PATRIA: A Paraguay Post Exclusive

A sneak peek inside my book, solely for Paraguay Post subscribers.

Author and book (not to scale).

Dear Paraguay Post community: I’m delighted to bring you an exclusive look inside Patria: Lost Countries of South America, which is published today.

My non-fiction debut, it’s an alternative history of the continent, drawing on research in dozens of archives, libraries, and museums, lots of travel, and many interviews over many years. Paraguay — you’ll be pleased to hear — features prominently.

To read the first few thousand words, you’ll need to sign up as a paid subscriber to The Paraguay Post. That will also get you access to the paywalled articles we’ll be publishing every other Thursday from now on, as well as the archive.

To sweeten the deal, we’re offering 30 days completely free. If you really can’t afford $5 per month after that, don’t worry: The Weekly Post will continue to land in your inbox every Monday, entirely free of charge. And if you want to go ahead and order Patria, you can do so here.

For now, the book is only out in English and in the UK (albeit available for shipping worldwide and e-readers via Amazon). If that changes, I’ll make it known: probably via my X and Instagram.

Without any further preamble: here’s the first bit of the introduction to Patria.

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Introduction:

One Hell of a Drug

Cerro Corá, Paraguay

We fly around fists of orange rock that punch out of the jungle. The horizon, a cloudless blue, pitches and rolls. Fuzzy chatter over the headsets, a gloved finger pointing out red triangles on a screen. From the air, you see them as rectangles of a spiky, lurid green amid the darker forest: marijuana plantations, spotted earlier on by reconnaissance flights. The men check their assault weapons, flick safety catches off.

Then we are down on the ground, ducking below the spinning rotors and running through flattened bushes of weed. It’s not long past 9 a.m., and already swelteringly hot. I follow Major Aldo Pintos and his unit through the thicket to a clearing. Black tarpaulins stretched over wooden poles cover a sleeping area: wooden bunks, duvets, a jar of toothbrushes tied to a tree – and bulging sacks of the harvest. The air is heavy with the dank, cloying aroma. A pot bubbles atop glowing embers. ‘They hide when they hear the helicopter,’ says Pintos. ‘They’re probably still nearby.’

The growers are impoverished farmers on the bottom rung of the international drug trade. They rarely pack more heat than a shotgun, used to hunt wild pigs. At most, they blast off a cartridge to cover their escape. Still, the major is taking no chances. Cradling his assault rifle under one arm, he grabs a bottle of cooking oil from a table, pours it over one side of the rudimentary tent, and touches a match to the plastic. It goes up in seconds, the flames shooting in all directions. The space beneath the forest canopy turns opaque with the fumes of a tonne of burning weed. The men and women of the SENAD – Paraguay’s anti-drug force – probably hotbox more pot than the most dedicated stoner.

Nearby, another SENAD unit hacks three-metre-high plants to the ground with their machetes. ‘Here, in a single day, I can take thousands of kilos of marijuana out of circulation,’ says Captain Óscar Chamorro, a stentorian soldier with cropped silver hair and wraparound shades. We watch as his men torch a giant wooden press, used to make compacted bricks of weed known as prensado. A couple of scrawny, mewling kittens inspect the flaming wreckage. Major Pintos picks up a child’s T-shirt – the word amor picked out in sequins – and tosses it into the inferno. Another blow struck in the War on Drugs, now well into its sixth decade.

On this front – like most others – the drugs are winning.