Armed opposition to the Stroessner regime in Paraguay: a review article

ABSTRACT

This review article addresses the little-known armed opposition to the Stroessner regime in Paraguay (1954–89) that remained virtually unreported during the dictatorship. It is based largely on first-hand accounts and official documents that have only recently become available. The Movimiento 14 de Mayo, led by radicals of the Liberal Party and the Frente Unido de Liberación Nacional, led by the Paraguayan communist party, together mobilized around 300 insurgents from Argentina during 1959–1962. Throughout the 1960s, the Columna Mariscal López, backed by the communist party, maintained a tenuous presence inside the country. The review shows that although substantial in scale, these insurgencies all failed. There were several reasons for this. The regime employed a harsh counter insurgency strategy of preventive repression that was adept at infiltration of movements with poor internal security. It was also skillful in manipulating nationalist sentiment against what was perceived as foreign aggression.

KEYWORDS:

• Stroessner
• guerrillas
• Movimiento 14 de Mayo
• FULNA
• counter-insurgency

An extensive literature exists on the insurgency against US-backed authoritarian governments that emerged in Latin America during the Cold War.¹ The two armed movements that succeeded in overthrowing such regimes have been richly documented – the 26 de Julio movement in Cuba² and the Sandinista movement in Nicaragua.³ Two other armed movements in Central America that ended in brokered peace agreements have also been studied in depth – the FMLN in El Salvador⁴ and the UNRG in Guatemala.⁵ By contrast, armed movements against authoritarian rule in South America were less successful and none succeeded in effecting regime change. Of these, the Ejército de Liberación Nacional in Bolivia has been most extensively researched, largely because of the involvement of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara.⁶ Armed movements have also been studied in Argentina,⁷ Peru⁸ and Uruguay.⁹ By contrast, the armed movements against President Alfredo Stroessner in Paraguay, whose authoritarian rule from 1954 to 1989 spanned the whole of the Cold War and was the longest in the history of the country, have received minimal attention. The most comprehensive comparative study of guerrilla movements in Latin America does not mention Paraguay, not even in the index.¹⁰ The main reason for this lacuna has been the paucity of information about these movements, itself the product of the culture of fear imposed during the dictatorship and self-imposed for decades thereafter.

This review article is a guide to the scarcely known accounts of the armed movements against the Stroessner regime and is based primarily on the testimony of survivors and documentation that has slowly emerged following the democratization process initiated in 1989. Three armed movements are identified – the Movimiento 14 de Mayo (1958–60) led by a sector of the main opposition Partido Liberal, and the Frente Unido de Liberación Nacional (1959–60) and the Columna Mariscal López (1961–1970), both led by the Paraguayan communist party, Partido Comunista Paraguayo (PCP). The review addresses a fundamental question: Why was armed opposition to one of the most brutal regimes in Latin America so singularly unsuccessful in generating a degree of support sufficient to enable it to pose any real threat to that regime? Although most of the accounts are primarily descriptive, they do offer important pointers for answering this question.

Armed insurrections had been commonplace during the Liberal Period in Paraguay from 1904 to 1940, yet they had almost always represented support for one or other oligarchic faction within the ruling Partido Liberal. As such, they did not represent any major threat to the established socio-economic order. Guerrilla tactics had been employed by some Paraguayan army units, known as Guerrilleros de la Muerte, against Bolivia during the Chaco War (1932–35). But it was not until the late 1950s that armed movements emerged which sought a revolutionary transformation of Paraguayan society.

Several domestic factors contributed to their appearance in the early years after the military coup that brought Stroessner to power in May 1954. In February 1958, he received 97.3% of the vote in a fraudulent re-election process in which the Colorado Party was the only legally permitted party. The urban trade union movement was crushed following a general strike in August 1958 against the onerous conditionality of one of the world’s first IMF standby agreements signed in 1957. In 1959, opposition to military control among dissidents within the ranks of the Colorado Party was also crushed. On March 12, 17 Colorado deputies from all three former factions of the party sent a note to Congress in which they protested against the repression of student demonstrators and demanded the lifting of the state of siege, an amnesty for political exiles, freedom of expression, and a new constitution. The note was accepted by the Junta de Gobierno, the ruling body of the party, on March 24 and was sent to Stroessner. In response, on April 28, the state of siege was lifted. In the following month, there were renewed student protests and street demonstrations, which culminated in violent repression by the police in late May. When the Chamber of Deputies voted by a narrow majority on May 29 to condemn police brutality, Stroessner responded by dissolving Congress, re-imposing the state of siege, and sending cavalry troops to occupy Asunción, On June 1, some 300 Colorado dissidents were arrested, most of whom were eventually forced into exile. In addition, peasant unrest in the zona central around Asunción was growing in response to the highly unequal land tenure system. A significant external factor was inspiration from the Cuban revolution that overthrew the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in January 1959. This triggered failed opposition invasions against the dictatorships of Luis Somoza in Nicaragua (May) and Leónidas Trujillo in the Dominican Republic (June). These would be followed in December by the Movimiento 14 de Mayo (M-14) in Paraguay.

The M-14 had been formed in Lanus, Buenos Aires in mid-1958 by young Paraguayan exiles from the radical wings of the Partido Liberal and the Partido Revolucionario Febrerista, supporters of the Febrerista movement that had briefly overthrown the liberals in the aftermath of the Chaco War with vague plans for social transformation (1936–37). Launched on 4 May 1959, the fifth anniversary of the coup that brought Stroessner to power in 1954, it was named after Paraguayan independence day (May 14). Its foremost leader was Juan José Rotela (1933–1960), son of a Brazilian military exile with only secondary education and who had never lived in Asunción. The other leader was Mario Esteche, whose memoirs provide a first-hand account of the movement.¹¹

The M-14 was inspired by José de la Cruz Ayala (1854–93), journalist and founder member in 1887 of the Centro Democrático, the precursor of the Partido Liberal. Ayala was one of the first politicians to express concern over the plight of the peasantry following the sales of state lands following the Triple Alliance War (1865–1870) against Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay. He argued that insurrection against an oppressive government was justified under the liberal constitution of 1870, a stance that led to his harassment and eventual exile. He became a source of inspiration for future generations of the radical faction of the Partido Liberal and in 1945 the youth wing of the party adopted his pseudonym, Alón.

