Alfredo Stroessner Mattiauda
From 1870 to 1954, Paraguay was ruled by 44 different men, 24 of whom were forced from office. In 1954, General Alfredo Stroessner took advantage of the strong link between the armed forces and the Colorado Party to overthrow the government; he ruled until 1989.
The son of an immigrant German brewer and a Paraguayan woman, Stroessner was born in Encarnacion in 1912. He joined the army when he was sixteen and entered the triservice military academy, the Francisco Lopez Military College. Like Franco and Estigarribia, Stroessner was a hero of the Chaco War. Stroessner, was of German background, and sympathized with the Axis powers during World War II.
He had gained a reputation for his bravery and his abilities to learn quickly and to command and inspire loyalty in troops. He was also known to be thorough and to have an unusual capacity for hard work. His extremely accurate political sense failed him only once, when he found himself in 1948 on the wrong side of a failed coup attempt and had to be driven to the Brazilian embassy in the trunk of a car, earning him the nickname "Colonel Trunk." Career considerations and an antipathy for communists possibly caused Stroessner to decide against joining the rebels in 1947. Morinigo found his talents indispensable during the civil war and promoted him rapidly. Because he was one of the few officers who had remained loyal to Morinigo, Stroessner became a formidable player once he entered the higher echelons of the armed forces.
Between 1948 and 1954, six persons occupied the presidency. Stroessner, who had become commander in chief of the armed forces, was an active participant in the political intrigue of that era and eventually led his troops in a successful coup in May 1954 against President Federico Chaves. Two months later, Stroessner was selected as a compromise candidate by the Colorados, who considered his presidency only a temporary interlude.
Relying on his control of the armed forces, and with considerable shrewdness and the constant work for which he was famous, Stroessner gained control over the factions of the Colorados and subordinated the party to his interests. By 1967 all within the party had become supporters of Stroessner. In addition to the control of the government itself, the major institutional bases of his rule, and thus of the Paraguayan political system, were the armed forces — including the national police, a paramilitary force that was under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Interior but was headed by army officers — and the Colorado Party.
Whereas Francia took the title of The Supreme Dictator (El Supremo Dictador), Carlos Antonio Lopez The Most Excellent One (El Excelentisimo), and Francisco Solano Lopez The Marshall (El Mariscal), Stroessner called himself The Continuer (El Continuador). Indeed, not only did Stroessner continue the authoritarian tradition of these three nineteenth-century dictators and the twentieth-century examples of Estigarribia and Higinio Monnigo, he also remained in office for more than three decades. Stroessner assumed power following a more open but highly unstable period in Paraguay's history.
The personalistic nature of Stroessner' s regime, which was known as the Stronato, adn his rule known as Stronism, is evident in the names of the capital's airport (President Alfredo Stroessner International Airport), the second largest city (Puerto Presidente Stroessner), and in a prominent neon sign on top of a building in the central square of Asuncion that flashes: "Peace, Work, Well-being with Stroessner." Stroessner's enduring, active, and highly involved control completely determined the workings of the structure of government.
The unusual characteristic of the Stroessner dictatorship was that it was neither personalistic, military, nor one-party rule, but rather, a combination of the three. The military institution never ruled, but it guaranteed the coercive power of the regime and was wholly partisanized. The Colorado Party was used to mobilize support down to the precinct level.
A decisive and disciplined politician, President Stroessner developed into a flexible and pragmatic national leader whose program of peace, order, and economic development earned him a popularity seldom achieved by an authoritarian ruler. Since 1963 he permitted an opposition party to play a constructive role in the legislature, and has granted greater freedom to the press. Political activity was held in check by the fact that the Stroessner regime can, if it wanted, return to absolutism at any moment.
Stroessner' s enduring power was based on the twin pillars of the armed forces and the Colorado Party. The former — from which he emerged and in which he maintained positions as commander in chief of the armed forces and commander in chief of the army — provided the institutional base for order and stability. The latter, of which he wrested control in the mid-1950s, furnished the links with large sectors of society, provided for mobilization and support, and allowed him to legitimate his rule through periodic elections. The overall system, based on these two institutional pillars, functioned through a combination of coercion and cooptation involving a relatively small sector of the population in the slightly industrialized and partly modernized country.
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