Paradise With Serpents

by Robert Carver

  After Fidel Castro was convicted and imprisoned for his failed attack on the Moncada barracks in Batista’s Cuba, the Minister of the Interior had come to visit him in gaol to congratulate him on his speech in the dock. Dressed in a toga, as if an ancient Roman, Castro – a qualified and practising lawyer – had spoken in his own defence for six hours without a break, citing St Thomas Aquinas, Jefferson, Plato, Thomas More, Rousseau, Thomas Paine, Washington, Aristotle, Hegel and Schopenhauer, among many others. There had been frequent interruptions as the assembled court broke into frenzied applause at his high-flown, philosophically abstruse rhetoric, applause which came unstintingly from the judge and the prosecution, as well as the defence. It was a bravura performance, and even the censored press praised his ‘eloquent latinity’. After Castro finally kicked Batista out, at a noisy politburo meeting at which all his ministers had been smoking cigars, talking loudly, and drinking rum, Castro ended the proceedings by shouting out, ‘If there is anyone here who is an economist, wait behind and see me.’ The ministers all filed out, leaving only Che Guevara. ‘Che, you amaze me,’ said Castro, ‘I knew you were a physician but I had no idea you were an economist as well.’ ‘Oh!’ said Che in surprise, ‘I thought you said a communist. I don’t know anything about economics.’ ‘Well, never mind, I need someone to manage the Central Bank of Cuba – you’ll do just as well as anyone else – take the post will you, like a good comrade.’ So he did. And that is why to this day, the banknotes of the Cuban State are all signed by Che Guevara, first governor of the revolutionary bank. The truth in South America is often so bizarre as to be all but incredible. When I got back to England and I told hardened travel writer friends about what I had experienced in Paraguay, many of them thought I was romancing. I took to carrying about with me a little wallet of press clippings actually showing the police in white gloves lighting candles to their patron saint, the President as an extra-terrestrial, the outlandish names …

  If weekend Marxism didn’t suit, more mundane needs could be satisfied in Asunción at the Cupido Sexy Shop – Lencería Italiana y Sexy Accesorios Eróticos, they promised. What would Italiana involve? I wondered. With spaghetti, perhaps, or gelato? Paraguay could also boast some of its own cultural leaders. There was Olga Blinder, German-Paraguayan painter, the first modernist to give an exhibition in 1950 – her name was often in the arts news. Somehow I felt Blinder to be a highly appropriate name for a Paraguayan painter. There was also Jacobo Rauskin, a poet; and sporting a fine moustache, the man of letters and statesman, Julio César Franco. My top journalist, who always came up with excellent investigative stories, was Erwing Rommel, who wrote for Ultima Hora, my favourite local paper. Many of its journalists had been in exile during the stronato and had returned to report upon the baroque criminality of the post-Stroessner Paraguay.

  The air of unreality in Asunción was heightened by the exuberant names of Paraguayans themselves. What could you do with a country where Maria Mercedes Bougermini rubbed shoulders with José Raúl Torres Kirmser, where Wilson Ferreira hobnobbed with Juan Angel Dellabedova. Even Ian Fleming, who had invented Miss Moneypenny and Pussy Galore, would have had doubts about calling one of his female characters ‘Dellabedova’, surely? César Augusto Caiz, Olga Ninfa Talavera, José Domingo Adorno Mazacote, Maria J. Bogardo de Shubeiu, Desidero Arzamendia López, Nicandor Duarte Frutes, Bianca Mafalde Benitez Rivas, and Ramón Anibal Scapini were all genuine Paraguayan names I plucked from the newspapers and noted down in my journal. Asunción was probably the last city in the world that still had an Avenida Generalíssimo Francisco Franco, named in honour of the late Spanish caudillo.

  Much English usage had crept into Paraguayan Spanish – el pullover was what you put on if the nights grew chilly; el baby shower was what your friends invited you to in celebration of their infant’s christening; el google was Paraguay’s favourite search engine; and Willy, el can sniffer, was the Drug Squad’s prize pooch on the trail of all that cocaine and hierba maldita, carried down from Bolivia by the human ‘mules’ on the trans-Chaco buses. El Shop was where you bought sweets and cigarettes at the petrol station forecourt, and el shopping was a mall, complete with armed guards in baseball hats and sub-machine guns at either end to stop el getaway after el robbery armado. ‘Baby’ Emilio Cubas was a Presidential hopeful for the next election, and graffiti reading Baby por el Presidente in bright Colorado red paint adorned many Asunción walls. A curiosity of political posters was that many of them were hand-painted rather than printed: this was because printing them was more expensive than getting peons to handrender them.

