Part Two: Alfredo Stroessner: The Luckiest Dictator

Robert is joined again by James Stout to continue to discuss Alfredo Stroessner. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
What's engaged in a conspiracy against all civilization my Catholic Church.
This is Behind the Bastards, a podcast that focuses on
the evils of the false Pope in Rome. We are,
of course, devotees of the Antipope Novadianum, who carried out

(00:23):
a righteous rebellion against the power of Pope Cornelius in
the in the mid two hundreds. Um, you know, God
rest his soul, James, what's the what's the chief thing
you've learned from the Antipope? No, his input on on
hair and skincare has been really important to me. Yeah, yeah,
he had. He had a lot to say about that

(00:44):
in the Latin language, which he was the first Roman
theologian to use. Um, I'm just learning about him now
on Wikipedia. I don't know why I went with this
as the introduction for the Abody Knows, Robert, nobody knows,
Nobody knows, nobody knows. But you know what this is
now a podcast dedicated to the Antipope Novation, who lived

(01:05):
from two hundred eighty to two hundred and fifty eight. Wow. Yeah,
well it's a big change from my last episode, which
was of course dedicated to a dead groundhog. So that's right,
that's right. They have a lot in common, the Antipope
and that ground log hog that built Blasio. Did build
a Blasio? Drop the anti incredible you gave us. Yeah,

(01:29):
I'm gonna make one more request from the artists to
our fans, which is a like a like a romance,
a Roman style relief, like the ceiling of the U
of the static. That's like, yeah, that's like antipope novation
and that fucking groundhog holding hands in the sky. Find

(01:57):
a building. It doesn't matter who owns it. Drawn that
as Amia, I know we will send you a titia.
Let those two kings be the symbol of our next revolution.
Hand in pull the Antipope writing into battle on the
graund hook. Finally, Deblasio will get his comeuppance. So, speaking

(02:20):
of Bill Deblasio, the first official Nazi party outside of Germany,
was formed in Paraguay in nineteen twenty seven under a
mango tree in the capital. While Forster, that anti Semitic
philosopher we talked about last time, had been a miserable
failure in his goal of creating an Aryan sanctuary, his
published writings traveled across the world and became kind of

(02:41):
a leading light for several generations of German anti Semites.
One of these anti Semites was a guy you might
have heard of named Adolf Hitler. He comes across Forrester's
readings as a young man, and he reveres them so
much that when he comes to power, he sends a
bunch of German soil over to Paraguay so that local

(03:03):
Nazis can cover Forster's grave. He also allegedly sends along
a tombstone plaque with the words the place where the
Father of Nazism lies inscribed upon it. Um. Now there's Yeah,
we have any lists in Paraguay. That's a great thing
to tag. Yeah that that would be a nice thing
to destroy. Yeah, yeah there is, Yeah, groundhog, that fucker

(03:28):
do that. Give it the old build a Blasio treatment
and drop it. M Now there's There is debate over
whether or not Hitler is the person who sent this plaque,
but the plaque does exist. British historian Ben McIntyre is
one of the people who considers it it likely that
Hitler would have said this. Obviously, that doesn't mean that
he was like the only ideological father of Nazism Hitler.

(03:51):
Hitler could be a flatterer when he wanted to be.
But it does there is like it is kind of
beyond arguing that Hitler was a fan of this guy
and that Forster influenced his attitudes. Um. As a result
of all this, it is perhaps not surprising that Nazism
held an a lure to some segments of the Paraguayan populace.
The nation's first National Police Director named his son Adolpho,

(04:13):
and demanded police cadets where swastikas on their uniforms. This
is this is a post nineteen five swastica right, No, no, no,
these are pre forty five. Okay, still still probably a
poor decision. Yeah, Um did he then say it's just

(04:34):
a Buddhist symbol, bro or yeah, yeah, it means peace time. Yeah. Now. Paraguay, also,
speaking of bad decisions, sided with the Nazis in World
War Two initially, Um, so they kind of switched their
allegiances midway through the war when it's like, you know what, look,

(04:56):
Paraguay's got a history of being on the wrong side
of wars. We don't want to risked at this time.
And obviously also like it doesn't really matter what side
of World War two Paraguay was on. They are a
landlocked country in South America. They're not going to play
a role in the fighting the government. Though the Paraguayan
government does switch their allegiances right before the end. It

(05:18):
is worth noting that the Paraguayan Nazi Party refuses to
give up the ghost until nineteen forty six, So Paraguay's
Nazi Party lasts longer than the original one. That's a
great at least later. Yeah, well well done. Then after
the war, this tiny landlocked nation seemed like an enticing
new home to dozens of former ssmen and other fascist

(05:40):
war criminals. Paraguay already had a modest German speaking population
based around Mennonite colonists, but it was also full of
and this kind of made it less desirable. It was
also a place where a lot of white Russian officers
had fled, some of whom had helped out in the
Chaco War. These guys, some of them didn't like the
ass some of them were always were also very sympathetic

(06:03):
to the Nazis because, like you know, Stalin and the
white Russians not a not a not a great mix um.
So on the whole this huh fucking white Russians end
up everywhere. I've recently been on a kick about reading
about white Russians in the Spanish Civil War who end
up yeah, all over the international brigades. Yeah, and a

(06:24):
lot of these guys are Czarists. A lot of these
guys are fascists. A lot of these guys are the
kinds of Czarists that are basically fascists. In any case,
it's a nice place to be a Nazi. After World
War Two, Paraguay, so Nazis start filtering in there. A
lot of them settle with Mennonites. At least one Mennonite
community adopts a pro Nazi school curricula for its children

(06:45):
as a result of this. God, yeah, don't speak that
shit into reality because understantists will be all over it. Yeah,
fucking Mennonazis, Jesus, others simply took Nazis. Be fair if
they if they'd all been Mennonites, and we probably would
have had quite so many issues with them. No, No,
although speaking yeah, they they I mean they already mostly

(07:08):
did shit on horseback anyway. As as illustrated and probably
the best scene of a Band of Brothers, God, that
show did a lot, right, there's this great scene where
like a bunch of American soldiers are like riding in
after kind of the Nazi regime collapses, and they see
all these like German po doubles hauling shit on horses

