Part One: Alfredo Stroessner: The Luckiest Dictator

So this is Behind the Bastards, a podcast where Sophie and I banter and then people on the subreddit decide whether or not it's problematic. Um, it's the moral north Star that is sebred Thank god. I just think it's so I just the the subreddit. It's so funny sometimes where they're like, oh is uh is everything okay? There? It's like yes, but also no, none of it's okay. Yeah.

I mean the thing is, we love our fans, and I appreciate that there's fifty five thousand people who want to talk about the show and a subreddit that's that's kind of amazing. But at the same time, there's like a degree of all of these podcast episodes, everything we do, there's like a script. Today's script for this two part or is eighty six hundred and sixty five words. It's usually between eight and ten thousand words, but also like

a third of the runtime of any episode. It's just us talking and the amount of fine tooth comb going over that people do like of like a like little jokes or like someone will misspeak or you'll transpose a couple of letters in a word, and then there's like thirty people talking about it, and it's like, guys, come on, man, we are recording a conversation. You know how those work. We've already recorded several of the conversations. We will make

some gaffs. Yeah, to chill out, Come on, man, chill out. God bless the people. I know. I yeah, I like subredits. Man. I keep in my heart the people who are alike just listening to this so they don't have to be alone with their thoughts while driving or vacuuming the house or you know, shearing a goat walking the dog. God bless all of you. God bless you, and God bless us everyone. James Stout, welcome to the program. Thank you, Robert.

It's glad to be here. Yep. Amongst the goat shearers, amongst the goat Shearers, James, what do you know about Paraguay? A relatively little. Actually, it's not another big area of expertise for me, So I'm excited to learn. I'm gonna I'm gonna venture to say, it's not really an expertise for many people outside of Paraguay. This is not a country that gets talked about a lot. It's certainly not

a country that, like Americans, talk about a lot. I had to really, really aggressively go into the reading about this to learn much of any just because, like my life, the first thirty four years of my life had not provided me with much information passively about the country of Paraguay. Now, Paraguay is, if you're like me, and up until recently had not spent much time thinking about the country is a lovely little landlocked nation bordered by Bolivia, Brazil, and Argentina.

And it is perhaps the most doomed little country I've ever read about. Maybe Belgium, but they wound up dooming a lot of other people and Paraguay never did that. So the subject for our episode today is another little another dictator, Alfredo Stressner. And you know, we got to go through some history before we talk about Stressner because as a man himself, he's not the most like He's not like Hitler or like Saddam, where his early life, as dark as it is, is just this like wacky

cavalcade of madness. Stressner is a guy who is an incredibly effective dictator. He might be best at being a dictator if anybody we've covered on this show, but he's also the best at being a dictator because he kind of lucks into the perfect situation for a dictator. Paraguay is almost like crafted over the course of about one hundred and fifty years to be the ideal country to

have a dictator like Stressner. I've never really encountered a situation like this in a history, and it's fascinating as a result of that, But it all kind of comes back to the fact that Paraguay might kind of be cursed this. They have a rough chunk of history after the liberation from Spain. Like most of Latin America, Paraguays founded as a Spanish colony in the early sixteenth century and up until the last twenty years or so, it

was not democratic in any meaningful way. One book that I read Paraguay under Stressner by Paul Lewis describes it as an unbroken sequence of dictatorships. Now, that is a nasty way to describe a political situation. It's also worth noting that when we're talking about the eighteen hundreds, that's an accurate description for basically everywhere on Earth. Like you could argue it's not that far off from describing the United States in that period, given the amount of people

who are enslaved or otherwise disinfraniation. So Paraguay is not alone, you know, in the eighteen hundreds and having a bunch of dictatorships. Um. Now, when the country achieved its independence from Spain in eighteen eleven, it left behind a Obviously Spain was a could be a very brutal colonial master, but it didn't like do so in order to take

on a more liberatory political system. The architect of their split from Spain, a guy named doctor Jose Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia, wound up as dictator, and that's probably not surprised. Was not surprising to that many people. He seems to have been fairly popular. He spends twenty five years in power, which is a substantial reign for a dictator. Stalin Mao, both only get like four years more than that, and those are kind of two famously, and this is eighteen eleven,

which makes it, I think more impressive. Yeah, because people didn't look very long. Yeah. So he's in there a long time. And while he's in charge, you know, it is a dictatorship, and he brutally purges, you know, any kind of opposition that attempts to form. But for most Paraguayans, it's a pretty peaceful and relatively positive time, especially compared

to kind of the previous period. It's worth noting that his official title voted to him by the Populace was El Supremo, so they could vote for his title, but not for when I vote put quotation marks. I don't know. It's like a thing where they've got like a parliament or whatever, or a congress that's like, you know, is basically enthralled to the dictator and periodically he'll have it vote for things. You know. That's kind of the story

of Paraguay for quite a while. I want to be judging this guy based on his apparent but this man has a face like a spank toss if we I've never heard anyone describe that way. Next leg. I spoke a picture for him in a chat, and I think it'll come to you like that is they's not a looker. Oh my god, you know his face people, you need to google this man. His face does look like a spanked ass. If there's no other way of coming. If you put a nose on an us, that would be

his face. It's like the bottom half of its His face collapsed in on itself because he smelled something so unpleasant, like it looks like he's yeah, like awful. His five head is is Yeah, really, it's incredible. What a horrible portrait. I wonder if he killed the person who painted this, because look, if I would, that would be okay. I'm just gonna say it. It's having this portrait made of you. It justifies at least one murder. This person struck a

powerful blow for democracy. Cons So. One of the fun things about Paraguayan dictators is that they all are named like luchadors um. So this guy is El Supremo. His successor, Carlos Antonio Lopez, who's also dictator for life, is El Excellentissimo. Um. Oh wow, yeah, I know it's fun. These are these are some good names. I'm gonna be yeah. Um he was like, yeah, we gotta throw a fucking adjective up

