"Natural Democracy"

Poise a fountain pen above the middle of a map of South America, jiggle the lever until a blob of ink falls and you have Paraguay, an irregular region about 200 miles wide and 300 miles long in the middle of the continent. For about a month now Paraguayans have not been able to get any uncensored mail or foreign newspapers. All they know is what they read in Paraguayan papers whose entire editorial staffs have been chased out and replaced by audacious, cheerful young Army men who idolize the country's great Chaco war-hero and new Dictator, chubby-faced young Col. Rafael Franco (TIME, March 2). Last week, fascinated by government as a child is fascinated by a new toy, the young Colonel began issuing fundamental Constitutional proclamations right & left.

In Buenos Aires representatives of the U. S., Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Peru and Uruguay, sitting as the executive committee of the Chaco Peace Conference, had just announced that on the following day at 6 p. m. they would recognize the Colonel's 25-day-old Government. When they read its proclamation they abruptly changed their minds. Like Hitler and like Stalin, dictatorial Franco spoke of his gang as constituting "The Revolution" and announced that it is the State. In 1936 this has become the usual crude variant of Louis XIV's elegant platitude, L'etat c'est moi. Immediately the Peace Conference gave fledgling Dictator Franco a deep nudge in the ribs by intimating that they had previously intended to recognize his Government because they had understood it was going to be democratic.

In Asuncion this made the new Dictator feel that he had better say something which would sound enlightened, and, like most South Americans, he has a natural flair for such pure forensics. Calling in correspondents, Colonel Franco cried:

"In order to fulfill the duties of our liberating revolution we have no necessity for raising the flag of any extreme tendency--neither a White dictatorship nor a Red dictatorship! The Paraguayan State will be neither Communist. Fascist nor Nazi. It will, however, take advantage of the experiences of every other country in the world! I am a democrat. But for us democracy is not an abstract formula. We shall have a true democracy of workers and peasants, who are the eternal victims of their economic weakness and their spiritual poverty, only when they feel themselves protected and assisted by the State and by a political party of their own and when the nation enters into full possession of its personality and destiny."

As this visibly left his hearers puzzled,

Colonel Franco sent them away with pat-on-the-back assurances that "Paraguay is a natural democracy." Duly reassured, the Franco regime was thereupon recognized by the U. S., Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Peru and Uruguay.

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