(07:29):
while they're on the back of a jeep, and they're
like fucking horses. Like, you thought you could win this
war and you've got fucking horses. What's wrong with you people?
It's very funny. So yeah, these Nazis start winding up
all over the fucking place, and they decide, like, you
know what Paraguay would be great for is a smuggling
base for Odessa, the organization of former ss men who

(07:50):
helped each other smuggle themselves into other countries in order
to avoid prosecution for doing a holocaust. Now, some of
my sources will argue that like Stressner, the kind of
guy who wasn't really logically committed to much of anything
other than being in power. But that's also essentially the
ideology of a lot of surviving Nazi officials. So Stressner

(08:11):
and the Nazis got along pretty well. And there are
some allegations, most notably from Alex Schumtov, that Stressner was
at least Nazi curious Schumatov basically claims that in his
early life Stressner had little contact with Germans in Paraguay,
but that this changed in his thirties and he kind
of became a Germanophile, you know, getting in touch with
his dad's people. I'm gonna quote from Vanity Fair again here.

(08:33):
One of Stressner's German buddies was Hans Rudel, a flying
ace in the Luftwava who flew more missions than anyone,
destroyed a cruiser, a battleship five hundred nineteen Russian tanks,
was shot down twice, lost his right leg below the calf,
but continued to excel at tennis and water skiing. Was
the idol of the post war German right, the embodiment
of Aryan perfection. Hitler created a special metal with him,

(08:55):
the Knight's crossed with golden oak leaves. After the war,
he tried out planes for the Argentinian government, and when
Perone fell in nineteen fifty five, was given asylum by
his friend Stressner. When Argentina was no longer safe for
x Nazis, Rudel went to Paraguay as well and worked
in the Ferretta Paraguaya and on Suncon selling BMW's telephone,
cement and iron. He also worked for Odessa, So he's like,

(09:17):
he's like a BMWU dealer who's smuggling lavafa SS out
of Europe and into Argentina. It's like the forest gump
of Nazis here here, all the high points fucking Argentina. Mm. Yeah,
he's all over the fucking place. In addition to selling
used cars. Yeah, so I gotta have a side hustle.

(09:38):
Stressner and Rudel become fast friends and working with Rudel,
Stressner sets up a system whereby new passports and visas
can be sold for an exorbitant price, of which he
got to cut two old Nazis. And one of the
Nazis who takes advantage of this very forgiving Paraguayan government
policy is another fella you might have heard of, doctor

(09:59):
Joseph Angola. So, oh good, it's good. That's yeah, so
I was looking forward to that. It's Friday afternoon. Yeah,
so if you if you're not up on your Mangola.
The kind of cliffs notes of this guy is that
he's a doctor at Auschwitz superform's fatal experiments on fifteen
hundred sets of twin children. Um, he did shit like

(10:20):
inject colored eye into like the eyes of toddler's color
die into the eyes of toddlers who were twins, to
like see if it affected the other twin. It was
like nonsense, it was, it was crazy nonsense. That's doctor
Joseph Mangola. He's a terrible person. We will cover him
at some point. He's one of those guys like Durrel Wanger,
who he's not like. Mangola himself is not the most

(10:41):
fascinating individual. So a lot of it's just kind of
a list of horrible war crimes. Um, but we'll get
him one of these days. I know, I know the
subreddits crying out from Mangola, and eventually I Am going
to show them why they don't want what they think
they want. No one's going to have a good time
with this episod so um it is. It is weird.

(11:03):
The people are demanding Mangola. Got a lot of Mangola
stands in the audience who can't wait to get their
mangelicque out. Um got a Mangola pill. Nope, nope, no,
that was not a mistake. No, that was a mistake. Ah,
let's move it on, Let's move it on so Mangola.
One report from a German Paraguay and who was in

(11:24):
country at the time says that Mangola in nineteen fifty
nine made us say a living in Paraguay as a
salesman for a manure spreading business. Post war Nazi careers
are always like what weird? Why did they make them
do shit? Like if you're just fucking like put them
in a hotel or something like these comedy fucking jobs. Yeah, no,

(11:48):
they're making money. The guy who claimed this told Alex Schumatov,
I didn't know he was a doctor, and we talked
about business and never the war. I figured he didn't
want to talk about it. Probably probably did, I see
from Probably didn't want to talk about the war. Yeah. Whatever.
So some reports do allege that Stressner and Mangola were

(12:10):
close friends also and knew each other well. I have
not come across any convincing evidence of this, but he's
certainly it's almost certain that Mangola traveled through and spent
time in Paraguay. He gets citizenship at one point in time. Um,
so it's certainly possible that he and Stressner had a
degree of social interactions together. Now, that's all pretty bad, James.
When you are smuggling, doctor Joseph Mengel at a safety,

(12:33):
that's a bad thing to do. That's that's high up
on the list of least forgivable things. And I'm I'm
very pro smuggling, but not if you're smuggling Nazis. You know,
Finnyl totally fine, old electronics that you stole from people's cars,
great catalytic converters, excellent. Yeah, some chop today. I was

(12:55):
really proud of him. M Exactly. We need, we need,
we need the smuggling community to come together against smuggling,
Joseph Mangela. Places. Look, not even once, folks, not even once. Anyway,
the government's tolerance of Nazis led the fairly small Paraguay
and Jewish population to have some awkward experiences after World

(13:16):
War Two. And this is where things get very weird. James.
This is a really odd little story I've got for you.
I found a peculiar but unique account of life in
Stressner's Paraguay written by a person who at the time
was a young boy named Michael Caine. Now, not that
Michael Kine o. This Michael kine is basically a fascist. Yeah,

(13:41):
and he grew up in This is so weird. The
guy I found this in like this guy's blog. He's
just like writing about his time as a little boy
in Stressner's Paraguay. He grew up in the UK in
a peace church called the bruder Hof, which was part
of a network of Pacifist Anabaptist religious communities that had
started spreading out from Germany in nineteen twenty. Now Michael's

(14:03):
like three, I think in nineteen forty one when his
family has to flee the UK when the war breaks out.
The UK puts Germans in concentration camps, now nicer ones
than the German concentration camps, it must be said, But
that's why his family leaves. They're like, this is not
It seems like maybe being German in the UK in
nineteen forty one is an ideal we might want to bounce. Yes,

(14:26):
so well, unless you're unless you're the monarch of cause,
in which grace, unless you yeah, unless you are the monarch.
So his family flees the UK for the only country
that will accept their peace church during the war years,
which is Paraguay. Michael's recollections are on his website, and
I have not looked into the Bruderhof a lot. It
is again, it's like a Pacifist Anabaptist network of religious communities.

