At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  List of Illustrations

  Acknowledgements

  Map

  Introduction

  1. Asunción

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  2. Eastern Paraguay

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 104

  3. The Chaco

  Chapter 105

  Chapter 106

  Chapter 107

  Chapter 108

  Chapter 109

  Chapter 110

  Chapter 111

  Chapter 112

  Chapter 113

  Chapter 114

  Chapter 115

  Chapter 116

  Chapter 117

  Chapter 118

  Chapter 119

  Chapter 120

  Chapter 121

  Chapter 122

  Chapter 123

  Chapter 124

  Chapter 125

  Chapter 126

  4. Epilogue

  Chapter 127

  Chapter 128

  Chapter 129

  Chapter 130

  Chapter 131

  Afterword

  Chronology

  Further reading

  Picture Section

  Copyright

  To Jayne

  List of Illustrations

  First section

  Madame Eliza Lynch (South American Pictures)

  Dr Gaspar Francia (South American Pictures)

  Carlos Antonio López (South American Pictures)

  Francisco Solano López (South American Pictures)

  Grave of Madam Lynch’s daughter, Corinne

  Captain Richard Burton (Hulton Archive)

  Robert Cunninghame Graham (Hulton Archive)

  Wilfrid Barbrooke Grubb

  Graham Kerr with his rescuer, Chimaki, and Dr William Stewart

  Paraguayan soldiers during the Chaco War (Die Mennonitische POST)

  Present day Chilupí Indians

  Braun family (Die Mennonitische POST)

  Swastika garden (Rex Features Ltd)

  Dr Josef Mengele (Bettmann/CORBIS)

  Martin Bormann (Popperfoto)

  General Andrés Rodríguez (Popperfoto)

  Pastor Coronel (Ultima Hora)

  General Alfredo Stroessner (Hulton Archive)

  Second section

  Monument to the Spanish conquista of 1537, Asunción

  Pantheon of Heroes, Asunción

  President’s Palace, Asunción

  Stroessner’s statue encased in concrete, Asunción

  Lino Oviedo (Jakob Ungers)

  Empty plinth, Asunción

  Asunción steam train

  López’s navy, Vapor Cué

  Cowboys on the battlefield at Humaitá

  Ruins of Jesuit church, Humaitá

  ‘Micawbers’ Shop’, Humaitá

  Aché woman breast-feeding a monkey (Reportaje al Pais, Paraguay)

  Aché chief

  Nurse Baker

  Maria and Hein Braun

  Jorge Halke and family

  Dr Enrique Wood

  ‘Don Nigel’ Kennedy

  Guaranís being led into slavery

  The Basilica, Trinidad

  From the reducción of Trinidad, views over the Jesuit Republic

  The trencito, Puerto Casado

  Train carrying soldiers to the front line during the Chaco War (South American Pictures)

  Bolivian machine-gun nest in a bottle-tree

  The revered battleground, Boqueron

  Line drawings

  Paraguayan soldier, c.1865 (University of Sydney Library)

  Cepo Uruguayo torture (Luis Agüero Wagner/Reportaje al Pais, Paraguay)

  The death of Francisco Solano López (Luis Agüero Wagner/Reportaje al Pais, Paraguay)

  Unless otherwise attributed, all the illustrations are from the author’s collection.

  Every effort has been made to contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be glad to make good in future editions any errors or omissions brought to their attention.

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank the following for their help with this book.

  In Paraguay – José and Virginia Franco, Diane and Antonio Espinoza, Robert Eaton, Rodrigo Wood, Dr Enrique Wood, Margarita Kent, Ysanne Gayet, Stuart Duncan, Arminda Girala de Morales, Bishop Ellison, Beryl Baker, Frank Fragano, Peter and Midi Graham, Jakob and Maria Unger, Geraldo Cadogan, Oscar Centurion Frontanilla, Paula Brown, Eddie and Sonia Mueller, Gundolf Niebuhr, Hein and Maria Braun of Loma Plata, Alberto Yanosky, the Halke family of Nueva Germania, Nancy Cardozo, Ian and June Martin, Angus Martin, Carlos Yegros, Dr Sergio Burgos, Lucy Yegros, Silvia Caballero, Cord Kelly, Federico Robinson, Dianny Elizeche of Paula’s Tours, Brian Condon, José Luis Gadea Miguel (of Spain), Sergio Caceres Mercado, Guillermo Peroni, Father Feehan and Marcelino Godoy Vera of Nueva Londres.

  In Argentina – Michael and Judy Hutton. It was w
ith them that my passion for South America – its people, its landscapes and its wildlife – all began.

