A REPUBLIC OF FEAR

But Paraguay is not a buffoon state, and President Stroessner is no Papa Doc or Idi Amin, men ruling in a flood of the irrational. Those few Paraguayans who openly oppose the President call him extraordinarily shrewd, a master at raising and lowering the level of violence and corruption in the country like the heat on a gas stove. No one holds power anywhere for 30 years without acquiring a sense of relative measure. The bodies don't float down the Paraguay River the way they did 20 years ago; torture is real but no longer systematic; the number of political prisoners has diminished, and Dr. Mengele, the ''Angel of Death'' of Auschwitz, is believed to have disappeared within the last four or five years - either after plastic surgery or, as a former American Ambassador, Robert E. White, put it, ''paid back, finally, in his own coin.''

While democratic change is coming to Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, Paraguay remains frightening because its regime proves that evil is not always needed in job lots to cow a people or appropriate a state. Compared with General Stroessner, President Somoza of Nicaragua was an apprentice, says Aldo Zucolillo, the publisher of a newspaper, ABC Color, put out of business this year by the general.

Mr. Zucolillo and a few other Paraguayans are rare men and women: They talk on the record in a place where almost nothing is verifiable and the only certainty is the efficiency of the police. Another man, no less admirable but not at ease about his name appearing in print, observes that in a historical perspective, General Stroessner's Paraguay probably will be more interesting in its perverse nuances than in the mass of its outrages.

''Add up the horrors,'' he says, ''and you get a substantial piece of ugly business. But what is interesting, really - original, you could say - is how after 30 years a place can be run through a perfect distillation of fear. By now, it's only a touch, a nod. One man disappears, one woman is tortured. It is enough, and the Stroessner people know it. It's a horrible truth, but some of us wait nervously to hear such stories. And too many of us are relieved to hear them, because then we touch the bars of the cage, and we know where we stand.''

These are wary days in Paraguay, with many people reaching to feel the contours of a situation they think might be changing. When the army goose-stepped through the streets of Asuncion on Aug. 15, the 30th anniversary of General Stroessner's rise to the presidency, the question for those watching was, ''How much longer?'' After the Trujillos and Somozas, General Stroessner, at 71, is almost the last of a breed of Latin American dictators who, unlike Fidel Castro or Gen. Augusto Pinochet of Chile, admitted to running their country as if it were a theme park in their own image.

For longevity, the general has few rivals; only Enver Hoxha of Albania and Kim Il Sung of North Korea are his seniors. For personalization of power, Nicolae Ceausescu of Rumania has some of the same reflexes, but he has yet to name an airport after himself, or a city (Puerto Presidente Stroessner), or to put a neon sign atop a building like the one at the Plaza of Heroes in Asuncion that blinks orange through the night: ''Stroessner - Peace, Work, Well-being . . . Stroessner - Peace, Work, Well-being . . . .''

In a strange way, President Stroessner has claimed an area of absurdity that none of his peers thought to expropriate. For the general, a man who can arrest, imprison or banish anyone he pleases without trial or explanation under the capital's permanent state of siege, Paraguay has achieved perfect peace and democracy. It is, by self-acclamation, the United States' best friend. The word ''democracy'' soils every official sheet of paper, every state proclamation, hundreds of pages daily in the official press. Even General Pinochet talks about an eventual return to parliamentary rule; even Mr. Castro says his ''Socialism'' aspires to achieving a more faultless Communist existence. But in Paraguay, General Stroessner has elevated himself to the level of democracy apotheosized.

For the people who reach out to touch the bars of the cage, all signals count. They look at the general and see his passive stare, his stiffened movements, his hands swollen to lobster claws, as signs of time passing, of an end to come. In a country with only a vague year or two of rule by law in its entire history, the signs of change inspire as much fear as hope.

