The Search for Paraguay’s Elusive Elysium

Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan

What do the Jesuits, Mary Gilmore, the Reverend Sung Myung Moon, Elisabeth Nietzsche, the Mennonites, Standard Oil and Josef Mengele all have in common?

In the last 323 years, beginning in 1690, all of them have found themselves at one time or another in Paraguay in pursuit of spiritual or material salvation. Jesuit missionaries carting evangelism, Mary Gilmore as part of the New Australia movement, Elisabeth Nietzsche and her Jew-hating husband Bernhard searching for racial purity in Nueva Germania (and later, Josef Mengele and other ex-Nazis hoping to avoid European war crime tribunals), Mennonites fleeing from religious persecution in Russia and Germany, the Moonies’ acquisition of 400,000 hectares of Paraguayan land for “ecological tourism”, and Standard Oil and Shell on opposite sides of the brutal Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay, in a bid to control the resources of the northern region.

Aside from the oil companies’ obvious motivation, why did all these other groups choose Paraguay, rather than, say, Perth? And why did the Paraguayan government welcome such diverse and radical groups of gringo settlers with open arms when the only thing any of them had in common was a desire to flee their homeland and an appreciation of the “happy hour” benefits of the local brew, yerba mate. What became of all their communal dreams of a perfect jungle Xanadu?

Paraguay, tucked in under the lower wing of Brazil, ruined by war, pestilence, famine, unpaid foreign debt and, by 1870, verging on collapse, was desperate to get new blood coming in. It had lost 90 per cent of its male population twenty years before in the War of the Triple Alliance against the forces of Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay. The country sought manpower to re-populate. It offered immigrants tremendously large areas of land with fertile soil for tremendously low amounts of money. The backwardness and remoteness of the wild country allowed it to spread these many diverse foreign communities around without conflict and helped Paraguay survive disintegration. 

Jesuits arrived in Paraguay as early as 1690 with the evangelical goal of recasting the social structure, religion and work habits of the locals, while seeking to eradicate native customs such as ritual sacrifice. The polygamous local Guaraní people had their own pre-contact idea of Shangri-La: they believed in yvy marane’y, a “land without evil” somewhere to the north. “Heaven” wasn’t that big a jump.

By the mid-1700s, the Jesuit missions, known as reducciones, had as many as 140,000 members of the Guaraní people. These so-called “republics” appeared in such movies as Candide (1962)—from the novel by Voltaire—and The Mission (1986).

The Jesuits became the first foreigners to develop and exploit the selling of the local beverage, yerba mate. Yerba mate is a species of the holly family; the steeping of the twigs and leaves of the tree produces a potent caffeine-based drink, differing from other caffeine drinks most significantly in its effects on muscle tissue rather than on the central nervous system.

But the Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay in the 1930s destroyed most of the missions, and the failure of the Jesuit missionaries to create a native clergy, among other reasons, resulted in their disappearance almost without trace. 

Nueva Germania was founded in 1887, near Asunción, the capital of Paraguay, by a German proto-Nazi, Bernhard Förster, his wife Elisabeth (née Nietzsche, sister of the philosopher) and five extremely anti-Semitic families from Saxony. Förster was a veteran of the Franco-Prussian War, a recipient of the Iron Cross, and an activist against Jewish power in Bismarck’s Germany. Förster’s idea was to create a model community demonstrating the virtues of German culture and society, and the superiority of the Aryan race far from the influence of the Jews he detested. Förster secured 40,000 acres along the Aguaraya River in return for a minimal down payment. The further terms were stiff however: 140 families had to be settled on the property within two years, or they would lose the land.

Back in Germany, Nietzsche himself, who despised his sister’s husband, wrote to her:

If Dr Förster’s project succeeds, then I will be happy on your behalf and as far as I can, I will ignore the fact that it is the triumph of a movement which I reject. If it fails, I shall rejoice in the death of an anti-Semitic project.

Förster eventually became an alcoholic and committed suicide, in 1889, with a neat two-finger shot of morphine and strychnine. Elisabeth returned to Germany in 1893. The colonists that remained abandoned supremacist ideals and integrated into Paraguayan society, intermarrying with locals.

