Documents / FOIA release

/specialCollection/nwcda6/154/MENGELE, JOSEF VOL. 2/MENGELE, JOSEF VOL. 2_0101.pdf

Central Intelligence Agency · 81 pages · text from the file's own layer

This is a Central Intelligence Agency cable dated 14 August 1985 and sent to Washington. It forwards news clippings and magazine articles on Josef Mengele, released under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act. The attachments include an Argentine magazine report on claims that Mengele lived in La Banda, Santiago del Estero, as Adolfo Gualterio Ascher, along with an interview with the judge investigating those claims. They also include a newspaper article on Mengele's protection in Paraguay and on past efforts to extradite him. The file has no UFO content.

  • p. 55 …Accord- ing to banking sources, a small group of friends and of- ficials knew of a…
  • p. 56 …In a green-walled class- room of AsunciOn's Catholfc University, I talked to a group…
After Paraguay gained independence in 1811, Jose Gaspar
Rodriguez de Francia became the nation's ruler "for life."
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operates on a kind of auto-
matic pilot, believe he sleeps
much of the day. For a group
convinced of his mental acui-
ty, the general's afternoon is
•the stuff of novels: plotting,
and counting money. For the
Paraguayan people, who
mostly work hard and shut
up, the nontelevised doings at
the presidential palace repre-
sent pure intrigue. A- foreign
diplomat's young son was
told by the family cook that
afternoon is the time when
"the old German doctor
comes and gives the general
Injections of fresh blood."
In a sense, General Stroess-
ner is no historical accident.
After independence in 1811,
Paraguay's first ruler was a
dictator "for life" — Jose
Gaspar Rodriguez de Fran-
cia, known as El Supremo,
who banned all travel, for-
eign trade, entry or exit,
meetings and mail. Despots
of varying compulsions suc-
ceeded him. Paraguay be-
came the first country in
South America to have a rail-
road, but it also found itself
with a ruler in Francisco
Solano Lopez who in 1884 de-
vised a way to start a war
against Argentina, Brazil and
Uruguay at the same time.
When the war was over, the
Paraguayan population of
550,000 was 60 percent dead.
Both El Supremo and Mar-
shal Lopez are national
heroes, perhaps. understand-
ably, if you count the 22 presi-
dents, several civil wars and
endless coups from 1904 to
1936. In the 1930's, a lunatic
war with Bolivia over the
Chaco desert — land with
none or little of the oil the two
parties hoped was there —
ended with 100,000 more
deaths. By 1947, another civil
war was on, and by late 1949
six presidents had come and
gone over a period of 16
months.. In 1954, It was the
turn of , Gen. Alfredo . Stroess-
ner, son of a German immi-
grant from Bavaria and a
Paraguayan mother, to stage
a military coup.
The general's staying
power has been based on con-
trolling the military and turn-
ing the Colorado Party, tradi-
tionally an amalgam of peas-
ants and shopkeepers, into an
unusually effective grass-
roots organization. Each lit-
tle town has its Colorado
"section,- a dispenser of jobs
and , favors and a collector of
local intelligence; neither the
block committees of the San-
dinistas nor the factory coun-
cils of East Germany ever
worked more effectively.
Party membership is usu-
ally a precondition for becom-
ing a grade-school teacher or
being appointed as a soldier
or officer in the Presidential
Escort Battalion. The mili-
tary's loyalty is assured by
cutting generals and colonels
Into the so-called illegal econ-
omy — contraband, kick-
backs, pure theft — that even
newspapers allied to the Gov-
ernment say represents
about half the gross national
product. Generals whose
nominal salary Is about $550 a
month can live in a kind of os-
tentation that goes beyond
caricature. Their houses,
built on half-paved roads,
look like the White House, or

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About this file

FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 81 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.