Dodging bullets in Paraguay

Guns, drugs and a shady underworld ... Rory MacLean follows Robert Carver's terrifying adventures through South America's lost paradise

• Rory Maclean
• Guardian Unlimited
• Tuesday November 6 2007

Paradise lost? ... Paraguay once attracted Utopian dreamers. Photograph: And Crist/EPA/Corbis

Paradise with Serpents: Travels in the Lost World of Paraguay
by Robert Carver
Published by Harper Perennial, September 2007, £8.99 (a paperback original)

Do all Paraguayans carry guns?

"I wouldn't say all – no, not by a long chalk," an expert on the country tells Robert Carver. "However, it is fairly common. I mean, there are shootings all the time – I mean every day, everywhere. And knife fights, of course. It's as well to be very polite to people. That generally pays off. Unless they want to kill you, in which case no amount of politeness would help."

As tea is to China and cuckoo clocks to Switzerland, so weapons are to Paraguay. With this view, it's not surprising that Carver seems to be one of the few tourists visiting this surreal and landlocked South American kleptocracy. He tells us that in the months before his arrival dozens of city buses were held up at gunpoint. The Minister of Defence (allegedly) loaned an army tank to facilitate a bank robbery. Assassinations were undertaken for $25 and taxis drove around empty because passengers tended to be robbed then "disappeared". So why on earth does he decide to stride into this maelstrom? Because he is fascinated by the world's "half-made, half-abandoned places" (his previous book explored equally lawless and piratical Albania). And also because – paradoxically — Paraguay has long attracted Utopians dreaming of paradise.

None of Carver's fears are disappointed on his terrifying journey. He is chased by a machete-wielding drunk and shadowed by secret policemen. He rides in stolen cars and swims with drug barons. He sidesteps the former Hotel Adolf Hitler, an establishment now frequented by paedophiles. When a coup d'etat threatens the capital, he escapes on a barge into the interior, awakening first to find his toes being sucked on by vampire bats and later to face an old Nazi with Alzheimer's disease armed with an automatic. In upcountry Concepción, he is mistaken for an arms smuggler.

"Did you bring the guns?" he is asked. "We need heavy weapons ... tanks also would be nice. Tanks and armoured cars with flame-throwers, napalm and grenade launchers."

........