‘Victims’ of Democracy : Dictators: A Vanishing Latin Breed

Opposition politician Miguel Abdon Saguier was jailed for 24 hours last month after leading a protest march. He was not charged with any offense, and when he went home, a watcher went with him.

The watcher, an earnest young man in a blue uniform, stood in the rain across the street from Saguier’s suburban home and took down in his notebook the license numbers of arriving cars.

To Paraguayans, the watcher is a neighborhood fixture as unremarkable as a lamppost. Gen. Alfredo Stroessner, a tough former artillery officer who is one of the world’s most durable dictators, has watched his enemies with unflagging resolve for 32 years.

Wearing Thin

Intimidation is a trademark of Stroessner’s rule, but it is wearing thin in a country now openly seeking political change. Despite the watcher outside, a procession of well-wishers knocked at Saguier’s door that gray afternoon.

Street protests against Stroessner, highly unusual when they began last March, have become commonplace. Students, workers, opposition parties, businessmen, churchmen and dissidents within the ruling party have begun to demand a democratic opening. Suddenly, in his seventh term as president, Stroessner is a dictator on the defensive.

He is not alone. In Chile, stiff-necked Gen. Augusto Pinochet is also confronted by broad-based civilian opponents seeking a transition to democracy.

Stroessner, 73, and Pinochet, 70, cherish power and have resolved to keep it. Indeed, it is their longevity, their personal style of governing and their unbending resistance to change that make Stroessner and Pinochet such anomalies in Latin America today.

They are joined, at the other end of the political spectrum, by Fidel Castro, who has been Cuba’s one-man band since 1959. Castro will be 59 in August, and the pressures that jostle his aging revolution are more subtle than the street demonstrations challenging Stroessner and Pinochet. After nearly three decades of grueling sacrifice, Castro’s Marxist economic model demands still more sacrifice.

Stroessner and Pinochet, anti-communist zealots, and Castro, as fanatic as ever in his anti-imperialism, are the sole survivors among Latin America’s long-lived dictators, a breed that once flourished.

Significantly, because of a major shift in U.S. policy, in both Paraguay and Chile the dictators’ democratic opponents count the Reagan Administration as a key supporter in the quest for change. Hard-line anti-communism no longer offers a shield from American disquiet with dictatorship.

“We see the United States as an ally in the search for democratic government,” Gabriel Valdez, president of Chile’s largest opposition party, said not long ago. “It can no longer be said that the U.S. is supporting authoritarian governments. There has been a very positive change.”

Aldo Zucolillo, owner of the newspaper ABC Color, which Stroessner shut down for good in 1984, said, “The presence of a concerned American Embassy is absolutely fundamental to the democratic opposition here.”

As object lessons in control and survival, the old-time dictators are joined by a remarkable Mexican political party that is among the longest-ruling in the world. The Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI as it is known by its Spanish initials, is a democratic giant to its majority supporters, a mask for dictatorship to its growing number of opponents.

Unaccustomed pressure is being brought to bear on the PRI, as it is on the dictators. Most of the pressure comes from within, the result of economic decline. But some comes from Washington, where U.S. officials have been publicly critical of the PRI’s grip on power.

Authoritarian Decline

In their concentration of power, the three one-man rulers and the monolithic PRI have withstood a historic turning of the Latin American political clock toward democracy. All are textbook examples of an authoritarianism that was once the Latin American rule and is now the exception.

A decade ago, there were only five democratically elected governments in Latin America. Now there are 14, and almost 90% of the hemisphere’s 400 million people live under some form of democratic system.

Today, the opponents of the remaining dictators win headlines; sometimes they win skirmishes. But thus far Stroessner, Pinochet, Castro and the PRI have won all the wars.

Of the dictators, Castro is not seriously threatened. But from the outside looking in, persistent unrest in Chile and Paraguay evokes the tumult that so quickly toppled the entrenched Duvalier family dynasty in Haiti earlier this year. Robert E. White, a former U.S. ambassador to Paraguay, told an American television interviewer recently that the fall of Stroessner “is a question of months.”

Democratic Task

In Chile and Paraguay, however, on the dictators’ home ground, government opponents struggle along a trail to change that is uphill, and characterized by detours, dead ends and violence. The task of the democratic opposition is more difficult than simply ousting a dictator: It is to replace him with an elected successor.

