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Martin Almada: A Pursuer of the Past
BY DEISY FRANCIS MEXIDOR
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Francis_mexidor@granma.cip.cu
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 Martin
Almada, a lawyer and 2002 Alternative Nobel Prize winner in
Human Rights confirmed the discovery of a second terror
archive in Paraguay. This time, the find took place in one
of the offices of the Ministry of the Interior during the
dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner (1954-1989).
Photographs, files, and even ID cards of detainees are among
the documents of the era that has so far been identified as
Archive of Terror II.
During a recent visit to
Asunción, the Paraguayan capital,
Granma
newspaper contacted Almada:
"I keep looking," he said then.
However what’s most important to
Almada is that "the disappearances and torture never to be
repeated.”
The new discovery adds to the
documents of the so-called Archive of Terror —currently
protected at the Paraguayan Palace of Justice—, revealed by
Almada in December 1992, in the Department (State) of
Lambare.
¿What’s in your opinion
the saddest chapter in Paraguayan history?
The intervention of the English
empire, which, by way of using the reactionary governments
of Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay at the time, brought to an
end an unprecedented experience in Latin America between
1811 and 1865.
How did you get a hold of
the Archives of Terror in 1992?
It took me 15 years of patience
and investigation, mainly through the Paraguay Police
Journal.
I received the first information
on Operation Condor while being —if you’ll excuse the
repetition— in "the Condor’s belly”, in May, 1975, the year
when this terrible machine of repression against the left in
Latin America was created with the support of the region’s
dictatorships. In 1975, I was under arrest at Asuncion’s
First Precinct, which was at the same time the headquarters
of the newly-formed office of INTERPOL.
I shared my cell with a
commissioner who was imprisoned for not having informed on
his son, a student at the University of La Plata, Argentina,
who was a member of the Council of Students. I wanted to
know how my wife had died and why foreign military men
tortured me in my country (Argentineans, Brazilians,
Bolivians, Chileans, Uruguayans and Paraguayans).
The Commissioner’s answer was
"we’re in the clutches of the Condor!" I said: "that flying
creature?" and he replied: "No. I’m talking about Augusto
Pinochet and Manuel Contreras (head of the National
Intelligence Department or DINA, by its Spanish acronym),
from Chile."
Then he gave me the names of the
Chilean and Argentinean military men that tortured me. One
day, I discovered that this commissioner had worked at the
Police telecommunications office and was the person that
received all the cables Pinochet and Contreras sent to
Alfredo Stroessner. I also remember that he told me that if
I managed “to get out alive” from that place, I should read
the Paraguay Police Journal, because there, he explained,
“there were many pieces of information.”
For "bad behavior", I was sent
to the Third Precinct, called "The tomb of the living,”
where the members of the Central Committee of Paraguay’s
Communist Party had been confined. An Argentinean political
prisoner, Dr. Amílcar Latino Santucho, who was in a cell
next to mine, spoke for the second time of the existence of
Operation Condor. Finally, I ended up —again for “bad
behavior”— at the Embiscada Concentration Camp, where there
were more than 400 prisoners. There I met Gladys de
Sannemann, a Paraguayan doctor who also told me that we were
the victims of Operation Condor.
I went on a 30-day hunger
strike, and thanks to the pressure of the Committee of
Churches and of human rights organizations, I recovered my
freedom and went to exile. I arrived to Panama as a
political refugee in 1978, and then I traveled to Paris,
France, in 1979, where I worked as a UNESCO Consultant for
Latin America.
On February 2, 1989, Stroessner
was removed from office. I returned to Paraguay in May of
that same year to carry out legal actions against the
dictator, accomplices, and accessories.
In September, 1992, through
judicial channels, I asked the Police for my records, using
a Writ of Habeas Data. In view of their refusal, I asked for
a search of the Central Archives of the Police. Thanks to my
patient research work of 15 years and a telephone call that
confirmed my calculations, on December 22, 1992, with the
support of criminal court judge José Agustin Fernández, we
found tons of documents in a faraway police station
neighboring Asunción, called Lambare.
What was the content of
these archives?
The dictatorship’s secret police
archives show the history of repression in Paraguay from
1929 to 1989. First came the repression against the
anarchists, then, against the communists and socialists and,
finally, against us, the so-called “subversives.” The most
amazing discovery was when we found the Chilean National
Intelligence document, which we baptized as the Condor’s
Birth Certificate.
You recently gave Aleida
Guevara March, one of Che Guevara’s daughters, documents
from the Archives of Terror related to Operation Condor and
the Argentinean-Cuban guerrilla. Could you mention some of
the most important elements in that document?
The document I gave Aleida is
from July 15, 1969, and belongs to the "pre-Condor" period.
It shows the 00043F 0003 code and it’s a report the head of
the Paraguayan political repression, Pastor Coronel,
submitted to President Stroessner, taking the report
received by the Brazilian Naval Intelligence Service as a
starting point. This Service was carrying out investigations
in Foz de Iguazu, bordering Paraguay. The 14-page document
intended to show that if Che Guevara hadn’t been
assassinated in Bolivia, he would have led an alleged
international revolutionary organization.
You have just come out of
a legal process for defamation and slander, for rummaging
into the archives, for exposing names, and denouncing people
involved, and we know you still have other accusations
pending. Why do they want to condemn you to silence?
In light of the imminent triumph
of Fernando Lugo, the dictatorship’s supporters devised a
strategy of defamatory remarks about my denunciations at
national and international levels. First, they managed to
get a court to subject me to a thorough psychiatric
examination –they want to make people believe I’m crazy;
then, they denounced me before the District Attorney’s
Office for alleged possession of false degrees, and lastly
they presented a police officer, an oppressor, as the real
discoverer of the Archives of Terror.
Why all that effort?
Because they simply want to
erase the memory of what happened.
Taken from
Granma Daily |
