Remembering the ‘Stronismo’: How ghost of a brutal dictator haunts Paraguay

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.

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.

Recalling the horrific events of that day in 2012, Nestor Castro, a thin 40-year-old small-scale farmer, pours water from a plastic pitcher into a glass and infuses terere (a cold variant of yerba mate tea) outside his house in the rural outskirts of Curuguaty, a city in Paraguay’s easternmost corner bordering Brazil. Years ago, Castro built the house himself on the disputed land, carrying all the wood and building materials by hand or motorbike.