Stroessner, whose current presidential term runs until 1988, and Pinochet, whose mandate under a disputed constitution lasts at least until 1989, both seem able to survive far greater pressure than their opponents have yet mustered.

“The search in Paraguay is for peaceful change; no one expects it will be either short or easy,” said Msgr. Jorge Livieres Banks, the Roman Catholic auxiliary bishop of Asuncion and spokesman for Paraguayan bishops concerned with what they call “the delicate situation.”

The old-fashioned dictators enforce stability with Draconian security laws and free-swinging repression. In the past month, ferocious-looking troops, their faces painted black, have repeatedly raided Santiago slums. Here in Asuncion, riot police recently depleted stocks of tear gas untouched for 15 years to disperse opposition protesters. In Santiago, a nightly curfew begins at 2 a.m. In Asuncion, meetings of three or more people, even in private homes, must end by 1 a.m.

‘Old Nazi Movies’

“Things happen here that you only see in old Nazi movies,” said Humberto Rubin, owner of a lonely, precarious, often-harassed radio station that dares challenge the Stroessner regime.

The PRI’s historic flexibility in the pursuit and exercise of power contrasts sharply with a single-minded righteousness shared by the trio of strongmen. With unshakable conviction, they believe that absolute power and unceasing vigilance are necessary safeguards against national disaster being plotted, as the case may be, by communists or imperialists. For all three, foreign enemies are near and necessary evils, reinforcing the need for continued authoritarianism as the only alternative to national catastrophe.

“The hatred-filled bravado with which the agitators of Marxism seek to provoke confrontation and class struggle among the Chilean people has not escaped our memory,” Pinochet said with massive understatement in a recent nationwide address.

In Mexico, the army casts no political shadow, but the armed underpinning of the three anachronistic strongmen is as unmistakable as it is essential. All three rest ultimately on support from armed forces they have painstakingly molded in their own image.

New Cuban Army

Castro created a whole new Cuban army in defeating the one that collapsed around dictator Fulgencio Batista. Pinochet won his commission in the professional and highly disciplined Chilean army in 1933. By then, Stroessner was already a battle-tested subaltern in Paraguay’s Chaco War with Bolivia. When Stroessner moved to the riverside presidential palace here in 1954, Dwight D. Eisenhower was in the White House and the Dodgers were in Brooklyn. Two-thirds of today’s 3.6 million Paraguayans were not alive when Stroessner became a general in 1950. There are graying Paraguayan colonels who were teen-age cadets when Stroessner became commander in chief after his 1954 coup d’etat.

Politically, Stroessner and Castro rely on obedient and well-organized political parties, one bourgeois, one Marxist, to assert a democratic facade without democratic substance.

Cuba’s Communist Party is elitist, accepting only about 5% of the population. Paraguay’s Colorado Party, like Mexico’s PRI, is a mass movement, counting 1.2 million members, a full one-third of the population. A Paraguayan cannot get a government job or serve in the armed forces without a party membership card.

“Why talk about changing the president while he is still alive?” asked Eustacio Lezcano Molina, a Colorado deputy in Paraguay’s tame Congress. “He has satisfied the party program and the desires of the people all these years.”

Corruption a Tool

In its cronyism, Paraguay’s governing system parallels the PRI. As in Mexico, institutionalized corruption is a powerful Paraguayan tool of control. The Cuban Communist Party is an echo of a Soviet model whose corruption so troubles the Kremlin’s new generation of leaders. Chile’s public administration, by contrast, is the most efficient and most honest in Latin America.

Pinochet and Castro, both workaholics, are indifferent to the material benefits of power. Stroessner, who enjoys fishing, chess, a weekly poker session and victories of a local soccer team called Libertad, is a rich man but without great ostentation. Not so some of his political and military aides. A former son-in-law is a dashing man about town in a white Rolls-Royce convertible. There are $1,000-a-month generals in Paraguay who live in houses worth close to a million dollars.

Of the three, Pinochet dissembles the least. He hates politicians of every stripe--Communists the most--and he doesn’t care who knows it.

At a recent news conference in Santiago, he defended the stand he has taken in the “war between Marxism and democracy” by saying, “The traitors would sell their mothers in order to gain power.”