  The local political scene came in for much abuse in the press – ‘de hacer politiquería bufonesca’ (to make political buffoonery) was Cuarto Oscuro’s comment. In the same paper was a comforting report that ‘diphtheria was under control in the countryside, after a massive vaccination’, but they did complain that ‘los pacientes indigenos tienden a inventar medicamentos’ – the Indian patients had a tendency to make up their own remedies. ‘Este es un hermoso país para evocarlo a la distancia’ (this is a charming country to think about from a long way away) claimed Cuarto Oscuro. In my journal I wrote ‘living in Paraguay is like being trapped inside an unedited first draft of a novel by Gabriel García Márquez – not an entirely enjoyable sensation’.

  The plague of kidnappings was thought to have come over from Argentina, where it was rife. There the sequestrators had perfected their techniques. Also, they had police and army in uniform, who slowed you down to check your papers at roadblocks, then robbed you, shot you, stole your car, or kidnapped you for ransom. In Colombia, world leader in kidnapping, the bandits checked your credit rating on each of your cards, this by mobile phone, then took cash withdrawals on the spot, with their own machines, to the maximum, demanding your chip and pin number – or your life. One person was kidnapped every 30 minutes in Colombia: it was known as ‘miraculous fishing’, after Jesus’s instruction to his Disciples to become ‘fishers of men’. It was a business in South America, like drug smuggling or gun-running, organized on professional lines, closely protected and profited from by high members of the government. In Argentina they had invented a new version called ‘express kidnapping’ – it worked like this: young, attractive student types with clipboards approached prosperous, middle-aged men about to go into the cinema for an afternoon or early evening showing. There was, the student interviewers claimed, a $5,000 lottery prize in return for two minutes of their time spent giving consumer-choice information. Everyone who took part got a ticket for the grand prize. What kind of whisky did they prefer, which cigarettes, what make of car did they favour, these were the sort of questions asked. They also gave their names, addresses and phone numbers, so they could be contacted if they won. When the interviewees were safely in the cinema, the ‘kidnappers’ went by taxi to the address given and phoned the family from downstairs. They gave a description of the person ‘held’, and demanded an instant ransom, on the spot, or the victim would be killed. The sum demanded was always small, US$100, a sum almost all middle-class Argentines could raise immediately. Most families paid up, in the local bar or pizzeria, five minutes’ walk from their apartment. It only worked, this scam, if the victim had no mobile phone, and so could not be contacted. Naturally ‘Do you own a mobile phone?’ was one of the first questions asked of the victim by the interviewers. Though sometimes the victims admitted that though they had a mobile phone, they always turned it off when they did not want their wife or girlfriend to know what they were up to.

  ‘This scam would not work in Paraguay because the sort of people whose family could raise $100 do not go to the cinema, but stay at home and watch them on DVDs or videos. And very few middle-class people today could actually get $100 immediately – they are deeply in debt as it is. What would happen here is that the family would agree to pay the ransom, meet the contact in the bar, and then five toughs would jump the money-collector and threaten to cut his throat if he didn’t authorize the victim’s release
immediately,’ Juan-Carlos Arturo Macnamara told me, as we shared cold beer and a plate of toasted ham and cheese sandwiches at the Lido bar. Mac, as he asked me to call him, was in his early forties, but looked older, grey and lined, balding, paunchy, with an intermittent tic in his left eyelid. He gazed around anxiously, flicking his eyes to and fro, as if searching someone out whom he knew. He wore casual clothes, blue jeans and a red t-shirt. ‘To confuse everyone,’ he explained. ‘Colorado above the waist, Liberal below.’ He was a descendant of Australians from the breakaway Utopian community of Cosme, where the leader ‘Billy’ Lane, originally a journalist from Bristol, England, had taken the true believers, leaving the soft-left capitalist-roaders behind in Nueva Australia: these latter had allowed their children, for example, to own their own toys, rather than holding them all in common, and the women had been allowed to cook individual meals for their husbands, rather than eating collectively, as the charter of the colony demanded. Mac was one of the few people I had contacted whom I had actually managed to catch up with – and it wasn’t easy because he was out of Asunción so much, looking after his business interests, import-export, which kept him in the north-east of the country much of the time, near – and over – the Brazilian border.