on that. Yeah, I'm taking to the max. So if you look at Paraguay on a map again, it is immediately obvious why the country has had such a tumultuous history. It is landlocked, and it is surrounded by Brazil and Argentina, two countries that are famously not peaceful with their neighbors during the eighteen hundreds. Um, although it's Paraguay that's going to be starting shit with them. So the early eighteen

hundreds are not a peaceful time in South America. And given the fact that Paraguay lacked any natural difference, so Paraguay is kind of geographically you might think of them as the opposite of Switzerland. Switzerland is like such a natural fortress that even with very few people, they could hold off as many times their size. Paraguay has basically no natural offenses other than that it's hot and there's lots of mosquitoes, which isn't nothing, but like anyone can

kind of walk in there and cause problems. And so as a result, it's early dictators chose wisely to invest very heavily in the army. They're like, we're probably gonna wind up getting our asses kicked if we don't do this. And by the time Carlos Lopez, that's l Excellentissimo dies, his son, Francisco Solano Lopez takes power and at that point the little country has a military that is larger and more well funded than one would expect from a

country of that size. Unfortunately, Francisco Lopez is um, he's going to take an ill advised year abroad to Europe. It's actually more like eighteen months. When he's in his twenties now. A lot of people go on gap year and you know, it's, yeah, go to some raves and yeah, intolerable in Barcelona. Yeah, it takes some e briefly date a German girl who has interesting opinions on the moon landing. You know, it's it's all. We've all had good experiences

on our gap year. Unfortunately, that is not the case with Francisco Lopez, because so his equivalent of entering into an ill advised romantic relationship from someone he met at a rave is he hangs out with Emperor Napoleon the third of France, um friend of the pod and so I'm gonna quote from an article in the January twenty thirteen issue of Military Heritage magazine. Here he was taken particularly with the glittering marshal splendor of the court of

the French Emperor Napoleon the Third. Returning home, Lopez brought back with him several steamships to fill out the embryonic Paraguayan fleet, along with all the guns, ammunition, and gold braid that his deep pockets could purchase. He also brought back it's it's a bling that. Yeah, he's he's getting going doubt. He also brought black a new mistress, an Irish adventuress named Eliza Lynch, who, like many a gold digger before her, catered to her meal tickets outsized ego,

recklessly encouraging his delusions of grandeur in dreams of imperial glory. Now, I don't know how entirely fair it is to blame this Irish jack. We are like, what happens next, But that's how that magazine put it. Yeah, so conte Military Heritage being particularly woke on gender, Yeah, that is very likely that said she does come up in any rite up you find it. The guy. I think there's there's

a lot going on. I mean, he's a rich kid whose dad was the dictator, and he goes to Europe, falls in love with these European armies, and he builds himself a splendid little army based on the solid base that his dad has left him. In eighteen fifty seventies, made vice president to Paraguay, and then in eighteen sixty two his dad dies in Francisco, takes power, and he from the beginning he cannot give up kind of these

these dreams Napoleon had stoked of military excellence. He's a little bit like that doomed Hapsburg who's going to get murdered in Mexico right around this same time period. So this little military, very good military his predecessors had built, was adequate, very adequate to the task of defending Paraguay

from intrusion by a neighbor. So he's he's got this toy like his for Lopez, this wonderful army that his predecessors built is like this big, shiny toy, and he spends like a couple of years outfitting it and getting it really set up. But he's, you know, the reasonable thing to do if you're Paraguay is just kind of try to keep being Paraguay, right, as opposed to starting a war with the neighbors who surround you and are

all much larger. Lopez, though, he wants to be a big continental power like France, and so in eighteen sixty four he decides to um to take that leap, you know, to throw the iron dice. So Uruguay, which is you know, pretty close, is racked by a sort of soft civil war at the time between two rival political parties. Again neither of them is very democratic, but one of these parties is backed or one of these parties, which is like the party in power at the time, is friendly

with Lopez and Paraguay. Brazil backs the other party, and in this kind of internecine struggle, the party that Brazil is backing and arming wins. Lopez takes offense to this. He demands that Brazil stopped giving military support to Uruguay, and Brazil is like, you guys are like a speed bump, where Brazil, of course not you. What do you think we're gonna listen to you? They are much bigger. So

he makes a questionable decision. Paraguay is on this river and there's like a Brazilian merchant ship that's import in the capital, and he has his forces sees that merchant ship and when they do, they find out that the Brazilian governor of the bordering province of Matta Groso is on the ship. So Lopez arrests this guy, throws him in a dungeon and then sends his arm and then invades Matta Groso and like, and it's this, it's a

very big, sparsely populated province. He basically just marches in, takes the tiny capital town and then it's like, we own this whole thing. So that is a bold yeah, okay, doubling the side of his country in one fells group, yeah, and thinking this will probably be okay. So, like, this is a bold move at the best of times. And if he had just wound up going to war with Brazil, that's a tough fight for Paraguay, right, That's like that's like Kansas going to war with the entire state of Texas.

Like it's not you know, the kind of odds are stacked against him as he is as it is, but he doesn't like stop just at taking Mattagroso, because the next thing he does is He's still pissed that Brazil has backed the side he didn't like in this conflict in Uruguay. So he sends his army to Uruguay to like take back power for his people. And at the time, by the way, while he's doing all of this, he has he has himself get voted the nickname El Supremo. So El Supremo sends his forces off to to Uruguay

to win some glory. But the problem is that there's like this slice of Argentina. So Lopez like asks for permission to send his army through, and Argentina is like, no, hey, what do you what are he of course not, We're not gonna let you do this, and so he declares war on Argentina too, So great, what a chat. The third thing that happens is that because of everything else we've talked about, Uruguay winds up declaring war on him

as well. Um. So this is a this is a bad situation to be in um And he, you know, he launches a couple of attacks with his well made little army, and his well made little army winds up getting just bashed to pieces, in large part because he

is an incompetent commander. After thousands and thousands are dead, it becomes clear to Supremo that the population of young adult males is not going to be enough to sustain Paraguay's war effort, so he starts drafting children, creating battalions of twelve year olds to hold the line and suicidal

last stands to delay the enemy. For an idea of how yeah, for an idea of how bad this is, there are ports of like Brazilian soldiers massacring trench lines and then when they realize they've just shot a bunch of twelve year olds, like weeping and like just breaking down because like you know, like that's a pretty bad situation. Twelve year old. No, nobody, very few people want to kill twelve years yeah. Yeah. So, as this war drags on,

