Stroessner had seized power in 1954, a veteran of both the Chaco War and the 1947 Paraguayan Civil War who understood that controlling the military meant controlling everything. His state of siege suspended habeas corpus and freedom of assembly, and though he nominally limited its scope to the Asunción area in 1970, the courts ensured that anyone charged with security offenses could be tried in the capital regardless of where the alleged crime occurred. Apart from election day itself, Paraguay lived under martial law for over three decades. The United States supported Stroessner through the 1960s and 1970s, drawn to his fervent anti-communism. When he finally lifted the state of siege in 1987, the gesture was cosmetic. Opposition leaders still faced the same heavy-handed repression, and the 1988 elections allowed only the Colorado Party to campaign unmolested. By the late 1980s, Stroessner had begun replacing experienced military commanders with loyalists, sensing the very rebellion he sought to prevent.

General Andrés Rodríguez commanded the 1st Army Corps, the strongest and best-equipped force in Paraguay's military. On the evening of February 2, he ordered forty to fifty tanks into the capital's center. His troops attempted to arrest Stroessner at his mistress's home, but bodyguards fought back fiercely, buying the president enough time to escape to the Presidential Guards Regiment headquarters. There, a battle erupted between Rodríguez's forces and the 700-strong presidential guard. Artillery units hammered the compound. Naval vessels in Asunción's harbor shelled the headquarters from the river. Meanwhile, Paraguay's other military districts pledged their allegiance to the rebels one by one. By five in the afternoon on February 3, Stroessner surrendered. Rodríguez announced it over the radio. The official death toll stood at 31, but the Catholic Church station Radio Caritas reported up to 200 killed, and later estimates suggest approximately 170 died, most of them members of the Presidential Escort Regiment.

After his surrender, Stroessner was detained at the 1st Army Corps base. On February 6, he boarded a Líneas Aéreas Paraguayas Boeing 707 bound for Brasília, accompanied by his son Gustavo and daughter-in-law. Brazil granted him asylum, and he settled into a lakeside home that had previously served as his summer residence. He would live there in quiet exile for seventeen years, never returning to Paraguay, until his death in 2006. The departure was almost mundane for a man who had held absolute power for so long -- a commercial aircraft, a family, a destination already familiar. The dramatic details of the coup's final moments were more revealing: at 12:40 AM, as the battle raged, the Minister of Defense, the Army Chief of Staff, and a cluster of generals and colonels filed out of the besieged Armed Forces headquarters one by one, surrendering individually, the machinery of dictatorship disassembling itself person by person.

Paraguay had no vice president at the time, so Rodríguez was elected provisional president by Congress and the Council of State. He moved quickly: abolishing the death penalty, dissolving the legislature, lifting the ban on political parties, and scheduling elections for May 1989. Some of Stroessner's closest collaborators were tried for corruption, notably the so-called Cuatrinomio de Oro. The May elections were the closest thing to a free vote Paraguay had seen in its modern history, and Rodríguez won. He served until 1993 and became the first Paraguayan leader in decades to step down at the end of his term. He died of cancer in 1997. The coup did not deliver perfect democracy overnight, but it broke the cycle. The 1992 constitutional reforms strictly prohibited presidential reelection, even in non-consecutive terms, ensuring that no one would hold power for thirty-four years again.