shade, hovered and darted by a hibiscus plant, long thin beaks moving inside the flowers to search for drops of water or nectar. I would sit for timeless periods, completely enraptured by the sight, the wings of this tiny dynamo revolving thousands of times every second, so fast all one saw was a blurr, whirling beside the tiny body. The birds seemed completely indifferent to the ghost-clad gardeners who shuffled slowly to and fro, or to the few guests, who like me, sat outside in the shade drinking in this tranquil atmosphere. Overpopulation, pollution, the depleted environment are realities of our era; to come to somewhere like Paraguay was to realize just how much had been lost.

I walked back with Gabriella to her house, which was less than ten minutes away on foot: it was a small, neat semi-detached building with a thin strip of garden in front and a larger one behind. Workmen were engaged in some maintenance at the front. The whole neighbourhood was tidy and prosperous-looking, with well-kept gardens, lush shrubbery, and clean streets. It reminded me of middle-class parts of Los Angeles. I asked Gabriella which suburb of London it most resembled, as she knew both cities well. ‘Kensington,’ she replied immediately. ‘It is where the embassies are and where the wealthy live.’ I asked her what her house would be worth. ‘Normally US$60,000, but because so many people are trying to sell, you could get a place like this for $40,000 – even for $30,000. People are only paying about half the asking price at the moment.’ To put this in perspective, Gabriella was paying her maid $25 a week: ‘and my mother thinks I am paying her too much – she only pays $15.’ High unemployment, low wages, few people, inexpensive land and property, high crime and insecurity, imminent risk of political violence and revolution – it was a familiar Third World equation.

Gabriella invited me in to meet her husband Hugo, and their two small children. Hugo told me he had invested some money in a cigar-making concern, a factory dating back to the turn of the century. ‘Paraguayan tobacco is good – not as good as Cuban, but close. We use Javan leaf for the wrappers, the rest is all local product.’ How much did the local cigars cost? I asked. I had seen none on sale anywhere. ‘That is because they are too expensive for most Paraguayans to buy now,’ he replied. ‘About US$2 each.’ Cigarettes cost US$7 a carton of 200 even in my local supermarket. I assumed the smuggled items, or false brands were even cheaper. Paraguayan men were ferocious smokers. The local brands I had seen advertised promised exotic pleasures. There was ‘Boots’ (not, alas, ‘Old Boots’) featuring a US style cowboy. There was ‘Palermo’ (a wealthy suburb of Buenos Aires, as well as a city in Sicily). The slogan for Palermo was Paraguayo y con orgullo’ – ‘Paraguayan and with pride’. The poster showed a racing car, and a racing driver, fag in hand. Then there was ‘Derby Club’ a contentious blend, much copied, imitated, falsified and smuggled, a favourite of the contrabanders trade, according to press reports. Truck-loads of ‘Derby Club’ were frequently discovered crossing the Brazilian border, without the required tax stamps on them. There was also ‘York’ and ‘US Mild’. In the local whisky line I particularly liked ‘Olde Monke’ and ‘Gran Cancellor’. Close inspection of the labels of the locally manufactured whiskies indicated that they had been made from a base of sugar cane – in fact were really rum dressed up as whisky. The local rum, called caña, was a working-class peasant tipple with macho associations. Alcoholism among the peasants and Indians was a serious problem; drunken all-male rum sessions often ended in knife fights and death, 80% of all killings in Paraguay were caused by armas blancas – knives or machetes.

Hugo was a fan of Paraguayan dolce far niente. ‘You cannot imagine how pleasant it is, Robert, for a man just to lie back in a hammock in the garden with a cigar all afternoon, just looking up at the clouds passing in the sky.’ While your wife and the maid do all the work, I thought, but did not say. The work ethic appeared to have scant appeal to Paraguayan men. All across the city they were sitting, sprawling, lounging or completely prone, in a state somewhere between sleep and coma. What little work was being done seemed to be entirely by women, who looked as if they monopolized about 95% of all available energy – men slumped, women bustled. Hugo invited me to visit his cigar factory. ‘You can buy the cigars at the special reduced employees price,’ he told me. Like most other promises I was made in Paraguay this invitation came to nothing. Despite several requests neither the visit nor the cigars materialized. Did they exist? Was the whole thing a fantasy? Perhaps he just did spend all his days in a hammock, gazing up at the sky. More concretely, Gabriella cooked macaroni cheese for supper, which I shared with them, along with a bottle of Argentine red wine called ‘Borgoña’, which tasted nothing like Burgundy. ‘Believe no one in Paraguay,’ Gabriella had told me, ‘believe nothing you cannot see or touch – this is a land of make-believe and fantasy – of chantar.’

I walked back to the Gran Hotel through the warm, velvety, shadow-strewn tropical night, the scents of the flowers and shrubs rising from the gardens around me along my way. Above hung the Southern Cross, that constellation which reaffirms that one is truly in the Southern Hemisphere. The petrol station at the crossroads at Avenida España was still open, and a lone soldier, the night shift, stood on duty, rifle at the ready, guarding the pumps. I turned off down a side lane, and walked a hundred yards away from the main road, the wine and the soft air having relaxed me. It was a mistake. The lane became dark, the surface under my feet was pitted and potholed. From a group sitting under a clump of trees a hundred yards further on, a man rose and lurched towards me. I was coming from the light of the main road and would be silhouetted clearly. He started to shout incoherently, angrily, at me, stumbling as he tried to run towards me. Out of the shadows I saw he had a machete, which he waved at me from above his head.

I turned abruptly, and made a fast trot back the way I had come, back towards the main road, and the petrol station with the lone soldier. I could hear the drunk behind me yelling and shouting at me now in incomprehensible Guarani. The lights of the main road grew nearer. I put on speed. I was sweating now, from the heat of the night and from fear. I was running. I could hear the man behind me, still coming on after me. If I slipped and fell, I would be done for. I ran really fast, faster than I had run for years. I got a sharp stitch in my side. I gasped for breath. Still I could hear the drunk lumbering behind me, breathing hard. The petrol station came in sight, well-lit, the soldier standing at ease, leaning on his rifle. I turned. The man was behind me, in shadow: he had stopped. He had seen the soldier, too. To chase a man at night in the streets of Asunción, waving a machete, was an invitation to be shot dead by anyone in uniform. The drunk mouthed angrily at me, but in silence, waving his weapon over his head, but he didn’t come on any further. Now would be the time to shoot him, I thought, if I had a gun. But then, of course, the soldier would shoot me. The drunk took a swig of rum from the bottle which he still held in his other hand, swallowed, and then spat at me silently, in disgust. I turned back and ran on, more slowly. In a moment I was under the arc of light by the petrol station forecourt, a recent model BMW being filled up by the uniformed attendant, a European-looking man in an expensive suit sitting at the wheel. I paused, slowing to a walk, and caught my breath. I turned to see what my pursuer was up to. He had completely vanished, swallowed up in the shadows behind me, invisible. I walked slowly back to the Gran Hotel now, keeping in light the whole way, my chest heaving. The margin between safety and danger in Asunción was just a few yards.

