I’ve never heard a bad word about General Stroessner — well, hardly ever — but conversely I’ve never seen any indication that he would be all saint-like if cheated by rascally contractors… Perhaps they persuaded him Fitzcarraldo was a documentary.
Little known fact: in his first election, he was the only one running.
As said – the “too-deep-draught” vessels thing is just something I read (or maybe “heard-told-of”) long ago: can’t give a cite for it, and it may just be apocryphal.
Stroessner certainly was – for good or ill – a “character”. A silly fact concerning him, which I’ve always liked: in Gerald Durrell’s book The Drunken Forest, about an animals-for-zoos-collecting expedition to Argentina and (principally) Paraguay in 1954, he tells of the venture being largely wrecked by a severe political upheaval in Paraguay, while he was there – he had to hastily leave the country in a chartered small plane, taking only two or three of his most valued “captures” – the rest, he had to set free (only they didn’t want to go). This “revolution” as he calls it, from which he had to flee, was in fact the coup in which Stroessner came to power. There followed several decades of stability in Paraguay, at a hell of a cost.
Paraguay is very similar to Bolivia, isolated an had a series of bad governments lead by crackpot dictators that weakened the nation even further. How bad? General Stroessner, the pro-Nazi head of the Colorado party was one of the better ones.
Paraguay has a long sad history starting with its it’s second president, Carlos Lopez who decided to go to war against Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay all at the same time. This resulted in the loss of somewhere between 40% to 65% of the entire population (and about 90% of the men of fighting age). Paraguay suffered complete conquest, and only survived as a country because both Brazil and Argentina couldn’t decide how to parcel it up.
An interesting book on Paraguay is At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig; Travels through Paraguay.
I’ve read Inflatable Pig – subject-matter fascinating, but came to find self strongly “allergic” to the author, the improbably-named John Gimlette. He strikes me as the worst kind of smug, self-satisfied, wildly-and-cliche’d-ly-generalising, tabloid-journalistish kind of writer. He’s written further travel books, about potentially interesting places – his second book, about Newfoundland / Labrador. I struggled some way through that one, then came upon an utterance by the fellow, which enraged me, as in throwing the book violently at the opposite wall; never opening it again; and vowing never to read a single syllable by him, ever again.
Pity – he goes to and writes about some interesting places – I just find him an insufferably up-himself, conceited, facile arsehole.
Starting with Francia firmly.
Of every dictator in all the world, Francia was the most depressing.
PJ O’Rourke had some interesting things to say about Paraguay in his excellent compendium Give War a Chance.
Ooo, tell us some, please!
Switzerland has a navy, subordinate to the Army, which operates on lakes on the country’s borders.
Just noticed this one: getting still further off-topic, but Stephen Fry makes a similar remark about New Zealand’s avifauna – “appear to have been named by [rude] ten-year-olds…the kakapo…the kokako, the kaka, the takahe, the cocky-poo (Okay, I made the last one up…)”
Bumped.
There’s an interesting article about the Austro-Hungarian Imperial and Royal Navy in the current (June 2017) issue of Naval History magazine, including a paragraph about Capt. von Trapp and a picture of him on the bridge of his tiny submarine, the U-5. He sank 14 enemy ships during World War I, including a French armored cruiser.
Well, as long as it’s bumped/resurrected, I’ll just mention that I got to chat with Maria when I was a kid (she owned an inn in Vermont, and when she wasn’t blasting through the mountains in her little yellow sports car, she’d dine with the guests).
Someone asked about the accuracy of a scene in the movie and she just chuckled as if to say “Oh, you gullible Americans” and proceeded to say “Let me ask you something. Do you think we would make our children hike across the Alps if we could just buy railway tickets instead?”
One wonders how many Jews fell for that and how many ‘honorary Aryans’ were led into the gas chambers bitterly regretting ever having taken the word of a Nazi for anything. Far too many I fear.
The Swiss Navy is the old joke, although one could argue that they do indeed have a navy, besides their mercantile marine. It isn’t termed such and is part of the army but they do have a sizeable flotilla of armed patrol boats which police the Swiss lakes.
Maybe cockapoos originated in NZ? 
More recent estimates suggests that the losses were much smaller than previously thought (closer to 20% of the population than 50%), but still, they were bad enough. The sex ratio by the end of the war was 3 women for each man, which means it must have been amazing to be a man around then.
There are claims floating around the fringes of the behavioural-ecology literature that Paraguayan women actually had more male children in the 1870s- the theory being that they subconsciously responded to the stimulus of being in a female-biased environment by having more children of the rarer sex. It sounds kind of dubious and IIRC the only source is one scholar, but if true it would be really interesting.
Paraguay sort of got some national pride back by defeating Bolivia in a territorial war in the 1930s (probably the last serious inter-state war to happen in the Americas), but the piece of land which they were fighting over turned out not to have the easily exploitable oil reserves that they’d initially thought, so it was mostly for nothing.
Old racist joke:
How come you never see any black folk on a cruise?
They ain’t falling for that again.
There was a restaurant near Very Jewish Skokie that was assembled of old railway freight cars. Unsurprisingly, considering how much of the population, or their family members they never again saw, had ridden on freight cars, it failed. Then the ex-pat Soviets moved in and, remembering freight cars as the height of luxury, turned it into a disco.
Bumped.
Just saw the movie again - good, gooey, schmaltzy, historically-inaccurate fun, as always. I noticed the lapel pins the Captain wears in a couple of scenes - anyone recognize what they are? He’s not in naval uniform: Christopher Plummer - Google+ Cristopher Plummer as Captain Von Trapp