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A major archive has recently been established in Paraguay that reveals the internal operations of the security forces during the lengthy authoritarian regime of President Alfredo Stroessner (1954-1989). Featuring open access, the archive dubbed by the media as "el archivo del terror" comprises a wealth of primary material on a significant but little researched aspect of the contemporary history of Latin America. This archive provides unique insight into the day-to-day workings of a totalitarian security system and the objectives and strategies of those who headed it. The archive also has regional significance because no comparable archive exists for the period of military rule in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, or Uruguay. Thus it should prove to be of considerable interest to academics analyzing topics like the nature of Latin American military regimes, the practice of national security doctrine, human rights, and related themes.
The contents came to light only three years ago, following a tip-off from a police informant. On 22 December 1992, the Direccion de Produccion of the Policia de la Capital in the residential suburb of Solares de Lambare (near Asuncion) was raided by a judicial team headed by Judges Jose Agustin Fernandez and Luis Maria Benitez Riera, accompanied by Congressional Deputy Francisco Jose de Vargas. They were acting under the habeas data provisions, inscribed in Article 135 of the Constitution of 1992, under which citizens may access information about themselves held by the state. A writ of habeas data to this effect had been issued earlier in favor of former political prisoner Martin Almada, an educator detained from November 1974 until he was expelled from Paraguay in mid-1977. To the judges' amazement, they discovered nearly two tons of documentation on the activities of the Departamento de Investigaciones de la Policia de la Capital (DIPC), commonly known as Investigaciones, the nerve center of state repression ding the Stroessner regime. Acting swiftly and accompanied by the press and television cameras, the judges ordered immediate confiscation of the documentation and its transfer by a fleet of vehicles to the Palacio de Justicia (High Court) in Asuncion.
This discovery led to two subsequent raids in the following weeks by judges acting on the basis of additional writs of habeas data. On 4 January 1993, the Departamento Judicial of...