Paradise With Serpents: Travels in the Lost World of Paraguay

I explained all this over several cups of cappuccino in a London coffee bar to Peter Hopkirk. He thought about it and gave a slight smile of approval. ‘It does sound like an interesting quest. But remember, two Carvers have already been killed by American Indian arrows. Just make absolutely sure you are not the third. Always remember, you can’t write a book if you are killed while researching it. Jonathan Carver is clearly the one to emulate. Steer well clear of silver mines, I should.’ This was very good advice, and I often thought about it later when I found myself in much hotter water than I would ever have thought it possible to get into – and then get out of alive.

Two (#ulink_44f9111d-8459-59c5-97f8-6afac7be2e4d)

An Ambassador is Born (#ulink_44f9111d-8459-59c5-97f8-6afac7be2e4d)

At Sao Paulo airport the passengers in the transit lounge slumped forward like the dead, eyes shut, their heads resting downwards, caught in metal and canvas cradles, motionless, their arms hanging limply beside them. Above, around, and all over them hovered lean, lithe, intense young girls dressed in white t-shirts and jeans, with bare suntanned midriffs, their fingers, fists and elbows kneading their clients’ skulls, backs, shoulders, torsos and feet. This service, unlocking flight-tautened muscles and imparting spiritual calm, cost five US dollars, and took place in full view of everyone; a whole line of these modern penitents were slumped as if in prayer between the coffee stall and the newspaper stand. The newspapers and magazines on sale were all from the Americas – from all over Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Peru, Bolivia and Venezuela, as well as Mexico and the US. There was nothing from Europe – and nothing, of course, from Paraguay: sometimes known optimistically as the Switzerland of the continent, it was more like the Tibet. You could get no information on the place anywhere. I was in a new continent, a new hemisphere, and a New World – and one in which my destination was as invisible as it had been in England.

The transit passengers, mostly Brazilians waiting for internal flights, whether upright, prone or at all angles between, were uniformly young, elegant and beautifully dressed. Wasp-waisted black men, ranging from double espresso to palest café au lait, drifted past me dressed in impossibly stylish suits of pastel hues. They were shod in elegant patent shoes which looked like Milan goes Carnival in Rio. There was a calm, almost Zen atmosphere to this hyper-modern airport, hi-tech tranquillity, luxe, calme and volupté. By definition, only the richest could afford to fly in this huge but deeply divided society. The chaos, the colour, the poverty of the favelas was nowhere in evidence. Problems? What problems? you might ask yourself. But the newspapers reminded you every time you glanced at their headlines. Argentina, Brazil, much of South America was in deep crisis. Argentina had withdrawn from its commitment to value the peso on par with the dollar. Foreign currency reserves had vanished in unexplained circumstances. The banks had shut their doors. Now outside the angry protesters, already known as los ahorristas, hammered at the roller-shutter doors with sticks and batons, while the police looked on sympathetically – they too had lost their savings: this was a middle-class and middle-aged protest. They wanted their money back. They had trusted their government but their government had, in effect, stolen their money, promising to honour an exchange rate, then reneging, then closing the banks by fiat, refusing to allow savers access to their own money. Who would ever trust their money to an Argentine bank again? How could you run any sort of economy when the banks were untrustworthy and closed the doors on their own customers? Argentina could not, would not service its international debts. It had borrowed and borrowed and borrowed, but the money had all been stolen or wasted. No new loans could be negotiated until the country agreed to start repaying the interest on its old loans. There were already food shortages, medical supplies running out, layoffs and bankruptcies. Kidnapping and gunlaw had proliferated. The demonstrations in the streets against the government were turning ugly. One of the richest – in theory at least – countries in the world was behaving like one of the poorest. In Brazil the situation teetered on the edge of crisis. And what of Paraguay? It was hard to find anything out about that secretive and isolated country. I would simply have to go and find out for myself.

Initially, I had favoured the classic approach into the country – via Argentina – to Buenos Aires, and up the River Plate and River Paraguay to Asunción. It was the route everyone had always taken from the first Spanish conquistadors to the exiled Argentine President Perón. But the old Mihailovich steamers had passed out of service, and Paraguay itself had started to look away from Argentina, from the south and its past, instead looking east to Brazil, and north to Miami and the USA. So I decided to fly to Asunción via Sao Paulo. There was another reason, apart from chaos, that I did not want to go via Argentina. It is no secret that the relations between Paraguay and Argentina have always been poor. Every Argentine I had met in London – and I had met dozens of them – had expressed a low opinion of Paraguay and Paraguayans. I was not going to get any helpful information from such entrenched and biased enemies of the country I wanted to explore. They seemed to regard the Paraguayans as backward natives, Indians in tents, almost savages. Their contempt was palpable.

From time to time, from the tannoy, a soft, sibilant voice would whisper departures in Brazilian-accented Portuguese to destinations from a poet’s lexicon – Manaos and Rio de Janeiro, Bahia de San Salvador and Cartagena de las Indias, Valparaiso and Tegucigalpa. However, there was just one flight to Paraguay and I would have to wait six hours for it. I found the departure gate and read the notice posted in front of it in Spanish, Portuguese and English: ‘Passengers are advised that all revolvers, automatics, rifles and other firearms must be unloaded with ammunition and packed inside luggage that has been checked in. No person carrying loaded or unloaded weapons will be allowed on to the plane. Thank you for your co-operation.’

