What do you know about freedom of expression in Paraguay?

[Judi Lynn]

2. Amazing that the waiter took a chance to caution them.

Far better to avoid having someone inform on them and get them rushed out of there to the closest police station.

That experience was really intense, but Stroessner was brutal, cruel, and vicious.

It's good your uncle and his friend weren't apprehended, by all means!




Just looked for Argentina's shared border with Paraguay, to refresh my picture. As soon as I saw the closeness the countries which took in actual former Nazis after the Second World War, I was amazed. I had never thought about it while looking at a map before this. Wow! They were all over the place! Shocking.

Of course, the US had Werner Von Braun prominently working away for years!

I had forgotten until just now, discovered it again looking for something to tell us how long the Colorado Party (right-wing monsters) have been in power all these long decades except for several years with Lugo, whom they illicitly removed from office:

APRIL 22, 20184:07 AMUPDATED 3 YEARS AGO
Paraguay's business-friendly Colorado Party keeps presidency
By Daniela Desantis, Mariel Cristaldo

4 MIN READ

. . .

Abdo is the son of the late private secretary of dictator Alfredo Stroessner, who ruled Paraguay with an iron hand for 35 years. Abdo was 16 when Stroessner’s rule ended in 1989.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-paraguay-election/paraguays-business-friendly-colorado-party-keeps-presidency-idUSKBN1HT0A0

The US right wing supported Stroessner throughout his 35 years of genocide, torture, assassinations, enslaving numbers of Native Paraguayans, doled out a fortune in foreign aid, of course, built an enormous runway out in the jungle which would accomodate the largest US military transport airplane at Mariscal Estigarribia, while still raving away, year in, year out about what an enemy was Fidel Castro.

Stroessner even invited the monstrous, brutal, despised Death Angel of Auschwitz, Dr. Josef Mengele to live in Paraguay after he fled Germany to avoid being executed as a war criminal after the war.

Jose Mengele, Paraguayan
GRAEME WOOD
JULY 18, 2009
ASUNCION -- Mengele grew up in Guenzburg, Bavaria. Guenzburg is the present-day site of Legoland Deutschland and is just a couple hundred miles from the ancestral hometown of Alfredo Stroessner. Stroessner, a year younger than Mengele, was born to a Bavarian immigrant father in Paraguay, and by the time Mengele arrived to settle in Paraguay permanent, he had ruled the country for nearly five years. Mengele thought a fellow fascist Teuton might see his flight from justice sympathetically. He was right.

I've come to the Paraguayan terror archives in Asuncion to examine the documents of Mengele's stay. The terror archives, a few small rooms on the ground floor, a thin wall away from the Palace of Justice's loading dock, exist mostly to document Stroessner's own extensive evils committed between 1954 and 1989. Stroessner employed a large corps of informants whom Paraguayans came to call piragues: in Guarani, "the hairy-footed," for the soft footfall that meant they could be lurking around any corner at any time. (Another Guarani name was "the wet-noses," for their ability to sniff out treason with sensitivity that matched the wet nose of a bloodhound.)

The documents describe a regime long toppled and repudiated, but they remain soaked in paranoia, and the natural instinct when reading these informants' reports is to look over one's shoulder. Bureaucrats sent in reports of Argentine lefties who may or may not have been massing along the border, and of Korean eccentrics who lived in jungle shacks and who may or may not have been feeding messages to Kim Il Sung. Most messages, though, concern Paraguayans themselves -- anyone remotely suspected of disloyalty faced interrogation -- and how best to make troublesome ones disappear. In retrospect few of these reports make sense (North Koreans in the Paraguayan jungle? What could they possibly want?), and the archive reads like a vast clinical document, evidence of a institution-wide neurosis.

It would probably take a defect in the Paraguayan government at least that serious to produce the document I found marked 809, concerning one "Jose Mengele," applying under his own (almost) name for Paraguayan citizenship in 1959. It is two pages long, and it resides in a leatherbound volume that the archivist produced quickly and with professional pride. Typed and stamped, the document attests to Mengele's good character, his solvency, and his having fulfilled all the requirements for citizenship. His backers were Werner Jung and Alexander (here "Alejandro" ) von Eckstein, both prominent Nazis. The paper states at least one obvious falsehood -- that Mengele had resided in Paraguay for the requisite five years already -- but that seems not to have fazed the three senior magistrates who signed it, signaling that with no objection they naturalized Josef Mengele as a Paraguayan citizen in 1959.

More:
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2009/07/jose-mengele-paraguayan/21603/