In spite of the tight-meshed flyscreen covering the windows of my room, some insects always managed to get inside. Tonight was no exception. On my pillow was a magnificent golden and black bug, crawling slowly about, lost on the great white pasture of cotton. I put this intruder in a matchbox carefully, so as not to damage it, and ejected it into the night. I felt a humanist European completely out of place in the teeming South American interior.

Breakfast was a buffet served in the grand ballroom, its ceiling painted with frescos of tropical birds and foliage, 19th century in style and execution. Sicilian painters had been imported by Madame Lynch, I was told, to carry out this work. It would take a sophisticated, European sensibility like Eliza Lynch’s to think of reproducing what was just outside the ballroom – tropical foliage and birds – inside the ballroom, on the ceiling. It was an artifice of nature present a few feet away outside: only to an émigré European’s eyes would such a ceiling decoration seem exotic. Madame Lynch was the first person in the post-colonial era to see the immense possibilities of Paraguay. To Francisco Solano López, her lover and protector, she promoted the idea of the country as a place to improve, to embellish, to make chic and elegant. No one had conceived of Paraguay in this way before, it had simply been a colony to exploit. Under her influence all the imposing buildings, self-consciously imperial, were begun – the opera house based on La Scala, Milan, the copy of Les Invalides, the huge Presidential Palace, the tropical Gothic railway station. Most of them were never finished – she and López were people in a hurry, new people, on the rise, imitating that tornado of newness, Napoleon Bonaparte, patron saint of all pushy, power-hungry arrivistes who have decided to live by will power and naked force. Napoleon had proved you could do it all, come from nowhere – Corsica, to be precise – seize power with a whiff of grapeshot, eliminate your rivals, rule by sheer energy and dash, conjure an empire out of thin air, become a king maker and breaker, institute an aristocracy of merit and favour, these all new people who had more energy and more to lose than the old aristocracy of blood. And you could do it all in a few years, if you drove people hard enough. Stucco was made for this style of rule. It looked like marble, or stone, or whatever you wanted to have it look like. And it went up so quickly – you just laid mudbricks or rubble walls, and then coated it and smoothed it down and painted it – presto! It looked just like ancient Rome. Peter the Great, another imperial arriviste, had used stucco to create his own fantasy of European civic grandeur, St Petersburg: take a dash of Venice, a draught of Amsterdam, add some London, and some Rome – and there you have it. In a few years, with enough slave labour and a few second-rate European architects – for who outside Russia has ever heard of Rastrelli, Hamilton or any other of Peter’s experts – you had a brand new ‘European’ capital on the Gulf of Finland.

Against all the odds the adventurer Napoleon III had actually erected another ramshackle empire in France, a country that had completely lost its way after the revolution of 1789, which would try all and every system of government, one after the other, in case one might actually work for more than a few years. Solano López had been immensely impressed with the Second Empire in France, which he had seen for himself on his European Grand Tour: Madame Lynch was a product of its frenetic decadence, its squalid energy, its sense of nervous excess and self-conscious cultivation – the bombastic new opera houses, the Baron Haussmann-designed avenues in Paris, the braying brass bands and the opulent uniforms of army officers; and the Zouaves, that orientalist military fantasy in baggy pantaloons, floppy fezzes and curled-up slippers – a corps just made for Verdi opera, harking back to Napoleon I’s Mamelukes from Egypt. All this López admired deeply and tried to imitate in Paraguay, where he could. If there were not enough men to enslave to build his new palace, well then, he would use child slave labour. To see what López and Lynch had in mind for Asunción it is only necessary to go to the spa town of Vichy, in France, for here Napoleon III, with his foreign architects, many of them English, created an eclectic, imperial yet Ruritanian pleasure-capital, small but with the flamboyance and grandeur of a capital city, right in the middle of nowhere, well away from cities such as Paris with revolutionary mobs. If López and Lynch had simply stuck to Paraguay, forgoing the dreams of conquering Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina, they would have created a complete mid-19th-century tropical-Gothic version of Vichy, and very extraordinary it would have been, too. Imperial overreach on a massive scale meant nothing was ever completed. What does remain – the Parisian-style parks, the ruinous stucco palazzi, the defunct railway station – are impressive enough: no Grand Tour ever bore such strange fruit, so far from anywhere. There are doubters, of course. Alwyn Brodsky, the American biographer of Eliza Lynch, among others, claims that the Gran Hotel was never Madame Lynch’s country residence at all, that the whole story has been cooked up as a publicity stunt by the hotel’s owners. Hard facts on which everyone can agree were always in short supply in Paraguay; more or less everything was up for debate. There were versions of events, narratives, claims, counter claims, refutations. The outsider became embroiled in these arguments, willy-nilly. What one person told you the next would vehemently deny. Reality was slippery.

Madame Lynch was the mistress and éminence grise to Mariscal Francisco Solano López, the third of Paraguay’s dictators after his father Carlos Antonio López (el fiscal – the magistrate), and the founding father Dr Francia (el supremo – the supreme one). All of Paraguay’s dictators had earned soubriquets: Solano López had been el mariscal (the Marshal) and Stroessner was el rubio (the blond). If Oviedo ever came to power he would inevitably be el bonsai – people called him that already – unless it was el loco which he was called, too. Beyond simple description no one could agree about anything Madame Lynch had done. For the Colorados she was a national heroine, whereas the Radical Liberals saw in her a manipulative exploiter who bled Paraguay white, along with Solano López, whom they viewed as a criminal lunatic. Both of these ambiguous historical figures had been co-opted by Stroessner and his regime, and the cult of their heroism promoted assiduously. Madame Lynch’s remains had been brought back from Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris and buried in La Recoleta in Asunción. The man who had organized this transshipment, a Lebanese-Paraguayan, had profited from the occasion to import a large quantity of hashish in the coffin with the remains of Madama.