HE GENERAL GETS up at 5 A.M. Since Somoza's assassination in Paraguay in 1980, after his ouster from his own country the year before, no one is sure where the general spends the night, but his official residence, part of a compound with a police hospital on the grounds (torture victims are said to be taken to a fifth-floor ward for attempts at reanimation), sits in awkward proximity to the United States Embassy, directly across the street.

The general's day begins with telephone calls, and it is said that, between 6 A.M. and 7 A.M., a ring on one of the 82,000 phones in a country of just over 3 million people is automatically answered, ''Si, Senor Presidente.'' Visitors parade through the office starting at 7 A.M. By 8 P.M. it is clear who came, because the visits lead the newscasts on the two television channels. It may be the Chilean Ambassador or the South African military attache, but more often the parade is an exercise in trying to look respectable, scooping up whoever is passing through town. In mid-August, the nightly news led off with President Stroessner extending his hand to a visiting veterinarian, described as the chief of the department of artificial insemination at a cow college in West Germany.

Then the general visits things. He opens banks, he hands out diplomas, he inaugurates telephone booths. He is conscious of his image. As an aide pointed out, he never cuts ribbons of Paraguayan red, white and blue, he unknots them - a man who cares.

The rest of the day, from noon on, is more opaque. No one can remember the general ever holding a press conference, and interviews are rare. (A request for an interview for this article never received an official response.) Some of those whose jobs involve watching the general, and who feel he is declining, while the country operates on anautomatic pilot, believe he sleeps much of the day. For a group convinced of his mental acuity, 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 represent 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 Stroessner is no historical accident. After independence in 1811, Paraguay's first ruler was a dictator ''for life'' - Jose Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia, known as El Supremo, who banned all travel, foreign trade, entry or exit, meetings and mail. Despots of varying compulsions succeeded him. Paraguay became the first country in South America to have a railroad, but it also found itself with a ruler in Francisco Solano Lopez who in 1864 devised 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 Marshal Lopez are national heroes, perhaps understandably, if you count the 22 presidents, 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 Stroessner, son of a German immigrant from Bavaria and a Paraguayan mother, to stage a military coup.

The general's staying power has been based on controlling the military and turning the Colorado Party, traditionally an amalgam of peasants and shopkeepers, into an unusually effective grass- roots organization. Each little town has its Colorado ''section,'' a dispenser of jobs and favors and a collector of local intelligence; neither the block committees of the Sandinistas nor the factory councils of East Germany ever worked more effectively.

Party membership is usually a precondition for becoming a grade-school teacher or being appointed as a soldier or officer in the Presidential Escort Battalion. The military's loyalty is assured by cutting generals and colonels into the so-called illegal economy - contraband, kickbacks, pure theft - that even newspapers allied to the Government say represents about half the gross national product. Generals whose nominal salary is about $550 a month can live in a kind of ostentation that goes beyond caricature. Their houses, built on half-paved roads, look like the White House, or the Chateau de Chambord, or Viking lodges. The relative prosperity of the last few years has produced a small middle class more interested in possessions than in politics.

General Stroessner's enormous good luck, in a sense, was to come to power in a country so devastated, so miserable that the capital had no running water in 1954, and the country had only minimal electrification. Over the years, he has had the astuteness to turn every light bulb into an enterprise that sounds like the Gen. Don Alfredo Stroessner Citizens Illumination Project, every drain pipe into the splendor of a National Hygiene Consortium, Don Alfredo Stroessner, President.

The small-town politician's sociological skills - ''Stroes sner looks like a Bavarian but thinks like a Guarani Indian,'' says a European ambassador - were accompanied by a fabulous windfall. The construction by Paraguay and Brazil of the Itaipu Dam on the Brazilian border - in Paraguay's case, almost entirely with other people's money - brought Paraguay a clear $1.8 billion in revenue from 1975 to 1983. The hydroelectric project, described as the world's biggest, gave Paraguay, for a while, the fastest growth in the hemisphere. The money, and its dribble-down effects on the population, modulated the need to brutalize.

