Word: filartiga
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...originally intended to deal with piracy, as well as to provide a way for foreigners, such as an ambassador posted in Washington, to seek legal redress for injury in the U.S. before it triggered an international incident. The statute lay virtually dormant for generations until Paraguayan Dolly Filartiga, whose 17-year-old brother Joelito was tortured to death by local policemen, found out that the police chief at the time, Américo Norberto Peña Irala, was living in the U.S. two years later. She and her father sued, and in 1980 a federal court in New York...
...place of his son, Filartiga appears to have adopted a nation. He speaks of "my people," not as a politician would carelessly sling around the tired buzzword, but as a father who has expanded his household to embrace a country...
...Filartiga clinic is in fact home to the 30 to 40 people who line up on the patio daily. Filartiga's patients, some of whom travel several days to reach his clinic, suffer from malnutrition, anemia and diseases caused by inadequate hygiene. Lately many of his patients have arrived with kidney infections, rashes and appendicitis, which he believes are caused by the phosphate insecticide the government bought from the United States, a type banned in the United States. "Anything they throw away in other countries," Filartiga says, "is sold over here." Filartiga often returns to this metaphor of his nation...
...phosphate poisoning case is only one instance in which Filartiga holds the United States accountable for his nation's woes. Filartiga outlines the relationship between Paraguay and the United States in blunt, unsparing words: "The government of Paraguay was created in the United States State Department in the year 1959." Carter's human rights stance does not move Filartiga; he calls it a "make-up policy," which makes "the regime swallowable" and allows repression to continue...
...Filartiga refuses to be affiliated with any party. Neither does he support a violent revolution. Human decency alone, he contends, dissolves dictatorships. More threatening to Stroessner than violent rebellion is caring. "I am serving the part of the country hated most--the people." Filartiga draws on dignity and faith to combat that hatred. Dignity Filartiga fosters every day as he promotes health among the peasants. Faith in the human capacity to overcome a dark political world allows him to continue his practice and sketch 100 drawings a year--in the shadow of his son's memory...