“The Wi-Fi is the name of the hotel. No password.”
I shucked my riding clothes off in the shower to clean them, and then looked into the bathroom mirror. My face was black with dirt, and the right side had a cartoonish bulge to it, as if I’d been in a brawl. But I was smiling.
CHAPTER 17
Paraguay
The Cost of Success
The rain was another pleasant surprise. Instead of an arid and dusty Menno Colony I found Mennonites luxuriating in an unusual, inconvenient, but very much welcomed rainy season. The water collected in puddles on the road and the ditches were filled with it; even the mosquitoes flourished. The farmers smiled—this was more than they’d hoped for. This weather was different from what it was at the start.
Menno Colony felt more like a town striving to match the rest of the world than one hiding from progress and integration. In its shops you could buy televisions, computers, designer furniture, and motorbikes. Or you could walk into the hospital, where doctors, Mennonite and non-Mennonite, offered professional treatment. The schools rivalled the best in the country, where teachers—again, Mennonite and non-Mennonite both—taught secular courses in Spanish and German. And if you had trouble finding some of the powerful business leaders who had helped build all this, it might be because they were in Asunción, the nation’s capital, where they sat in the boardrooms of national banks and corporations and jostled for political positions in the halls of power.
The harsh landscape hadn’t changed. Farmers had learned to put two rubber tires on each wheel, one over the other, double-clad for protection against razor-sharp thorns. They carried small electric shockers in their pickup trucks, as they’d found the shockers to be the most effective way to treat victims of poisonous snakebites, even though the treatment defied medical explanation. The treatment consists of four or five high-voltage, low-current but very painful electric shocks, applied as close as possible to the bite. The positive results were documented in The Lancet, the British medical journal, but they couldn’t explain it.
But despite the persistent thorns and snakes, the Mennonites had become rich enough that they no longer needed to eat algarrobo pods. The Menno Colony cooperative, which ran most of the biggest businesses in town, produced revenues of US $750 million a year. On the outskirts of town stood their new eight-hundred-head-per-day cattle abattoir, which exported beef around the world. Mennonites made up only about 1 percent of Paraguay’s population, but they produced a huge share of its agricultural goods—they were, on average, more than ten times as wealthy as other Paraguayans. The proceeds enabled the colony to build thousands of kilometres of roads and electricity lines.
The Mennonites I met were proud of their accomplishments, offering to take me on tours of their expanding farms, new businesses, schools, and hospitals. They pointed out that their students were going off to university and leading Mennonite institutions to new heights. Strangely, no one mentioned the relief of having escaped Canada’s education standards, or the spiritual balm the Chaco had provided. No one mentioned the need to remain separate from the weltmensch. But they hadn’t forgotten about the heroic struggle they’d gone through to get there eighty-five years earlier. Nowhere in Mennonite history was there a story of suffering and perseverance more worthy and hallowed than in Paraguay. Nowhere was the story of the beginning, the struggle that was endured for God’s glory, more tied to Mennonite identity. After a week of bewilderment at the about-face of Menno Colony I was offered a chance to revisit that story in person. Peter, a middle-aged Loma Plata businessman, invited me on a day trip. He brought along his taller, balder brother David, as well as Rudy, their brother-in-law.
It was raining as we set off. The windshield wipers swished back and forth. A scum of grey water swept over the truck in a whoosh as we plunged through a puddle big enough to bathe an ox in. Peter was hunched over the wheel of his brand-new Nissan extended-cab 4x4, muttering encouragement to the truck as he peered from underneath a baseball cap. He was soft-spoken and his salt-and-pepper goatee twitched when he smiled, warning that a wry wisecrack, delivered in a low, monotone voice, was on its way.
The road to Puerto Casado cut a muddy and rutted two-hundred-kilometre-long blaze through the Chaco, running east in a straight line from the Mennonite colonies. Had there been traffic, we would have seen it from far away. But there was no traffic. Deep green forest on either side of the road disappeared into a narrow apex on the horizon, both front and back. An apex we chased for hours on end.
