Falling Off the Map

by Pico Iyer

  In 1932, just as the wounds from the Triple Alliance were beginning to heal, Paraguay promptly got involved in another war, with Bolivia, over a piece of land that neither of them wanted. Some 85,000 men were killed, and Paraguay found itself on the bleeding end of two of the three major wars fought on the continent (while the Chaco, over which the battle had raged, was revealed to be an entirely desolate and inhospitable scrubland without resources of any kind). A little later, the country entered a civil war, in which roughly a fifth of its people fled into Argentina. Meanwhile, Paraguay saw thirty-one presidents in fifty-years—seven between 1910 and 1912 alone—in a cycle of instability that ended only when Stroessner took over. Thus the melancholy pattern dragged on: the country either had no government at all or a government that saw itself in block capitals. “Dictatorship is to Paraguay what constitutional democracy is to Scandinavia or Britain,” says the U.S. Library of Congress survey.

  The Stroessner regime was the same old story, a tale of good intentions gone awry and of a man who started out industrious, instituted reforms, brought constancy to the economy—twenty-two years without inflation—but gradually became more and more caught up in power and isolation, until he ended up lost in a hall of golden mirrors, his country turned into a cemetery. The monomania, the public mistresses, the brutal elimination of enemies, the commissioning of books in which he was called “THE LUMINOUS LIGHTHOUSE”—no one could deny that Stroessner was faithful to Paraguayan tradition.

  If Paraguay is a paradise today, it is mostly one for ironists. For it offers absurdities almost too good to be true and schools its residents in the higher forms of sarcasm. “Anything, anything you can get here is illegal,” a delightedly “polluted” academic told me. In the central market of town, he said, almost gleefully, “No one can go in, not even the police. It’s entirely lawless there. The people pay no taxes, nothing is registered, anything can happen.” Argentine goods are cheaper in Paraguay than in Argentina, but Paraguayan sugar is cheaper outside Paraguay. Paraguay exports soya beans, but it has no soya crops. When paychecks are delivered, receptionists routinely loot the envelopes before they can be handed out. And when the opposition newspaper ABC Color was closed down by the government in 1984, many government bigwigs came to the publisher in secret and offered to sell him paper mills on the cheap.

  I didn’t take the celebrated “Tour of the Houses that Corruption Built,” which is the first stop of almost every foreign journalist in Paraguay. But still, I found, one cannot drive around the city without receiving a crash course in the popular folklore. This was the place where Somoza was gunned down, this was the house where the Argentine hit men lived for a year while tracking him. This was the house where Stroessner’s favorite mistress lived—the daughter of his former mistress—and this was the house that Stroessner promised to his illegitimate daughter. This was Stroessner’s own home (a massive park that goes on and on and on for more than two blocks, with a police station next door and, across the street, the U.S. embassy—“the largest in the world,” by some accounts—waiting to polka with the dictator). The newest highlight of the circle tour is the home of General Rodríguez, just off Avenida General Genes, in a thicket of satellite dishes and generals’ palaces, opposite a Chinese gangster’s pagoda, and within sight of the Central Bank (a twenty-five-acre spread big enough to house a university, its massive buildings sitting like Titanics stranded in a vacant lot, and equipped with an Olympic-size swimming pool).

  Paraguay today, therefore, has the equivocal aspect of a whole country decorated like a closing sale—All Stock Must Go! Positively Last Prices!—and governed by rules that run counter to those of the world at large. “If you brought the Queen of England to Paraguay, she would run contraband too,” the secretary of the new president had memorably declared. “Paraguay is full of witches,” a sorcerer had told Norman Lewis. More serious charges had been brought by human rights activists and scholars, who claimed that Paraguay was home to slavery, child brothels, and genocide as recently as the seventies. At the very least, there was a sense that this was a place where anything could be bought—passports, identities, babies. Everyone had a price in Paraguay, and usually it was radically discounted.