With a sinking heart I realized that this was an official indication of what I had been warned of before – that Paraguayans have a love affair with powder and shot, pistol and lead, that knows no bounds. ‘Do they all carry pistols?’ I had asked a seasoned old Paraguay hand in London. ‘Well, I wouldn’t say all – no, not by a long chalk. However, it is fairly common. I mean, there are shootings all the time – I mean every day, everywhere. And knife fights, of course. It’s as well to be very polite to people. That generally pays off. Unless they want to kill you, in which case no amount of politeness would help.’ This was useful advice, I suppose: I had made a mental note to be more than usually polite. In the event, there might have been some Paraguayans I met during my eventful trip who were not armed with some sort of pistol, sub-machine gun, machete or knife, but I couldn’t actually swear to it. Often we find ourselves the embarrassed witness of other people’s intimate little moments when they think they are not being observed – the surreptitious scratch of the groin, the furtive pick of the nose, the fart eased out apparently unnoticed. In Paraguay these moments always revolved around someone’s jacket falling open to reveal a gleaming or matt-black automatic peeping out coyly from waistband or shoulder holster; a drawer opened by mistake to display a cluster of Uzi sub-machine guns, a brace of pump-action sawn-off shotguns, or a vintage Luger with an embossed swastika on the wooden handle. As tea is to China, chocolate to Switzerland or red wine to France, so are firearms to Paraguay.

The first group of Paraguayans I saw, clearly waiting for the same flight as myself, were obviously vaqueros or gauchos – cowboys in jeans and stetson hats, sprawled on the bench seats near the departure gate. Each of them had a tan cowhide grip out of which protruded the butts of their rifles. They all wore empty leather pistol holsters and belts with empty bullet holders. They had obviously read the same notice I had and would check their luggage in when the counter opened. I was tempted to go and talk to them, but didn’t. They looked tired, many of them actually kept falling asleep. They had clearly driven a herd of cattle across the border from Paraguay to Brazil, and were now returning home the quickest way possible. They would have sold their horses along with the cattle – it would make no sense to ride them back. Besides a certain natural diffidence in pushing myself forward into such an uncompromising bunch, there was a question of language. If the word ‘Indian’ did not convey political incorrectness, one would have said these were Indians. They had coppery skins and hooked noses, dark lank hair and tight, compact bodies. They were cholos, campesinos or indigenos, though, that was what one called them. Indio was considered by many a term of abuse and never used politely, though the first morning I walked through the central square in Asunción a very drunk man approached me from the favela below the Presidential Palace, cackling and swaying – ‘Yo soy indio, señor,’ he shouted at me. It was 7.30am and he was well away.

There was also the question of what language one should use in speaking to people. Graham Greene, who had visited Paraguay in the depths of the Stroessner dictatorship, had been warned that if he spoke in Spanish in the countryside, he might be assumed to be being patronizing and so run the risk of being shot. On the other hand, if he spoke Guarani, the language of the predominant ethnic group, he might be assumed to be insulting, considering them to be low, ignorant fellows. There was a third lingo, too, called Jalape, which was a mixture of Spanish and Guarani, just to make things clear as mud. I asked my Paraguay expert in London about this. ‘Well, you could always try speaking to them in English – that wouldn’t cause any offence. Not that they’d understand you, of course. In the Chaco the locals speak a version of 17th-century plattdeutsch. They learnt it from the Mennonites who farm out there. So you can find this chappie who knows where the alcalde’s office is but the only language he can give you instructions in is his own tribal palaver and 17th-century Low German. I suppose you speak that fluently, of course?’ I mumbled something about French and Italian. ‘Well, those won’t be much use. The other Germans, the Third Reich lot, don’t actually say “Heil Hitler” any more, but rather “Grüss Gott”. You could manage that, I suppose?’ Surely now that Stroessner, the half-Guarani, half-Bavarian dictator who had had a signed photograph of Hitler in his office and wore a pair of Goering’s boots, had been expelled from the country, things were rather better? ‘Rather worse, if anything. He ran a tight ship, did Don Alfredo. If you were a communist he had your balls cut off with a chainsaw to the sound of Guarani harp music. But if you were white, reasonably prosperous looking and apolitical he gave you no grief. Asunción in those days was a frightened town but a safe one. Now it’s frightened and very unsafe. No one is really in charge, no one has been paid for months, in some cases for years. Tempers are short, so is cash, and with the poor even food. In the last year things have gone downhill badly. There’s talk of a coup in the offing – or a revolution. Keep your head down is my advice.’ Advice I fervently hoped I was going to be able to keep.

The flight was all but empty. I had been earnestly quizzed by the security staff about my armoury. Was I certain I didn’t have any little amuse-gueules tucked away in my boots, sleeves, or hat? No little derringer pistols, ladies’ handguns, odd trifles I might in my haste have forgotten? No plastic guns, like the Glock, which wouldn’t have shown up in the X-ray machine? We were all frisked and turned over, very politely, three times before we were allowed on board. The group of cowboys sat at the front and got merry on beer. I sat at the back and concentrated on Argentine red wine. The plane went on afterwards to Cordoba in Argentina – Paraguay was just an embarrassing little stop to be got over as quickly as possible. The flight seemed very quick. Before I knew it we were banking over the river, below us a tropical city of low-rise redroofed houses, much dark green foliage, and a few taller buildings in the centre. My stomach knotted up tightly. Why on earth was I going into one of the most dangerous countries on Earth? I let the cowboys – indeed let all the other passengers – get off first, then I ambled slowly in late-afternoon tropical heat across the tarmac. The airport building was shabby concrete, low and small. You walked to the terminal on foot. I had had to fill in an old-fashioned white immigration card, exactly the same size and type as I’d filled in as a child in colonial Cyprus. ‘I’ve flown back into the 1950s,’ I thought, as I made for the Customs Hall.

Inside, under a high ceiling, a strange scene was being enacted. Several passengers with open suitcases were in deep argument with uniformed Customs officials. Between them were being passed a collection of automatics, pistols, rifles, sub-machine guns and boxes of ammunition that had clearly come out of the luggage. They were arguing, politely but forcefully about how much duty should be paid on these items. All the Customs men were engaged in this task. I kept walking.