(14:46):
Michael claims that he suffered terrible sexual abuse and paints
a picture of the Bruderhof in Paraguay as a cult
entirely possible. This is true, It would not be out
of line with a lot of similar movements. I have
no particular reason to doubt him on this. We will
be using Michael's count today because it provides some contexts
on how German Jewish and the German Nazi diaspora communicated.

(15:06):
Which is an interesting thing, right that you have these
Jewish people who have fled to Paraguay and these Nazis
who have fled to Paraguay, and because they're all German,
they wind up like involved with each other sometimes and
word that would be and again Michael, he is writing

(15:27):
as an adult about his experience as a child in
this like expat community. This same bar he's talking about
like a bar that he was brought to as a
kid for like a business deal. The same bar used
to be owned by Schortzel. His real name was a
meal Wolf, a German jew and his place was used
for years by Nazis and Jews, who were all involved
in business and all of them good friends. As a

(15:48):
fourteen year old, the Bruderhoff put me to work in Asuncion,
where they bought a new house in Vulgiicio Marino. They
rented a large house in Indepensia Naciona, two doors down
from Wolf. I went to Shorze Bar with Alfred, a
brother from the Bruderhoff, who wanted to drink of beer
but had no money, but I did so we went together.
Soon Schortzel approached me for some business in wood turn

(16:08):
to products that the Bruderhoff was selling. That's how he
became a good friend of Schortzel with Jews. The key
to a good friendship is money. When I came roun
oh boy, oh no? Do we want to keep reading room? It? Yeah,
one last sentence. When I came round to Shortzel's with
wooden articles, he called me Nachmann and I called him saujud.

(16:30):
Now I looked these nicknames up because I was like,
what kind of nicknames do basically and a Jewish boy
come up with for each other. Vainachman basically means Santa Claus. Uh,
So that's the Jewish guy is calling him Santa Clause
right because he's buy I think, because he's buying him
a beer. And Saud that nickname which is this kid's

(16:53):
nickname for his this his Jewish friend, comes from the
term judensau, which is a medieval racial caricature sure that
depicts Jewish children suckling at the teats of the pig.
It is a racial slur. Um. So like his friend
is like, hey, Santa Claus, and he's like, hey slur,
Like hey racial slur buddy, um awkward look. Yeah, I

(17:16):
would love to find I haven't found really any other
accounts of like the complicated interactions of the Jewish striass
for a German community in Paraguay and the Nazi. I
assume this happened in places like Argentina too. Um. It's
a fascinating topic. I would love to read more on
the matter. Hopefully I'll find something else at some point.
I just kind of a stumbled into this. The ship

(17:37):
that people will put on the Internet without being forced to, Like,
you cannot send me to Guantanamo Bay if I had,
if I had been giving my friends slur nicknames and
get it out with me. But this guy's used apparently
popped it out on the Internet for the world to see.
I mean this, I don't entirely know what's happening with
the fascist Michael Caine, but he's it's it's His blog

(18:00):
is a real one. Yeah, yeah, there was a time
when yeah, humans were blogging and yeah, a powerful insight
into the brain. Speaking of fascist Michael Caine, do you
know what the non fascist Michael Caine loves blowing the
doors off things? Is? That? Is that a thing that

(18:21):
Michael Caine did? A lot of the Michael Caine, isn't
it in h what's it called? He's in a lot
of stuff. He's Michael Caine. Uh yeah, I mean he
was in the Batman movies. He's Alfred. So does he
blow the doors off of something in the in the
Italian job? Oh? Oh oh yeah, I think that is

(18:45):
my That is Michael Caine Italian j I had a
moment there, always worried. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, this is
this is good Michael Caine content. This is an episode
rich with Michael's cane. So um, anyway, that was a
bit of a digression, but I just found it too
interesting to not include. Fascinating this must have happened in

(19:06):
a lot of other countries too. This like the German
Jewish dias for a and the German Nazi dias for
a having some forms of interaction with each other. I
would love to read more about that. I just don't know.
I haven't I haven't run into much else. But yeah,
it's a whole whole thing, and it gives you an
idea of the kind of peculiar bedfellows that exist under
Stressner's regime. The main reason that I found Michael's story, though,

(19:28):
is that it provides a rare, direct personal account of
the man that Alfredo Stressner trusted to maintain his secret
torture police, who were his primary instrument of maintaining power.
And this man was named Pastor Militiadez Coronelle born in
August of nineteen nineteen. Coronelle worked for the Education and
Culture Ministry when Stressner came to power. He was like

(19:50):
part of the Department of Education, and then Stressner's liken, no,
you see my I'm more of a torture guy. To me,
I'm gonna put you in charge of my torture department.
Coronelle was noted to be an obsessive bureaucrat. He loves paperwork.
Part of all we know so much about this guy
is every arrest and every torture that they do is documented.
Every surveiled dissident is recorded and filed away. But he's

(20:12):
not just a paperwork guy. He likes to get down
there and get his hands dirty. In nineteen seventy five,
when his forces arrested the secretary of the Paraguayan Communist Party,
Pastor Coronell had him dismembered by chainsaw while he watched.
That is, yeah, we don't come into enough chainsaw killings
in this show, but there we go. That's it's always

(20:34):
good to break new ground when yeah he's an e
state minns. Yeah, no, it's nice. He's like a Robert
Rodriguez ville in this guy. So Coronell is a dedicated
student of torture. He practiced it himself, but he was
also a keen amer of the world's greatest torture experts
at the time, which was the US Police. Now we
know that the FBI sent him friendly letters as well