Often called ‘Irish’, Eliza Lynch claimed to have been born in County Cork of Ascendency, Protestant parentage, and educated in Paris. She was a woman of cultivation and taste, speaking French, Spanish and Guarani with fluency, and played the piano, sang and danced with distinction. She had attached herself to López in Paris when he had been Ambassador at large in Europe, arriving with a substantial entourage and ample funds, the first the independent Paraguay had sent across to Europe. López had made the Grand Tour through France, Italy, England and the Crimea, where he observed the war in progress. In France he collected Napoleonic uniforms for his army officers, and from England guns and steamships supplied by the London firm of Blyth Brothers, who were also to send out a stream of technicians to Paraguay which enabled López to build up his army, navy and arsenal quickly enough to take on the three other regional powers all at once, very nearly beating them. López and Lynch returned to Paraguay with a complete kit for DIY imperial splendour – Sèvres and Limoges china sets, a Pleyel piano, fabrics, sewing machines, books, pictures, manuals of etiquette and court ritual, ladies’ maids and dancing masters, curtains, furniture and antimacassars. López actually went as far as to have a golden crown designed and sent out from France, but it was intercepted at Buenos Aires, and he never managed to have himself crowned Francisco I – even though he was referred to as such in some outlying provinces of Paraguay. Considered a great beauty, Eliza Lynch was the first modern career-blonde to arrive from Europe in South America with a mission, and a protector with enough money and political clout to make her ascent possible. Eva Perón, native-born South American, trod very much in the footsteps of Madame Lynch. Both of them were reputed to have been common whores working in brothels in their youth.

Madame Lynch created a sensation among the Guarani Indians, to whom she seemed an embodiment of the Virgin Mary. To the Creole elite of old Spanish blood she was an interloper, and a putana – a whore. They refused to recognize her, and eventually, when López got into his stride, were exterminated for their pains. López already had a wife and children established before he left for Europe and the new, big ideas he imbibed over there. Madama, as Lynch became known, was set up in style by López in Asunción, and formed her own alternative Court in her houses, which she decorated and furnished in the latest Parisian style. She was the cynosure of wit, elegance and art in a backward provincial capital that was nothing more than a village by a clearing in the jungle on the river. She came into her own when López senior died and Francisco Solano took over supreme power. López and Lynch turned the Pygmalion story upside down – Dr Higgins the rustic hayseed instructed by the sophisticated Parisienne Eliza Doolittle. Paraguay has always been, it would seem, a country of strong, capable women and weak, vain, indolent, incapable men. Whatever small quantity of sense Solano López may ever have had seems to have been provided by his mistress, though her detractors claim that it was her evil genius which spurred him on in his disastrous military and imperial ventures. The idea of becoming Emperor of Paraguay was not particularly absurd; there were in existence two new-minted empires – Brazil and France – as well as the older Russian, British, Austro-Hungarian and Turkish imperia. The fall of Napoleon III’s empire saw the creation of a German empire to replace it. Nor was defeating Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil particularly ambitious. They were all weak, poorly led and disorganized. The problem was that Solano López was consumed with vanity and egotism, trusted no one, and set about killing off his family and anyone in Paraguay of any ability and competence. Had he done nothing, and let his generals, British technical experts and brave soldiers simply attack the enemy, there is little doubt he would have defeated them and become Emperor of southern South America.

What is not in doubt is that Madame Lynch introduced into Paraguay an element of courtly style, of elegance, of well-dressed chic which had never been seen before, and which among the upper classes, survives and flourishes to this day. Paraguay, under her aegis, became a place of masked balls, river-boat picnics with brass bands in attendance, elaborate full-dress evening dances, classical music concerts, theatrical and opera performances, and champagne suppers. Everything had to be shipped up the river, and before that across the Atlantic from France, but neither time nor distance was any hindrance to the dandies and belles of either the 18th or 19th centuries. The details of all the wine imported by Thomas Jefferson from Château Margaux to his estate in Virginia still exist today in the Bordeaux archives. The Madame Lynch belle-of-the ball legacy lives on vibrantly today, and one of the startling features which elevates Paraguay from, say, the Congo, which in other ways it closely resembles, is the old-fashioned chic and elegance of the rich in Asunción, who still dress in long white gowns, full evening dress, starched shirts and tailcoats, and attend high-society balls with bands, masters of ceremony, sprung ballroom floors and all the other appurtenances of courtly behaviour now more or less a memory in Europe. The Society pages of Ultima Hora revealed a social Asunción which looked like Paris before the First War – pearls, tiaras, wing-collars, black or white tie, patent leather shoes, full orchestras in uniform – all a thousand miles up the river and in the sub-tropical jungle. At the Gran Hotel I was witness to all this, for every weekend some celebration would be mounted in the ballroom: Strauss waltzes would echo from the Indian orchestra in dress uniform, and the belles of Asunción would trip the light fantastic while outside waiters in white-starched uniforms with cummerbunds would circulate with canapes and champagne on silver trays held high over their heads. The debutante balls of the season were all lovingly photographed and reported in the Society pages, everyone’s name printed in full; it made light relief after the litanies of crime, corruption and bankruptcy on all the other pages.

Asunción’s bizarre elite were really too much. In a city where so many were almost starving there were no less than four Tiffany’s jewellery shops, and the company was doing so well that they could afford to take out full-page advertisements in the papers promoting their latest imported deluxe items from New York. Whether she had or had not lived in the old estancia that had become the Gran Hotel, all this was certainly the result of Eliza Lynch’s meteoric passage through Paraguay. Without doubt she and López and their Court would have danced here, for it would have been one of the few ballrooms in the city of that time able to accommodate large parties. It was somehow very Paraguayan to have breakfast under an artificial, painted tropical sky, installed by emigre Sicilians, when outside through the open french windows real Paraguayan tropical birds sat in real tropical foliage, fed from time to time by indigenous Guarani servants. I was reminded of the old Chinese saying: ‘Is Chuang-zu dreaming of the butterfly, or is the butterfly dreaming of Chuang-zu?’

Five
Paraguay, Champion of America

The census had not been a success, according to the press. Incomplete, notorious disorganization, several suburbs of Asunción left out completely the journalists all reported. Perhaps it had all been as inefficient under Stroessner, only then no one would have known, because in those days the press had been allowed to report nothing but peace, progress and order – the regime’s apt motto, reflecting three much desired qualities in Paraguayan life, and notable mainly for their complete absence in the post-Stroessner polity. The students who had actually carried out the census with their clipboards and serious expressions, knocking on individual doors and demanding entrance, like latter-day emissaries of King Herod, had been paid 5,000 guaranis for their day’s work, sometimes only 2,500 guaranis. A bus ticket in Asunción cost 1,300 guaranis. Everyone had been restricted to their place of residence all day long, forbidden to take to the streets, which was why I had received so many sidelong glances and felt so much discomfort when I was busy striding about the town taking photographs.