Paraguayan military experience during the victorious Chaco War provided a major boost to the revolutionary morale of the M-14. It counted with the tacit support of many exiled war veterans who had supported the short-lived Febrerista movement. Esteche has harsh criticism of the complacency of the old guard leadership of the Partido Liberal who avoided any confrontation with the Stroessner regime and for whom the guerrilla warfare tactics and land reform program of the movement were anathema. Yet he skates over the movement’s own support for a botched coup attempt by the Partido Liberal, known as the Bouvier incident, on 4 November 1958. Several hundred exiles in Argentina led by Tte. Eliseo Salinas had planned to cross the border at Clorinda but were ignominiously arrested by Argentine forces after trucks taking them to the River Paraguay got stuck in the mud.

Esteche reveals without a hint of self-criticism that, in the wake of the Bouvier debacle, the invasion plans of M-14 went ahead regardless, buoyed by a mixture of idealism and naivety despite the lack of any automatic weaponry and the refusal of Fidel Castro to give material support.¹² Carlos Pastore, a respected member of the exiled leadership of the Partido Liberal had a secret meeting with Fidel Castro in Montevideo in May 1959, which only confirmed his conviction that the guerrilla incursion was doomed to fail.¹³ The subsequent refusal of the party leadership to give its full backing was a major setback for M-14.

Although around 300 exiles had travelled up from Buenos Aires and were camped around the Argentine border town of Posadas, this meant that the number of active insurgents was limited, more than anything else, by the extreme shortage of weaponry. The Paraguayan opposition also overestimated the extent and duration of antipathy inside the Argentine armed forces towards Stroessner for having given refuge to the exiled Juan Perón in 1955 and for his shift in foreign policy towards Brazil. With the tacit approval of Vice-President Isaac Rojas and army chief General Carlos Toranzo Montero, the Argentine government of Arturo Frondizi (1958–1962) had begun to give arms and training in its military camps to exiled groups of the Partido Liberal. This led to a diplomatic incident after it was revealed that weapons seized following a botched incursion on 31 March 1958 by rebels that attacked the town of Coronel Bogardo had proof marks of the Argentine armed forces.¹⁴ Although the Argentine army gave limited support to M-14, this also meant that the movement was easily monitored by its military intelligence, Secretaría de Inteligencia de Estado (SIDE). Furthermore, from mid-1959 government infiltrators were already reporting on the preparations of M-14.¹⁵

The first wave of incursions from Argentina on 12 December 1959, referred to as La gran invasión, seemed to lack any strategic objective apart from detonating a spontaneous against the regime. This attracted growing numbers of supporters on a planned march on Asunción from a secure base in the dense Ybytyruzú hills in the Departments of Caazapá and Guairá which the M-14 conceived of as a Paraguay version of the Sierra Maestra in Cuba. According to a December 26 US army dispatch from Asunción to Washington, ‘USARMA visited Puerto Embalse and Encarnación areas 23 December’ and reported that the number of insurgents involved totaled ‘no more than 250’.¹⁶ Three ill-coordinated units sought to cross the Paraná River into Paraguay at Encarnación and Capitán Meza in the south-east and Puerto President Franco in the far east. They were very poorly equipped, none took proper food rations, and the absence of radio transmitters meant that they could not communicate with each other. The unit that crossed from Posadas failed in its aim of detonating an uprising in Encarnación, Paraguay’s second city. According to the testimony of a survivor, the 12 occupants of two canoes led by Esteche and Carlos Madelaire surrendered to a Paraguayan gunboat in mid-river near Encarnación.¹⁷ The occupants of a third canoe led by Rotela avoided capture and crossed without detection at nearby San Juan del Paraná, but returned to Posadas, Argentina the same day.

A memoir by Juan Gerónimo Ventre Buzarquis, a survivor of Columna Mainumby, a 30 strong unit led by two Chaco War veterans, Blas Talavera and Tte. Brizuela, reveals the poor that crossed the river from Puerto Rico, Argentina to Capitán Meza, north of Encarnación, reveals the poor military preparedness of the movement.¹⁸ This was the only unit with a female member – Gilberta Verdún, the wife of Talavera. Problems surfaced almost as soon as it reached Paraguay. Talavera was wounded during an attack on a police station. Refusing to retreat, he had to be carried by stretcher, greatly reducing the mobility of the unit. Pursued by a large military force airlifted into the selva, and with no food rations, within four days half of the unit had deserted. Demoralized, the remaining 13 members decided to return to Argentina but were intercepted by the Paraguayan military on December 23 just as they reached the river. Five were killed, and seven, including Ventre, were arrested. Talavera managed to escape but was recaptured the next day. Denied any medical attention, he died of his wounds in a prison cell at Capitan Meza. Ventre was transferred to the Guardia de Seguridad prison in Asunción, where 152 members of M-14 were eventually held, and where daily punishment consisted of breaking rocks at the Tacumbú quarry. In mid-July 1960, 47 senior M-14 prisoners were sent to an isolated prison camp at Peña Hermosa, an island on the River Paraguay, 500 km north of Asunción, where conditions were idyllic compared with those in the Guardia de Seguridad. When Janio Quadros, an opponent of Stroessner, took office as president of Brazil in late January 1961, prisoners escaped with the aim of seeking political asylum in Brazil. A first group of six prisoners led by Rubén Ayala Ferreira fled on 23 March 1961.¹⁹ The remaining 41 prisoners broke out on April 27 and trekked north, crossing the River Apa into Brazil three days later.²⁰

