Paraguay's Colorado regime built its meeting halls atop a dozen stolen public parks, and now the local community wants them back
In the early 2000s, Iván Gayoso used to play football at a pitch a few blocks from his house. The Sub Seccional Number 8 was a rare place where he could meet friends locally after school. Then, when he was 13, the caretaker shut its doors. Fifteen years later, as an architecture student, Gayoso was poring over the land registry for Asunción, the capital of Paraguay. ‘A light switched on,’ he says.
He realised that the compound where he used to kick a ball around was once public property, but – like countless other former parks and plazas across the city – was being illegally occupied by the right-wing political movement that has ruled the South American country almost without interruption since 1947. He wrote his thesis on how the 35-year dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner walled off acres of public areas and built local branches of the Colorado Party on top of them. A mix of sports hall, frat house and listening-post for Stroessner’s informants, at least a dozen of these seccionales – typically corrugated-iron hangars adjoining offices of roughly plastered brick – are still squatting on public land, according to legal rulings. ‘These are just the confirmed cases,’ Gayoso emphasises. ‘It could be 12 or 50 or 100.’
Unlike Argentina, Chile or Uruguay, Paraguay has hardly reckoned with its decades of one-party rule. Stroessner’s dictatorship – an unholy trinity consisting of him, the army, and the scarlet-shirted Colorados – sheltered Nazi fugitives, murdered over 400 opponents, and tortured some 19,000. Even after Stroessner was exiled in 1989, the Colorados clung on to the presidential palace, and still hold huge sway over the courts, the media and everyday life.
Paraguay’s right-wing Colorado Party, which has ruled the country almost without interruption since the 1940s, seized swathes of public land in the capital Asunción and built seccionales and sub seccionales (meeting halls) atop it
Credit: Kostiantyn Levin/Alamy
The neighbourhood seccional remains the foundation of this structure, throwing parties, handing out medicines, hosting boxing matches: all in exchange for votes. When Gayoso started to dig into how the Colorados had implanted themselves into the fabric of the city, many warned him off the topic. ‘It implied prodding the beast, a huge party machine with its tentacles everywhere,’ he explains. But for the architect, now 30, it has become a personal matter. ‘We’re not just recovering public space. We’re also bringing down the bastions of corruption in this country – and above all in the capital.’
Asunción, founded by conquistadors in a languid bend of the Paraguay River five centuries ago, looks green at first glance. Palms sprout from crumbling belle-époque palaces. Mango trees deposit their overripe fruit in the gutter with a thud. Public life seems vibrant too: Indigenous women lay out handicrafts on the pavement; taxi drivers tend a roadside barbecue; campesinos (peasant farmers) pitch camp outside the Pantheon to demand land reform. But compare Asunción with, for example, the leafy promenades of Buenos Aires, and you realise how few genuine civic areas there are in the metropolitan area of nearly three million people. ‘I’m Asunceno through and through,’ says Gayoso. ‘But go to Argentina and you see the difference is huge. For many Asuncenos, public space means shopping malls.’
Iván Gayoso, an architect who used to play football at the Sub Seccional Number 8 (pictured) as a teenager, is part of a growing movement of Asuncenos reclaiming the largely empty seccionales for public use
Credit: Fotociclo
The concept of ecological urbanism holds that cities should reserve a minimum of 10m2 of public space per resident to protect individual and societal wellbeing, but this figure is barely 2.5m2 in the Paraguayan capital. There are plans to erect railings around still more public squares, and to build over the Parque Ñu Guasú, a common near the airport. An important wetland habitat by the river could soon be covered with yet another petrol station. According to media outlet HINA, Greater Asunción contains 975 of them: just one fewer than the 976 catering to Bolivia and Uruguay combined. ‘Asunción is trapped between clientelism and systematised deregulation, between authoritarian fascism on the one side and hyper neoliberalism on the other,’ says Alejandro Valdez Sanabria, co-founder of photography collective Fotociclo. ‘This Stroessnerist, Colorado city can’t carry on like it is. But the hyper-capitalist vision isn’t an option either.’
Fotociclo started out in 2014 when photographer Juan Carlos Meza was roaming Asunción’s 70 neighbourhoods with a custom-built mobile camera tripod, half-Dalek, half-perambulator. A few years later, Gayoso’s thesis, published in 2020, ‘came into our hands,’ says Valdez Sanabria. It confirmed their experience: Asunción’s severe shortage of public space is exacerbated by the Colorado usurpation of squares and parks. In response, earlier this year, Fotociclo convened open workshops in five affected neighbourhoods. The 200 or so residents who took part in the Fotolaboratorio Urbano were encouraged to dream big about what could take the place of the seccionales.
