Paradise With Serpents: Travels in the Lost World of Paraguay. Robert Carver
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Margaux to his estate in Virginia still exist today in the Bordeaux archives. The Madame Lynch belle-of-the ball legacy lives on vibrantly today, and one of the startling features which elevates Paraguay from, say, the Congo, which in other ways it closely resembles, is the old-fashioned chic and elegance of the rich in Asunción, who still dress in long white gowns, full evening dress, starched shirts and tailcoats, and attend high-society balls with bands, masters of ceremony, sprung ballroom floors and all the other appurtenances of courtly behaviour now more or less a memory in Europe. The Society pages of Ultima Hora revealed a social Asunción which looked like Paris before the First War – pearls, tiaras, wing-collars, black or white tie, patent leather shoes, full orchestras in uniform – all a thousand miles up the river and in the sub-tropical jungle. At the Gran Hotel I was witness to all this, for every weekend some celebration would be mounted in the ballroom: Strauss waltzes would echo from the Indian orchestra in dress uniform, and the belles of Asunción would trip the light fantastic while outside waiters in white-starched uniforms with cummerbunds would circulate with canapes and champagne on silver trays held high over their heads. The debutante balls of the season were all lovingly photographed and reported in the Society pages, everyone’s name printed in full; it made light relief after the litanies of crime, corruption and bankruptcy on all the other pages.
Asunción’s bizarre elite were really too much. In a city where so many were almost starving there were no less than four Tiffany’s jewellery shops, and the company was doing so well that they could afford to take out full-page advertisements in the papers promoting their latest imported deluxe items from New York. Whether she had or had not lived in the old estancia that had become the Gran Hotel, all this was certainly the result of Eliza Lynch’s meteoric passage through Paraguay. Without doubt she and López and their Court would have danced here, for it would have been one of the few ballrooms in the city of that time able to accommodate large parties. It was somehow very Paraguayan to have breakfast under an artificial, painted tropical sky, installed by emigre Sicilians, when outside through the open french windows real Paraguayan tropical birds sat in real tropical foliage, fed from time to time by indigenous Guarani servants. I was reminded of the old Chinese saying: ‘Is Chuang-zu dreaming of the butterfly, or is the butterfly dreaming of Chuang-zu?’
The census had not been a success, according to the press. Incomplete, notorious disorganization, several suburbs of Asunción left out completely the journalists all reported. Perhaps it had all been as inefficient under Stroessner, only then no one would have known, because in those days the press had been allowed to report nothing but peace, progress and order – the regime’s apt motto, reflecting three much desired qualities in Paraguayan life, and notable mainly for their complete absence in the post-Stroessner polity. The students who had actually carried out the census with their clipboards and serious expressions, knocking on individual doors and demanding entrance, like latter-day emissaries of King Herod, had been paid 5,000 guaranis for their day’s work, sometimes only 2,500 guaranis. A bus ticket in Asunción cost 1,300 guaranis. Everyone had been restricted to their place of residence all day long, forbidden to take to the streets, which was why I had received so many sidelong glances and felt so much discomfort when I was busy striding about the town taking photographs.
Now at last, it seemed, the country had won an international accolade. According to Transparency International, Paraguay was the third most corrupt country in the world, after Bangladesh and Nigeria, and the most corrupt in the Americas, ahead even of Haiti and Colombia. Less corrupt than Paraguay were Angola, Azerbaijan, Uganda, Cameroon and Kazakhstan, among others. The least corrupt countries were Finland, Denmark and New Zealand, in that order. Corruption in Paraguay was not individual or sporadic, it was institutional and endemic. Nothing could be done without bribes at every level, from the simple policeman manning a roadblock to a cabinet minister approving a government contract. Anyone in a position to milk money from the system did so. The country’s economic plight was spelled out in its depressing list of negative statistics. There was a US$2,200 million external debt, the interest on which could not be paid, and a US$305,000 million budget deficit. Out of a total population of 6 million, 200,000 people were employed in the public sector, most of them unpaid for months or even years; 15.3% of the population was ‘openly employed’, 22% officially unemployed. There was an 8% illiteracy rate and 81% of the population had no health insurance. There was, of course, no government health service whatsoever; 33.7% of the population fell below the official poverty line of $25 a week and 16% (900,000) existed in extreme poverty, with no source of formal income at all. The most startling imbalance was the tiny proportion of public service workers – less than 3.3% of the population. In Welfare State Europe this figure stood at 45% or 50% of the population. But to employ so many people in the public services you had to tax people heavily – Europeans paid more than 50% of their incomes in direct taxes, pension levies and national insurance contributions, and then again on sales taxes, VAT and indirect taxes on such things as fuel, tobacco and alcohol. In Paraguay there was virtually no tax at all, which was what made it such a paradise for the rich. Huge tracts of Paraguay’s real economy were illegal – smuggling, drug processing and export, arms trafficking, fake cigarette manufacture and sale, car theft, cattle rustling and extortion, money laundering and the government cheating on contracts. The government was simply bypassed by private enterprise – criminal and legal – and the administration was too feeble and corrupt to do anything about it. Paraguay was a classic Third World kleptocracy, bankrupt but enormously wealthy, all the money kept out of the country in hidden bank accounts in untraceable offshore havens. When Belgrade was being bombed by NATO and accused of alleged sanctions-busting during the Kosovo war, the then President of Serbia, Slobodan Miloševic, commented that they really ought to be bombing the Cayman Islands, as that was where all the sanctions-busting was actually going on. Similarly, it would be futile trying to chase the missing billions in Paraguay as it was all hidden offshore.
The blame for the ruin of this rich and fertile country was laid squarely at the door of the Colorado Party by local historian Mida Rivarola.
The economic model invented by Stroessner turned a country that had been an exporter of agricultural products into an economy dominated by smuggling, crime and primitive State protectionism. When this model was exposed to more modern economies due to changes in the world it simply collapsed leaving poverty and corruption at every level.
Ultima Hora had produced a crime map of the country – drug smuggling, contraband, cattle rustling, piracy, marijuana cultivation, car theft, highway robbery, banditry, north, south, east and west, the whole of Paraguay was one large crime zone. Only bank robberies were in short supply, for most of the banks had closed, gone bust, or were defended by private security guards who looked like militiamen in flak jackets, armed with bazookas and heavy machine-guns. The streets of Asunción and other provincial cities were, from time to time, full of protesters complaining of all this. Mostly these demonstrations were peaceful, but they seemed to do no good: they belonged to the politics of theatre, the essentially futile statement in noisy collective form that people were unhappy with their lot, with the government, with the facts of Paraguayan life. No one had any answers or even any ideas except to borrow more money from the IMF, or to reimpose a dictatorship under Oviedo which, it was hoped, would at least limit the corruption to the Colonel and his cronies as in the days of Stroessner. The situation was almost beyond analysis, let alone solution. No one even talked of a Castroist, extreme socialist solution. For years young Paraguayans had been sent to Cuba to be trained as doctors. The Cubans hoped to induct them into revolutionary fervour: the opposite had been the result. They had all come back with horror stories of socialism in action. Even the bitterest critics of the Colorado regime admitted that Castroism was a dead loss and a cul de sac. There was no guerrilla movement like the FARC in Colombia, no potential President Chavez, a nativist anti-gringo rabble rouser, as in Venezuela. Paraguay was a pirate state, full of pirates, who complained only because the chief pirates were stealing all the booty, and they were getting little or none. The writer Jorge Luis Borges had wondered if his