  In Britain – Eliza Aquino at the Paraguayan Embassy, Andrew Nickson of Birmingham University, John Renfrew, Ian Savile (my uncle), Georgina Capel, Andrew Roberts, Hugh and Lulu Williams, Kate Wykes, Diego de Jesus Flores-Jaime of King’s College (London), Bishop Douglas Milmine, Michael Kerr and his colleagues on the Daily Telegraph travel desk and Tim Murray-Walker of Journey Latin America. I would also like to thank those who’ve read through the script and who’ve offered their own invaluable suggestions and improvements – in particular, Mark Wordsworth and my father, Dr T.M.D. Gimlette. Perhaps most of all I am indebted to Roger and Maria-Cristina Freeman of the Anglo-Paraguayan Society; although they knew that what I’d write about Paraguay wouldn’t always make comfortable reading, they have not hesitated to provide generous support at every stage – whether by means of contacts, literature or advice. Any errors in this book are made in spite of their best efforts to educate me and must therefore be entirely mine.

  I am grateful to Vintage for permission to reproduce parts of Graham Greene’s Travels With My Aunt and Ways of Escape, and to Curtis Brown, on behalf of the Estate of Gerald Durrell, for permission to quote from The Drunken Forest by Gerald Durrell (© 1956 Gerald Durrell). Some of the episodes in this book first appeared in The Spectator.

  None of this, however, would have been possible without the support and encouragement of my wife, Jayne. She has indulged me at every stage; seeing this book through several drafts, offering hours of brilliant editing and generally putting up with the ‘widowhood’ that comes of being a writer’s spouse. It is to her that this book is dedicated, with all my love.

  Introduction

  ‘An island surrounded by land’, wrote Roa Bastos of his country, Paraguay. For me, it is a remarkable observation not so much because it is true but because it comes from a Paraguayan. Throughout the travels described in this book, I met few Paraguayans who saw their country in relative terms; for most, there was, quite simply, no other world than their own.

  As I travelled around Paraguay, I began to appreciate the scale of its insularity. It sits at the heart of a continent but not on the way to anywhere else. Bounded by Brazil, Argentina and Bolivia, it is a country nearly twice the size of the United Kingdom but with only a tenth of its population. This puts it among the most sparsely populated countries in the world. In the outer margins of the country there is virtually no population at all, and these, I suppose, are its oceans. They are even described in the language of the sea, with ‘islands’, ‘coasts’ and ‘bays’.

  I set out in all directions from the capital, Asunción, and every journey ended at forbidding natural frontiers: poisonous jungles, boiling rivers, deserts or endless, enervating marshes. In the whole country there are only two all-weather airports and much of what’s landed still comes by boat along a great river, the Río Paraguay. Despite thousands of kilometres of frontier there are but a handful of viable entry-points. Paraguay is not merely isolated, it is almost impenetrable. Small wonder that it has become a refuge to Nazis, cannibals, strange sixteenth-century Anabaptists, White Russians and fantastic creatures that ought long ago to have been extinct.

  In their more flamboyant moments, the Paraguayans describe their landlocked nation as ‘South America’s Switzerland’. In truth, it is its Cinderella. A third of its people live below the poverty line, and until comparatively recently, drinking water was sold from mule carts on the streets, even in Asunción. Only 11 per cent of the roads are paved and the telephone system is so haunted that nowadays there are twice as many mobile phones as there are land lines. It is a young country too; 40 per cent of the population is under fourteen. Few of them will have heard of Switzerland, one in ten of them will get no education at all. Nor are there Alps. At its highest, Paraguay never climbs more than 840 metres out of the savannah. On a sober analysis, the most that Paraguay and Switzerland have in common is a dearth of sea water.

  I realised that, for all its difficulties, Paraguay had never ceased to surprise (and sometimes alarm) those around it. I realised too that there was much explaining to be done; isolation has encouraged lively eccentricity. Paraguay is the greatest importer of Scotch per capita in the world and yet few Paraguayans drink it. It is the greatest exporter of electricity and yet a sizeable proportion of its people still live by slash-and-burn. There can be few other countries whose national collections include a Tintoretto (Iacopo Robusti) and yet where there are men surviving by the bow and arrow. It is the only country on the continent that still officially speaks the language of its original inhabitants, the Guaraní. Here, perhaps, the Paraguayans are at their most impenetrable. Parents, for example, might speak to each other in Guaraní but will expect their children to address them respectfully – in Spanish.

  Less surprisingly, their insularity has given the Paraguayans a powerful sense of intimacy. Although I was always treated with embarrassing kindness, I was seldom regarded as anything other than a curiosity, an outsider. Paraguayan patriotism is about the only commodity that is limitless. Even the word ‘Guaraní’ resonates through society, in the names of boats, buses, hotels, the currency and the national fizzy drink. Sometimes this enthusiasm emerges as ugly nationalism but at other times it is inspirational. Asunción had its own impressionist movement at the turn of the nineteenth century, beautiful but deeply introspective. Its writers, despite their clunky foreign names – Appleton, Appleyard and Thompson – have also given the Paraguayan arts a respectable acquittal (in 1996, Roa Bastos was short-listed for the Nobel Prize for literature). On the sports field too the Paraguayans have bloodied themselves well. Seldom does an international golf or tennis championship take place without some Guaraní heroism. In the FIFA World Cup 2002, Paraguay was seeded ninth (five places above England) and took the fight all the way to the last rounds in Japan, a remarkable achievement for a David amongst so many Goliaths.

