On this day, 28 August 2008, Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo gave a formal apology to the victims of the US-backed military dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner which ruled over the country from 1954-1989 (content note: sexual violence). The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Victor Núñez, was booed off the stage by the crowd before he could make his speech, as he was heckled by shouts of “pyrague” (“informant” in the Indigenous Guaraní language). The apology came after the publication of a comprehensive report which revealed the extent of the crimes of the regime. Its victims numbered over 128,000, with labour organisers, socialists, communists, Indigenous people and Christian rural collectives as the primary targets. Thousands of people were illegally imprisoned, dozens executed and 337 “disappeared” as part of Operation Condor – a coordinated anti-communist plan across several right-wing dictatorships in the region. The most numerous group of victims were women and young girls who were sexually abused by members of the military, the police and the government – many of them having been abducted from poor, rural, mostly Indigenous communities and held captive. The regime was toppled by a coup in 1989, but Stroessner himself was given asylum in Brazil where he lived out his days.
Pictured: Stroessner with Spanish dictator Francisco Franco https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1513090025542809/?type=3
Anonymous asked:
The rise of facism around me is terrifying but I'm only 17 and not physically or mentally healthy enough to go out and protest, I don't know how to help. I try to spread info but my blog is very small. Do you have any ideas on ways I can assist? I can't just sit here while tyranny crushes the American people.
We hear you, Anon - it’s been terrifying for all of us. But it’s also been empowering to see how many people are willing to step up and do what needs to be done to fight it!
First off: we don’t see age as a barrier to doing anti-fascist work. In fact, being young can often be a real advantage! Most of us started doing this stuff when we were still in high school or younger, tbh.
The good news is that most antifa work doesn’t involve being on the frontlines all the time! There is tons & tons of stuff you can do besides that.
The film-biography of Lucio Urtubia (“Lucio” 2007) turned him into a legend as some sort of anarchist Robin Hood. But until the age of fifty, Lucio had spent most of his time trying to keep out of the limelight. The spectacular conclusion to his life of crime in 1981, with the Citibank forgery trial, was a pyrrhic victory for the prosecution; Lucio was the real winner against all the odds.
Lucio was many things to many people. Radical theatre director Albert Boadella, whose dramatic escape from under the noses of the Spanish police in 1977 was organised by Lucio, dubbed him ‘a Quixote who tilted, not at windmills, but at real giants’. French counter-terrorist cop Paul Barril cast Lucio as a dangerous criminal mastermind who pulled the strings of a vast international anarchist conspiracy. And the examining magistrate who presided over the Citibank case, Louis Joinet, had Lucio round to dinner, twice! To Stuart Christie, Lucio was ‘a man of generous spirit who valued freedom and justice above all else, even above his own life’
