Remembering the 'Stronismo': How ghost of a brutal dictator haunts Paraguay [View all]

Seventy years since General Alfredo Stroessner seized power in the small Latin American country, memories of his bloody legacy and the massacre it triggered in 2012 live on.



Farmers protest in June 2012 holding pictures of people who died when they were fired upon by police evicting them from a reserve on the outskirts of Curuguaty, Paraguay. The events of that day have come to be known as the Curuguaty massacre [Jorge Saenz/AP Photo]

By Klas Lundstrom
Published On 29 Jun 2024

Marina Kue, Curuguaty, Paraguay – A lonely dirt road leads to Marina Kue in eastern Paraguay; 2,000 hectares of arable land forever marked as a last stand between the heirs of Paraguay’s late dictator, General Alfredo Stroessner, and the victims of his brutal dictatorship, the landless peasants.

At dawn on June 15, 2012, a 350-men unit of Special Police Forces encircled the disputed land lot to evict 60 families who lived there. To the women, men, children and elders who had claimed access to Marina Kue, this was “Farm No 53”, a property incorporated within Stroessner’s controversial land distribution programme and agricultural colonisation scheme of eastern Paraguay.

The arriving police forces were fully armed, while the strongest ammunition held by the landless peasants was a legal verdict from 1999 when the Commission of Human Rights of Paraguay had ruled that the property was public land.

Many of the dispossessed peasants now surrounded by police forces had lived on these lands since the late 1960s when the previous owner, the Paraguayan Navy, returned the land to the state. But a powerful businessman, Blas Riquelme (now-deceased), had other ideas. A prominent member of Paraguay’s long-ruling, right-wing Colorado Party – formally titled the National Republican Association – he had set out to lease the Marina Kue lot for growing genetically modified crops. The police forces present that day were obeying his command.



Relatives bury a peasant farmer killed in the Curuguaty Massacre on June 18, 2012. At least 17 people were killed and dozens hurt during armed clashes on June 15, 2012 that occurred when police attempted to evict landless peasant farmers from a farm in Paraguay, officials said [Reuters]

More:
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2024/6/29/remembering-the-stronismo-how-ghost-of-a-brutal-dictator-haunts-paraguay

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HISTORY STORIES | Paraguay's Nazi dictator, who mocked the country for 35 years.

6 years ago

Torture, concentration camps, corruption, poverty, genocide, slave trade. All this and not only was in Paraguay during the reign of dictator President Alfredo Stroessner. This period can be called the "terrible dream" of Paraguay, that's just happened all in reality. The tyrant mocked the country for 35 years, and hundreds of thousands of innocent people became victims of his arbitrariness.





Stroessner did not repeat the mistakes of his predecessors. Suppressing any opposition actions directed towards him. Stopped hard. In the course of release of the torture, murder. Without trial, people just disappeared. Later their bodies were found in the rivers or on the streets, sometimes all we found was body parts. Requests for missing persons or statements about the murder of law enforcement ignored.

. . .

In addition, the dictator was a Nazi. Many Nazis after World war II took refuge in Paraguay. They were given new passports, police, army or concentration camps, of which there were about 20 in the country.

During the dictator's rule, the tribes of Indians inhabiting Paraguay were almost completely destroyed. The Guarani population has decreased from 250,000 to 30,000. Indians ACI in General there are only 500 people. The Indians were poisoned and killed in the open, without fear of punishment. In the markets in the order of things was selling them into slavery.

More:
https://steemit.com/history/@aydogdy/history-stories-or-paraguay-s-nazi-dictator-who-mocked-the-country-for-35-years