Lopez starts drafting old men and eventually even women. He has them doing a lot of logistics work in the back, and in eighteen sixty nine, Asuncion the capitol falls and Lopez flees into the hills to fight a guerrilla war, which he is just as bad at as the rest of this The last of his forces are surrounded in eighteen seventy and he dies a band ending them trying to wade across the river. So now that's that's that's kind of funny the way this ends. And like, objectively,

there's an absurdity to how badly this war goes. But like James, you and I have both reported on and studied a lot of wars. I don't think I've ever read about a war that goes worse for a country. No war this goes. This is called the War of the Triple Alliance. So the death toll of the War of the Triple Alliance is comparable to the American Civil War.

There is no accurate pre war census of Paraguay. All of the estimates of the of the percentage of the country that dies are kind of based on calculations that are themselves a little bit of a crapshoot um. But I have every analysis that I've read makes basically the same point, which is, Paraguay suffered a higher percentage of its populace dead than any country in a war I can I can name. Um. The most common estimates say that two thirds of the pre war population die. Um.

Some estimates place the death tolet. There are estimates as high as ninety percent, although that's likely high, but everyone seems degrees sixty per seventy percent of the entire country dead is a reasonable estimate. This includes nine ninety percent of the pre war male population. Wow, and so post war chunks of the country will have a twenty to one ratio of women to men. So that's about as bad as a war could go. Yeah, yeah, that's not great.

That's it's really sub optimalcome for everyone. Yeah, maybe from the dude to survive, but yeah, the graphic collapse, wow, yeah, it is, it is it. It's like, I don't I've ever heard of a war going that badly, Like when you're making German casualties in World War two seem like, well that's you know, you can bats back from that. Yeah, yeah, I mean it didn't even do like twelve year olds

at the Battle of the Psalm that is. Yeah. I love that the sort of the misogyny kept on if when they were sending twelve year olds out there, that like, we've got to keep women out of the front line, can't company yea guns? Yep. It's uh, there's a lot actually to say about because I've read a couple of articles about this about like the way in which this impacts kind of cultures of entrenched misogyny in Paraguay that

I am not really competent to go into. But there's you know, a lot, there is a lot written about like what happens when you're like the first generation of young men after this, and there's like like twenty twenty to one female male ratio and all this attention being kind of like lavished on you because of how badly this war goes and how decimated the population of men was prior to this. There you can find some really

interesting writing on this. I don't want to, like, uh, we'd be getting a little bit off of where I feel competent talking to go much more into it, but it's most worth reading that, Yeah, you're going to fuck up your society for genetically as well as social. It's really it's very rarely good if ninety percent of any

group and your society gets massacre. He's like he's bested the Black Death in terms of decimating his own Sula Lopez gets our gets the behind the Bastards of award for probably the worst at Warum, I don't think I've ever heard if anyone fail worse at having a war than this. But you know who's good at engaging in unrestricted warfare? Oh, the Raith Young Corporation. That they are,

They are one of the best. And all of our sponsors believe that you can only truly achieve victory in a conflict by salting the earth with the bones of your enemy. Um. So you know you get the gold, isn't it You grow grows from the bones, That's right, That's right, that's where gold comes from. And also where the best delivered mattresses are forged from. Anyway, the biom mattress. Ah, we're back. So Paraguay just kind of barely ekes it

out as a country after this. Um. And if you're if you're interested in kind of much more detail about this, the War of the Triple Alliance, which if you google it that's also like you'll get a lot of World War One results, but this is a different thing. The Lions led by Donkeys podcast did a good series on this, which which you should check out. They go into it, spend a lot more time on it than we are,

because this is just kind of setting the scene. So Paraguay and kind of like there's this series obviously afterwards, Brazil occupies the country, the people, the countries who would want to take about a third of the land mass of Paraguay as kind of part of the war debt, and then there's another like cash war debt that staggers the economy for a few generations. The only reason that Paraguay survives at all less a nation is that Brazil and Argentina are big rivals and neither of them is

willing to let the other have Paraguay. Right, they kind of like maintain a rump state there just because it's not worth dealing with the conflict over who gets to

have it now. Argentina in this period had played host to a lot of dissident Paraguayans, members of the old upper class who had had to flee the country when the dictators took over right when Spain gets kicked out, and a bunch of these guys, when Argentina participates in this invasion of Paraguay, they form up and join the Argentine army and like make a unit of like exiled

Paraguayans fighting to liberate the country from Lopez. And so after eighteen seventy, Argentina successfully kind of helps maneuver these guys into power, and they draw up a democratic constitution that basically existed as an excuse for these people to sell off all of the state's land and businesses for their own personal profit. The British banking firm Bearing Baring's brothers. Oh yeah, James, how did I know that the British

banking industry would get involved? I was just going to remark of selling off the entire country's assets for your own personal profit is a very British vibe. Like the thing is so it is. I mean waiting as a as a rule, if there's like a dictator in the eighteen hundreds, there's a British bank behind God, let's not let's not limit the time period so narrowly, very air. Yeah, we've made a long and proud tradition of during three

twentieth century. So Margaret's kid. So the Bearings brothers are like, Wow, things are going great in Paraguay. Look at how effectively they have taken all of these national resources and handed them off to a tiny chunk number of oligarchs. Here's a couple of very large loans Paraguay, and the oligarchs say thank you for the loans that are meant to develop our country. We're just going to take the money though, and buy houses. Yeah, and so the nation has left

bankrupt and in ruinous debt. After this, it's again not the first or the last time this will happen. So the Brazilian military occupies Paraguay for a while, but they bounce pretty quick and Paraguayans are left to try and navigate their place in South America. Bereft of a couple generations of men and also any money. It does not go smoothly. As scholar Paul Lewis describes, Paraguayan governments after eighteen seventy brought either internal peace nor liberty, although they

were still dictatorships. Managed elections, or the direct seizure of power was the means by which every succeeding president achieved office. Forty four men occupied the presidency in the eighty five years between the death of Slano Lopez and Alfredo Streissner's coup in nineteen fifty four, one president every twenty three months. Moreover, of those forty four, more than a half twenty four were forced from office by violence of the threat of violence.

