Graham Green in Paraguay by Richard Greene

‘If shit was worth money the poor would be born without arses.’

- Chuchu  Martinez-


About this time [in the late sixties], Greene was considering a visit to Paraguay, a repressive country with no industry to speak of, apart from smuggling. One of its distinctions was that its primary language was not Spanish or Portuguese, but Garani. He had been interested in the place for almost forty years, as around 1929 he had met the social reformer and historian R. B. Cunninghame Graham, who wrote of the Jesuit reducciones in Paraguay, a religious and social experiment that survives in modern memory through the film The Mission.

In the early seventh century, the Society of Jesus attempted to create what amounted to an indigenous republic among the Guarani of north-east Paraguay. By 1732, about 140,000 people lived in communes with shared ownership of most possessions. The Jesuits assigned just two priests to each of thirty missions, which would have an average population of 4500, so they had little power of compulsion – the Guarani lived in these places by choice. The Jesuits, of course, worked to make Catholics of the Guarani; they also encouraged the development of a rich, musical, artistic, and technical culture. For a time they were successful in protecting the Guarani from slavers, but were finally overmatched, as many thousands were abducted and forces to work in Brazil. The priests were expelled and the reducciones destroyed; Cunninghame Graham called it, rather romantically, ‘A Vanished Arcadia.’ Having made an enemy of the Portuguese government, The Jesuit order was suppressed by Romein 1773, although it continued to exist vestigially in Russia and a few other places, before being revived in 1814. The history of the reducciones took on an enormous importance in the evolution of  Catholic social thought, and Graham Green in particular gave a good deal of consideration to it. He longed for a non-Marxist alternative  to capitalism that would be respectful of indigenous peoples, and the reducciones contained the seed of such a thing.


In 1938, he had pitched a book about Paraguay to his agent. From 1932 to 1935, the country had fought its neighbor Bolivia, another landlocked country, over possession of the desolate Chaco region, thought to have oil reserves, and control over the rivers that would, with Argentina’s cooperation, give access to the sea. It was a dire conflict in which nearly 100,000 people died. Paraguay won, partly owing to the support of Argentina, but was internally riven with coups and revolutions. At the time, Green saw in Paraguay’ the totalitarian state transported to the center of South America.’

And he was right. A civil war  fought in 1947 saw the deaths of another fifty thousand people and the emergence of the right-wing Colorado Party as the dominant force in the country. In 1954, General Alfredo Stroessner, afterwards known as ‘El Excelentisimo’, seized control and ruled as dictator for thirty-four years. His regime was nationalist, corrupt, and repressive, and it maintained a large force of paramilitary killers. Since it had democratic pretensions and hunted down possible communists, the regime enjoyed American support. He had no real policy platform, and ran the country on the basis of what one historian has called ‘neo-sultanism’- he gave orders and expected them to be obeyed.

From the mid-1970s, Paraguay was a very active participant in ‘Operation Condor’ along with Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Brazil, and later Peru and Ecuador. This secret cross-border arrangement, backed by the CIA, facilitated the pursuit, torture, and killing of supposed subversives. In 1992, an enormous cache of records now known as the ‘Archives of Terror’  was discovered in Asuncion, the Paraguayan  capital, documenting the deaths, disappearances, illegal detention, or torture of hundreds of thousands of people through-out Latin America. Some of these documents were later used in the prosecution of Augusto Pinochet, dictator of Chile from 1973 to 1990. The Truth and Justice Commission/Commission for Historical Memory of Paraguay found that under Stroessner 19,862 people were detained illegally, 19,722 tortured, and 459 murdered or disappeared. It is hard to deny the dictator’s close involvement in all of this, as his summer residence near Ciudad del Este, known as  the ‘house of horrors’, was understood to be a center for torture, human remains were discovered there, under the floor of the bathroom, in 2019.

Green arrived in Buenos Aires in mid-July 1968 and found himself treated like a film star. Pursued by the press and by amorous women. He planned to travel up the Parana river, which formed a boundary between the countries, to Asuncion, but he was delayed two weeks trying to organize his passage.

 

His main contact in Argentina was his publisher and translator Victoria Ocampo, whom he had first met in 1938 and for whom he had a considerable fondness though they seldom saw each other. A leading figure in South American letters, she owned two houses, now UNESCO sites, one in San Isidro outside Buenos Aires and the other in Mar del Plato, to which she welcomed many authors and intellectuals, including Rabindranath Tagore and Albert Camus. She had a mystical bend, with interest in the Gospels, Dante, Buddhism, and the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, and this combination led her to pursue social justice and, especially, women’s rights. An opponent of Juan Peron, who she regarded as a fascist she had been imprisoned for a month in 129053 as the police tried, without evidence, to connect her with a bomb attack on the leader.

