Paradise With Serpents

by Robert Carver

  The question as to why no public servants had been paid for so long was easily answered: the government had run out of money, and if they simply printed more banknotes, as South American governments had in the past, they would fuel inflation and cut off the IMF and International banks as potential donors for further hard currency loans. ‘You will have noticed how many of the waterpipes in the streets of Asunción are broken,’ Gabriella had remarked. I had noticed. There were leaks everywhere, spilling out into the streets, flooding the pavements, a side effect of which was vigorous tree, shrub and weed growth beside the roads, among the cracked pavements, and even in the potholes of the lesser used streets. Asunción had been hacked out of sub-tropical jungle, and given half a chance the jungle would reclaim it again.

  ‘The water company, State-owned, borrowed US$10 million for repairs from a US based international agency,’ she continued. ‘The construction company that got the contract was owned by the head of the water company’s brother. A $10 million hole was dug in the ground, achieving nothing. No leaks were repaired. The hole was abandoned. Obras inconcluidas – “abandoned works” – should be the Paraguayan national motto. The $10 million disappeared abroad into offshore bank accounts. The water company officials have not been paid for more than a year. Now we have a large, useless hole, a $10 million debt, and a leaking water system. About a third of all the water is lost through leaks and broken pipes. Scientific tests have shown that the water is seriously contaminated – cholera and typhoid among other infections are in the system.’ Before Stroessner there had been no piped water at all, just as there had been no airport, or paved, metalled roads. People had their own wells, or depended on water sellers who toured the capital with mule-drawn tanks. Now there were frequent electricity blackouts, and the petrol stations regularly ran out of fuel. Those who could afford them had emergency electricity generators. In spite of the fleets of stolen luxury cars, Asunción more closely resembled a decaying African city, falling apart after the European colonials left, than anywhere in Europe. Stroessner had attracted immigrants and capital because he accepted gangsters on the run, fraudsters, conmen, Nazi war criminals with stolen loot, and because he offered a stable, authoritarian government which built roads, created infrastructure, and limited corruption to himself and his cronies. Now he was gone what he built up was in no way maintained or replaced. Paraguayans had not paid for these things, foreigners had. They felt, like colonial peoples newly liberated, no debt to the past, no sense of possession. His successors were bent purely on looting the country and fleeing abroad with what wealth they could steal. According to a report in Ultima Hora, the only income the Paraguayan government now had was the monthly US$16 million from Brazil for hydroelectrical power Paraguay exported across the border. Without this sum the government would be completely bankrupt. Yet it was not enough to pay even the civil servants. There had been a plaintive letter published in the papers from Paraguay’s ambassadors abroad. They, too, had not been paid for a year, and the rents on their embassies and residencies were in default. Unless money was forthcoming, embassies and residencies could soon be repossessed. This was all a minor nuisance for the few very rich in Paraguay, with their money abroad in offshore havens, their houses with tall walls built round them manned by armed guards, or sequestered on 200,000-hectare ranches. For the great majority of the country, it made life a grinding misery. Paraguay was potentially a very rich country, fertile and replete with mineral resources, yet so badly was it managed, and so feebly was it cultivated that it imported even basic foodstuffs. The supermarkets were full of goods brought in from Brazil, Argentina and Europe that could easily have been grown domestically.

  ‘You cannot fire public servants in Paraguay,’ Gabriella had told me. ‘Once appointed, it is a job for life. Under Stroessner, the administration of the city of Asunción was carried out by 400 civil servants, who worked from 8.30am to lunchtime, then finished. They were all members of the Colorado Party. Although they worked slowly, and very easy hours, they did actually turn up and did actually work. Everything was kept in good repair, and new roads were laid, parks maintained and basic services ensured. Then, after Stroessner was ousted, the Radical Liberal Party managed to get into power in the Asunción local government. They could not fire the 400 Colorado Party civil servants, but they could hire 1,000 new civil servants – all Radical Liberal Party members. These are known as “gnocchis”. There is a tradition in the River Plate countries, Uruguay, Paraguay and Argentina, that civil servants eat gnocchi, the Italian potato-based pasta, on pay day every month, usually the 29th of the month. It’s an old tradition. In time, the civil servant who is purely a political appointee and merely turns up every month to collect his salary, became known as a gnocchi. This is how the political parties fund themselves – they reward their followers with civil service jobs when they are elected on the understanding that the party gets a kickback of between 50% and 90% of the placeman’s salary. The gnocchi can have several jobs of this sort as all they have to do is turn up once a month to get the salary. Well, the Colorado civil servants naturally didn’t turn up for work any more – they couldn’t be fired, and Stroessner didn’t frighten them now he was in exile. And the Radical Liberals didn’t turn up because they were gnocchi and paying much of their salary back to the Party. So there was no civic administration and nothing got done and things started to fall apart. The disgusted citizens of Asunción voted out the Radical Liberals after this happened, and voted in a minor party who immediately appointed 1,000 of their own members on the same gnocchi principle. The local government now has 2,400 employees, none of whom turn up except to get their salaries. And none of them can be fired. As a result no maintenance work is done, no local taxes collected, and the infrastructure of the city is falling apart. And as there are no taxes collected, none of the civil servants have been paid for at least a year, sometimes longer.’ The logic of all this, I had to admit, was inescapable.

