Paraguay

You can tell a lot about a country from its national heroes. In Paraguay they revere Francisco Solano Lopez, whose statue still stands in the centre of the capital, Asuncion. Lopez was a tyrant, who ruled Paraguay in succession to his father from 1862 to 1870. He was also a paranoid megalomaniac, who murdered members of his own family on suspicion of plotting against him, waged a disastrous five-year war against Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay in which three-quarters (yes, three-quarters) of his people died, and who kept as his mistress an Irish gold-digger called Eliza Lynch, notorious for parading on the battlefield in the latest imported Paris fashions while the flower of Paraguayan manhood starved beside her. As a nation, it seems to be a good definition of the word "forlorn".

This benighted nation has an unenviable reputation: the most corrupt country in South America; the smuggling and counterfeiting capital of the continent; a state burdened by almost 200 years of dictatorship - a yoke only thrown off in 1989. Yet because Paraguay is so far off the beaten track, it is a good place to find the real spirit of South America. The typical small town in Paraguay is a montage of peeling paintwork, dusty streets and weatherworn faces with gently creased smiles. It feels like the Wild West but with no imminent danger of anything much happening.

This land-locked nation is a sleepy backwater where, it is said, some of the pale-skinned locals are descended from Nazi war criminals. It is a country of exiles. Graham Greene loved it. He lived and wrote at the Hotel Gran del Paraguay in Asuncion, a fading colonial relic which manages the undemanding achievement of having the best restaurant in Paraguay. Among the exiles are 10,000 Mennonites. The men wear black and the women are clothed from head to toe, their pale faces scorched pink by the harsh sun. Conversation is in the throaty burble of Platdeutsch (low German), and the local paper is named Aktuelle Rundschau.

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