Almada, Martín

(1937– )

   Paraguayan educator, lawyer and human-rights activist. He was born in Puerto Sastre, in the Chaco region. During his youth, Almada’s mother moved the family to the city of San Lorenzo, where, because of the family’s precarious economic situation, he worked from the age of six selling pastries on the street. He was, by all accounts, a brilliant student, and his circumstances did not keep him from completing his education with great success. In 1963 he graduated as a teacher from the Universidad Nacional de Asunción. With his first wife and fellow educator, Celestina Pérez de Almada, he founded the Instituto “Juan Baustista Alberdi” in his adopted city and soon took up social causes, among them a grassroots movement to create a housing complex for teachers, mostly women, who lacked houses of their own. He went on to graduate as a lawyer from the Universidad Nacional de Asunción in 1968. In 1972 he obtained a scholarship from the Argentine government to study at the Universidad Nacional de la Plata, where in 1974 he obtained a Doctorate in Education. He was reportedly the first Paraguayan to receive the degree.

   His doctoral thesis in Argentina, “Paraguay: Educación y Dependencia” (Paraguay: Education and Dependency), was brought to the attention of the Paraguayan police that year. Almada was designated an “intellectual terrorist” by the regime of Alfredo Stroessner and soon arrested. In 1974–1977 he was held at Emboscada, the maximum- security penitentiary of Paraguay, built in 1816, and used as a torture and detention center by the regime. Among the inhuman treatment to which he and his family were subjected was a series of phone calls to his wife, during which Mrs. Almada was made to listen to the screams of her husband as he was tortured. The 33-yearold Celestina Pérez de Almada suffered a heart attack during one of these calls and died. The attention of international organizations for human rights, among them Amnesty International, coupled with a 30-day hunger strike begun by Almada, eventually won him his freedom in 1977. Soon after, Almada, his mother, and his three children left for exile, first in Panama and later in France, where he joined UNESCO’s environmental education division for educational projects in Africa and Latin America.

   In the years following the fall of the Stroessner regime, Almada returned to Paraguay. In 1992 he made use of the habeas data provision, now enshrined in several constitutions of Latin America. The provision guarantees citizens, among other rights, the personal right to freedom of information. Almada discovered that some of the documents related to his detention were held at the police station of Lambaré, a suburb of Asunción. According to reports, most notably that of journalist Stella Calloni, he and Judge José Fernández went to the station, where they discovered documents related not just to the Almada case but also to the reign of terror known as Operation Condor. The search, expanded a few days later to include the headquarters of the Paraguayan Policía Técnica and eventually to other police stations, resulted in the discovery of over four tons of documentation. The documents were proof of what had long been known in human-rights circles: the existence of a clandestine pact through which repressive governments in Latin America conducted a campaign of abduction, torture, and murder against anyone perceived as an enemy of the state.

   Collectively, the documents are known as the Archives of Terror, and they describe the wide-reaching effects of the secret pact. The files contain documentation granting Paraguayan citizenship to Josef Mengele, the notorious Nazi war criminal, as well as photographs and identity papers for some 1,888 people who remain among the disappeared (missing). It details specific cases of interstate cooperation in torture, such as the case of Gustavo Edison Inzaurralde, a Uruguayan, who had escaped to Paraguay after being accused of belonging to an armed insurgent group. In Paraguay, he was handed over, along with four others, to officers of the Argentine military. The detailed report also included the information that Argentine intelligence officers and a Uruguayan counterpart had been allowed to torture the detainees while still in Asunción. Other files in the archive point to Operation Condor’s expansion across the Americas. There is, for example, a petition by Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda, then chief of the Chilean secret police, asking for funds from the regime of Augusto Pinochet Ugarte to “neutralize the enemies of the junta abroad, particularly in Mexico, Argentina, Costa Rica, the United States, France and Italy.” Among the victims of Operation Condor were the Chilean Orlando Letelier del Solar and his associate Ronni Karpen Moffitt, in Washington, D.C., and the Uruguayan legislators Zelmar Michelini and Héctor Gutiérrez, in Buenos Aires. Among the more troubling aspects of the discovery is evidence of cooperation between U.S. intelligence and the FBI and some of these regimes. Faced with the dilatory actions of his government in bringing human- rights violators to justice, Almada created a Paraguayan branch of the American Associations of Jurists and organized a series of Tribunals against those implicated in torture and assassination, among them General Ramón Duarte Vera, Stroessner’s chief of police, widely regarded as the regime’s chief torturer. The Tribunals, which had no legal force, held hearings in which witnesses testified. The Tribunal convicted the former general, then serving as ambassador to Bolivia. The evidence was so compelling, the Paraguayan government recalled Duarte Vera home, tried him, and sentenced him to 16 years in prison. Almada participated in a similar Tribunal in Argentina against disgraced former captain Alfredo Astiz.

   Since the discovery of the archives, Almada has labored intensively to safeguard them, with various results. Presently, his activities link him to programs in Paraguay for sustainable development, conservancy, and education. He also collaborates with several organizations in Paraguay dedicated to advancing the cause of human rights and the identification of those responsible for crimes under the Stroessner regime. He cooperated with Judge Baltasar Garzón in the investigation on the case against Pinochet Ugarte in Chile. He was also an active promoter of the creation of an agreement between the Center for the Rehabilitation of the Victims of Torture in Paraguay and the International Center for Victims of Torture (IRCT) in Copenhagen, Denmark, and, through his legal affiliations, has participated in recovery efforts of private property stolen by the Stroessner regime. He also presides, with his second wife and fellow attorney, María Stella Cáceres, over the Fundación Celestina Pérez de Almada, named after his first wife. The foundation concentrates on antipoverty and environmental programs. A frequent participant in world conferences on human rights, Almada is the author of Paraguay: La cárcel olvidada, el país exiliado, his testimonial account of his experiences in detention under the Stroessner regime.

   Widely recognized for his efforts in Paraguay, Almada has been honored by the French government for his discovery of the Archives of Terror. In 1997 he was awarded the Medalla de Gratitud by the Argentine organization Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo) and has received an award from the Brazilian group “Nunca Mais.” In 2002 he received the Right Livelihood Foundation Award, annually presented in the Swedish Parliament and sometimes called the Alternative Nobel Peace Prize. In awarding the prize, the Right Livelihood Foundation cited Martín Almada for “his outstanding courage in bringing torturers to justice, and promoting democracy, human rights and sustainable development.”