翻译 [2006.08.17]Obituary

Obituary
讣告

Alfredo Stroessner
Aug 24th 2006
From The Economist print edition
General Alfredo Stroessner Matiauda,
dictator of Paraguay, died on August 16th, aged 93
乌拉圭的独裁者，Alfredo Stroessner Matiauda将军于 8月16日逝世，享年93岁

NOT only Africa has a heart of darkness. South America has one too, squeezed in the tight embrace of Argentina, Bolivia and Brazil. Two great rivers, the Paraguay and the Paraná, flow through Paraguay and past it, but travellers have little reason to come to this empty, landlocked place. The dry western chaco has no gold or oil, though wars were fought on the supposition it did; the east is more fertile, but still poor. The people are mostly Indian farmers, the army dangerously unpredictable. It is good ground for dictators.
不光非洲有邪恶的独裁者。南美洲也有这样的人，他们压榨着阿根廷，玻利维亚和巴西。两条伟大的河流，乌拉圭河和巴拉纳河都流经乌拉圭，但是旅行者们却很少来探访这片空旷之地。西部的查科地区没有黄金也没有石油，可是战火却从没有熄灭过；东部地区比较肥沃，但同样很贫穷。当地人基本上都是印第安农民，对于他们来说军队是琢磨不透的危险。这里是一片养育独裁者的好地方。

For 35 years, from 1954 to 1989, Alfredo Stroessner ruled there. Under him, although he brought electrification, asphalt roads and friendship with America, the place became yet more isolated and benighted. The economy was based on contraband: whisky, cigarettes, passports, coffee, cocaine, luxury cars, rare bird skins, anything, until the unofficial value of Paraguay's exports was said to be three times the official figure. The style of government was a spoils system, underpinned by terror of a vicious network of spies and secret police. Foreign policy was a buddies' brigade with other dictators----Videla of Argentina, Pinochet of Chile----to co-ordinate counter-terrorism and assassinations. And the most famous tourist was Josef Mengele, the fugitive doctor of Auschwitz, riding into a village in the Paraguayan wilderness to be welcomed and protected.
从1954年到1989年的35年间，Alfredo Stroessner统治着那里。尽管他给当地带来了电气化和沥青马路，并与美国建立了良好的外交关系，但是在他的统治下，这个国家却变得更加孤立更加愚昧。当地经济也是通过非法买卖繁荣起来的：威士忌，香烟，护照，咖啡，可卡因，高档轿车，稀有禽皮等，乌拉圭非官方出口收入曾一度高达官方数字的三倍。政府就是一个强权系统，全国遍布着恐怖间谍网络和秘密警察。外交政策就是独裁者之间哥们儿般的关系----像阿根廷的Videla，智利的Pinochet----他们一起协调反恐和暗杀行动。那什么样的旅行者会来这里呢？最著名的就是奥斯维新集中营的纳粹医生Josef Mengele了，他逃到乌拉圭的野外村庄，并且受到欢迎和保护。

General Stroessner himself was not seen much. His blue-eyed portrait, in white uniform with gold braid and multiple medals, stared down from walls in offices and private houses alike; but he was stocky and dull, the typical son of a German immigrant brewer, and preferred desk-duties to speeches and parades. He would work, breaking only for siesta, from six in the morning until nine at night. Much of his day was spent, like some Roman emperor, receiving the petitions of the long lines of ordinary citizens who filed towards his inner sanctum.
Stroessner将军自己不经常露面。身穿戴着许多奖章的金边白色制服，不管是在办公室的墙上还是私人住宅里，那肖像上的蓝眼睛总是一个样得凝视着远方；不过与此不同的是，他本人是一个矮壮的，无趣的人，典型的德国阴谋移民的后代，而且他喜欢办公胜过演讲和阅兵。除了午睡，他会从早上六点一直工作到晚上九点。如同罗马皇帝一样，一天里，他的大多数时间用来处理那些普通居民的请愿书，这些人排了很长的队挤破头的想加为他私人服务。

He did not give interviews to the press, having no wish to reveal himself. A single conversation, with Isabel Hilton of Granta when he had just begun his long exile in Brasilia in 1989, is almost all obituarists have to go on. In this he prided himself especially on bringing Paraguay peace. He had avoided “negative political movements”, imposing stability and order. As he said the word, orden, he rolled it sensuously round his mouth. But it had a different meaning for him: the political opponent “disappearing” in a bricked-up cell, the newspaper ABC Color closed down for five years, or the “communist” agitator (he saw such phantoms everywhere, they unloosed American aid) silenced by near-drowning in a bath of dirty water. He told Ms Hilton there had been no torture. But five tonnes of secret-police files turned up three years later, stacked from floor to ceiling of a police station in suburban Asunción, to give the lie to that.
他从来没有接受过媒体采访，不愿意展示自己。1989年当他开始巴西利亚的流放生活时，他和Granta的Isabel Hilton的一段单独对话几乎让所有死亡新闻记者撰写了它讣告。在对话中，他尤其为自己给巴拉圭带来了和平而感到自豪。他避免了“消极的政治运动”，并带来了令人难忘的稳定和秩序。正如他将orden这个词发音非常饱满。但是他眼里的这个词却是指：政治对手在监狱里“消失”，ABC彩色报纸停办5年，还有“共产主义”煽动者（他随处可见这些幻影，这些人不要美国的援助）因为差点被赃水溺死而默不作声。他告诉Ms Hilton，从来没有严刑拷打发生过。然而3年后，重达5吨的秘密警局档案，其整整装满了Asunción郊区的一个警察局，证明了他说的话是假的。

