The Enduring General

In the summer of 1989 I went to Paraguay. I was six months late; I had missed the story. In February that year, when Paraguay’s Alfredo Stroessner, the western hemisphere’s longest serving dictator, had been overthrown, I was somewhere else. It was the kind of bad luck you dread as a reporter.

Stroessner had embodied every comic opera cliché about Latin American dictators: he wore outsized military hats and his chest was crowded to absurdity with medals and decorations, many self-awarded, others offered in tribute by fellow heads of state; he sheltered Nazis, or so it was widely, if fuzzily, reported; he held regular elections in which he won more than ninety per cent of the vote; he had a political system—the Stronato, a well-judged mix of cronyism and terror—named after him; and he had been in power for thirty-five years—not literally forever, but for most of the lifetime of most of his people. The Stronato was Paraguay and Paraguay was the Stronato.

Now he was gone. The coup had begun as Stroessner enjoyed his afternoon siesta with his mistress, a routine known to everyone in Asunción and certainly to General Andrés Rodriguez, Stroessner’s relative by marriage, who was the one who had set the tanks rolling that day and, after a brief resistance, had succeeded in bundling Stroessner out of the country. Stroessner had sought refuge in Brazil and silence had closed over his whereabouts and his circumstances.

I had never been to Paraguay. It sat in the geographical heart of Latin America, a byword for nastiness and corruption, unvisited and little studied even by those who followed the continent’s dramas. The images of the country that came to my mind derived from Graham Greene rather than any direct experience. I had been covering Latin America since the Falklands War in 1982, and when I started almost every country in the region was under some form of military rule. At first my job had taken me from one Latin American dictatorship to another but by 1989 things had changed. The armies were returning to the barracks, mostly taking with them the secrets of the unmarked graves and the names of their victims. Across the continent nervous civilian governments were balancing the cost of justice against the fear that to press too hard might yet bring the tanks back to the streets. The undisguised brutality of the military regimes, covertly supported for years by the United States in the name of anti-communism, had finally grown embarrassing. Even in Chile, the dictator’s grip was slackening. Paraguay had been the last.

A few months after the coup, I set out to find Stroessner and write about him for Granta. Though he was no longer physically in the country he had dominated for so long, it was there that I had to begin, first to understand his regime and then to try to find people who would open whatever door it was behind which he was sheltering in Brazil.

In some respects the job was unexpectedly easy. Asunción was like a map of the Stroessner years: a tropical city shaded by palm trees, air that was heavy with moisture, a sleepy city of broken pavements and colonial squares bordered with sad arcades, dusty shops and dingy offices that you reached by climbing steep, dark staircases, flaking balconies from which you could count the city’s prisons and torture chambers, and in the low wooded hills on the edge of town, brash palaces built by Stroessner’s cronies on the proceeds of drugs, arms dealing, corruption and smuggling. All I had to do was read the map.

But as I worked my way across the topography of the Stronato, I began to see that it was not a simple map but a palimpsest. There were other maps underneath, layer beneath layer. Before I went there, I had imagined that such a tyranny was a matter of force; but I began to understand that Stroessner’s force, though brutal, had been selective. In Paraguay, as elsewhere, it had only been necessary to intimidate a few. The majority, at one time or another in his long rule, had acquiesced. In the beginning, Stroessner had put order into a country exhausted by chaos, by coup and counter-coup. By the end of his regime, discontent was widespread. I began to ask people not whether they had opposed Stroessner but when had they switched.

I had imagined that the fall of a tyrant brought liberation and certainly when he left there had been dancing in the streets in Asunción. But the fall of a tyrant also brings uncertainty and insecurity. This had been a top-down coup, a mockery, finally, of the decades of often quixotic exertion by a disparate and always viciously persecuted opposition. It was not so much regime change as a shift change. In a country in which all power derived from one man, there was no democracy waiting to rush into the vacuum. The kleptocracy quarrelled among itself in the absence of the patriarch: it was off-balance, but there was nothing that could tip it over.