At the time of Greene’s visit in 1968, Argentina was under the authoritarian rule of General Juan Carlos Ongania, and there was unrest in the country. The northern state of Tucuman was near insurrection, largely over wages in the sugar industry; in the absence of labor leaders, parish priests led the protests. At the same time, the Montonero rebel group, consisting of Catholics, socialists, and left-wing  Peronistas, pursued a small-scale urban insurgency, and would make international headlines two years later by  kidnapping and killing a former president, Pedro Eugenio Aramburu; this group became a special target of right-wing Peronistas once the Dirty War started in 1974.

Ocampo arranged for Greene to spend an evening with a ‘clandestine’ group of young Catholic revolutionaries, whom he thought naïve and in love with theories. However, some of what they said did get his attention. They told him that in Paraguay opponents of the regime had been flung from planes and that their bodies, with hands bound, had been known to wash up on the Argentine bank of the Parana –he did not know whether to believe them. This was early evidence of the death flights which were later common practice in several South American countries. The best-known victim of a death flight was the Argentine chemist Esther Ballestrino, a very good friend of Jorge Bergoglio, the future Pope Francis.

Greene was struck by the young people’s devotion to Camilo Torres, a Colombian priest and sociologists who had joined a group of rebels and been killed in a skirmish in 1966. He is now regarded as one of the pioneers of liberation theology, which sought to reconcile the demands of the Gospel with a Marxist critique of class relations, but it is actually a very loose term, and can include quite traditional thinking about doctrine, a gradual approach to social reform, and a commitment to non-violence. Because Father Torres took up arms, his legacy is controversial. There are many other priests who joined revolutionary movements or endorsed them, but Torres stands out partly because he could turn a praise: “I took off my cassock to become more truly a priest’: ‘The duty of every Catholic is to be a revolutionary’; The duty of every revolutionary is to make a revolution’ ; ‘The Catholic who is not a revolutionary is living in mortal sin.’ Greene spoke of him as ‘The Catholic equivalent of Che Guevara’, but he had little hope for the struggle such men were waging. Torres lodged in Greene’s imagination and was part of the inspiration for the rebel priest Father Rivas in his next novel, The Honorary Consul, also set largely in Paraguay. Greene told Bernard Diederich that Torrres was a ‘romantic’ figure and so somewhat different than Father Rivas’, Nonetheless, had there been no Torres, there would have been no Rivas.

Greene finally got on a steamboat on 1 August 1968 for the 1300 kilometer  river voyage north to Asuncion, a journey with its absurd aspect: among the passengers was a Hungarian plastics manufacturer trying to find a buyer for two million drinking straws. Greene worked him into the story. The five-day journey provided the backgrounds for an encounter between Henry and Tooley’s father, a CIA operative obsessed with his own bladder. Indeed, the comic and pathetic elements of his novel at times mask an underlying horror at the political; situation of Paraguay. Sailing north, he looked upon the fallen walls of the reducciones on either side of the river as if they contained the lost promise of justice and peace.

Arriving in Asuncion for a three-week stay, he had a brief encounter with the press but was then left alone. He met the British ambassador, who told him that artists accepted certain rules of censorship here and must not openly criticize the United States. Greene noted that such restraints were intolerable to the leading Paraguayan writer, Augusto Roa Bastos, a magic realist who spent most of his career in exile. Greene received a letter from Stroessner saying he was ‘gratified’ that the novelist was there in time for his inauguration to a new term as president and offering him any help he could –he had no idea the Englishman was about to embarrass him much as he had recently embarrassed the President for Life of Haiti.

Greene did meet members of the government but was more interested in the activities of the Jesuits, who were trying to create a new kind of Catholicism in Paraguay and encouraging the formation of peasant cooperatives. He admired these priests, but again had little hope of them succeeding. It was dangerous work in a right-wing dictatorship, as the Brazilian Archbishop Dom Helder Camara put it: ‘When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they’re poor, they call me a communist.’ In 1969, the police invaded a church in Asuncion in search of radical Jesuits and beat up some elderly priests, an act for which the Minister of the Interior was excommunicated. For obvious reasons, the regime preferred the traditional clergy of monsignors and army chaplains, who, in the midst of a malnourished country, specialized in grace after meals.

Paraguay had a superficial air of peace, which would suit the dream-like but menacing conclusion of his novel. The flowers of the capital alone were intoxicating. He came upon a large old house, which later provided the setting for the last section of his novel. It had a garden, sweet-smelling with jasmine and roses. Oranges fell to the ground and lay un-gathered. There were also lemon, grapefruit, and palm trees in this Eden of privileges. It could be purchased for 3000 pounds and the necessary servants employed for just 40 per month. Greene later framed his article on Paraguay with descriptions of this house. It stood as a temptation. One could end one’s life as a lotus eater in a country without  income tax and in such a house. The additional cost would be bearable – just living in a military dictatorship: ‘Only 150 men in the police station cells to forget and the children dying of malnutrition – no evil comparable at all to the wholesale massacres in Biafra and Vietnam. Perhaps if one were sufficiently fond of beef . . . .’