After decades of terror sent about a million Paraguayans out of the country, the rush of cash purchased a kind of national docility, and allowed an occasional slackening of the whip hand. Last year, when the Government broke up the Paraguayan Data Bank, a group trying to furnish statistics to contrast with the regime's own on national wealth and its pathetic distribution, only two of the 30 people arrested complained of being tortured. ''By local historical standards, an enlightened percentage,'' a diplomat said. This summer, a businessman told of two Paraguayans being arrested when they bumbled into a police shake-down scheme. Naked, they were made to kneel and stare at a white- painted wall for nine hours. If they tried to move or close their eyes, they were beaten. ''Not the real hard stuff,'' according to the businessman.

The Minister of the Interior, Sabino Montanaro, who has been excommunicated by the Roman Catholic Church for intolerable abuses over the years (and who, more recently, has been restored to the faith), mumbles something about subversives when the torture question comes up. In an interview, he says, ''We are against all harassment.''

Don Alfredo does not enjoy such unpleasant subjects. The foreigners who see him regularly are of two schools. One of them reports that he is incapable of answering precise questions, and that his conversation runs to reminiscences from the Chaco War and ramblings about communism, subversives, do-gooders and being unappreciated. These visitors regard him as in clear decline; he is old, they say, sometimes clear enough in the head to cancel someone's permit to import a Volkswagen or a salami slicer, but gradually fossilizing, the last of the South American dinosaurs turning slowly to stone. The other school insists that the general is all there when he needs to be. One frequent visitor, a bit of an archivist, has compiled a small folio of Stroessnerisms delivered before dawn:

''Even Carter thought I was doing a good job. He was a fool, he destroyed people's faith in America. I am one of America's best friends, but the United States treats their enemies better than their friends.''

''Pinochet is a failure. He never created an organization, a type of democracy that would give people a sense of participation.''

''Somoza was arrogant. A boozer.''

''I can understand why Reagan would not want to see me. It wouldn't be good for him politically.''

''No one starves here.''

''Some countries - the real people - are not politically mature enough to sustain a United States type of democracy. Paraguay is one.''

''I am no dictator.'' ASUNCION IS A poky place that actually smells of orange blossoms. By South American standards, it is short on the dismal and the desperate: A couple of kids sleep on the sidewalk; a barefoot boy sells papers in the nasty rain of the austral winter. In truth, Asuncion largely escapes the assault of endless, gagging misery. On Saturday nights, what there is of the new middle class stakes out parrilladas (grill restaurants) in Miami- bought leisure suits to eat and stare. If you listen hard, you can still hear men playing the harp and guitar duets that are Paraguay's sweet, sad folk music.

The appearances are inuring. A representative of a faraway little country with a passionate, even manic democratic system, said he rather liked living here: He can drink the water, he can eat the lettuce, and he says his daughter can walk the streets at 11 P.M. That is not entirely certain - after attempted attacks on women staff members, the United States Embassy instituted a nightly security patrol for its families this year. In any case, Paraguayans are often appalled by some foreigners' readiness to take quiet for calm, stillness for an absence of violence, in a city where soldiers point guns at children when they approach a general's house.

The West German Embassy, which spends a lot of its time trying to extradite German thugs and deadbeats who regard Paraguay as a kind of enormous safe house, got the mood understatedly right in a sheet of travel tips made available to those passing through: ''All restaurants close at 1 A.M. It is advisable at that point to leave the streets. The police has far- reaching powers and, as a rule, does not hesitate to employ them extensively. It is urgently emphasized not to become involved in discussions with the police or other authorities. Foreigners should avoid commenting on Paraguayan politics. Subsequent difficulties are easily encountered as a result of the efficient information police system . . . . Visitors who are arrested should request that the Embassy be informed.''

