PARAGUAY: Now What?

There was the customary pre-dawn prelude of machine-gun and mortar fire. Then troops from the capital garrison at Asunción moved in. In no time at all, as revolutions go, Army strongman Lieut. Colonel Benítez Vera had fled from his Campo Grande headquarters. Box score: five killed, scores wounded. By noon, as the official communiqué said, “absolute tranquillity” again reigned over Paraguay.

Since President-General Higinio Morínigo took over Paraguay in 1940, he has used Benítez Vera’s, fascist-minded military clique for a whipping boy: it was to blame for Morínigo’s failure to set up some semblance of a democracy. Finally, Benítez Vera had played the strongman act with so much authority that he had been given the boot. Now what?

Oxcart Economy. That has been Paraguay’s leading question ever since Dictator Francisco Solano López’s, lust for power led Paraguay to defeat in the bloody war with Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil (1865-1870). The debacle of the Chaco War with Bolivia (1929-38) had just about finished the job. It left Paraguay a back-country ruin.

Today Paraguay has more police and soldiery (14,000) than industrial and commercial workers (13,171). The annual per capita income of the 1¼ million population is only $6. Because there is just one 274-mile railway and little more than 500 miles of improved roads, oxcarts still carry the bulk of the country’s cotton, tobacco, quebracho extract (tannin).

Political Promise. President Morínigo’s chances of leading his country out of this economic morass are slim. His chances of democratizing Paraguay are at least better.

Last week Morínigo, no striking apostle of liberty, promised that Paraguay, the only nation in the Hemisphere without a parliament, would elect one within the year. He also promised that political parties—perhaps even his enemies, the Liberals—might organize. Press restrictions also would be relaxed, to a degree. Already concentration camps were on the decline.