The Dictator Dilemma

In a moment of either senility or honesty, after being removed from power in 1989, the Paraguayan authoritarian leader Gen. Alfredo Stroessner responded with confusion to an interviewer's question about communism in his country. Communists had never existed in Paraguay, he declared. That frank admission undermined the justification not only for his deadly grasp on power but also for consistent U.S. support for his long and brutal regime. As was readily apparent to anyone who cared to observe reality, homegrown radicalism responding to local conditions in Latin America represented more of a threat to these highly exclusionary and oppressive governments than did any fictional Soviet-inspired communist movement. Drawing primarily on State Department documents, Kirk Tyvela surveys U.S. policy changes toward the Stroessner regime from his ascension to power in a military coup in 1954 to his eventual removal in another coup in 1989. His goal is to provide in granular detail a better understanding of U.S.-Paraguayan relations, to use changes in those policies to understand the evolution of official U.S. attitudes toward Latin America, and to understand Stroessner's responses to those changes. Throughout the text, he examines how policy makers and diplomats articulated and rationalized their positions on whether Stroessner represented either an “anti-communist necessity or authoritarian excess” (p. 170

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