For the first time in history, Paraguayans were able to hear a sentence to the maximum penalty for a repressor of the de facto regime of Alfredo Stroessner (1954-1989).
The retired police officer Eusebio Torres was sentenced to 30 years in prison for torturing Carlos Ernesto Casco, his pregnant wife and his brother at the headquarters of the Investigations Department of the former Asunción Police.
Torres, convicted of committing torture events in 1976 to a group of civilians, joins the short list of eight repressors of the Stromist government – seven members of the police and one soldier – convicted by justice in the 1990s.
“This sentence is historic. After 30 years, we see the condemnation of a high-ranking member of the dictatorship, for the first time, in an oral and public trial,” Dante Leguizamón, secretary of the Human Rights Coordinator of Paraguay, tells BBC Mundo.
Torres’ defense lawyers, Federico Hetter and Óscar Torres, had requested the prescription of the cause because these are events that occurred in 1976.
“The Prosecutor’s Office has the opportunity to educate these farmers who do not understand the law, to tell them that their time has elapsed to file a complaint,” Torres said in his statement before the Court.
The Court rejected the argument because it was crimes against humanity.
For Carlos, 71, the sentence is a relief after so much pain. “It hurts a lot to relive those tragic moments, but it had to be done. The sentence serves as a balm for the wounds,” Carlos tells BBC Mundo.
Illegal and arbitrary detention was a common practice in the Stroessner regime.
Illegality predominated in 91% of the 19,862 arrests and 18,772 people were tortured, according to the 2008 Truth and Justice Commission report.
“This sentence probably marks the beginning of a new stage of trials for crimes of many other repressors who until now have gone unpunished,” says Carlos.
The memory of the past
At that time, the mechanism was simple.
The commissioner Eusebio Torres interrogated the detainees in one of the rooms of the Investigation Department of the Asunción Police, while two agents hit them from behind with their wooden batons.
“When we entered the hallway of the Investigations Department, they greeted us with blows of sabers,” says Carlos, alluding to Luis Ricardo Shmalko, with whom he was detained.
The dynamic was repeated with each of the detainees, but the physical violence was not exclusive to the subordinates but also to the commissioner.
On April 3, 1976, the same day he was detained in the port of Asunción upon arriving from Argentina, after finishing his medical studies in Corrientes, Carlos saw Torres for the first time.
That day, Torres hit him on the side of his face and on the neck with an item that was on his desk, according to the complainant.
The objective was to obtain a self-incrimination from Carlos for “subversive activities”, and then promote a process before the justice system, which was also controlled at that time by the political and military power led by Stroessner.
“They told me that I was a communist. Anyone who opposed the regime was considered a communist. And that was enough,” he says.
At that time, Carlos was participating in the Guarani Cultural Groupan organization of medical students that the Stroessner regime linked to the guerrilla Military Political Organization from Paraguay.
“Once they called you a communist, you entered the immense gallery of subversives,” says Carlos almost five decades after the events, accompanied by his family, one of the fundamental pillars in his life, the day after the conviction. to Torres.
Carlos was detained for more than two years. He was released on July 25, 1978, after passing through the Emboscada prison, a detention and torture center that he operated from 1976 to 1979, which the victims call a “concentration camp.”
The witnesses who testified at the trial agreed that Eusebio Torres was in charge of taking the statements at police headquarters because of his status as a lawyer as well as an agent.
“Torres led the interrogations with threats of torture,” testified Miguel López Perito, who said he had once seen Carlos Casco being tortured by Torres, according to the local press.
In his defense, Torres said in court that “they were confused with another person.”
“These gentlemen came forward and reported 35 years later. They must have changed so much, even we changed and they confused me because I was not providing services in that department at the time they were victims,” he said.
The Investigations Department “led, planned and executed 82 repressive operations throughout the dictatorship,” says the Human Rights Coordinator of Paraguay.
