Edgar Linneo Ynsfrán Doldán (December 9, 1921 – November 2, 1991) was a Paraguayan politician who held important governmental posts during the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner.
[1] In 1948, he was a member of the Paraguayan delegation that participated in the Paris meeting of the third session of the UN General Assembly, where the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted.
During the civil war of 1947, he participated on the side of the government, but supported not so much President Higinio Morínigo as Colorado leader Juan Natalicio González.
Ynsfrán referred to the Colorado paramilitaries - who were particularly infamous in their brutality against left-wing activists in the countryside - as the lifeblood of the party, hailing their "barbaric" tendencies and calling them a "people's movement for the truth", contrasting the village far-right militants with "intellectual slackers who sat in cafes".
[1] The ideological and political views of Ynsfrán naturally led him to the camp of supporters of General Alfredo Stroessner in the tumultuous years of the Federico Chaves presidency.
He coordinated the actions of the army's death squads, secret police and the Py Nandi peasant militia, demonstrating great cruelty.
In 1962, a conspiracy by a group of junior army officers in support of exiled Colorado dissident Epifanio Méndez Fleitas was discovered and brutally suppressed.
He played an important role in providing asylum to Josef Mengele, and personally alluded to the presence of Martin Bormann in Paraguay.
A May 1966 police corruption scandal gave Stroessner a convenient way to dismiss Ynsfrán in November from the post of head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
He was succeeded by Sabino Augusto Montanaro, a member of the ruling "Cuatrinomio de Oro", who remained a minister until the end of the Stronist regime.
[9] This movement grew in strength until the coup d'état of 2 and 3 February 1989, when Stroessner was deposed and replaced by his former confidant, Andrés Rodríguez Pedotti, with the support of the army.
By this time, Ynsfrán had come to favor a more humane approach to government, a marked turnabout from his role in the most repressive phase of the Stronato.