Many people transmit a distorted image of Paraguay, which corresponds to what they saw during a shopping trip to Ciudad del Este, from Brazil or Argentina. Yet the "City of the East" is unlike any other in Paraguay. This border city of more than 300,000 inhabitants is the largest free zone in South America, and has a bad reputation for insecurity, smuggling, arms, drugs, cars, money laundering, and even terrorism, according to Americans who would like to set foot in the region (some reports claim that members of Hezbollah are hiding in the large Lebanese community, and the North American secret services even combed the city after September 11, 2001, suspecting the presence of Al-Qaeda cells...). The Triple Frontier, a lawless zone where goods and dirty money from all over the world are exchanged, and where Chinese, Japanese, Arab and Brazilian mafias rub shoulders, does indeed give a very sad image of the city. There's some truth in all this, but above all there's a lot of fantasy around Ciudad del Este. The city was founded in 1957 under the pretty name of Puerto Flor de Lis, renamed Puerto Presidente Stroessner. The name will change again in 1989, with the fall of the demago dictator. Ciudad del Este was created from scratch to open up the east of the country to Brazil, in the middle of what was until the 1950s a thick jungle. The modern city has large avenues and vast green spaces. It was nicknamed the "Garden City". Take a walk around the lake and Área 1, the area where the engineers of the Itaipú dam were housed, and you will get a completely different image of the city, far from the hustle and bustle and traffic jams of the centre. From a touristic point of view, the city is not very interesting, except of course for its huge commercial area, where you can find everything. The locals joke that you can even buy elephants there! These Chinese from Taiwan who speak Brazilian with the sacoleiros (Brazilians who cross the Friendship Bridge by the hundreds with big bags on their backs), or these mesiteros, these sellers who display their counterfeit products on a "small table" in the streets overflowing with merchandise, offer a spectacle that cannot leave one indifferent. However, cross-border trade has been greatly reduced since the devaluation of the Brazilian and Argentinean currencies in recent years (against the dollar and guarani). Today, the rates posted in Ciudad del Este are less attractive for residents of neighbouring countries than they were a few years ago, and it is now sometimes Paraguayans who fill their cadis in neighbouring countries! For the traveller, Ciudad del Este is above all a pied-à-terre, to visit the Itaipú hydroelectric power station, the Moisés Bertoni reserve, or Saltos Monday, a small foretaste of the Iguazú Falls, on the other side of the border.

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Frontière Ciudad del Este - Foz do Iguaçu. Nicolas LHULLIER
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