Everyone was in a jocular mood, relieved to have escaped family and work obligations for the day. David filled any silence with his constant stream of quips and observations, while Rudy added colourful commentary in a nasal, impassioned voice.
“We should have taken my Toyota,” David said, grinning at Rudy, who sat in the back seat with him. “A Nissan will never make it there in this mud!”
“Well, we should have at least brought your Toyota along to drag this thing out if we get stuck. Peter can still drive his new Nissan, just for show,” Rudy added.
“In Canada the roads are never this bad, are they?” Peter asked.
I laughed. “Sure they are. But we don’t drive Nissans, so it’s not a big problem.”
Peter snorted, and the brothers in the back slapped their knees and guffawed. Ford versus GMC, John Deere versus Massey Ferguson. They were the rivalries I’d grown up with, a substitute for the pro sports we never watched. I felt as if I was on an outing with my uncles in Canada. These men had the same puckish sense of humour that played with the Plautdietsche language, stories that relied on self-deprecation but were backed by deep pride.
The men from Loma Plata were proud of what they’d achieved, especially when compared to the wilderness around them. Each kilometre looked the same as the previous one we’d passed. Parts of the bush had been fenced in by enterprising farmers. Small tumbledown huts, where the caretakers of the lots lived, stood naked and alone in muddy yards.
David was busy in the back seat making tereré, the Guaraní version of the herbal drink yerba maté. First, he scooped finely mulched leaves out of a plastic bag and into a tall cup made from a bull horn, decorated with a steel base and rim. He put the cup between his knees and filled it with ice water from a large thermos. Next, he fished around in his bag and pulled out the bombilla, a silver pipe with a wide screen scoop at the end, like a tea infuser attached to a straw. He tamped down the leaves with the bombilla, mashed and stirred, added some more water, and then sucked on the straw. He repeated this a few more times, adding water and crushing the leaves until the cup was full of sodden mash.
“We Mennonites are sometimes too stubborn to learn from others, but we have learned to drink maté,” Rudy said as he took the cup from David.
He drew deeply on the bombilla, then held the cup as David refilled it again, working the bombilla like a mortar at the same time. It was passed on, and whenever the bombilla made a gurgling sound David added more water. The drink had a refreshing bitter taste, like green tea, and the caffeine perked me up. Too much of it could give you diarrhea, but that didn’t hamper their intake. They passed it round and round, unhurriedly. At times it would rest in someone’s hands as they became lost in the telling of the story before resuming its rounds.
Ironically, as the Mennonites are ardent pacifists, war was a big part of their story. Once again Mennonites were pawns in a conflict, but this time it had played out in their favour. In the late nineteenth century, Paraguay lost a ruinous war with Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay that forced it to give up half of its territory. After the war the government resorted to selling some of its remaining land to raise cash.
Carlos Casado del Alisal, a swashbuckling businessman from Argentina, bought the land we were driving through, about 5.6 million hectares in total, for tannin and timber production. The tannin, used to tan animal hides, came from the quebracho tree, an extremely hard, blood-red wood
that grows only in the Chaco.
“Casado was a terribly rich man,” Peter said. He said Casado’s name like he knew him, but I couldn’t tell if he was accusing or admiring. “By the mid-1920s his son was running the company and was selling some of their land.”
It was perfect timing, because some of Canada’s hard-working pioneer Mennonites had become disillusioned. Many had already moved to Mexico, but the bravest souls chose Paraguay and the Privilegium that offered them the isolation they so craved. Nearly 2,000 Mennonites—most of them from the Old Colony sect—sailed from Canada down the east coast of the Americas and travelled to Asunción. There they boarded boats that churned up the Paraguay River and deposited them at a bend near the Brazilian border. They stepped ashore in the Chaco on New Year’s Eve, 1926. The town—officially named La Victoria, but commonly referred to using the district name Puerto Casado—was a booming company town at the time, bustling with traders and tannin workers. It was now a swampy, remote village built around the abandoned factory and a disused port. There was little industry, and most of the 6,500 inhabitants wore a sullen, bored expression.