Many of the remainder were simply provisional presidents who headed caretaker governments while the real contestants for power fought it out. Sixteen of the twenty four presidents were overthrown. Who were overthrown served for less than a year, and five of them were in office less than a month. Amazing. This is a lot of turnover. Yeah, the worst is the period from nineteen ten to nineteen twelve. That is a two year period in which Paraguay has seven presidents and

nine administrations outstanding. Again, don't just wait, because we could still do that in the United Kingdom. We've been we've been pushing for it. Hey, I believe both your country and my country can have seven presidents in two years. Yeah, we'd love to see. All it's gonna take is the Secret Service getting a little bit more into cocaine. And

they're already pretty into cocaine. It's gonna be like, get cocaine bear up and there in the CIA, and it'll be I think it would be nice if, like our president, we adopted like a pseudomystical tradition where like the president gets to continue to be president as long as the cocaine bear does not eat him, and when it does, we all agree not to be partisan about it. It's just like it's it's like that that what's its name? Seeing its shadow and deciding we're going to have more winter.

She's like the bear the president. Can I get a new one in there? He's talking about the groundhog. The groundhog. I forgot the name groundhog, so sorry, yeah, Phill, Yeah, that's I recently learned. Apparently there is another groundhog called Staten Island phil Um. But the previous New York mayor dropped it. Our ground hugs not drop safe. I think it depends on the height and probably the angle of the drop. This is another reason cats are superior. Yeah, yeah,

you can drop a cat all day long. I don't get shit. Mayor? Was this? Do you know? Because I'm just gonna look handsel Stan? Yeah, I guess it's let's have a look stant nine and phil dropped de Blacio. Here we go, Washington Post. Stannine, his famous groundhog died after build de Blacio dropped it. Incredible, incredible, p he's the Francisco Solano Lopez of New York groundhogs. Yeah, there were pictures. The dog is a pitch of it on its way down. Oh, how far did you drop him. Okay,

was he standing on a balcony? Was he? Was he doing a Michael Jackson with this animal? Oh god, if I had, Deblascio would have been at the top of my list of mirrors. He's blamed the groundhog for his unpopularity. Wow yeah, wow. This manisode goes out to that groundhog. Yeah, this is this is now dedicated to whatever that groundhog's name was. Just Staten Island film stann Island, Phil r I, Oh god, Deblascio, what the fuck this? Honestly as you

can't blame you can't blame the groundhog. No, I like, he's another victim of state violence, and I have to say it another example of classic groundhog shaming, which is a plague in this country. So back to Paraguay in the late nineteen twenties, things are finally starting to improve slightly after that, after that two year seven precedent run even out a little bit. They get some more competent

leaders who start to reinvest. I mean they're mainly reinvesting in the military, but also not the worst idea given kind of the situation, because at this point the late twenties, the only neighbor that Paraguay has not lost a devastating war.

Two Bolivia starts sniffing around this region in northern Paraguay called the Chaco, and Bolivians are like, well, the last time Paraguay went to war didn't go good, and like we could probably take them, and there's this kind of this place, the Chaco is kind of this like wasteland in the northern significant chunk of the country. It's not a wasteland, but that's how it gets described by people.

It's like a kind of desertified territory. It looks beautiful. Honestly, I'd love to go hike there or something, although there's a hell of a lot of skeeters. But there's this like the Olivia becomes briefly convinced because of like they find a little bit of oil there. There's not really oil in the Chaco, but they are convinced that, like there's a shitload of oil in the Chaco, and so they're like, let us, let's let's go invade and take this from Paraguay. And it's kind of obvious for a while.

Part of why this is happening is that, like when everybody gets their freedom from Spain, they don't always have like super clear maps of who's is what. So there's like this long argument about like whether or not, you know, this chunk of the Chaco should belong to Paraguay or Bolivia.

So they're all arming while this is going on, and Paraguay puts this guy in command of their army in the Chaco called Jose Estigarribia, and he is going to be There are military scholars who will say this guy is one of, if not the best field commanders in the history of modern warfare in the Americas, because the war that's about to result from this is a modern in war. They have tanks, they have machine guns, they have air power. This is going to occur in like

the early nineteen thirties. The Bolivians put an old German Man in charge of their military. Now what time, guys, you're you're not even ready, James, You're not even ready because this guy's this guy is no shit. Real name is General von kunt Li k you in DT. Look this ship up now, I know on this episode always called Hans cunt Yeah, so he I was going to say, yeah, this guy from the day he was born, which look, so this guy, first of all the Vaughan means that

he's German nobility. He is a German officer's count me. Well, let me tell you the rest of the story. So he is a German general officer throughout the First World War in the Eastern Front, and he has a reputation for two things. One he is a competent logistical commander and two, whenever there's any kind of combat, his go to tactic is to throw every man he has into a suicidal headlong charge. He is a He is one of the worst journal commanders. He is terrible at what

he's doing. Um, he gets a shitload of men killed, but he's he's also he becomes after the war a celebrity in Bolivia. Um. Now, this is very like like the question of like why is this guy so beloved by the Oblivians. A lot of it is that, like he loves Bolivia, like he moves there. After World War One, he gets a job kind of acting as an instructor for the Bolivian military. This is very common at the

time too. I mean, you have to remember that while von Kunt is very bad at what he does, I know, I know, the German military has just almost won a war against the world. So all of these little countries and big countries in South America are like, oh, we the best people we can get to help us reform our militaries is some German guy, right, because like they