(20:55):
as books on law enforcement. Like the director of the
FBI is like sending this guy like textbooks to be
like here you go, this will help you make your
torture police. Don't worry, we know all about it. We
also know that, through Operation Condor, the FBI kept abreast
of whenever Paraguay and dissidents would pop up in surrounding
countries that had right wing dictatorships allied with the US,
which at this point was all of Paraguay's neighbors. This

(21:17):
brings me to the nineteen fifty eighth story of Gladys
Sanomon and Augustine Guibero. They were physicians in the capital
who refused to falsify an autopsy report to claim a
victim of Coronel's police had died of natural causes. Instead,
doctor Santomon took the corpse to a class in her
medical school and performed the autopsy in front of her students,
so that there would be people who knew what had

(21:38):
happened to this man. It was just the only thing
she could think of to do to make sure that
the truth got out. Like if I write anything about this,
they will purge it. So I am going to autopsy
this murder victim in front of my students so they
see what our government's doing. Very sensibly, she and her
husband fled the country for Brazil. Now they're in Brazil

(21:58):
for a little while before the Brazilian military caesar's power,
and so then they have to flee Brazil, and the
next place they move, Argentina, falls to a US backed
military dictatorship in nineteen seventy six. This gives you an
idea of like how tough it is to be any
kind of dissident in South America at this time. Right,
they are like running as fast as they can, always
just ahead of the next US backed military coup. And

(22:20):
I'm going to quote from the New York Times here.
Hours after the coup, the Argentine police abducted doctor Sanomon
and tortured her at the Esquela Mechanisa in Buenos Aires.
Doctor Sandomon said she was bound and plunged into a
bathtub of vomit and excrement. They accused me of killing
a patient in my office, doctor Sanomon said, calling the
charge a total lie. Then the police falsely accused her

(22:41):
of selling drugs, she said. A week later, doctor Sanomon's
husband was abducted and tortured as well. Doctor Sanomon landed
at the Imboscata camp for political prisoners in Paraguay, where
she treated more than four hundred fellow prisoners from several
South American countries, including women whose husbands had been executed
and their children. The women she said had been in
prison to silence them. Doctor Sanoman and her husband were

(23:01):
eventually given asylum in Germany in nineteen ninety seven after
the German government pressed Argentina to bring about their release.
The fate of doctor Gooibrew, who also refused to white
watch torture, remained a mystery until the archives were opened
in nineteen seventy seven. He was kidnapped from a street
in Missions, an Argentine town where he had gone to
escape the stress in a regime, and um, you know

(23:22):
he's executed by the regime. He's killed once he gets back.
We have some personal accounts of Pastor Coronel's torture tactics
as well. Senator Carlos Levy Ruffinelli was the leader of
the Liberal Party, a controlled opposition party stressner allowed to
exist to provide the illusion of democracy. And even though
this was he you know, he's letting this guy basically
live to be controlled or to be opposition. He still

(23:45):
arrests him nineteen times and has him tortured six times.
That guy's what that is a bold dude to just
keeps coming back for more. He is a brave man,
and I'm going to quote from him now talking about
his experiences under Core and El's torturers. Most of the
time I did not know what they wanted. They did
not even know what they wanted. But when they put

(24:05):
the needles under your fingernails, you tell them anything. You'd
denounce everybody, and then they say, see, you were lying
to us all the time. Now I found an even
more detailed, in horrific account of Pastor Coronel's jails in
a BBC article by Simon Watts. Almada came to the
attention of the Secret Police in the early nineteen seventies
when he and his wife Celestina were working as teachers

(24:26):
in a school where they had set up on the
outskirts of Unsuncion. Their politics were left wing, and they
campaigned for better salaries and working conditions for teachers and
for changes to the curriculum. One evening, the Secret Police
came for him. After thirty days of interrogation, Almada was
officially classified as an intellectual terrorist and an ignoramus. He
was sent to the infamous in Buscata open air prison,

(24:46):
where he was held for three years. Celestina died shortly
after Almada's arrest and what the police said was a suicide.
Almada has always believed she died because police played her
recordings of him being tortured. The telephone was used as
an instrument of ecological torture, he says. For eight days,
they made her listen systematically to everything that happened to me.
Then they sent her my bloodied clothing. Finally, they called

(25:08):
her one night and said the subversive teacher is dead,
come and get his body. She died of a heart attack,
he says. She died of grief. And again, all of
this is based on teachings that the FBI handed down
to Coronel and his police. They sent trainers, the CIA
sent trainers like US cops, taught Coronel's cops how to

(25:30):
do all this. None of this was, you know, separate
from American politics in Latin America at the time. Yeah,
there are people alive today whose tax who's helped to
pay for that. Anyway, to the FBI agents listening, I
hope you enjoyed this proud recitation of your history. Here.
What a cost institution. So thanks to those now open archives,

(26:00):
we also know that Stressner after he took power, a
US military colonel named Robert Terry T. E I R R. Y.
He lived in Texas, actually came to Paraguay to put
together a lot of the basic structure of Stressner's police
state as part of a broader US plan to crackdown
on left wing organizing in the entire region. The FBI

(26:20):
handled a lot of the grunt work. On one occasion,
a dissident from Pinochet's regime in Chile fled to Paraguay.
He was arrested and interrogated by Coronell's men. They then
called up the FBI, who interrogated Chilean relatives of the
dissident who were living in the United States, and in
handed that information to Pinochet, who disappeared the dissident once
he'd been handed over. This is the way things worked

(26:43):
in Latin America, much of it. Clarence Kelly, who was
head of the FBI at the time, sent Coronell a
Christmas letter wishing him, quote, a truly joyous Christmas and
a new year filled with all the good things you
so richly deserved. Good guys, christ Good guys. Now earlier
I read you a quote from that weird Michael Caine

(27:04):
Guy's blog. I decided to highlight some of this kind
of a Nazis recollections because as a child he lived
near Pastor Coronell and he spent time with the man,
and there's not a lot of context on this guy.
So he's some of like the only evidence I've found
about what Stressner's chief torture was like as a person,
and this is kind of interesting. On this day I

(27:25):
first met Pastor Coronell. He was about five years older
than me. His uncle Dawn and rather or rather Mayor
Coronell owned a neighboring estancia ranch to the Bruderhoff. His
estancia was called San Martin, and Paraguay landowners like to
give themselves military titles for importance, hence the mayor title.
Mayor Coronell habitually carried a gun. He must have read

