"We Will Show Them"

Ten years ago this week, Army General Alfredo Stroessner seized control of Paraguay in a classic South American palace coup. He is still the landlocked little nation's undisputed Numero Uno. But no swelling bands or fancy parades will mark the anniversary. Stroessner may hoist a cup of fiery cana, the local rum, with a few army cronies-- nothing more. At 51, he looks and acts more like a mild-mannered businessman than the most durable of Latin military dictators. Today the important thing for Stroessner is not the tormented past, and his own part in it, but the progress he has begun to make in bringing to 1,800,000 Paraguayans a measure of peace and stability.

Blood & Iron. A savage history of foreign wars and civil strife left the country little strength for nation building. In 1864 Paraguay blustered into the suicidal, six-year War of the Triple Alliance against Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay; out of a population of 525,000, only 220,000 survived, and only 28,000 of these were men. Again in the Chaco War of the 1930s, Paraguay took on Bolivia and won 20,000 sq. mi. of wilderness borderland--at a cost of one Paraguayan life for each square mile. Thus the prize won in 1954 by Stroessner, a veteran of the Chaco War, was a sleepy backwater, 600 miles by river from the sea, cobblestone-quaint but short on manpower and desperately poor. Only a few miles of roads were paved, and a wood-burning railroad served as the main land link to Argentina and the outside world.

Stroessner got off to a dictator's ironfisted start, organizing a tough secret police, suppressing all opposition, packing the prisons. Close to 300,000 Paraguayans now live in exile. At Stroessner's Colorado party headquarters in the Asuncion capital, functionaries keep IBM listings on everyone who applies for party membership; there are 400,000 names on file. Stroessner is staunchly antiCommunist, but beyond that he does not concern himself with ideology. When a visitor once suggested that Paraguay needed a first-class public relations man to improve its image abroad, the general replied: "We don't need publicity. We will show them by doing."

Roads & Molasses. In his own heavy-handed way, Stroessner is actually trying to make good the boast. By imposing order on his violent little land, he has been able to push new roads through the hinterland to the Bolivian, Brazilian and Argentine borders. Following behind the bulldozers are settlers, clearing and cultivating the 40,000 plots of unused government land that have been distributed to peasant families. Lumber, beef and leather are growing businesses. Last year exports climbed to $40 million, highest since World War II, while imports fell enough to give the country its first trade surplus in five years. The cost of living rose only 1.1% last year v. 26% in neighboring Argentina and 80% in Brazil.

Foreign capital has helped finance a plastic-hose factory, a molasses plant, new sawmills and a cottonseed-oil processing plant. In the first two years of the Alliance for Progress, the country received commitments for $45 million from international bankers, the U.S. Government and private investors.

The dictatorship is changing too. As a practical matter, not out of any sudden conversion to democracy, Stroessner now tolerates an opposition, relatively tame though it may be. In the 1963 presidential elections, a nominal opposition got on the ballot for the first time, and by law wound up with an automatic 20 of the 60 seats in Congress. (In Mexico's one-party "guided democracy," the ruling P.R.I, also guarantees some seats to its opposition--but up to 11%, not 33%.) "We allow freedom for all non-Communist political parties," says Edgar Ynsfran, 43, Stroessner's ambitious and influential Interior Minister. "It is subversion that we cannot tolerate."

A U.S. businessman puts it another way. "This place is in no sense the old-style jack-booted dictatorship. I've worked in Venezuela during the time of Perez Jimenez, in the Dominican Republic under Trujillo, in Argentina under Peron. There is no atmosphere of tension and fear. The idea is order, to build something." That is how Stroessner sees himself--as Paraguay's builder. His term expires in 1968, and constitutionally he is barred from running again. But in Stroessner's Paraguay, the builder can always reconstruct a constitution.

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