A young woman in a smart uniform darted forward and smiled at me. ‘¿Diplomatico?’ she asked.

This threw me. ‘Yo soy inglés,’ I stammered.

‘¡Bravo!’ she said. ‘¡Bravo – el embajador británico!’ even more loudly, and started to applaud me, clapping her hands. The Customs men looked up at me from their deliberations, and gave me great big smiles. Unnervingly, they and their clients with the weaponry all started to applaud me, clapping their hands and calling out. ‘¡Bravo … ! ¡Bravo! ¡El embajador británico!’ I had only a small bag on wheels: I bowed to the left and to the right of me, and gave what I thought might pass as an ambassadorial benediction with my free hand, and kept on my way.

Another man stepped forward, took my immigration card, stamped my passport, and gave me a smart salute. ‘Any firearms, Your Excellency?’ he asked in Spanish.

‘No, señor, nada de nada,’ I replied. ‘Pasar, pasar, Excelencia,’ he said, motioning me with his hand. I moved out into the arrivals hall, which was already all but empty. I was in Paraguay, reborn as an ambassador. I kept walking until I saw the aseos [toilets], and then darted in. I was now in a muck sweat, and it wasn’t the heat. I had arrived all right, but what the hell had I got myself into?

The queue at the Cambio was short but the wait interminable. In front of me was a young North American banker and his girlfriend, here on business. ‘She speaks German so we should be OK,’ he told me. We exchanged cards. They were staying at Madame Lynch’s old estancia, now the best hotel in Asunción. Eliza Lynch is one of the few people connected with Paraguay known to the outside world. She was the mistress and éminence grise of the mid-nineteenth-century dictator López, who ruined the country with his insane war against Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay all at the same time.

When my turn came I asked the cashier behind the counter to change US$100 into guarani. He look at me as if I was crazy. ‘You want to change all of this into guaranis?’ His expression told me that whatever else Paraguay was going to be it was not going to be expensive. My glance fell lightly on the automatic pistol in a shoulder holster under his arm, and a large revolver he was using as a paperweight to hold down mounds of ancient and dirty bank notes from being blown all over the place by the fan. My eyes slid, unavoidably, to the security guard who was sitting on a chair, the chair high on a desk, at the far end of the room. He was in uniform and had a bazooka on his shoulder. It was pointed straight at me. There was a heavy metal grill between me and the man counting and re-counting hundreds of thousands of guarani notes, but the bazooka and the man’s stare made it hard for me to concentrate on the transaction. I did have the wit to ask for one of the ten thousand notes to be broken down into thousands. I hate the airport taxi rip-off, and always get the bus into town if there is one. I knew already the bus driver wouldn’t be able to change a thousand guarani note. The man with the bazooka wasn’t South American theatricals, I later discovered. The current method of bank robbery in Paraguay and Brazil was with an armoured car; these military vehicles simply ploughed into the banks and smashed through whatever bars were there. Bitter experience had taught the Paraguayans that a man with an antitank weapon was the only way of stopping these heists. Every bank I went into had one of these characters, as well as the run-of-the-mill fellows with sub-machine guns, pistols and grenades. Bank robberies were as common as thunderstorms and as violent. One of the current scandals in the papers, I discovered, was the use of a Paraguayan army armoured car in a bank robbery just across the border in Brazil. The Minister of Defence and the President were accused of having rented out the armoured car to the mob who carried out the raid, in return for a share of the proceeds. The Brazilians claimed they had photos of the armoured car during the raid, and then afterwards, back in its army park in Paraguay. They claimed US$15 million had been stolen, but the Paraguayan press claimed this was an exaggeration – more like $8 million, they thought. When asked why he robbed banks, Butch Cassidy had replied: ‘It’s where they keep the money.’ He had been gunned down in Bolivia, eventually, just next door to Paraguay.

I evaded the lurking taxi-drivers who I knew might cheat – and possibly rob me – and walked out to the bus stop. A couple of obviously quite poor locals were waiting for the bus into town. They eyed me cautiously, but then looked away. A more hopeful fellow carried a briefcase, wore a smart watch and had a shirt with a tie. I fell into conversation with him, and explained I was new to the country – did one buy a ticket on the bus, from a driver, or from a kiosk? He was helpful and informative and I was pleased to discover that I understood his Spanish and he understood mine. The bus arrived, empty, and my new friend helped me get my ticket. We sat together, and I asked him about the state of things as we rolled towards town.

Luis Gonzalves was a Customs official, just coming off duty. Mercifully he had missed my apotheosis as fake ambassador. He gave me a thorough rundown on everything. Things were very bad. Fifteen banks had gone bust taking almost everyone’s savings with them. The government was both weak and deeply corrupt. You could trust neither the police nor the army – both were corrupt and criminal. Civil servants hadn’t been paid for six months, some not for a year. The police hadn’t been paid for three months, and if they weren’t paid soon there would be a revolution. Foreigners were leaving the country in droves – every plane out was packed to capacity, every plane in virtually empty. The only people making money were the cocaleros who exported cocaine, and the mafia who stole from everyone. What about crime? Very bad, he said, and getting worse. Buses held up and the passengers robbed, even in central Asunción, every day. Shootings and kidnappings. Bank robberies and stick-ups. Everyone was sick of it. Many wished Stroessner was back in power. ‘That was a paradise then, but we didn’t know it,’ he said, a view I heard echoed by almost everyone I met. No one I spoke to stood up for what passed for ‘democracy’ in Paraguay.

