Latin America’s Democratic Wind Stirs Stroessner’s Foes in Paraguay

At first meeting, Domingo Laino seems an unlikely candidate to be a cause celebre. A bearded, 49-year-old economist, Laino is just rebel enough to add blue jeans when some occasions oblige him to wear jacket and tie. Yet Paraguay’s dictator, Gen. Alfredo Stroessner, considers Laino so dangerous that he is the only man who has been subjected to a permanent state of exile for the last four years. Laino’s first four attempts to return home were foiled when Paraguayan authorities turned his car back at the border and refused his flights permission to land.

His most recent effort had more serious repercussions. On June 24, Laino flew into Paraguay on an Uruguayan airliner, accompanied by three television crews, former U.S. Ambassador to Paraguay Robert E. White and a group of Argentine and Uruguayan congressmen. Paraguayan police agents met the group at the door of the aircraft.

The police kneed White in the groin and beat Laino until he fell to the ground, where they continued to kick him in the ribs. “They concentrated on the torso and avoided leaving any marks on his face,” recalled one member of the Laino party. “You could tell that Stroessner sent out the real pros.” Laino and his group were hustled back on the plane to Uruguay and emergency medical attention.

Why was Stroessner so threatened by Laino? Certainly not for his original infraction, his authorship of an unflattering book about Stroessner’s late crony, Gen. Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua. Nor could it be Laino’s power base inside the country. Laino heads a major opposition group called the Authentic Radical Liberal Party (PLRA), but it has little clout.

Since Stroessner took power in a 1954 military coup, much of Paraguay has lived under a state of siege--the longest in the hemisphere--which has sapped the strength of every political organization except Stroessner’s own Colorado Party. None of the usual institutions of democracy function well in Paraguay; the press, labor unions, universities and church groups are all kept under tight control.

But, gradually, the monolith of Stroessner’s power is beginning to shift under his feet, and the new context could give political figures like Domingo Laino a currency they lacked before. Paraguay, a landlocked country of 3 million inhabitants, is greatly influenced by its neighbors, and the democratization process in Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay has had a profound impact.

The ranks of the international club of long-term dictators have also been reduced, with the dramatic departures of Ferdinand E. Marcos from the Philippines and Jean-Claude Duvalier from Haiti, leaving Stroessner and his counterpart in Chile, Augusto Pinochet, increasingly exposed to criticism. Stroessner must also note the Reagan Administration’s shift in policy that took place with the fall of Duvalier--proclaiming a chill towards “authoritarian” as well as “totalitarian” governments.

Granted, the State Department’s denunciation of Stroessner’s goon-squad tactics against Laino was lukewarm. The Administration also gives no indication of withdrawing support for $245 million in international loans to Paraguay currently under discussion. Yet all the signs suggest that Stroessner cannot depend on the United States to back him. Military dictators are out of fashion in Washington as allies of choice; modern centrist democrats are in.

Although Stroessner shares many aspects of his current problems with Chile’s Pinochet, Paraguayan dissent is neither as violent nor as ideologically based as Chile’s. Paraguay does not have Chile’s long history as a functioning democracy or its burgeoning underground political culture; what Chileans seek to restore, Paraguayans must create. Paraguayans seem to have internalized their repression, and most of the would-be opposition exercises a kind of self-censorship.

So far, this moderation has blunted the government’s response to opposition activities. In Chile, torture, death and disappearance at the hands of government forces have been commonplace events. In Paraguay, the most common human-rights violation is arbitrary arrests, primarily against opposition parties holding peaceful public rallies. (Of 120 arbitrary arrests documented by Paraguayan human-rights organizations over 1985 and the first part of 1986, 66 of them involved members of Laino’s party, the PLRA.)

Torture is a frequent practice in Paraguay, but the security forces are more likely to use it against common criminals than against political dissidents. Opposition labor and student groups are infiltrated and taken over by government agents from within, rather than decimated by targetted assassinations as they have been in Chile. It is apparent that the Paraguayan opposition has no stomach for violence and tests its limits gingerly as a result.

This means that Paraguay’s opposition has had to invent its forms of protest as it goes along. Paraguay’s growing economic problems may accelerate the process. The country suffers from the same double-barreled crisis that afflicts most of its neighbors--a growing foreign debt and flat world commodity prices for its agricultural exports. This economic situation may be dampening public enthusiasm in South America’s new democracies, but in its old dictatorships it is fueling public protest.

The menace of unemployment gives new urgency to union demands and student movements, and erodes the support of the business community and the military. Restrictions on civil liberties that middle-class Chileans found tolerable during the boom years became unbearable when the economy collapsed in the early 1980s. Now Paraguay’s economic future looks equally grim, based on a cutoff in foreign exchange--and aggravated by the termination of the massive Itaipu’ hydroelectric construction project, which brought in millions of dollars in international financing.

Stroessner is an old man, possibly afflicted with skin cancer or more serious illnesses, presiding over a bickering, corrupt party that has never been allowed to develop second-string leadership. The question is not whether Stroessner leaves power, but when and how. At the State Department, U.S. officials are reviewing their options. In Asuncion, the opposition is rehearsing its speeches and gestures on an ever-larger scale. Domingo Laino is convalescing in Buenos Aires, trying to decide when to make his next entrance.