Scourge of Paraguay's Drug Trade, Journalist Cándido Figueredo Is Ready for Retaliation PEDRO JUAN CABALLERO, Paraguay - Grasping his semiautomatic Browning handgun, he peeked through the curtains. Then he pondered the images of passers-by on the closed-circuit television screens recording movement in front of his house here. "I'm always comforted by the gunmen on the porch," said Cándido Figueredo, 56, motioning to his police bodyguards. They're my first line of defense. Managing a weak smile, he added, "but if they're taken out, I have the gun in my hand." Mr. Figueredo, an authority on Paraguay's drug trade, has opted for an unconventional method - among journalists, anyway - for surviving death threats. He has armed himself to the teeth. The arsenal includes Chilean 9-millimeter submachine guns, used by his bodyguards, Israeli automatic handguns acquired here on the streets, and his trusted Browning pistol, manufactured in Belgium, which usually rests on his desk or bedside table. For the last 17 years, Mr. Figueredo has been the correspondent for ABC Color, Paraguay's main newspaper, in Pedro Juan Caballero, a border outpost known as a nerve center for drug trafficking and gun running. For 16 years and 8 months of that time, he has lived like a prisoner in his own home. Nearly everyone here knows where Mr. Figueredo lives, in a ranch-style house tucked away on a quiet street not far from the garish mansions exemplifying the latest in Paraguay's contributions to "narco-style" architecture. It is impossible to miss the 24-hour security detail, four heavily armed men from Paraguay's national police, standing watch at his front door. Sometimes they deter attacks. Sometimes they do not. Bullet holes from a spray of gunfire in 2003 still scar a painting in the kitchen. "We rarely go outside," said Mr. Figueredo's wife, Luz Patricia Bellenzier, 28, a psychologist. We know our phones are tapped. The lack of sunlight gets to me sometimes, as it would for someone living in a bunker," she said. It is a strange life. Then again, Pedro Juan Caballero is a strange city. A smugglers" paradise, it straddles the border with its Brazilian twin, Ponta Porã. Chinese, Arab and Paraguayan merchants sell an array of products of dubious origin, including contraband cigarettes, Uzi submachine guns, even a whiskyesque spirit called Etiqueta Negra (Black Label). Gunslingers guard shopping malls, squinting at visitors. Shiny new S.U.V."s prowl the streets, Sertanejo ballads blaring from their speakers. Residents of this borderland speak an amalgam of Spanish, Portuguese and Guaraní, Paraguay's resilient indigenous language. Drug trafficking provides the lifeblood of Pedro Juan Caballero. Paraguay cultivates one of Latin America's largest marijuana crops, supplying the markets of Brazil and Argentina, and ranches along Paraguay's eastern frontier have emerged as a major transshipment point for Andean cocaine. Still, drug violence in landlocked, isolated Paraguay barely registers elsewhere, even as the death toll here steadily climbs. Journalists covering the shadowy drug trade and related corruption along the border face perils like those in other Latin American countries, like Mexico and Honduras. In February, for instance, a newspaper editor, Paulo Rodrigues, 51, was shot dead by gunmen in Ponta Porã. In 2007, two assailants killed Tito Alberto Palma, a radio reporter in the town of Mayor Otaño. Mr. Figueredo has cataloged each one of these killings, well aware that his time may come. He said he had received dozens of threats over the years by telephone, e-mail, text message and in person. In January, he got a call from an elite police squad in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul. They told him of on intercepted phone call in which a Paraguayan fugitive, Barón Escurra, spoke to an inmate in a Brazilian high-security prison of plans to kill Mr. Figueredo in retaliation for articles describing Mr. Escurra's involvement with clandestine airstrips near the border. Referring to the intercept, Mr. Figueredo shrugged and called Mr. Escurra "an amateur." He did not even qualify as a "pez gordo," or fat fish, as big-league traffickers are called in the jargon of the Paraguayan drug trade, Mr. Figueredo said. Still, a decade-and-a-half is a long time to live with such threats. Asked why he remains on the job, Mr. Figueredo smiled and pointed to the photographs on his wall. They showed idyllic, steep-walled fjords. He motioned at tomes on his bookshelf, written in Norwegian. "I had an urge to return home," he said, explaining that he left Paraguay in the 1970s after marrying a Norwegian woman and moving to her homeland. They settled in Finnmark, a remote, snowy expanse with the coldest winter temperatures in Norway. Once there, near another border, with Russia, he found work in a steel factory. "I was very happy," he said. For a while. The marriage eventually failed, and he found himself at loose ends, yearning for Paraguay after the end of Alfredo Stroessner's 35-year dictatorship in 1989. He returned, but was appalled by the lawlessness, after experiencing Scandinavia's order and transparency. He saw the job of a reporter as a way to shed light on certain ills.