The aura of evil was undoubtedly enhanced by Paraguay's reputation as a haven for Nazis and by his German name, which no one seemed able to pronounce correctly. One heard Stressner, Strohssner, Strussner as in strudel, Streuzner as in the Kreutzer Sonata, when in fact it was Stroessner, as in Goebbels. A South American who has never been there once described Paraguay to me as Nuremberg with a mambo. Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death, had been approved for citizenship. There were rumors that he was a close associate, a bosom buddy, of Stroessner, that at the very least Stroessner had known where he was and didn't tell. 

One morning this spring, a few months after Stroessner's fall, I drove around Asuncion with a man I'll call Roberto. A scholar of the regime and of the black humor it engendered, Roberto was nervous about being identified even now, in the heady days of relative openness following the coup. "Please-don't quote me," he pleaded, "or I might become a soprano." 

We were making a tour of the capital's oligarchic residences. For a city of only 800,000 in the swampy, urticating heart of South America, Asuncion has a surprising number of palatial homes. The first wave of mansion-building began in the 1860s, when squat, megalomaniacal Francisco Solano Lopez, the third in Paraguay's unbroken succession of dicta¬tors after it shook off Spain in 1811, brought over architects from Italy to design palaces for the local gentry. Those along the A venida Mariscal Lopez are now embassies and offices for the civil and military bureaucracy. Roberto pointed out several of their delicate-columned fac;ades that had been strafed during the eight-hour firefight leading up to Stroessner's abrupt departure for Brazil on February 5, after which Paraguay emerged with a new president, General Andres Rodriguez, the father-in-law of Stroessner's coke-addled son, Freddy. 

Asuncion's second wave of mansion-building occurred between 1978 and 1982, when the world's largest hydroelectric dam, Itaipu, was being built across the Parana River, which separates Paraguay from Brazil. Financed entirely by Brazil and by multilateral banks, the project pumped around $2 bil¬lion into the Paraguayan economy, half of which is "informal" -a thriving trade in contraband whiskey, cigarettes, soybeans, VCRs, P.c. :s, counterfeit Rolexes, stolen cars, smuggled Brazilian babies, you name it. Most of the Itaipu money slipped under the table and after a year or two of frenzied untraceable transactions-kickbacks, shakedowns, payoffs, all manner of usury, graft, and carruptela-several thousand garish new villas of prodigious square-footage ap¬peared in Asuncion, especially along the airport road and in the barrio of Villa Mora. The houses were built in an exuberance of styles-Swiss chalet, tropical-alpine kitsch, Neo¬Gothic, neo-Niemeyer, neo-Khashoggi, neo-Trump. Their only unifying elements are a satellite dish on the roof and a Mercedes in the driveway. The size and flamboyance of one's mansion depended, of course, on how close one was to the Tyrannosaur, as Stroessner's subjects called him, on how high up one had risen in the hierarchy of corruption that he had institutional¬ized and was fond of describing as "the price of peace." 

Roberto drove me past a walled Arabian palace, known locally as Aladdin's Castle, that belonged to Stroessner's flamboyant former son-in-law, Hum¬berto Dominguez Dibb. The Dominguez Dibb fam¬ily controls the casinos, the slots, the baccarat tables, and the Loteria Paraguaya. Humberto, whose latest plaything is the newspaper Hay, tools around in a white Rolls-Royce con¬vertible. There was a ru¬mor that he was behind the 1980 assassination of Anastasio Somoza Debayle, the ousted dictator of Nicaragua, to whom Stroessner had given asylum in Asuncion. Roberto discounted this theory, although he said that it was true that Humberto was furious because Somoza, who was un peligro, a terrible womanizer, had stolen his beautiful young mistress. 

We pulled up behind a Volkswagen Voyage with Paraguayan plates. It had probably been stolen from Brazil, since no Volkswagen dealer in Paraguay sells Volkswagen Voyages. Indeed, half of all the cars in the country are said to be hot. They are either stolen outright in Brazil, or their owners sell them to Paraguayans, report them stolen, and collect the insurance. Ro¬berto was explaining the logistics of such transactions as we cruised past the stately manse of the former main whiskey and cigarette smuggler (Kents, Marlboros, and Johnnie Walker Black are cheaper in Paraguay than they are in the States), and the even statelier manse of the new booze and butt king, President Rodriguez's son-in-law Gustavo Saba. Then we hit some heavy-duty ostentation, the compounds of the four men-the so-called cuatrinomios-who ran Para¬guay during the final two years of the regime, when Stroess¬ner had lost it physically and mentally and the ruling Colorado Party split into two factions, the tradicionalistas, who wanted him out, and the militantes, who remained loyal to him. Led by the cuatrinomios, the militantes succeeded in purging the tradicionalistas, and in 1987 and 1988 there was a new eruption of corruption that was impressive even by Paraguayan standards. 

