Paradise With Serpents: Travels in the Lost World of Paraguay. Robert Carver
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a British colony after 1820, when the Spanish had been expelled and the River Plate region fell under the economic influence of the British Empire. This reflection was made during the years of the repressive military regime in which everything had gone to the bad. ‘Colonies are so boring, though,’ he had concluded. Better then, in South America, to be theatrically badly governed than boringly well governed.
The great unanswered question hanging over the whole Third World is still the one posed by Goethe: ‘Injustice is preferable to disorder.’ What the colonial world had thrust upon it by the European powers had been injustice and order, which in almost all cases had been replaced upon independence by injustice and disorder. Asked if he thought India would be better governed after the British had left, Gandhi replied, ‘No, it will be worse governed.’ That had been a brave as well as an accurate prediction. A refugee white South African academic, safe in London, had moralized to me that it was ‘essential for Africans to make their own mistakes’ and learn from them, that colonialism only mollycoddled people. He, of course, did not have to suffer the effects of those mistakes, as he had fled, but he was happy to condemn the rest of the continent’s population to the Idi Amins, the Robert Mugabes and the Mobutus, as an inevitable learning curve. With freedom had come disorder, and injustice in another form. A new, native ruling class had formed, corrupt, authoritarian, immune from Western liberal criticism, more oppressive in most cases than the old white supremacists. Most ex-European colonies were in a far worse state than they ever had been under direct colonial rule. The democracies imposed on them by the parting masters had all failed and been replaced by despotism, oligarchy or anarchy. In some cases, after years of fruitless civil wars and disorder, that quintessential postmodern phenomenon, the failed state, had emerged. Paraguay was not yet a failed state, not quite: but it was not far off one.
Walking round Asunción it was evident that the fabric of the city was collapsing: garbage was uncollected, streets and pavements lay broken and unrepaired, buildings were not just unpainted and peeling, but crumbling apart, showing cracks and bulges in the walls. The dead banks, great glass and concrete mausolea, lay silent and empty, front doors chained and padlocked outside, dust and emptiness within. Groups of Indians from the Chaco, or simply homeless, poor people had taken up residence on strips of cardboard in their doorways – shelter at least from the tropical downpours. The local markets had spilled out on to the pavements, and the streets were full of rotting vegetables and fruit. A whole tribe of people lived by scavenging from this bounty. All around the centre of the city vendors had set up shop on the pavements, selling cans of food, bottles of wine, packets of biscuits – all imported. The hotels in the centre of town were completely empty. I went inside to talk to the receptionists who were pretty, smiled a lot, and had time on their hands. They all told the same story: ‘No one comes here now. Before, under Stroessner, there were tourists. Now nothing.’ Cruise ships used to come up the river from Buenos Aires for winter breaks, duty-free shopping expeditions. Now Argentina was broke, and Brazil was in deep trouble, too; no boats with tourists came any more. Asunción had become too dangerous. Right in the centre of town knife-wielding robbers held up buses, one man with a blade at the throat of the driver, the other passing down the bus collecting the passengers’ watches and wallets. On one such attack there had been an army major in uniform on board, a woman. She had had her face slashed. These attacks were happening all the time, every day, not at night in remote suburbs, but in the very centre in broad daylight. People were afraid to use the buses. Taxis were known to be used to kidnap people for ransom, or simply to rob and ‘disappear’ them. Many people walked, even long distances, rather than risk public transport, and I was one of them. The city was just about small enough to get around on foot. Everywhere, though, there was the same atmosphere of suspicion and mistrust. Each small shop had its assistant with a large automatic pistol. When they opened the cash box to get you your change their free hand would be on the pistol, finger curled round the trigger, in case you tried something. There were attempted robberies of these small stores every day, and shoot-outs leading to deaths. Every transaction, however small – a tube of toothpaste, a razor, a comb – involved a handwritten receipt with a carbon copy left in the receipt book: this was so the assistants could not steal from the till. The owners checked the takings against the carbon every evening and made sure the sums tallied. There were no smiles of welcome in any of the shops, rather wary caution or outright hostility.
