PARAGUAY: Torture Victim Still Fears Colorado Party ‘Mafia’

[Judi Lynn]

Source: IPS News

PARAGUAY: Torture Victim Still Fears Colorado Party ‘Mafia’
By Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, May 5 (IPS) - The Colorado Party has become a "criminal mafia" during its 61 years in government in Paraguay, and it will continue to be a force to be reckoned with in spite of its defeat in last month’s elections, says Anuncio Martí, a Paraguayan citizen living in exile in Brazil.

Martí said he was abducted and tortured in Asunción in January 2002 by "a paramilitary and parapolice group linked to the government." Since 2003 he has lived as a political refugee in a Brazilian city, along with two fellow members of the Partido Patria Libre (roughly, Free Homeland Party, PPL), Juan Arrom and Víctor Colmán.

Martí rejoiced at the victory of opposition candidate Fernando Lugo, a progressive Catholic bishop who was elected president in Paraguay on Apr. 20. But he still has mixed feelings of hope and fear. The election result was "an important step forward for democracy," but "not the beginning of a real process of change," he told IPS.

"We hope that at least the criminalisation of social struggles and mass movements will end," so that "construction of a participative democracy" can begin, he said. His scepticism with regard to the prospect of a government of the people, led by Lugo who is known as "the bishop of the poor," is partly due to his own personal experience.

On Jan. 17, 2002, Martí and Arrom were kidnapped in downtown Asunción, taken to a clandestine location, and brutally tortured for nearly two weeks by a group of 15 police and military personnel and criminal investigation agents belonging to the official Centre for Judicial Investigations (CIJ).



Read more: http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=42239

[Judi Lynn]

1. Torture in Latin America, as taught by the C.I.A.:

The Unholy Trinity - From Latin America To Iraq

Death Squads, Disappearances, and Torture

By Greg Grandin

~snip~
At this point, Washington can no longer deny that its agents in Latin America facilitated, condoned, and practiced torture. Defectors from death squads have described the instruction given by their U.S. tutors, and survivors have testified to the presence of Americans in their torture sessions. One Pentagon “torture manual” distributed in at least five Latin American countries described at length “coercive” procedures designed to “destroy capacity to resist.”

As Naomi Klein and Alfred McCoy have documented in their recent books, these field manuals were compiled using information gathered from CIA-commissioned mind control and electric-shock experiments conducted in the 1950s. Just as the “torture memos” of today’s war on terror parse the difference between “pain” and “severe pain,” “psychological harm” and “lasting psychological harm,” these manuals went to great lengths to regulate the application of suffering. “The threat to inflict pain can trigger fears more damaging than the immediate sensation of pain,” one handbook read.

“Before all else, you must be efficient,” said U.S. police advisor Dan Mitrione, assassinated by Uruguay’s revolutionary Tupamaros in 1970 for training security forces in the finer points of torture. “You must cause only the damage that is strictly necessary, not a bit more.” Mitrione taught by demonstration, reportedly torturing to death a number of homeless people kidnapped off the streets of Montevideo. “We must control our tempers in any case,” he said. “You have to act with the efficiency and cleanliness of a surgeon and with the perfection of an artist.”

Florencio Caballero, having escaped from Honduras’s notorious Battalion 316 into exile in Canada in 1986, testified that U.S. instructors urged him to inflict psychological, not “physical,” pain “to study the fears and weakness of a prisoner.” Force the victim to “stand up,” the Americans taught Caballero, “don’t let him sleep, keep him naked and in isolation, put rats and cockroaches in his cell, give him bad food, serve him dead animals, throw cold water on him, change the temperature.” Sound familiar?

Yet, as Abu Ghraib demonstrated so clearly and the destroyed CIA interrogation videos would undoubtedly have made no less clear, maintaining a distinction between psychological and physical torture is not always possible. As one manual conceded, if a suspect does not respond, then the threat of direct pain “must be carried out.” One of Caballero’s victims, Inés Murillo, testified that her captors, including at least one CIA agent — his involvement was confirmed in Senate testimony by the CIA’s deputy director — hung her from the ceiling naked, forced her to eat dead birds and rats raw, made her stand for hours without sleep and without being allowed to urinate, poured freezing water over her at regular intervals for extended periods, beat her bloody, and applied electric shocks to her body, including her genitals.

More:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18920.htm

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Speaking of torture in Paraguay, please see Amnesty International's 2007 Report at the end of this statement:

PARAGUAY
REPUBLIC OF PARAGUAY

Head of state and government: Nicanor Duarte Frutos
Death penalty: abolitionist for all crimes
International Criminal Court: ratified

Journalists were reportedly subjected to threats and attacks during the first half of the year. There were reports of armed civilian patrols operating in the north of the country. One community leader was killed. Prison conditions were poor.

Economic, social and cultural rights
Peasants continued to be evicted from their land which was then given to landowners for the monoculture of soya bean crops. Indigenous people, women, children and the elderly suffered ill-health, malnutrition and hunger.

In August, former President Alfredo Stroessner died in exile in Brazil. Requests for his extradition were unsuccessful and he was never brought to trial for the many human rights violations committed during his rule, including in the context of Operation Condor, a joint plan by Southern Cone military governments in the 1970s and 1980s to eliminate opponents.

Threats and attacks against journalists
Journalists were subjected to threats and attacks because of their investigative work on politics, drugs and the environment.

• In February, Enrique Ramón Galeano, a radio journalist, disappeared after being seen in a police station in Azotey in the city of Horqueta. After receiving death threats, he was placed under police protection in 2005. The prosecutor who had been investigating Enrique Ramón Galeano's whereabouts expressed concern for her own safety.

Prison conditions
Prisons were reportedly overcrowded and conditions harsh, sometimes amounting to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. In Tacumbú prison in the capital, Asunción, 40 inmates with mental illness reportedly had no access to medicines or medical care, no mattress or bedding and lived in unsanitary conditions. A prosecutor filed a legal petition for medical assistance on their behalf.

Armed civilian patrols
In July, two community leaders were attacked by members of the Neighbourhood Security Commission (Comisión Vecinal de Seguridad), a government-sponsored armed civilian patrol group, in the city of San José del Norte, San Pedro department. Luis Martínez, who was shot more than 30 times, was killed and Zacarías Vega was wounded. The attack appeared to be linked to the men's work raising awareness of peasants' rights, their campaigning against the excessive use of agricultural pesticides, and their opposition to the use of firearms by civilian patrols in the area. Luis Martínez's family and Daniel Romero, another community leader, and his family received death threats after they pressed for an investigation into the shooting. An official investigation was launched into the shooting, but there was no news of any progress at the end of the year.

UN Special Rapporteur on torture
In November, following a visit to Paraguay, the UN Special Rapporteur on torture criticized severe prison overcrowding and the lack of basic human rights for prisoners, including health care and the provision of clothing, food and mattresses. He also stated that detainees in police stations were widely subjected to torture during the first few days in custody. He expressed concern that torture was not criminalized in the military criminal code and at allegations of beatings and degrading treatment of conscripts. He stressed the need to investigate effectively all suspected cases of torture and bring perpetrators to justice, eradicate corruption, and increase the use of non-custodial measures.

http://thereport.amnesty.org/eng/Regions/Americas/Paraguay