Today's title is a book, not a song. 'I The Supreme' is the Paraguayan novelist Augusta Roa Bastos' masterpiece. Not well known in the English speaking world he is, to my mind, the equal of more famous Latin American novelists such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa. 'I The Supreme' was written when Roa Bastos was living in exile in the 1970s and whilst ostensibly about Gaspar Rodriquez de Francia, the first dictator of Paraguay, few doubt it is rea...

This is a photo of Paseo la Galeria, Asuncion's newest shopping mall. It joins several other glitzy such malls in the posher parts of the city, all of them filled with international brands selling at international prices. Proving that even in a country which, on the basis of GDP per capita, ranks as the 111th poorest in the world, there is enough wealth to justify the predatory attentions of some of the leading capitalist companies. Yes there is wealth here. As ...

At some point if you're travelling in South America you're going to end up taking a long bus trip as buses are the commonest form of long-distance travel. Latin America used to have a good rail network, largely built by British engineers in the nineteenth century. However it has now all but disappeared save for a few suburban networks and some tourist trains, such as the one from Cusco to Machu Picchu. And for some reason cheap air travel hasn't taken off here i...