Thoughts on Asunción, Paraguay
11 comments
·June 23, 2025rurban
Maybe it helps to read about the history of Asunción first: https://asunciontimes.com/culture/paraguayan-history/history...
cjo_dev
The river? Contaminated since they don't have sewer system. The best place to go according to locals? The mall. Want to go anywhere else in Paraguay? It'll take you ages due to a lack of infrastructure.
andrepd
> Indeed, 70% of the new housing supply is acquired by foreign investors as a capital preservation strategy.
Housing being used as an investment vehicle is pretty much a global problem and one of the most pernicious consequences of modern capitalism. Be it Argentina->Paraguay or Russia->London or Germany->Spain.
pieds
In some ways, it is just more noticeable now. Because even countries like the US had a huge push for public infrastructure in the road network, state schools and energy when those things were both more and less important than now. Now urban housing, broad education and energy efficiency have become more important with changes in society and the economy. But there isn't the same public influence in those areas now.
That is, there were always estates, land, and business. And private education. Just that public investment created and enabled other opportunities. A massive road network enabled sprawl where additional housing could be constructed at a decent cost. Now the economy wants density for network effects, but there isn't a similar expansion in public transport. So urban housing has become very valuable.
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kgwgk
Real estate has been an investment vehicle used for capital preservation for millennia.
zabzonk
It really does look very horrible. Just the kind of place that a piece of filth like Mengele might have slunk off to. I've always been amazed that the Israelis didn't go in there and grab him.
probably_wrong
But... Mengele was barely in Paraguay - he spent some time in hiding in 1958, moved permanently in 1959, and then departed again in 1960 because he didn't consider the country a safe place to hide [1].
As for why Mossad didn't capture him: they didn't know where he was - they found his address in Argentina, but by the time they looked into it he had already fled [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Mengele
[2] https://archive.org/details/houseongaribaldi00isse/page/250/
DiscourseFan
I think it must’ve looked very different back then. Probably a developed urban center surrounded by agrarian communities, instead of the mixed, developing community it is today.
owebmaster
It was always a favorite place to hide, not because it was a developed urban center, much more the opposite.
There is a rather splendid travel book about the strange country that is Paraguay called 'At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig: Travels through Paraguay'. Part history, part travelogue. All weird. Probably only available second hand. I've never been there. Having read the above book, I'm not sure I want to.
IIRC Paraguay's economy is based in some part on smuggling stuff into other countries, duty free. Whisky in particular.
The long term dictator, Stroessner, is credibly accused of having abducted and raped vast numbers of underage girls. https://www.americasquarterly.org/fulltextarticle/how-paragu...