got they came pretty close to winning. So the Bolivians fall in love with von Kunt because he's just kind of this, despite the fact that he's shit eatingly incompetent, he looks and talks like this, like archetypal image of the Prussian military genius, and they just all kind of buy it. Paraguays again, Paraguay's army is commanded by Estegarribia, who's one of the best military leaders in the modern history of the Americas. And so the Chaco War which

results when Bolivia invades, is a fascinating conflict. It is going to be a testing ground for a lot of tactics that are key in World War Two. This is not a military history podcast, so we're not going to

labor long on the specifics. But there is one key detail I think we need to talk about, which is that when the Paraguayans start arming up in the late twenties and early thirties, they have to make one of those tough decisions that countries who don't spend a trillion dollars a year on their army have to make, which is like, what kind of artillery do we buy? Because we can't afford a lot of it, and we can't afford many different kinds, so we're either going to be

getting a few big guns or a lot of little ones. Now, World War One had proven that modern wars can't really be one without big guns. But big guns come with all sorts of logistical hurdles, and Paraguay did not have the industrial base to manufacture the kind of shells and parts that larger field pieces needed. Artillery was also super vulnerable to air power, and Bolivia had an air force

that outnumbered Paraguays more than two to one. So the very savvy Bolivian military planners or a Paraguayan military planners decided, instead of buying a bunch of big a few big field guns that planes can bomb, why don't we just get hundreds and hundreds of eighty one millimeter mortars. We'll just get a shitload a little mortars. And these are like man portable indirect fire weapons that you can camouflage easily.

You can like pick them up and run like a motherfucker after shooting some stuff off, and they fire a small enough shell that Paraguay could afford to make it indigenously. This was a huge success. Paraguay becomes maybe the first nation to use mortars effectively in a modern combined arms sense in the twentieth century. They use mortars very similarly to how you're going to see them used in Ukraine and stuff during this conflict, and they just massacre the Bolivians.

This war goes terrible for Bolivia despite having by far more men in tanks and stuff. And one of the officers who is in command of a mortar of a bunch of mortars during this war, I think he winds up at the end in control of the mortar regiment that helps to win the Chaco War is a guy who aventially a general named Alfredo Stressner. Right, that's the job that stress the big job Stressner does. He is,

he is a mortar commander. Now. Stressner's father, Hugo, had been part of the massive German diaspha that had moved to South America in the years leading up to the First World War. Hugo was a Bavarian who'd worked as an accountant for a brewery. His mother was the daughter of a wealthy Paraguayan family of its She's actually a mix of Basque and indigenous Paraguayan descent. Yeah, and so

Stressner fairly a lot of privilege, you know. But the fact that his dad is German, they have a lot more like money than most people, and his mom comes from a family with money too. He enrolls in a military school when he's sixteen, and by the time the Chaco War breaks out, he's nineteen years old and had established has established a reputation for himself as a competent

leader who has earned the respect of his men. Paraguayan politics remains tumultuous in the years after the Chaco War, but Stressner succeeded in sliding past most people's radar because he's really fucking boring. We don't have a I don't have all. I haven't found a lot on this guy's early life, on his childhood and stuff, but he is. It seems accurate to say, based on the stuff I have read that goes into detail, that he is a quiet, sober man whose main hobbies are chess, fishing, and a

weekly poker game. He gets married to a school teacher who's a few years older than him in nineteen forty. They have three children, and most people who knew Stressner at this point in time would be like, hey, he's a quiet family man. He plays a lot of chess. You know, he's about as boring a guy as you're going to get. In nineteen forty, he gets picked for advanced training at a military college, and he returns home a major whose superiors call him a complete officer who

was discreet and circumspect. Again, everyone, everything about this guy is he is quiet and competent and not really worth talking about in much detail outside of that, which is again, we just finished our episodes on Romania and Chauchescu. You always got to watch out for the quiet guys. So quiet. If you ever meet someone who is quiet and competent, bear mas them. That's the only thing to do. You know, somebody,

somebody you know, changes your your your car oil. You know, quiet and competent mechanic Mason, do it to anybody who's good at anything and humble. It's the only way we can save ourselves from another Alfredo Stressner. So yeah, yeah, yeah, that's that's that seems fair. Yeah. By the By the early forties, Paraguay had taken a kind of rough stab

at democratic politics. This never goes great for them, and the parties that they have are never very committed to any scheme that might make them give up power if they happen to take it. The largest conservative party in the country is the Colorado Party, and it has both a democratic wing, which means a wing that cares about democracy, and a wing that doesn't so much care about democracy. And in the early forties, that second wing is run

by a man named Juan Natalisio Gonzalez. Now, he'd been involved in a number of violent protests and one failed revolution before, for which he'd been exiled and then sent to a concentration camp from which he had escaped. So Gonzales has quite a background, and he had prior to getting like exiled the second time he has been, he'd

been kind of a rabbit, almost religious nationalist. And then he gets exiled the second time, and he winds up like most Paraguayans who get exiled, fleeing to Argentina and Willie's. While he's in Argentina, he meets a bunch of socialists who have also been exiled because they had tried to do, you know, a revolution, and these socialists, you know, even though they're pretty left wing guys, also happened to be nationalists.