As he talked and I plied him with questions I looked out through the window, intrigued by my first sight of Paraguay on the ground. The earth was deep, laterite ochre red, the road pitted and ancient tarmac. As we came closer to the centre of Asunción the gardens grew lusher with tropical foliage, glossy green, sometimes studded with bright flowers. There were fine stucco houses of an Italianate style with red tile roofs, though everywhere was an air of decay and dereliction. The cars were surprisingly modern and the traffic busy. My premonition at the money changer at the airport that the bus fare would be tiny was correct. The fare turned out to be 1,300 guarani – about 25 US cents. Luis had told me that a 5,000 guarani note was ‘too big’ to expect the driver to change for a ticket. In the end Luis had put in 100 guaranis of his own money for my ticket, as I had only two hundreds.

I asked Luis what he thought of the hotel I had selected. It was near the Plaza Independencia. He made a face. ‘Not good. A very bad area. Much crime, robberies, prostitution, drugs, alcoholics.’ I rapidly changed my plans. The Hotel Embajador met with slightly more approval. ‘A better area – near the business district.’ There’s nothing like local knowledge and a local warning. He was kind enough to get off the bus by the Embajador and show me where it was. We shook hands and he departed. Just before he left he said, ‘Oh, and by the way, tomorrow is the annual census. Everything will be shut – everything. Everyone has to be off the streets for the whole day. No buses run, no taxis, nothing.’ As we had been talking on the bus he had asked me casually ‘Which part of Brazil do you come from?’ I said, ‘I’m English. From England.’ He creased up his face as if in slight pain and waved his hand in front of his chest, ‘Ohh – so far away …’ First an ambassador, then a traveller from Brazil. Paraguay was very different to anywhere I had ever been before. It was quite simply one of the most remote countries in the world, about which almost no one knew anything, which almost no one went to, and almost no one came from – or indeed ever came back from. I felt heartened by this, but also daunted. I felt very much alone and friendless. If anything happened to me out here no one would know or care. Paraguay was a place in which one could disappear without trace.

Three (#ulink_0b583160-03f6-57d5-978c-276b1467f39b)

Counting Paraguay (#ulink_0b583160-03f6-57d5-978c-276b1467f39b)

The heat of the tropical night faded after midnight; the dull roar of traffic was replaced by an absolute calm. I slept fitfully and woke at dawn, faint pale light creeping down the yellowing wall of my room, the shutters casting a shimmering tracery of dark and pallid shadow, a mobile set of bars ominously like those of a prison. I dressed and went out into the open patio. The pot plants and creepers snaked up towards the pale, faintly azured sky, still star-flecked. Leprous walls peeled and sagged, dead plaster like the mummified flesh of a long-buried corpse. Old, decrepit chairs sprawled as if cast away in some deserted, abandoned Spanish posada of a hundred years ago. Dust lay thick on the tiled floor. The shutters’ grey-ochre paint had blistered and flaked, the colour bleached away by heat and sun. The air smelt cool and earthy; I could hear birds twittering.

The Hotel Embajador had seen better days. It felt like something out of a Graham Greene novel – a place in old West Africa, pre-war Liberia, perhaps. I seemed to be the only guest. This was the sort of place Scobie had committed suicide in, I reflected. There was no air-conditioning and the electric bulbs had no shades. The walls were smeared with squashed mosquitoes and I had itched all night; I suspected bedbugs.

The young lad who had booked me in the night before was asleep on a couch in the foyer, fully dressed, with his shoes off. The hotel was on the first, second and third floors of a city centre building. I tiptoed to the open window and glanced out – the shutters were pulled back and the window open. The street below was deserted. A large Paraguayan flag hung idly from a 19th-century Parisian-inspired corner-building opposite, and on the top of the flagpole squatted a vulture, hunkered down, apparently asleep. Inside the hotel, on the wall opposite, above the sleeping boy, hung a gold-coloured plastic representation of Don Quixote, Sancho Panza, and the Don’s horse Rosinante. Windmills were the backdrop. Wherever you travel in the Hispanic world, you are sure to meet Don Quixote, not just as wall decoration, but in person, and Paraguay was to prove no exception.

The lad awoke with a start and gave me a sleepy, friendly smile. I beckoned to the list of refreshments advertised on the wall. Coffee, rolls, cheese sandwiches, soft drinks – what was available, I asked? He looked sheepish. ‘The woman who does the coffee and rolls and sandwiches won’t be in today – because of the census. No one can move. I have to stay here all day.’ I tried to persuade him to make me a cup of coffee – surely that at least was possible? But it wasn’t. He didn’t know how, or where the things were. I settled for a Coca-Cola, then went downstairs and out on to the silent streets.

The capital of Paraguay was as empty as if a nerve gas strike had wiped out the entire population in their sleep. Not a soul stirred, not a car, not a bus or taxi moved. It was now 6.30am. On a normal day in such a tropical city the place would already be bustling. I took my black bag with me and my cameras. The best photographs I was ever going to get without being disturbed or harassed would surely be today.

It was by now 7.30, and the first groups of students carrying clipboards began to move about from building to building. These were the sharp-end censors who did the actual counting. On the corners of the blocks, soldiers and armed police had appeared, standing in pairs. Trucks drove around dropping them off. I noticed the soldiers were all small and dark, and when I strode by they avoided my eyes and instead looked at the ground or into the middle distance. With my purposeful air, my black bag and my camera, it was evident that they thought I was something to do with the census, and a figure of authority. Much later, when I asked Gabriella d’Estigarribia what impression I made on the local people she had smiled and said, ‘They think you are a German from the Technical Service. You stride about, and look angry, and stare at people. Johnny Walker! Very gringo and dangerous. You frighten them.’