  Thus the TAP “Guide to Paraguay” began, pointedly: “On visiting Paraguay, tourists may have several aims, in addition to recreation, resting and renewing energy.” The only trouble was, there were no tourists in Paraguay. The “Land of Sun, and of Adventures,” as its official slogan has it, maintains not a single tourist office around the world; the only office within the country consists of a sullen man sitting (occasionally) at a desk under a stairwell and telling you not to take more than two of the dusty brochures in front of him. “Asunción is home to hundreds of places worth visiting,” the book in my hotel room hopefully suggested; unfortunately, even the ever-diligent Lonely Planet guide could find only three “things to see” in Asunción—and one of them was a double bill of bad American movies at the cinema. During all the time I spent in Paraguay, I met only one other sightseer—a fantastically merry peronista from Buenos Aires named Daniel Ortega, with whom I dined in the hotel where Nietzsche’s brother-in-law committed suicide. (“There is a book in Buenos Aires, a best-seller,” said Sr. Ortega, a student of the human comedy, “that was written by Bush’s dog!” In the very next sentence he was telling me that there was a hole in Belém, in Brazil, that reached to the center of the earth—he had read this in another Argentine best-seller, by Charles Berlitz.)

  Yet as I spent more time in the country, I began, very slowly, to fall into its rhythm and its spell, and to see more and more advantages to being neglected by the world. I took to relaxing in the sauna of a five-star hotel with a copy of Business Week only three years old, and to inching through the side streets on a Saturday night in a ’72 Chevy, which gave out at every corner, all the warning lights on its dashboard flashing at once and parts of the car rolling around beneath me while the radio throbbed, “Gonna take you into the danger zone!” And as I started to talk to foreign experts on the place, I began to find that Paraguay was a kind of cult favorite among many old Latin American hands, the hidden (costume) jewel of South America. “Oh, Paraguay, my favorite country in the continent!” said Laura López, the longtime Time bureau chief for the whole of South and Central America. She liked it? “I love it—the way you’d love an orphan, or a bird with a broken foot.” Paraguay was something of an Ur-land, untamed, undeveloped, abandoned by history, wood-paneled streetcars still clattering through its streets, and electricity and running water arriving only a president ago. “It’s a crazy country, wistful and surreal and forlorn,” said a highly engaging American journalist who had lived there for three years. “But it’s magical—like Macondo in Gabriel García Márquez.” “The air is so pure,” added her husband, a Spanish writer. “And the streets are full of orange trees and jacarandas and lapachos. When you arrive in Stroessner Airport, you feel as if you are in one of the last corners of the world.”

  The sinister stories had been burnished by legend, the woman went on. “But they never have mass slaughters in Paraguay the way they do in Chile and Argentina.” Recently, she pointed out, they’d even extradited two Argentine kidnappers. Paraguay, in a sense, was like Rip Van Winkle after only twenty winks. “And if Asunción’s sleepy,” she went on, “the rest of the country’s in a coma.” Was there anything to do there? “Well, you can go to the Jardín de la Cerveza [Garden of Beer] and see women dancing with jugs on their heads.” With that, she ran out of suggestions. Then she perked up again. “Oh, and they do have great hammocks there. Wonderful hammocks. You see them hanging up on the main road out of town.” “Yes,” said her husband. “Excellent hammocks.”

  …

  Leaving the Gran Hotel, I decided to move to the Oasis Hostel, its name translated into Korean outside its entrance. The Oasis was a curious place. Just inside its firmly double-bolted doors were several color pictures of Brazil—taken from a Playboy spread and concentrating on the c
ountry’s topless beauties; on the opposite wall was a huge map of Argentina. Nearby was a series of formal snapshots of a Korean couple on their wedding day, in black tie and white gown, and beside them—quite a coup, I thought—an entire brochure on Paraguay aimed at a Korean audience (and centered around a strong-looking woman in a director’s chair whom the brochure identified as “Producer Kim”). There were also, in the entrance hall, some photos, snipped from Korean fashion magazines, of bedroom sets in Seoul department stores.

  I passed through this unlikely gallery, down a narrow alleyway, past another fortress of a door, and into a filthy courtyard. There I found a basketball hoop and a broken-down washing machine. A few plants were feebly protruding from some Nescafé bottles, and a body-length mirror announced at its top, “Christ is coming.” In the middle of the courtyard stood a very large Korean teenage girl with a yapping dog on a leash.