Now at last, it seemed, the country had won an international accolade. According to Transparency International, Paraguay was the third most corrupt country in the world, after Bangladesh and Nigeria, and the most corrupt in the Americas, ahead even of Haiti and Colombia. Less corrupt than Paraguay were Angola, Azerbaijan, Uganda, Cameroon and Kazakhstan, among others. The least corrupt countries were Finland, Denmark and New Zealand, in that order. Corruption in Paraguay was not individual or sporadic, it was institutional and endemic. Nothing could be done without bribes at every level, from the simple policeman manning a roadblock to a cabinet minister approving a government contract. Anyone in a position to milk money from the system did so. The country’s economic plight was spelled out in its depressing list of negative statistics. There was a US$2,200 million external debt, the interest on which could not be paid, and a US$305,000 million budget deficit. Out of a total population of 6 million, 200,000 people were employed in the public sector, most of them unpaid for months or even years; 15.3% of the population was ‘openly employed’, 22% officially unemployed. There was an 8% illiteracy rate and 81% of the population had no health insurance. There was, of course, no government health service whatsoever; 33.7% of the population fell below the official poverty line of $25 a week and 16% (900,000) existed in extreme poverty, with no source of formal income at all. The most startling imbalance was the tiny proportion of public service workers – less than 3.3% of the population. In Welfare State Europe this figure stood at 45% or 50% of the population. But to employ so many people in the public services you had to tax people heavily – Europeans paid more than 50% of their incomes in direct taxes, pension levies and national insurance contributions, and then again on sales taxes, VAT and indirect taxes on such things as fuel, tobacco and alcohol. In Paraguay there was virtually no tax at all, which was what made it such a paradise for the rich. Huge tracts of Paraguay’s real economy were illegal – smuggling, drug processing and export, arms trafficking, fake cigarette manufacture and sale, car theft, cattle rustling and extortion, money laundering and the government cheating on contracts. The government was simply bypassed by private enterprise – criminal and legal – and the administration was too feeble and corrupt to do anything about it. Paraguay was a classic Third World kleptocracy, bankrupt but enormously wealthy, all the money kept out of the country in hidden bank accounts in untraceable offshore havens. When Belgrade was being bombed by NATO and accused of alleged sanctions-busting during the Kosovo war, the then President of Serbia, Slobodan Miloševic, commented that they really ought to be bombing the Cayman Islands, as that was where all the sanctions-busting was actually going on. Similarly, it would be futile trying to chase the missing billions in Paraguay as it was all hidden offshore.

The blame for the ruin of this rich and fertile country was laid squarely at the door of the Colorado Party by local historian Mida Rivarola.

The economic model invented by Stroessner turned a country that had been an exporter of agricultural products into an economy dominated by smuggling, crime and primitive State protectionism. When this model was exposed to more modern economies due to changes in the world it simply collapsed leaving poverty and corruption at every level.

Ultima Hora had produced a crime map of the country – drug smuggling, contraband, cattle rustling, piracy, marijuana cultivation, car theft, highway robbery, banditry, north, south, east and west, the whole of Paraguay was one large crime zone. Only bank robberies were in short supply, for most of the banks had closed, gone bust, or were defended by private security guards who looked like militiamen in flak jackets, armed with bazookas and heavy machine-guns. The streets of Asunción and other provincial cities were, from time to time, full of protesters complaining of all this. Mostly these demonstrations were peaceful, but they seemed to do no good: they belonged to the politics of theatre, the essentially futile statement in noisy collective form that people were unhappy with their lot, with the government, with the facts of Paraguayan life. No one had any answers or even any ideas except to borrow more money from the IMF, or to reimpose a dictatorship under Oviedo which, it was hoped, would at least limit the corruption to the Colonel and his cronies as in the days of Stroessner. The situation was almost beyond analysis, let alone solution. No one even talked of a Castroist, extreme socialist solution. For years young Paraguayans had been sent to Cuba to be trained as doctors. The Cubans hoped to induct them into revolutionary fervour: the opposite had been the result. They had all come back with horror stories of socialism in action. Even the bitterest critics of the Colorado regime admitted that Castroism was a dead loss and a cul de sac. There was no guerrilla movement like the FARC in Colombia, no potential President Chavez, a nativist anti-gringo rabble rouser, as in Venezuela. Paraguay was a pirate state, full of pirates, who complained only because the chief pirates were stealing all the booty, and they were getting little or none. The writer Jorge Luis Borges had wondered if his country’s fate might have been better if Argentina had become a British colony after 1820, when the Spanish had been expelled and the River Plate region fell under the economic influence of the British Empire. This reflection was made during the years of the repressive military regime in which everything had gone to the bad. ‘Colonies are so boring, though,’ he had concluded. Better then, in South America, to be theatrically badly governed than boringly well governed.

The great unanswered question hanging over the whole Third World is still the one posed by Goethe: ‘Injustice is preferable to disorder.’ What the colonial world had thrust upon it by the European powers had been injustice and order, which in almost all cases had been replaced upon independence by injustice and disorder. Asked if he thought India would be better governed after the British had left, Gandhi replied, ‘No, it will be worse governed.’ That had been a brave as well as an accurate prediction. A refugee white South African academic, safe in London, had moralized to me that it was ‘essential for Africans to make their own mistakes’ and learn from them, that colonialism only mollycoddled people. He, of course, did not have to suffer the effects of those mistakes, as he had fled, but he was happy to condemn the rest of the continent’s population to the Idi Amins, the Robert Mugabes and the Mobutus, as an inevitable learning curve. With freedom had come disorder, and injustice in another form. A new, native ruling class had formed, corrupt, authoritarian, immune from Western liberal criticism, more oppressive in most cases than the old white supremacists. Most ex-European colonies were in a far worse state than they ever had been under direct colonial rule. The democracies imposed on them by the parting masters had all failed and been replaced by despotism, oligarchy or anarchy. In some cases, after years of fruitless civil wars and disorder, that quintessential postmodern phenomenon, the failed state, had emerged. Paraguay was not yet a failed state, not quite: but it was not far off one.