  A wave of nostalgia was now spreading for the ‘good old days’ of Stroessner when the firm hand had meant a degree of order and efficiency, and a level of corruption that now seemed positively moderate. ‘Ya seria feliz y no sabia’ I had seen as a printed car rear-window sticker all over the city – ‘then we were happy and we didn’t know it’. Liberalization brought street crime, robberies, rapid inflation and a collapse of the infrastructure as well as the banks. Diphtheria, cholera, malaria, yellow fever, dengue and leprosy were all on the increase. There was no foreign exchange to import necessary drugs and medicines. Even the water supplies in the hospitals were polluted. ‘Will you stay in Paraguay or go abroad again?’ I asked Gabriella. She thought for a long time and gazed away from me into the middle distance. ‘I don’t know. We’d like to stay. It’s much easier here than Europe. But if the chaos grows … I don’t know.’ ‘Easier’ meant cheaper, with servants, in a pleasant climate. ‘Where would you live if you could?’ I asked. ‘Miami,’ she replied without hesitation. ‘It’s a terrific city – culturally Hispanic but run by Anglo-Saxons, so everything runs properly. And so safe.’

  Everything is relative. In England, Miami is a byword for violent crime, drugs, gangs and disorder. But from the perspective of Asunción it seemed as appealing as Switzerland. ‘We need a government of honesty, austerity, and lack of corruption,’ one Paraguayan had said to another in an Ultima Hora cartoon. ‘That is to say, a foreign government,’ his friend had replied. Gabriella gave me a list of useful contacts, people who would help give me an insight into the country – a radical priest, a German settler, a US drop-out living with a Paraguayan girl, and many others. ‘Don’t get too hopeful,’ she cautioned me. ‘You will be promised many things in Paraguay, and none of them will come to pass. There is much talk and almost no action. Everything that works here is run by foreigners – it has always been the case. This hotel is an island of German efficiency. If the Germans left Paraguay – and one in forty are of German descent – the country would go back to the jungle. And they are leavi
ng, the foreigners, for Brazil, and Bolivia, those who can. The civil service wages bill consumes 87% of the government budget even when they have any money, which at present they don’t. What the private sector doesn’t provide simply doesn’t get done. Government here equals a parasitic class which provides nothing.’

  My own observations walking round Asunción confirmed the dereliction. In the municipal gardens there had been a man in rags sweeping leaves off the path with a cut palm branch. He wore no shoes and looked more like a tramp than a public servant. He took care not to disturb the beggars sleeping on the wooden slatted benches, on the grass, under the palm trees. There were very small children, from four upwards, who strolled about trying to sell chewing gum and sweets from cardboard trays. Lunatics from the local asylum wandered about aimlessly, cackling and grinning, dressed incongruously in old-fashioned evening dress – tailcoats, striped trousers, spats but no shoes – as a result of international charity clothing donations. The asylum had no money to feed the inmates, so they had been turned loose to wander the city and fend for themselves, scavenging rotting vegetables from the gutters, left by the Indian street sellers. They capered and loped about, these lunatics, distinctive in tailcoats stained by diarrhoea, adding a carnivalesque, grotesque note to the tropical dirt of the Central Business District. Neither the police nor anyone else paid the slightest bit of attention to them: like the vultures hunched on the telegraph wires, watching for a stray dog that had escaped attention, and the Makká Indians from the Chaco who drifted about in loincloths and painted cheeks, trying to sell bows and arrows, they were simply part of Asunción’s dusty, stinking reality. In the air hung the smell of foetid, fermenting human excrement and urine; all these people were living, eating and eliminating in public, in a hot, humid tropical climate. They, like the street children and the beggars, slept in the parks. In daylight the streets were full of European-looking businessmen and their BMWs. At dusk these vanished to the suburbs, and the town centre became an ill-lit Indian-haunted place where pistoleros and whores roamed about and the police stayed mainly inside their fortified barracks. If the police had withdrawn completely the city would be given up to looting and uncontrolled violence: and the police had now not been paid for several months, and were extremely disgruntled. If the government could find no money to pay the police they would not suppress the next pro-Oviedo demonstration. And then there would be a revolution, democracy would be closed down, and a hard-line dictatorship set up again. Liberalization led to chaos and riot and so back to dictatorship again. It was like the ancient Greek city states, an endless swing between repression and licence.