  She stared at me with little joy. “How many hours?” “Just one night, please.” She looked at me blankly and tried again. “How many hours?” “Hours? I don’t know. Maybe twenty-five, twenty-six.” This was too much for her. Padding over to a red telephone, she picked it up, and I heard furious cries of “Appa, Appa …” Daddy apparently applied a tonic to her wounds, and she gloomily returned to our discussion, leading me off to a tiny room and fastening the dog to the door handle. The room consisted of a sagging bed, a table, and a trash can. “Do you have anything else?” I asked. She looked at me phlegmatically, then flip-flopped back to the red phone. “Appa, Appa …” Again Daddy worked his rare magic, and she put the phone down and led me to another room. This one consisted of a sagging bed, a table, a trash can, and one entire wall covered with flesh-colored pictures, many of them poster size, of girls in every conceivable position—sunny side up, over easy, languid in French lace. In the middle of the porno shots was a replica of the Korean flag and a picture of a Korean girl, relatively modest in a chemise. Thinking this preferable to another suite we had passed, which came decorated with pictures of male heartthrobs and some faded Kyongju beauties, I instantly accepted.

  As I was making myself comfortable in my new home, I began to see what services it provided. One three-foot pinup, featuring a girl climbing some stairs without benefit of underwear, was scribbled over with hearts and proclamations: “Nidi and Luis made love all night long 15-11-91.” “Ramon Dermidio Iriquera and Rosa Catalino Gill made love here 1991–1992.” On the back of the door, in a fit of graphomania, perhaps, Nidi and Luis had added: “Nidi and Luis here consolidated, mutually, their love.” It was, in its way, a historic site.

  Just as I was taking all this in, there came a knock on the door. It was Appa (“Daddy,” as I now thought of him), my smiling host, a few furtive Paraguayan couples shuffling in and out of rooms behind him. He came in and blurted out something unintelligible about his life in Singapore. I responded with nonsensical protestations of my devotion to Korea. He asked me to give him some money—twenty-six hours’ worth, at an hourly rate—and I assured him that I was a friend for life. Then he lurched into a brief discussion of the Olympic Games and some fairly searching questions about my marital status. Disconcerted, it seemed, by my replies, he suddenly looked deranged. “Pooky-pooky no quieres?” (Don’t you want some pooky-pooky?) I looked at him dumbfounded. “Chicas,” he added, “hay.” (Chicks are available.) Whether or not this was an invitation or a mere statement of fact, I decided not to ask whether Continental breakfast was also on offer.

  The Koreans are, in fact, a highly visible, if somewhat shadowy, presence in modern Paraguay, subject of many rumors. (“There are 30,000 Koreans in the city,” one boy in Asunción told me. “More than 1,200,000 Koreans here,” another boy in Asunción said.) Some are here in hopes of migrating to the U.S. (since the quota from Paraguay is more accommodating than that from South Korea), some are here mostly to put their export-import skills to use in a country most notable for its lassitude. In either case, whole parts of the capital are flavored now with kimchi and decorated with signs for tae kwon do academies, Korean billiard halls, places like the Gimnasio Han Kwok. You can eat at bulgogi parlors here or at a place advertised—in Korean—as “Donald Kentucky Chicken.” The Kims take up more than a column in the Asunción phone book, and shops are full of Lees with curly blond locks. Theirs is not a very welcoming community, however. When I went, my third night in town, into a Korean-run Japanese restaurant, I had not even sat down before the proprietor came up, asked me where I came from, and—when I said India—showed me the door.

  Disappointed, I went into the Hidalgo Pizza Parlor down the street. A girl with a Korean frame, a half-Korean face, and sandy light-brown hair accosted me at the entrance but looked too terrified to throw me out. Reluctantly, she led me to a table next to a picture of Jesus and as far as possible from a gaggle of young Korean girls hiding their mouths with their hands. Luckily, they knew nothing of my interest in the works of Kim Il Sung.

  The Koreans, though, are only one element in the improbable Paraguayan stew. One of the other main ingredients is simple, gaudy affluence. Drive down the length of Avenida Mariscal López and you pass stores shaped like castles, car showrooms dressed in four-color neon, mansions made up to resemble the White House, Arabian castles, and Tara from Gone with the Wind. Up and down the cars prowl on Saturday nights, in one never-ending stream, past ice cream parlors offering “dietetic” snacks, past tanning centers and solaria. Much of the city, in fact, feels as if it were decorated by Judith Krantz: the streets are lined with hand-painted copies of famous Benetton and Calvin Klein ads, and everywhere you go you see familiar names—Sony, Burberry, Eastern Airlines; Lloyds Bank, Visa, Hyundai. Even the villages in the Brand-Name Republic are draped in Wranglers ads, and a huge banner hangs above the main street in the lakeside resort of San Bernardino: LUCKY STRIKE WISHES YOU A HAPPY SUMMER.