The 40 members of the Columna Patria y Libertad, consisting mainly of Febreristas, who crossed in canoes from Puerto Iguazú on 12 December 1959 were divided into two groups. The first was aiming for Puerto Presidente Franco when one of its canoes capsized in mid-river, drowning some of its members. Alerted by the commotion, the Paraguayan authorities fired on survivors, killing their leader, Tte. Patricio Paraguayo Orzúzar. The second group, led by Denis Cibils and Manuel Ceferino Halley, crossed without incident to Puerto Embalse, Acaray but abandoned the original plan to attack the Fifth Region military headquarters at Puerto Presidente Stroessner (today renamed Ciudad del Este) when the group led by Orzúzar did not show at the agreed rendez-vous. Instead, they attacked the municipal headquarters at Hernandarias, briefly arresting the local mayor and police officers. They then travelled inland in commandeered vehicles to Itakyry, where the sight of spotter planes revealed that the authorities knew of their whereabouts. This forced them to abandon plans to make for the relative protection of the Ybytyruzú hills. Instead, they set off by foot back to the river where they surrendered on December 20 to troops led by General Gregorio Morínigo, son of ex-president Higinio Moríngo (1940–1948).²¹ The latter disobeyed orders from interior minister, Edgar Ynsfrán, not to take prisoners alive. Instead, some 30 prisoners were taken to Asunción and later transferred to Peña Hermosa. It was only 45 years later that two of these prisoners provided the only first-hand accounts of this column.²² Velázquez became the sole survivor of the guerrilla campaigns to achieve national office in the post-dictatorship era when he served as a senator for the Partido Liberal Radical Auténtico from 1989 to 1993.

Two other units of La gran invasion never even entered Paraguay. All members of a unit led by Gabriel Armoa that planned to cross the land border from Punto Porã to Pedro Juan Caballero in the north east of the country were all arrested and later released by the Brazilian authorities. Another unit, led by Chaco War veteran, Cpt. Modesto Ramírez, abandoned its plan to attack Pilar on the southern border and instead briefly boarded a Paraguayan warship Bahía Negra, anchored off Corrientes. But they fled when the Argentine coastguards fired on them, killing two of its members.

As Esteche readily admits, the impact of this first wave of incursions in December 1959 was ‘negative’. Apart from the heavy losses, the imprisonment of hundreds of its supporters deprived the movement of future logistical support inside the country. Nevertheless, hurried plans were made for a second wave of incursions. This hasty decision was spurred by signs of an impending rapprochement between the Stroessner regime and the military rulers of Argentine, whose antipathy towards Stroessner was now outweighed by their concern over the growing Brazilian influence in Paraguay. In addition, in January Luis Parra, a Chaco War veteran who had infiltrated the leadership of M-14, fled to Foz de Yguazú, Brazil where he briefed interior minister Ynsfrán and senior military officers on its structure and future plans.²³

On 28 April 1960, the large and unwieldy Columna Libertad led by Rotela crossed the River Paraná north of Mayor Otaño with the intention of establishing a secure base in the Ybytyruzú hills around San Joaquín. Meanwhile, a smaller Columna Resistencia led by Cpt. Modesto Ramírez crossed the river further north, attacking Carlos Antonio López. Following a skirmish at Lomas Valentinas in which they inflicted casualties on the government forces, a navy gunship forced them to retreat back across the river except for four members of this group who managed to link up with the Columna Libertad on May 8.²⁴

Rotela’s forces were now both isolated, exposed, and ruthlessly pursued by the security forces, which had been informed of the invasion plans by SIDE. The Stroessner regime declared the whole territory east of a straight line drawn north-south through Coronel Oviedo as a military zone. Within this enormous area, the army imposed arbitrary taxes on sympathizers of the Partido Liberal and the forced requisition of cattle in order to feed its troops. The diary of Rufino Marcial Arce, deputy leader of Columna Libertad, confirms that by May 7, only 9 days after crossing into Paraguay, the column was ‘without provisions’ and that by May 27 ‘half of the combatants had deserted’, leaving 30. This suggests a total figure of 60 for the original size of the column, exactly half of the inflated figure of 120 in M-14 propaganda at the time. By June 9, when the column was ‘totally disoriented’, its remaining 11 members decided to flee back to Argentina, in desperation marching by day. Arce’s diary ends on the morning of July 8, hours before he was among those killed by the security forces at Puerto Ordóñez on the banks of the River Paraná as they sought to escape to Argentina.²⁵ Rotela was flown to a counter-insurgency command post at Estancia Tapÿta, near San Juan Nepomuceno, Department of Caazapá, where he was executed on July 12. Only six of the original sixty strong Columna Libertad – including an Argentinian, Felix Blanco – are thought to have escaped back across the border on June 13.²⁶ All captured insurgents were tortured, mutilated and killed. During June–July 1960, the Argentine press carried stories of mutilated bodies washed up in the River Paraná. The third and final incursion by the M-14 took place on 21 December 1960 when Major Juan Bartolomé Araujo led around 100 combatants in an abortive raid across the Paraguay River to the Asunción suburb of Itá Enramada but the attack was abandoned due to poor logistical support.

Only one unit of the M-14 remained unscathed from these incursions. The testimony of one of its survivors, Remigio Giménez, reveals that although unusually well armed, it also suffered from the extraordinary lack of planning and coordination within the movement that Esteche described.²⁷ This maverick eight-man unit led by Carlino Colinas Mercado had left the main guerrilla camp at Pareja-í in Misiones, Argentina without permission on 11 October 1960 in a desperate attempt to provide support to the beleaguered forces of the Columna Libertad. They did not know that Rotela and his companions had already been wiped out. As a result, from the moment that the unit entered the country from Puerto Yguazú, it was completely bereft of logistical support. The original plan had been to move west, attacking a police station at Yhú en route, and then reach the highlands of Ybytyruzú, where the unit would relieve pressure on Rotela’s troops. But within days of starting their march, the authorities were alerted to their presence after the unit captured a Mybá Indian who escaped the same night. After approaching within 70 km of Yhú, they encountered stiff military resistance and were forced to move north, spending the next 2 months traversing the selva with the army, Colorado Party militias and light spotter planes in pursuit. On November 17, they killed two local Colorado Party officials, who were taking food to a nearby army camp.²⁸ Despite several more encounters, including one on November 24 when they killed an army officer, Tte. Cnel. Manuel Galeano, they suffered neither losses nor serious injuries.

