He was released in 1977 and went into exile in France as a “broken man”, but was eventually recognized as one of Paraguay’s most notable heroes. After Stroessner was driven from power in 1989 in a military coup, Dr. Almada returned to the capital Asunción and discovered state archives containing documents and recordings detailing decades of torture and murders. This sum, proving acts long denied by state authorities, opened the way to a vast legal judgment.
The cache, known as the “Terror Archive,” offered a horrific timeline of atrocities as the Stroessner regime imprisoned or killed tens of thousands of suspected political opponents, left-wing academics, students and others.
The documents have been used in trials in Paraguay against police and military officials from the Stroessner era, including in the February conviction of a once-feared torturer, Eusebio Torres, nicknamed “the Whip” because of his stints at tobacco. During the work of Paraguay’s truth commission investigating the crimes of the Stroessner regime, Dr. Almada filed a lawsuit on behalf of his late wife.
For the region as a whole, these files provide a more in-depth account of the repression and bloodshed carried out under a clandestine pact called Operation Condor, which linked Paraguay and five other South American juntas supported by the military in an effort to crush left-wing dissent from mid-century onwards. -1970s. The network included US-backed dictators such as Chilean General Augusto Pinochet and the Argentine junta responsible for the ‘dirty war’ that cost 30,000 lives, rights groups estimate .
“I felt that every file we opened would help us go back into the past and understand the regime of terror we suffered,” Dr Almada told the BBC in 2002. “Each document revealed the terror and the tragedy. »
In the archives, Dr. Almada and Judge José Agustín Fernández found a crucial historical document: an invitation to the head of the Paraguayan secret police for the meeting that launched Operation Condor in Santiago, Chile, in November 1975. The other documents The information discovered was part of efforts to prosecute Pinochet before his death in 2006. The documents have been cited in other human rights cases in Chile and elsewhere.
Julieta Heduvan, a Paraguayan foreign policy expert who contributes to journals such as Americas Quarterly, called the documents’ importance “immeasurable” to historians. “Also because they have deprived the political and judicial powers of excuses to evade state investigations into human rights violations in Paraguay,” she said, “while hindering the process of granting reparations to victims. »
“Intellectual terrorism”
Martín Almada was born on January 30, 1937 in Puerto Sastre, in northeastern Paraguay, and as a child moved with his family to San Lorenzo, a town near Asunción. His parents found work in factories and small stores, and Martín sold pastries on the street to earn more money.
He graduated from the National Academy of Agronomy with a degree in education in 1963 and worked as a teacher and principal. In 1968, he earned a law degree from the National University of Asunción and undertook pro bono legal work, including advising poor villagers and farmers on issues of housing and land rights.
As an educator and lawyer, he led collectives that charted paths outside of state control, including building teacher housing and promoting unions. In a bold slap in the face to the military, Dr. Almada once proposed that teachers’ salaries be increased to match those of soldiers.
At another time, in the late 1960s, he came across a banned book by Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire, who saw literacy and education as powerful tools for political change. “We said that school was the gateway to democracy,” Dr. Almada said. For the Stroessner regime, such calls to expand learning among the rural poor and others were seen as threats to the state’s monopoly on thought.
Dr. Almada and his then-wife, Celestina Pérez, were placed under full-time surveillance by the secret police. “It was my first sin, my first crime,” he told PBS’s “Frontline” in 2007, “after reading a book by Paulo Freire.”
At the National University of La Plata in neighboring Argentina, Dr. Almada earned a doctorate in education in 1974 and wrote a thesis arguing that Paraguay’s education system supported elite domination and reinforced economic inequality. “When I came back,” he said on “Frontline,” “the Argentine police had sent my thesis to the Paraguayan police.”
On November 25, 1974, Dr. Almada was arrested for “intellectual terrorism,” a charge intended to send a chilling message to his wife and all those who joined them in their dissent.