Chile’s Democratic Fame

Pinochet’s rule is without precedent in modern Chile. He has governed for nearly 13 years, far less than the other two but longer than any other president in the history of Chile, a country renowned for the vivacity of its democratic institutions.

Castro and Stroessner are dictators who succeeded dictators. Paraguay has never known democratic rule.

Cuba, in its quest for political and economic independence, has exchanged American hegemony for Soviet hegemony. Pinochet particularly, but Stroessner, too, endures more public criticism of his rule in any given week than is heard in Cuba in a year.

Castro’s is the most closely held government in the hemisphere, the only one without organized opposition, and the only one that, in the Russian style, denies its citizens the privilege of travel abroad.

Of the surviving dictators, it is Stroessner who most closely embodies the Man on Horseback stereotype. Paraguay is poor, landlocked, among the most isolated of the South American republics. An Indian language, Guarani, ranks with Spanish as the official national language, but it is the Spanish-speakers, both white and mestizo (mixed Hispanic and Indian), who have historically wielded economic and political power.

History of Tumult

Paraguayan history is long on tumult, short on stability. In the 19th Century, while the United States was caught up in the Civil War, Paraguay, under a dictator, was devastated in a prolonged war against the combined forces of Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. The dictator, Francisco Solano Lopez, is revered today as a national hero.

By the count of one Stroessner supporter, Solano Lopez’s 20th-Century countrymen fought three dozen revolutions and installed 39 presidents between 1904 and 1936. Stroessner has changed all that. He brought stability and economic development to a country that had never known much of either.

Colorado loyalist Lezcano Molina recalled that “when the president took office, the country had few paved roads; even in the capital, there were no sewers or any running water; electricity was generated by burning wood.”

Starting from a low base, Paraguay’s growth record, spurred in the 1970s by collaboration with Brazil in construction of Itaipu, the world’s largest dam, has been among the best in the region. Today, Asuncion is a pleasant city with a population approaching 1 million, with services that work and trolley cars that run on time.

Demands for Reform

The boom is over, though. The economy has registered no growth in the past year, fueling widespread demands for economic reform and political change resisted by the government gerontocracy.

Ricardo Caballero, a Paraguayan historian and prominent government critic, said: “In the Space Age we are governed by men who shared a war together a half century ago in the times of Hitler and Mussolini. They are too old to change.”

Demands for reform are strongest from a middle class born amid the development engendered by Stroessner’s stability. In short, Paraguay has become too modern-minded for the one-man rule that made modernization possible.

Angel Roberto Seifart, a dissident Colorado legislator with impeccable party credentials, said: “After so much chaos and anarchy, some sort of authoritarianism was necessary to bring stability. That is what Gen. Stroessner has given us. Authoritarianism has achieved its goal. There is nothing in this country now that requires such strict authority to assure a peaceful national life. The image of the government must change so change may continue.

Civilian Candidates Urged

“Methods, style and men have been overtaken by events. It is up to us in the ruling and strongest party to make reforms. Stroessner calls us deserters, but we are faithful to the principles of the party. An ideal solution would be to have civilian candidates for the 1988 presidential elections with the president retired as a figure of historic merit.”

If domestic concerns are the paramount discomfiture of the dictators, there is fallout as well from a change born on the eve of this decade. Democracy is fashionable in Latin America. Dictatorship is not. Not even Washington’s coldest warriors wept at the fall of such anti-communist stalwarts as Haiti’s Jean-Claude Duvalier and the Philippines’ Ferdinand E. Marcos.

In one country after another, the armed forces, which historically have embodied Latin America’s strong-arm heritage, have retreated in honor or disgrace to the barracks.

“For the first time ever, the exceptions to the democratic tide in Spanish-speaking America can be counted on the fingers of one hand,” President Reagan told Spanish business leaders a year ago. “They number four. Two, Paraguay and Chile, have entrenched military rule; the two others, Cuba and Nicaragua, are Communist tyrannies.”

Vanishing Generals

All the military governments that ruled collegially--that is, where the presidents were more representatives of their institutions than leaders in their own right--are gone. The Brazilian generals yielded to civilian rule in 1985 after 20 years, the Peruvians in 1980 after 12, the Uruguayans in 1985 after 12, the Argentines in 1983 after seven.