  A by-product of Paraguay’s strong kinship and oral traditions is that no one agrees on anything. History is largely a matter of opinion, which makes this book both harder and easier to write. There isn’t even agreement as to what the word ‘Paraguay’ means. Some say it is ‘the water that flows to the sea’ or ‘the water that is richly adorned’. Some think it is derived from the Guaraní for ‘crown’ or the paraquá bird (Ortolida Paraqua), or from the name of an Indian chieftain. Others, less charitably, say it refers to a group of water-pirates, the Payaguás, who once terrorised the river in their search for good scalps.

  Whatever it means, few have any reason to go to Paraguay. Even my own introduction was a matter of chance. In the countdown to the Falklands War, I’d been working on a farm in northern Argentina; Paraguay was my nearest bolt-hole. Although I would often feel excluded, I would come to love this State of Isolation.

  As I rummaged through Paraguay’s history, I realised that isolation explained much of what was otherwise inexplicable. There seemed few points at which it had connected with the outside world. In the long day of human existence, Paraguay was only noticed in the nanoseconds before midnight. Even then, the conquista of 1537 was a very different experience to the genocide endured elsewhere in the Americas. Finding themselves alone at the heart of the continent, the conquistadors bedded down among the savages and a new and peculiar race evolved. In time, the provincia of Paraguay, which was momentarily the greatest Spanish holding after Peru, slipped into obscurity.

  For centuries, the country had few visitors. Still the only way in was through the hard southern flanks of Argentina and then two months sailing up the Paraná. This long seclusion enabled the Paraguayans to experiment, to try out all the different shapes and sizes of tyranny.

  The first was an agricultural tyranny, a land of half-castes herded into work camps or encomiendas. Then, from 1609, it was a Jesuit theocracy, ruled by the ‘sword of the word’. However godly and admirable it may have been, Spain eventually saw it for what it was, an empire within an emp
ire, and in 1768 it was dismembered. Independence was then thrust upon the Paraguayans in 1811 (until then they’d never seen the point) and the chance arose for some experiments of their own.

  In 1814, God made way for a spindly agnostic in a black frock-coat who is still known as ‘The Supreme One’. For the next twenty-six years, the country was his revolutionary police state. Dr Francia ruled with genius, madness, ferocious impartiality and scrupulous honesty (he even returned his unspent salary to the treasury). In the course of his experiment, Paraguay was sealed off from the world and the peninsulares (those born in Spain) persecuted almost to extinction.

  Francia’s brand of revolutionary socialism was replaced in 1840 by a period of feudalism under the López dynasty. Though initially there were elements of revolutionary design (the Law of the Womb, 1842, was one of the first moves against slavery in the Americas), by the second generation the family’s rule was hopelessly self-serving and often just bizarre. It ended with the bloodiest war modern man has ever known: the War of the Triple Alliance 1865–70.

  Ravaged, smashed and isolated, Paraguay could boast no tidy structures in the decades that followed. The worst years were 1910 to 1912, when seven presidents came and went. By this time half the country’s land was owned by seventy-nine people. At the moment when it might have recovered, Paraguay was then entangled in another war, the Chaco War (1932–5). It would become the most destructive war of the twentieth-century western hemisphere, a fight with Bolivia over 247,000 square kilometres of desert.

  There was then almost a period of fascism. Even the chief of the Asunción police named his son ‘Adolfo Hirohito’ in anticipation of a muscular future, but it never happened. At the last minute, Paraguay changed tack, declared war on Nazi Germany and was admitted to the United Nations.

  The last of the experiments began in 1954, when General Stroessner seized power. His own vicious, ill-defined brand of totalitarianism became one of the most enduring the world has known, lasting nearly thirty-five years. By the end, Paraguayans could look back over their history and count only two years of democratic rule of law.

  It is not always easy to decide which was the consequence of the other; Paraguay’s isolation or its experiments with tyranny. Either way, its relationships with the outside world have always been distant and often tortuous. In the last century and a half, Paraguay has fought all its neighbours, on one occasion three at once. It was thrown out of the League of Nations for fighting, and even now there’s a tendency to evaluate foreign countries according to their football. It was left out of the Cold War; too self-contained for the communists and too unpredictable for the Americans (Nixon politely declined an offer of Paraguayan help in Vietnam). Its friends have tended to be its benefactors – those who’ve desperately needed its vote: the Israelis, the Taiwanese and the pre-Mandelan South Africans. Everyone else has left it to its isolation.