Walking round Asunción it was evident that the fabric of the city was collapsing: garbage was uncollected, streets and pavements lay broken and unrepaired, buildings were not just unpainted and peeling, but crumbling apart, showing cracks and bulges in the walls. The dead banks, great glass and concrete mausolea, lay silent and empty, front doors chained and padlocked outside, dust and emptiness within. Groups of Indians from the Chaco, or simply homeless, poor people had taken up residence on strips of cardboard in their doorways – shelter at least from the tropical downpours. The local markets had spilled out on to the pavements, and the streets were full of rotting vegetables and fruit. A whole tribe of people lived by scavenging from this bounty. All around the centre of the city vendors had set up shop on the pavements, selling cans of food, bottles of wine, packets of biscuits – all imported. The hotels in the centre of town were completely empty. I went inside to talk to the receptionists who were pretty, smiled a lot, and had time on their hands. They all told the same story: ‘No one comes here now. Before, under Stroessner, there were tourists. Now nothing.’ Cruise ships used to come up the river from Buenos Aires for winter breaks, duty-free shopping expeditions. Now Argentina was broke, and Brazil was in deep trouble, too; no boats with tourists came any more. Asunción had become too dangerous. Right in the centre of town knife-wielding robbers held up buses, one man with a blade at the throat of the driver, the other passing down the bus collecting the passengers’ watches and wallets. On one such attack there had been an army major in uniform on board, a woman. She had had her face slashed. These attacks were happening all the time, every day, not at night in remote suburbs, but in the very centre in broad daylight. People were afraid to use the buses. Taxis were known to be used to kidnap people for ransom, or simply to rob and ‘disappear’ them. Many people walked, even long distances, rather than risk public transport, and I was one of them. The city was just about small enough to get around on foot. Everywhere, though, there was the same atmosphere of suspicion and mistrust. Each small shop had its assistant with a large automatic pistol. When they opened the cash box to get you your change their free hand would be on the pistol, finger curled round the trigger, in case you tried something. There were attempted robberies of these small stores every day, and shoot-outs leading to deaths. Every transaction, however small – a tube of toothpaste, a razor, a comb – involved a handwritten receipt with a carbon copy left in the receipt book: this was so the assistants could not steal from the till. The owners checked the takings against the carbon every evening and made sure the sums tallied. There were no smiles of welcome in any of the shops, rather wary caution or outright hostility.

That there had once been order and a degree of security was evident from the style of houses put up during the stronato. These were US-style villas or suburban bungalows with large windows and low fences, symbols of trust in the security the regime provided. Under Alfie a virgin could walk the streets of Asunción dressed in gold jewellery and risk no harm, people had told me, people who had opposed the old regime and hated the dictatorship. Then, everyone had been terrified of falling into the hands of the police. Now people had rights, but no duties. Improvised security precautions had been tacked on to these vulnerable homes of the Pax Stroessner era – iron grills on the doors and windows, razor wire on hastily erected high walls and steel fences, video security cameras and snuffling, whining guard dogs kept on short rations to make them hungry for burglar flesh. In all this I was again reminded of Los Angeles, with its neat notices in the gardens of dinky gingerbread cottages promising an armed response if you trod a step across the lawn.

The amenities of a capital city were absent in Asunción. There were no proper bookshops, only kiosks selling comics and religious kitsch. You could buy no foreign newspapers at all, anywhere. There were no coffee shops or bistros where you might relax in comfort and security. The park benches were filled with sleeping men, some of them police in uniform, and the parks themselves stank of human piss and shit and were full of rubbish. Concerts, recitals, theatrical peformances, art exhibitions were all absent; the few cinemas showed kung fu movies or sadistic pornography. There was one theatre show, I discovered, the English play The Vagina Monologues. It was a Buenos Aires production, and for macho Argentina the title had been redubbed The Secrets of the Penis. This was too daring for staid Asunción, and here it was running under the title The Secrets of the Male.

Although there were a few lurking stray dogs, with claw marks on their backs from unsuccessful vulture attacks, there were no stray cats at all – they were no match for the beady-eyed, telegraph-wire-perching birds of prey. A cat would only last a matter of minutes out of doors, I had been told; those that existed in Paraguay led cosseted, prison-like existences indoors, not unlike their owners. Small babies were never allowed out for the same reason – they would be snatched up from pram or cradle and torn apart and devoured in an instant. The man lost and waterless in the Chaco always saved the last bullet for himself, before the vultures tore his eyes out while he was still alive, but too far gone to defend himself. In the centre of town, by day, the police were about in force, lounging like the rest of the population, but kitted up in macho uniforms, with low-slung, black-holstered pistols. This fearsome image was assuaged to a great extent by the policemen’s girlfriends, who also hung about with them, talking softly and weaving roses and other flowers into their caps and uniforms with one hand, while holding their beaux’ hands with the other. These clumps of cops and lovers were particularly thick around the government buildings on the main plaza. One coup d’état had already been foiled and the Vice-President had been assassinated. No one knew who did it, so the authorities called in Scotland Yard, perhaps hoping that Sergeant Lestrade or Sherlock Holmes would be sent out to uncover the truth. From time to time passion would overcome the couples of policeman and lover, and they would detach themselves from the rest and make for a hot-bed hotel where you could hire a room by the hour. There was a constant traffic of heavily armed cops up and down the stairs of these establishments. As they hadn’t been paid for so long I assumed they had a good credit rating. It was probably not a good idea to deny tick to a Paraguayan cop.

In the centre of town, on the main street, was a ranchero’s outfitters; here you could kit yourself out completely with everything you needed to take on the Paraguayan estancia – leather chaps, saddles, bridles, lassos, boots, bombacha baggy trousers, saddle bags, revolver and rifle holsters, horseshoes, spurs and all manner of wide-brimmed cowboy hats. I spent ages in this shop, to the evident puzzlement of the assistants, fingering and peering at all these articles, which were laid out in piles on wooden shelves. The general ambience of the store was Tucson, Arizona, circa 1880. Unfortunately, I am large and Paraguayan gauchos are small, otherwise I would have equipped myself with one of almost everything. All the items were handmade and had a pleasingly rustic, archaic quality. If you wanted to set up a Wild West museum this would be the store to head for. Before Stroessner there had been few metalled roads, and Asunción was simply a cow-town; cowboys rode in from the Chaco, and tethered their horses at hitching rails in the capital. This shop must have dated from that era, but clearly still did enough business to stay alive, although I never saw anyone apart from myself and the staff in the place. Next door was the Café des Artistes. This had a vaguely Art Nouveau decor with marble top tables, red plush seating, a lot of mirrors, but no visible artistes, or indeed any clientele at all. The armoured, bullet-proof plate-glass windows and protective iron bars outside suggested that the absinthe-sipping decadents in floppy ties and Oscar Wilde-style velvet jackets had yet to come into their own in Asunción, or perhaps they’d all been gunned down in the civil war pre-Stroessner. It was always empty when I passed. Maybe all the artistes had left town or been shot up by the clientele of the cowboy joint next door. I liked the absurd juxtaposition of the two establishments, one pure 1880s, the other authentic 1890s, Arizona and Paris respectively: only in Asunción, surely, could you get a new set of spurs and a stetson with a rattlesnake skin swaggerband, then amble – or mosey, rather – next door for a few shots of Baudelaire, flowers of evil, and la sorcière glauque, as the fin de siècle crowd used to call the genuine sea-green wormwood absinthe, which, of course, though banned in France itself you can still buy in Paraguay. The waiters in the Café des Artistes were always asleep, heads on the bar, unless they’d been hitting the opium-laced papier mais cigarettes too hard, of course, and were actually on Cloud Nine.

