Paradise With Serpents

by Robert Carver

  The myth of the Noble Savage, though dating back at least from Roman times, gained new impetus with the discovery of simpler, more equal communities of men in the Americas and Oceania, many of which held property in common, did not recognize the ownership of land, and denied kingship. Why, then, should Spain and Portugal be allowed to dominate such vast lands, men argued, particularly in the Protestant North. Dr John Dee, Welsh magus, alchemist, member of Sir Walter Raleigh’s ‘School of Night’, and necromancer at Queen Elizabeth I’s Court, was the first man to coin the term ‘British Empire’ to describe a theoretical but possible future settlement in North America to rival the Spanish and Portuguese empires. Raleigh envisaged a native Guianese-English alliance against the Spanish, and brought back from his first expedition to Guiana many fruits, plants and medicines new to Northern Europe, including, possibly quinine, a remedy for malaria, then a common illness throughout England. America offered anything you cared to imagine. Skeptics had laughed at Raleigh’s traveller’s tale of oysters plucked from trees, but the mangrove swamps of Guiana at low tide offered just such a reality. America was a great escape route out of the mental and moral shackles of Old Europe: the past could be shrugged off – no tithes, no bishops, no kings, instead wonders aplenty – and hope. Ordinary men and women wondered if they might not find freedom of conscience and freedom of worship in the Americas.

  Intellectuals hypothesized that new, rationally based, perfect societies could be devised and implemented, to prove beacons to the world. What was impossible in Europe could become a reality in the New World. American exceptionalism is not unique to the USA: the whole of the Americas were bathed in a sympathetic philosophical light, emitting hope, and a geographical centre for a Utopian future. The Bible and Classical antiquity could not be right or wrong about the Americas, they were useless authorities on the subject. Old World pessimism could be abandoned. America offered optimism, the future, man redeemed, a new society born. Why should European Kings or prelates have any authority over these new worlds? What had the Pope to do with the Americas? European restrictions were imposed on the new colonies, but they were easily evaded. Jews, Moors, New Christians, lawyers and all fiction were banned from entering the King of Spain’s New World possessions: they all entered anyway, and a new hybrid Euro-American society began to form.

  Cotton Mather wished to see the City on the Hill established in North America, a New England, Protestant, reformed Light unto the Nations, man spiritually reborn – but a humanity from which the native American was largely excluded. Whether as Noble Savage or cruel savage, the North-American Indian himself was not included in the European visionary future or the Utopian musings. The redemption of mankind meant the redemption of white European man. Within a few years of the first English settlements in North America, Indians were already being displaced or killed. In Paraguay the situation was quite different. There were no mines for the Guarani to be forced to work in as in Mexico or Peru, and the Spanish colonists had no desire to till their lands. The Guarani greatly outnumbered the Spanish, and interbred with them from the start. They laboured in semi-serfdom for their masters under the quasi-feudal encomienda system, but they were certainly better off than the natives of Peru, Mexico or North America. And it was in Paraguay that the Jesuits, spearhead of the Counter-Reformation, created an entirely new social order based around the interests, as perceived by the Catholic Church, of the Guarani themselves, deliberately to protect them from exploitation by Spanish Creole and Portuguese-Brazilian slave trader alike. The Reducciones of the Jesuits in Old Paraguay, now Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina, were the first and most successful examples of social engineering on a mass scale: too successful for their own good, for they were abruptly halted and liquidated, being too dangerous to the secular interests they challenged. Like Cotton Mather, and later in Paraguay, William Lane, leader of the Australian Utopian communists, the Jesuits intended to use America as an experimental springboard, a tryout for a Paradise without Serpents, a new social order which would be applicable universally.

