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Joe Dolce
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Elysium in Paraguay

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?

Over the span of three hundred and twenty-three years, between 1690 and 2013, all of them found themselves at one time or another in Paraguay in pursuit of either spiritual and/or material salvation. Jesuit missionaries carting evangelism, Mary Gilmore, as part of the New Australia Movement, Elisabeth Neitzsche and her Jew-hating husband Bernhard searching for racial purity in Nueva Germania, (and later, Josef Mengele and other ex-Nazis with the assistance of ODESSA 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’ (which they continue to hold today) and Standard Oil and Royal Shell Oil on opposite sides of the brutal Bolivia-Paraguay, Chaco War, 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 literally desperate to get new blood coming in. It had lost 90% of its male population 20 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 had originally come to 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’ laying 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’ were featured in such Hollywood films such as Candide (1962) - from the novel originally written by Voltaire, in 1759 - and again, in 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 produce a highly potent caffeine-based drink, differing in comparison with other caffeine drinks most significantly in its effects on muscle tissue rather than on the central nervous system.

But the ‘Chaco Wars’- between Bolivia and Paraguay - in the early decades of the nineteenth century 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.

Neuva 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 philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche) 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 Jews whom 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, Nietzche himself, who despised his sister’s husband, wrote 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. His wife, Elisabeth returned to Germany, in 1893. The colonists that remained abandoned supremacist ideals and integrated into Paraguayan culture intermarrying with locals.

Josef Mengele, the Nazi war criminal, spent some time in Nueva Germania while a fugitive after World War II. The majority of Nazis, five thousand, fled to Argentina after the war. President General Juan Peron sold 10,000 blank Argentine passports to ODESSA, the organisation set up to protect former 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 – 900 Nazis ended up in Paraguay.

The New Australia Co-operative Settlement Association, or New Australia, led by Labor figure, William Lane, officially founded their own Paraguyan utopia, in 1893, known locally as Colonia Nueva Australia. The tenents of the settlement were a brotherhood of English-speaking whites, preservation of the 'colour-line,' life-marriage, teetotalism and Communism. Also, the concept of common-hold where each member of the settlement could withdraw their proportion of the society's wealth if they chose to leave.

Australian poet, Mary Jean Cameron (Mary Gilmore), followed Lane and other socialist idealists to Paraguay in 1896. There she married Billy Gilmore a year after. 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 early Labor movement. But in a talk at the Theatre Royal, on July 4, 1889, he declared 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 of the inhospitable Paraguayan land, including mosquito swarms that were so thick, 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 Willam Lane’s management forced Lane and fifty-eight others to leave New Australia and found a separate colony called Cosme 72 kms farther south. Eventually both settlements were dissolved as cooperatives 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.

Reverend Sun Myung Moon, in 1954, first established his Unification Church in Seoul, Korea. Within a year, 30 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 2000 more than 10,000 couples were married in the Seoul Olympic Stadium. Moon’s view on sex and marriage were somewhat humorous and blatantly homophobic. Pre-marital celibacy and marital faithfulness were emphasized. The church did not give its blessing to same-sex couples and excluded AIDS victims from marriage ceremonies.

In The Palace of True Love, Moon 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 $20m on a 74,000 acre site, called New Hope Ranch, in neighbouring Brazil. Two thousand followers lived on the site, and planned to invest $2bn 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 18-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 and planned on being joined by wives and many more followers. But a group of local residents launched a bitter legal battle to nullify the deal. The Reverend Sun Myung Moon died in September 2012 from complications from pneumonia at age 92.

The Mennonites were a group of Christian Anabaptists (meaning literally: one-who-baptizes-over-again requiring candidates to make their own confession of faith, thereby rejecting baptism of infants) named after the Frisian Menno Simons, born in 1496, in the Netherlands. Mennonites were recognized as leaders in the art of conflict resolution and one of the historic peace churches because of their commitment to nonviolence. Persecuted by Catholics, Protestants, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union under Stalin, rather than resist, they survived by fleeing to countries more tolerant of their non-traditional Christian beliefs of the time, such as rejecting church-state control over individuals' lives and adult baptism. 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 insured an open immigration policy allowing more Mennonites settlers to come into the community. Eighty of the original group died of plague. The area was so dustbowl-dry that water had to be collected in sisterns. 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 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 30s was South America’s greatest modern conflict when Paraguay went to war with Bolivia. The Standard Oil Company had already 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 organizer 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 Praguayan 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, approx. 20,000 square miles. Two Paraguayans and three Bolivians died for every mile. 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 and freckled children play in 40 degree heat. There is a single Catholic church and a cantina. Spanish and Guaraní are the primary languages. Harold Smith (76) is one of the only 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 World War II 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 specializing in the cultivation of yerba mate. There are currently 4335 inhabitants, 10% of those 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 the people still retain blonde hair and blue eyes but are predominantly poor, slightly inbred and weakly. Residents 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 reedited 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 completely obliterated but the ruins of their missions are still promoted as tourist attractions.

There are currently 4.5 million followers of Reverend Sun Myung Moon in the world. In 2011, 48th President of Paraguay Juan Carlos Wasmosy, 49th President of Paraguay Raúl Cubas Grau and the 50th President of Paraguay Luis Ángel González Macchi attended the Global Peace Festival of the Unification Church. Moon's ten surviving children (he fathered 15 from two marriages) are presently fighting for control of his empire.

The Moonies’ Paraguayan complex is now practically deserted except for a handful of stubborn devotees. The town centre is an unfinished three-story brick building known as ‘the hotel’, its only occupant a goat foraging for food scraps. The local messiahs are now looking at building an insect museum as a tourist attraction. They originally planted thousands of Jatropha trees, with an eye toward bio-diesel fuel, but swarms of parrots ate all 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 descendents of the Russians who fled the upheavals of Boshevik Russia and Stalin’s purges, and the pacifist Christians of German descent, who fled Canada in the 1920s. Mennonites contribute seven percent of Paraguay’s gross domestic product with a $100 million a year income from selling meat, dairy products and grains. Heat-resistant buffalo grass imported from North America in the 50s helped lay the foundation for a thriving cattle industry. Farming cooperatives, run by Mennonites, furnish 80 percent of agricultural production in the country. But environmentalists criticize 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 neighboring 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 by 2013, Bolivia was 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 might be hardwired 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, cooperatives, 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 Heidi, in Australia: there will always been those who gather in intentional communities for causes, social reform, the creation of art, to pioneer new ground and share common goals.

Jack Carroll once mused that the greatest utopia might be if everyone just realized 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 civilization, or the beloved community, as Martin Luther King Jr called it, than merely ‘taking care of business’. Novelist and Guggenheim award-winner, 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.”