  It is often said that the border between San Diego and Tijuana (and continuing along) is the only place on earth where the first world meets the third. The same claim could be made, however, for Avenida Brasil in Asunción, which divides this abandoned bastard child of Tijuana and La Jolla down the middle: on one side, the bargain-basement commotion of downtown; on the other, the jasmine-scented quiet of the mansions. What can one say about a city where the four-star hotels offer no direct-dial phone service—even within Asunción—while the taxis are Mercedeses? Where women carrying baskets of fruit on their heads walk past ice cream parlors that accept eleven international credit cards? Where the per capita income is half that of Mexico, yet twenty-first-century arcades abound? At the very least, it seems fair to say that Asunción enjoyed a radical facelift in the seventies, when billions of dollars poured into the town from President Stroessner’s construction deals—and it now seems only fitting that the main features of the suburbs are “facial” salons, makeup parlors, and plastic surgeons.

  At the very least too, Paraguay seems to live by laws (or no laws) of its own. Officially, the country claims only 34,000 passenger cars, about as many as Suriname (Brazil, by comparison, has 14 million, or 400 for every one in Paraguay). In a country full of two-car garages, whose streets are jammed with Volkswagens and Peugeots, this is a little strange.

  Now I understand, I thought, what people mean when they talk of wealth as “obscene,” as I cruised one day along Avenida Generalísimo Franco with an affluent Paraguayan, amidst nouveau mansions and Ralph Lauren kids, their BMW’s disappearing behind electronic gates. “These people are rich,” I said, trying not to look at the ugly scar across my young host’s hand. “Not rich,” he said sagely. “But they know how to take it.” Soon he was pointing out sites of local interest: this was the house where Stroessner’s son lived (the gay son, not the drug addict), this was the house where the general sold passports. “Every cent of highway tax, every penny of gasoline tax,” he said, with some relish, “went straight into President Stroessner’s personal bank account. Coca-Cola alone brought him forty thousand dollars a day in the summer.” The minister of educatio
n, he went on, had diligently raised funds for seven hundred schools around the country, none of which existed; one colonel had been hired entirely to find nubile schoolgirls for the president.

  All of this has ostensibly changed, in the era of President Rodríguez. Thus the walls are alive now with signs crying. “Enough repression of the campesinos!” and “Long live the struggle of the peoples of Iraq and Palestine!” and “Busch is an assassin!” And the newspapers seethe with discussions of a new constitution, the legalization of abortion, and the importance of a people’s voice. Che Guevara is almost as ubiquitous today as the Marlboro Man. Yet a country whose heroes are all military tyrants is not ideally suited to democracy. The opposition, during the Stroessner days, used famously to sip maté at “demonstrations,” to invite their government tails to come to the movies with them, and to wait for foreign journalists to tell them what to shout. If you visited the opposition leader’s house, I was told, you would find a few men in ill-fitting suits, sipping iced maté and saying nothing. Come back three days later, and the same men would be in the same seats, sipping the same pipes. Occasionally, a fly would land, and someone would swat it away.

  One day in Asunción, I saw a bright banner above the cathedral. “We too,” it proclaimed in red and blue, inviting people to come to a rally outside the church to discuss the new constitution, at 8:00 p.m. on Thursday. At 8:00 p.m. on Thursday, the rally consisted of myself, looking somewhat bewildered, alone in a light rain.

  “There are good politicians, yes,” a seemingly liberal man assured me. “But the trouble is, a good politician has many enemies. A bad politician is ringed with friends.” This man supported abortion and was opposed to the dictates of the Church. But he also supported dictatorship. “We need a strong government here,” he said. “If there isn’t one, there is only chaos. And if we have a civilian president, there’s nothing but trouble with the military.” The general feeling in Paraguay seemed to be one of “Plus ça change …” The Colorado Party men were still shouting. “Long live Stroessn—I mean, Rodríguez!” and the phone book still listed three Alfredo Stroessners.