All around the town stood tight-buttocked young men with rags hanging out of their back pockets, beckoning energetically to passing cars to come their way. In some cities of the world these might have been taken to be gay hookers, trolling for trade: in Asunción they were parking touts. They owned or rented a couple of parking bays on the street, informally, that is, from the police or the local cacique. These they deftly waved drivers into with their rags, promising to look after the car while the owner was away, in return for a few guarani notes. It was the smallest possible of all small businesses. And all across the city there were furtive men, furtively pissing. They pissed beside parked cars, in the parks behind trees or in the rubbery shrubbery, against walls, in the sandy soil, down the blocked drains, against car wheels, anywhere. ‘¡No Pisar!’ read the signs impaled into the grass lawns outside the Pantheon of Heroes, but they pissed there too, in spite of the Honour guard in full-dress uniform with Mauser rifles and fixed bayonets. Pisar means ‘step’ in Spanish, not ‘piss’, so the signs really meant ‘don’t walk on the grass’, but the synchronicity was too great. The reason for this great, national incontinence was the compulsive, endless drinking of yerba maté, once known as Jesuit tea, by most of the adult male population. Made from the cut-up leaves of the ilex tree, to which hot water is added, maté is a mild narcotic and is widely drunk throughout the southern cone, nowhere more so than Paraguay, where the majority of the crop is grown and harvested. The bitter, dark green leaves are put in a pot, cup or more usually a gourd known as a maté: hot water is poured on and the drink sucked up through a metal straw known as a bombilla. For a cold brew, ice or just cold water is added to the leaf, and the drink is then known as tereré. The drinking of maté is a bonding ritual for Paraguayan men: one man will brew up, slurp up a draught, add more water, and pass the gourd round to his mate, as it were. Each man follows suit – slurp, add water, pass on. As TB and other saliva-conducted diseases are rife, this isn’t all that gets passed on, of course. Never mind, the macho Paraguayan male doesn’t: police on duty drink it, beggars drink it, civil servants, businessmen, politicians, shopkeepers, truck drivers – every Paraguayan male is constantly drinking the stuff all day long. You saw thermos flasks for sale everywhere, usually brightly coloured and made in China, essential for the brewing process. Men carried the complete gear around with them, thermos on shoulder strap, packet of leaf maté, spoon, gourd and bombilla. People didn’t go into cafés to drink it, they just made it up from their own kits wherever they happened to be – in offices or shops, on buses or in queues, squatting on the pavement or slumped in a park. The end result was a city full of men pissing all the time. In a shop selling religious icons I had noticed an almost life-size painted carving in wood of a Spanish friar, perhaps a Jesuit of yore, dressed in an old-fashioned ecclesiastical gown and a tonsure on his head. He had a straw in his mouth, and was sucking on what looked like a large, pear-shaped brown turd, but which in fact on closer inspection was a maté gourd. ‘The reason rioplatano men are so useless is all down to maté drinking,’ Alejandro Caradoc Evans told me one evening in the bar of the Gran Hotel, which was where he spent most of his waking hours. ‘They are all mother-dependent, not properly weaned, and addicted to the tit. The maté habit enables them to suck in public, and collectively, like babies in a crèche. Also, the stuff is a poison, slowly rots your brain and drives you mad. It is as bad as cocaine, but not so fast and more insidious. Notice how you almost never see the women drinking it, though they do behind closed doors in Buenos Aires, I have to say.’ Caradoc Evans was a Welsh Patagonian Argentinian, in his late twenties. He was cooling his heels in Asunción, rusticated for some unstated misdemeanour he had committed in Buenos Aires, where his family now lived. He had a complete contempt not just for Paraguay, but for the whole of South America. Like so many local critics, he had never actually left the continent, had never visited Europe, the place he dreamed of escaping to. He sat every day in the bar of the Gran Hotel, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. He was allowed to run up a bar tab to a certain amount each day, and was allowed to eat in the hotel restaurant, but he had no cash. He was a prisoner of his family, under hotel arrest in Paraguay. He spoke perfect English and was dressed in a rather old-fashioned, officer-and-gentleman style, double-breasted blazer, club tie, light blue shirt, cavalry twill trousers and chelsea boots. He would not have looked out of place at a polo tournament somewhere near Cheltenham. His main aim, in so far as he had one, was to get a passport and go to Europe, and then never come back to South America again. ‘Except to be buried. I don’t mind them shipping my carcass home again. You may think this Third World dereliction is all very picturesque, but for those of us forced to live here it isn’t. Have you read V. S. Naipaul on the return of Eva Perón?’ I said I had. ‘Well, it’s a great pity he didn’t come to Paraguay, isn’t it? He could have out-Uganda’d his Uganda book here. This is the People’s Republic of the Congo of the South American continent, Stroessner as Mobutu. There is still slavery in the interior and the Indians are still being exterminated by ranchers and loggers, just as they were under good old Alfie.’ He spoke in fast, colloquial English most of the time, a language it was assumed most of the Guarani staff did not understand. ‘You know they found another thirty fantasmas, don’t you?’ Alejandro continued. I asked him what fantasmas were. ‘Well, when someone dies you don’t report it, you just go on drawing that person’s salary or pension – it means ghosts or phantoms. These thirty were army veterans, dating back to the Chaco War in the 1930s. God knows how long ago they died – decades, probably – still drawing their pay. One had a theoretical age of 120.’ Alejandro’s father had friends and business interests in Paraguay. ‘Powerful friends, who keep an eye on me,’ he added, with menace in his voice. ‘You never grow up in these rioplatano countries, you are always a child and kept as a child.’ It was evident that his clothes were expensive, but they were not well looked after and never seemed pressed. He looked rumpled and tousled as if he slept in his jacket and trousers. He was always well-shaved but often in need of a haircut. ‘Once I get my passport I’m off for good – you won’t see me for dust,’ he concluded with some vehemence, swigging back his beer for emphasis. I had met Argentine émigrés like Alejandro in London, where they complained ceaselessly to anyone who would listen of the cold, the damp, the expense, the lack of servants, the frigidity of the women, the unfriendliness of the men, the smallness of the apartments, and the terrible food. When they finally went back to Buenos Aires, I had heard, they fell into a pine for London that sometimes lasted a lifetime, endlessly reminiscing in the Jockey Club or the tearooms of Harrods in BA about their years in paradise, now lost. Someone had once seen a somewhat flashy tweed suit advertised in a Paris gent’s outfitters as ‘Très chic – presque cad’. No doubt whoever bought it was an Argentine anglomane.

