Juan Manuel Frutos Fleitas

Juan Manuel Frutos Fleitas
Rural Welfare Institute
In office
1963–1989
Personal details
Born10 April 1923
Asunción, Paraguay
Died24 March 2013
Asunción, Paraguay
Political partyNational Republican Association – Colorado Party
NicknamePapacito

Juan Manuel Frutos Fleitas (also known by his alias of Papacito) (April 10, 1923 – March 24, 2013) was a Paraguayan politician and government minister under the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner. He was the founder and first chairman of the Rural Welfare Institute (Instituto de Bienestar Rural—IBR), and as such, he was one of the key figures of the Stroessner administration's economic policy, spearheading the "March to the East" land reclamation and colonization project of the 1960s-1980s. Frutos, a staunch anti-communist, also served as an ideologue of the Stroessner regime, and was the chairman of the Paraguayan branch of the World League for Freedom and Democracy anti-communist organization.