And so Gonzalez becomes more and more convinced that the right politics for Paraguay might be some kind of you'd call it national socialism. Yeah, going, it's bad now, James, I know what you're saying, But this is the mid thirties. No one, no one else has thought of national socialism in this period of time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Alam bells and I'll be rung around the world. There's there's no evidence of like how this could go badly in the

mid nineteen thirties. So Gonzalez is becomes yeah, he's we've just been joking about this. Gonzalez does accurately identify one of the biggest problems with Paraguay, which was the kind of economic liberty, like the economic liberalism that has allowed a tiny number of elites to buy all of the land and natural resources in the country. Right, he recognizes this is a huge problem that is just a justification

for the rich to take advantage of the poor. Now, the leader of Paraguay at this point in the early forties is a dictator named Maringo. In nineteen forty he had suspended the constitution and banned political parties like you do. But in nineteen forty six he legalized political activity again and formed a cabinet with the Colorado Party and a

Democratic Socialist Party. Now Gonzalez is back in the country by this point, and he does not like the idea of the Colorado Party sharing power with a coalition government, so he starts to build a street fighting movement for the Colorados in order to like, you know, beat and murder their opponents in the streets. Kind of themed after the essay in Germany. Yeah, a little bit of good vibe,

I'm picking up. Yeah. Now, things come to a head at the start of nineteen forty seven, which brings Paraguay a fun new civil war called the Barefoot Revolution. The side shook out roughly to every other political party and most of the officers on one side and just the Colorado Party, but a bunch of soldiers also on the other side. And it's it's ugly, it's very short, but

extremely bloody. And one of the reasons why the Colorado Party wins the civil war is that Alfredo Stressner is a general by this point, and he is in command of the country's largest artillery division. And when you kind of just have one artillery division and the other side doesn't have an artillery division, you know what, it's very easy to do. Yeah, it's just kill everybody, that's yeah. Yeah. Now, So Stressner is a big part of why his side wins this civil war, and over the next two years

things do not calm down though. There are in two years six coups and counter coups, and Stressner participates in four. So he is by like nineteen the early fifties, he is like one of the most experienced coopers on the planet. Like, this guy could give notes to the CIA. Oh, you guys are doing a coup. Now, I've been in a bunch of those. Let me tell you, let me walk you through the basics. Yeah. Now, it is a well known fact that carrying out coups are it's like eating

potato chips. You never stop with one, right, And in Stressner's case, he he does like five and in nineteen fifty four he decides it is his turn to be the man doing the cooping. He had succeeded in gaining the support of the military by this point, and Gonzalez's wing of the Colorado Party. And now I'm going to quote from an article and Vanity Fair by Alex Schumatov. The coup took place while all of a Suncon society

was at the Philharmonic. Legend has it that the shooting started just at the thunderous beginning of Beethoven's fifth Da Da Da Dam and everyone thought that it was part of the show until soldiers burst onto the stage and announced that a coup was under way. This is again the struth. It's like, this is like a this is not a thing that has not happened before either, like this this is a way to do coups. Oh yeah, Look, if you're not timing your coup with an orchestral presentation

like at the Philharmonic, what are you even cooing? Right? Yeah, come on, it's a coup without culture, and it's that coup at all. Have a little bit of art, you know. That's That's all I'm saying about a good old fashioned coup. It's it's you know, you could do it in a in a Mala piece, because I don't know, have you

seen Mala's Hammer, No, Okay, it's worth googling. It's a giant fucking hammer that, like I guess like every every orchestra has to have one because it's just one piece that he wrote that one of the instruments is just a dude hitting a wooden box with it, like a comedy sized hammer, And I feel like that would give you some more cover for coups in Beethoven. So they

fucked up in that regard. Yeah, Yeah, there's a there's a John Waters quote where he's like talking about today's hackers and the thing that depresses him about the fact that they all just kind of like wear hoodies and shit, and he's like, look, I love what you're doing, but if you're going to like hack into the Defense Department's computers and like spread top secret information to try to bring them down, you should have an outfit for that, right,

You've got to like a little pinash, you know. That's what you gotta respect about Stressner. He's got a little bit of pinash here. You know, this is this is a this is a coup that's got some art to it. Um gosh, darnett. So you know what else has art to it? Is it? Gold? Gold is the only real form of art, James, because gold never fades. It's eternal, just like this podcast, which will continue from now until the heat death of the universe and the end of

all things. Ah, what a what a great time. We're all back. We're talking about the beginning of the Stressner era. So the period of time that he's in power, his regime is known as the Stronato, and it's one of those things where, like a lot of the this is sort of one of the there's this kind of concept in Paraguayan politics that's evolved over the last hundred years or so called I don't know how to pronounce this, but mba r ete, which is an indigenous Guarani word

meaning like the law of the strongest right. This is

a like a strongly believed this. This is just kind of like the I mean, we've gone through the history here, right, this is the of the time, right, it's been nothing but strong men dictators, And to be frank like you, if you're one of these people who's living through these periods where there's like seven coups in two years, you might just find yourself wanting someone strong enough to stop it, right, someone who could actually hold onto power so everyone can

get their fucking breath like it he comes to like Stressner is it's not going to be easy for him to solidify power because Paraguay's famously unstable. But also he has this benefit that very few dictators get, where everything has been so bad for so long that people are willing to put up with a lot from a dictator if he can actually hold things together. And like we talk about how the instability of the Weimar years contributed to the rise of the Nazis, that's not a long

period of time. This is like a hundred something years of constant chaos and bullshit. So given the fact that Paraguay goes through presidents like porn directors go through lube, the fact that Stressner managed just to make himself dictator is again not in and of itself impressive. Someone had managed to do that about every year since eighteen seventy. What's impressive is that he'd held onto that title. For he holds onto this title, he's in power for thirty

five years. That is almost unprecedented in world history. Saddam rules Iraq less than thirty years. Stolenis in power for like twenty nine years. MAOIs in power for like twenty seven years. It is extremely uncommon for a dictator or a king at any point in history to reign for more than thirty years, very very rare. The fact that Stressner does this in a place as unstable as Paraguay

means that he's doing something. He's doing something competent from like a consolidation of power standpoint, right, He's good at what he's doing, not not in a moral sense, but justin This is not an easy situation to handle, so obviously, Yeah, one of the things that Stressner has to deal with as soon as he takes power is the fact that there's going to be a million other people who are already planning to coop him out of power and take power themselves. And I want to quote now from an

article or from that book by Peter Lambert. At the time of the nineteen fifty four coup, the different factions within the Colorado Party supported Stressner in the belief that they would be able to use him for their own political inns in the event. However, before nineteen fifty six and nineteen sixty six, Stressner manipulated existing factional divisions to