Exhausted and half-starved, they eventually crossed into Brazil near the Brazilian town of Paranhos on December 18 in search of protection from exiled supporters of M-14 led by Filemón Valdéz, who had set up a training camp 20 km from the Paraguayan border. But within days they were betrayed by Paraguayans working as municipal laborers in Paranhos, who informed the armed forces based in the adjoining Paraguayan border town of Ypejhú of their whereabouts. Tricked into believing that they were being handed over to Brazilian military custody for their own protection, late at night on 24 December 1960 they were taken by truck to an isolated dirt road near Paranhos. Instead, as they alighted, a covert Paraguayan army unit gunned them down. Only Giménez escaped while Antonio Arce, left for dead, managed to survive. In February 1961, the Brazilian government of Janio Quadros made a diplomatic protest to Stroessner at the violation of its territorial sovereignty and granted asylum to both Giménez and Arce.

A Chaco War veteran, Caballero Fereira, who died in exile in Montevideo in the late 1960s bequeathed the only analysis by a leading member of M-14 into the underlying reasons for its debacle.²⁹ He attaches great importance to the alleged treachery of many of the leaders of the Partido Liberal who had signed its act of foundation on 4 May 1959. According to Caballero, these leaders had an ambivalent attitude to the movement from the start and soon sought to undermine its efforts. He singles out one of these leaders, Benjamin Vargas Peña, for particular criticism. Moreover, Vargas Peña wrongly assumed that the Argentine government would remain neutral in the conflict and, as a result, even informed the Argentine authorities in Corrientes of the invasion plans. But far from remaining neutral, SIDE regularly passed intelligence about M-14 to the Paraguayan authorities. Caballero also blames him for creating internal division within M-14 by placing advertisements in the Argentine newspaper, La Prensa, denouncing communist infiltration of the movement. His gravest accusation is that these ‘traitors’ actively sought the destruction of Rotela’s column. Once it was inside Paraguay, he alleges, they fed it false information through a radio operator, suggesting that the other columns had also succeeded in entering the country unnoticed. In fact they had all been destroyed and Rotela’s column was probably unaware that the security forces were already closing in.

The Partido Comunista Paraguayo (PCP) had been the only communist party in South America to opt for armed struggle, even before the Cuban revolution. Surprisingly, the abject failure of M-14 did not lead to a re-assessment of that decision, taken back in March 1956. Instead, it was the driving force in creating the Frente Unido de Liberacion Nacional (FULNA), headed by Fabián Saldívar Villagra and Lorenzo Arrúa, Chaco War veterans and military leaders during the 1947 civil war between the Colorado Party and a loose alliance of the Partido Liberal, Febreristas, and communists. In the late 1920s, Arrúa had trained at the Saint Cyr national military academy in France. FULNA was formed in February 1959 partly as a knee-jerk reaction to the euphoria created by the Cuban Revolution. But domestic factors, namely the rapid closure of democratic spaces by the dictatorship, were also important. The PCP noted that it was only when a general strike in Havana in April 1958 had failed to shake the Batista regime that Castro had turned to guerrilla warfare. So when a general strike in Asunción in August 1958 was similarly crushed, the party drew a similar conclusion. However, as Oscar Creydt (1907–88), its secretary-general at the time, readily admitted later in a rare 1985 interview, the hasty decision to launch a guerrilla invasion in mid-1960 was also prompted by fears of being upstaged by the ‘bourgeois’ backers of M-14.³⁰ The public launch of FULNA took place in Uruguay at the University of Montevideo on 15 September 1959. One of the platform speakers was the then Chilean senator, Salvador Allende, who said that he was optimistic for the future of Paraguay because FULNA had managed to ‘aglutinar a la inmensa mayoría del pueblo’.³¹

In a bizarre re-run of M-14, on 13 June 1960, just 6 weeks after the Columna Libertad, the Columna Ytororó of FULNA, comprising fifty-one men and three women, crossed the River Paraná into Paraguay at Planchada San José from bases in Argentina. The column had orders to follow a war plan and instruction manual written by Creydt.³² It was led by Adolfo Ávalos Carísimo (1925–1960), son of the first director of the national girls’ school in Asunción, Colegio Nacional de Niñas, who had fought in the 1947 civil war. According to Creydt’s testimony, on the pretext of providing M-14 with support and in order to establish protected guerrilla bases, Columna Ytororó was instructed to head straight for the area where Rotela’s guerrillas were believed to be located.³³ But, contrary to what they supposed, the Columna Libertad had already been destroyed. Furthermore, the security forces had identified the exact location of the crossing within hours.³⁴ Days later, on June 17, they had arrested and later executed Adolfo Alonso Ramírez, head of the logistical support for Columna Ytororó in the hills around Villarrica to where the column was heading. Furthermore, the Argentine military had by now swallowed their antipathy toward Stroessner in the context of a perceived communist threat in the region. As a result, building on its penetration of exile groups through M-14, SIDE passed information on FULNA’s plans to the Paraguayan intelligence services. So, rather than mounting a second front to divide the security forces, the Ytororó insurgents walked straight into the lion’s den.

The first engagements took place on June 19, only 6 days after they had entered the country, again suggesting effective infiltration by military intelligence. On June 28, the security forces mounted a surprise attack on the guerrilla camp at Ñu Cañy, south of Tavaí. The survivors of this attack dispersed into small groups, which were soon flushed out of the selva by the counter-insurgency forces. In a marked hardening of position from that adopted in response to the December 1959 incursions when hundreds of combatants and sympathizers were arrested, imprisoned and later confined to prison camps in the Chaco, the regime now introduced a policy of taking no prisoners alive. Captured guerrillas, including the three women members, were tortured and killed in July 1960 at a counter-insurgency base at Charará (the present-day Municipality of General Eugenio A. Garay) in the Department of Caazapá, and their mutilated bodies were later dumped from planes and boats into the River Paraná. On 16 July 1960 the Asunción newspaper El País published an official list of 82 insurgents belonging to M-14 and FULNA who had allegedly died in combat with the security forces. There were no names of injured or arrested combatants because there were none. Only two of the fifty-four members of the Columna Ytororó – Gregorio Gerancio Aguilera and Erasmo Arzamendia – survived to give testimony to an internal party hearing.³⁵ The death of its leader, Ávalos Carísimo, on August 10 near Itape, Departament of Guairá, marked the demise of Columna Ytororó.

