Word: paraguay
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...found himself in jail. Two hours later a friend posted bail, and the "Angel of Death" was free once again. In the late '50s, after Peron had been exiled and the West German government had issued a request for Mengele's extradition, the doctor moved again, this time to Paraguay...
...month he had persuaded two prominent members of the influential local German community to swear, falsely, that he had resided in the country for five years and to sponsor him for citizenship. On Nov. 27, 1959, he was issued nationality card No. 293348 and took up residence in Paraguay under the name Jose Mengele. For the most part, he stayed in the lush farm country around Hohenau, near the Brazilian border, where, according to Alejandro von Eckstein, one of the men who sponsored him for citizenship, he remained "very reserved and very melancholy...
...effort to stay several steps ahead of his pursuers, Mengele was apparently helped by Paraguayan Dictator Alfredo Stroessner, the grandson of a Bavarian cavalry captain and a man of pronounced right-wing views. When, in July 1962, Bonn began agitating for Mengele's extradition from Paraguay, Stroessner responded that he could be of no assistance since Mengele was a Paraguayan citizen and was thus protected. Two years later, the West German Ambassador in Asuncion approached Stroessner again with the request for Mengele, only to be told that it would be best to drop the matter...
...Paraguayan government has consistently tried since then to brush the Mengele issue aside, usually by insisting that he had left the country in the early 1960s. In 1979 Paraguay's supreme court canceled Mengele's citizenship. The official explanation for the revocation was that he had been absent from the country for more than two years. The real reason, according to other assessments, was that Asuncion was growing increasingly uncomfortable with the unpleasant publicity generated by the Mengele association. (Not coincidentally, perhaps, the doctor had by then been the inspiration for two novels, Ira Levin's The Boys from Brazil...
...deny categorically that Mengele is in Paraguay," Paraguayan Under Secretary of the Interior Miguel Angel Bestrad said two months before the supreme court ruling. Stroessner himself told an interviewer last March, "I don't know where Mengele is. The Mengele question is a repeat question, like a long-playing record...