MATIAS JOFRE

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Paraguayan lawyer Martín Almada discovered the “Archive of Terror” in 1992, a massive collection of more than 700,000 secret police documents that detailed decades of repression under General Alfredo Stroessner’s dictatorship. Almada, who had been tortured and imprisoned in the 1970s, found evidence proving the regime’s abuses and exposing the workings of Operation Condor, the coordinated campaign by South American dictatorships to track, kidnap, and eliminate political opponents. Among the documents was a top-secret Chilean invitation to Paraguay to attend Condor’s founding meeting in 1975. The archive confirmed how the region’s security forces shared intelligence, monitored dissidents, and collaborated across borders. Almada’s discovery became crucial to human rights investigations in Chile, Argentina, and Paraguay, playing a key role in efforts to prosecute figures like Augusto Pinochet. Despite limited justice within Paraguay, Almada views the discovery as a vindication of his suffering and a lasting blow against the dictatorship.