The Rebels had driven Billy Lane out of New Australia and inherited the rich 93,000 hectares of grazing land. If the Paraguayan government revoked the privilegium, the Mennonites, or most of them would leave the country. The government would then inherit their land. What they did not realize, any more than Mugabe’s ZANU-PF Party had in Zimbabwe, was that merely replacing one set of efficient white farmers with a set of inefficient native farmers would achieve nothing except economic collapse. If Guarani farmers from the east of Paraguay could ever be induced to migrate to the Chaco, which I doubted they ever could, they would be able to do nothing except scratch a mere subsistence living, for that was all they did in the much better land they occupied already in the east. Indeed, there were thousands of hectares of excellent, well-watered, fertile land in the east completely uncultivated. Why would the Guarani bother with this highly marginal land in a drought zone? They wouldn’t, of course. If the Mennonites left the Chaco it would go back to what it had been before – scrub desert with a few nomadic Indians hunting and gathering. However, this would not stop the Paraguayan government shooting itself in the foot, eventually, by revoking the privilegium.
Very few governments in the world observe the sage minimalist doctrine of leaving their citizens well alone to make money and become prosperous, and simply taxing consumption rather than income and savings. Politicians and civil servants do not understand how money is made, only how it is spent – by them. Even when billions start to pour, leak or flood out of an economy, legally or illegally, governments still go on raising taxes, hiring civil servants, increasing politicians’ pay and perks, embarking on ludicrous and costly programmes of public spending. It takes about 20 years of persistent folly to ruin an economy completely, as the Zimbabwe case exemplifies. The result is always the same – a permanent capital and skills flight, astronomical unemployment, a siege economy, food rationing by price, a collapse in public services, hyper-inflation with mounting chaos and disorder, responded to by repression and state violence. Eventually, the government collapses. Paraguay was a little over halfway down this road, by my estimation. Only the complete inability of the government to collect taxes prevented the usual massive civil service overspend. Even in dictatorships government depends on at least passive consent. If the whole people withdraw their labour and export their capital, government becomes a hollow exercise: there is nothing and no one to govern. In the end, only the politicians and bureaucrats remain, defending their offices and houses from the irate mobs outside whom they have ruined with their extravagance and short-sighted stupidity. They keep on doing it, though, completely oblivious to the lessons of the past. For them the goose that lays the golden egg is only there to be starved to death.
If this happened in Paraguay, the Bolivians might well chance their luck and reinvade the Chaco. They had never reconciled themselves to its loss after the Chaco War of 1932–5. It was still marked as Bolivian territory on their national maps. At the time it was thought there might be oil under the ground, and it was alleged that two major oil companies were bankrolling both sides in the hope of concessions, but there now appears to be no oil there at all. It was another pointless, futile war, fought in harrowing conditions, a sort of desert version of the trench warfare of the First World War, complete with biplanes on strafing missions, Mills bomb-throwing soldiers, and machine-gun detachments. Instead of mud and cold the soldiers had suffered thirst and impossible heat. The Bolivians, most from the cold highlands, the rarified atmosphere of the altiplano, had suffered far worse in the desert conditions than the Paraguayans. The Bolivian Commander in Chief was a German soldier of fortune with the highly unfortunate name of Kundt, who put his faith in armoured cars and warplanes, but who was beaten by tough Guarani endurance and staying power. It was known as the ‘guerra de sed’, the war of thirst: water had to be brought by the trencito, the little train whose track was laid to bring supplies out from eastern Paraguay, and by choffers who drove cars and buses to the front line with water for the soldiers. The supply situation got so bad that sometimes the Paraguayan air force was reduced to bombing its own troops with ice cubes. There were dogfights between ancient biplanes – the last the world was ever to witness – and mercenaries from all over the world flocked to fight on either side. The Bolivians were out of their element, and the Paraguayan tactic of outflanking their enemy, separating them from water, made mass surrenders inevitable: 21,000 Bolivian soldiers and 10,000 civilians were captured and put to work as prisoners in the fields and gardens of the east; many stayed on after the war. Immense booty was captured – 28,000 rifles, 2,300 machine-guns, US$10 million of ammunition. It was to set Paraguay up as a major arms exporter for years to come. Much of the equipment used by both sides in the Spanish Civil War was bought in Paraguay from these stocks.