(27:46):
the Little Read Book by Chairman Mao, whereon it says
page forty eight, the power of the people comes out
of the barrel of a gun. For this reason, he
was highly respected or feared, pending on your language. It
was him who let me shoot his cult forty five
revolver for the first time in my life. The recoil
hurt my thumb. This made all the Paraguayan onlookers laugh
really loud. But this kind of pros it's really a

(28:07):
gift to the Internet. It's amazing. It's amazing. You legitimately
never know what this fuck is gonna come up with next.
I know it's it's this man is fascinating. Yeah, yeah,
just a stream of consciousness. Yeah, it's unedited. It's one
of those little gifts that you, um, you come across
when you're doing a deep enough dive. That's just like

(28:30):
no one, no one would put this in a scholarly
because like, I can't verify any of this, but I'm
not not gonna put it in a podcast. It's just
too it's just too incredible. It's hate and jam of
the this guy. I was commenting on Facebook shit about
how he I didn't powerfully divorced vine. Yeah, I'm not

(28:52):
surprised that Michael Caine grew up to be the most
divorced man on the internet. Hates his children. Perfect. Yes,
now I'm giving it all to me, James's that's what
I love the Internet for. Yeah, this is a true goal.
So back to Paraguay. It has always been pretty deeply

(29:13):
fucked from an economic justice point of view. Today it
actually has fun fact, James, the most unequal land distribution
of any nation on Earth. Ninety percent of its land
is owned by twelve thousand people. Now, Jesus Christ, but
that's not great. This state of affairs actually started because
of the War of the Triple Alliance, which left most
Paraguayans dead and their land up for grabs. Right, there's

(29:34):
a lot of land that there's no one alive left
to Yeah, And in the wake of that calamity, the
next dictators basically sold everything that wasn't nailed down, all
these dead people's land, to fund rebuilding and to fund themselves.
And during this period, thirty two firms purchased almost half
of the country. One Spanish businessman purchased seven million hectares,

(29:56):
which is more than a full ireland of private property. Um, yeah,
that's that's too much land for a person now, yeah, yeah, yeah,
you know one needs so much. What was he doing.
There's a brisk debate to be had about the extent
to private property. No one should be able to own
an ireland. Yeah no, that's that's too much. The consequences

(30:21):
of this led directly to a situation where all wealth
in Paraguay was determined by landownership, because land gave one
the ability to exploit minerals or other natural resources, or
at least charge rent. When Stressner came to power, the
first person he killed was a government official tasked with
carrying out a land reform policy to remedy this inequality.
That is the first guy he has murdered. Is this

(30:42):
guy doing the land reform? And yeah, I'm going to
quote next from an article in Earth Sight. As part
of these clientelist networks, Stressner divided what remained of public
land among his allies. Eight million hectares were given away
or sold at negligible prices to army generals and Colorado grandees.
This land was a stint be destined for small scale
farmers as part of a program of agrarian reform, and

(31:04):
so has come to be known as Las tierras malhabidas
the ill Gotten Lands. Yeah yeah, it's cool, good story, great, Yeah, yeah,
no problem. He started off on a great note, didn't he. Yeah. Yeah.
So this leads to a pretty long running series of
massacres of what are called composinos, who are tenant farmers

(31:25):
attempting to protest for land reform for Stressner. This also
forms a crucial part of the network of bribery and
other way looking that powers his dictatorship to get military
officers on his side. He hands out high level positions
and state monopolies or land, and then he also has
Pastor Corradel's secret police stand aside and ignore the illegal
trade and contrabands that they can make a shitload of

(31:47):
money smuggling stuff into the country. Peter Lambert writes of
this contraband often quoted as the price of peace and
involving the vast majority of officials through their control of
the frontier zones guaranteed them city of the military establishment
and the maintenance of a lucrative status quo and the
words of Eduardo Galiano, the generals fill their pockets and
hatch no plots. So basically he takes he kills the

(32:10):
guy who is responsible for redistributing land of the peasants.
He takes all this land, he gives it to his generals,
particularly land on the borders, which they then use in
order to carry out like basically create smuggling networks. Right
to bring products and that are not taxed, and this
is fucked up. It's a mixed bag for much of

(32:32):
the population. Because one thing this does is that you
can actually get a lot of shit cheaper in Paraguay
than you can in like the US where it's being made,
Like TVs are cheaper there and ship for a while
because it's like no taxes, and everyone in the government understands.
Part of why we don't we're not dealing with any
uprisings right now is that, like people get cheap TVs,
and the money from those cheap TVs bribes the generals

(32:53):
not to upset the apple cart. You know, it's a
pretty intelligent system. It's evil, but it's smart, right right,
funding your your state though, if people aren't paying taxes,
and well a lot of people aren't paying taxes, you
do have like a ship I mean part I. Honestly,
James is the CIA right, Like he's getting officially tens

(33:15):
of millions of dollars from the United States Eutropean socialism.
But it's a perfect system. What if the CIA could
fund civic programs here to rebuild roads and bridges. You
don't even think about it. Nope, dropping in CIA agents
to like clean up that part in town in Ohio

(33:36):
that the train just knives torturing dude who runs Norfolk seven. Yeah,
backing a dictator in Ohio, but then also cleaning up
the land. It's a mixed bag in Ohio. Yeah, you have.
The population's been tortured to death, but the sea's cleaner. Now, um,
the sea it's Ohio a yeah, yeah, the Ohio ocean. Yeah,
the Ohio Ocean we call it's where the land sharks

(33:59):
come from. We've talked a good amount about the torture
and murder. Stressner's chief attack dog pastor, And by pastor's
not like a religious term. It's like, I think, sorry,
pastor is what I should be saying, But you know
me in pronunciations, it's his first name as pastor, Pastor
coronel carried out. But what's perhaps more interesting is how
relatively rarely he needed to do this. The early years

(34:20):
of the Stressner regime established such a baseline of terror
that Paraguay and civil society was comprehensibly beaten down, and
it had been pretty beaten down earlier. Right, So kind
of what happens after he takes powers. Most people are like, yah, man,
he sucks, but we're not dealing with the civil war
every year, and like, you know, the corruption at least