I had met many of Stroessner’s victims: some had made me rock with laughter at the absurdities of the police state, others had filled me with shame and horror as they relived their torture, just because I had asked them to. I had met the other celebrated Paraguayan record-holder of that era, Napoleon Ortigoza, a man whom Stroessner had locked for twenty-five years in solitary confinement, six months of it in a cell two metres by one, and the last several years with his cell door bricked up. Ortigoza, then an army captain, had been convicted of a murder in 1963, after a confession forced out of him by torture. What the real reason was for Ortigoza’s imprisonment—what it was about him that had been so potent that Stroessner had needed to bury him alive—was buried in layers of myth and counter-myth. Not even Ortigoza seemed able to explain.

He was, of course, hardly a normal man when they finally let him out. He spoke in the manner of a deaf man who has learned to produce sound as an exercise of will. His volume control was erratic and his delivery disconcertingly staccato. The world outside his cell seemed to confuse and alarm him. Once, when we were talking, he abruptly froze in mid-sentence. I followed his stare. Two girls were walking past. He seemed to be in shock.

I had met long-term Stroessner supporters, too, many of them freshly reinvented as noble figures of the opposition. I asked everyone I met how to get to Stroessner. Nobody in Asunción volunteered a solution. When the word finally came that it might be possible, it came from Brazil. I flew to Brasília, suppressing my disbelief that a man who was famous for his ability to smell treachery even before a plot was formed would fall for the proposition that had been put to him: that his long and wise presidency deserved a respectful history, one that could not be written without his cooperation.

In her book The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcolm writes of her unease about the relationship of the journalist to the subject, a relationship she characterizes as a morally indefensible abuse of trust. The journalist must induce the subject to confide and must then betray the confidence. Rat-like cunning, as the late Nick Tomalin observed, is one of the journalist’s most necessary qualities. In cases such as this, Janet Malcolm is not wrong in her description, though I would argue that Alfredo Stroessner was owed little in the way of moral obligation. How else do you approach someone like Stroessner except through his vanity and his sense of injury?

We met at his house, a comfortable but for him much reduced accommodation in a dull suburb of Brasília. Gustavo, his clumsy, nervous son, invigilated our conversations like a jumpy teenager who feared that his parent would mortify him in front of his friends. They bickered with each other, picking over false statistics. The people, they seemed genuinely to believe—a people whose votes they had stolen and whose funds they had embezzled—must miss them.

Did they think that they might be restored to power? Perhaps. Gustavo had a reputation for consuming the drugs that I was told he dealt in, but he had had a faction in Asunción that had planned for his succession. I could imagine few of his former champions risking anything for him. He had been in*the wrong branch of the forces, for one thing: the air force never runs the coups, in Paraguay or anywhere else, something his father knew better than anyone. Did he keep Gustavo out of the army to forestall an eventual challenge? It would have been in character. The only person Stroessner had trusted was his long-suffering mistress and she had been left behind.

There was no need, as it turned out, for me to project sympathy or approval: Stroessner and Gustavo were primed to enact self-justification. Listening to it quickly grew tedious. As Stroessner talked on about the paradise that was Paraguay under his rule I weighed the options in my head. If I listened, would he eventually trust me enough to drop the performance and talk seriously, or should I gamble everything on one confrontation that I knew would bring it to a close?

It made no difference. In the end, he was impervious to contradiction. There was no torture, no human rights abuse, no manipulation of elections, just wise and steady government traduced by traitors. That much was predictable, but something was missing: he had not mentioned communism. For decades his regime had bathed in US dollars, shipped in to buttress this defender of the free world against the menace of Cuban-inspired subversion. There was never a serious possibility of a communist revolution, but whatever legitimacy Stroessner’s regime could claim in Washington depended on the existence of the threat. I had braced myself for a long harangue on the evils of left-wing subversion, hoping that he might be induced to catalogue the real extent of US support. When he dismissed the whole idea as absurd I was stupefied. Communist insurgency, he insisted, was never a problem in Paraguay. The central myth of his regime was discarded without apology.

I wrote a piece reporting on what Stroessner had told me, and Granta published it as ‘The General’, in the spring of 1990. I didn’t send Stroessner a copy.