Dr. Almada said he expected to die at the hands of state torturers. Day after day, he suffered beatings and electric shocks. He said he was once immersed in a vat filled with human excrement. His wife, under house arrest, was forced to listen to his screams of suffering. “The telephone,” he declared, “was used as an instrument of psychological torture. »
He was shown clothes that police said were soaked in Dr. Almada’s blood. Dr. Almada said his jailers were demanding information about anti-Stroessner exile groups in Chile and Argentina. He refused. After nine days, they told Dr. Almada’s wife a fabricated story that he had died as a result of the punishment – apparently hoping she would reveal details of their activities, which he did not want. The next day, she was found dead.
Authorities said it was a suicide. Dr. Almada always insisted she had a heart attack. No doctor wanted to care for her, he said, for fear of being monitored by police for helping a woman under suspicion. “She died of grief,” he said, still calling her a “martyr” of the Stroessner regime.
He was released in 1977 after pressure for his release by Amnesty International and religious groups, including the Committee of Churches of Paraguay. He was 40 years old but was hunched over, weakened by his ordeal and with serious eye injuries that later required operations to heal. As part of the release agreement, he signed a document that amounted to an admission of treason. The wording, Dr. Almada said, gave the diet the validation it wanted.
“I have to say it’s true,” he said in the PBS interview. “If I don’t sign, they’ll kill me.” He obtained asylum in Panama, then settled in Paris, where he began working with the United Nations cultural agency, UNESCO, in 1986.
After Stroessner was overthrown and allowed to cross to Brazil, Dr. Almada returned to a Paraguay ravaged by nearly two generations of violent repression. An entire “thinking class” of artists, journalists and other intellectuals were maimed or died, he said. Political forces linked to the regime, the right-wing Colorado Party, still held control. Few have dared to raise the question of responsibility for the past. Historical amnesia has become de facto policy.
“I returned to Asunción, went to court and asked for access to my files,” he says. “And the police said, ‘There was no record’ because (no record was visible) I had never been to prison.”
Then, in late 1992, he received a visit from the disgruntled wife of a former regime bodyguard. “Her husband drank a lot and went out with other women,” he told the Miami Herald. “She really hated him.” She gave Dr. Almada some advice: Stroessner’s secret police chief was obsessed with keeping records of everything from arrest records to torture programs. The files, she explained, were hidden in a police station in Lambaré, a town near Asunción.
When Dr. Almada entered the storeroom in late December 1992, he was stunned to see towers of boxes containing more than 700,000 pages. “It was full, way more than we thought,” he told the Herald. “It’s the storming of the Bastille. I cried with joy.
Stroessner died in 2006, aged 93, after the Brazilian government refused to grant Paraguayan court requests for his extradition on homicide charges. Paraguay’s Colorado Party continues to dominate the country, last winning elections in May 2023. But over the decades, the party has tried to blur its ties to the Stroessner regime and reinvented itself as a political machine conservative accused of vote buying and other tactics to stay in power.
Dr. Almada, however, has always focused on the Stroessner era, calling it a cautionary tale at a time when autocratic political forces continue to gain a foothold around the world. In 1990, he created a human rights watchdog group named in honor of his late wife, the Celestina Pérez de Almada Foundation.
“The fragility of our democracies arouses in many Paraguayans a nostalgia for the so-called ‘times of order, peace, progress and security,'” he said in 2002 after receiving the Right Livelihood Award, sometimes called the “alternative” Nobel Peace Prize. “There were the same moments when Operation Condor eliminated millions of people in the face of the passive and complicit silence of neighbors.”
Dr. Almada’s death, which occurred in a hospital in Asunción, from undisclosed causes, was announced in statements including a tribute from the current president of Paraguay, Santiago Peña.
Dr. Almada and his second wife, María Stella Cáceres, led the human rights group he founded and worked on projects such as opening a museum to trace abuses committed under the regime of Stroessner and Operation Condor. His published work includes an account of his prison years, “Paraguay: la Cárcel Olvidada, el País Exiliado” (Paraguay: The Forgotten Prison, the Country in Exile).
He had three children from his first marriage. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.
Dr Almada told the BBC how he told his jailers that one day he would have the upper hand.
“When I was handcuffed and chained, I told them that the world was a slowly turning wheel and that sooner or later democracy would come and that I would play a very important role,” he said. “I made that up, of course, and I doubt they believed me, but in a way they did.”
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