Paraguayan Dictator Alfredo Stroessner Exposed In Documentary

A giant statue of Paraguay’s dictator, Gen. Alfredo Stroessner, used to dominate the capital city of Asunción. Now, all that remains at the site are his steel boots. Stroessner’s monumental likeness was cut off at the ankles after he was deposed in 1989 following almost 35 years of military rule.

“It’s crazy. It’s still there,” comments filmmaker Juanjo Pereira. “It’s still there and will be there for many years.”

The people, celebrating Stroessner’s downfall, severed the head, torso and the legs of the statue. Yet, the base remains – the foundation. Perhaps that symbolism is most critical to understand from Pereira’s new documentary Under the Flags, the Sun, which played at the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival in Greece Monday night. It won the FIPRESCI critics prize in the Panorama section of the Berlin Film Festival last month, where the documentary premiered.

“It was the last [right-wing] dictatorship to fall in Latin America,” the director noted during a Q&A after the screening.

Stroessner seized power in 1954, promising “peace, progress and fraternity,” but delivering repression under the guise of virulent anti-communism. During his reign, almost 20,000 perceived political opponents were tortured, and hundreds were “disappeared.” A regime like that doesn’t invite scrutiny, limiting what footage exists. But Pereira’s research located about 120 hours of footage around the world, which became the basis for his film.

Included are newsreels, propaganda films, and some material shot by French journalists, “revealing the hidden mechanisms of power behind Stroessner’s rule,” as the Thessaloniki festival describes it. There is also footage of Stroessner visiting President Lyndon Johnson in Washington in the 1960s, where he was warmly greeted as a useful American ally in the Cold War.

Cameras didn’t document the torture of trade unionists and others in Paraguay. But, helpfully, the dictatorship did keep written records of its activities which were discovered in 1992. Those “Archives of Terror,” as they have become known, became an important source for Pereira.

“The Terror Archives is one of the most important archives in Latin America,” Pereira said. “It’s free to go [and see], and it’s there in the Ministry of Justice.”

Between the documents and grainy, mostly black-and-white imagery, the film shows how Stroessner dominated all aspects of Paraguayan life, rendering many ordinary people apparently incapable of thinking for themselves. He created a strongman’s cult of personality and surrounded himself with an obsequious court (parallels to Trump 2.0 may leap to mind, but that’s outside the scope of this documentary).

Once he reached his mid-70s, however, Stroessner seemed to lose a step and the Colorado Party he had tightly controlled shoved him aside, in favor of another military man, Andrés Rodríguez Pedotti, who had once been Stroessner’s closest confidante.

“In a way, the end of the dictatorship was not a revolutionary moment. It was a change of command,” Pereira observed. “The Colorado Party needed to change its image… It’s not the people taking power.”

Pereira described himself as a “child of democracy. I’m born after the coup d’etat [of 1989].” But fielding a question from the audience, he questioned whether Paraguay’s form of government today really represents the people.

“I don’t know if we’re living in a democracy in Paraguay,” he said. “The last election [the Colorado Party] won 80 percent [of the vote] and the government is full of Colorado people. We don’t have opposition in Paraguay. So is it a democracy? I dunno, maybe it’s up to us to understand that. Yeah, there are no more disappeared people, but we don’t have [the ability] to choose [leaders]. It’s complicated to say that this is democracy. Maybe we need to find a new way to say what is the world we’re living in now.”

Pereira suggested Stroessner has been scrubbed from his country’s history. “In school we didn’t study this period of the country. So I finished school at 18 and I didn’t even know who was this guy,” he said. “And at 20 or 21 I started to search more about this period. I started to search more about the history of cinema in Paraguay and then I found more about the dictatorship and in a way, I studied the dictatorship through the archives.”

Describing Under the Flags, the Sun, Pereira said, “The film is opening questions, proposing questions. This is my main goal.”

He added, “We know so little about this period. For me, it is like we only know fragments and the movie is about fragments… I take all these fragments and I make this sense of memory.”