(34:41):
means cheap TVs. So why don't we just give up
on politics? Right? Like that's kind of that's how Lambert Lambert.
That's how Lambert kind of describes what happens to the people.
And he calls this the institutionalization of repression and defines
that as a demobilization of civil society due to a
perception that politics is only the domain of soldiers and
the leaders who control them. Yeah, you don't have like

(35:04):
if civil society is like nonstate actors who make demands
of the state, Like, what the fuck is the point
in making demands of the state when yeah, either it
changed every five minutes, so it kills you exactly. And
I'm going to read another quote from Lambert here that
makes this point. To a large extent, the regime succeeded
in not only demobilizing the but depoliticizing civil society, destroying

(35:24):
not only the organizational ability of the opposition, but more importantly,
the capacity to question, to analyze, and to criticize. The
repression and co option of nascent opposition led to an
apparent acceptance of the status quo, a cynicism toward politics,
a disinterest in what was seen as an area reserved
for elites and prohibited to the masses. And to be fair,

(35:45):
the stability that Stressner brings with him makes it easy
for the people who aren't being targeted by the government
to feel this way. Regular people are benefiting from this
situation in a lot of ways, and the nineteen seventies
see an economic explosion as Paraguay finally covers from both
the Chaco War and it's decades of instability. For a while,
it has the highest growth rate of any South American country,

(36:07):
and a lot of this is due to the fact
that there's a joint Brazilian Paraguayan project to create a
massive hydroelectric dam in a Typoo. Today, I believe the
a Typoo Dam is still the most productive hydro electric
power project on the planet. Like, it's a pretty good
idea to have this dam there, you know, not that
that's up to stress everybody green lights it, and massive
corruption ensures that Paraguayan industry Like this is part of

(36:29):
the problem is that like this is a great thing
to have in your country, like this incredibly productive power dam.
They have a contract basically with Brazil, where they split
the power fifty fifty and brazil Like funds the construction.
But because of massive corruption, none of the fifty percent
of a typoo's power that's supposed to go to Paraguay
actually goes towards, you know, building an industrial base or

(36:50):
doing anything to improve the economy. So the project temporarily
brings an economic boom because so many Paraguayans are working
on it, but they're not going to actually use the
resources that it generates to improves the economy in any
meaningful way, which is going to be a problem for
everybody in a little bit here. Paraguay's boom years are

(37:11):
also helped by regular infusions of cash from the United
States and the IMF, to the eventual tune of hundreds
of millions of dollars in exchange. Stressner keeped Paraguay as
a compliant and stress free part of Operation Condor. The
CIA never needs to send in black ops teams to
the country or fund paramilitary death squads. There's no grinding
left wing insurgency that threatens the stability of the government.

(37:33):
The fact that Stressner was generally good for US policy aims,
and the undeniable fact that life under his rule was
at least more stable than life under previous dictators, led
some in the international community to call him a good dictator.
George Landau, a US ambassador to the country, called Alfredo
but nine as dictatorships go, oh god, there it is. Yeah,

(37:53):
I'm sure I'm suring the teachers being soaked in shit
and then murdered are Yeah, this is nine. Basically, yes,
dictatorships go yeah, television's cheap. What are you gonna do?
It's nice. What of the things fucking George Landau says,
is that, well, you know, political prisoners and in Paraguay

(38:13):
generally get out of prison alive as long as they
have powerful friends. No, yeah, great, that's good. We're good. Yeah, no, yeah,
thank you. I was. I was worried we were complicit
and nightmarish evil again. But you know what, it's good.
We're fine. Shining city on a hillship as always the
United States. I am at the ghost of George Washington

(38:36):
speaking on a mountain above DC. Yeah, we will build
a nation where political prisoners sometimes get out of prison
if their friends are powerful. That's one of the things
they didn't put on my becoming an American test Now
that's one of those like little quotes they write in
your passport book. I'm sure. Uh you know what else

(38:59):
winds up written in your passport book? Is it corporations? Yeah?
I mean kind of. If you have enough gold, you
don't even need a passport. Sophie, you know what innovative?
I like it. Thank you. Ah, we're back. We're all

(39:27):
having a good time. Everybody's happy. The story is happy. Um. Yeah.
So George Landau, our our good friend, the US ambassador
to Paraguay for a while, claims that Stressner repeatedly complained
in the late seventies that he was tired of ruling
and that he wanted to retire to a life of
fishing and hunting, but that Paraguay needed him. Landau claimed

(39:48):
he believed this most dictators do, that he was absolutely irreplaceable.
He talked himself into a sense of duty. Now that's horseshit. Sorry,
why's he writing this? Like is he just like doing
all bay like uscon Yeah, he's like he's like I
think this is like yeah, while he's he's probably yeah,

(40:10):
I think he leaves. Yeah, So, um, I believe that,
and other sources I found will argue that Stressner basically
gets addicted to total power. Yeah, and it kind of
loses the ability to conceive of anyone else making decisions
about his country. Um. It is interesting to read accounts
like Landau's by Americans who talk to Stressner during this

(40:30):
period because like everyone in Paraguay, like all of the
people in his cabinet, every other leader has to treat
him as kind of a cross between like God and
the devil, because his whim can destroy their lives. Right,
so no one can talk to him, honestly. But American
soldiers and diplomats like are safe, right, like you, you
can actually have a conversation with Stressner because like he's

(40:50):
not he's not going to fuck up the money, right,
He's not an idiot. Um, so take this in taking
this into account, I found a letter to the editor
of National Review by a former US soldier who traveled
to Paraguay for work during Stressner's time in office that
I found really interesting. In very good English, he said,
I am President Alfredo Stressner, and I would like to
thank you for showing us your aircraft. Since I am

(41:11):
in my country, custom requires that I continue this conversation
in Spanish with my interpreter, which he did. His interpreter
was far less fluent in English than the leader. We
gave him a tour of the airplane and answered all
his questions about it. Then he philosophized for a few minutes.
We never understood why. The remark that has struck with
me to this day was I am sure you have
heard that I am a dictator. That is true, but
I am a benevolent dictator, which my country needs. We

