Paraguay: Versions of Unknowability
In the early hours of April 23, 1996, I was standing under a palm tree in the Plaza Uruguaya in Asunción, Paraguay. The plaza was empty, not just because of the hour, but because everyone in the capital believed a military coup was about to go down. The previous evening, General Lino Oviedo had holed up at an army barracks on the edge of the city, where he was threatening to roll his tanks on Mburuvicha Róga, the official residence of President Juan Carlos Wasmosy.
The coup had not yet happened, but the city—the whole country—instantly shut down. People went inside, closed their doors, and stayed there. Nothing was running, including public transportation. The media went into silent mode. Driving to the U.S. embassy, where I was serving as public affairs officer, I encountered no traffic on the roads. An eerie desolation had spread across the city.
I had gone to the plaza to meet a TV journalist. Benjamín was sympathetic to the besieged president. He had enough juice to get the station back on the air with an interview of Wasmosy, who had made no public appearance since the crisis began. He had not even issued a statement. If Paraguayans saw their president standing firm against Oviedo, our thinking was, the general’s calculus might change. Perhaps the tanks would not roll.
Our conversation under the palm tree in the murk of night was an exchange of ignorance. Neither of us knew how far Oviedo was prepared to go; I have a hunch he himself wasn’t sure. The general was known for his bluster. In fact, one American ambassador had lost his job by crying wolf one too many times, predicting an imminent coup. Nor did we have any idea what Wasmosy was going to do. Rumors were circulating that he had already fled the country or capitulated to the general and stepped down. I was able to inform Benjamín that the president was, in fact, at the U.S. embassy. Then-Ambassador Robert Service had invited him to take shelter there.
Another major unknown: we had no idea whether the civic and governmental institutions of the country’s nascent democracy would crumble under the weight of Oviedo’s threat. The swiftness with which the capital shut down showed just how fragile they were after more than forty years of de facto government.
The ignorance that pervaded our conversation—the ignorance that drenched and confused the situation that April night—was no novelty to me. In the late 1970s I had taken a bus from the Plaza Uruguaya south through a new country of rolling green, herds of tan Zebu cattle, and small towns that still featured hitching rails for horses. I traveled south to a remote village of cotton and subsistence farmers. Potrero Yapepó, near the Tebicuary River, was the site to which the Peace Corps assigned me. Go see what you can do. Those were my instructions, and I am grateful to this day for the latitude.
It took me an unconscionably long time to get something done. People in Yapepó told me the thing they wanted most was a school. They had a modest adobe structure in which classes were held. What they wanted was a full-blown primary school built to education-ministry specs. I was able to get funding to buy the materials thanks to a Peace Corps program linking us with schools in the U.S. Our partners raised the money. But week after week, and then month after month, the materials sat in a pile at the work site.
And sat there.
The idea was, parents of school-age children would volunteer their labor to build the school. We had meetings. Nothing came of them. There was political division in the village. There was personal animus. There were feuds. Some of the villagers told me that these antagonisms were the problem. There was also apathy, and times when food was scarce enough to induce apathy. There was the lethargy of routine and the habit of low expectations.
I spent a huge amount of time listening to people, talking with them, and talking up the project, trying to discover the stumbling block. Wasn’t a school the one thing the residents of Yapepó really wanted? And here were the bricks, the roof tiles, the cement, everything that was needed to make it a reality.
I was baffled. I was frustrated. My ignorance was a mountain. I had a hunch that the reasons people gave me were not the whole story. But, as at the Plaza Uruguaya the night Oviedo was threatening a coup, I had no idea what was really going on.
There were unknowns. And behind them, there was unknowability. I don’t think I could live without it.
Finally a middle-aged man from a nearby pueblo took me aside and told me the problem was me. Nothing was going to happen until I asserted myself. I had to learn to stand up in front of the parents and give some orders. That, he claimed, was how Paraguayans were. They were accustomed to la mano dura, a heavy hand.
I was skeptical but took his advice. One last meeting. If people didn’t want to build the school, I announced, I would find a truck—somewhere; I had no idea where—and take the materials to another village. It worked. Two weeks later the school was done.
Two years in Yapepó chipped away at my ignorance. My stock of unknowns decreased somewhat. But there remained, always, a kind of luminous unknowability. Walking past a pasture one afternoon, I was puzzled by the behavior of the cows. They were extremely restless, roaming, lowing, butting heads. Not until later did I learn that one of their own had been butchered that morning in the same field. It was the lingering scent of cow’s blood that was wilding them.