That there had once been order and a degree of security was evident from the style of houses put up during the stronato. These were US-style villas or suburban bungalows with large windows and low fences, symbols of trust in the security the regime provided. Under Alfie a virgin could walk the streets of Asunción dressed in gold jewellery and risk no harm, people had told me, people who had opposed the old regime and hated the dictatorship. Then, everyone had been terrified of falling into the hands of the police. Now people had rights, but no duties. Improvised security precautions had been tacked on to these vulnerable homes of the Pax Stroessner era – iron grills on the doors and windows, razor wire on hastily erected high walls and steel fences, video security cameras and snuffling, whining guard dogs kept on short rations to make them hungry for burglar flesh. In all this I was again reminded of Los Angeles, with its neat notices in the gardens of dinky gingerbread cottages promising an armed response if you trod a step across the lawn.
The amenities of a capital city were absent in Asunción. There were no proper bookshops, only kiosks selling comics and religious kitsch. You could buy no foreign newspapers at all, anywhere. There were no coffee shops or bistros where you might relax in comfort and security. The park benches were filled with sleeping men, some of them police in uniform, and the parks themselves stank of human piss and shit and were full of rubbish. Concerts, recitals, theatrical peformances, art exhibitions were all absent; the few cinemas showed kung fu movies or sadistic pornography. There was one theatre show, I discovered, the English play The Vagina Monologues. It was a Buenos Aires production, and for macho Argentina the title had been redubbed The Secrets of the Penis. This was too daring for staid Asunción, and here it was running under the title The Secrets of the Male.
Although there were a few lurking stray dogs, with claw marks on their backs from unsuccessful vulture attacks, there were no stray cats at all – they were no match for the beady-eyed, telegraph-wire-perching birds of prey. A cat would only last a matter of minutes out of doors, I had been told; those that existed in Paraguay led cosseted, prison-like existences indoors, not unlike their owners. Small babies were never allowed out for the same reason – they would be snatched up from pram or cradle and torn apart and devoured in an instant. The man lost and waterless in the Chaco always saved the last bullet for himself, before the vultures tore his eyes out while he was still alive, but too far gone to defend himself. In the centre of town, by day, the police were about in force, lounging like the rest of the population, but kitted up in macho uniforms, with low-slung, black-holstered pistols. This fearsome image was assuaged to a great extent by the policemen’s girlfriends, who also hung about with them, talking softly and weaving roses and other flowers into their caps and uniforms with one hand, while holding their beaux’ hands with the other. These clumps of cops and lovers were particularly thick around the government buildings on the main plaza. One coup d’état had already been foiled and the Vice-President had been assassinated. No one knew who did it, so the authorities called in Scotland Yard, perhaps hoping that Sergeant Lestrade or Sherlock Holmes would be sent out to uncover the truth. From time to time passion would overcome the couples of policeman and lover, and they would detach themselves from the rest and make for a hot-bed hotel where you could hire a room by the hour. There was a constant traffic of heavily armed cops up and down the stairs of these establishments. As they hadn’t been paid for so long I assumed they had a good credit rating. It was probably not a good idea to deny tick to a Paraguayan cop.
In the centre of town, on the main street, was a ranchero’s outfitters; here you could kit yourself out completely with everything you needed to take on the Paraguayan estancia – leather chaps, saddles, bridles, lassos, boots, bombacha baggy trousers, saddle bags, revolver and rifle holsters, horseshoes, spurs and all manner of wide-brimmed cowboy hats. I spent ages in this shop, to the evident puzzlement of the assistants, fingering and peering at all these articles, which were laid out in piles on wooden shelves. The general ambience of the store was Tucson, Arizona, circa 1880. Unfortunately, I am large and Paraguayan gauchos are small, otherwise