All across the Chaco were little fortines, tiny entrenchments where the two sides had shot at each other, gasped for water, and died in large numbers. The only gains were on postage stamps, both sides printed exaggerated maps on their stamps, which claimed huge swathes of enemy territory. In all the war claimed 88,000 lives, 36,000 of them from Paraguay. Kundt’s tanks and planes and flame-throwers all failed; he was fired and went back to Germany, having proved himself, in fact, a complete and utter Kundt. The mercenaries were not much use either. A group of chantar artists from down south calling themselves ‘the Machetemen of Death’ proved adept only at pillage, and were packed off back to Argentina. Alfie Stroessner made his reputation as a general in this war, which once again exhausted Paraguay, although in the end it was notionally the victor, in that it had seen off the Bolivian challenge and gained an extra 20,000 square miles of useless semi-desert it didn’t know what to do with. Fear that Bolivians might one day come back kept the Paraguayan army chained to the Chaco, manning useless fortines and patrolling empty tracts in the middle of nowhere. The army had a sinister reputation for bullying, torture and worse out here. In a 10-year period 103 conscripts had met violent, unexplained deaths, almost certainly from their fellows. They army was also reputed to be deeply involved in gun-running, cocaine smuggling and manufacture, and marijuana growing. There was also said to be a secret US airbase deeply hidden in the desert somewhere, much of it underground. None of this was apparent from Filadelfia – the city of brotherly love, after all – but it was out there, with the Ow-Ow and the anacondas.
There was a stranger in the restaurant of the Hotel Florida at lunch. He was obviously no Mennonite. Dressed in faded blue jeans and embroidered jean jacket, he had shoulder-length blondwhite hair, wore impressive cowboy boots and a stetson with a snakeskin dandyband and dangling shark’s teeth at the front. Although seated, his immense height was evident in his crouched position and long legs sprawled out on either side of the table at which he was sitting eating a solitary lunch. With a beaky nose and light blue eyes, he looked like the actor Klaus Kinski’s wilder younger brother. He was perhaps about 50, in a lean, well-preserved sort of way. Most curiously, he had slung over the back of his chair a particular type of straw basket on long thin strings which is only made and used on the island of Ibiza. He resembled, in fact, a late-1960s hippy from Ibiza who had taken a wrong turning at the Straits of Gibraltar. He looked up at me sharply as I came in. We were the only two people in the restaurant. I gaped at his bag, and pointed, saying involuntarily, ‘Ibiza!’ He looked as startled as I felt, and indicated the chair in front of him. We started speaking in Spanish, then switched to English. I had lived on the island on and off for 20 years or more, and we soon found we had friends in common. I ordered my lunch and we talked on, obsessively now, about the island and its past. ‘You know, I had thought I didn’t miss the place at all,’ he said at one point, lighting a long black cheroot, in spite of the frowns of the waitress, ‘but you’ve brought it all back to me.’ I asked him where he had lived on the island. ‘Oh, all over, but the best place was somewhere you would never have heard of, much less have been to.’ Try me, I told him. ‘A finca, on the north shore, at a plac
e called Cap Blanc …’ I didn’t let him finish. ‘On a long peninsula that sticks out into the sea, terraces all around with olives and almonds, descending down to the rocks below, the finca being the only house on the peninsula, that guards the entrance …’ He gasped with astonishment: ‘You know it!’
