How did Alejandro Domínguez’ rise in football and business happen? Thanks to his father Osvaldo who created his wealth thanks to the brutal pedophile dictator Alfredo Stroessner.
By Philippe Auclair and Håvard Melnæs
In collaboration with Sin Falta
In the afternoon of Friday 2 May, a helicopter carrying Conmebol president Alejandro Domínguez touched ground at the Estadio Facunda de Léon Fossatti, the home of Paraguayan second division club 12 de Junio. It was a typically grand entrance from the man who is now in his third term as head of the South American confederation. The Conmebol headquarters from which he’d flown were only half an hour’s drive away from Villa Hayes, 12 de Junio’s hometown, but a helicopter it had to be. It’s not every day that a Fifa vice president makes the effort of paying a visit to such a modest club. Cameras were in place to film his arrival. A small crowd had gathered at the stadium to welcome him. At the head of the queue to greet him was one of Paraguay’s most influential politicians, head of Congress Basilio “Bachi” Núñez, who also happens to be the honorary chairman of 12 de Junio, which also happens to be owned by the Núñez family.
Alejandro Domínguez (r.) welcomed at 12 de Junio by Head of Congress “Bachi” Núnez (c.) and Nuñez’s daughter Sol (l.), herself a member of the Villa Hayes council.
Fifa officials are not supposed to dabble in politics. Yet Domínguez was happy to talk about his friendship with “Bachi”, a leading figure of “Cartismo”, a faction of the ruling Colorado party which was also represented in Domínguez’s welcome party by the current mayor of Villa Hayes Luis Alberto López and Paraguayan member of Parliament Ida Cattebeke. Why exactly Domínguez was there on that day – apart from exchanging compliments with Cartista politicians – was not made clear by anyone. 12 de Junio’s team would only play 24 hours later. Yet this insignificant entry in Alejandro Domínguez’s diary was a telling indicator of who the 53-year-old businessman and football administrator is: a man of great wealth who could treat a private visit as if it were Conmebol business, and who cultivates a privileged relationship with the party which has ruled Paraguay virtually without interruption – and without serious challengers – since 1948. Boundaries are often blurred to the point of non-existence when Domínguez is concerned, especially when politics intersect with business.
Keep it in the family
This won’t come as a surprise to anyone acquainted with the family background of the Conmebol president. Alejandro has claimed to be a ‘self-made man’ on occasions in the past. The truth is that the first two businesses he was involved in, the tapas manufacturer Atlantida and the daily newspaper La Nación, were owned by his father Osvaldo Domínguez Dibb, one of Paraguay’s richest men, who left his six children an estimated fortune of half a billion US dollars when he died on 2 February 2024. Alejandro had only just finished his master’s in business administration (MBA) at the Catholic University of Asunción when his father launched him in the business world. In 1999, still only 27, Osvaldo’s son took over the Nación media group as a whole. It was another of his father’s gifts. More were to follow. If Alejandro has come to grow so tall, it is because he first stood on the shoulders of a giant – but a giant whose name remains tainted by his family’s close association with the brutal regime of general Alfredo Stroessner and by countless accusations of criminal behaviour, including contraband, fraud and money-laundering.
When Stroessner was finally ousted from power in 1989, the victims of his 34-year long reign of terror numbered in the tens of thousands, people who’d been arbitrarily detained, tortured or “disappeared”. Over 1,200 girls between the ages of 10 and 15 were also raped by the paedophile dictator, who was supplied with an average of four victims a month by his henchmen. These are not wild allegations. These are the official findings of the Department of Historical Memory and Reparation of the Paraguayan Ministry of Justice. Stroessner also provided protection for one of the very worst Nazi criminals to have escaped capture, Josef Mengele, the sadistic “Angel of Death” of Auschwitz concentration camp.
Wedding photograph of Graciela Stroessner and Alejandro Domínguez’s uncle Humberto Domínguez Dibb. Dictator Alfredo Stroessner, in full uniform, is standing to the left of the groom.
