JOURNEY TO THE HEART OF THE CONDOR JOURNEY TO THE HEART OF THE CONDOR love, loss, and survival in a south american dictatorship Emily Creigh Dr. Martìn Almada JOURNEY TO THE HEART OF THE CONDOR: The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. LOVE, LOSS, AND SURVIVAL IN A SOUTH AMERICAN DICTATORSHIP Milan Kundera A Peace Corps Writers Book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting An imprint of Peace Corps Worldwide In collaboration with Casa Satori Books (www.casasatori.com) and the Celestina Pérez de Almada Foundation (www.fcpa.org.py) Copyright © 2015 by E. Creigh and M. Almada. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America by Peace Corps Writers of Oakland, California. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permis- sion except in the case of brief quotations contained in critical articles or reviews. For more information, contact [email protected]. Peace Corps Writers and the Peace Corps Writers colophon are trademarks of PeaceCorpsWorldwide. org. ISBN 10: 1935925644 ISBN 9781935925644 Library of Congress Control Number: 2015938014 Peace Corps Writers, Oakland, California First Peace Corps Writers Edition, November 2015 Celestina Pérez de Almada, driving force of liberation education, militant member of the Febrerist Revolutionary Party. Febrerist ideals of justice and solidarity moved her to support movements of social significance. Co-founder of the Juan Bautista Alberdi Institute of San Lorenzo and developer of the campaign “A Roof for Every Paraguayan Educator.” Victim of the Stroessner dictatorship, under Operation Condor, died as a result of the psychological torture she was subjected to during the kidnapping and imprisonment of her husband, Martín Almada, December 5, 1974, in San Lorenzo, Paraguay. Museum of Memories: Dictatorship and Human Rights Dedicated to the memory of Celestina Pérez de Almada, pioneer of Paraguayan educational reform and martyr for freedom— and to everyone engaged in the struggle for truth and justice. Cover design by Kathleen Koopman Cover photo (and most interior photos) by Emily C. Creigh Paraguay map by Wesley Fawcett Creigh Author photo by Rochester Studios, Asunción Preface To teach is not to transfer knowledge but to create the possibility for the production or construction of knowledge…The teacher is no longer merely “the one who teaches,” but one who is himself taught in dialogue with students. PAULO FREIRE (1921–97) t is 2011, the first of July, and my life is over. My working life, anyway. I’ve just been laid off from my fourteen-year Idream job with Pima College Adult Education for the third (and final) time in two years, now that funding for the Family Literacy program has dried up for good. It appears that an educated populace is not in the interest of our elected officials. I scrape together a modest pension, take a deep breath, and set out on another dream: the long-awaited journey to my Peace Corps (PC) past and this much-hoped-for book. I have no idea that what I’m about to discover will change my life. A quick Internet search reveals a Paraguayan educator whose name I do not recognize, as I haven’t followed events in that country since I left it thirty- six years ago: Dr. Martín Almada, lawyer, PhD, environmentalist…political prisoner from 1974 to 1977? Excuse me? Those were my years! I am spellbound by his story but devastated to realize that I was in Paraguay as a PC trainee and volunteer for thirty of the thirty-four months that Dr. Almada languished in prison. xiii Journey to the Heart of the Condor Preface Especially heartbreaking for me is that as a professor and school adminis- are noble and generous.” He invites me to Asunción for a “delicious typical meal trator, Dr. Almada had been a follower of Brazilian liberation educator Paulo made in a solar oven” and, in a postscript, says I am welcome to use his story. Freire—as had I at Pima College—and believed passionately in the importance Since then, in my three trips back to Paraguay (I also took my family there of teaching critical thinking, which was one of the reasons (along with his relent- in 2004), I have spent many hours with this diminutive, soft-spoken man who less fight for teachers’ rights) why he had been under surveillance. Finally, after sacrificed so much for freedom and human rights. I am honored and grateful he denounced the Paraguayan educational system in his August 1974 doctoral dis- to stand with him in support of his vital work, which has changed history. sertation, Dr. Almada was apprehended, dragged to the Office of Investigations On December 22, 1992, in a police station outside Asunción, Dr. Almada in downtown Asunción, accused of being a communist, and tortured…only and a courageous young judge found several tons of documents now known weeks before I arrived in that city as a fresh-faced PC recruit. as the Archives of Terror. These meticulous records of the covert kidnapping, An educated populace was clearly not in the interest of the dictator, torture, and assassination of thousands of innocent people included Martín’s Alfredo Stroessner, either. own file. The landmark discovery resulted in the immediate arrest of some Because this type of news was censored, and Peace Corps volunteers of Martín’s torturers—who for years had denied to his face that such atroci- (PCVs) are strictly prohibited from getting involved in local politics, I knew ties ever occurred—and the ultimate indictment of several high-level offi- nothing of Dr. Almada at the time—although we were often just blocks away cials throughout South America’s “Southern Cone,” including Chile’s Augusto in downtown Asunción, me enjoying dinner with friends in a café and him Pinochet and Argentina’s Rafael Videla. (Alfredo Stroessner, on the other fighting for his life in the basement of a government building. Reading about hand, died with impunity in Brazil in 2006.) him decades later overwhelms me. I know the PC often has no choice but to The archives also proved that Operation Condor, the secret campaign to cooperate with host governments, but I see for the first time that from 1975 to carry out terrorist attacks against political opponents around the world, did in 1977, as a PCV in agricultural extension and public health, I effectively worked fact exist, and was supported by the United States. Estimates vary, but Condor for the dictator who imprisoned Dr. Almada without due process, appropriated resulted in at least fifty thousand people killed, thirty thousand “disappeared” his livelihood, and caused the death of his wife, Celestina. (certainly killed), and four hundred thousand arrested. And that’s just Condor, I discover Martín’s book on his website and weep as I read about his or- not the other country-specific “dirty wars” of state terrorism being waged at the deal. I realize that I must contact this courageous man, apologize to him, and time. It stands to reason that many more thousands of surviving family mem- ask to include his story, in his voice, to complete my version of those years—if bers still search desperately for information about their missing loved ones. he will let me (the United States was, after all, complicit in his suffering). I So many lives ruined…and the tragedy is that, according to the 1985 Trial take weeks to compose the right email, then one night screw my courage to of the Juntas, so-called “subversives” never posed a viable threat to the dicta- the sticking point and click SEND, having no idea what, if anything, will be- torships in the first place.1 come of my true confession as it disappears into cyberspace. The day after Martín’s discovery of the archives, the Third Precinct—a To my astonishment, Dr. Almada responds before I even wake up the next prison in Asunción where he had spent twenty-one miserable months—was morning. He thanks me and says he is “still struggling against impunity.” He says closed. Fittingly, the Museum of Memories, founded by Martín and his second his concept of Americans changed when, as visiting professor at the University wife, María Stella Cáceres, now sits across the street from the Third Precinct, of Kansas from 2000 to 2002, he saw how “government is one thing and the in offices and cells formerly used by the dictatorship. people another entirely. I want you to know that I am fond of your people, who 1 “El estado de necesidad” (“The State of Need,” desaparecidos.org), documents of the Trial of the Juntas. xiv xv Journey to the Heart of the Condor Preface Months after his 1,038 days in Stroessner’s hell, in February 1978 Dr. in. Of course my suffering didn’t begin to compare with that of Dr. Almada, Almada was exiled to Panama, where he finished the book he’d begun in whose world had come tumbling down also, but in a most horrific way. What prison, much of it written in shorthand (by him) on papers from cellmates’ kept him going was his hope for a free and just Paraguay. packs of Virginia Slims and smuggled out in his mother’s clothing. Currently I had hope, too: that I might make the world a little better place and, in its fourteenth printing in Spanish, Paraguay: Forgotten Prison, Exiled Country in the process, become whole again. I was convinced the farther away from (Asunción: MARBEN, 2010) is published here in English for the first time home I got, the sooner I could escape my demons and discover my purpose (with my edits and some translation).