The Paraguay River was the town’s main feature. Like the Red River, where Johann’s journey had ended and mine had begun, the Paraguay also flowed smooth and brown through flat, flood-prone land. Both had muddy, overgrown banks that bred mosquitoes and both places had received Mennonites at the end of epic journeys. It was wide with eddies and currents that rippled the coffee-coloured surface like taut muscles. Tree branches and clumps of tangled water hyacinth, unmoored by recent rains, floated by. Wooden skiffs were pulled up on the banks to unload cargo.
We stood on a rotting old dock and looked out over the water, relieved to be out of the truck. The air was heavy and damp. Suffocating. “So, this is where our parents and grandparents stepped ashore to make a new life,” David said. He pointed up and down the river, reminding me of the corporate public relations people I’d had to deal with as a financial journalist. So completely and utterly committed to sticking to their script that they never questioned the narrative or wondered who had written the words they were repeating. I found his dedication to the storyline tiresome because after a week on the colonies I couldn’t see what that struggle had achieved beyond more land, more cattle, more wealth.
“The people who came through this port would barely recognize you as Mennonite now. Apart from the Mennonite food and Plautdietsch, your lives aren’t that different from other farmers, here or in Canada. What do you think they’d say if they could see what the colony has become?” I asked. I didn’t bother to hide the challenge in my voice.
I’d seen little evidence of the advertised motives of this move that had taken place eight and a half decades earlier. They might have set out to prove their piety and follow “God’s will,” but along the way they’d changed tack and proven that integration and breaking down walls didn’t kill off Mennonite culture and success, but instead enhanced it. Maybe my moving away and exploring the world had made me more of a true Mennonite than I would have been if I had remained.
“I think our parents would say it was worth it,” David said. “We appreciate it, that they dared to do this, to come to the Chaco. We like it here now. We want to stay here. I’m very thankful to my parents that they did it.”
Rudy had never visited Puerto Casado before, and he shook his head in wonder. He, like me, ignored David’s enthusiastic exclamations.
“Man, oh man. So this is it, eh?” he said under his breath as he shielded his eyes to look across the river. “This is where they landed.
“I have lived there, in Canada, for two years, and I can’t understand what our fathers’ complaint was or why they moved away,” Rudy said. “I can see it a bit better now, the goals that came from that kind of life, but those objectives exist here as well. It is the same here now.
“I always say, God can take the crooked line and write it straight, and here he has shown that. It depends which side you see it from, but I think it would have been better for us to stay there.”
Rudy laughed as he saw the surprise on his brothers’ faces. These exoduses, from Russia to Canada, from Canada to Paraguay, were rarely looked back on as mistakes. God was leading them, after all, and God wouldn’t make such mistakes. In the end, as the struggles paid off and life became more comfortable, the stories of suffering were shaped and retold until they added a touch of glory to it all. That was the Mennonite way.
“We have been able to create work for a lot of people here,” David said, now speaking to Rudy as much as to me. “For a long time, we thought that, as Mennonites, we should live on our own, separate and quietly. Today I see that differently, because I’ve seen how we can help people by giving them jobs and teaching them skills and how to work.”
“Yes, we took this land and made it productive, and made ourselves some of the richest people in the country,” Rudy said. “That was not the goal, but that is the result. By making our home here and developing it we have made progress. But the original intention is gone.”
Bolivia had also been mired in wars, losing its Pacific Ocean coast to Chile, and, like Paraguay, it became protective over the territory that remained. Both countries claimed the northern part of the Gran Chaco, at the time considered a barren, unprofitable scrubland. When Paraguay offered Mennonites a Privilegium to colonize the Chaco it became a potential source of agricultural production, which raised the stakes. The Mennonite settlements also helped validate Paraguay’s claim to the Chaco, which Bolivia protested at the League of Nations to no avail. The resulting Chaco War of 1932–35 became South America’s most bloody conflict with more than 100,000 dead.
