In Ciudad del Este, the sunbaked Paraguayan border town along the “Triple Frontera” with Argentina and Brazil, men make a living by stacking cars in an alley. Although the gravel lot is tiny, the men manage to squeeze in car after car, vowing to return the vehicle to the owner at the agreed time. The men take pride in their skills to create space for cars out of thin air. “Parking magic,” says the man who holds the chain with many keys, while sipping tereré (a cold infusion of yerba mate and medicinal herbs) from a gourd prepared from a cow’s hoof.

Making money out of nothing and anything is every frontier town’s blessing and curse. Ciudad del Este is Paraguay’s second-biggest city (population three hundred thousand), after the capital Asunción; it is mostly known as a gateway for tourists who make the pilgrimage to the Iguazú Falls and purchase cheap Gucci knockoffs and tax-free electronic goods from street vendors. It is also a notorious trafficking port where weapons, drugs, cheap goods, and humans cross the border into Argentina and Brazil, fueling organized crime in cities like Rosario and Rio de Janeiro.

Ciudad del Este sprang out of a fishing village in the mid-1950s to become the landlocked nation’s “port to the Atlantic Ocean.” But at first, it had a different name: Puerto Presidente Stroessner, in homage to the dictator who first brought it into being. 2024 marks seventy years since the patriarch’s climb into power, after a military coup that overthrew previous president Federico Chaves.