Soldiers were guarding Mario Abdo Benitez's home, which had been impounded by the state. A remote second cousin, Benitez was the Rasputin of Stroessner's court. "All our Polish jokes are about him," said Roberto. "He was a dum-dum, but he wielded incredible power." Benitez started as the president's valet and worked his way up to private secretary. He controlled access to the president, as Eva Pe¬ron's brother did to Peron. In his last years in power, Stroessner had stopped signing documents, but his signature-an 'unforgeably idiosyncratic chicken scratch-was needed for everything. No corporal could be promoted to sergeant, no foreign diplomat's car could be exempted from duty, without it. Benitez kept blank documents ready for Stroessner to sign on the rare occasions he was up to it. Traffic in the signature was one of the most profitable activi¬ties of Benitez's entourage. 

"If Rodriguez had not staged the coup," Roberto explained, "Benitez would have become president of the party and would have secured the presidency of the republic for [Stroessner's elder son] Gustavo. This was his pro¬gram." Gustavo was a colonel in the air force. He specialized in flying C-47 transport planes. It was widely believed that he was also gay, and that he had started arranging high posi¬tions in the military for his boyfriends. "Paraguayans are conservati ve in these matters," said Roberto. "They never would have stood for the country being run by Gustavo and his coronelitas. So the coup was inevitable. " 

"Where's Benitez now?" I asked. Roberto pulled down his left earlobe, a Paraguayan gesture meaning he's in prison (as a teacher might haul off a misbehaving pupil by the ear). "He's cleaning the First Cavalry Division's stables." 

 Benitez's place was quite modest compared with the com¬pound of Sabino Montanaro, a very greedy man. Montanaro had raked it in every way he could: drugs, money laundering (it had just come out that there was a discrepancy of a billion guaranis, a million dollars, in the public-works budget of the Ministry of the Interior, which he had headed for decades), and trafficking in passports. Middle-level Hong Kong busi¬nessmen, anticipating the collapse of that commercial hub in 1997 but not influential enough to get visas to the States or Europe, were re-establishing in Paraguay, and Montanaro had charged them $5,000 to $10,000 apiece for the proper papers. (This was one of Stroessner's dreams, that Paraguay would become the new Hong Kong.) 

Nearby was the residence of the Honduran ambassador, where Montanaro had taken asylum. And what about the other two cuatrinomios, Eugenio Jacquet and Godoy Jime¬nez? I asked. Roberto pulled down his left earlobe again. 

But no house in Asuncion could hold a candle to President Rodriguez's replica of Versailles, which climaxed our tour. It was built in the early seventies, when Rodriguez was thick with Auguste Ricord, the heroin kingpin of the' 'French con¬nection," who smuggled $145 million worth of the stuff from Marseilles to New York via Paraguay, overseeing the operation from a nightclub in Asuncion, until-despite Rodriguez's efforts-he was finally extradited in 1972. Rodri¬guez provided the planes and the landing strip on his ranch, and Montanaro the fake passports. But now, following the coup, Rodriguez was eager to bury the past. "You can be sure that at no moment will it be possible to demonstrate that I really had any connection to these things," he told the press three days after he overthrew his mentor. Asked how he had managed to build a house like this on an army salary of only 
 

$500 a month, he is said to have replied, "I gave up smoking some time ago." His other assets include a money-changing house that nets $25,000 a day, farms and ranches totaling a hundred thousand acres, a brewery, and shares in several banks and construction companies. After the Stroessners, he is the richest man in Paraguay. 

Down the street from Rodriguez's opulent vision of European haute culture, a member of the Chinese Mafia had erected a pagoda. In an adjoining lot was the vine-smothered shell of a mansion started by someone who had apparently suffered a reversal, and looming in the background was the windowless concrete hulk of the Central Bank, which sprawled over twenty-five acres and from which the militantes had made off with $100 million. The president of the bank, Cesar Romeo Acosta, was arrested at a cheap motel, his pockets bulg¬ing with dollars and incriminating documents. 

The official story was that Rodriguez had turned over a new leaf. Having delivered the country from Stroessner, he was genuinely committed to leading Paraguay into a new political era. Two things had allegedly effected his transformation. One, his miraculous survival some years ago in the crash of a small Brit¬ish experimental plane, and, two, the terrible suffering his daughter had endured from Freddy's drug addiction. (This had been another factor in the bad blood between him and Stroessner.) He was said to be really down on drugs now. 

The amazing thing 'was that the Paraguayan people, who have been deceived so many times, who live in what may be the most refined culture of deceit on the planet, except possi¬bly for Hollywood, seemed willing to believe this story. "Our only hope is now that they've got enough for them¬selves, maybe they'll start thinking about the country," Roberto said. 
 

xx