Caribbean Breeze

The thud of Batista's fall reverberated in far-off Paraguay. The official radio, broadcasting from the Interior Ministry, urged Strongman Alfredo Stroessner to proceed with "preventive executions to avoid a blood bath like Cuba's in Paraguay." One night last week, heavily armed police, tipped off by a stoolpigeon network organized by the fugitive Yugoslav war criminal, Ante Pavelic,* charged into Asuncion's southern district. There they seized two boys who, with chunks of clay, were scrawling on house walls an appeal to free political prisoners. Cops sealed off ten blocks of cobblestoned streets, raided houses and dragged 35 victims off to prison, kicking and clubbing them en route.

Neighbors peered into the street through half-closed shutters, but the police quickly warned: "Shut those windows or we will shoot." A young doctor ignored the order and tried to administer first aid to a man felled by a police truncheon. A cop shot him through the chest.

The chief threat to Stroessner is a colony of exiled Paraguayan oppositionists -a third of the population of 1,600,000 -most of whom live across the border in Argentina. In December they scared him enough to make him black out the palace, send troops to the frontier, get the Argentine government to impound two Beechcraft planes that seemed set to bomb Paraguay. In Buenos Aires, Paraguayan exiles announced that they were drawing up a list of "war criminals" to be executed "after the liberation."

President Stroessner's press censorship is so tight that newspapers refuse to print obituaries unless they are first okayed by police. No public meetings are permitted; police recently forbade a wedding party planned by one oppositionist.

The dictator's 23,000-man armed forces keep him in power, and the troops are not entirely happy. Younger officers are disgruntled because their careers are slowed by the superabundance of brass at the top; e.g., Paraguay's two-gunboat navy has seven admirals. Early this month Stroessner arrested several junior army officers and transferred others to a searing Chaco outpost. It may be lonely to be South America's last dictator, but Stroessner does not intend to be blown over by breezes from a distant Caribbean island.

* Pavelic, a fanatical Croat fascist, was named Poglavnik (leader) by Hitler, and ruled Croatia during the early days of the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia. Responsible for the extermination of 800,000 of his countrymen, Pavelic escaped to Argentina after the war, began working for Stroessner late last year.

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