Alejandro had been educated at an Argentine English-style Public School outside BA and his flawless English had cadences of the British upper classes of the 1950s. He said ‘crawse’ for ‘cross’, and his slang was dated, copied from the émigré masters, themselves products of the 1950s. This gave him the strange aura of being a contemporary of mine: he was young enough to be my son, almost my grandson – yet he spoke in much the way I had myself when I was about 12 or 13, before the 1960s really got going, and posh accents became a liability in swinging London.

‘What exactly are you going to do when you get to Europe?’ I asked him. I tried to imagine him among the pierced noses and glottal stops of the postmodern, multicultural, know-nothing estuary English.

‘Live,’ he replied with fervour. ‘It’s something you can’t do outside Europe. It is all pretend here, in case you haven’t noticed, pretend Europe, pretend USA. Everything that has been brought in from Europe has been misunderstood and misapplied. These ridiculous fake palazzi in the jungle put up by naked savages under the slave driver’s whip. I mean Solano López’s absurd fixation with Napoleon and imperial architecture – you know his grandfather, López’s I mean – was a mulatto bootblack on the streets of Asunción, of negro and Guayaki descent. He had no Spanish or Guarani blood, which is why he had no compunction in slaughtering all the Spanish and Guarani Paraguayans. The Guayaki and the Guarani loathed each other from pre-Spanish days. You see, a mestizo has to prove himself by doing down the white Creole – just look at Juan Perón. Francia, the first dictator here, was another mestizo. He forbade whites from marrying other whites, by law. Remember, this was the early 19th century when whites ruled the whole “civilized” world, and certainly the whole of South America. The mestizo on the rise, typically, joins the army, dons a colourful, picturesque uniform of a style obsolete in Europe by some decades, preaches uplift for the Indians and downfall for the white elite, makes a coup d’état, bankrupts the economy, ruins the country, persecutes and tortures everyone, declares war on the world, particularly the Catholic Church and the USA, and finally goes down in a welter of blood and chaos.

‘Francia avoided the latter because he was too paranoid and too mean to go to war. He just locked Paraguay in a prison for forty years instead – the anal retentive tyrant, the first truly modern totalitarian ruler, with secret police, torture chambers and the rest. Juan Perón in Argentina was the same type, a part-Indian whose mother was so dark she couldn’t be acknowledged in public. It’s part of the Argentine fantasy that there are no “natives” in the country, only aspirant Parisians and Londoners, though these are better dressed and sexier. In my grandfather’s day, among the English of BA, they always spoke of “Johnny Sunday”. Perón’s first names were Juan Domingo, and it wasn’t safe even to mention his proper name openly. When he was kicked out they found he had stolen US$500 million from the treasury alone. Solano López robbed the whole of Paraguay blind, stealing everything there was, including the jewels on the religious statues, replacing them with paste. Most of it got lost in his final retreat, but he did manage to transfer some of it out via Madame Lynch and the US and French consuls, through the Allied blockade, and so get it to Europe. His “heroic” death at Cêrro Corá was a mistake. He’d miscalculated. He was on his way to the Bolivian border and thought he was a full day ahead of his pursuers, which would have allowed him to get clean away. He would have ended up being fêted in Paris as a nationalist hero in exile, a sort of pre-Bokassa figure, complete with diamonds and crown.’

Alejandro lit another cigarette and motioned to the waiter for yet another beer. He had the most jaundiced view of Paraguay in particular and South America in general of anyone I had yet met in the country. In Europe, among expatriate South Americans, such views were more common; the exiles had left for a life abroad because they had such a low opinion of their homelands. It was interesting to listen to this abrasive and critical version of local history, to compare it with the bombastic nationalism of official Colorado propaganda which I got from other sources: you could always chose your national narrative in Paraguay.

‘Had Stroessner and Perón met?’ I asked.

‘Oh, yes – when Perón was overthrown Alfie was just starting out as a Junior-Jim dictator. He sent one of those smart, blackhulled fascist-era Italian gunboats that are moored opposite the palace down the river to BA to collect Perón, who’d taken refuge in the Paraguayan Embassy. Perón was well on his way down the usual mestizo war-against-the-world track when the air force had enough of him and bombed him out of his own palace. I think the navy were involved, too. He’d opened hostilities against the Catholic Church – like Francia did here – and was about to close the cathedral in BA and turn it into a workers’ playground. Every South American populist leader is potentially Tupac Amaru, the Inca noble who revolted against the Spanish in the 18th century. They want to bring down the house around them as they fall. Although they have absorbed all the French, Spanish and English customs, uniforms and ideologies, superficially at least, they remain spiritually Indian – that is, in revolt against the European way, while being besotted with the outward show of gringo style. It’s the latino paradox. They love us and hate us, and end up hating themselves for having absorbed so much of us. The Brazilian literary movement of the 1920s and 1930s called the antropofagos had a saying that they “ate a Frenchman for breakfast every day”. It was a reference to the Tupi-Guarani traditional cannibalism which the Europeans found so distressing when they arrived, on account of resurrection being made so complicated and difficult if people were eating each other all the time. I’ve never actually seen a direct prohibition on cannibalism in the Bible, mind you, have you? It’s kind of subsumed in the love-your-neighbour guff, I guess. There’s a strain in South American life that would like to undo the Conquest completely. It’s much the same in Africa, which South America resembles far more than most Europeans realize. Bokassa, Idi Amin and Mobutu could all have been South Americans, easily – the uniforms, the mania, the corruption, torture and confusion. The cross-cultural derangement is there, you see, on both sides of the Atlantic. King Lear with a colour chip and a culture chip, one on each shoulder.’

It was Alejandro who advised me to make a pilgrimage to see the British Ambassador. I asked him why. It seemed such a curious mission to undertake.

‘Because ambassadors have an unusually high profile in this country. Paraguay is right off the beaten track, the Gringo Trail, which you’ll have heard of, does not pass through here, as it’s too dangerous and not romantic enough, no native ruins and no McDonald’s. So few foreigners of note ever come here – de Gaulle was the first head of state ever to do so, by the way – that the foreigner is wildly overglamorized, and certain ambassadors act almost as vice-regents, deferred to by the governments which are always lacking in self-confidence and savoir-faire, not to mention credibility. In particular the ambassadors of the USA, Great Britain and France exercise great influence and add lustre to the shabby local political scene. These are countries important to Paraguay. The country was so nearly snuffed out by the War of the Triple Alliance, that Paraguayans do not trust either Argentinians or Brazilians. Good, cordial relations with these three most powerful states, who could stop any potential neighbour aggression, are very important here. You know that during the Falklands War, thousands of Paraguayans rang up the British Embassy offering to fight the Argentinians on the British side? What made it even richer was that the woman answering the Embassy switchboard was an Argentinian! ¡Ole! But seriously, if you ever found yourself in difficulties in Paraguay – and that is not hard to do at all – then knowing your Ambassador could prove very useful.’