Josef Mengele, the Nazi war criminal, spent some time in Nueva Germania while on the run after the Second World War. Five thousand Nazis fled to Argentina. President General Juan Peron sold 10,000 blank Argentine passports to Odessa (the organisation that had been set up to protect SS men in the event of defeat). Another estimated 800 Nazis escaped on passports provided by the Vatican. Over 20,000 Germans settled in Brazil between 1945 and 1959 and approximately 500 to 900 Nazis ended up in Paraguay. 

The New Australia Co-operative Settlement Association, or New Australia, led by the socialist William Lane, officially founded their own Paraguayan utopia in 1893, known locally as Colonia Nueva Australia. The tenants were a brotherhood of English-speaking whites advocating racial purity, life-marriage, teetotalism and communism, as well as the concept of common-hold whereby each member of the settlement could withdraw their proportion of the society’s wealth if they chose to leave.

The Australian poet Mary Jean Cameron followed Lane and other socialist idealists to Paraguay in 1896. There she married Billy Gilmore a year later. Rose Summerfield and Jack Cadogan were also among the first settlers. Summerfield had been an activist in the socialist and women’s suffrage movements in Sydney.

Fleeing Australia, “they had been called cowards and deserters”, said Gilbert Casey, a trade unionist, and agitator of the labour movement. But in a talk at the Brisbane Theatre Royal in 1889 he declared that the New Australians were endeavouring to settle the great problem of putting the great mass of unemployed on the land. He regretted that the venture had not been made in Australia, but later donated his Brisbane home as a prize in a fund-raising raffle and left with his wife and the second group of settlers on the ship Royal Tar Australia. He became president of the Sociedad Cooperativa Colonizadora Nueva Australia in 1896 and remained the police chief of New Australia until his death in 1946.

The difficult living conditions—including mosquito swarms that were so thick that heavy protective clothing and face mesh were required—helped knock the air out of their socialist bubble. Internal strife developed when the second group of settlers arrived a year later. Arguments over use of alcohol and the ineptitude of William Lane’s management resulted in Lane and fifty-eight others leaving New Australia and founding a separate colony called Cosme seventy-two kilometres to the south.

Eventually both settlements were dissolved as co-operatives by the Paraguayan government, each settler given their own piece of land. In 1899, Lane left Cosme for New Zealand, becoming a conservative journalist and editor of the New Zealand Herald. In 1902, the Gilmore family returned to Australia, where they took up farming near Casterton, Victoria. 

The Reverend Sun Myung Moon established his Unification Church in Seoul in 1954. Within a year, thirty churches had sprung up. The Moonies, as they hated to be called, came to public attention for big media events such as mass weddings: in the year 2000 more than 10,000 couples were married in the Seoul Olympic Stadium. Moon’s views on sex and marriage emphasised pre-marital celibacy and marital faithfulness. His teachings also had their weird side. In The Palace of True Love, he wrote: 

In your relationship as husband and wife do you want to just sit and look at one another and smile? Or would you rather have a love relationship that is so tight, so sweet, so strong that you would become totally one like a rubber ball, and roll around together? Once you become totally one and begin rolling together like a round ball, when you roll too fast you will shout and scream and God will hear you and come down and enjoy watching you. Interesting? Exciting? 

The Reverend Moon and his “interesting and exciting” Moonies rolled the round rubber ball to South America and laid the foundation for their Garden of Eden in northern Paraguay. The Unification Church had already spent more than $20 million on a 74,000-acre site, called New Hope Ranch, in neighbouring Brazil. Two thousand followers lived on the site, and planned to invest $2 billion over the next decade. But in 1982 Moon was convicted in the United States of filing false federal income tax returns and conspiracy. He was given an eighteen-month sentence and a $15,000 fine. In 2000, Moon paid an undisclosed amount—estimated at $15 million—for roughly 1.5 million acres of land fronting the Paraguay River. That’s ten dollars an acre. He declared the territory “the least developed place on earth, and, hence, closest to original creation”. In the beginning, the colonists consisted of only males; wives and more followers would join later. But a group of local residents launched a bitter legal battle to nullify the deal. The Reverend Sun Myung Moon died in September 2012 at ninety-two from complications from pneumonia. 

