One evening I called on Rudel's good friend and colleague at the Ferreterfa Paraguaya, Colonel Alejandro von Eckstein, a bullet-headed, barrel-chested, remarkably robust eighty¬four-year-old Russian whose ancestors had come from Prus¬sia at the invitation of Peter the Great; all that was missing was the monocle. Von Eckstein was the last living veteran of an all-Russian volunteer company in the Chaco War-a senseless border conflict between Bolivia and Paraguay that took 85,000 lives in 1930. He showed me his photo album: himself in pith helmet, arm around bare-breasted Indian girl in feather headdress; Bolivian casualties skeletonized by army ants. His friendship with Stroessner went back more than fifty years. He had taught the Stroessner children how to water-ski. Gustavo, he told me, was a khoroshii sportsmen¬a good athlete (the interview was conducted half in Spanish, half in Russian). But von Eckstein had not joined the band¬wagon, to judge from his modest house in a not particularly elegant part of town. 

One day in 1959, he told me, Rudel brought a fellow German to the office. He was very cultivated and correct and he was selling manure spreaders for his family's firm in Germany. His name: Josef Mengele. "I didn't know he was a doctor," von Eckstein assured me. He didn't know that Mengele had conducted grotesque experiments on 1,500 sets of twins and fatally injected blue "dye into the eyes of Gypsy children in an effort to perfect the Master Race. Did he know him well? "We knew each other," von Eckstein went on. "He was very suave but not very alegre. He didn't seem to have much of a sense of humor." How many times did you meet? "Maybe twenty. It was always at the office. We talked about business, never about the war. Rudel had brought by others like them and helped them settle in Para¬guay. I figured he didn't want to talk about it. " 

But von Eckstein knew Mengele well enough to sponsor him for citizenship with another colleague at the Ferreterfa Paraguaya, Werner Jung. I asked von Eckstein if Stroessner knew Mengele, and he said no, which seemed strange, be¬cause Rudel was a good friend of both of them. In any case, Mengele left Paraguay for good in 1960 and hid in Brazil, lonely, tormented, undetected. He drowned in 1979. "Look at how he ended his life, poor devil," said another old ac¬quaintance. "Do you think if he had been under Stroessner's protection he would have lived that way?"

Colonel Thomas Chegin, who was the military attache at the American Embassy in the late fifties, believes he met Mengele in Filadelfia, one of the Mennonite communities in the Chaco. "I was shown a medical dispensary," he recalls. "A doctor came out in a white smock. I'm pretty sure it was Mengele. He said hello and kept out of sight. A lot of guys with shady pasts have hidden in Paraguay. It's a good place to get out of the mainstream." There are stories that Martin Bormann and Eduard Roschmann, the Butcher of Riga, melt¬ed into the German community in Paraguay, but none of them have been confirmed. 

Another scoundrel welcomed into the bosom of Stroess¬ner's Paraguay was the Croatian anti-Communist terrorist Miro Baresic, who killed the Yugoslav ambassador in Stock¬holm. Baresic was teaching martial arts at a military college outside Asuncion when he mistakenly killed the Uruguayan ambassador to Paraguay while trying to get a visiting Yugo¬slav official. "Stroessner was a friend of Muslim, Mason, Jew, white, Indian," a close associate told me. "He only drew the line with blacks. As long as you had plenty of hard currency, he didn't care how you got it. Another pirate on the pirate ship was always welcome." 

RISE OF THE TYRANNOSAUR

In 1929, at the age of sixteen, Stroessner was enrolled in a military school. Three years later the Chaco War broke out, and he joined as a young artillery officer, command¬ing by the end of it his own mortar group, already attract¬ing notice as a hard worker and good leader. His pastimes were nauseatingly wholesome: chess, fishing, flying, a weekly poker game, the matches of his favorite soccer team, Libertad. In 1940 he married a schoolteacher several years his senior, Eligia Mora, who in later years would come to resemble Mrs. Khrushchev. Settling into the life of a sober, churchgoing family man, he produced three children. Also in 1940 he was selected for further training at a Brazilian mili¬tary college. Returning home as a major, Stroessner was hailed by his superiors as "a complete offi¬cer with a great future in the army" who was "discreet and circumspect. " 

In 1947 there was a bloody civil war.  Around a fifth of the population fled to Argentina. (Argentina and Paraguay are the traditional countries of each other's exiles. At the moment, Paraguay is play¬ing host to 10,000 Argentineans.) Over the next two years there were half a dozen coups and countercoups. Stroessner took part in four of them. In 1954 it was his turn. With the support of the military and the conservative "democratico" wing of the Colorado Party, he grabbed the presi¬dency. The coup took place while all of Asuncion society was at the Philharmon¬ic. Legend has it that the shooting started just at the thunderous beginning of Bee¬thoven's Fifth-da-da-da DUM-and ev¬eryone thought it was part of the show until soldiers burst onto the stage and an¬nounced that a coup was under way. 

