Stroessner's Coup: Paraguay's 35-Year Dictatorship Begins
Alfredo Stroessner seized power in Paraguay on 4 May 1954 and held it for nearly thirty-five years, the longest dictatorship in South American history. He was the son of a Bavarian immigrant brewer and a Paraguayan mother, had fought in the Chaco War against Bolivia in the 1930s, and had risen to command the artillery. Paraguay had been through a civil war in 1947 and six presidents in eight years, and Stroessner had backed the winning side each time. He removed President Federico Chávez in a short action and was elected unopposed in July. The system he built rested on three pillars — the army, the Colorado Party and the state — with membership of the party effectively required for public employment, and a state of siege renewed every ninety days for most of his rule, suspending constitutional guarantees. Opposition was met with surveillance, torture and disappearance. The records of it, some 700,000 pages found in a police station in 1992 and known as the Archives of Terror, documented the machinery in detail and also the workings of Operation Condor, the coordinated repression among the southern cone dictatorships. He was a reliable American ally through the Cold War and received aid accordingly. Paraguay under him became a haven for smuggling, for Nazi fugitives including Josef Mengele, who was granted citizenship, and for contraband on a scale that was itself a system of patronage. The Itaipú dam, built with Brazil from 1975, funded a construction boom and enormous corruption. He was overthrown in 1989 by his own son's father-in-law and died in Brazil in 2006.
- Year: 1954 CE
- Category: Political