‘I nearly bought it,’ I replied, ‘but I couldn’t raise the money.’ He thrust out a long thin muscular hand and pumped mine enthusiastically. ‘Jurgen,’ he said, introducing himself. ‘And what are you doing in the Chaco?’ ‘Looking for land to buy, maybe an estancia. Europe is all washed up …’ This was a cover story I had evolved after finding that the terms ‘journalist’ and ‘author’ brought with them suspicions of investigation of criminal activities, and therefore a degree of reticence and even hostility. ‘You must come and visit my finca,’ he used the Spanish terms in use in Ibiza, ‘it’s only an hour and a half away – well, two hours if there are headwinds.’
The use of ‘headwinds’ should have alerted me to the probability that this was two hours by plane, not road but it didn’t since I was still in shock over meeting someone from Ibiza in the middle of the Chaco. An hour later, with my bags packed and bills paid, I found myself sitting beside him in his private avionetta on the way back to his ranch. He had been in Filadelfia to see the dentist, he told me – an old crown had fallen out. He hardly ever came in, maybe only twice a year. Like many in the western Chaco he was oriented towards Bolivia. He flew to Santa Cruz for preference. ‘Much more sophisticated than anything in Paraguay, really quite a nice town actually, almost civilized. You can sit at pavement cafés under the palm trees and watch the giant sloths clambering about above you in among the foliage.’ In reality in places like the Chaco the idea of nations and nationality is reduced to absurdity. Argentina, Paraguay and Bolivia all shared the Chaco and none of them really controlled it in any but the vaguest sense. People moved about at will, across borders, with no one to stop them. It was by chance that Jurgen had happened to find some land he liked and could afford in the Paraguayan Chaco rather than in either of the other two jurisdictions. He had nothing to do with Asunción or with the Guarani elements in the country, any more than the island people of St Kilda off the west coast of Scotland had with London and England in the 18th century.
The Chaco looked no better from a light plane than it did from a bus, although there was no dust to contend with. I had no idea which way we were heading. Very occasionally we would overfly an estancia with a silver corrugated-iron roof and perhaps an identifying number painted on top, this to give bush-pilots an idea where they were. There were also straggly cattle roaming about in search of food, tiny from our height. After two hours and twelve minutes we came in to land at a narrow strip with a single windsock which stood limp at the mast: there had been no headwind at all. If there had it would have been more like three hours. We must have been very near the Bolivian border. A Japanese Land Cruiser stood under an open-sided thatch-roofed sunshelter, the windows all open. We drove a couple of hundred yards to the ranch house which shimmered white in the heat-haze. I could not help myself from laughing – it was a reproduction of an Ibicencan farmhouse, complete with flat roof, porche on the front, and single date-palm in front of it. There was a conical bread oven and corrales around for the animals. ‘Too much!’ I spluttered. ‘You’ve built a complete Ibicencan finca reproduction – it’s highly authentic.’
He smiled with evident pride at his creation. ‘It’s made of mud bricks rendered with sand and cement – well, earth and cement really. Come and look.’
It was cool and shady inside. The roof beams which would have been sabina or juniper in Ibiza were here quebracho, he told me. It was comfortably furnished with modern white fabrics, deep armchairs and long elegant sofas. There were ample bookcases, a good music system and Moroccan and Turkish carpets. ‘What do you do for electricity?’ I enquired. ‘Solar,’ he told me, ‘with a generator as back-up.’ He showed me round his finca with enthusiasm. Once indoors it was hard to believe one was not actually in Ibiza, so uncanny was the resemblance of his faithful copy to the original.
We had tea and then he showed me to my guest room for a late siesta. It was still very hot and I was glad to dive under my mosquito net and doze off for a couple of hours. When I emerged it was getting dark. A splashing drew me to the back of the finca, where Jurgen was swimming strongly in a large open-air pool, shaded by mature palm trees. ‘Come on in, it will wake you up,’ he cried. I needed no second invitation. I stripped off to my underpants and dived in – it was deliciously cool. Lights came on automatically as dusk fell. ‘Timer switches, every modern convenience,’ chuckled Jurgen, as he clambered out and shook himself like a dog. He did not bother with swimming trunks, I couldn’t help noticing. He had a deep all-over body tan. ‘What about water? You clearly must have plenty.’