  ‘The difference between smuggling and legitimate trade is an interesting one,’ he remarked. ‘In modern, developed countries, the businessmen pay the government taxes and VAT in return for protection, infrastructure and social and health security. Smugglers in these countries are those who evade the taxes but take advantage of what the government provides. In underdeveloped or collapsed States, the government can neither provide the protection, nor the services, nor even collect the taxes themselves. Instead, businessmen are forced to pay individuals and groups – local police, Customs officers, mafias and politicians who will at least allow them to continue in business, even if they provide no infrastructure or services. Who, then, is a smuggler in such cases? It would be absurd and unbusinesslike to pay twice, particularly for no services rendered, to an incompetent State which cannot even collect its own revenues. Thus, ordinary businesses simply bypass the State and make individual deals with officials and criminals. Personally, I would love to have an efficient, honest, trustworthy government to which I could pay taxes in return for services rendered – honest police and Customs officials, a good health service, roads, schools, etc. It would simplify my life a great deal and also, in the long run, would probably be less stressful. I might make less money, but it would all be simpler and easier, safer and less time consuming. Unfortunately, that has never been and never looks like being even a remote possibility in Paraguay. To pay the government any taxes would be just to add to the corruption – all tax money is siphoned off and stolen inside the bureaucracy. Nothing at all has been repaired or replaced since Alfie was kicked out – and much of what he did – the roads, the dams, the airport, for example, were really excuses for his cronies to rip off millions on the construction contracts.’

  I asked Mac what the relationship had been between Colonel Oviedo, now in exile in Brazil, and the imprisoned ex-President Raúl Cubas of Paraguay.

  ‘Well, Cubas is under house arrest, on the estancia of his brother Capitán Cubas in the Chaco, a place called El Trebol. That’s the way with the political class, they never actually put each other in common gaols, always house arrest. Oviedo ordered the army to shoot some young demonstrators, which they did, killing a lot of them – the numbers are disputed, but it counts as “magnicide” as there were so many. Cubas allowed Oviedo to escape from prison and get across the border, so it’s claimed; Oviedo may have had some sensitive material on Cubas that helped this process along. If Oviedo makes a comeback and succeeds in a golpe, Cubas could well end up as his Vice-President, which is probably why he hasn’t taken an avionetta from the Chaco to Brazil himself. That is all the public is aware of – there may be convoluted ins and outs which insiders know, but we don’t.’

  It occurred to me, reflecting on what Mac had told me, that Paraguay was perhaps the last 18th-century state still surviving in the modern world, closer to the Poland of King Stanislaus Augustus Poniatowski than any contemporary 21st-century regime. In pre-partition Poland there had been an immensely rich and powerful landowning aristocracy which controlled all the land and disposed of the peasantry like chattels; they had been quarrelsome, argumentative, constantly forming and re-forming into rival factions, making any sort of stable government impossible. They obeyed no laws, paid no taxes, aped the fashions of France and Western Europe, importing whole dinner services of Sèvres porcelain in oxcarts. Under them the peasantry had toiled for a pittance. Corrupt, inefficient, proud, in thrall to foreign ideas, sandwiched between three much larger states which had designs on its independence – Russia, Austria and Prussia – Poland had been a byword for folly, waste and aristocratic pride. The monarch had always been weak and almost powerless. Contemporary Paraguay resembled old Poland to a marked degree – vast plains with endless herds of cattle, huge estates, regiments of cavalry, hussars and lancers, the cult of the Virgin Mary, a sense of being cut off from the mainstream of European life and ideas. I had never been in a country that was quite so anarchic, so old-fashioned as Paraguay.

  I asked Mac what he made of Stanley Guillermo the President of Union Industria’s claim that 70% of all taxes were evaded, and if they could be collected there would be US$500 million to spend.