Letras de Sangre is a dossier of confidential internal communications of the counter-insurgency units of the armed forces that defeated M-14 and FULNA, meticulously curated by Paraguayan political scientist Milda Rivarola.³⁶ Documents list the names, rank, origins, and fate of captured insurgents of M-14 (54 dead and 38 disappeared) and FULNA (52 dead). An incomplete list of 66 M-14 insurgents shows that half were under 25 years of age, only two were over 40, less than a third had some secondary education and three had university education. It also reveals the structure and efficiency of the counter-insurgency campaign, which benefitted from US training and logistical support.³⁷ The dossier shows that two separate but coordinated counter-insurgency units were created. Agrupación Operativa No. 1, headed by Gral. Hipólito Viveros was directed primarily against M-14 and patrolled the eastern river border with Argentina. Agrupación Operativa No. 2, composed of members of the Regimiento de Infantería R.I.14 ‘Cerro Corá’ under the command of General Patricio Colmán, was based at Caazapá and directed against FULNA. It eventually took overall control of the counter-insurgency campaign. Although the interior minister, Edgar Ynsfrán, gave press conferences in Asunción, the campaign was totally under military control, with local police and Colorado Party militias reporting directly to these military units. The campaign diary of Coronel Marcial Alborno, aide-de-camp of General Colmán, includes nine explicit instructions to kill captured prisoners and shows that these alleged deaths in combat were communicated to President Stroessner, who visited the front on three occasions. With few exceptions, prisoners had been tortured prior to summary execution. The dossier also reveals that the military used torturers flown in from the Dirección Nacional de Asuntos Técnicos (DNAT) in Asunción, which had been set up as an anti-communist unit within the national police force with technical assistance during May 1956-March 1958 from U.S. Army Colonel Robert Thierry, a CIA operative and former member of the US armed forces, under the cover of a USAID project, ostensibly for public administration reform.

Cristina Treherne highlights several inter-connected reasons for the failure of FULNA.³⁸ First, like the Columna Libertad before it, the Ytororó guerrillas were poorly ill-equipped, with little military training, only nine automatic weapons, most of which did not work, and rations for only 2 days despite a planned seven-day march to the Ybytyruzú hills. Second, although the PCP had attributed the failure of M-14 to its inability to develop strong ties to the rural poor, FULNA made exactly the same mistake. From the late 1950s, it had established rural cells among campesinos in Piribebuy, Department of Paraguarí and among cane sugar growers near the town of Villarrica, led by Wilfrido Alvarez and Adolfo Alonso Ramírez, respectively. Both were implementing the Maoist strategy of deep engagement with impoverished communities. But the unwieldy Columna Ytororó entered the country as a copycat version of the Cuban strategy of foquismo, with its emphasis on highly mobile and self-sufficient guerrilla units. Third, although Ytororó was replicating the Cuban military strategy, the PCP still retained the sharp subordination of the military command to its political leadership, a characteristic of the Maoist model of guerrilla warfare. However, this caused long delays in decision-making on the ground because orders and requests had to be relayed back-and-forth between Ávalos Carísimo, its military head, and PCP Secretary-general Creydt, who remained a thousand kilometers away in Buenos Aires. Fourth, as Creydt admitted in a rare but surprisingly candid 1985 interview, the PCP still lacked sufficient understanding of the peasantry to sustain rural guerrilla warfare over the long term.³⁹ It is perhaps not surprising that a party that hitherto had its roots exclusively in urban areas should have made such a mistake. Finally, and most important of it, the PCP grossly underestimated the ability of the Stroessner regime to infiltrate its own organization. The mass arrests carried out around the small town of San Juan Nepomuceno, where a military command post was set up in late May in the weeks prior to the Ytororó incursion, shows that the Stroessner regime had prior knowledge of the direction that it would take. Only seven members would eventually reach there and awaiting government troops killed all of them. FULNA was officially disbanded in October 1963 in an atmosphere of bitter recriminations between communists, liberals and Febreristas.

Aníbal Miranda offers an overview of the period 1959–62 through a selection of public proclamations and condemnations from M-14 and FULNA as well as articles from Patria, the official newspaper of the Stroessner regime.⁴⁰ Together, they highlight both the gross exaggerations by the insurgents, who repeatedly predicted the imminent demise of Stroessner, as well as the gross cynicism of the regime, which consistently denied the arrest and disappearance of its opponents. A swathe of other declarations reveal the bitter jealousies and animosities inside and between the leadership of the liberal, Febrerista and communist parties at the time, divisions that did more than anything else to weaken the respective movements.

Despite the abject failure of the incursion of Columna Ytororó from Argentina, the PCP leadership planned a new incursion from Brazil, where the left-of-center government of President João Goulart had taken office in 1961.⁴¹ Under orders from Creydt, the plan was for small groups to cross into Paraguay and establish a base in the same Ybytyruzú hills as Ytororó. According to one source, 63 party members were sent to Cuba for military training in 1961.⁴² In 1962, a political training camp was established at Itapecerica da Serra in the State of São Paulo and a military training camp at Ponte do Grego in Mato Grosso del Sur, led by two former Chaco War veterans, Olegario López and Lorenzo Arrúa.