A party of his own
他自己的政党

His main machine of power was not the army. Although he was a distinguished soldier, rising to brigadier-general by the age of 36, and indeed had done nothing else in life since he was 17, he did not trust military men. He himself had skilfully ridden the divisions in the army to seize power from a civilian president in 1954. His policy was to keep the officers sweet with a cut from the smuggling revenues or a share of the contracts for his grandest project, the Itaipu hydroelectric plant built with Brazil on the Paraná. Some cronies amassed fortunes. General Andrés Rodríguez, who eventually overthrew him in what he contemptuously called a cuartelazo, or barracks revolt, built himself a replica of the Palace of Versailles.
他的权利机器主要还不是军队。虽然他是一个著名的军人，36岁就成为了准将，而且的确从17岁开始就没有过什么作为，但是他不信任军人。自从1954年当上平民总统以后，他本人还是能够很出色的通过驾驭军队里的分裂状况来巩固自己的权力。他用一部分走私收入和一部分电厂的股份来笼络官员，这个Itaipu电厂是和巴西一起在巴拉纳河上建的水电站。任人唯亲聚敛财富。最后，Andrés Rodríguez将军推翻了他的政权，之后给自己建了一个类似凡尔赛宫的官邸，Stroessner轻蔑的称之为cuartelazo，也就是军事政变。

As a firmer, more loyal base than these soldiers, General Stroessner used the Colorado (“Red”) party, a right-wing body that became steadily more so as its moderate politicians were ejected. Membership of the party was compulsory for all teachers, doctors, engineers, officers or those who hoped for government service. In a population of 3.8m, 900,000 belonged to it, their party dues docked from their salaries. Every four years, in a conspicuous show of phoney democracy, General Stroessner stood as the Colorado candidate and was elected, sometimes----as his supporters joked----with more than 100% of the vote. He won eight straight elections, and the constitutional bar to three consecutive terms or more was quietly set aside.
就像一个凿子，Stroessner将军的科罗拉多（既“红党”）党比军人更加忠诚可靠。它是一个右翼政党，温和派的政治家越少越稳固。所有教师，医生，工程师，官员或者想享受政府待遇的人都必须成为这个党的党员。380万人口中有90万是这个党的党员，党费是从这些人的薪水中扣除的。每四年，一个隆重而虚假的民主选举都会将科罗拉多党的候选人Stroessner将军推上了总统宝座，有些时候----他的支持者开玩笑道----得票率还会超过100％。他赢得过8次直选，宪法中只能连任三届的规定也很快被抛到一边去了。

There was some resistance. The Catholic church got restive, especially when the general ignored calls for land reform from the indigenous poor. The Americans, fed up at last with his wiliness and his human-rights abuses, began to part company with him in the late 1970s. Paraguayans as a whole, however, were much slower to be disillusioned. It was true that he treated the country as his fief, to the point of picking out teenage girls for himself when he presented school diplomas; but he paid for the girls, set them up in houses, and gave their relatives money. You could argue that the Itaipu project left Paraguay with only 2% of the energy and 15% of the contracts; but that 15% had given the country, for eight years in the 1970s, the highest rate of growth in Latin America. General Stroessner was a master-dispenser of illegal spoils. Yet the dark truth of his Paraguay was that he co-opted even his opponents into that system with him.
不过抵抗运动还是存在的。天主教堂不好控制，特别是当这位将军忽略了对当地平穷地区土地改革的承诺。美国人最后也厌烦了他的狡诈和对人权的侵犯，并在1970年末断绝了与他的合作。但是巴拉圭人民醒悟的更晚。这位将军还真的把整个国家看作是自己的领地，在颁发学校文凭时甚至还挑选十来岁的女孩子供他自己享用；虽然他付钱，给这些女孩子盖房子，而且给她们的亲属很多钱。你可以说Itaipu工程只给了巴拉圭2％的电能和但是分给了巴拉圭15％的收入；但是那15％是给国家的，而且那8年里，15％是拉丁美洲最高的发展速度了。Stroessner将军是非法利益的分配者。然而事实上这个国家的黑暗还在于，反对者在他的巴拉圭里居然也被他指派到这个系统中和他一起腐败。