  Eight

  MAMBFAK

  The reality of modern-day life in Paraguay is indeed far from the hopeful dreams of European idealists who planned the salvation of mankind away from Old World corruption and temptations. ‘A Paraguay without corruption would be like a Switzerland without snow, a France without wine, a Germany without Mercedes-Benz – it is our national activity par excellence,’ opined the editorial writer in Ultima Hora, the country’s most outspoken newspaper. In order to get one’s car registered for the following year, the paper reported, it was necessary to queue all night, over several 24-hour periods, and pay bribes to the officials concerned of 50–100,000 guaranis. More than half the cars on the road were not registered at all: the owners preferred to pay small bribes to the police every time they were stopped at impromptu roadblocks. Those drivers with correct registration papers still had to pay the police bribes for imaginary offences – scratched mirrors, worn windscreen wipers and so on – so there was little advantage in being legal. A complete collapse of all State services was being widely predicted in the newspapers. A government could run on empty for only so long. Carlos Marti, journalist with Ultima Hora, complained of the ‘permanencia de show de denuncias de corrupción sin sanción alguna’ (the permanent parade of denunciations for bribery without any resulting punishments). ‘Other than a social explosion or a collapse of the State all we can hope for is more of the same,’ he concluded. Carlos Sanchez wrote to the paper from the provincial town of Itagua complaining that when his car was stolen and recovered, the police in Encarnación made all sorts of problems and difficulties, although he had every piece of correct paperwork. What they wanted, they hinted none too subtly, were incentivos (incentives) or propinas (bribes) to permit him to get his own car back again. ‘We must realize corruption is in our blood – so much so that we don’t realize it …’

  Three prison guards were being held in gaol and another under house arrest in Tacumbu, after the escape of three prisoners there. ‘I am more than sure that there was complicity in the escape,’ said the Fiscal (magistrate) Juan de Rosas Avalos to the Director of Tacumbu prison, Teodor Silva. The guards, too, had not been paid for more than a year: they were living on a ‘tax’ of the food prisoners’ families brought in for them. Naturally, the prisons could provide no food for the inmates, as the administration had no money. From the interior there were reports from the police of large-scale sales of non-existent lands to banks, foreigners or insurance companies, and the gangsters responsible had threatened to murder the Head of the Public Land Registry Office if he did not assent to the issue of bogus titles for these imaginary pieces of real estate. Once issued, the fraudulent title deeds were used to give to the banks as collateral for loans: the money then left the country for the Cayman Islands and other offshore banking havens. You could trust nothing in Paraguay, not the water, the police, the banks or even the land title deeds. The currency, the guarani, was useless outside the country’s borders, and suffered from constant inflation against the US dollar and all other hard currencies. A curiosity of the few banks still in business was not only that the rate of the dollar and the euro were displayed, but also for the ‘old’ pre-euro currencies of Europe – the Italian lira, the French franc, the German mark, the Dutch guilder. I asked a bank official why this was. ‘We don’t actually believe in the euro, frankly. We think it will go under, and the old currencies come back. We know for certain that the Italians and the Germans have emergency plans to reintroduce their own currencies, if things get bad enough, alongside the euro at first. We can’t afford to be caught out.’ I said that every time these rumours surfaced the Germans and Italians denied them strenously. The official smiled at my naïveté. ‘In that case, it will certainly happen, but when no one expects it to.’ Paraguayan skepticism and mistrust extended far beyond their own borders: the world was a gigantic con and they were determined not to be had. Europeans may have waxed optimistic about Paraguay, but Pa
raguayans were the greatest cynics in the world – about themselves and everyone else.

