Alfredo Stroessner Mattiauda - In Power
Any analysis of contemporary politics in Paraguay needs to be firmly based in an understanding of the nature of the dictatorship of General Alfredo Stroessner (1954-1989)—who molded, over 35 years, many of the tendencies and patterns of behavior that characterize Paraguayan politics today—and his pervasive legacy, which endures throughout the economic, political, judicial, and cultural spheres.
Stroessner’s skill was to secure the hegemony of the Colorado Party by developing incipient links with the armed forces, and formalizing the relationship between the state, the Party, and the military, a relationship that became the backbone of his dictatorship. In this triangular structure of power, all three became heavily interlinked, with the state and military subjected to a process of ‘coloradization’, with all members required to join the Colorado Party. Stroessner developed the Colorado Party from a traditional party, deeply divided by competing caudillos, into “a highly efficient vertically organized political vehicle which dominated all aspects of Paraguayan life.”
Beginning in the late 1960s, the Roman Catholic Church persistently criticized Stroessner' s successive extensions of his stay in office and his treatment of political prisoners. The regime responded by closing Roman Catholic publications and newspapers, expelling non-Paraguayan priests, and harassing the church's attempts to organize the rural poor.
The regime also increasingly came under international fire in the 1970s for human rights abuses, including allegations of torture and murder. In 1978 the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights convinced an annual meeting of foreign ministers at the OAS to pass a resolution calling on Paraguay to improve its human rights situation. In 1980 the Ninth OAS General Assembly, meeting in La Paz, Bolivia, condemned human rights violations in Paraguay, describing torture and disappearances as "an affront to the hemisphere's conscience." International groups also charged that the military had killed 30 peasants and arrested 300 others after the peasants had protested against encroachments on their land by government officials.
Paraguay entered the 1980s less isolated, rural, and backward than it had traditionally been. Political and social structures remained inflexible, but Paraguayans had changed their world views and their perceptions of themselves. Perhaps the clearest example of cracks in Stroessner's regime was the assassination of Somoza. From Stroessner's standpoint, there were ominous similarities between Somoza and himself. Like Stroessner, Somoza had run a regime based on the military and a political party that had been noted for its stability and its apparent imperviousness to change. Somoza also had brought economic progress to the country and had skillfully kept his internal opposition divided for years. Ultimately, however, the carefully controlled changes he had introduced began subtly to undermine the traditional, authoritarian order. As traditional society broke down in Paraguay, observers saw increasing challenges ahead for the Stroessner regime.
By skillfully balancing the military and the Colorado Party, Stroessner remained very much in control. Still, he was increasingly being challenged in ways that showed that his control was not complete. For example, in November 1974, police units captured seven guerrillas in a farmhouse outside of Asuncion. When the prisoners were interrogated, it became clear that the information possessed by the guerrillas, who had planned to assassinate Stroessner, could have come only from a high Colorado official. With the party hierarchy suddenly under suspicion, Stroessner ordered the arrest and interrogation of over 1,000 senior officials and party members. He also dispatched agents to Argentina and Brazil to kidnap suspects among the exiled Colorados. A massive purge of the party followed. Although the system survived, it was shaken.
Through purges and the centralization of power, he harnessed the party, bringing it under his own control while reorganizing it into a centralized, corporatist, and vertical organization, with himself approving unopposed, centrally nominated, single lists for all local and national party elections. He also established an organizational structure that covered the country in the form of a comprehensive network of 236 seccionales (party offices) and hundreds of subseccionales, responsible for mobilization and support for the regime, but also for local vigilance, social control, and repression. Since they rapidly became centers of local patronage and clientelism, membership in the party became a prerequisite for access to patronage, employment, and government services.
Crucially, the Party came to function as both the party of government and of the state, deeply inserted within the bureaucratic structure, which dominated all aspects of political and civil society at every level. The “coloradization” of the state led to ministries and public entities passing from public hands to the private terrain of the Colorado Party. All public employees, including teachers, doctors, judges, and (from 1955) all officers in the armed forces were required to join the party, as well as contribute to party funds.
The state sector henceforth became a source of patronage, clientelism, and electoral support, expanding massively to become the largest national employer by 1989. Loyalty to the regime was also strengthened through officially tolerated corruption—“the price of peace” as Stroessner reportedly described it. Indeed, institutionalized corruption became the cohesive factor linking the party, the army and the state, the elites, and the masses. Contraband became the most active informal activity in the country, with Stroessner assigning portions of the illegal trade to key officials in the armed forces and the party in exchange for their continued support. By the 1980s, this included the illegal income from an arms trade that was available to party officials and military leaders.
Finally, another key to his longevity was a nationalistic discourse. So pervasive did the Colorado Party become in terms of national identity, and dominance of the Paraguayan political life, that the Party could claim that to be Paraguayan was to be Colorado. Thus by 1989, when Stroessner was finally overthrown, Paraguay was characterized by Party control of state bureaucracy, deeply rooted clientelistic practices, the prevalence of an informal economy based on contraband, widespread and deeply rooted corruption, and a fragmented and repressed civil society which had no leverage over the state, and was emerging from the longest dictatorship in 20th century Latin America.
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