(41:33):
are a backward country and my people are not ready
for democracy. We wisely made no comment on the remark,
and shortly after we launched for our return flight to
the canal zone. Yeah. And it's interesting because this guy
is he's literally writing the editor of National Review. I'm
going to assume this serviceman is pretty conservative. But he
ends this letter by noting we knew very well even
then there was nothing benevolent about Stressner's dictatorship, which is honestly,

(41:57):
which is more honest than George Landau was willing to. Yeah,
this guy's cut out for career and foreigner. No, no novatudio.
Thanks showing him your aeroplane, just being like, oh, I'm
glad that was sharing on military asset. Yeah, a piece
of shit, Booma. I feel good about my service today. Yeah,
I signed up to defend this country, God willing. As

(42:21):
the nineteen eighties dawned, Alfredo's power was at its apparent height.
From the New York Times, President Stressner was never won
for understatement. His name, written in neon, flashed nightly over
the Asuncion cityscape during his reign, and at the times
he's adopted. Yeah, he's ready. For the Reagan years, his
face was plastered daily in the newspapers and on television.

(42:43):
He was known for turning up in his powder blue
military uniform every Thursday at the General Staff Headquarters of
the Armed Forces. John Finacure, writing in the New York
Times magazine in nineteen eighty four, offered this snapshot of
Paraguay as its army goose stepped down the boulevards to
celebrate General Stressner's thirty years in power. A continual state
of siege over the entire period that literally places the

(43:04):
president above the law. People with occasionally uncontrollable urges to
fall into rivers or jump from planes with their arms
and legs bound serenades in front of the presidential Palace
featuring the ever popular forward my General and congratulations my
great friend. Foreign thieves, brutes and madmen hidden at a price.
An economy administered so corruptly it is officially explained away

(43:25):
as the cost of peace. A United Nations voting record
on so called key issues more favorable to the United
States than any other. Ally, a party newspaper that prints
six four page color pictures of the General every day.
Jesus Christ, what a great country thinks are going well?
A powerful image anytime you've got goose stepping military and

(43:46):
anyone in power for thirty years, as you'd set up
some alarmbos. Yeah, Now, appearances can be deceiving, James, because
when the construction of the type dam stopped in nineteen
eighty one, that just so happened to occur at the
same time as a global collapse in the value of
cotton and soyabean, which were Paraguay's two biggest crops. So because,
due to rampant corruption, none of this power generated by

(44:09):
a type who is being used to help them create
a better industrial base, Paraguay's economy takes a long walk
off a short pier. At this point in time, the
balance of payments and deficit for Paraguay gets so bad
that Stressner is finally forced to abandon his fixed rate
for the currency. Inflation rises sharply, and with it comes
the first stirrings of resistance to his regime. Now, in

(44:31):
addition to the fact that the economy has taken a shit,
Stressner's an old man at this point. His health troubles him,
and he's forced to hand over more and more control
to his underlinks, like Pastor Coronelle, who begins actively scheming
to replace him. To cope with the stress, Alfredo increasingly
gravitates to the only hobby that makes it all better. James,
what do you do when you're stressed out? How do

(44:51):
you chill up? I go for bike ride, interesting camp.
Those his favorite activities too. I know, spoon you know
that's interesting. Those are all great hobbies. James. Alfredo takes
a slightly different route. He gets really involved in child
sex trafficking. M Oh okay, yeah, quote different kind of

(45:14):
spooning I enjoy. Oh boy, I'm gonna quote from Alex
Schumatov from Vanity Fair. Stressner was no doubt aware of
the inevitable waning of his powers, and his solution to
the problem seems to have been schoolgirls much. They were
his elixir. Maybe he thought that the intercombiod hormonis would

(45:35):
keep him young. He wasn't alone in his predilection for
this therapy. His friend Perrone, who liked boys as well,
consoled himself with a fourteen year old after the death
of Avida. In the opinion of Stressner's family surgeon Manuel Riveros,
there was nothing abnormal about an old man having a
soft spot for nymphets. This is an article from the
eighties and vanity fair. So the writer's a bastard too. Look,

(45:56):
let's not be wrong here. Youth is contagious, he told
me Truehilo crossed the streets of Santo Domingo looking for girls.
Bocasa cruised the streets of Bangui. Stressner cruised the streets
of Asuncion. It went with the turf. The girls were
don Alfredo's draw to signor Oh dear, oh dear. Yeah, no,

(46:19):
it's not very good. Alex Schumtov is a prestige magazine
journalist writing in the nineteen eighties. So he's a kind
of gross guy in some way. Yes, he's an extreme
fucking creep. Oh I had even started James. Oh God,
here's Alex sigid give me more of his pay. On
to Peterophelia. It is hard not to notice the school girls,

(46:43):
slender tan Mestiza beauties butting in their white uniforms, who
pour into the streets of Asuncion at noon after a
long morning Stressner would park near one of the schools
and watch them come out. When he had made his pick,
his age would find out who the girl was and
approached the parents with an offer of cash or real estate.
If all else failed, the girl was kidnapped and given
an injection that made her more cooperative. If she got pregnant,

(47:06):
she was sent to the best possible and treated by
the best doctors. How many children the tyrannosaur produced is unknown,
but there are a thought to be many. I am
feeling physically unwell, so that's fucked up. This is obviously
if you are this guy reporting for a huge magazine
on this, this is critical stuff to report on. You
don't need to describe how attractive the schoolgirls are. Alex,

(47:30):
that's bad. That makes too, that story wildly inappropriate. Terrible. Wow,
So yeah, Jesus Christ, good stuff. One of the people
procuring children for the dictator was Colonel Leopoldo Perier, who
scoured the countryside for eight to twelve year old peasant

(47:52):
girls and brought Yeah, yep, he me very young. And
he would bring them to safe houses and suburban like
neighborhoods that had playgrounds so that they would be amused
while they waited for the general. Um, that's like the
worst to take. Yeah, fucking hellum if you've got a
slide for your girlfriends, Like, yeah, you're doing it wrong.

(48:15):
I'm going to read another very rough two sentences from
that Vanity Fair article. One of the Stressner's conquests was
the fifteen year old daughter of the head of the
National Cement industry. As part of the seductions, she and
her brother got a trip to Disney World. Ah man, good,
hell now that is that is dark. That is rough.