consolidate his own control over the Colorado Party. Through skillful political maneuvering, Stressner selectively purged real or perceived party opposition. Epifanio Mendez Flitez, the major political rifle to Stressner, was isolated and exiled in nineteen fifty six. In nineteen fifty nine, Stressner responded to rebellion within the Colorado Party by dissolving Congress, sending troops onto the streets, and exiling four hundred members

of the more reformist Colorado Activists. The expulsion of his powerful Minister of the Interior, Edgar L. Yesfnin in nineteen sixty six, represented the final move in eliminating internal party opposition and in bringing the party firmly under his control. And that's like a kind of good high level overview of what Stressner does to consolidate power. But it doesn't provide a lot of texture. It's just sort of a

list of people who get purged and kicked out. So I want to read another quote from that Vanity Fair article, which deals with the story of a single person Stressner had to suppress. Take, for instance, the case of Napoleon or Togoza, an attractive upperclass cavalry officer who ended up being the longest held political prisoner in Latin America. The theories about why he was arrested are many in baroque, but some of them involve a sinister plot to overthrow Stressner.

When a young cadet, Alberto Benitez was killed, either by other officers to cover up a homosexual clique or because he was tortured by the police as encouragement to reveal details of a coup plot. The Minister of the Interior, Edgar Yussunfran or so. One theory goes hit upon the brilliant idea of pinning the murder on Ortogoza, who was not actually involved in any plot yet, but was just

the sort you had to watch out for. Putting him away would be what is known as an acapette, a warning slap to anyone who got ideas about moving against the president. Where it goes A's insistence on his complete innocence fell on deaf ears. He was not allowed to be present at his trial, and one of his lawyers was arrested and beaten. He was condemned to death, although Stressner later commuted the sentence to life imprisonment after a priest threatened to break the seal of confession and tell

who the real murderers were. Um, so yeah, that's a that's that's Stressner. That's how this guy wields and consolidates power. Sounds like a nice guy, Yeah, it's yeah, it's a pretty normal thing to do. He is such a nice guy that he is given. We've gone through all of these other dictator nicknames, Stressner gets the best of them, um, because people just start calling him the tarrannosaur. What the fuck for? Look, ye sons, he sounds like reptile if

honestly though, like, this guy's a piece of shit. But if that's the nickname that you get, it's hard. That's hard to beat. That's about as hard a nickname as anyone's ever gotten. That bold and they give him that in part because he becomes he's there. He's in power for so long, right, he's like this ancient, implacable, malevolent force. Now, legally, Paraguay continues to maintain the trappings of a democracy, including a Congress that occasionally gets to vote on stuff that

doesn't matter. For example, since nineteen twenty nine, the country had been in a legal state of siege, which suspended civil liberties, including habeas corpus. Stressner continued this, and Congress renewed the state of siege every ninety days. His justification was the threat of communism, which pleased the Americans. Many

of the changes Stressner brought were initially positive. The biggest achievement of his reign was simply staying in power, which put an end to the ceaseless stream of coups and civil conflicts that had racked Paraguay for generations. This allowed the state to actually focus on delivering services to regular people. One example of this would be Stressner's stabilization of the guarani,

Paraguay's currency, which had been essentially worthless for decades. He set a peg for the currency's value at one hundred and twenty five guarrani to one US dollar, and while every other currency inflated rapidly in South America during this period of time, he was able to use the hammer of state power to keep the guarani locked into place. However, as Alex Shomatov notes, there was a price for all this. When student and labor groups demonstrated in the Recession of

fifty nine, he crushed them. When the Congress objected, the police brutality against students protesting a bus fare increase, he dissolved it. The downside to order and progress. With Stressner was one of the largest military and police to general population ratios in the world and the highest proportion of unsentenced prisoners in the Western hemisphere. He purged the old generals and four hundred of the old democraticos and replaced

them with loyal members of the Bandwagon. Membership in the party became compulsory for military officers and civil sergeants and strongly advised for anyone else who wanted to get anywhere. In the various sham elections, he received more votes in

some rural areas than there were registered voters. His heavy leonine face was posted everywhere, and radio stations began the day with the don Alfredo Polka polka, followed by the message the Constitutional President of the Republic, General Alfredo Stressner, salutes the Paraguayan people and wishes them a prosperous day. So this is like one of the more effective police

states I've ever seen anyone institute. And he does it in a He comes to power in a state where like holding on for more than two years is almost unheard of, and in a couple of years, he has created like the most policed country in the Americas, which is interesting to me. He's very he's a very fast and efficient worker. Yeah that he's like he like builds a state around himself, Yes, yeah, around himself and his

maintenance of power. But he also gives people a reason for wanting him to stay in power, which is that, for one thing, we're not dealing with these constant overthrows of the government anymore. And as a result, while there's all this chaos in a lot of other parts of Latin America, that's not happening here, and our currency is

maintaining its value. It's kind of worth noting we're about to talk about the US is very involved in Stressner's regime, but this is the only country this is and they're part of Operation Condor, right, um. But Paraguay is the only country that's involved in Condor that the CIA doesn't do any domestic like they don't have to fund any right wing rebel groups. They don't need to. He has

such a hold on power, um. And you know, there's other things that he does during the early period of his reign, development projects that provide a lot of jobs for Paraguayans. He builds a road to Brazil that brings new options for trade while he has people build that road. Uh, and he like when he comes to power, there's no storm drains in the capital, there's no running water, really, there's not regular electricity. All of those things come to

the capitol like once Stressner is in power. And a part of that's just because like, well, we're not fighting this endless series of coups anymore, so we can spend some of our resources on making this place livable. A lot of why he has the money to do this is because he decides to bill himself as an anti communist. Now, there's people who will argue that he was not really ideologically, he didn't really care one way or the other. He would have been a socialist if that had been the

way for Stressner to be in power. Right, that's a thing that some people will argue. But he's he's wise enough to see that, like, well, it's the nineteen fifties and sixties. If I bill myself as an anti communist, I can get a lot of that sweet ass America money. And you know, that's that's kind of the best way to improve your material base in Latin America at this period of time is have like the CIA black budget,

