Three weeks after taking office, Chávez imposed a state of siege, using his executive emergency powers under the Constitution of 1940 to attack the supporters of González and of ex-President Felipe Molas López.

The Central Bank's practice of granting soft loans to the regime's cronies was spurring a rise in inflation and a growing black market.

Méndez Fleitas was unpopular with Colorado Party stalwarts and the army, who feared that he was trying to create a dictatorship like his hero, President of Argentina Juan Domingo Perón (1946-1955).

When Stroessner took office on 15 August 1954, few imagined that this circumspect, unassuming forty-one-year-old would be a master politician capable of outmaneuvering and outlasting them all—[2] or that they were witnessing the start of the fifth and longest of Paraguay's extended dictatorships.

He had virtually unlimited power by giving a free hand to the military and to Minister of Interior Edgar Ynsfrán, who began to harass, terrorize, and occasionally murder family members of the regime's opponents.

The retirement of González and the death of Molas López had removed two of his most formidable opponents and the September 1955 Argentine coup that deposed President Perón deprived Méndez Fleitas of his main potential source of support.

[2] Stroessner was at the time barely in control of the Colorado Party, which was split in competing factions by rival politicians, while the army was also not a dependable supporter of his rule.

The Colorado Party employed its own militias, the peasant py nandí irregulars ("barefoot ones" in Guaraní) had a well-deserved reputation for ferocity in combat, torture and executing their prisoners.

In addition, the new economic policy had boosted exports and investment and reduced inflation, and the military coups in Brazil in 1964 and Argentina in 1966 also improved the regional political climate for nondemocratic rule in Paraguay.

His replacement, Sabino Augusto Montanaro (a member of the "Cuatrinomio de Oro", a group of politicians intimately connected to Stroessner) continued the same violent policies.

Beginning in the late 1960s, leaders in the Roman Catholic Church persistently criticized Stroessner's successive extensions of his stay in office and his treatment of political prisoners.

The regime responded by closing Roman Catholic publications and newspapers, expelling non-Paraguayan priests, and harassing the church's attempts to organize the rural poor.

In 1980 the Ninth Organization of American States General Assembly, meeting in La Paz, Bolivia, condemned human rights violations in Paraguay, describing torture and disappearances as "an affront to the hemisphere's conscience".

Laíno's charges of government corruption, involvement in narcotics trafficking, human rights violations, and inadequate financial compensation from Brazil under the terms of the Treaty of Itaipú earned him Stroessner's wrath.

In 1979 Laíno helped lead the PLRA, the PDC, Mopoco, and the legally recognized Febreristas, the latter angered by the constitutional amendment allowing Stroessner to seek yet another presidential term in 1978, into the National Accord (Acuerdo Nacional).

The victim of countless detentions, torture, and persecution, Laíno was forced into exile in 1982 following the publication of a critical book about ex-Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle.

Like Stroessner, Somoza had run a regime based on the military and a political party that had been noted for its stability and its apparent ability to resist change.

A 1956 agreement with Brazil to improve the transport link between the two countries by building roads and a bridge over the Paraná River broke Paraguay's traditional dependence on Argentine goodwill for the smooth flow of Paraguayan international trade.

Foreign exchange earnings from electricity sales to Brazil soared, and the newly employed Paraguayan workforce stimulated domestic demand, bringing about a rapid expansion in the agricultural sector.

[2] Agricultural policy for much of the regime was headed by Juan Manuel Frutos Fleitas, who oversaw the creation of the Rural Welfare Institute (Instituto de Bienestar Rural—IBR).

From 1963 to the late 1980s, the IBR titled millions of hectares of land and created hundreds of colonies, directly affecting the circumstances of roughly one-quarter of the population.

Argentina, alarmed by Itaipú and close cooperation between Brazil and Paraguay, pressed Stroessner to agree to participate in hydroelectric projects at Yacyretá and Corpus.

Upon reaching Asunción during his 1958 tour of Latin America, Vice President Richard Nixon praised Stroessner's Paraguay for opposing communism more strongly than any other nation in the world.

The main strategic concern of the United States at that time was to avoid the emergence a left-wing regime in Paraguay, which would be ideally situated at the heart of the South American continent to provide a haven for radicals and a base for revolutionary activities around the hemisphere.

Although pressure of this sort no doubt encouraged Stroessner to legalize some internal opposition parties, it failed to make the Paraguayan ruler become any less a personalist dictator.

The appointment of Robert White as United States ambassador in 1977 and the congressional cut-off of military hardware deliveries in the same year reflected increasing concern about the absence of democratic rule and the presence of human rights violations in Paraguay.

Stroessner used some of that money, as well as slices of major infrastructure works and the delivery of land, to buy the loyalty of his officers, many of whom amassed huge fortunes and large estates.

[8] Most Latin American dictatorships have regularly instituted extrajudicial killings of their enemies; for one of the better-known examples, see Operation Condor, which Paraguay participated in.

It sent U.S. Army officer, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Thierry to help the local workmen to build a detention and interrogation center named La Technica as part of Operation Condor.

In the aftermath of the coup, one of the immediate results was that rural Paraguayans occupied unused lands "claimed by the state, the Stroessner family and its cronies, and foreign investors.