  One of the collapsed banks under investigation was the Banco Oriental, which had made unsecured loans of 4,307 million guaranis to the local financier Chang Nan Long, and also to directors of another local bank under investigation, the Banco Wai Hing Chan. The money had vanished and the bank had closed its doors. The former Minister of the Interior, Walter Bower, pictured in the press toting an assault rifle while briefing his moustachioed, uniformed and, presumably unpaid, policemen, was found to be in possession of two farms in Missiones Province, with a total of 8,000 hectares, or 20,000 acres, which he could not account for ever having purchased. A full-scale investigation of his allegedly illegal activities was promised, but no one seriously believed anything would happen. An opinion poll conducted by Ultima Hora revealed that 99% of those taking part believed that Paraguayan justice was corrupt. The Association of Judicial Magistrates took umbrage at this, and put a full-page advertisement in the paper, protesting against ‘tendentious publications which militate against the administration of justice and discredit the image of magistrates’. They did not, however, deny that Paraguayan justice was deeply, almost universally, corrupt. In another case an estimated US$35 million in missing stamp duty and VAT since 1998 was claimed by the commercial tax authorities against 12 tobacco companies, which had simply evaded the duties, it was claimed. Fraudulent import and export bills were alleged to have been used to defraud both clients and the authorities of VAT. More than 70% of all businesses were alleged to use such false accounting practices. Haresh Jamdus Chandrani, Sunil Jamdas and Muskan Kamles, called Los Hindues in the press, were suspected of running an illegal arms business from Ciudad del Este, formerly Ciudad Stroessner, and were accused of money laundering, falsification of documents and criminal association. It was claimed that they had transferred US$130–140 million to Hong Kong in a single day. They were under arrest and being investigated. Two light Cessna planes were caught flying between 400 and 500 kilos of marijuana (la hierba maldita – the accursed weed – as it was known locally, or else macoña) from Paraguay into Brazil, coming across from Capitán Bredos into Minos Gerais Province. The pilot of one plane, Carlos Diaz Canpuzano, was a Paraguayan. The dope was going to be sold in Belo Horizonte. The second Cessna, piloted by a Bolivian called Eduardo Marciel Dantas, known as Ghagino, had arms on board as well as drugs – FAL rifles, made exclusively for the Parguayan army by INBEL (Industria Belica Brasiliera), plus semi-automatic pistols. These were destined to be sold to the drug gangs in the favelas of Rio. Both planes were caught at a clandestine airstrip in the rural zone of Pimate. It was well-known that Paraguyan armed forces had long been involved in the illegal export of drugs and weapons to neighbouring countries. Paraguay had a venerable tradition of gun-running, going back at least to the Spanish Civil War, when old First War equipment was sold by the Paraguayans to both sides: they had bought it cheaply after the Armistice in 1918 and sold it dear in 1936 – for gold or dollars only. In a cartoon in the press one Parguayan was saying to another: ‘It says that in the census the indigenous people [the Indians] are now part of society.’ His friend replies, ‘Of honest society or corrupt society?’ So pervasive was the criminality that it was hard to tell them apart.

  The ‘new parliament’ building, still a skeletal, unfinished ruin of reinforced concrete surrounded by abandoned, rickety bamboo scaffolding, had been funded by Taiwan, and the contractors, it was alleged, had stolen the money and then gone out of business. Asunción was full of such incomplete ruins. The most spectacular was a life-size replica of the White House in Washington, which, roofless and in decay, was being built by Stroessner’s son Freddie, who had simply helped himself to money from the Treasury to construct his fantasy. He was aiming to live in it when it was finished, but his cocaine habit got the better of him and he died in his early twenties. The building was inhabited now by goats, and Indians, silent figures who squatted over iron pots on small fires in front by the weed-choked lawn, where they cooked their food.

  Paraguay’s bizarre relationship with Taiwan was frankly that of a client state. Paraguay had a seat at the UN and Taiwan did not. Every time a Paraguayan diplomat got up to speak at the UN he launched into a long list of Taiwan’s complaints and grievances, otherwise unheard in the chamber, always ending with the demand that Taiwan should be given a seat at the UN. For this service Taiwan was alleged to pay out millions, perhaps even billions of dollars in aid, kickbacks, and sweeteners to Paraguay. When Winston Churchill had visited Mark Twain, the great American humorist wrote in a copy of one of his books: ‘To do good is noble: to teach others to do good is nobler still – and no trouble.’ That credo would stand as a fair description of Paraguay’s advocacy for Taiwan. ‘The Taiwanese pay well over a million dollars a word every time the Paraguayan Ambassador at the UN mentions them,’ a senior EU diplomat told me in confidence. ‘It is very good money for very old rope.’

  Unsurprisingly, Paraguay had its own special word for corruption, theft, and graft – they called it mau. Stolen cars were mau, smuggled cigarettes and false documents, dope and guns were all mau; illicitly gained farms, bogus title deeds, rustled cattle – these too were all mau. This was, in fact, the land of mau. No one I asked was quite sure where the word came from. It was not Guarani, as I had first assumed. Some said it originated in the 1960s when Chairman Mao had been much in the news, others from the Mau-Mau in Kenya in the 1950s. In a newspaper the President was caricatured as a little green extra-terrestrial driving a flying saucer which bore the number plate ‘Mau 1’; he was waving gaily, with a cheeky grin on his face. In Ultima Hora the cartoonists always had the last word: ‘It appears from Transparency International that Paraguay has galloping inflation,’ said one man. ‘Galloping? I would call it Turbo-diesel,’ replies his wife. The press in Paraguay – in particular Ultima Hora – was a real surprise: concise, witty, satirical, full of facts and figures, tables of international comparisons, with very sharp cartoons and penetrating open analysis of the country’s faults. I had expected timidity or the sort of flatulent, empty rhetoric that exemplifies so much peninsular Spanish journalism, long on polysyllabic pomposity but short on realism, concrete facts and figures. Ultima Hora was a revelation: they exposed all the warts and named all the names, including senior generals and politicos. The newspaper ABC Color had been the most daring during the Stroessner era, but it had been closed down eventually, and when it reopened after the dictator had gone, it was never the same again.