The Domínguez family prospered throughout the Stroessner dictatorship. There was a very good reason for this: both families were linked by a marriage. On 3 September 1966, Stroessner’s daughter Graciela wed Osvaldo’s brother and Alejandro’s uncle Humberto Domínguez Dibb (nicknamed ‘HDD”, as Osvaldo, El Tigre, was often referred to as “ODD”) in what was described at the time as “the wedding of the century”.
Humberto was also president of the country’s biggest football club Olimpia and chairman of the Paraguayan federation by the time he was 34, presiding over what was then called the Liga Paraguaya de Fútbol from 1973 to 1976, thirty-eight years before his nephew Alejandro took on the same role. Often presented as a flashy “eccentric” with a genuine, all-consuming passion for football (*), HDD died aged just 46, some say from a drug overdose, others from cirrhosis of the liver. What everyone agrees on is that his untimely death was caused by a reckless lifestyle which made him a favourite of gossip columns. He was said to have driven a Mercedes 500 in a swimming-pool as a retort to someone who’d told him that Paraguayans were a bunch of peasants who were just good enough to scratch the earth for a living. He was said to have done many such things. His marriage to Graciela did not survive his misdemeanours (the couple separated and eventually divorced), but the relationship between the Domínguez family and the dictator did.
Humberto Domínguez Dibb (r.) with journalist Julio del Puerto (centre) in Malmö, where Club Olimpia played and won the final of the 1979 Intercontinental Cup. Olimpia’s striker Evaristo Isasi is on the left.
A CIA report compiled in March 1985, which primarily dealt with Mengele (*), provides some explanation as to why this divorce did not harm either HDD or his family. The dictator “considered [Humberto] to be the father of his grandchildren”, one of whom, Alfredo Gustavo “Goli” Stroessner Domínguez, later became a senator for the Colorados and supported his uncle Osvaldo’s unsuccessful bid for the presidency of the party in 2005. “His family”, the report read, “is considered to be of the lower class, gross in behavior, underhanded and probably involved in drug trafficking”. Humberto’s status in the Stroessner entourage also meant he benefited from direct government help. On 31 December 1968, the Paraguayan authorities decreed a ban on the import of wire. Two months later, HDD opened his own wire factory, ICIERSA, which could then enjoy a virtual monopoly in this product. Something similar happened in 1975, when it was batteries which were the subject of another import ban. HDD started a battery manufacturing operation three months later.
Excerpt of the March 1985 CIA report on Humberto Domínguez Dibb
Alejandro’s father Osvaldo also made the news, but not because of his eccentricities, but because, with him as president (from 1976 to 1990, then from 1996 to 2004), Olimpia de Asuncion became one of the most successful clubs in the history of South American football. His phrase, “glory has no price” ( la gloria no tiene precio), became an unofficial motto of the perennial Paraguayan champions, who also won three Copa Libertadores and two Recopa Sudamericana with him at the helm. There was another side to the charismatic football administrator, however. He was suspected of being a tobacco smuggler on an industrial scale through his company Tabacalera Boquerón, of which his son Alejandro was also a shareholder. ODD oversaw trafficking of genuine and counterfeit cigarettes into Brazil. Seizures by the Brazilian authorities and wiretaps of ODD’s phone line established that those cigarettes had been manufactured in Paraguay – by Tabacalera Boquerón. According to a report by Brazilian network Globo (*), every week, twenty lorries, each of them loaded with 50,000 packets of cigarettes, crossed the border from Paraguay, generating a profit of 1 million US dollars for the smugglers. A criminal investigation was launched in Sāo Paulo, a report was written – but the case was discreetly closed in the end.
Their close links with Stroessner had been a boon for the Domínguez family for decades, but the time finally came when they became a cause for concern as the dictator’s hold over Paraguay weakened. Stroessner, born in 1912, had entered his eighth decade, and there were clear signs that the old, brutal order was about to come to an end. ODD’s insurance policy against a backlash against Stroessner collaborators – which would force him and his family into exile – was to provide false information to the Brazilian authorities in order to obtain a permanent residents’ visa in Brazil, including false information about his own son, then only 13 as documented by Brazilian investigative journalist Lucio de Castro. The family’s address was given as Rua Gonçalves de Ledo in Foz de Iguaçu, when their main residence was still in Paraguay. This trick, which attracted the attention of Brazilian police, was not of any use in the end. The Domínguez remained in Paraguay, impervious to the regime change which occurred in 1989. Better than that, their wealth and their influence within the Colorado party, which is still ruling the country thirty-six years after the dictator was deposed, enabled them to prosper.