This was a blow, I confess. I had thought I made a slightly better impression. The Technical Service was the euphemism given to the secret police who did the torturing under General Stroessner’s regime, and who had not gone away after his fall. What was evident on this my first morning’s walkabout was that at six foot I was very tall, and also very white, and the ordinary soldiers and police were very small and dark, and that the small dark people shrank from the tall white people in Paraguay, when they thought they had power. You wear your continent’s history on your face, in your build, and in your skin colour. Whether I was Brazilian, German or British did not particularly matter: I was a white European in a country and a continent that had been conquered by tall white people, and whose descendants still largely owned, controlled and dominated it to this day, along with much of the rest of the world. It was not a comfortable realization. However liberal, however multicultural one felt oneself to be, in this continent one’s safety, even one’s continued physical existence depended upon being defended by a corrupt and unjustifiably empowered regime’s police force, of which one felt afraid oneself. It is possible to forget you are white if you live in Europe: in the Third World it never is.

As I roamed about taking photo after photo, I wondered whether I, too, was supposed to be indoors along with everyone else. No one challenged me, but if they did I had a feeling that simply saying I was a gringo turista was not going to be a good enough excuse. But I wasn’t challenged, far from it – I was obviously avoided and ignored, and so I wandered about with increasing confidence. There simply were no tourists in Asunción, I realized, so my movements were interpreted as being in some inscrutable way official. Better not to ask, they would be thinking – I might make trouble for myself.

I had spent a long time looking for a café that was open where I might be able to get a coffee and some breakfast, but the whole city was completely shut – not so much as a kiosk or corner store open. Later, the next day, in the newspaper Ultima Hora, I had seen a cartoon of a shivering Paraguayan family indoors trying to hide from view their smuggled TV set, fridge, freezer, hi-fi and so forth. Outside was a burglar wearing a black mask and carrying a swag bag, knocking on their door. ‘No thank you – we know who we are,’ the head of the household was saying. In Paraguay, as in Turkey, the censors actually entered every house and counted the people in every room, and noted down all the things they possessed. Each property had a sticker pasted on the outside door to prove they had been inspected. ‘Smuggling is the national industry of Paraguay,’ Graham Greene had observed, when he visited the country in the stronato, as the Stroessner years were called. ‘Contraband is the price of peace,’ Stroessner had stated, defining it as official policy. With the second lowest per capita income in South America, Paraguay imported more Scotch whisky than all the rest of South America put together. It was almost all immediately re-exported to neighbouring Brazil, Bolivia and Argentina. Paraguay was sometimes known as ‘the Switzerland of South America’ not because of its non-existent mountains or ski slopes, but because it was the regional haven for hot money, millionaires on the run, shady enterprises of all kinds, numbered bank accounts and smuggled luxury goods. As in Switzerland, there were a lot of cows and a lot of pastureland – but you didn’t make much of a living out of those. ‘Switzerland is where all the big criminals come together to hide the profits of their swindles and thefts,’ Juan Perón, dictator of Argentina had said in the 1950s, before being ousted. He should have known: he had sent Eva Perón across to Europe in 1947 to bank their own ill-gotten gains in Geneva. The bankers had put on a special celebratory dinner for her. The British government had refused her a visa and denied her entry as a harbourer of fugitive Nazis and handler of stolen Jewish gold. It was estimated by the Allied Enemy Property Bureau after the Second World War that the Nazis laundered 80% of the loot they had stolen from the Jews and the countries they occupied through Switzerland, with the full knowledge of the Swiss, and the remaining 20% through Argentina, Paraguay, Egypt and Syria, all sympathetic to the Nazi cause. It was the Swiss authorities who had suggested the Nazis add a ‘J’ on to the passports of German Jews before the war, so the Swiss could tell who they were and refuse them entry. ‘Few things have their beginnings in Switzerland,’ observed Scott Fitzgerald, ‘but many things have their endings there.’ Seedier, poorer, more evidently corrupt and oppressive, Paraguay was a downmarket latino, South American tropical version, more like Albania in ambience. Already in my strolls around the city centre I had seen the empty shells of many monumental steel and glass banks, their doors locked and shuttered, beggars sleeping on cardboard under their massive porticoes. Inside you could see the desks and tables covered in dust, with empty cartons on the floors from where the computers and office equipment had been taken away. Like desecrated cathedrals, I thought, these were modern temples of money that had failed, abandoned by their priests, acolytes and devotees, who now worshipped abroad, in Miami and the Cayman Islands.

The night before, although tired after my 18-hour journey from London, I had gone out into the city centre, curious and impatient to get some first impressions. The broken pavements, sandy soil spilling out, potholed streets and grime-stained walls suggested a city down on its luck, and slipping into dereliction. Closed shops, broken windows, beggars, dirt, unpainted walls, shutters falling off their hinges: no one had spent any money on this city for a long time. There were armed police everywhere, hanging around, and the 19th-century stucco buildings suggested a derelict Andalucian provincial town in Spain during the early years of General Franco, just after the Civil War. But the Indian women crouched on the pavements selling tropical fruit and vegetables, herbs, potions and unknown fruit drinks were from the New World, not the Old. I had been recommended the nearby Lido restaurant by the hotel clerk. Right opposite the Pantheon of Heroes, this was an atmospheric 1950s-style soda fountain, with pink granite counter top at which one sat, huge fans churning the air above one’s head. The place was run by capable, sensible Paraguayan women of a certain age, who wore pink uniforms with little pink caps. I ordered a veal escalope à la Milanese, with salad and bread, and a Pilsen beer. I had inwardly groaned when the waitress had appeared carrying the beer, and a bucket of ice with a glass inside it. Ice in beer is a favourite – and disastrous – tropical invention I had experienced in Malaysia and Indonesia. But I need not have worried. The glass rim had not touched the ice, and the bottle of beer was opened and thrust into the bucket in place of the glass, up to its neck in frosty coldness, as if champagne in an ice bucket. This was a hot country where they understood cold beer. I had last tasted an iced beer glass straight from the freezer in Australia, a country where they also understand the needs of thirsty, heat-choked men. The Paraguayan beer, brewed to a German lager recipe, was very cold and very good. The food was excellent too: the salad had a flavour completely unavailable in Europe today unless you grow your own vegetables without pesticides and fertilizers. Native pessimism led me to abstract about a third of the escalope and secrete it inside a paper napkin in my bag, together with a couple of slices of bread. I had a feeling there would be no food available on the morrow for any price. I was right, too. Together with an apple I had left over from my flight, and some boiled sweets, this was all I had to eat until the day after the census.