  With so much fraud, evasion, fakery, theft and deceit in Paraguay it was not surprising that the level of fantasy extended into almost every reach of life. Sometimes the telephones worked, often they did not. Sometimes there was running water from the taps, at other times there was none. Sometimes there were waves of kidnappings and hostage-takings, robberies on the buses and car-jackings on the highways, then a lull seemed to follow. There were no apparent reasons for any of this. There was ample food in the supermarkets, much of it imported from abroad – for those who had money to buy. Long conversations on the phone to arrange elaborately detailed meetings took place, but these always ended without a result. In Argentina, it was said, when two people agreed to meet, only one of them turned up: in Paraguay, neither of them made it. I had a long list of contacts, and enjoyed many fascinating conversations with people in English, Spanish and French, but all of these fantasy plans for meetings, outings, trips to the interior, stays on ranches, excursions into the rainforest, always ended the same way – with me waiting in vain at the meeting place, the contacts never turning up. In Africa, in foreign aid circles, this syndrome is known as MAMBFAK, or Many Appointments Are Made But Few Are Kept. At first I became annoyed at these no-shows, fumed and got all cross and European; then I drifted with the flow, absorbed the tropical atmosphere and simply laughed. ‘They also serve who stand and wait,’ observed John Milton, and, of course, not getting the result you want is a vital part of the travelling experience
– humility grows with being stood up so often. You realize how utterly unimportant you and your mission really are. I saw a lot of Asunción on foot, trudging about, in the sticky afternoon heat, picking my way through the market women who squatted in front of their piles of vegetables on the pavements, past the cops in their black shades and low-slung pistols in big macho holsters. With my plastic supermarket shopping bag and my sunglasses, sleeves rolled up, straw hat on my head, cheap cheroot in my mouth, sweating and unshaven, I blended in, anonymous in the multiracial crowds, the only way for a travel writer to be surely. When Shirley Conran first met Bruce Chatwin at a book launch, she asked him the best way to see a country. ‘By boot,’ he replied. ‘I thought he was from the North and had said “by boat”,’ she commented. He was right – foot is best. Shelby Tucker, who lives in leafy Oxford and footed it through Burma, suggested I walk through Paraguay. Given the time and a less fraught political climate it would be a good plan, but now not even the buses and taxis were safe, the interior was virtually unpoliced, and everyone was armed. I don’t think I’d even have got out of the suburbs alive.

  The dominant mood on the streets of the capital was extreme suspicion of everyone else. In all the shops I entered, however small, the owner stiffened with visible apprehension. Perhaps I was a robber? Some had iron grills across the counter and your purchase was thrust back at you through a little slot, wordlessly. The supermarkets had armed guards at the exits with assault rifles, just in case you thought of legging it with your trolley. This practice was to have terrible, tragic consequences later, after I left the country. Trying to make sense of this confusing social malaise wasn’t easy, but help was on hand. The Faculty of Philosophy at the Catholic University of Asunción was offering a course in the thought of Karl Marx, given by a professor from Uruguay called Javier Caballero Merlo, who it was promised, had been educated in Europe with ‘Bourdieu, Braudrillard [sic], Touraine, Saramango y otros intelectuales descados’. The course lasted 30 hours, and was conveniently taught between 10 and 12 on Saturday mornings. You could nip in for a bit of Marx straight from Europe, fount of all knowledge, squeezed between buying some cocaine for the weekend, bribing the cops to release your wife’s stolen car, and dropping a load of mau Derby Club cigarettes to some camaradas downtown. Perhaps only in South America could a Catholic University be offering courses in Karl Marx’s thought.