Juan Manuel Frutos Fleitas (also known by his alias of Papacito) (April 10, 1923 – March 24, 2013) was a Paraguayan politician and government minister under the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner.
He was the founder and first chairman of the Rural Welfare Institute (Instituto de Bienestar Rural—IBR), and as such, he was one of the key figures of the Stroessner administration's economic policy, spearheading the "March to the East" land reclamation and colonization project of the 1960s-1980s.
Ideologically, he was close to the Third Position: he combined the traditional Catholic worldview, extreme nationalism, implacable anti-communism with republican views and social populism.
The 1954 coup d'état saw the rise to power of Alfredo Stroessner, an army general who instituted a one-party state dictatorship in Paraguay for the next 35 years.
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.
In March 2012, under left-wing President Fernando Lugo, a group of human rights activists even approached the Prosecutor General's Office with a proposal to investigate the activities of Frutos when he was head of the IBR.
He was the leader of the right-wing radical faction of traditionalists in the ruling Colorado, and acted as one of the main ideologists of the Stronist regime and the organizer of its mass base, particularly following the dismissal of Edgar Ynsfrán.
[5] Characteristically, Frutos headed the Paraguayan branch of the World League for Freedom and Democracy, and chaired the XII WLFD conference in Asunción (April 1979).
Frutos called not only to defend traditional values and the Christian understanding of freedom, but also to assert social equality and justice as opposed to communism.