Following the March 1964 military coup that overthrew President João Goulart, major security lapses enabled the Brazilian army to identify the camp at Itapecerica. It was abandoned and most of the munitions moved to Ponte do Grego only days before it was raided by the Brazilian army on 2 August 1964. A recently discovered report by the Brazilian intelligence services to their Paraguayan counterparts concerning the documents captured in the raid of the Campamento guerrillero Nro. 20 ‘Rodríguez de Francia’ revealed the scale of the clandestine operation.⁴³ It includes diagrams for instruction in military tactics, the diary of its camp commander Carlos Chaparro, maps of Brazil-Paraguay frontier zones, and affiliation details of recruits, only one of whom had completed 6 years of primary education. Most significantly, it referred to the existence of several other such camps dotted around the border area with Paraguay.⁴⁴

On 19 July 1965 the main camp at Ponte do Grego was raided by the army and all its members arrested. A CIA document reporting the raid referred to Arrúa as ‘chief of Paraguayan guerrilla activities in Brazil’.⁴⁵ Twenty members were tried by a military court and in August 1966 given jail sentences ranging from 7 years for Arrúa to 1 year. Following a successful appeal on the grounds that the exiles posed no threat to the national security of Brazil, the sentences were reduced. The ministerial head of the Supreme Military Tribunal, Olympio Mourão Filho, was reported as saying, ‘Although I would have shot them all, my preference is not the law’.⁴⁶

The discovery of the Ponte do Grego camp and the arrest of its team took place at the same time that the security forces inside Paraguay carried out widespread arrests and the assassination of three senior members of a clandestine PCP network based in the Department of Cordillera that had planned to give logistical support to the insurgents from Brazil.⁴⁷ This strongly hints again at the efficacy of infiltration by the Stroessner regime of the insurgents based in Brazil.⁴⁸ This double whammy had a devastating impact on the structure and morale of the PCP. As the CIA report said, ‘The Brazilian action came at approximately the same time Paraguay’s own security forces arrested some 60 low-level Paraguayan Communist Party (PCP) members in rural areas of central Paraguay where they were attempting to form cadres for guerrilla columns. The two series of arrests seem likely to leave the PCP with even fewer assets than before in its unequal struggle against the Stroessner government’.⁴⁹

A separate PCP guerrilla unit, the Columna Mariscal López (CML), had been established back in 1958 near Piribebuy, 64 km. from Asunción in the Department of Cordillera led by a young local primary school teacher, Arturo López (1920–1970), whose pseudonym was Agapito Valiente. It was located in the heartland of a large area characterized by extreme inequality of land tenure, with extensive latifundios (cattle ranches) co-existing with myriads of munifundios (small family plots of 5 ha). The original base of the CML was in the Compañía 4 de Julio, most of whose 120 minifundista families gave protection to the unit. An oral history of CML estimates a total of 28 members at its high point in early 1965. The vast majority of them and the 100 or so inner ring of sympathizers were poor semi-subsistence farmers for whom the land reform program of FULNA was a major attraction and they held Agapito Valiente in high regard.⁵⁰ On 24 May 1960 the CML had raided the small town of Barrero Grande (later renamed Eusebio Ayala) in a failed attempt to deflect the attention of the security forces away from the impending entry of the Columna Ytororó. Surprisingly, its members survived the intense repression that followed as several hundred campesinos in the area were rounded up and tortured.⁵¹

After the destruction of Ytororó, in 1961 Creydt and two other PCP leaders wrote a document, Trabajar con las masas en profundidad y a largo plazo, which ordered the CML to revert to the Maoist strategy of prolonged guerrilla warfare by prioritizing low profile work of conscientization among the campesinos. But as had happened in the case of Ytororó, the dual command structure greatly hindered the work and security of its members. The CML was paralyzed for months at a time while orders were relayed through the regional committee in Asunción to the party leadership in Buenos Aires. Furthermore, the political leaders who made the orders were completely out of touch with the conditions that the guerrillas were facing on the ground. This problem was highlighted by their failure to authorize repeated requests by CML to move its base camp further east for better security to the hills around San Joaquín, Department of Caaguazú. The demoralization and sickness brought on by their harsh living conditions and isolation also led to bitter infighting among its. One of its leaders, Wilfrido Alvarez, was betrayed and killed in June 1963 and in February 1964 Arturo López was sent to the Soviet Union in an attempt to reduce tensions. By this time, its members had become despondent following the demise of FULNA.

In March 1964, the security forces mounted a counter-insurgency operation around Piribebuy against campesinos who were suspected of collaboration with the CML. In spite of this, support for the unit grew rapidly thereafter with ‘large meetings’ in 20 different locations.⁵² However, after the PCP central committee rejected its request for arms, in April 1965 the unit made a botched attempt to steal arms in Santa Elena. The regime responded with a ferocious counter-insurgency offensive. From mid-June to end-July, several hundred campesinos were rounded up in the Departments of Paraguarí and Cordillera and around 10 died from torture, including the then leader of CML, Santiago Coronel Acevedo (Camarada Cibils). In a September 1965 press conference, interior minister Edgar Ynsfrán announced that the guerrillas had been wiped out. In fact, this success had been mainly due to police infiltration of new members recruited to the unit from 1963 onwards rather than from evidence gathered from the torture of hundreds of arrested suspects. On September 13, Ynsfrán attended ceremonies of public humiliation in Piribebuy and Santa Elena where a local priest accepted the confession of 103 campesinos for their alleged collaboration with CML, after which he ‘re-baptized’ them.⁵³ The mid-1965 repression marked the death knell of the PCP strategy of armed insurrection. Logistical support for the CML had been decimated at precisely the same time as the destruction of the training camps in Brazil.

The abject failure of the PCP’s foray into armed struggle and the ensuing decimation of its cadres led to mutual recriminations within the party. In 1963 several members of the central committee had split away to form their own party, the Partido Comunista Leninista Paraguayo (PCLP), in open opposition to Creydt, blaming his autocratic leadership for the failure of Ytororó. The unwillingness of the party to offer military protection to campesino supporters during the mid-1965 repression led to further criticism of Creydt, who was in Vietnam at the time. A meeting convened by senior activists opposed to Creydt took place in Buenos Aires on July 11 and in September 1965, with the support of the Soviet Union, Creydt was removed from his post as party leader. The PCLP was disbanded and its members re-integrated into the leadership of the PCP. In 1967, Creydt was eventually expelled from the party altogether on the grounds of treachery. He then formed a new party, the Partido Comunista del Paraguay, with initial support from the People’s Republic of China.

