Word: filartiga
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...artist, Filartiga wishes to expose his nation's pain, force outsiders to examine Paraguayan wounds and ultimately to heal them. As a doctor, Filartiga's artistic vision finds literal expression. But in his son's case, his physician status could not save the battered body that he found four hours after the child was kidnapped by the police...
...After Filartiga leaves the clinic, sometimes as late as 2 or 3 a.m., he goes home to draw in stark angularities and symbolic distractions, the suffering of the people he serves. The blatantly political message in his drawings of peasant life--which have circulated widely, in California and Mexico two years ago--and his outspoken criticism of Stroessner's human rights violations have forced him into direct confrontation with Stroessner's secret police. He has been arrested and interrogated several times, his family called in for questioning. In 1976, Filartiga paid a devastating price for his political views...
...Although Filartiga is certainly not the first victim of the repressive regime, few families in Paraguay will discuss their experience, much less launch a protest because they fear reprisal. When torture ends in death--as is often the case in countries such as Paraguay where political violence in standard state policy--most families bury their dead quietly and lay low, hoping to be forgotten. According to Amnesty International reports, the main human rights violations committed under Stroessner's rule are indefinite detention without trial, torture, often resulting in death, and "disappearance" following arrest. (In Filartiga's case, the government...
...unlike most victims, Filartiga refused to remain silent. Filartiga's abhorrence of violent methods of political control climaxed in the death of his son. Just before midnight on March 29, 1976, Joelito disappeared from his house in Asuncion, Paraguay. Two uniformed officers awoke his sister four hours later and brought her to the neighbor's home, where she discovered her brother, a beaten, slashed and electroshocked corpse. A police inspector told her it was a crime of passion; her brother had been found in bed by the neighbor's husband with his wife...
Stroessner's regime has its reasons for singling out Filartiga as a politically dangerous figure. As the sole physician to almost 40,000 peasants in the poorest country of the continent, Filartiga had attained the unofficial status of folk hero and rural leader. If anyone can mobilize revolt, he is in the most strategic position to do so. Though Filartiga does not aspire to organize politically subversive activity, his art publicizes the repercussions of Stroessner's reign on an international scale which seriously threatens the dictatorship's security...