(48:38):
This story was first broken by Jack Anderson in The
Washington Post in nineteen seventy seven. Who I'm fair from
what I recall of his article does not write anything
creepy about these children. Um yeah, he like bases his
article off of an interview he conducts with a woman
named Melina Ashwell, and Molina is the daughter of a
Paraguayan official stationed in Washington, DC, who tells him that

(49:02):
two years earlier and seventy five back in the Capitol,
they'd been having lunch with a colleague when they were
called over to the mansion next door, where they saw
the unconscious bodies of two eight year old girls and
one nine year old girl, who were both bleeding between
their legs. Ashwell called the police, but they had like.
The police show up, but they leave immediately because somebody
points out that the house is owned by Colonel Perrya.

(49:25):
The house is apparently a brothel frequented by the dictator himself,
and she calls like, you know. Once the police leave,
she calls a local journalist and tries to give him
the story before she goes to the post, but the
journalist she tells this all to the Paraguayan journalist gets
arrested for communism, and a raid of his house turns
up the text of her interview, so she gets tortured

(49:45):
for three days. She's only saved because her dad is influential.
When Anderson publishes this story, whe'll start turning in the
Carter White House, and thankfully Carter is not unwilling to
back dictators as he does in El Salvador during this
period of time. But this is far too much for
Jimmy Carter, and the United States cuts aid to Stressner's dictatorship.

(50:09):
Now Reagan winds up in the office very shortly thereafter,
and Reagan's like, oh, we have no problem supporting a
pedophile is totally fine. Yeah, Reagan switches up on a
sea right back. They do lose out on money during
this period where the economy is also in the shitter,
and that creates problems that weakens Stressner's regime. Right It's
one of the things that contributes to the weakening of

(50:31):
his regime. By nineteen eighty two, campesinos who lost their job,
or in nineteen eighty two, campesinos who lost their jobs
when the dam was finished, started to protest again for
land reform. This got in the way of the dreams
of Stressner's cabinet members and military officers. Villages were declared
centers of delinquency of subversion and forcibly evacuated. The peasantry

(50:52):
began to desert Stressner as a result. By the late
nineteen eighties, the general was sick enough that he could
no longer fully control his regime. He hoped one of
his sons would take over for him, but one of
them was an alcoholic and the other was gay, and
neither of them had the wherewithal to politic their way
through Stressner's cabinet. On February third, General Andres Rodriguez, a

(51:12):
close relative of the dictator by marriage, executed a violent
coup against Stressner. There's an eight hour gunfight. Stressner barely
gets away in like a limousine from the gunfight, but
like there's enough resistance that like he is able to
escape and keep his own life. But his troops are
not able to stop the soldiers loyal to Rodriguez from

(51:33):
taking the capital. By the way, Rodriguez is married to
his daughter. It's like his son in law too, right,
So cool Stressner is able to negotiate the safe surrender
of power, and he and his household are granted, you know,
the ability to leave the country. So he survives losing
power which is again rules for thirty five years, gets

(51:55):
out alive. Very rare story in the annals of dictatorships.
He had an initially hoped to land in Florida because
he owned several houses in Florida. The traditional resting place
of He feared though being tried for his crimes, and
so when the right wing military government of Brazil offered
him sanctuary, he took it. He spent the last seventeen

(52:17):
years of his life there, living in comfort, until the
age of ninety three. Jesus, Yeah, wow, a terrible Yeah,
he'd never based for his scribes. Yeah, I was really
rooting for Rodriguez Stato. Yeah. Yeah. It would have been
good if he'd gotten the old Mussolini. Yeah, that would Yeah,

(52:37):
we'd have loved to see that. Yeah, or if they
did him like Kadafi. But yeah, I know, put him
up as a fucking pinata for eight year old girls too, alas,
because he lives out his life on the beaches of Brazil. Yeah,
so you know that's a good story. Yeah, that in
many ways not but it's it is a story that's undeniable.

(53:03):
You know what else is undeniable, James, how brutal. The
ending of this fucking podcast was, Yeah, that was properly.
I really did backload the Yeah, yeah, that did that
fucking disneyl and shit is Oh my god, it's pretty rough.
You said some really horrible things on my podcast. Wow. Yeah,

(53:29):
that I'm I'm glad you gave like a slight warning
to people, because that's just yeah, that was some particularly
dark shit. That is some particularly dark shit. James, James,
do you have anything to plut Yah. Yeah, Now that
we've talked about child sexual abuse, that's uh. You know,

(53:56):
we've got another podcast in which we much more rarely
talk about child sex abuse, which is you know, so
if that's something you don't want to hear about, you
can listen to It could happen here sometimes with me
sometimes good Robert Sophie. We're gonna put that in our
Vulture right up, we'll go soaring up the rankings. Yes,

(54:19):
really discusses child sex abuse. Yeah, so yeah, it's the
thing we won't talk about. I would like to plug
the concept of hugging a nice friendly animal like a
dog or a cat. Yeah, and definitely definitely not Phil. Yeah. Yeah,
well he's probably acade at this point. He's been dropped

(54:43):
thanks to Yeah. Yeah, if you're gonna hug an animal, like,
you know, really make sure you're in a stable stance,
make sure the animal wants to hug you back. Yeah. Yeah,
don't kidnap animal, Don't let your animal anywhere near filter. Yeah,
built Plasia adopted it posthumously and it's now phil to Plasia. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

(55:08):
I mean he simply had to at that point, but yeah,
for its funeral. You have a book that people can
buy I do. It's called After the Revolution. You can
find it at a K Press's website or like Amazon
or like bookstores. You'd go to a bookstore and you
could be like I would like After the Revolution by
Robert Evans. And if they say no, whatever weapon you're carrying,

(55:30):
you know, you can just whip that out and and
you know, create a hostage situation until you get a
copy of my book. Or you could request it at
your local library. Yeah, all of these are equally valid options.
I like, my brain is on that photo of Phillio
dropping fill the ground. It's very funny, very funny. Oh man,

(55:57):
all right, this is over. I've afforded. Goodbye. We're gonna
go pull one out fulfilled, poor out fulfill byebye. Kaye.
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,

(56:17):
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts