Archives Unearthed in Paraguay Expose U.S. Allies' Abuses

          By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO

          ASUNCION, Paraguay -- When Martín 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.

          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.

          The documents trace the creation and work of Operation Condor, a
          secret plan among security forces in six countries to crush left-wing
          political dissent.

          Paraguayans quickly named the files the "archives of terror." Though
          discovered six years ago, the files have gained new prominence
          throughout Latin America with the arrest of Chile's former dictator, Gen.
          Augusto Pinochet, in London last October. To this day, they remain the
          only extensive collection of public records of a project by the region's
          military rulers that succeeded in exterminating thousands of political
          opponents.

          The files have given a kind of vindication to survivors, their families and
          the families of those dead and missing by delivering concrete proof of a
          darkly secretive era.

          The archives have also provided fodder for the developing case against
          General Pinochet, the only one of the region's dictators to face the
          prospect of trial. General Stroessner remains a fugitive from justice living
          in Brazil.

          Baltazar Garzón, the Spanish magistrate seeking the extradition of
          General Pinochet from England, has collected more than 1,500 pages of
          evidence from the archives. Last December, he requested records on
          Hugo Banzer, the current President of Bolivia, who ran the military
          regime there from 1971 to 1978, and on General Stroessner.

          "This documentation might exist in other countries as well, but it's hidden,
          while in Paraguay they didn't manage to hide it all," Juan Garcés, the
          lawyer who brought suit against General Pinochet, said in a telephone
          interview from Madrid.

          "It proves that there was an organization with a structure and discipline
          that didn't only exchange information but committed criminal acts," he
          said.

          Intelligence sharing between Washington's allies in South America did not
          begin with Operation Condor, but the plan formalized and deepened
          cooperation among police and military forces that had taken power in six
          countries: Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay and Bolivia.

          After Gen. Manuel Contreras of Chile invited security chiefs to create
          "the basis of an excellent coordination and improved action" at a meeting
          in November 1975, police forces from member countries began to
          operate in each others' jurisdictions. Their new ties allowed security
          officials to take part in joint interrogations, to pursue people across
          borders and to order surveillance on citizens who sought asylum in other
          nations.

          Trained during the cold war at the School of the Americas in Panama, the
          officials viewed their enemy as Communism, backed by Moscow in a
          subversive war without frontiers. To prevail, governments too would
          have to work across borders, they said.

          The security threats were not entirely imagined. Rebels like the
          Montoneros in Argentina did aim to destabilize some governments. But in
          other countries there were no rebel movements, and military regimes
          used the club of anti-Communism to snuff out any calls for democracy or
          labor rights.

          In Chile, General Pinochet had overthrown the democratically elected
          President, Salvador Allende Gossens, a Socialist, and hunted down his
          Cabinet officials and supporters. Among them was Orlando Letelier, who
          died when his car exploded on a street in Washington, also killing his
          American aide, Ronni Moffitt.

          According to a 1979 Senate Foreign Relations report, which remains
          classified, the killings of Gen. Carlos Prats of Chile and Gen. Juan José
          Torres of Bolivia in Argentina were also reportedly the work of
          Operation Condor, as was the attempted assassination of a Chilean
          Senator, Bernardo Leighton, in Italy.

          In Paraguay, the targets of General Stroessner included members of a
          rival faction in the governing Colorado Party, doctors who refused to
          cover up torture and Almada, who criticized the educational system in his
          dissertation.

          "They said I was an intellectual terrorist," Almada said. He blames the
          Paraguayan police for the death of his 33-year-old wife, who suffered a
          heart attack and died after hearing his screams over the telephone.

          Two of the thousands of cases contained in the archives are those of
          Gladys Sannemann and Agustín Goiburu, physicians in Asunción 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 Asunción and
          performed a proper autopsy before her students.

          "Practically from that moment it began," said Dr. Sannemann, an
          immunologist who is now 69 and practicing here in Asunción. The
          challenge marked her out for the Stroessner regime.

          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.

          Hours after the coup, the Argentine police abducted Dr. Sannemann and
          tortured her at the Escuela Mecánica in Buenos Aires. Dr. Sannemann
          said she was bound and plunged into a bathtub of vomit and excrement.

          "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.

          Dr. Sannemann landed at the Emboscada camp for political prisoners in
          Paraguay, where she treated more than 400 fellow prisoners from several
          South American countries, including women whose husbands had been
          executed and their children. The women, she said, had been imprisoned
          to silence them.