It was dark by 6pm. The night fell suddenly, like a curtain. Wood fires started up, pinpricks of light, from the shanty town on the sandbanks by the river. A breeze from the river wafted up the characteristic Third World smell of sweat, smoke, excrement and spices. By day I had been in Franco’s Spain, but by night it was Java or Malaysia. There were small children everywhere, ragged, energetic, vociferous and hungry. The Lido had two private armed guards in khaki uniform, one inside by the cash desk, the other outside by the door. The children begged for coins as the customers left. There was a charity box by the cash desk which bore the printed label: ‘Give generously for the lepers of Paraguay’. I just hoped none of them worked in the kitchens. In England, I had asked my local medical centre what diseases were on offer in Paraguay, and what injections were required. It’s hard to impress a British National Health doctor, but Paraguay did it for my GP. ‘I say … malaria, dengue fever, yellow fever, blackwater fever, cholera, typhoid, jiggers, tropical sores, dysentery, plague, HIV, sleeping sickness, bilharzia … by golly, they’ve got the lot out there … it’s a complete Royal Flush. Why are you going, if I might ask?’

I muttered something about work. ‘Oh, and the llamas all have syphilis, due to the lonely herdsmen taking advantage of them in the altiplano …’ Surely not llamas, in Paraguay? I queried faintly. ‘Oh, sorry, my mistake, that’s Peru, next paragraph down. Oh and meningitis, leprosy, river fever, Lhasa fever … you know I think it’s easier to say what they haven’t got in jolly old Paraguay,’ he added jovially. ‘Ebola – they haven’t got that, it seems – yet.’ I’d had to go three times to his surgery for various shots over a couple of weeks. ‘Do please come back and see us again if … or I should say when you return,’ the doc had said cheerily. ‘The tropical medicine boys up in London like us to send up stool, blood and urine samples from people coming back from these sorts of places – you might pick up something really interesting, something new, even.’ Carver Fever, I thought, a hitherto unknown infection, carried by mosquitoes, incurable, causing paralysis, catalepsy, raging insanity, multiple organ failure and agonizing, lingering death by multiple spasm, also known as the Black Twitching Plague, after its gruesome effects. First brought back to Europe from tropical South America by the late travel writer Robert Carver, who was its first known victim, and whose body had to be cremated in an isolation hospital to avoid contaminating southern England … I could be famous: dead, and famous. I said I would stagger in on crutches, somehow, so he could apply his leeches to my depleted carcass. I thanked him, finally, after the last jab session, with thinly disguised insincerity and turned to go. ‘Oh, and I should take a plentiful supply of condoms – just in case any of those syphilitic llamas stray across the border … ha, ha, ha!’ His laughter echoed tinnily round the surgery. I gave him a weak smile, but I felt perhaps the joke lacked a certain good taste, or just simple fellow-feeling. On my first evening’s stroll in Asunción I was not particularly reassured to see a large sign with a vicious-looking mosquito on it in the Plaza Independencia, warning of dengue fever. ‘No hay remedio’ ran the Goyaesque rubric underneath – there’s no cure. Later, I was told that the dengue mosquito was slow and stupid and operated in Paraguay only by day, whereas the malarial mosquito was fast, intelligent and operated by night. The infectious dengue mosquito was male, the malarial female – make of that what you will. ‘Women are just as good as men, only better,’ observed D. H. Lawrence, who probably knew. The other Lawrence, T. E., contracted malaria while cycling in the south of France before the First War, while studying medieval castles. I had a great sack of anti-malarial and anti-every-other-damn-thing in my bags. If I had anything to say in the matter I was determined to avoid being immortalized in the medical history books.

The centre of old Asunción did have a certain faded elegance, reminiscent, especially after dark, of post-Baron Haussmann Paris, with tropical excrescences such as vultures perched on the telegraph wires, and impassive Indian women smoking coarse cheroots, squatting on the doorsteps. The park sported French 19th-century style wooden benches, white wooden slats held together by elaborate wrought iron, these boat-like contrivances designed for amatory ooh-la-la, even, perhaps, for complete copulatory performance, their arched backs swooning towards the grass. The palms rustled in the faint breeze, rats of impressive size scampering up and down the trunks with complete lack of pudeur, and groups of Indians in costume hunkered down for the night amidst the shrubbery, grouped around small, glowing fires on which they brewed their evening potations. By day, I later discovered, these impassive indigenos strolled about the town in loin cloths, amid the BMWs and Mercedes, proffering handicrafts, bows and arrows, and beadware, with very little evident enthusiasm or hope of a sale. These, I was told, were the Makká people, who had come in from the Chaco, the Paraguayan Outback that lay just across the river.

