Alfredo Stroessner
Alfredo Stroessner ruled Paraguay for thirty-four years, the longest dictatorship in South American history. He was the son of a Bavarian immigrant brewer and a Paraguayan mother, joined the army at sixteen, fought in the Chaco War against Bolivia, and became the youngest general in the country at thirty-six. He took power in a coup in 1954 and then did what few Latin American strongmen managed: he institutionalised it. Membership of the Colorado Party was required for a government job, a teaching post, a licence or a passport; the party had a cell in every neighbourhood reporting on it; the state of siege declared in 1954 was renewed every ninety days for thirty-five years; and he was re-elected eight times in ballots that were held with some care and counted without any. The economy was run on smuggling. Whisky, cigarettes and cars moved through Paraguay in quantities the country could not consume, and the profits were distributed as the currency of loyalty. He gave asylum to Nazi fugitives including Josef Mengele, who held Paraguayan citizenship for a decade, and to deposed dictators from Nicaragua and Argentina. Paraguay was a founding participant in Operation Condor, the coordinated programme through which the southern military governments hunted each other's exiles. The Archive of Terror, found in a police station in 1992, documents some 50,000 killings across the region and 400,000 imprisonments. He was overthrown in 1989 by his own son's father-in-law and died in Brazil in 2006. The Colorado Party he built outlived him by a considerable margin and has held the presidency for all but five of the years since. The archive found in 1992 is the single most important documentary source on the coordinated repression of the period, and it was discovered by a man looking for his own file.
- Lived: 1912 CE – 2006 CE
- Nationality: Paraguayan
- Roles: dictator, general, head_of_state
