APPALLING NUMBERS I'VE NEVER SEEN BEFORE. I actually know a fair amount about various Latin American dictators in the past century, though far less about those of the 19th century. (I once astonished a boss at one of my odd jobs, a couple of decades ago, when I was working on a complicated computerized telex-system for a reinsurance company in Seattle, and he gave me a message which misspelled the name of General Efrain Rios Montt of Guatemala, which I corrected, and he asked me how I knew that, and I reeled off some of Rios Montt's history, and said "I read a lot"; he seemed to find this a great deal more unusual than it warranted.)

But I never knew this tidbit (second sentence):

Paraguay was an underpopulated, backwater nation the size of California, with a penchant for impossible wars that would swallow its male population in battles of dubious, if operatic, purpose. Among the worst of these was a disastrous war Paraguay waged simultaneously against Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil from 1865 to 1870, which shrank its population from 525,000 to 221,000, and left the nation with only 28,000 men.

Gollikins. Surprising that one of the neighbors didn't simply knock Paraguay off entirely.

And apparently a great place for a man to get a date.

Read The Rest Scale: 3.5 out of 5 for a not-so-nostalgic look back at the life of of the tinpot torturer, Gen. Alfredo Stroessner, one of the more disgusting and evil (out of so many choices!) Latin American dictators of the 20th.

Paraguay, incidentally, during his reign, was a splendid and welcoming home for Nazi war criminals. And, of course, Operation Condor is always worth not forgetting, as is the fact that Stroessner was a pet dictator of the U.S.; why any folks in Latin America might remember this sort of thing, amongst a thousand other legitimate grievances against the U.S., well, who could imagine?

Bananas could easily have been set in Paraguay.

John Vinocur, writing in The New York Times Magazine in 1984, offered this snapshot of Paraguay as its army goosestepped down the boulevards to celebrate General Stroessner’s 30 years in power:

“A continual state of siege over the entire period that literally places the president above the law; people with occasionally uncontrollable urges to fall into rivers or jump from planes with their arms and legs bound; serenades in front of the presidential palace featuring the ever-popular ‘Forward, My General’ and ‘Congratulations, My Great Friend’; foreign thieves, brutes and madmen hidden at a price; an economy administered so corruptly it is officially explained away as the ‘cost of peace’; a United Nations voting record on so-called key issues more favorable to the United States than any other ‘ally;’ a party newspaper that prints six front-page color pictures of the general every day.”

Those were the days, eh?