In 1967, the new leadership of the PCP published a character assassination of its former secretary-general with the expressed intention of justifying his expulsion from the party.⁵⁴ Written in the convoluted style of Cold War pro-Soviet ideology, it rejected the argument that Creydt’s increasingly erratic behavior could be attributed to an inflated ego or even to mental instability. Instead, its argument is wholly conspiratorial – namely that Creydt had been a secret Trotskyist ever since he joined the PCP in his youth and that he consciously set out to sabotage the party for reasons of political treachery. Despite the questionable nature of this central argument, the correspondence contained in the text offers interesting insights into the views of FULNA guerrillas, although their representivity and veracity may be contentious.

Treherne points out that, for all the effort by the PCP to dress up Creydt’s expulsion in ideological terms, the main reason for the split was the perceived megalomania of Creydt. The ideological differences between the two groups, although repeatedly cited by both sides as the cause of the split, were in fact of secondary importance. Her overall conclusion is stark – that the PCP, which had been a significant political force within Paraguay until 1958, ceased to be politically relevant following its defeat in the guerrilla war. She believes that it is too simplistic to blame Creydt alone for its destruction and points out that, although he was its leader throughout this period, the majority of the party supported the decision to embark on armed struggle. Even afterward, most members were still prepared to put their lives at risk for this strategy.⁵⁵

Although the CML was effectively disbanded, Arturo López returned to Paraguay in October 1967 and established a clandestine base with nine active members in the south-western districts of the Department of Caaguazú, particularly Colonia Blas Garay and Colonia Serafini, where he became something of a folk hero. But on 17 May 1970, his whereabouts were betrayed to the authorities and he was killed in a shoot-out with a counter-insurgency team led by General Colmán.⁵⁶ The other eight members of this group were all killed or disappeared by the Stroessner regime. In his history of the party, a veteran PCP activist concluded that the PCP was ‘almost annihilated’ by the guerrilla campaign, a blow from which it never recovered.⁵⁷

Conclusion

This review article has examined the various armed movements against the Stroessner regime – M-14, FULNA, and CML – that all failed. Four factors explain the extraordinary success of the security services in nipping in the bud each and every attempt at armed opposition before they posed any significant threat to the regime. First, infiltration of armed movements was perfected by the counter-insurgency intelligence unit, DNAT, created soon after Stroessner’s rise to power. As well as becoming the prime location for the torture of political detainees throughout the stronato, it established an extensive network of police informers throughout the country and in Argentina.

Second, the regime employed a largely successful counter-insurgency strategy of preventive repression that was first publicly revealed by General Gerardo Johansen at a 1972 Inter-American Defense Board meeting in Montevideo. Under this strategy, the slightest indication of armed opposition was met with a highly disproportionate response from the security forces. This involved the arrest, interrogation, torture, and imprisonment of a very wide circle of individuals, whose only alleged crime was to be a relative, friend, workmate, or neighbor of the small number of persons prepared to become involved in armed resistance to the regime. This strategy, first employed against M-14 and FULNA, was extremely effective in inculcating a climate of fear within the general population that had the long-term effect of dulling the growth of political protest throughout the rest of the dictatorship. Third, as the personal accounts in this review suggest, the various armed movements showed all the hallmarks of voluntarismo with extremely inadequate systems of internal security and discipline. Furthermore, they had virtually no training in guerrilla warfare, reflecting the fact that all of their military leaders were former members of the Paraguayan armed forces, whose experience during the Chaco War and 1947 civil war was primarily that of conventional warfare. This was exemplified by the unwieldy sizes of the Columna Libertad and Columna Ytororó, far in excess of the nimble eight-member size of guerrilla units.

Finally, the regime was adroit in manipulating the deep-rooted popular sentiment in Paraguay against perceived foreign invasion, itself the cultural legacy of crushing defeat in the Triple Alliance War (1865–70) against Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay.⁵⁸ Regime propagandists cleverly referred to members of M-14 and FULNA as legionarios, a term of abuse originally used to refer to the Paraguayans who had fought in the enemy ranks during that war. From the 1920s, a generation of nationalist ideologues such as Juan O’Leary, Manuel Domínguez, and Ignacio Pane extended the term to refer disparagingly to members of the Partido Liberal in general because of their distaste for Mariscal Francisco Solano López, who had led the Paraguayan forces during the war. This discourse became a potent force for garnering campesino support for the beleaguered government during the 1947 civil war, when Colorado militias defeated the combined forces of the liberals, Febreristas and communists. By so capturing the sense of nationalism, the discourse of the regime and the Colorado Party on which it was built was equally successful in redefining armed movements against Stroessner as a diabolic mixture of liberalismo legionario and comunismo internacional, the common element of which was the dire threat that they posed to the nation (apátria). There is no doubt that the resonance of these views contributed to the dulling of popular support for both M-14 and FULNA. At the same time, by reinforcing the commitment of the pynandí, the extensive network of Colorado rural militia inherited from the civil war, this discourse greatly assisted the counter-insurgency effort of the regime.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to criticize the various attempts at armed struggle against the Stroessner regime for their abject failure. But this failure can be attributed neither to the madness of an egocentric individual, nor to political adventurism of naïve idealists, nor to a facile attempt to replicate the Cuban revolution. The movements arose in response to specific historical circumstances, both national and international. As Treherne aptly concluded in reference to FULNA, ‘Had Castro’s guerrillas been suppressed in Cuba, they would have been relegated to a footnote in the history books, and in 1958, there was nothing to suggest that their experiment was anything more than adventurism. Similarly, if Che Guevara had not died in Bolivia the struggle in that country would have passed unknown and those who died with him would have been ignored like their Paraguayan counterparts’.⁵⁹

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Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/09592318.2024.2333065.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrew Nickson

Andrew Nickson is Honorary Reader in Public Management and Latin American Studies at the International Development Department (IDD), University of Birmingham. He carries out teaching, research, consultancy, and writing on international development, with special emphasis on public administration reform, decentralisation, and the regulation of privatised public utilities. He writes for the Economist Intelligence Unit, Oxford Analytica and IHS Markit. Since 2011 he has been external trainer for the Peace and Security Division of the United Nations System Staff College (UNSSC) in Turin, Italy, for which he teaches face-to-face courses on the role of decentralisation and local governance in the peacebuilding process of post-conflict countries (Kenya, Uganda, Somalia, Yemen, Bangla Desh, Ethiopia) as well as at UN HQ in New York. In 2013/14, he wrote a distance learning (DL) version of the course for UNSSC and to date has taught 14 editions. His long-term country work has been in Nepal, Paraguay, Peru, and Sierra Leone. From 1992 to 1998 he directed a European Union regional training program for senior public administrators in Latin America and from 1999 to 2000 he directed a European Union Project for State Reform in Paraguay. He has carried out short-term assignments in 40 other countries in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia.