‘We dug a well, after a dowser roamed around for ages searching, and when we found water, plenty of it as you said, that’s where I built the finca. There’s a wind pump that raises it and a storage tank which feeds into the pool, the house and the vegetable tunnels,’ he explained.
The rear had an area that was out of doors but also with thick metal mesh fly-screen all round it, so that mosquitoes, vampire bats and other bichos couldn’t get in. We sat there and drank tea, and then cocktails, and talked on about Ibiza and our old friends there. Did he really miss it, I asked, or was this all enough? I was genuinely curious to know.
‘I do and I don’t. I miss the social life – there’s none out here, really, though occasionally a few friends from Santa Cruz come and visit. The thing is, though, I felt crowded out in Germany – too many people. That’s why I went to Ibiza, living in the most remote part of the island. Then mass tourism came and it all became impossible, so I moved to the desert in Almeria, down near Tabernas, on the mainland. Then tourism started down there, motorways, airports, huge developments on the coast, agribusiness inland. There’s nowhere now in Western Europe that is genuinely peaceful, isolated and where you are left alone. Noise, people, development everywhere. I have many thousands of hectares here, which I bought for almost nothing. You can’t drive a vehicle on to this property, not without a detailed map, which no one has except me. I can get on and off with my Land Cruiser, if I really want to, but it takes a hell of a long time. When the builders from Bolivia came in with the roof sheets, the cement, the water pump and all the furniture, I had to guide them in on dirt tracks, and then guide them out again. The army don’t come here – it’s too remote for them – so no one bothers me. My nearest neighbour is more than 50 kilometres away, over impassable terrain. I’m as away from the world as it’s possible to get these days,’ he said, refilling my glass as he spoke, evidently pleased at his self-willed isolation.
‘What about an emergency?’ I asked.
‘I employ about 30 people on the estancia – vaqueros, general workers, cooks, cleaners and so on. I have some cattle, which frankly I’m not very interested in, but there are enough to sell the surplus every year, and pay everyone, and turn in a small profit, a few thousand dollars over expenditure. The vaqueros drive the cattle slowly to the abattoir – it takes them more than a week each way. The men can all operate the short-wave radio set. If I fall off a horse or get appendicitis, a flying doctor from Santa Cruz can be here within a couple of hours. If it’s not so serious I can fly out and get treament. It’s a lifestyle choice … you have to take the risk …’
What about the isolation, then, surely that must get to him after a while?
‘Well, yes and no. I spent so much time in Europe trying to get into genuine wilderness and avoid people that frankly it became a bit of an obsession. I don’t have to worry about that here. I go for long horse rides, and sometimes take the Land Cruiser out for a few days’ safari in the wilder reaches of the estancia – the birdwatching is terrific. I put a bed in the back and sleep inside to avoid puma attacks. You know the British travel writer, Bruce Chatwin? Someone once described him as a clubbable lon
er – I like that English word “clubbable”. But I don’t think I am any more. Once I was, in Ibiza, in the early days when there were very few people and it was all fun.’ He paused and thought for a moment. ‘You get set in your ways out here.’
Did he ever go back to Europe, I asked.
‘I used to go every year – friends and family. Then it became every two years. It’s been five, now. I don’t really enjoy it. Too many people all crammed in together and far too many rules and regulations. I find eastern Paraguay far too crowded. You come to the Chaco only when you are willing to sacrifice everything else for personal freedom and an absence of people. Do you think you are ready for the Chaco yet, yourself?’
I had to admit I didn’t think I was. It was too extreme a solution. He laughed softly. ‘Give it a couple of years yet. You’ll move to rural Spain from England, then find that too crowded. Then you’ll think back to this place – the nature, the peace, the wildlife, the heat, the great empty spaces – complete untamed nature just as it was thousands of years ago. Then you may just come back and buy a place here, or across the border in Bolivia. You are the type. I can see myself 20 years ago in you. Just don’t leave it too late.’
Paradise With Serpents Page 34