Mariscal Estigarribia

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US military bases in South America.

Mariscal Estigarribia is a town in the Boquerón Department, Paraguay.

[edit] Military base

Mariscal Estigarribia is home to an airport which some media reports claim is a US military base set up to provide access to the strategic Triple Frontera region.

400 US troops arrived in Paraguay in July 2005, shortly after the Paraguayan Senate granted US troops diplomatic immunity. Hundreds of US military personnel are rotated though Paraguay each year, though the military has stated that the total number in the country will not exceed 10-20 at any time.^[1]

According to the Clarín Argentinian newspaper, Mariscal Estigarribia would be a strategic location for a military base because of its proximity to the Triple Frontera between Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina; the Guarani aquifer; and Bolivia (less than 200km_ at a time when "Washington's magnifying glass goes on the Altiplano and points toward Venezuelan Hugo Chávez—the regional demon according to Bush's administration—as the instigator of the instability in the region".^[2]

The US and Paraguayan governments deny that the US military is establishing base at Mariscal Estigarribia.The US government said "...limited, short-term deployments of U.S. military personnel are scheduled to take place for a series of joint exercises with the Paraguayan military between July 2005 and December 2006. Most personnel deployed will not remain in Paraguay for more than 45 days."^[3]

A Brazilian weekly news magazine, CartaCapital, published an investigative article on April 25th, 2008, that dismisses what it calls a conspiracy theory about the base. A reporter actually visited it, interviewed Paraguayan military personnel in the area, as well as the airport director, and reached the following conclusions: i) the base was built by the military in the 1970s on Alfredo Stroessner's orders; the air strip is indeed capable of receiving heavy aircraft, including the C-5 Galaxy, but no US personnel is anywhere to be seen, and no signs of military security are present; the airport is in the middle of nowhere, without infra-structure that could support ongoing military operations (as opposed to sporadic exercises like the one that took place with US Armed Forces between 2005 and 2006 in Paraguay); there are no signs of recent investment, US or Paraguayan, to modernise facilities; and the civilian administrator of the airport was actually eager to clinch deals to increase revenue. The only foreign entity that uses the basis regularly is British CDS Oil & Gas. The air strip is indeed big: 3,5 km length, 40 m width, all 35 cm-deep concrete. The reporter concludes that if there are any plans to lease the base to the US military, they have not been implemented to any extent yet and may have become unlikely to be given the recent election of Fernando Lugo. This essentially means that, when US personnel are expelled, in 2009, from the Eloy Alfaro air base in Manta, Ecuador, South America will be the only continent without permanent US military presence in the form of a base.