The old Post Office was the finest 19th-century stucco building I found, with a charming interior patio full of carefully tended tropical plants, and an elegant stone staircase up to the flat roof, where there was a café and an unrivalled view down across the square to the river beyond. Flags, of the Paraguayan variety, of all sizes, flapped energetically from many buildings in the strong evening wind that rose off the river, bringing the stink of the poor up into the centre of town. It was evident already that there were many poor, and they surrounded the city proper in their slums. A few of them slunk about furtively in the shadows, watched intently by armed police who carried shotguns, machine-guns and assault rifles, and wore six-shooters in black special-forces style low-slung holsters. I had been greeted jovially by a police officer as I walked about the square below the Post Office. He smiled elaborately and said that, with my permission, as I was evidently a foreigner, I would not mind if he gave me a few words of friendly advice. Under no circumstances was I to wander down the steps and into the favela – he used the Brazilian word for a shanty town – below us. The centre of Asunción was safe, he said, relatively safe even at night. The favela was not. I would be attacked, robbed and perhaps killed within minutes of going down there. It would be best if whenever I wandered around I kept an eye out for police and soldiers. If I could see police and soldiers I was probably all right – no one would attack me. If I couldn’t, then I was not safe. There was a great deal of crime at the moment, he told me, due to the unsettled conditions in the country. Not only foreigners were at risk, ordinary Paraguayans were attacked every day, even here in Asunción. I asked if everyone had identity papers, even the poorest of the poor, even in the favela. Everyone had papers, he said, absolutely everyone. Not to have papers was a criminal offence in itself. He wished me a good evening, smiled again and then strolled away. His warning and the slight chill in the air had suggested I should now retire for the night. I made my way back to the hotel and shuttered the windows tight. There were many mosquitoes on the wall and I spent half an hour killing them before turning in. I couldn’t really tell if these were the fast, intelligent variety or the slow, stupid ones. I rigged up my mosquito net, purchased in London, and crept under it. The bed was hard and uncomfortable. My room cost US$5 a night. I determined to move upmarket and out of the centre of town after the census was over.

Four (#ulink_afa8fd8b-a591-5436-b41a-072555c4bbac)

Du Côté de Chez Madame Lynch (#ulink_afa8fd8b-a591-5436-b41a-072555c4bbac)

Gabriella d’Estigarribia sat in the shade under a palm tree by the swimming pool and sipped her grapefruit juice delicately. She had a wide-brimmed straw hat on, her face in deep shadow, yet already the sun had caught the pale, fair skin of her face.

‘Foreigners come to Paraguay, find they can do nothing with the people, become angry, then give up, eventually, and go away again in disgust,’ she said evenly, not looking at me, but rather at the hummingbird which hovered like a tiny helicopter over the swimming pool.

‘Why is it so hard to get things done, for foreigners?’ I asked.

‘Not just for foreigners, for everyone. Some say it is the mentality of the Guarani people, who used to be called “Indians” before they were converted to Catholicism by the Spanish. Then, by a sort of unexplained miracle they ceased to be Indians and became Paraguayans. People say the Guarani live entirely in the present – the past is forgotten, the future unimagined. Remembering things and making plans for the future are both of no interest to them. Promises are made, events planned, but nothing happens – inertia sets in. From the first the Europeans had to use authoritarian means – force, coercion – to get anything done. The Jesuits used to whip their converts on the famous, oh-so-civilized, we are told, Reductions, as well as the ordinary secular colonial overseers on the plantation.’

‘That was a long time ago, surely. What about today, in the new post-Stroessner democracy?’

‘His Colorado Party is still in power. He was displaced by an internal coup because he had grown old and flabby. He was arrested at his mistress’s house. She was called Nata Legal – nata being “cream” in Spanish – that makes her Legal Cream in English, no? What better name for a mistress. He tried to call out the tanks but the only man with the keys for the ignition had gone off to the Chaco for the weekend – so no tanks. There was an artillery duel in Asunción – you can still see the pockmarks in the buildings from the shells – then he was gone, bundled off to Brazil where his stolen millions had been sent ahead. Now we have mounting chaos because no one is frightened any more. Corruption is universal. Everyone takes bribes if they can. Before, under Stroessner, you paid your 10% in bribes to the Party and then you were left alone. Under this so-called democracy you are constantly being made to pay up by everyone, and still nothing is done, because no one is forced to do it any more. You must have noticed the city is falling apart from neglect.’