  All of this swirling, picturesque, smelly chaos was kept out of the Gran Hotel by high brick walls, 20 foot or more, and an armed guard at the entrance to the grounds with a machine-gun and stern glance who kept would-be intruders at bay. I had negotiated the room-rate down from US$100 a day to $40 a day, and thought I had done well. When I told Gabriella what I was paying she snorted, and went to harangue the middle-aged woman, once an ambassador’s wife it was said, who managed the front reception. After a short altercation in Spanish, Gabriella informed me that as from today my room rate had been reduced from $40 to $30 a day, and when I went off into ‘the interior’ as the rest of the country was quite unironically referred to by the people of Asunción, the hotel would keep my room for me and all my luggage in it, ready for my return, at no charge to me. This was quite usual, Gabriella told me. ‘There is almost no one staying here. They have dozens of rooms and almost no guests. They are lucky to have you.’ The hotel was a pleasing old colonial affair in the Spanish style, with loggias and white stucco Tuscan columns, dark oxblood-red walls, roman tile roofs over verandahs. The windows had white-painted louvred shutters and the ceilings of the rooms were high, to keep the air cool. Each room opened out on to a courtyard garden planted with banana and citrus, bougainvillea and palms; ferns and bright orchids hung in baskets. The soil was dark red and the white-clad Indian gardeners moved about slowly, directing water, pruning, hoeing, weeding. When a guest passed them they stopped work, turned to face the passer-by and, smiling, said quietly, ‘Buenos días, señor’. This is how it must have been throughout much of Paraguay under Stroessner – calm, obsequious, well-ordered, the peons knowing their place. Now the Gran Hotel was an island of tranquillity in a sea of chaos and disorder. Behind the swimming pool lay a dusty tennis court, and beside this, shaded by trees, a tall metal cage which held two brightly coloured green parrots: at dusk these birds gave off terrible shrieks, as if heralding the end of the world. They were fed with cut-up fruits by the gardening staff – oranges, bananas, mangoes, and fresh leaves from tropical trees. They perched on one claw and slowly, delicately, nibbled at the fruit held in the other. There was also a large toucan in a separate cage on the other side of the swimming pool. This bird clambered up and down the wire, as if imprisoned in an adventure playground. He too lived on fruit provided twice a day, and was shy: if you looked at him, he avoided your gaze and trundled off, embarrassed, getting out of your eye line. Birds in cages always make me feel sad and depressed: not only do I feel sorry for the imprisoned birds, but it also reminds me of our own incarceration. I had felt oppressed and imprisoned in Europe, and now I felt oppressed and imprisoned in the gilded cage of this luxurious hotel and its grounds in Asunción. In Europe I could sit on a park bench in public, unnoticed and unthreatened – I was invisible. In Paraguay I felt unsafe in all public spaces. The eyes that searched me over were not friendly. It was noticeable that Paraguayans of European extraction spent as little time as possible in public spaces, passing through them in cars, usually, whereas the mestizo and Indian population, on foot, seated or sprawled on the ground, lived at ease in these spaces. My race, my pale skin made me an intruder.