It would be imprudent to suggest that the generals have left for good. Their political history runs too deep for that in virtually every country. In the past, economic distress of the sort so widespread in Latin America today, security concerns, and attempts by elected civilians to control arrogant military establishments have all triggered intervention.

Still, for the moment, at least, it is the democrats’ turn, and there are not many among their countrymen who now publicly lament the generals’ passing.

The likes of Nicaragua’s Anastasio Somoza and Argentina’s Jorge R. Videla are memories reviled by their successors. Stroessner gave Somoza refuge, but it was flawed: Somoza was assassinated in Asuncion in 1980. Videla is serving a life term in Argentina for human rights abuses.

Elections have brought fresh air and democratic civilian leadership to countries as diverse as Brazil and El Salvador, Peru and Guatemala, Uruguay and Honduras. Violence brought the Sandinistas, a contentious variation on the old theme, to Nicaragua.

Unfriendly Neighbors

Now, after the departure of Duvalier, the three surviving dictators command uptight realms of shrinking horizons. They are all masters of islands, one real, two figurative, all flanked by hostile neighbors.

After 27 years, Castro counts only Nicaragua as a real friend among hemisphere governments. More, his revolutionary credentials are tarnished by reliance on the Soviet Union. Nineteen years after Ernesto (Che) Guevara died in Bolivia spreading Castro’s gospel of rural insurgency, Cuba is not a revolutionary model that excites many Latin American radicals.

The isolation of Stroessner and Pinochet is even more striking.

In 1980, Chile’s neighbors and Paraguay’s neighbors were all military dictatorships. Now, none of them is. Peru, Bolivia, Argentina and Brazil have elected civilian presidents to join such democratic stalwarts as Colombia and Venezuela.

South America’s new democratic leaders are at no pains to hide their distaste for Pinochet and Stroessner. Paraguay, particularly, is buffeted by democratic winds fanned north by the Argentine government.

“If democracy does not flourish or affirm itself in all of Latin America, in all the South, the world will not be safe or stable for anyone,” Argentine President Raul Alfonsin said in a recent speech.

A U.S. Shift

The decades-long U.S. hostility to Castro has not eased in the Reagan years, but the official American view of Pinochet, Stroessner and Mexico’s PRI has shifted significantly.

Activist U.S. embassies under newly arrived ambassadors here in Asuncion and in Santiago figure prominently on government enemies lists.

In Paraguay, where diplomatic legations from Taiwan and South Africa are solid in the government camp, both the Argentine Embassy and the U.S. Embassy regularly anger Stroessner loyalists.

Even an invitation to a routine diplomatic reception becomes part of the national political flux, weighed to see if it is an affront or an encouragement. Stroessner did not attend a farewell for departing U.S. Ambassador Arthur Davis last year after Davis declined to cancel invitations to opposition leaders.

The present U.S. ambassador to Paraguay, Clyde D. Taylor, told a recent visitor: “The government perceives this embassy as a supporter of opposition parties because we are conspicuous in our contacts with them, although we have more contact with the government than the opposition. We want to encourage all democratic elements that seek a transition toward democracy.”

‘Odd Men Out’

In Chile, neither Pinochet’s world view nor his uncompromising monopoly of power has changed one whit since 1973, when he took power after the ouster of Marxist President Salvador Allende. But it was news last March when Secretary of State George P. Shultz, for the first time, publicly termed Chile a dictatorship, referring to it and Paraguay, Cuba and Nicaragua as “the odd men out.”

The U.S. ambassador to Chile, Harry G. Barnes Jr., said in a recent interview: “We have to be as clear as we can about what we stand for--democracy and human rights.”

In Mexico, nationalists are fuming at the recent observation by Elliott Abrams, assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, to the U.S. Senate that the PRI benefits from “continual vote fraud.”

“The charges of fraud, of course, have led to serious questions about the quality of Mexican democracy,” Abrams said.

For many years, the United States made no comment on Mexico’s internal politics: The PRI meant welcome stability. A new, more critical look has come about because of the Mexican economic shambles, the unchecked flight of Mexicans to the United States, and the disarray of the cross-border fight against drugs. American conservatives also chafe at Mexican criticism of U.S. policy in Central America.