But would the British Ambassador be in the slightest bit interested in seeing me, I queried. I couldn’t really imagine him wasting his time on such a trivial matter.

‘He’ll be delighted. You will probably be the first respectable Brit passing through for quite some time. Usually, the only ones who come here are on the run from Scotland Yard. He will be sitting twiddling his thumbs up there behind the armed compound, and you will be good for a whole morning of diplo-chitchat. He can put you in his monthly round-up to the FO – met and debriefed visiting British journalist and author Robert Carver who was en mission in Paraguay, a full and frank exchange of views ensued, etc. etc.’

I thought this was all highly unlikely, frankly, but I recognized good advice when I heard it.

‘Get the old bat on the reception desk here to ring up the Embassy and make an appointment for you. Your status will rise 500% immediately inside the hotel, for a start, and word of it will spread through Asunción, which is a small and gossipy town, in the end. You will become respectable, in a word.’

I expressed the doubt that anyone in the city would find me of the slightest interest, respectable or not.

‘Don’t be too sure of that, Don Roberto. Every foreigner who arrives here is photographed at the airport when coming through immigration – you noticed the big mirror, which was a see-through one from behind? A file is opened on everyone by the secret police, just in case – where they stay, who they meet, what they say about Paraguay. The big paranoia at the moment is Colonel Oviedo’s agents. A Brit would be a good disguise. Your profession, “journalist”, is immediately of interest to the pyragues – the hairy feet, as the spooks are called in Guarani. Your suitcases will already have been searched, and the number and type of your cameras will have been noted. The hotels always have a tame pyrague to do such elementary first moves. Although local film developing is not up to international standards it would be a good idea to get at least two or three films processed and printed up here, and leave the results around in your room when you are out and about – snapshots of the national monuments, parks, palazzi and so forth. This will show you are not saving films with compromising shots – military installations, the air force planes at the runway, say – to smuggle out and develop in UK or Brazil, as you came from Sao Paulo, and are flying back via there. Oviedo is just across the border in Foz do Iguaçu, and it could be very convenient for him to use a visiting British journalist to take a few useful snaps for him. He’d pay very well, I’m sure. You could have been recruited in London. There are certainly Oviedistas there who have already been in negotiations with the UK government as to what stance the latter might have if and when their man seizes power here. As you have at least two different cameras, I can’t help having noticed, one standard 35 mm, the other panorama, it would be a good idea to get at least one film from each developed, even if they can’t do the panorama properly here. Just to show you are not hiding anything. This is how the secret service mind works, you see, suspicions about ordinary things like cameras, which most Paraguayans don’t have and never use. Leave the cameras in your room, too, so they can be inspected. Notebooks, also. If you don’t, they may assume you have something to hide, and your cameras may be stolen, just to see what’s on the film inside. If you carry them with you all the time, this may mean you have to be attacked, possibly even killed, in order to get the films. Life is cheap here. It costs US$25 to bump someone off, I’m told – a policeman’s wages for a week – when he gets them, which isn’t often. It might also be a good idea to fax an editor in London, real or imaginary, a “colour” piece on Paraguayan wildlife, say – David Attenborough zoo quest sort of stuff – armadillos in the Chaco, pumas in the pampas, piranha in your soup, and so on. Say how much you are enjoying this peaceful, friendly country with its unspoiled, kindly people and charming, beautiful women. That is the sort of journalism they like, the pyragues, from foreigners. It will justify your existence here. Things not to mention are: 1) Oviedo and imminent, bloody coups d’état, which are called golpes in Spanish, by the way; 2) cocaine, cocaleros and drug smuggling; 3) Nazis and hidden Nazi gold; and 4) corruption and the crooked government – i.e. anything that is actually real. Keep all that until you get back to Europe. Alfie had an Interpol agent from France, a genuine Frenchman, mind you, not a local with Froggy papers, blown up inside his airplane as it was about to leave Asunción. It was on the runway, taxi-ing for take-off. Killed everyone on board, including the narco-cop, who had uncovered some embarrassing evidence of heroin smuggling among members of Alfie’s government.’

I thought privately that this was all highly fanciful, and that Alejandro was more than a shade paranoid, though I said nothing out of politeness: in fact I took his whole spiel as alarmist, of the sort those in the know love to plant in the minds of the timid newcomer. As events progressed, however, I began, slowly and reluctantly, to come round to the idea that some, if not all, of what Alejandro suggested might have a grain of truth to it. His words echoed in my mind, right up until the last moment, when sweating and frankly terrified, I sat waiting on the tarmac in a crammed exit flight, waiting to see if we were in fact going to be blown up before we took off. Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold, as W. B. Yeats sagely observed: the questions no one can answer are: a) how fast are they falling apart, and will they take me with them when they finally explode? and; b) will the centre be able to mount one last horrendous act of violence before it falls apart and bumps thousands off including oneself? An old hippy on the island of Ibiza who had hitched right round South America, including Stroessner’s Paraguay in the 1970s, had advised me laconically, ‘It’s very easy to get offed in Paraguay – paranoiaguay, as we used to call it.’ How right he turned out to be, and how little things had changed in thirty years.

Six
An Ambassador is Uncovered

Finding the British Embassy was not easy. Once, it had been downtown, lodged in an upper floor of an office building. Terrorism and attacks on British diplomats in other parts of the world had meant a whole new secure complex had been built far out in a new suburb which hardly anyone in town knew how to find. It was not even registered in the phonebook, and it was so new the large-scale map of the city in the hotel foyer wall did not include the suburb. Eventually, after contacting Gabriella d’Estigarribia, who was up on these sorts of things, the hotel receptionist did manage to phone the Embassy, find out the address, and book in an appointment for me with His Excellency, whose diary seemed as empty as mine – any day at any hour of any day would be convenient, it seemed. I spoke to the Embassy secretary myself, after all the toing and froing had been got over: she had a brisk, efficient manner and spoke excellent English, yet was not herself English. I wondered if it was the same lady who had fielded all those calls from ardent Paraguayans volunteering to take a swipe at the Argies in the Falklands War. Plucky little Paraguay had a reputation for trying to get into other people’s wars. Stroessner had volunteered to send troops to Vietnam, but Lyndon Johnson had turned him down; an unusual case of preferring someone to be outside the tent pissing in, than inside pissing out. A Paraguayan regiment or two, particularly of horseborne hussars, say, or lancers in 18th-century full-dress uniform, would have enlivened the bar scene in downtown Saigon, if nowhere else.