Since everything has its price - $200 for a permanent residency permit, $200 for citizenship, maybe $700 for a passport - no one need tarry in jail too long. Unless, of course, the military feels crossed in some deal, and, like a poor German named Gandermann this summer, you wind up in a brig in the Chaco beyond even the shrugging impotency of the courts. Laws are written down, but mbarete , a Guarani word meaning clout, runs everything. Two confused tax collectors who inexplicably ventured into a business run by Gen. Andres Rodriguez, commander of the Asuncion military region and one of the country's richest generals - besides having a son married to one of the President's daughters - got a summary definition of mbarate : They were beaten, had their heads shaved and were thrown into the street, an American said.

Attempts at moving in wide arcs around the violence-corruption-military complex do little good; in Paraguay, there are more police per capita than in Bulgaria, East Germany or South Africa. Paul H. Lewis, professor of political science at Tulane University, who compiled the statistics, gives General Stroessner his due, though. According to his figures, the proportion of police to Paraguay's population falls behind the comparable ratio in Qaddafi's Libya and Hoxha's Albania.

Corruption, like brutality, is discussed with a flip, next- case matter-of-factness. A diplomat tells of a Cabinet minister asking for a $2 million slice of a $12 million contract. A banker explains that he must kick back 100 guaranis per dollar to employees in the Central Bank in order to export dollars at a rate of about 240 to one, roughly half that of the unofficial parallel market. A foreigner tells of the construction of a cement plant with a yearly production capacity of 650,000 tons, when the country uses only 200,000 tons; the size of the deal, he explains, increases the amount of cream at the top for the bosses. A private Panamanian barge company wins a contract in dollars to transport oil from Buenos Aires in competition with a Government-owned Paraguayan firm which accepts payment in guaranis. According to banking sources, a small group of friends and officials knew of a planned devaluation two weeks before it took place, and got richer on the foreign exchange market.

The Colorado Party talks about land reform and providing farming plots to 300,000 peasants, but the best land goes into the estancias of the generals and colonels, or into the agribusiness. By American reckoning, almost three-fourths of the usable farming and ranch land is occupied by 3 percent of the country's farms and ranches. On a standard scale used by one embassy to measure land distribution - placing egalitarian perfection at 0 and total injustice at 1 - Paraguay scores a .93. ''Paraguay is a brothel,'' a businessman said. ''The magnitude, intensity and openness of its corruption is unique. There are days when just about every buck here stinks.''

Humberto Rubin, the radio- station owner and broadcaster whose station was shut down for discussing corruption in the courts and in land reform, talks of ''stealing and lying, shameless beyond belief.'' ''Can you understand,'' he asks, ''what this has done to the dignity, to the self-respect of a people?''

Mr. Rubin, a man of unusual courage, stops there. General Stroessner and his friends have left Paraguay with the fears and passivity of a battered child. IN GRAHAM GREENE'S

''Travels With My Aunt,''

Aunt Augusta, on a visit

to Paraguay, meets a wretch named Mr. Visconti who has lost all his money trying to buy a new passport and bribing the police. She finds him sad. ''God knows how Dr. Mengele manages,'' Aunt Augusta says, ''but I expect he has a numbered account in Switzerland.''

Dr. Mengele was here indeed, paying off his Paraguayan citizenship papers for 20 or 25 years. The papers, according to a published document, were witnessed by Col. Alejandro von Eckstein, a Paraguayan in his 70's, with a European accent, who, diplomats say, was given an ''honorary'' officer's commission by General Stroessner and is often seen in the presidential antechambers. The Israelis, who have an embassy in Asuncion, and a sufficiently equivocal relationship with Paraguay to try to sell the army mobile desalinization equipment, think that Mengele is dead or gone; the Americans are of the same view.

The best indication of Dr. Mengele's departure is a story, told by a foreigner, of how three Paraguayan colonels reacted when Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo chief of Lyons, was extradited by Bolivia to France in 1983 - in exchange, it has been said, for shipping French weapons to the Bolivian police. ''Maybe we could pass von Eckstein off as Mengele,'' one of the colonels is supposed to have said. ''What do you think he is worth - $200,000?''