Mexican Hackles Raised

The revised official American view of the PRI seems more rhetorical than substantive, but it has been enough to raise Mexican hackles. PRI spokesman Jose Diaz Redondo told Times correspondent Dan Williams in Mexico City:

“We see what happened in Haiti and the Philippines. The U.S. has intervened here before.”

There are more than bugles and flowers to the new U.S. activism. Nicaragua sticks in the American craw. A procession of U.S. presidents marched too long with anti-communist West Pointer Somoza, the reasoning goes. When the Jimmy Carter Administration belatedly withdrew American support in 1979, Somoza collapsed.

By then, though, the strongest elements in a nationwide Nicaraguan rebellion, those best able to fill the vacuum left by authoritarianism, were the radical Sandinistas. Nicaragua seesawed overnight from one brand of extremism to another. Nicaraguan democrats who battled Somoza now rally forlornly against his heirs, with U.S. assistance.

The U.S. policy goal, then, is to avoid a frying-pan-to-fire replay in Chile and Paraguay. In the American view, it is not a question of pulling the rug from under Pinochet or Stroessner but, rather, pushing firmly toward a negotiated and democratic transition.

Hope for Peaceful Change

The hope is that when change occurs, whether from political or actuarial reasons, it will be peaceful and democratic rather than violent and absolutist.

The U.S. stance is a more vigorous variation on an American theme the Chileans first heard from the Administration of former President Carter, but discomfiture is real among supporters of both Chilean and Paraguayan regimes who expected better of a conservative Republican Administration.

Officially, Paraguayans wonder aloud how their friend Ronald Reagan could allow such American efforts at destabilization.

“The Department of State will never be sufficiently purged of stupid people,” the Colorado Party newspaper Patria observed after Abrams told a press conference that less was heard in the United States of Paraguay than of Chile “because the Paraguayan democratic opposition is less organized.”

In Paraguay, history suggests that if there is an abrupt change from Stroessner it will be dictated by some other general. In a country that has never known democracy, there are no traditions or institutions to fall back on.

“Only by achieving public participation in solutions to problems do you have a good possibility of avoiding the kind of destabilization which provides fertile ground for extremists, right or left,” Taylor, the ambassador to Paraguay, said.

Chile’s Democratic Tradition

Chile is another matter. There, democratic parties boast both long tradition and experience in government. But there, too, Pinochet’s toughest and most uncompromising opponent is a proscribed but hyperactive Moscow-line Communist Party, which maneuvers politically with one hand and sponsors terrorism with the other.

Chile’s Communists are the spearhead of Marxists who historically have accounted for about 20% of the electorate. Pinochet wars unceasingly against the Communists, but many of the regime’s democratic opponents fear that the longer Pinochet’s extremism encourages polarization, the stronger the Communists will become.

“He is leading us to a civil war,” said Ricardo Lagos, leader of a non-Marxist faction of the Chilean Socialist Party. It is the same kind of thing conservatives and moderates used to say about the Allende government that Lagos once supported.

American liberals have attacked Pinochet from the outset of his rule, but now there is mounting pressure from the conservative Establishment as well.

Mark Falcoff of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, commented in a recent magazine article subtitled, “Pinochet Is Playing Into the Communists’ Hands”:

“Just because Pinochet claims to represent the only alternative to communism is no reason for others to accept the argument at face value. The issue in Chile is not whether the country can be trusted to return to democracy, but whether an open society can be nourished by a system that rests upon force and fear. Pinochet is not the first dictator to think so, but by this point in the 20th Century, the U.S. has had enough unfortunate experiences with other putative allies to know better.”

Barnes, the ambassador to Chile, said: “There is strong sentiment in the U.S. that there should be clearer and more positive progress toward a democratic transition.”

Like Asuncion’s watcher in the rain, the surviving trio of one-man rulers are lonely curiosities today, as dated as tail fins.

Cuba is a special case. The system is designed and Russian-inspected to survive Castro’s passing.

The vital question in Paraguay and Chile, though, is not when the dictators depart, but whether their moderate opponents, with U.S. backing, are able to fashion more modern and democratic alternatives in a changing hemisphere.