The Mennonites were a group of Christian Anabaptists (meaning, literally, “one who baptises over again”, requiring candidates to make their own confession of faith, thereby rejecting infant baptism) named after the Frisian Menno Simons, born in 1496 in the Netherlands. Mennonites were recognised as leaders in the art of conflict resolution and one of the historic peace churches because of their commitment to non-violence. Persecuted by Catholics, Protestants, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union under Stalin, rather than resist they fled to countries more tolerant of their non-traditional Christian beliefs of the time, such as rejecting church-state control over individuals’ lives. The Paraguayans offered the immigrants bountiful incentives: freedom from military service, their own German-language schools, the promise of little or no government interference, and absolute religious freedom. They also promised an open immigration policy, allowing more Mennonite settlers to join the community.

Eighty of the original group died of plague. The area was so dustbowl-dry that water had to be collected in cisterns. The region’s biggest city, Filadelfia, Paraguay’s first Mennonite settlement, once known as Colonia Menno, was nicknamed “the green hell” due to its inhospitable conditions. In 1937, a group of settlers broke off and founded a new colony in East Paraguay. By 1944, there were two factions, one pro-Hitler with hopes of regaining the farms they had left behind in Russia, and one pacifist and anti-Nazi. Eventually the pro-Hitler group was forced out. 

The Chaco War in the 1930s was South America’s greatest modern conflict. The Standard Oil Company had discovered oil in Bolivia in 1927. On the Paraguayan side was Royal Dutch Shell, which had been granted drilling rights in the Chaco region. Royal Dutch Shell wanted to prevent Standard Oil from exporting via Argentina, so the Rockefeller interests in Bolivia urged expansion into the Chaco region. Captain Ernst Röhm, the infamous organiser of the Nazi SA, had been acting as a special adviser to the Bolivian army from as early as 1925. Marshal José Félix Estigarribia, the Paraguayan commander, was a French-trained strategist who relied on guerrilla tactics against the better-equipped Bolivians. From 1932 to 1935, approximately 30,000 Paraguayans and 65,000 Bolivians died in the fighting. In 1938, a truce was reached and Paraguay was given three-quarters of the Chaco, about 20,000 square miles—less than a square mile for each dead Paraguayan. Huge oil and gas resources were subsequently discovered along the portion of the Chaco awarded to Bolivia, making it the second-largest resource of natural gas in South America after Venezuela. During the next seven decades, no commercial amounts of oil or gas were discovered in Paraguay.

Today, out of the eight original families who stayed, there are some 2000 descendants of the New Australia colonists still residing in Paraguay. Oddly, the larger district is known as New London. Blue-eyed, freckled children play in forty-degree heat. There is a single Catholic church and a cantina. Spanish and Guaraní are the primary languages. Harold Smith (seventy-six) is one of the few remaining English-speaking residents. John Cadogan’s son, León, who was born in the colony, became a renowned ethnologist, and was given the spiritual name of Tupa Kuchubi Veve (one who flies like a whirlwind) for his publications on the culture of the Mbya-Guaraní tribe, and was officially made the first Protector of Indians in 1949. He fought for indigenous rights until his death in 1973.

There is a small cemetery. Names like the Smiths, the Kennedys and the Murrays date back to the early 1900s. Some were young soldiers from the Second World War who felt an affinity with their parents’ ancestors, volunteering to fight for a people—whom they called “Australianos”—and a country that had never known.

Nueva Germania is now a quiet community in San Pedro dedicated to agriculture and specialising in the cultivation of yerba mate. There are currently 4335 inhabitants, 10 per cent of them of German origin. Paraguayans of Latin and Guaraní Indian stock long ago intermarried with most of the descendants of the German colonists, wiping out forever the defective dream of a pure Aryan bloodline. Many of them retain blonde hair and blue eyes but they are predominantly poor, slightly inbred and weakly. They live in adobe homes with tin roofs, no indoor plumbing or telephones. The original Lutheran church and the German school have been closed for twenty years. Children walk five miles to a Spanish-language school. In the town, there are German remnants and a museum that exhibits memories of the town’s origin.

Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, upon her return to Germany, served as her brother’s guardian after his mental collapse in 1889. Upon his death, she refused public access to his writings, editing them without scruple or understanding. The Encyclopaedia Britannica states:

Her distortions of Nietzsche’s ideas … were in large measure responsible for the subsequent misperception of Nietzsche as an early philosopher of fascism. Elisabeth was a supporter of the Nazi Party; her funeral in 1935 was attended by Adolf Hitler and other Nazi dignitaries. After her death scholars re-edited Nietzsche’s writings and found some of Elisabeth’s versions distorted and spurious: she had forged nearly 30 letters and often rewrote passages.

The Jesuits were obliterated but the ruins of their missions are still promoted as tourist attractions.

There are currently 4.5 million followers of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon in the world. In 2011, the forty-eighth, forty-ninth and fiftieth presidents of Paraguay, Juan Carlos Wasmosy, Raúl Cubas Grau and Luis Ángel González Macchi, attended the Global Peace Festival of the Unification Church. Moon’s ten surviving children (he fathered fifteen from two marriages) are presently fighting for control of his empire.

According to Monte Reel, who visited the community in February 2013, the Moonies’ Paraguayan complex is now practically deserted except for a handful of stubborn devotees. The town centre is an unfinished three-storey brick building known as “the hotel”, its only occupant a goat foraging for food scraps. The remaining “messiahs”, as they call themselves, are now looking at building an insect museum as a tourist attraction. They originally planted thousands of jatropha trees, intending to produce bio-diesel fuel, but swarms of parrots ate the fruit. The legal action that local residents launched against the original settlers to nullify the land deal is still in progress.

Of the communities that sought Shangri-la in South America only the Mennonites succeeded. There are currently two main divisions of these Anabaptists thriving in Paraguay: the original descendants of the Russians who fled the upheavals of Bolshevik Russia and Stalin’s purges, and the pacifist Christians of German descent, who fled Canada in the 1920s.

Mennonites contribute 7 per cent of Paraguay’s gross domestic product, generating $100 million a year selling meat, dairy products and grains. Heat-resistant buffalo grass imported from North America in the 1950s helped lay the foundation for a thriving cattle industry. Farming co-operatives run by Mennonites furnish 80 per cent of agricultural production in the country. But environmentalists point out that the vast dry forest known as the Gran Chaco is being felled at an alarming rate by this once poor Christian sect.

The Mennonites number 80,000 today in a country of 6.5 million people.

Although Paraguay has been democratic for two decades, it still suffers from poverty and corruption. A drug trade thrives and policemen carry Kalashnikovs on every street corner in the capital. Between 1970 and 2009, the country had the highest economic growth of South America. A market economy with a large informal sector, it now focuses on re-export of imported consumer goods to neighbouring countries, as well as thousands of small enterprises and street vendors. It prides itself on being “the world’s leading importer of whisky”.

It has the third most important free commercial zone in the world: Ciudad del Este, just behind Miami and Hong Kong. The promises of oil are frequent, but have yet to be delivered on.

Across the river, the military government which took power in Bolivia expropriated Standard Oil’s holdings, creating the state-oil company YPFB, and Bolivia is now the fifth-largest oil producer in South America.

Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote:

The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.

The yearning for a Paradise Regained may be hard-wired into our DNA. But Lionel Trilling also observed, “We are at heart so profoundly anarchistic that the only form of state we can imagine living in is Utopian; and so cynical that the only Utopia we can believe in is authoritarian.”

Communes, co-operatives, back-to-the-land movements, Israeli kibbutzim, German kommuja, the Chinese well-field system, Catholic communitarianism, even the Shakers, the Amish, Tolstoy Farm, Findhorn, and artist’s colonies such as Provincetown in the USA, and Montsalvat and Heide in Australia: there will always be those who gather in intentional communities for causes, social reform, the creation of art, to pioneer new ground and share common goals.

The Canadian politician Jack Carroll once mused that the greatest utopia might be if everyone just realised there was no place to run and no place to hide and just take care of business here and now. But there is more to the imagining of future civilisation, or the beloved community, as Martin Luther King called it, than merely “taking care of business”. The American novelist and poet Marguerite Young wrote eloquently:

All my writing is about the recognition that there is no single reality. But the beauty of it is that you nevertheless go on, walking towards Utopia, which may not exist, on a bridge which might end before you reach the other side.