  Behind my room, in a small courtyard garden into which one could wander, was another prison, a small menagerie with hoopoes, cranes, two small monkeys in a cage, a couple of miniature deer of the muntjak type, and a large terrapin. As menageries go this was deluxe – leafy, calm, shady and private – but like the hotel, it was still a prison. The trees and shrubs in this small haven were dense and in deep shadow for much of the day. The birds and animals were so well hidden that you could be almost on top of them before you saw them. And everywhere, in the gardens, in the air, all around one, was Paraguay’s spectacular birdlife – on the wing, perched in trees, darting between bushes, a rich burble of song. Like Manaos in the Brazilian Amazon region, Asunción was a small city in a clearing in the middle of the jungle. For thousands of miles in every direction there was nothing but largely empty countryside – empty that is of human activity. For the birds flying across Asunción, or attracted by the food, the several acres of gardens the hotel offered to them was just more native jungle as a convenient stop-over. Living in the depleted, overpopulated Northern Hemisphere where any signs of wildlife are rare and fugitive, I found the explosion of bird noise in Paraguay startling and sobering. It was evidence of what we had lost by our overbreeding. Perhaps Europe had been like this in the Middle Ages. It was a real pleasure just to sit in a cane chair outside my room looking at and listening to the birds. The only thing I can compare it to is being inside a tropical aviary at a zoo. Tiny hummingbirds smaller than the first joint on my thumb, rainbow coloured with iridescent green the dominant shade, hovered and darted by a hibiscus plant, long thin beaks moving inside the flowers to search for drops of water or nectar. I would sit for timeless periods, completely enraptured by the sight, the wings of this tiny dynamo revolving thousands of times every second, so fast all one saw was a blurr, whirling beside the tiny body. The birds seemed completely indifferent to the ghost-clad gardeners who shuffled slowly to and fro, or to the few guests, who like me, sat outside in the shade drinking in this tranquil atmosphere. Overpopulation, pollution, the depleted environment are realities of our era; to come to somewhere like Paraguay was to realize just how much had been lost.

  I walked back with Gabriella to her
house, which was less than ten minutes away on foot: it was a small, neat semi-detached building with a thin strip of garden in front and a larger one behind. Workmen were engaged in some maintenance at the front. The whole neighbourhood was tidy and prosperous-looking, with well-kept gardens, lush shrubbery, and clean streets. It reminded me of middle-class parts of Los Angeles. I asked Gabriella which suburb of London it most resembled, as she knew both cities well. ‘Kensington,’ she replied immediately. ‘It is where the embassies are and where the wealthy live.’ I asked her what her house would be worth. ‘Normally US$60,000, but because so many people are trying to sell, you could get a place like this for $40,000 – even for $30,000. People are only paying about half the asking price at the moment.’ To put this in perspective, Gabriella was paying her maid $25 a week: ‘and my mother thinks I am paying her too much – she only pays $15.’ High unemployment, low wages, few people, inexpensive land and property, high crime and insecurity, imminent risk of political violence and revolution – it was a familiar Third World equation.

  Gabriella invited me in to meet her husband Hugo, and their two small children. Hugo told me he had invested some money in a cigar-making concern, a factory dating back to the turn of the century. ‘Paraguayan tobacco is good – not as good as Cuban, but close. We use Javan leaf for the wrappers, the rest is all local product.’ How much did the local cigars cost? I asked. I had seen none on sale anywhere. ‘That is because they are too expensive for most Paraguayans to buy now,’ he replied. ‘About US$2 each.’ Cigarettes cost US$7 a carton of 200 even in my local supermarket. I assumed the smuggled items, or false brands were even cheaper. Paraguayan men were ferocious smokers. The local brands I had seen advertised promised exotic pleasures. There was ‘Boots’ (not, alas, ‘Old Boots’) featuring a US style cowboy. There was ‘Palermo’ (a wealthy suburb of Buenos Aires, as well as a city in Sicily). The slogan for Palermo was Paraguayo y con orgullo’ – ‘Paraguayan and with pride’. The poster showed a racing car, and a racing driver, fag in hand. Then there was ‘Derby Club’ a contentious blend, much copied, imitated, falsified and smuggled, a favourite of the contrabanders trade, according to press reports. Truck-loads of ‘Derby Club’ were frequently discovered crossing the Brazilian border, without the required tax stamps on them. There was also ‘York’ and ‘US Mild’. In the local whisky line I particularly liked ‘Olde Monke’ and ‘Gran Cancellor’. Close inspection of the labels of the locally manufactured whiskies indicated that they had been made from a base of sugar cane – in fact were really rum dressed up as whisky. The local rum, called caña, was a working-class peasant tipple with macho associations. Alcoholism among the peasants and Indians was a serious problem; drunken all-male rum sessions often ended in knife fights and death, 80% of all killings in Paraguay were caused by armas blancas – knives or machetes.