Thus began the stronato, the Stroessner era. But making it to the top was one thing, and staying there was another. Poli¬tics in Paraguay is governed by the princi¬ple of mbarete, a Guarani word meaning clout, the law of the strongest. It is very Darwinian. Take, for instance, the case of Napoleon Ortigoza, an attractive, upper¬class cavalry officer who ended up being the longest-held political prisoner in Latin America. The theories about why he was arrested are many and baroque, but some of them involve a sinister plot to over¬throw Stroessner. When a young cadet, Alberto Benitez, was killed-either by other officers to cover up a homosexual claque or because he was being tortured by the police as encouragement to reveal the details of the coup plot-the minister of the interior, Edgar Ynsfnin, or so one theory goes, hit upon the brilliant idea of pinning the murder on Ortigoza, who was not actually involved in any plot yet, but was just the sort you had to watch out for. Putting him away would be what is known as an aca pete, a "warning slap," to any¬one who got ideas about moving against the president. Ortigoza's insistence on his complete innocence fell on deaf ears. He was not allowed to be present at his trial, and one of his lawyers was arrested and beaten. He was condemned to death, al¬though Stroessner later commuted the sentence to life imprisonment after a priest threatened to break the seal of confession and tell who the real murder¬ers were. 

Such perversions of justice wouldn't have been so easy to pull off if Paraguay hadn't been in a state of siege in which the right of habeas corpus was suspended. The state had to be renewed every ninety days, which Stroessner did until 1987, cit¬ing the threat of international Commu¬nism. In fact, a state of siege had been in effect almost continuously since 1929. It is important to realize that none of the techniques Stroessner used to stay in pow¬er were invented by him. Let's not give the man more credit than he deserves. The code of power, the mad vision of perfect order, the acts of arbitrary cruelty fol¬lowed by sudden unpredictable acts of kindness, the ubiquitous spies, known in Guarani as pyragiies, or "feet with feath¬ers" (usually translated as "hairy soles"), the incondicionalismo that he demanded because he was Paraguay, the paternalism that he justified because the people were like children, weak, ignorant, not yet ready to take charge of their lives-this was pure El Supremo, techniques used by Dr. Francia in the nineteenth century. 

Communism was absolutely verboten. In 1958 an anti-Peronista general, Te¬ranzo Montero, attempted a guerrilla inva¬sion of Paraguay. Four hundred and fifty¬eight subversives trained in Argentina and pretending to be campesinos infiltrated the province of Alto Parana. But the govern¬ment got wind of their arrival and sent six thousand soldiers to take care of them. Three months later only seventeen of the subversives made it back to Argentina. There were no prisoners. The others were dropped from planes, fed to the piranhas. Their bloated bodies were floated down the river to Asuncion as an aca pete. In 1975 the secretary of the Paraguayan Communist Party, Miguel Soler, was me¬thodically dismembered by chain saw in the presence of Pastor Coronel. 

Some responsibility for this kind of ac¬tivity must be laid on the United States, because Stroessner would never have sur¬vived without its support. The early word from American intelligence sources had been that he was "a known friend, austere and honest, a hero of the Chaco War." His government had been recognized quickly. A month later U.S. development aid to Paraguay increased 50 percent. Be¬tween 1954 and 1960 the country got $23.8 million, and the figure kept going up. American and Taiwanese advisers were sent to Paraguay, as they were to Uruguay and Brazil, to train the police in counterinsurgency and interrogation tech¬niques-like how to jog the subject's memory by grinding your thumb into his jugular below the ear. In fact, the United States contributed more to the state terror of stronismo than the ex-Nazis did, and intelligence from the C.I.A. station in Asuncion, which monitors transmissions in the Southern Cone, helped Stroessner stave off four of five attempts to remove him. In 1958 Nixon stopped by on his way to Caracas, where he would be stoned by demonstrators. He got a much friendlier welcome in Paraguay. There are pictures of him and Stroessner hugging, standing side by side in a finned convert¬ible whose hood is draped with the flags of both countries.
 

xx