December 22 marks the 30th anniversary since the so-called Terror Files were discovered, documenting the workings of a criminal pact that coordinated the actions of repressive military dictatorships in the Southern Cone of Latin America during the 1970s and ’80s. These “Archives of Terror” are the most important collection of documents ever recovered about state terror on the entire continent and have been used as evidence in numerous international legal cases.
After 15 years of investigation led by Paraguayan lawyer Martín Almada, around 700,000 pages of secret documents were found in an abandoned police station on the outskirts of Asuncion de Paraguay in 1992. These findings proved the existence of Operation Condor, a US-backed plan to impose a free-market capitalist economic model through the physical elimination of dissidents. The files closely related to Almada’s personal history, who received the Right Livelihood Award in 2002, and is 85 years old today.
“The finding is the story of a social process with a stubborn victim as a leader,” says María Stella Cáceres, an educator, journalist and Almada’s second wife. For more than 20 years, Cáceres has headed the Celestina Pérez de Almada Foundation and the ‘Museum of Memories’ in Asuncion, which is housed at the location of a former secret detention centre where Almada himself, among many others, had been held and tortured.
The Terror Files were declared a “Memory of the World” by UNESCO in 2009. At the international level, the finding was decisive in the search for justice for the victims, providing evidence in numerous international legal cases.
Thirty years later, the regional context is volatile: democratically-elected leaders are removed and detained, prominent politicians are banned from running for office, and conservative sectors gain space explicitly by decrying and chipping away at human rights. The findings thus are not only a matter of history. “In the face of the current social and political processes in our countries, the memory about Condor is crucial to defend our democracies in the present and future times,” Caceres said.