Paraguay reacts with operatic outrage when Mengele's name is mentioned. Last month, the official party newspaper, La Patria, produced an editorial, printed on specially tinted yellow paper, denouncing what it called ''Mengele-Wiezhental and Co., Inc.'' The argument, complete with its derogatory misspelling of Simon Wiesenthal's name, was that the redoubtable Nazi hunter was interested solely in making money and defaming Paraguay. This is just another turn in the Paraguayan tragicomedy, since the country has always been a haven for right-wing extremists, or just embezzlers, swindlers and con men on the run. The acknowledged list now includes Georges Watin, who once tried to kill Charles de Gaulle; Gaetano Orlando, an Italian neo-Fascist whose extradition on criminal charges was rejected, and Auguste Ricord, the French-born international drug dealer who returned to Paraguay after being released from an American prison last year.

The general expectation of people like these - many of them Germans attracted by the fact that about a tenth of Paraguay's population has some German background - is that compassion is available at a price. Some find it. Some do not: German sources tell of a German dental-supply salesman who arrived recently with suitcases containing 110 kilograms of gold, which he had accumulated by faking orders from his clients. First the suitcases disappeared, then the salesman.

Among those alighting in Asuncion during the last few years was Hans Hermann Weyer, a West German who had specialized at home in selling phony titles to used- car dealers hungry for respectability. In Paraguay, which ignored three extradition requests for him on fraud charges, Mr. Weyer concentrated on real-estate deeds and drivers' licenses - both reputedly of his own design. Then he moved on.

Like movie listings, the newspapers save space for extradition news. One day it's a couple of embezzling Argentine bankers; another day it's a phony Spanish priest. The local rule is that when you can't pay, you go. Two Americans, Richard Cochran and Janet Krebs, wanted for robbing a Nevada bank, found this out in August. Their arrest was announced, and a newspaper story followed, saying that about $900,000 had been seized at the same time. Then another report appeared, saying the take was really more than $1 million, plus jewelry. A third story, published a few days later, said a lawyer had been arrested and the sum involved was, in fact, $2.7 million. What happened, a foreign source explained, was that there had been some competitive bidding among police factions on protection fees, and that the deal had tottered out of control.

Paraguay made the best of it: The money, with great and rare ceremony, was entrusted to the care of the Central Bank, and an extradition request from the United States Embassy for Mr. Cochran and Mrs. Krebs was granted. G ENERAL STROESSner always makes the best of things, following the rule he has created for himself - buying out or beating up; one generally works as well as the other. His refinement, his special totalitarian discovery, is that if you destroy a people's honor long enough, many will think of themselves as beyond repair.

In a green-walled classroom of Asuncion's Catholic University, I talked to a group of students. They spoke of themselves in an odd, jarring language for young people, one of enormous self-contempt. Again and again the comments were despairing, self-lacerating:

''I'm not hopeful. If he dies, it can get worse. He keeps a balance.''

''There is no political option. The young people are rotten. There are no moral values. When he goes, it's more of the same.''

''You don't change anything. Maybe through violence, maybe through a revolution, but the people are passive.''

''We hate him.''

''Our desire is to become a real democracy, but this is so hard. We must be cautious.''

Carmen Lara Castro, president of the Paraguayan Human Rights Commission and a woman whose entire family has been jailed, tortured or exiled, describes the essential characteristics of Paraguayan life as indifference and fear. The opposition parties, she says, are largely to blame for their feebleness. ''They have been irresponsible and petty, wasting themselves in their own endless in- fighting.''

The truth is, the opposition, allowed to function within the parameters of rigged elections to a sham parliament and the Colorado Party's system of surveillance and patronage, does not come to much, and when it cannot be bought, it is beaten. ABC Color, the newspaper that edged closest to questioning the President's authority and methods, was shut down this spring. Mr. Rubin, the radio broadcaster, says he has been in and out of jail 10 times. P40 Perhaps to control them better, a group of Colorado Party dissidents known as Mopocos were allowed to return from exile - and were led into a trap of severe restraints and total surveillance. Communism is forbidden, but so is the Christian Democratic Party, its leader banished. Anyone can found a new political organization: All that is needed are 10,000 signatures, a notion as inconceivable as the Supreme Court abridging General Stroessner's state-of- siege powers.