The report of the Truth and Justice Commission links this police headquarters with 62 cases of arbitrary executions and forced disappearances.
The Emboscada prison, where Carlos was transferred after going through Investigations, received around 1,000 detainees, according to the Truth and Justice Commission report, including some children.
This is the case of one of Carlos’s children, who was born in the “Rigoberto Caballero” police hospital while his mother, Teresa Dejesús Aguilera, was detained.
Carlos’s wife was imprisoned the day before her husband’s arrest while entering the city of Encarnación by land from Argentina.
Teresa, I was five months pregnantspent eight months in the detention center where, according to Carlos, she received “inhuman treatment” not only while she was in the cell but also at the time of childbirth.
“She was mistreated by the obstetrician and by the doctors on duty for being a political detainee,” Carlos denounces.
Judge Juan Francisco Ortiz referred to the issue this Tuesday, saying that Teresa Dejesús had been “psychologically tortured by Eusebio Torres”who threatened to murder her husband if she did not answer the questions he asked her during the interrogation.
Due to Torres’ age, the retired police officer will serve his sentence under house arrest.
The Stroessner years
Stroessner’s dictatorship was the longest in Latin America. And, unlike other military regimes in the region, the Stronerist sought to maintain itself over time.
It lasted more than 35 years and left a balance of 336 people missing20,000 detained and more than 18,700 people tortured, according to the records of the report of the Truth and Justice Commission of Paraguay.
But the people reported for human rights violations who faced judicial proceedings in the country are, with Eusebio Torres, only nine.
The Investigations Department is known in Paraguay as one of the main operational centers of the Strom dictatorship.
“There they tortured the 30.6% of the total victims of torture during the regime,” says the Human Rights Coordinator of Paraguay.
The complaint against Torres was presented to the human rights prosecutor’s office in 2011, but the trial was not reactivated until January 30 of this year, when prosecutor Sonia Sanguinés decided to recover the case.
“Torres had never been investigated before. It was only 10 years ago that a case was opened. Before that, he walked freely around Asunción. He was even decorated by the government of Horacio Cartes,” the secretary of the Coordinator tells BBC Mundo.
During the trial, not only Carlos but 20 victims recounted the experiences of torture suffered at the hands of then-Commissioner Torres.
“With a braided leather whip, he begins to punish me, with rage, with a lot of rage and in one of those lashes goes to my eye and bursts my lens“testified Carlos Arestivo, who now wears a glass eye.
Human rights organizations consider that this sentence represents the most important punishment given by a justice body for this type of crimes in the country in the last 30 years.
Alfredo Stroessner died in 2006 in Brazil, aged 93, without having gone through any court of law.
Condemnation as relief
The week before the sentencing, and as part of the judicial process, the victims had to tour the small rooms and corridors of the old Investigations Department – now converted into the Police Human Rights office – where they were detained.
The reconstruction of spaces which Carlos had been through 48 years before, necessary to prove the acts of torture attributed to Eusebio Torres, was not easy for him.
“Going back to the place was re-victimizing ourselves, but it was necessary to do it, especially because of what we achieved in the trial,” he says while clearing his throat to avoid crying.
During the reconstruction, Carlos was accompanied by his brother Luis, who also testified after having passed through the old Investigations Department.
“The sentence broke the entire planned scheme. We did not expect more than 15 years of conviction. We were very happy to hear that the maximum sentence of 30 years was applied to Eusebio Torres,” says Carlos.
For Carlos, Tuesday’s sentence breaks impunity in Paraguay.
The work of prosecutor Sonia Sanguinés, as well as the court made up of judges Juan Francisco Ortiz, Rossana Maldonado and Manuel Aguirre, is valued by the victims in their search for justice.
“All the attempts to prosecute the monster [Alfredo Stroessner] that our nation gave birth to were simply prevented. But this Tuesday’s sentence has managed to break impunity in our country,” says Carlos.
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