Alfredo Stroessner

Stroessner took power on 4 May 1954 in a coup backed by the Colorado Party and the army, then won an unopposed election that August after all rival parties had been banned since 1947. He suspended constitutional and civil rights immediately, deploying the army and military police as secret police to crush opponents through violent repression. Though opposition parties were nominally legalized in 1962, he kept winning through electoral fraud from 1958 through 1988. The 1967 Constitution permitted his re-election; changes in 1977 let him rule indefinitely. On 2 and 3 February 1989, his trusted confidant Lieutenant General Andrés Rodríguez Pedotti overthrew him. Stroessner went into exile in Brazil on 5 February, died there on 16 August 2006, and was buried while his Colorado Party continued ruling Paraguay through the same clientelistic networks he had built.