The most effective counterforce in Paraguay is the Roman Catholic Church, whose newspaper, Sendero (Path), is essentially the only self-respecting reading material in the country now. The Archbishop of Asuncion, Ismael Rolon, has sent letters to the semiofficial press complaining of the scarcity of truth in their columns, but the letters are not published. Perhaps the most courageous of the churchmen is Bishop Melanio Medina of the town of Benjamin Aceval, a couple of stores and a sugar refinery about an hour's drive away from the capital and into the Chaco region. For La Patria, the Colorado Party newspaper, Monsignor Medina is the ''Red Bishop.'' The monsignor replies to the taunt with a smile of middling contempt, but he talks about Paraguay with the same sadness as the young people:

''The dictatorship has succeeded in domesticating us. Fear is pervasive. Youth has no ambition for political life. If you think, you come under pressure. If you don't think, you have no problems. No real dissident could survive. The country has been impoverished in the worst, most essential sense - in its humanity.''

Monsignor Medina says the ''Red Bishop'' jibe is the Government's pathetic response to his sermons on human rights and injustice. ''The anti-Communism of the regime is ridiculous, a facade to protect their own interests. The disrespect for the individual; the informers; the police - in these ways we are like the Communists, not very far from them at all.''

It may be a unique case in Latin America, but, within the opposition, the United States is not the focus of blame. Brazil, the essential source of Paraguayan money and arms, is often described as Paraguay's colonial warder. Argentina, once again a democracy, gets criticized for not matching its promises as a critic of oppression, and for sending, instead, its Cabinet ministers to pose with General Stroessner's friends for the signature of a hydroelectric project. Compared to Argentines and Brazilians, who have the alleged arrogance of big brothers - and money invested in Paraguayan agriculture, light industry and utilities - Americans seem somehow vague.

A century ago, President Rutherford B. Hayes decided in Paraguay's favor in an international arbitration, and since then, America's errors or disinterest or negligence vis- a-vis Paraguay are treated with eerie semi-indulgence. The opposition says the United States could do more to exert pressure: withdraw its ambassador, block internationally funded loans to the general's regime, howl in public about 30 years of Stroessnerism. American assistance to Paraguay, which totaled $187 million in technical and economic aid from 1942 to 1984, comes to about $190,000 this year. With an average annual income of more than $1,000, Paraguay, like Brazil, Colombia or Mexico, is regarded as being out of the league of desperate poverty, and assistance from the United States Agency for International Development is being terminated. Washington still maintains an Office of Defense Cooperation in Asuncion, with a $50,000 annual budget for sending a handful of officers to United States Army training schools; others occasionally join in American-led command exercises.

These days, the United States does not offer General Stroessner either guns or much money, or even photo opportunities. On the other hand, with the exception of a complaint when ABC Color was closed, and the absence of an American honor guard from this year's big parades in Asuncion, the Administration does little to oppose General Stroessner, even symbolically. None of the difficulties thrown up for General Pinochet's Chile are carried over to Paraguay; the United States turns its head when money for the country is discussed at the Inter-American Development Bank or the International Monetary Fund.

The current Ambassador is Arthur H. Davis Jr., a Colorado shopping-center developer described as a friend of the brewer Joseph Coors, one of the major backers of President Reagan's campaign. Coming after Robert White, the Ambassador for two years of the Carter Administration, who nagged and nudged Paraguay into releasing hundreds of political prisoners, Mr. Davis was greeted like a long-lost friend. He turned out to be rather more interested in human-rights violations than the general or his friends would have liked. Although it was not the Ambassador's fault, a gaffe by the State Department was probably the most significant American action in relation to Paraguay this year. Somehow, a departmental document included a reference to the Mopocos - a breakaway faction of the Colorado Party - as having possible terrorist links. The information was wrong, the United States Embassy acknowledged in an open letter. But the Paraguayan Government, insisting on the well-known infallibility of the American security services, has used the gaffe to turn the Mopocos into pariahs.