Why were some of the front doors of people’s houses painted blue? Blue was the color of the Liberal Party, whose opposition to General Alfredo Stroessner, South America’s longest-lasting dictator, made them defiant outcasts, on the short end of every stick. Government resources did not flow to Liberal strongholds.
Hostility ran below the surface, but just barely. In an oxcart with a bunch of young boys, on our way to do a job, someone’s chance political comment led, in an instant, to the boys’ grabbing their machetes, their hoes and shovels, ready to take each other on in a reflex of pride and inherited identity.
My wife, Anne, was experiencing the same sort of perplexing unknowability. She had a separate worksite, a hundred kilometers from mine, in Encarnación, on the border with Argentina. She was assigned to a teacher-training team. They were two Paraguayan educators and one American. The mix of machismo, resentment of a young foreign interloper, and the strictures imposed by a repressive government led to actions—and inaction—that bordered on the incomprehensible.
Unknowability was everywhere, not just in my interactions with people, but in the life and world I was eagerly observing. One morning early, maybe five a.m., I woke in a one-room shack of boards with a dirt floor and a thatched roof. It was raining. I had no bed; slept on a pallet. The thatch leaked, making the floor a muddy lake whose shore brushed my pallet.
In the soft insistent rain, across the way I heard a family stirring. Someone was building a fire, someone filling a kettle for the morning mate, without which no day began. I lay on my soggy pallet and listened. They were speaking in Guaraní, the Paraguayans’ private language, in which I had less than a baby’s proficiency. I was still working on my Spanish. (Years later, a government minister told me that, while serving as an ambassador abroad, he and his colleagues spoke in Guaraní when they wished to keep a conversation confidential.) That rainy tranquil morning, what I experienced was more than the novelty of fresh perception, it was a shimmering.
For me, it was in the wake of such shimmer that the impulse to tell a story found its first working out. I was at an intersection: new knowledge collided with a headstrong drive to say what I was seeing. I started writing Paraguay stories. Never stopped. Their genesis was everywhere.
Years later, having joined the foreign service, I was sent to the American embassy in Asunción. Regardless of job title, our work was political. We were there to advance U.S. policy. To do that, we had to understand what was going on in the country.
No easy matter, that. From 1954 to 1989, General Alfredo Stroessner had run Paraguay as though it were a big farm and he was the landowner. He quashed the opposition, at first with brutal violence and later, when the population was sufficiently cowed, with intimidation and exemplary punishment. The organs of government and the media were subservient. A handful of heroic exceptions existed. Humberto Rubin of Radio Ñandutí was astute and courageous, and he survived. By and large, however, the constraints on the media, the government ministries, the political parties, and civic organizations led to profoundly negative consequences.
One of those consequences was the manipulation of information. Government rhetoric was sanctimonious propaganda. The media spoke obliquely at best, and many outlets openly fawned on Stroessner. In such an environment, rumor and innuendo flourished. People learned to discount what they were told. They assumed they were being lied to. They assumed the truth of events, of interests, of motivation was sordid and, in the last analysis, unknowable.
It was no surprise that when Stroessner fell in 1989, the institutions of the country he had dominated were spindly, dependent, and in some cases dysfunctional. The nation moved in fits and starts toward health and legitimate government, but the authoritarian past cast a long shadow. This was dramatically apparent in the media. Businessmen owned the papers and the radio and TV stations and regularly deployed them in support of their own economic and political interests, and those of their allies. Millions of words were spoken, recorded, printed, but murk prevailed.
This was another form of unknowability, hardly luminescent.
One painful example was the storm that followed the midday assassination of General Ramón Rosa Rodríguez, who headed the country’s anti-drug forces. Who had him killed? Was he getting dangerously close to bringing down a trafficking organization? Or was the general himself dirty? Was the hit the consequence of a deal, or an arrangement, gone bad? Or did the assassination have to do with something else entirely, unconnected to his work? These are the kinds of questions good journalists ask and answer. Somebody knew the truth, but it would have cost a reporter his life to dig too deeply into the matter. Nor would it have been possible to report one’s findings. Editors did not just edit, they blocked. Red headlines and gory photographs of the murder scene were published everywhere. The media frenzy went on for days and then weeks, but the turbulence generated no light.
One newspaper, Noticias, was particularly virulent. Their photographer, on the scene of the assassination, snapped a picture of our embassy’s Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) chief. He had been monitoring a police radio frequency, heard a report of the hit, and driven to the scene; the general was his senior work contact. Relying on that photo, Noticias carried on a sustained campaign suggesting that the American DEA chief was responsible for the general’s murder. They ran and reran the picture of him at the scene.
