Carlos Miranda’s short, well-written book on the Alfredo Stroessner regime in Paraguay is a welcome addition to the growing literature on Latin America’s military governments. During the writing of it, Stroessner fell from power, which allowed Miranda both to bring his subject to a definite conclusion and to snatch a peek at immediate post-Stroessner developments. The reader thus gets a panoramic view of the origins, development, climax, decline, and fall of an amazing thirty-five-year dictatorship.
Miranda’s basic thesis is that Paraguay’s authoritarian culture—the product of centuries of political experience—tends to make dictatorship there a common phenomenon. This makes him cautious about predicting success for attempts at democracy. What made Stroessner unique, in Miranda’s view, is not that his government was so authoritarian, but that it lasted for such a long time. Dietatorship may be frequent in Paraguay, but dictators tend to come and go all the time. Miranda intends to explain how Stroessner managed to perpetuate himself in power for more than three decades, and he devotes separate chapters to the regime’s organization, ideology, and policies.
Miranda’s work is accessible to the specialist and the intelligent layperson. It provides not only an overview of the Stroessner regime but also a good introduction to the basics of Paraguayan politics. What it does not do is systematically compare Stroessner’s Paraguay with contemporary military dictatorships in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay. Miranda’s is a purely descriptive work; it will be for others to fit it into a theory-building study.
