LA Times via Boston Globe:
Are the Americans coming?That question continues to reverberate in this sleepy capital four months after a ''courtesy call" visit by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld unleashed a torrent of speculation about Washington's reputed ''secret agenda."
US officials have categorically denied having plans for a military base here, describing the episode as a misunderstanding over ongoing US-Paraguayan military exercises.
Despite the denials, talk of detachments of Marines taking up residence in this nation in the heart of South America has entered the continent's political discourse.
''No Yanqui Troops in Paraguay!" read banners hoisted by protesters at last month's Summit of the Americas in Argentina.
For Paraguayans who lived through a 35-year dictatorship that was long backed by the United States, the daily images from Iraq have stirred memories of American interventions in Latin America, one of the battlegrounds of the Cold War.
''We don't need armies, especially foreign armies," Adolfo Perez Esquivel, the Argentine Nobel Peace prize laureate and leftist icon, declared during a recent visit here. ''It's important to remember that once the troops of the United States enter a country, they never leave."
To many, the lingering controversy also illustrates the political and social frailties of a long-isolated, landlocked nation still in the formative stages of democracy 16 years after the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner ended.
''Paraguay remains a country in gestation," said Oscar Torres, a legal scholar here. ''We still haven't reached national maturation. We are in our adolescence, and, consequently, full of fears and ghosts."
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US authorities call the military exercises standard and largely humanitarian in nature, involving no more than two dozen or so US troops at a time in this California-sized nation. Paraguayan officials approved 13 joint exercises last spring, lasting through the end of next year, but it wasn't until Rumsfeld's visit in August that the maneuvers ignited a firestorm, especially in neighboring Brazil.
Not all have condemned the notion of a tilt toward the United States. Some here have applauded the idea of enhanced political, commercial, and even military ties to the United States, complaining that Brazil -- an economic colossus here -- has had an unhealthy stranglehold on this nation of 6 million, which suffers from high unemployment and has little industry. Stolen cars, contraband cigarettes, and high-quality marijuana are among Paraguay's best-known products.
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