Notes

1. Gott, Rural Guerrillas in Latin America; Kohl and Litt, Urban Guerrilla Warfare; and Landau, The Guerrilla Wars of Central America.

2. Sweig, Inside the Cuban Revolution.

3. Nolan, The Ideology of the Sandinistas; Vilas, The Sandinista Revolution.

4. Bryne, El Salvador’s Civil War.

5. Jonas, The Battle for Guatemala.

6. Alarcón, Le Che en Bolivie; Harris, Death of a Revolutionary; and Ryan, The Fall of Che Guevara.

7. Gillespie, Soldiers of Peron; Giussani, Montoneros.

8. Campbell, “Historiography of the Peruvian Guerrilla Movement.”

9. Labrousse, Una historia de los tupamaros; Lessa, La revolución imposible.

10. Wickham-Crowley; Guerrillas and Revolution in Latin America.

11. Esteche, Comandante Rotela; Esteche, Movimiento 14 de Mayo.

12. The only known finance from Cuba was a US$10,000 donation that Che Guevara made to Baudo Franco, the Febrerista member of a delegation of representatives of the Liberal Party, PCP and Febreristas who visited Cuba in September 1959.

13. Miranda, Lucha armada en Paraguay, 36–37.

14. Caeiro, Crónica de un matrimonio político, 160–167.

15. Comisión de Verdad y Justicia, Informe final, Vol.7:57.

16. Miranda, Argentina, Estados Unidos e insurrección, 211–212.

17. Ayala Ferreira, “Guerrilla, prisión y fuga durante la dictadura.”

18. Ventre Buzarquis, Prision, torturas y fuga.

19. Ayala Ferreira, “Guerrilla, prisión y fuga durante la dictadura.”

20. Arellano, Movimiento 14 de Mayo, 130–146, 222–223.

21. The only member of the unit to escape, Rufino Marcial Arce, would become second in command to Rotela months later in the Columna Libertad.

22. Castillo, “Enfrentamos muchas dificultades”.; Velázquez, “No teníamos suficientes armas.”

23. Seiferheld, Conversaciones político-militares, 189–202.

24. Rivarola, Letras de sangre, 138.

25. Ibid, 117–131.

26. Personal correspondence with M-14 survivor, Miguel Cibils, December 6, 2023.

27. Martínez Cuevas, Masacradas en Nochebuena.

28. One of the two – Raúl Arsenio Oviedo, vice-president of the Colorado Party branch in Yhú – was converted into a martyr by the Stroessner regime and a municipality in the Department of Caaguzú is still named after him.

29. Caballero Ferreira, La celda del miedo.

30. Carmona, Oscar Creydt, 271. On the life of Creydt, see Nickson, Oscar Creydt.

31. El Popular (Montevideo), September 16, 1959.

32. See “Relaciones entre las guerrillas y las masas campesinas,” Centro de Documentación y Archivo para la Defensa de los Derechos Humnaos, Corte Suprema de Justicia, Asunción, Ref: 00108F 2533–2537.

33. Carmona, Oscar Creydt, 289.

34. Rivarola, Letras de sangre, 61,66.

35. Comité Nacional de Defensa y Reorganización del Partido Comunista Paraguayo, Relatorio sobre la actividad enemiga, 39. After military training in Cuba, Aguilera re-entered Paraguay in 1967 as a member of the CML where he disappeared around 1968–1969. https://diccionario.cedinci.org/aguilera-gregorio/

36. Rivarola, Letras de sangre.

37. In August 1960 three commanders of the counter-insurgency campaign – General Hipólito Viveros, General Alejandro Fretes Dávalos and Coronel Marcial Alborno – gave a debriefing at the US Southern Command headquarters (UACARIB) in Panama.

38. Treherne, The Guerrilla War.

39. Carmona, Oscar Creydt, 323.

40. Miranda, Lucha armada en Paraguay

41. Such was the secrecy that it was only with the discovery of the Archivo del Terror in 1992 that information on the PCP camps in Brazilian territory began to enter the public domain.

42. Barrett 2017, Autobiografía clandestina, 116.

43. It is probable that the training camp was located at Pinheirinho, in the town of de Itapecerica, which was discovered by the Brazilian army on August 5, 1963.

44. Pérez Cáceres, Materiales para un conocimiento.

45. Central Intelligence Agency, Intelligence Memorandum, 5–6.

46. Montero,”Aunque yo los fusilaría.”

47. Commanders Blas Ignacio Alvarenga Caballero (‘Patricio’) and Herminio Cubilla ‘Barúa’ were killed on July 6, 1965 and Commander Santiago Coronel Acevedo (‘Cibils’) on July 30, 1965.

48. Barrett, Mis andares por el PCP.

49. Central Intelligence Agency, Intelligence Memorandum, 6.

50. Montero, ‘La Columna Mariscal López’.

51. Duré and Silva, “Frente Unido de Liberación Nacional,” 140–142

52. Ibid, 157.

53. Comisión de Verdad y Justicia, Informe final, Vol. 5:162–169.

54. Comité Nacional de Defensa y Reorganización del Partido Comunista Paraguayo, Relatorio sobre la actividad enemiga.

55. Treherne believes that the dual command system was guaranteed to produce gross misjudgements in the management of guerrilla operations, whoever was in charge.

56. For an excellent biography of Arturo López, see Montero, M. Agapito Valiente. Stroessner kyhyjeha.

57. Bonzi, Proceso histórico, 208, 214.

58. Lambert,”Ideology and Opportunism.”

59. Treherne, The Guerrilla War, 67–68.