Finding it hard to believe that this was the Third World, 1 had taken a cab from the strikingly modem Presidente Stroessner International Airport, as it was still being called then, to the swank, wood-paneled Excelsior Ho¬tel, which is owned by Stroessner's longtime friend and busi¬ness associate, Nicolas Bo. Bo belonged to the group of intimates that lunched with the Tyrannosaur every Thursday. He had started out poor and had been rewarded for loyal service with the newspaper El Diario, the Fiat dealership, an insurance company, and a TV station. Eo was now one of the ten richest men in Paraguay, a gran sinvergiienza, as Roberto described him-completely unscrupulous. "He doesn't approve pf drug smuggling, because he wasn't cut in."

The phones at the Excelsior were bugged—on whose instructions, I wondered, the government's or Bo's? But apart from that the postcoup loosening-up, or apertura, seemed to guay in 1932 , be for real-or a very convincing facsimile. Things that had hundred thous been absolutely ineditos, unheard of in Paraguay, were going brands of beel on. There were actually two candidates from different parties German descei campaigning for the presidency. Asuncion's four dailies who were part were givihg balanced coverage to the race without fear of the ear." The censorship, and the people in bars and living rooms were from Africa'aft sitting speechless before TVs as the opposition candidate, nies there. The hoarse, bearded Domingo Laino, who had spent many of the ed converting Stroessner years in exile or prison, railed against the neo- prairie, swamp colonialism of the superpowers. Laino was the choice of the two-thirds of the Authentic Radical Liberal Party, which had split from the Radical Liberals in 1977 when the constitution was re¬amended to give Stroessner yet another term. 

If it was a euphoric time, it was also a time of internal crisis, as the full horror of the last thirty-four years came out and the people confronted their complicity in it. Bodies were surfacing like locusts in a plague year. The papers were full of photographs of bones being disinterred from secret mass graves and of the testimony of those who had been tortured. The human-rights organization Americas Watch had docu¬mented only 47 desaparecidos, but it looked as if the final death toll would be closer to 1,500. 

Paraguay has a long tradition of torture, going back to the regime of Jose Francia, El Supremo, who was dictator for life from 1814 to 1840. But there are apparently no particu¬larly Paraguayan torture techniques. In the nineteenth centu¬ry something called the uruguayana, in which the victim was trussed up with half a dozen muskets stacked on the back of his neck, was used a lot. Under Stroessner the police weren't scientific, like the Argentineans. They used the usual whips, cables, belts, cattle prods, cigarettes. One of their favorite techniques was the pi/eta, immersion in a tubful of urine and excrement, also known as el submarino. Graphic testimony of what they did comes from victims like Maria Baez, a hairdresser who was accused of belonging to the pro-China wing of the Paraguayan Communist Party and was taken to the Departamento de Investigaciones for questioning in 1982. Baez was suspended by her wrists for six days without food or water, then for forty-two days she was tied to a chair at night in a room full of biting ants. The interrogation of prisoners was often supervised by Pastor Coronel, the infa¬mous chief of investigaciones. One of his victims, Regina Chaparro, a maid accused of theft, described how he tor¬mented her with la corriente electrica. Sitting by a phone before Chaparro, who was lashed to a chair with wires attached to her pinkies, he would lift the receiver and give her the shock of her life. Coronel was now "by the ear," cleaning the stables of the First Cavalry Division with Benitez. 

HITLER'S HUNDREDTH 

The centennial of Hitler's birth occurred a few days after my arrival, and I thought it might provide a show. Ex¬treme right-wing and Fascist organizations thrive in conservative Paraguay-not only ex-Nazis but Spanish and Argentinean Falangists who do the straight-arm salute. The first Nazi Party in South America was formed in Para¬guay in 1932 and it wasn't dissolved until 1946. There are a hundred thousand ethnic Germans in the country. The two brands of beer are Munich and Pilsen. Stroessner was of German descent, as were Generals' Clebsch and Johansen, who were part of the Thursday lunch group and are now' 'by the ear." The Germans came in several waves. Some came from Africa after World War I, when Germany lost her colo¬nies there. The Mennonites arrived in the twenties and start¬ed converting the Chaco, the godforsaken wilderness of prairie, swamp, and thorn forest that takes up the northern two-thirds of the country, into orderly farming communities. "But as for ex-Nazis," a Lutheran priest who worked with the Indians told me, "there may be a barbecue or two on the Fuhrer's birthday. There are always some locos. Some peo¬ple still think it was a gran epoca. But, please, how many years has it been since the war? What's your expression? Give me a break. " 

Nevertheless, that day I drove out to San Bernardino, the oldest of the German colonies, twenty-five miles from Asun¬cion, and had lunch with Luisa Buttner, whose grandfather had been one of its founders, on the porch of the gracious old Hotel del Lago. It was here in Nueva Bavaria, Miss Buttner told me as butterflies skipped from flower to flower, that Nietzsche's brother-in-law, Bernard Forster, killed himself. In 1881, Forster, a schoolteacher in Berlin, had been one of the leaders behind a petition designed to limit the participa¬tion of Jews in German life. Discouraged by the lack of immediate progress along these lines, he came to Paraguay and tried to create a pure German utopia. "But within a generation the intellectuals who came with him degenerated completely and he got a mezcla instead of a pure race-just what he didn't want. There are two theories about why-he killed himself. Either because his wife was having an inces¬tuous affair with her brother or because he was broke and Nietzsche refused to send him any money because he thought he was crazy." Miss Buttner wasn't even aware whose birthday it was. There had been no mention of it in the Asuncion papers. 

As for Stroessner, "1 never heard that he moved in the German environment," she told me. Stroessner's father had come with a group of Bavarians to visit Hohenau, one of the colonies in the South. There he met a beautiful dark-skinned Basque-Guarani woman named Heriberta Mattiauda. The others went on to Buenos Aires, but he stayed and married her. They settled in Encarnacion, where he started a brewery and became part of the rural Paraguayan bourgeoisie. Their son, Alfredo, who was born in 1912, had little contact with the German community. It was only later, in the thirties, when his ideological development took place, that he was influenced by the Fascism of Hitler and became more of a Germanophile. When he was president, he would often speak about "the Paraguayan race." 

THE ELUSIVE ANGEL OF DEATH 

One of Stroessner's German buddies was Hans Rudel, a flying ace in the Luftwaffe who flew more missions than anyone, destroyed a cruiser, a battleship, 519 Russian tanks, was shot down twice, lost his right leg below the calf but continued to excel at tennis and waterski¬ing, was the idol of the postwar German right, the embodi¬ment of Aryan perfection. Hitler created a special medal for him-the Knight's Cross with Golden Oak Leaves. After the war he tried out planes for the Argentinean government, and when Peron fell in 1955 and was given asylum by his friend Stroessner and Argentina was no longer safe for ex-Nazis, Rudel weat to Paraguay as well and worked in the Ferreterfa Paraguaya in Asuncion, selling BMWs, telephones, cement, and iron. He also worked for ODESSA, the secret organization for smuggling former officers of the Waffen SS out of Eu¬rope and finding them new lives in South America. 
 

xx