#alfredo stroessner

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is known for praising his country’s 1964-1985 dictatorship and on Tuesday he also paid tribute to the late military strongman in neighboring Paraguay, calling Gen. Alfredo Stroessner “a man of vision.”

Bolsonaro, a far-right ex-army captain, made the comments during a ceremony at the Itaipu hydroelectric dam on the South American countries’ shared border. At his side was Paraguayan President Mario Abdo Benitez, whose father served as Stroessner’s private secretary for 25 years. Stroessner ruled Paraguay with an iron fist from 1954 to 1989.

Construction of the hydroelectric project, one of the world’s biggest, was completed in 1984 during Stroessner’s rule. It is jointly administered by the two nations.

“All of this was possible because a man of vision, a statesman who knew perfectly well that his country, Paraguay, would need to grow. So here is my tribute to honor Gen. Alfredo Stroessner,” Brazil’s president said, speaking on the Paraguayan side of the dam.

In 1995, Paraguay’s Congress passed a bill calling Stroessner’s 35-year rule a dictatorship. Victims of human rights violations were allowed to sue for damages. Stroessner was overthrown by a coup in February 1989 and went into exile in Brazil’s capital, where he died on Aug. 16, 2006, at age 93.

Some major events that occurred on February 3.

Photo One: A German U-boat sinks the SS Dorchester. Of the 902 men on board, only 230 survive, 1943.

Photo Two: Known as The Day Music Died, a plane carrying Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson crashes near Clear Lake, Iowa, killing all on board, 1959.

Bo Hi Pak offered a CAUSA perspective of the Godist or Moonist Kingdom, when speaking of Paraguayan dictator General Alfredo Stroessner, Pak said: “I believe he’s a special man, chosen by God to run his country.”

quote from Christianity and Crisis, October 28, 1985, by Frederick Clarkson

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More recently, Moon has been buying large tracts of agricultural lands in Paraguay. La Nacion reported that Moon had discussed these business ventures with Paraguay’s ex-dictator Alfredo Stroessner. [Nov. 19, 1996]

http://consortiumnews.com/archive/moon1.html

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A report by Paraguay’s Truth and Justice Commission states that, under Gen. Stroessner, at least 423 people were executed or “disappeared”, 18,722 tortured and 3,470 forced into exile. The bodies of only 37 of those murdered by the dictatorship have been found to date, of which just four have been identified.

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Stroessner was a philanderer who engaged in extramarital affairs before and during his presidency. According to many sources, some of his affairs were with teenage girls as young as 13, and he may have fathered over 30 illegitimate children. The affairs were divulged after his downfall, further tarnishing his image.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfredo_Stroessner

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Nevertheless, Rogelio Goiburú, director of reparations and historical memory at Paraguay’s Ministry of Justice, told AQ the contours of the case are clear. As many as 1,000 girls “may have been groomed and then systematically raped” during the dictatorship, he said. They tended to be between the ages of 12 to 14 and from poor families in the countryside, he said. They were taken from their homes to houses in Asunción and elsewhere, where they were held captive and subjected to abuse by senior officers in Stroessner’s government, Goiburú said.

https://www.americasquarterly.org/content/paraguays-darkest-secrets

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“El dictador Stroessner violaba a unas cuatro niñas por mes” (Dictator Stroessner raped about four girls per month)

Stroessner: La colección de amantes y su otra familia oculta (Stroessner: The collection of lovers and his other hidden families)

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https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/16/world/americas/16cnd-stroessner.html

Aug. 16, 2006

Gen. Alfredo Stroessner obituary

Gen. Alfredo Stroessner, the former president of Paraguay whose 35-year hold on power made him South America’s most enduring dictator during the cold war, died today in exile in Brazil. He was 93.

General Stroessner, a tall, husky artilleryman proud of his crisp military bearing, seized power in Paraguay in 1954, through a surgical coup that took only one life at its start: that of Roberto Le Petit, a police chief who also served as minister of agrarian reform and who was in charge of redistributing land to the poor. Soon, however, General Stroessner won American help in establishing his secret police, and hopes that his dictatorship would give way to democracy faded before a string of elections in which he faced token or no opposition and that were generally considered to be fraudulent. Today, Paraguay remains the country with the most uneven distribution of land and wealth on the planet, followed by Brazil.

Under General Stroessner, Paraguay’s security forces became so efficient at intimidating potential opposition figures that eventually fear itself — fear of arrest, torture, exile and murder — became one of his prime levers for staying in power. The country became a haven for Nazis on the run, with new passports and visas sold for a price. Among those it sheltered was Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death” who selected victims for the gas chambers at Auschwitz and conducted medical experiments on humans. 

▲ Josef Mengele; Auschwitz prisoners to be used in Josef Mengele’s experiments. LINK

In addition, hundreds of political prisoners and their families were imprisoned at concentration camps like Emboscada, about 20 miles outside the capital city of Asunción, in the 1970s.

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Martín Almada, a schoolteacher imprisoned during the 1970’s as an “intellectual terrorist,” said that General Stroessner’s legacy was “terror and corruption.” Mr. Almada’s wife died at the age of 33, after, he said, security agents played her a tape of his screams under torture. In 1992, Mr. Almada discovered a trove of government documents that came to be known as the Archives of Terror, which detailed the political arrests of thousands of Paraguayans, and unveiled the workings of Operation Condor. “Fear became our second skin,” Mr. Almada remembered.

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Paraguay’s archive of terror

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The CAUSA Kingdom

CAUSA and the Catholic Church in the 1980s

In Bolivia, Moon disciple Tom Ward and the former Hitler SS Officer, Klaus Barbie were often seen together

How Sun Myung Moon’s organization helped to establish Bolivia as South America’s first narco-state.