Word: joelito
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...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 awarded her $10.4 million...
...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: His 17-year-old son Joelito died after torture in a local police station...
...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...
...husband was quickly ushered into the nearest police station where he "confessed" to the murder and has been imprisoned ever since. The wife "disappeared." Overwhelming evidence points to a government kidnapping. An autopsy by three doctors showed Joelito died from multiple cuts and burns often caused by beating and electroshock treatment. The police testimonies, in addition, contradict...
Filartiga found his voice--a strident one--as well as his compassion in these years. His son's death taught him to use it. Joelito's one-and-a-half-hour torture session was recorded by the police, because they were so certain it would produce a confession. Filartiga has heard the tape, heard his son cry out that he had nothing to confess, listened while they accelerated the electric shocks, administered through his fingertips and genitals, until Joelito suddenly had a cardiac arrest and died...
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