The Mennonites were already settled on their new land by the time the Chaco War kicked off, and the front lines went right past their farms. The Mennonites began to trade their food and water to the Paraguayan troops, while Bolivia struggled to get supplies to their front lines. The Mennonites helped Paraguay win the war and take ownership of two-thirds of the disputed territories. Today, the Mennonites point at that early trade as a key factor in why their colony had opened up to the world. But since then the changes had come from within. When the Mennonites saw that their schools weren’t equipped to produce the kinds of citizens they needed to colonize the Chaco, they improved their schools, and taught Spanish so that they’d be better at negotiating on a national level. The change was intentional, so much so that those who disagreed packed their plows and bonnets and moved to Bolivia, refusing to accept the changes. The opening up of Menno Colony wasn’t an accident, and it had worked. Menno Colony turned out better than anyone could have hoped for. Their growing influence and interaction with the Paraguayan community was a positive change, but it undermined the isolationist intentions of their immigration story. “I don’t know how important it is to keep the culture, but it is important,” Rudy said. He fell silent for a long time, and then sighed. “A lot of the culture is disappearing, and that is the way of the world. But in the end, I think it’s important that bits of it remain. But most important is that we remain Christian, because without that…”
Rudy made a half-hearted gesture towards the town behind us, as if the same fate would befall the Mennonites if they dropped their guard. Puerto Casado reeked of mould and rot. The cornerstone buildings of the town’s glory days—a cathedral and several large homes—still stood straighter and taller than those that had come later, but their yellow paint was streaked with grey and the buildings were home to pigeons and cobwebs. We snooped around the stone cathedral and admired the heavy wooden beams in the roof.
“Still perfectly straight after all these years,” Rudy said as his eyes roved the shadows high above him. “It could still be repaired. If this building was on a Mennonite colony we would do something with it, make use of it somehow, you can be sure of that.”
There was a touch of selfish satisfaction in seeing Puerto Casado wither away, as it was a place of bitter memories in M
ennonite history.
“The plan was that the land they’d bought would be surveyed when they arrived, and they’d move directly into the Chaco,” David said as he again took on the role of official narrator. “But the railway was not done, and the survey was not done. They moved into tents pitched next to the tannin factory, and some of them had to stay there a year and a half. In Canada in December it was cold, but here it was very hot, and they became sick. They lived about a kilometre from the graveyard, and they had nothing to drive, so they put the bodies on a wheelbarrow or whatever, and as soon as they’d returned from burying one there was another death. It was a very sad situation, but they did not give up.”
They waited and negotiated with Casado’s company men and made exploratory trips into the Chaco to see their recently purchased land. And they waited for the transaction to be completed. Typhoid, malaria, diarrhea, and a host of other tropical afflictions took their toll. They were instructed to bury their dead in the Catholic cemetery near the river. It was a huge affront to the Mennonites to lie next to the Catholics in death, but they had no choice. Now the cemetery was as waterlogged and fetid as the rest of the town. A sickly-sweet smell emanated from the mauve blossoms of the lapacho trees, mixing with the dankness of sodden earth. But the air screeched with life. Birds, high above in trees with trunks blackened by humidity, called out like church bells. Mosquitoes buzzed in our noses and ears. Cicadas thrummed in the trees.
The Catholics were buried in large tombs covered in ceramic tiles and crosses and praying figures. The tombs were decrepit now, decorated with faded plastic flowers, but they still had a stately quality. The Mennonite graves were overgrown mounds and broken rings of concrete, with cheap concrete-cast headstones that were sinking into the swamp.
“Imagine people rising up,” Rudy said, raising his arms as if lifting angels to heaven. “The concrete, it will all just crack up, and it won’t matter how big and strong and fancy the graves are.”
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