In wealthier neighbourhoods, participants mooted a theatre. Elsewhere, there was talk of community allotments and art galleries. At one meeting, a biologist spoke about rewilding the parks. A group of skaters wanted a skate park. One recurring question, says Melina Pekholtz, an architect who assisted the meetings, was ‘how to leave evidence’ of the erstwhile Colorado occupation. In Barrio Obrero, a traditional Colorado stronghold, people were initially too scared to get involved. Screenshots of WhatsApp groups were leaked to Colorado officials; police were sent to one meeting. ‘I realised that the same methods are still operating,’ Pekholtz adds.
‘It's the last straw: the dictatorship shat on us – and they robbed these parks from us as well’
This June, Fotociclo was due to unveil the resulting proposals and hand them to city hall. It poses an interesting challenge, says Valdez Sanabria: ‘Can we photograph the future?’ Pekholtz hopes that the blueprints, if realised, will enable face-to-face encounters after years of political crisis and the pandemic. ‘The architecture of fascism is hard, it has a single use,’ she argues. ‘But architecture should transcend the functional, and capture the spirit of the place. Generating consciousness is the first step and the most important one. Afterwards, it’s a waterfall.’ Valdez Sanabria agrees: ‘It’s just a beginning. It’s little sparks.’
The seccionales are the urban counterpart, Valdez Sanabria suggests, of the tierras malhabidas – the eight million hectares of state-owned agricultural land parcelled out among Stroessner’s cronies. ‘They stole the equivalent of Panama,’ he says. Put end to end, ‘the land would stretch to the moon. But many people in the city don’t realise that.’ Generating awareness about the Colorado land grab in the capital could promote solidarity with the campesinos forced off their land. ‘It’s a question of memory,’ argues Josue Congo, a journalist with Fotociclo. ‘It’s like the last straw: the dictatorship shat on us – and they robbed these parks from us as well.’
Founded in 2014, the photography collective Fotociclo has organised workshops in which local residents brainstorm ideas for how the reclaimed spaces could be used
Credit: Fotociclo
The campaign has been met with a mixture of intimidation tactics and measured official support
Credit: Fotociclo
When Norma Ramírez moved into the Mburucuyá neighbourhood in 1994, it was dominated by the Sub Seccional Number 4, which looked abandoned. ‘It didn’t feel safe for our kids to walk past. At the weekend, it was all parties and noise,’ she says. Learning that the seccional was sitting on public land, like-minded locals collected signatures, held jumble sales to raise funds, and presented an alternative plan for the square to the progressive mayor, Carlos Filizzola. ‘The whole neighbourhood pitched in,’ recounts Ramírez, now a retired architecture professor. She is no fan of Paraguay’s ruling party, but they were careful to keep their campaign apolitical. ‘It wasn’t an aggressive or violent thing. It was simply saying that we wanted what was ours.’
Eventually, municipal workers came to tear down the seccional with a backhoe. ‘It was amazing,’ Ramírez recalls. ‘For us, it was a triumph.’ A statue of Stroessner on a prominent hill was also toppled. Carlos Colombino, an artist, sandwiched the remains between two blocks of concrete. Still outside the presidential palace today, it looks like the fleshy, moustached general is clutching at the air, trying to escape.
Ramírez drives me the few blocks to the park, now run by the community. A pair of teenagers lope around the running track, a man walks a dog, and two women are working out on the exercise machines. Hand‑painted signs are affixed to trees: ‘Let’s look after our plaza.’ The foundations of the seccional run alongside the football pitch like a platform. ‘People come from other barrios to spend the day here,’ says Ramírez. ‘And we’re proud of that.’
As an architecture student, Gayoso proposed the transformation of seccionales and sub seccionales into public spaces
Credit: Iván Gayoso
Last year, the Colorado mayor of Asunción promised a ‘friendly’ solution regarding the seccionales, but little has happened since. Officials still defend the quasi-statal role played by the party centres. In May, a senior Colorado congressman boasted online of how seccional members find people work, host fundraisers to pay for hospital treatments and cover funeral costs. Colorados, he insisted, belong to ‘the most beautiful and lovely party in the world.’
Gayoso recently flew a drone over the Sub Seccional Number 8. The footage is strangely eerie: panning over high walls daubed with red electoral graffiti, across the long building, and above an empty wooded area. There is no sign of anyone. I ask what he would like to see instead. He thinks each recovered plaza should host a small municipal centre where locals can access government services and hold community meetings. It is the inverse of the Colorado seccionales: not private fiefdoms that dispense favours with strings attached, but a crop of new public parks empowering citizens and diffusing democracy. ‘The secret ingredient is for locals to take ownership, and to have perseverance,’ Gayoso reflects, mentioning the example of the Plaza Mburucuyá. ‘It’s complex, but it can be done.’
Erratum: In the original version of this article, in print and online, the Colorado regime was described as having sheltered Nazi fugitives who had murdered over 400 opponents and tortured some 19,000. This is incorrect: the 400 murdered and 19,000 torture survivors were victims of the Stroessner dictatorship, not the Nazis. The Nazi fugitives, who included Josef Mengele, killed many more. The article has been updated to clarify this.