The State Department is more certain of the accuracy of another piece of information, which Paraguayan officials also frequently wave in the air for visitors as the final, transcendental proof of the goodness of the general's life work. On 10 so-called key issues in the United Nations last year, Paraguay voted with the United States more faithfully than any other country in the world.

''What I keep telling the Americans is that Paraguay is not a case of the regime or the Communists,'' says Mr. Zucolillo, the ABC Color publisher. ''But there must be some political growth here - something. We're stunted. Otherwise, the alternatives when the old man goes are not all good ones.''

Although Mr. Zucolillo does not name them, the alternatives are obvious enough. One is a war among the Colorado Party clans and the military factions; a new dictatorship, weaker, more brutal, more unstable; revenge, trouble, bloodshed. The stuff of revolution. In Paraguay, Mr. Rubin says, ''power has never been handed over peacefully.''

Rather more sanguine is the reasoning that Brazil and Argentina, with their large investments in the country, would act to prevent any upheaval. Pushed further, the argument contends that since Argentina has already returned to democracy, and Brazil is expected to move away from military rule when an electoral college chooses a new president next January, General Stroessner must take heed of the trend.

Foreigners often talk that way. Paraguayans think that the years ahead may bring a civilian president, perhaps Luis Maria Argana, the chief of the Supreme Court, but that someone in the military is certain to be behind him - perhaps the powerful General Rodriguez, once described by United States narcotics agents as a drug-running ally of Auguste Ricord; perhaps Gen. Gerardo Johannsen, a rather more self-effacing officer, who heads the country's military training institutes. General Stroessner, according to a diplomat, has given General Johannsen the following bit of advice for the years to come: ''In this country, don't tell anyone your family is from Denmark. The Danes are bakers, bacon makers. From now on, Johannsen, you're German. They're soldiers.''

Paraguayans who look closely at the general for signs of slippage; who watch hopefully for an end, and fear an end; who yearn for a new life while dreading the future of a country stripped of political structure and robbed of so much of its pride, say the prognosis is depressing: After Stroessner, more Stroessner. TO WATCH THE COUNtry watch him, I flew into the Paraguayan outback, to a place called Capitan Bado, where the general went to unknot inaugural ribbons at a post office, a dispensary and, it seemed, anything else that had been built there in the last 10 years. The town's main street, a wide dirt road that looked like a river bed, is the border with Brazil; no customs men, just some soldiers wearing forage caps with chin straps, and a tent show, the ''Fantastico Circo Koslov,'' that could have come straight from ''La Strada.'' I had been told the general was popular in the countryside, and red banners nailed up at a little stand fit right in: ''Stroessner, Stroessner is the jubilant cry emerging from our Paraguayan soul,'' and ''Welcome, noble and illustrious chief, governor of the heart of America.''

I was given a red Colorado Party bandana, which I was graciously dispensed from wearing, and a seat in the reviewing stand about three rows behind the general, which made me uncomfortable, thinking of the violent, reviewing-stand end of Anwar el-Sadat. There were some speeches, and then we walked, following the general, through the dirt streets.

There were school kids in white smocks, and little bunches of townspeople. We walked and walked, and there was silence. Past the old men in white shirts, the guys in cowboy hats, the kids with their shoes shined - walking in total silence. Thirty years, and it had come to this! Oh, the stillness!

Finally someone cheered, ''Viva Stroessner.'' It was thin but audible. The general broke ranks, went over, and shook the man's hand.

The New York Times

Archives|A REPUBLIC OF FEAR

Archives | 1984

A REPUBLIC OF FEAR

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