The ID of 13 year old Alfredo Domínguez, featuring false information about his “permanent residence” in Foz de Iguaçu in Brazil.
The three presidents
The three Paraguayan Conmebol presidents: Nicolas Léoz (seated), a young Alejandro Domínguez (l.) and Juan Angel Napout (r).
Alejandro Domínguez is also part of another powerful ‘family’: the dynasty of Paraguayan football administrators who rose from presiding over their country’s federation to become heads of Conmebol. Quite extraordinarily for a footballing nation whose population of just over 6 million is twenty-five times smaller than neighbouring Brazil’s and whose national team only reached the World Cup quarter finals once, fifteen years ago, Paraguay has had no fewer than three of its citizens at the helm of the South American confederation in the last half-century: Nicolas Léoz, Juan Ángel Napout and Alejandro Domínguez. Even more strikingly, putting aside the three-week interim of Uruguayan Wilmar Valdez in late 2015, Conmebol has only been headed by a non-Paraguayan official on one occasion since 1986, and this, for just over a year, by another Uruguayan, Eugenio Figueredo. Whether this should be a matter of pride or not is debatable.
Nicolas Léoz, whose presidency ran for a day short of twenty-five years, from 1986 to April 2013, was one of the Fifa Executive Committee members who gave Russia and Qatar the hosting rights to the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, and was named in the FBI’s Fifagate indictment as one of three South American ExCo members whose votes had been ‘bought’ by the Qataris, the other two being Brazil’s Ricardo Teixeira and Argentina’s Julio Grondona. The veteran bribe-taker (he also took 730,000 US dollars from sports marketing firm ISL in the 1990s) was banned by Fifa for corruption, money laundering, wire fraud and racketeering in May 2015, put on the Interpol red list and died, aged 90, before his appeal against extradition to the USA could be heard. Napout, first named as interim president in August 2014 after Figueredo vacated the position to become a Fifa vice-president in lieu of the deceased Julio Grondona, was elected to the role for good in March 2015. Nine months later, he too had become a casualty of the Fifagate scandal after being arrested in Zurich on charges of accepting bribes. Napout was sentenced to nine years in prison by a New York federal court, of which he served five and a half years before being given a hero’s welcome when he returned to Paraguay.
Domínguez has never distanced himself from his disgraced predecessors. In Napout’s case, he had reasons to be grateful, as it was Napout who’d picked him to be his successor at the head of the Paraguayan federation. Napout had been banned for life by Fifa in the wake of his arrest. Yet in early November 2023, here he was in Brazil, staying in the same Rio hotel as the Fifa and Conmebol delegations on the eve of the final of the Copa Libertadores between Fluminense and Boca Juniors. “I’m here as a tourist”, Napout told reporters who wondered how a banned football official could be present at the biggest club game of the year in South America. But photographs taken at the stadium showed that the “tourist” had been invited as part of a “Legends” group and displayed an official Conmebol accreditation badge to prove it.
Juan Angel Napout (front row, second from left) at the 2023 Copa Libertadores final.
Juan Angel Napout (l.) displaying his official Conmebol accreditation badge at the 2023 Copa Libertadores final.
Fifa didn’t respond to this blatant breach of its ban. No answers were needed, as no questions were asked. Fifa, after all, is another ‘family’, of which Alejandro Domínguez is now one of the prominent members.
This is the second part in a series of articles of which Conmebol president and Fifa vice president Alejandro Domínguez is the main character.
You can read the first part here:
(*) HDD published a book on the subject in 1977, El Fútbol Paraguayo.
(*) It was only discovered in May 1985, two months after the CIA report was compiled, that Mengele had drowned in Brazil in 1979.
(*) According to the same report, Osvaldo Domínguez had also been linked to cocaine trafficking from Bolivia in the 1980s.