It was clear that somebody had an agenda. Not much else was. Was it as simple as wanting to drive the DEA out of the country? Was it a smoke screen to deflect attention from the perpetrators of the crime? Was the owner of the paper in it himself, or was he lending his platform, for a fee, to somebody else? The truth did not emerge, although a string of hypotheses, plausible and implausible, were vetted in the media with neither proof nor foundation.
I made an unsuccessful run at tamping down the harsh coverage of the DEA. The news chief I went to see in his office at Noticias all but laughed in my face. I remember his sneer. The sensational coverage went on.
Then I made a tactical mistake. I agreed to go on a live radio call-in show. The idea was to use the occasion to reiterate the embassy’s denial of involvement in the Rosa Rodriguez murder, and to highlight our commitment to working with the Paraguayan government to combat drug trafficking. It turned out to be the longest hour of my life. Encouraged by the show’s host, who sat opposite me in the studio, listeners calling in excoriated me and cursed me out. As a stand-in for official America, I was called a clown, a fool, an incompetent who was not fit to work as a gardener on the embassy’s grounds. I kept my cool. I made my points. In the deluge of vitriol, they were lost.
The assassination was never satisfactorily cleared up. Certain rank-and-file reporters had good intentions and good instincts, but if they learned who killed the general, the particulars remained unpublished. Even in the subterranean world of intelligence, a collector of information had to be wary. There was a knack to figuring out not that people were lying to you but why. Truth by triangulation was an imperfect science. That was the sort of overheated milieu in which General Oviedo operated. I did not know him well. The little time I spent in his company left an impression of cold self-possession I could not help but read as ominous. In the turbid waters of his landlocked country, he was definitely a shark.
In the end, however, Oviedo did not roll the tanks. It was a long night. At one point, a reporter friend showed up at the embassy in a righteous rage, carrying a .22 pistol, as if a pistol could stop a tank. He had in tow the young son of one of the newspaper publishers, a privileged kid, what the Paraguayans called un hijo de papá. Daddy’s boy, when daddy was a wealthy and powerful man. I was fascinated that the son would follow a furious incautious reporter out into the unknown of that night. Couldn’t help admiring him.
The reporter wanted to know where the president was. Rumor had put him in our embassy, where in fact he remained. But as much as I trusted the reporter, we were not about to confirm Wasmosy’s whereabouts. Later, he told me he knew, not from what I said but from how I said it, that the president was with us.
The president agonized. Wringing his hands on a sofa in the ambassador’s office, he kept repeating, “No quiero derrame de sangre.” I don’t want bloodshed. He thought if he stepped down, the country might be spared a bloodbath. But he agreed, eventually, to go to the television channel and be interviewed by Benjamín. It helped.
Meantime, those of us who worked through the night at the embassy put together a straightforward statement condemning the threatened coup and strongly supporting the continuance of the Wasmosy government. I read the statement on one of the radio stations still on the air. Our message was relayed around the capital and across the country. Millions of Paraguayans heard it. Our statement was quickly followed by similar pronouncements from the Organization of American States and from the government of Brazil, Paraguay’s single most influential neighbor.
It’s too much to say that the tide turned. But the coup did not go forward, although Oviedo’s decision-making process remained completely opaque. Once it began functioning again, the government did not dare arrest him, despite his having committed a treasonable offense. He still had a significant portion of the military establishment backing his play. He was feared. So he remained free. A few days later he convoked several thousand supporters to a park outside Asunción, where he gave a rambling performance of several hours that had the hallmarks of a swan song.
Life in Paraguay returned to normal. Normal was precarious. Normal was full of ambiguity. Normal presumed that things could blow up at any moment, or keep limping along the path in the general direction of stability.
In 1978, not long after being sworn in as Peace Corps volunteers, Anne and I visited a woman who lived in Encarnación. A social call. We had an acquaintance in common.
We sat in the woman’s living room. At one point in the conversation she looked around to be sure nobody was listening. The country was larded with pyragúes, eavesdroppers willing to report to the government, for a small fee, anything juicy or untoward they heard. The name means “hairy foot,” suggesting the silence with which they came up behind a person to listen.
Our host moved her chair closer to ours. She lowered her voice to a whisper. She made a political comment. It seemed innocuous to me. Because she was speaking so low, however, and because I was new, I had a hard time making out the words. I could not be sure. It may have been the first time. It was definitely not the last.