{"id":358,"date":"2006-08-18T21:21:03","date_gmt":"2006-08-18T11:21:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/?p=358"},"modified":"2006-08-18T21:21:03","modified_gmt":"2006-08-18T11:21:03","slug":"a-life-cut-tragically-short","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/?p=358","title":{"rendered":"A life cut tragically short…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alfredo Stroessner<\/a><\/em>, Paraguay’s former dictator, died August 16, aged 93, but you’ll have to travel to Brazil to join me in pissing on his grave: Stroessner left Paraguay for that country in 1989, after his 35-year-old dictatorship was finally ended, in stereo-typical South American fashion, with a military coup. Besides amassing a huge personal fortune, Stroessner also oversaw the murder, torture and imprisonment of thousands of his regime’s opponents, as well as the provision of a safe haven for Nazi war criminals such as Josef Mengele<\/a><\/em> and even poor old Anastasio Somoza<\/a><\/em>, the Nicaraguan dictator ousted in 1979 by the Sandinistas<\/a><\/strong>. (Anastasio was given his just desserts when he was shot to death behind the wheel of his Mercedes-Benz in Asuncion, just one year after fleeing the scene of his many, untold crimes.)<\/p>\n

‘CONDOR archives unearthed in Paraguay expose U.S. allies’ abuses’<\/a>
\nDiana Jean Schemo
\nNew York Times<\/em>
\nAugust 11, 1999<\/p>\n

ASUNCION, Paraguay\u2014When Martin Almada asked a judge for records of his arrest under the dictatorship of Gen. Alfredo Stroessner, he hoped merely to learn more about his own private tragedy: nearly four years of captivity, during which the police telephoned his wife so she would hear his screams under torture.<\/p>\n

Instead, the one-time schoolteacher unearthed a mountain of records detailing repression among United States-backed military regimes throughout South America during the cold war. From floor to ceiling, five tons of reports and photos detailed the arrest, interrogation and disappearance of thousands of political prisoners during General Stroessner’s 35-year dictatorship.<\/p>\n

The documents trace the creation and work of Operation Condor<\/a><\/strong>, a secret plan among security forces in six countries to crush left-wing political dissent [ = hunting down, torturing and often killing leftists and other opponents in the 1970s and 1980s] …<\/p>\n

Two of the thousands of cases contained in the archives are those of Gladys Sannemann and Agustin Goiburu, physicians in Asuncion who refused to falsify an autopsy to show that a man beaten to death under police custody in 1958 had died of natural causes. Instead, Dr. Sannemann took the cadaver to her medical school in Asuncion and performed a proper autopsy before her students.<\/p>\n

Practically from that moment it began, said Dr. Sannemann, an immunologist who is now 69 and practicing here in Asuncion. The challenge marked her out for the Stroessner regime.<\/p>\n

Seeking safety, Dr. Sannemann and her husband, Rodolfo Jorge, fled to Brazil in 1963, a year before the military seized power there, and then moved to Argentina. But in March 1976, the military took power in Argentina as well.<\/p>\n

Hours after the coup, the Argentine police abducted Dr. Sannemann and tortured her at the Escuela Mecanica in Buenos Aires. Dr. Sannemann said she was bound and plunged into a bathtub of vomit and excrement.<\/p>\n

They accused me of killing a patient in my office, Dr. Sannemann said, calling the charge a total lie. Then the police falsely accused her of selling drugs, she said. A week later, Dr. Sannemann’s husband was abducted and tortured as well.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Stoessner was one of half-a-dozen rulers who — along with dictators from Argentina<\/a> (Videla<\/a><\/em>), Bolivia<\/a> (Banzer<\/a><\/em>), Brazil, Chile<\/a> (Pinochet<\/a><\/em>) and Uruguay — implemented the Condor Plan on behalf of the US state, helping the US to destroy progressive social movements throughout the Americas. This policy was partly based on the construction of ‘National Security States’<\/a>, a policy developed in the 1950s and 1960s.<\/p>\n

Today they might call it ‘Homeland Security’<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alfredo Stroessner, Paraguay’s former dictator, died August 16, aged 93, but you’ll have to travel to Brazil to join me in pissing on his grave: Stroessner left Paraguay for that country in 1989, after his 35-year-old dictatorship was finally ended, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4,6,16,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anti-fascism","category-history","category-media","category-state"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6AyE-5M","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=358"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}