shotgun money your way. So the month after he takes power in fifty four, US development aid to Paraguay increases by fifty percent. Between nineteen fifty four and nineteen sixty, the country gets twenty four million dollars from US, and we send advisors and CIA agents into Paraguay to train the police in advanced torture techniques because he's like, we're not good enough at torturing, and America is like, oh no, we got guys who know to do that. We'll get

him right in there. And the reward for the US here is eighteen In nineteen fifty eight, Nixon tries to go to Venezuela. He goes to Venezuela and he gets like pelted with rocks. But then he heads to Paraguay afterwards and he's like met in the street with adoring crowd. Stressner stage manages it. Nixon gets a great photo op out of the situation, so you know, it's all worthwhile for the US. We got Nixon got a nice photo. Yeah,

whether yeah that makes her styles today. Yeah, I've seen the photo of Dixon getting pelted with rocks and I used to live in Venezuela, and yeah, that's a proud moment. Proud moment. Yeah, like I've been shamed of course, Like that is what what what could be prouder than throwing a rock at Richard Nixon? Not enough people in this country through fucking rocks Richard Nixon. If we're being on it, we should all have been throwing rocks at Richard Nixon.

That is beyond debate. That's really a bipartisan consensus on that. I feel like we could end at the Cold War. Yeah, but enough people throwing enough rocks at him. The old people of Venezuela picked up where we left off. Yeah, tragically. In Paraguay, stress is able to stop any rock throwing. Now that same year, the same year Nixon visits, fifty eight,

a left wing guerrilla leader attempts to invade Paraguay. He brings with him four hundred and fifty eight soldiers trained in Argentina who attempted to infiltrate the country and start recruiting for an insurgent war. Stressner's CIA backed security. Basically, the CIA learns this is happening, and they warned Stressner, and he sends six thousand soldiers to crack down. Most of these guys are gunned down, but the survivors are taken and put in to like helicopters and dropped into

Piranha filled waters. Yeah, it seemed to become Pitia ship for proud boys. Yeah. That said, if you are the kind of person who's willing to play ball with a vicious authoritarian, Stressner's regime is not the worst time that you will have had in your lifetime in Paraguay, right, at least not in the early period of time. However, the fact that he has made his country a stable place that is very friendly for right wing authoritarians makes it an enticing getaway for a very specific group of

people escaped Nazi war criminals. So this is good. We're getting to a real fun part of the story here. Paraguay's got this fascinating history with Germany. We've kind of talked about some bits of it, right, and this is the whole region. Right, You've got like you've got guys like von Kunt going over to Bolivia, Paraguay gets its own Germans like as we you know, as I noted,

Stressner's dad is a Bavarian. In eighteen eighty six, Bernard Foster, who is the brother in law of Friedrich Nietzsche, had moved to Paraguay. He moves there because he's like number one. Eighteen eighty six when Forster moves to Paraguay is like

the immediate wake of that horrible, devastating war. And so Paraguay is like, we will give Europeans money if they will immigrate here and help us have like make enough people, like we need your come right, we need we need a lot of We need all the seamen we can get right now, there are not many of us left. Um. So that's when Forster comes over. And Forster also has come related plans, but much more racist ones than the Paraguayan government, because he is a philosopher of anti Semitism.

And to Forster, the primary appeal of Paraguay is that it doesn't have any Jewish people, right, it does, but it doesn't have a lot of them. Um. And he's like, well, since this country is basically free of Jewish influence, and use this country's policy to move a bunch of Arians in and create weather Germania. You know this, uh, this this German paradise in Paraguay. Um, Now this is obviously and it doesn't work for shit, Yeah, it is. It is not going to succeed. And I'm going to read

quote from an article by Nick Farizos. Here. Forster, his wife Elizabeth, and fourteen families from Saxon, he crossed the Atlantic and the dead of winter and reached Paraguay in the swelter of summer. They carved a settlement out of the rainforest northeast of the capital of Suncion, but the isolated community was soon infested with bugs, burrowing into fingernails and toenails and laying eggs beneath the skin. Yes, fucking hates an anti semitis this next part, James, You're going

to really like. Their indigenous neighbors knew the cure, but colonists. The colonists refused to consult an inferior race, sitting there like, yeah, man, we got like a plant. We just rub on us to deal with that. Oh you're dying. That's cool. Foisted on his own patime. He'd love to see it. The strict colonies. Young bucks pounded nails into the coffin of an unsullied aryan New Germany when they began betting and

wedding local women. Plagued by sickness and unpaid bank loans, Forster retreated to the Hotel de Lago in the town of San Bernardino in eighteen ninety nine and committed suicide by shooting up with morphine and strychnine nine in room nineteen. So hey, good to this episode. Frederick Nazer's shitty ass brother in law kills himself. That's nights. Nietzsche really inspired some great suicide. Boy. We're going to talk more about

Bernard Forrester next episode, and a lot more about the Nazis. James, We're not nearly done with the Nazi portion of this episode. O. Good, great, good. But speaking of Nazis, I know that's not a good way to lead into plugs. Not speaking of Natz Yeah, yeah, how how where do you get to plug? James? Oh yeah,

definitely not any Naties. Actually, I've returned to Twitter after my band so people for now now, yeah, until until I post another picture of Mussolini hanging out with his friends, and then I'll be that that is that is James stout Um. And yeah, I also do a podcast with you and Sophie and several of our other friends and colleagues. It's called It Could Happen here. People should listen to it. It's got some banging episodes. Yeah, all right, enough legendary,

All right, all right, legendary. Okay, everybody, that's the end of the episode. Go. You know. Yeah, bugs anti Semites wants to eat. Yeah yeah. My advice would be, if you're too racist to stop the bugs from eating your fingers, maybe you rethink your politics. Or take a ship ton of morphine. I don't care. Yeah, yeah, honestly, the morphine in stryct nine works fine too. If you're a Nazi, I'm fine either way. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, you won't find me crying 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, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.