          Dr. Sannemann and her husband were eventually given asylum in
          Germany in 1997 after the German Government pressed Argentina to
          bring about their release.

          The fate of Dr. Goiburu, who also refused to whitewash torture,
          remained a mystery until the archives were opened. In 1977, he was
          kidnapped from a street in Missiones, an Argentine town where he had
          gone to escape the Stroessner regime. The Government steadily denied
          any knowledge of Dr. Goiburu's disappearance to his wife, Elba Elisa
          Benítez de Goiburu.

          The archives, however, contained surveillance reports and photos of the
          doctor's house and office, and showed that eliminating him had become a
          priority for General Stroessner.

          General Stroessner declined repeated requests for comment.

          Mrs. Goiburu said she had no doubt that it was Condor that had taken
          the life of her husband, though he has never been found.

          The archives do not detail Washington's role in cold war repression here.
          Along with documents surfacing elsewhere, however, they suggest that
          United States officials backed Condor nations not only with military aid,
          but also with information. Last month, the United States declassified
          20,000 pages of documents from the cold war era, mostly involving
          Chile. Some have made their way to Judge Garzón.

          The archives here show that a United States military official, Col. Robert
          Thierry, apparently helped draw up the apparatus of the police state as
          he trained police officers for the Technical Section soon after General
          Stroessner seized power here in 1954. A relative, Margaret Van Skike,
          located in Galveston, Tex., said that Colonel Thierry died several years
          ago.

          Earlier this year, the Federal Bureau of Investigation released a document
          confirming that it had provided the Pinochet regime with information
          about Jorge Isaac Fuentes de Alarcón, the leader of a leftist movement in
          Chile who, the archives here show, was first seized and interrogated by
          Paraguayan agents. F.B.I. officers checked addresses in the United
          States found in Fuentes's personal phone book and gave the results and
          information on Fuentes's questioning in Paraguay to the Pinochet regime.
          Fuentes disappeared in Chilean custody.

          The archives include friendly letters, law enforcement magazines and
          books sent by the F.B.I. to Paraguayan police officials. In one letter, the
          F.B.I. director, Clarence M. Kelley, wishes Pastor Coronel, the head of
          the Department of Investigations who is now serving a 25-year sentence
          for torture, "a truly joyous Christmas and a New Year filled with all the
          good things you so richly deserve." Kelley died two years ago.

          The archives also shed light on the killing of Letelier in Washington. Two
          weeks before the assassination, General Contreras requested $600,000
          from the Pinochet Government, in a memo, for "the neutralization of the
          Governing Junta's principal adversaries overseas, especially in Mexico,
          Argentina, Costa Rica, the United States, France and Italy."

          Earlier this year, the F.B.I. defended the sharing of information with Chile
          as standard practice among law enforcement agencies of governments
          friendly to Washington. A State Department spokesman declined to
          comment on the record of United States cooperation with the South
          American dictatorships, saying it was "ancient history."

          The discovery of the archives in 1992, coming as Paraguayans tackled
          their first democratic presidential elections, brought euphoria at first.

          Victims of the dictatorship flocked to the police station at Lambaré, 15
          miles outside the capital. Gloria Estrago, a former political prisoner who
          is now a judge, said she imagined an old friend who vanished in police
          custody, Mario Sher Prono, calling out to her, "Here's proof of what
          happened to me."

          But for many, early exhilaration has given way to disillusionment. Key
          documents published in newspapers days after their discovery vanished
          from the archives.

          "There's no doubt they have been sanitized," said Rosa Palau, the
          director of the archives. The archives, at least now, contain no direct
          accounts of tortures or deaths, only of prisoners whom the police
          arrested but never released, and formulaic confessions that say nothing
          about the methods used to obtain them.

          Only five officials here have been convicted for torturing and killing
          Paraguayans who challenged the Stroessner dictatorship. None have the
          security forces' code of silence. Nobody has said where the bodies are
          buried.

          Mrs. Goiburu said the present Government had pressed her to drop
          efforts to find her husband's killer, as well as a lawsuit against General
          Stroessner for her husband's disappearance. Recently, Paraguay's new
          President, Luis González Macchi, dismissed her from her job
          representing the Ministry of Education and Culture in a national
          professional association. The dictatorship is over, the widow said, but the
          reflexes of terror linger on.