In her thirties, married and with two small children, Gabriella came from an old Paraguayan family which had been in the country, on and off, since the Spanish Conquest. Her ancestors had come from the Basque provinces of Spain, as had so many of the other conquistadors. Like many of her Paraguyan ancestors, she had spent years abroad in exile, in her case in Miami, in Italy and in England, during the decades of political repression. We were sitting outside in the lush tropical garden of Madame Lynch’s tropical estancia. Once this had been a cattle ranch in open country, belonging to the mistress of the dictator López, now it was a hotel, surrounded by a well-heeled suburb of Asunción, an hour’s walk from the centre of town. You could get a bus or taxi down Avenida España, which made the journey much shorter, but the spate of robberies on public transport meant that many, including myself, preferred to walk. The Avenida España had well-armed police at frequent intervals, as well as motorized patrols during daylight hours, and most of the shops and institutions on either side had highly visible private armed guards sitting outside in plastic chairs with pump-action shotguns or automatic rifles across their knees. At each petrol station there was an army patrol permanently stationed, two or three uniformed men with automatic rifles. This was the route to the airport from the centre of town. If there was a coup d’état or a revolution, this was the route the outgoing government would flee along: clearly they wanted to make sure there would be enough petrol available to get them to their planes. It was the petrol supply for Stroessner’s tanks that had been under lock and key, I later learnt, when the crunch had come, not the ignition keys. Clearly, this government didn’t intend to make the same mistake. Stroessner still gave maudlin interviews to journalists from time to time from his hideout in Brazil, where he bemoaned the fact that he was a much misundertood former dictator – but then they all say that, those that survive. An avowed fan of Adolf Hitler, his secret police, known as the Technical Service, were among the most feared in South America. Cutting up political opponents with chainsaws to a musical accompaniment with traditional Paraguayan harp music was a popular finale, the whole ghastly symphony played down the telephone for favoured clients. Like his local hero the Argentine dictator Juan Perón, Stroessner had a taste for young girls – very young, pre-pubescent. When a daring journalist had once asked Perón if it was true that he had a 13-year-old mistress, he replied, ‘So what? I’m not superstitious.’ His reputation among Argentines had soared after this was revealed, the ultra-young mistress being seen as a sign or both power and virility. The 13-year-old in question used to parade around Perón’s apartment dressed in the dead Eva’s clothes, to the slothful admiration of her ageing beau. Stroessner was reputed to favour the 8–10 age group. His talent scouts waylaid them outside school, from where they were taken to discreet villas to be enjoyed by the Father of his People. If they performed nicely they and their parents would be sent on a free holiday to Disneyland in Florida, the nearest Paraguayans can get to Heaven without actually dying first. Stroessner, the half-Bavarian, half-Indian dictator had sent a gunboat down the river for Perón, the mulatto dictator, when he had taken refuge in the Paraguayan Embassy, after his overthrow. Forced into exile, Perón had fascinated the young supremo by recounting his adventures and reminiscences. ‘They used to worship my smile – all of them!’ he cried. ‘Now you can have my smile – I give it to you!’ and here he had taken out his brilliant set of false teeth, and passed them across the table to the startled Stroessner. Perón had found Paraguay too dull, and he had to agree to abstain from political intriguing in Argentina, which was irksome, so after a short period of rustication up the river he had taken himself off to the Madrid of Generalissimo Franco, where he lived in exile with the mummified corpse of Eva Perón upstairs in the attic of his Madrid villa, surrounded by magicians and occult advisers. The mummifier, Pedro Ara, who had taken a year over his task, had used the ‘ancient Spanish method’ and had charged $50,000 for his work, a bill that was never paid. Throughout the last weeks of Eva’s agonizing illness the embalmer had stood close by on guard in an antechamber, night and day, waiting in anticipation, for he had to start the process of mummification the instant she died ‘to render the conservation more convincing and more durable’. Her viscera were removed entirely and preserving fluids were sent coursing through her entire circulatory system before rigor mortis set in. Some areas of her body were filled with wax and her skin was coated in a layer of hard wax. The complete process was slow, painstakingly slow. After the fall of Perón, the military mounted ‘Operation Evasion’ in which the body of Eva Perón was ‘disappeared’ to prevent her becoming the focus of a popular cult; for many people, particularly women and the poor, she has already become a saint.

The son of a First World War German officer, Lt-Col. Koenig was given charge of the body, and he showed it to a delegation of Peronist CGT trades unionists to show that the military had not outraged her body. After this the mummy was hidden in various military barracks: but the people always found out where she was cached, and flowers, candles and votive offerings appeared as if by magic outside each new hiding place. For a long time Colonel Koenig refused to bury the mummy of Eva: some said he had fallen under her spell and used to sit up at nights talking to her as if to a lover, perhaps indeed having fallen in love with this masterwork of the embalmer’s art. Eventually, under mysterious circumstances, the mummy was exhumed and smuggled out of the country to the Vatican by an Argentine priest, Father Rotger, aided by a posse of Italian priests well versed in the black arts of corpse vanishings. Finally, it seems, Koenig had managed to force himself to put to earth the mummy of Eva. ‘I buried her standing because she was male,’ he said later, and this vertical interment was confirmed, for when the mummy was examined in Rome the feet had been destroyed by the weight of the body forcing down on them. It was rumoured that even when buried, Eva had been consulted on various occult matters by the military, and burying her standing up made such consultations easier – the casket only had to be opened at the top, with a sort of cat-flap on hinges. Originally, Eva’s mummy had been exhibited in a glass casket to her adoring public, her hands holding a rosary given her by the Pope; now her body vanished into limbo, finding its way by unknown means into Juan Perón’s hands again in Madrid. After Eva’s death, Juan Perón had made her brother Juancito fly to Switzerland and sign over her numbered accounts into his own, Perón’s name; following this Juancito was conveniently killed in a car accident in Buenos Aires, and his skull ended up being used as a paperweight by Captain Grandi, a military official. Torture and bullfights had both been banned in Argentina in 1813, after the Spanish had been expelled. Perón reintroduced torture, including for women, especially to the genitals. His chief torturer was one Simon Wasserman, a Jewish police official. Like Stroessner, Perón was half-Indian. His mother was so dark that in the racially prejudiced Argentina of the era, she could not be presented in public. Perón had a sense of humour, however; when criticized for living with an actress – Eva was a famous star of the Argentine radio and cinema – he replied, ‘Who do they expect me to sleep with – an actor?’ He was just about to confiscate all the Catholic Church’s property in Argentina, and turn the Cathedral in Buenos Aires into a social centre for trades unionists when he was overthrown. His antecedent – also of part-Indian descent – was Dr Francia, the first dictator of Paraguay after independence from Spain who successfully nationalized Church property, and said, ‘If the Pope cares to come to Paraguay I shall do him no greater honour than to make him my personal confessor.’ Dr Francia got away with it because he had eliminated all opposition from his rivals, and because Paraguay was so far away and so difficult to get to. Many people in Europe still do not know where the place is, including, presumably, the editors of the Penguin History of Latin America, who give the country a complete miss.

Stroessner observed all of Perón’s antics and travails from up the river, and carried many of the murkier aspects of Peronism into practice himself in later years, particularly torture and the cult of the personality. There was even a ‘Don Afredo Polka’, the polka being the national dance, though nothing like a polka anyone in Europe has ever heard. Though the Paraguayans do not like you to say so, Paraguayan history sometimes seems to be a grotesque parody of what has already occurred down south. If the saga of Juan and Eva Perón reads to European eyes as a bizarre excursion into Grand Guignol, something from the pages of a magical realist novel by Gabriel García Márquez, it is worth noting that Márquez himself worked when a young man as a journalist on the Buenos Aires newspaper Clarín during the Perón years. To those who know South America at all, Márquez’s fiction is closer to reality in that continent than many Europeans would credit.