The global anticorruption watchdog Transparency International describes Paraguay as a “monolith in the study of corruption,” a country that offers a case study on the difficulty of recovering from a dictatorship that institutionalized corruption. Such studies may have to write a new chapter now that Paraguayans have introduced new weapons into the battle — toilet paper and eggs.

Paraguay, a small, landlocked country of fewer than seven million people in the middle of South America, has a long history of conflicts, revolutions and coups d’état followed by 35 years of autocratic government under Gen. Alfredo Stroessner, a serial violator of human rights who actively promoted corruption. “ Corruption ,” he would argue, “is the price for peace.”

The country has not yet thrown off that yoke, despite some earnest efforts. Several institutions have been set up to fight corruption, but they have run up against deeply entrenched habits of graft in politics and the judiciary. On Transparency International’s “corruption perceptions index,” which measures public perception of official corruption, Paraguay, in a tie with Bolivia, ranks above only Venezuela in South America. And according to Latinobarómetro, a Latin American polling organization, Paraguayans have one of the lowest level s of support for democracy in Latin America. General Stroessner’s Colorado Party has been in power for all but four years since he was overthrown in a military coup in 1989 — the current president, Mario Abdo Benítez, belongs to a conservative wing of the party; his father was the dictator’s personal secretary.

That does not mean that Paraguayans, or their elected leaders, are necessarily congenitally hooked on graft and bribery as a way of life. What it does mean is that countries with long histories of rampant and systemic corruption, often as a result of autocratic government, face huge obstacles in eradicating the blight, since it infects the very institutions, political and judicial, that are needed to fight it.