What do you know about freedom of expression in Paraguay?
Paula Martins
29 April 2021
On 5 May, Paraguay will be evaluated within the third cycle of the UPR. The SPP and IFEX-ALC network have formulated a series of recommendations regarding freedom of expression in the country. We will ensure that attacks on freedom of expression in Paraguay are examined under the spotlight!
This is a translation of the original article.
A city divided by a border. In Paraguay its name is Pedro Juan Caballero, while in Brazil
it’s Ponta Porã. Violence is a constant in this city located in the middle of South America, far from the larger urban centers. The area is known for its pervasive organised crime, particularly the presence of numerous drug trafficking groups. The Primer Comando de la Capital (First Capital Command, PCC) is one such group, and assassinations, corruption and torture are among the crimes reported on a daily basis in the region.
Brazilian journalist Leo Veras lived in Pedro Juan Caballero and reported on the situation in the area. On 12 February 2020, hitmen entered Veras’s home and shot him twelve times as he was preparing to have dinner with his family. Veras was not the first journalist to be assassinated in Pedro Juan Caballero.
In its 2017 report titled ‘Silenced Zones’, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights’ (IACHR) Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression characterised the situation in the area of Paraguay’s border with Brazil as highly dangerous for those who exercise journalism. In addition, the report stated that “with the advancement of so-called ‘narcopolitics’, freedom of expression has been affected insofar as journalists face serious difficulties when they try to report on specific unlawful activities being conducted in their communities and the institutions—according to the journalists themselves—do not function as they should to protect them.”
The Sindicato de Periodistas del Paraguay (Paraguayan Journalists Union, SPP) has noted that the border between Paraguay and Argentina also represents a problematic area for those exercising journalism in the country, along with other zones where organised crime groups have taken control, both formally and informally. According to the SPP, these groups are also constantly vying for territorial control, resulting in an increasingly dangerous situation for journalists.
The SPP’s deputy secretary general, Santiago Ortiz, recalls a critical time when violence against the press in Paraguay peaked in 2015. According to Ortiz, the situation received little attention outside of the country. Paraguay was never seen as a ‘hotspot’, especially in comparison with the horrible statistics for attacks on the press in other countries in the region, such as Colombia or Mexico.
More:
https://ifex.org/what-do-you-know-about-freedom-of-expression-in-paraguay/
= new reply since forum marked as read
Far better to avoid having someone inform on them and get them rushed out of there to the closest police station.
That experience was really intense, but Stroessner was brutal, cruel, and vicious.
It's good your uncle and his friend weren't apprehended, by all means!
Just looked for Argentina's shared border with Paraguay, to refresh my picture. As soon as I saw the closeness the countries which took in actual former Nazis after the Second World War, I was amazed. I had never thought about it while looking at a map before this. Wow! They were all over the place! Shocking.
Of course, the US had Werner Von Braun prominently working away for years!
I had forgotten until just now, discovered it again looking for something to tell us how long the Colorado Party (right-wing monsters) have been in power all these long decades except for several years with Lugo, whom they illicitly removed from office:
APRIL 22, 20184:07 AMUPDATED 3 YEARS AGO
Paraguay's business-friendly Colorado Party keeps presidency
By Daniela Desantis, Mariel Cristaldo
4 MIN READ
. . .
Abdo is the son of the late private secretary of dictator Alfredo Stroessner, who ruled Paraguay with an iron hand for 35 years. Abdo was 16 when Stroessner’s rule ended in 1989.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-paraguay-election/paraguays-business-friendly-colorado-party-keeps-presidency-idUSKBN1HT0A0
The US right wing supported Stroessner throughout his 35 years of genocide, torture, assassinations, enslaving numbers of Native Paraguayans, doled out a fortune in foreign aid, of course, built an enormous runway out in the jungle which would accomodate the largest US military transport airplane at Mariscal Estigarribia, while still raving away, year in, year out about what an enemy was Fidel Castro.
Stroessner even invited the monstrous, brutal, despised Death Angel of Auschwitz, Dr. Josef Mengele to live in Paraguay after he fled Germany to avoid being executed as a war criminal after the war.
Jose Mengele, Paraguayan
GRAEME WOOD
JULY 18, 2009
ASUNCION -- Mengele grew up in Guenzburg, Bavaria. Guenzburg is the present-day site of Legoland Deutschland and is just a couple hundred miles from the ancestral hometown of Alfredo Stroessner. Stroessner, a year younger than Mengele, was born to a Bavarian immigrant father in Paraguay, and by the time Mengele arrived to settle in Paraguay permanent, he had ruled the country for nearly five years. Mengele thought a fellow fascist Teuton might see his flight from justice sympathetically. He was right.
I've come to the Paraguayan terror archives in Asuncion to examine the documents of Mengele's stay. The terror archives, a few small rooms on the ground floor, a thin wall away from the Palace of Justice's loading dock, exist mostly to document Stroessner's own extensive evils committed between 1954 and 1989. Stroessner employed a large corps of informants whom Paraguayans came to call piragues: in Guarani, "the hairy-footed," for the soft footfall that meant they could be lurking around any corner at any time. (Another Guarani name was "the wet-noses," for their ability to sniff out treason with sensitivity that matched the wet nose of a bloodhound.)
The documents describe a regime long toppled and repudiated, but they remain soaked in paranoia, and the natural instinct when reading these informants' reports is to look over one's shoulder. Bureaucrats sent in reports of Argentine lefties who may or may not have been massing along the border, and of Korean eccentrics who lived in jungle shacks and who may or may not have been feeding messages to Kim Il Sung. Most messages, though, concern Paraguayans themselves -- anyone remotely suspected of disloyalty faced interrogation -- and how best to make troublesome ones disappear. In retrospect few of these reports make sense (North Koreans in the Paraguayan jungle? What could they possibly want?), and the archive reads like a vast clinical document, evidence of a institution-wide neurosis.
It would probably take a defect in the Paraguayan government at least that serious to produce the document I found marked 809, concerning one "Jose Mengele," applying under his own (almost) name for Paraguayan citizenship in 1959. It is two pages long, and it resides in a leatherbound volume that the archivist produced quickly and with professional pride. Typed and stamped, the document attests to Mengele's good character, his solvency, and his having fulfilled all the requirements for citizenship. His backers were Werner Jung and Alexander (here "Alejandro" ) von Eckstein, both prominent Nazis. The paper states at least one obvious falsehood -- that Mengele had resided in Paraguay for the requisite five years already -- but that seems not to have fazed the three senior magistrates who signed it, signaling that with no objection they naturalized Josef Mengele as a Paraguayan citizen in 1959.
More:
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2009/07/jose-mengele-paraguayan/21603/
