Alfredo Stroessner

Biography

Alfredo Stroessner was born in Encarnación in 1912 to a German immigrant father and a Paraguayan mother. He joined the army at 16, attended the military school in Asunción and fought in the Chaco War against Bolivia. In the 1947 civil war he sided with the Colorado Party and helped secure its victory, and in 1951 he became commander-in-chief of the army.

On 4 May 1954 he led a coup that overthrew President Federico Chávez. With the backing of the Colorado Party and the army he was the only candidate in the presidential election that July and took office on 15 August 1954. He soon placed the country under a state of siege, renewed almost without break until 1987, and was re-elected seven times between 1958 and 1988 in contests that were openly rigged. The 1967 constitution and a 1977 amendment allowed him to stay in office indefinitely.

His regime relied on the army, the police and Colorado militias to crush opposition. Thousands were imprisoned and tortured, several thousand were killed and hundreds disappeared, and Paraguay took part in Operation Condor, the coordinated repression by South American military governments. Firmly anti-communist, he enjoyed close ties with the United States for much of his rule, while Paraguay gave refuge to Nazi fugitives such as Josef Mengele.

On 2 and 3 February 1989 General Andrés Rodríguez, long his closest associate, overthrew him in a coup. Stroessner went into exile in Brazil, where he lived until his death in Brasília in August 2006. The discovery in 1992 of the police files known as the Archives of Terror documented the abuses of his government.