Pastor Coronel

Pastor Coronel was chief of detectives of the police of Paraguay under President Alfredo Stroessner.¹

"He has acquired, for example, an informal title as the patron of all heroin and cocaine smugglers moving through Paraguay, and he protects them tenaciously as long as they pay him." The Drug Enforcement Administration classified him as a Class I narcotics violator. Ambassador George Landau "has forbidden any official of the American embassy to have any contact whatsoever with Coronel," and worked against him through Stroessner's chief of protocol, Conrado Pappalardo.¹

The Tribunals

Coronel interrogated arrested members of the Junta Coordinadora Revolucionaria before an audience. "High officials from Stroessner's government and foreign military attaches were invited to attend the secret sessions. Dark-suited waiters serving coffee and snacks circulated among the dozen or so officers seated in semicircle rows around the prison." One prisoner "was convinced that Stroessner himself was in the room for his interrogation." Robert Scherrer, the legal attaché of the FBI in Buenos Aires, wrote to his principal police source in Chile, General Ernesto Baeza, about the arrests, in what has been called "the first documented case of U.S. official participation in the multicountry operations against the JCR." When the letter came to light the bureau called it a "routine and traditional form of cooperation." By Scherrer's account the Paraguayan interrogations led French agents to a Paris apartment where they expected an Argentine using the alias Carlos and found Carlos the Jackal, who shot his way out.²

A group of former members of the Colorado Party, students, and Marxists trained in Argentina, led by Agustín Goiburú, twice parked a van holding a bomb built by the Montoneros on the president's route, and twice it failed to go off. The CIA called it "the most sophisticated of many attempts to oust the President since he came to power twenty years ago."²