  ‘Hmm, interesting. He assumes 30% of the taxes are being collected – that would be US$214 million, am I right? So where is this fabulous sum then? The government is broke, or so they assure us. If they had US$214 million per annum they could pay the police and a few other people as well. I don’t believe any tax at all is collected – collected that is and spent on public services or salaries. It’s all filtered off and stolen by politicians and bureaucrats and salted away in the Cayman Islands. There is a kind of fantasy in Paraguay that even educated people subscribe to, and it is always preceded by the word “If”. If there was no corruption, if the justice system was honest, if there was no smuggling, if Paraguay could become clean, honest, hard-working, efficient, etc. etc. It comes from the Roman Catholic heritage, I think. If mankind were not sinful, if Jesus would extend his grace, if the Virgin Mary would intercede. All of these things lie in the realms of fantasy and wish fulfilment. They are like wanting Father Christmas to exist, the fairies to come back to inhabit the end of the garden. The “if” game in Paraguay simply makes people feel better for a minute or two, nothing more. All these fatuous statements the good and the great make in the press, they could never become reality here. The facts are different, but unattractive, and so people try to “if” them away. Stanley doesn’t mention the 30% of taxes he assumes are collected. Why not? Why didn’t the journalist interviewing him query this? Fantasies and fantasmas. Take the railways. The last train jumped the tracks two years ago or more. It ran once a week to Aregua, 25 kilometres away, hardly the Pacific Express, eh? It was a steam train built in the north of England in 1865. But the Ministry of Railways still employs 25,000 people. Why? Can’t be sacked. What do they do? Well, eat, drink, get married, collect their salaries every month – or try to anyway, for sure. The railway station? It’s a museum – literally. Go and have a look. Full of 19th-century British gear – clocks, ticket punchers, cast-iron seats for waiting rooms, all shipped out in kit form. Some of the old carriages have been kept with loving care – look for the frosted glass with the initials of Ferrovia de Paraguay engraved on them – real craftsmanship. Imagine shipping all that up the river in the 1860s – heroic! But it started to run down when the British left. It was the same in Argentina when Perón nationalized the trains. Did you know that in Brazil 80% of the civil service budget goes on paying the pensions of retired civil servants? One thing Alfie managed to do was keep down the numbers of the civil servants. Everyone in South America – the poor that is – dreams of a safe job with the government, a meal ticket for life. In Italy it’s called a poltrona – an armch
air. Jorge Batlle in Uruguay turned a prosperous country into a ruin simply by expanding the public service until it embraced the whole country. No one actually produced anything at all any more, but simply sat in an office and shuffled paper. We are on the same road here, but there is a long way to go yet. Imagine! We actually import bananas and oranges, pineapples and mangoes now! All tropical produce we could grow ourselves. And England imports coal, gas and oil, I understand, yes? Everyone complains here about the price rises – 26% on public transport, 10% on dairy products, 10% on breadstuffs, and that diesel and petrol prices keep on going up every week. What no one seems to understand is that all these things are now imported and paid for with dollars – the public transport buses are US-made as well as the diesel that runs them. Even water needs machinery, pumps, filters and so on, that have to be imported. And the fall of the guarani in value against the dollar exactly mirrors the rise in prices. No one grasps this. If we produced more for ourselves, we would save money and keep prices down. With a proper train network using modern steam trains made in China, burning local timber of which there are endless forests, and cars and trucks run on ethanol alcohol distilled from sugar cane which we grow here – and which the Brazilians have used since the 1970s – we would be completely self-sufficient in transport. Not Paraguay, though, never. There is a complete lack of realism, of politico-economic literacy here, among all the classes. “If only we could get another loan from the IMF!” How often have you heard that cry, in the press or from a politico. Sure – give the alcoholic another bottle of caña – it’s what he knows and after a quick guzzle oblivion follows. We can’t possibly service the debt we already have, and all the loans are stolen or wasted and just embed us deeper in the mire. The trouble is people have swallowed the get-rich-quick fantasy economy of smuggling and tax evasion. Including me, because you’d be mad not to, given the absurd protectionist economies surrounding Paraguay on all sides. Imagine one state in the USA – say Wisconsin – could grow top quality marijuana and cocaine, and all the rest banned them. Well, the Wisconsin guys would make their livelihood smuggling dope to the rest, wouldn’t they? That’s what we do to Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. We import Scotch, cigarettes, diesel – you name it – and smuggle it over to them for a profit. Plus all the dope, guns and other nasties, of course.’