Paraguayan policeman on trial for torture meted out decades ago

By

 AFP

Five decades ago, he was a feared policeman nicknamed “the Whip,” an enforcer of Paraguay’s military dictatorship. Today, aged 87, Eusebio Torres is finally standing trial on torture allegations dating to 1976.

Some 20 witnesses testified against Torres in a court in Asuncion this past week, detailing his alleged cruelty and opening a rare window onto crimes committed under the 1954-1989 rule of strongman Alfredo Stroessner — South America’s longest-serving dictatorship.

Torres, under house arrest, attended the hearings online, listening stoically as witnesses detailed allegations of extreme brutality committed against dissidents — real and suspected — of the Stroessner regime.

“He (Torres) ordered me to undress and, with his leather-braided whip, he began to hit me hard, with rage… One of the impacts burst my eye,” one of them, Carlos Arestivo, told the court of an incident 47 years ago. 

He has worn a glass eye since.

Another, 70-year-old Guillermina Kanonnikoff, said Torres had “tortured me with whips while I protected my eight-month-old child with my body.”

Her husband, Mario, did not survive his own interrogation, she said.

Constantino Coronel, 92, told the court how he was made to drink blood from his own wounds, had his head dunked in a toilet bowl with feces, and given repeated electric shocks.

– Justice, not revenge –

The Stroessner dictatorship left a tally of 59 extra-judicial executions, 336 people disappeared, nearly 20,000 illegal detentions, and almost 19,000 cases of torture. 

On the scale of small Paraguay, it affected “one in 133 inhabitants,” according to a Truth and Justice Commission report from 2008.

Prosecutions have been rare, however, with about a dozen police officers held for torture and Stroessner himself, sentenced in absentia, dying in 2006 at the age of 93 never having been extradited from retirement in Brazil.

The trial, victim Antonio Valenzuela Pecci told AFP, is “of great importance, because very few police officers… of the Stroessner dictatorship were convicted.”

He added: “It is a desire for justice that animates us, not revenge.” 

For her part, Kanonnikoff insisted that “all these people who committed crimes against humanity continue to be protected. This guy (Torres) knows perfectly well what happened to the people who disappeared in 1976.”

This was a year of mass arrests at the height of “Operation Condor” that saw South America’s military dictatorships club together to hunt down and eliminate left-wing dissidents across national borders.

The right-wing Colorado Party that was in power in Paraguay at the time continues to dominate politics today, and Torres was honored by the state in 2014 for a half-century career — an event that sparked much anger.

Prosecutors have sought a 15-year prison sentence for Torres, whose defense lawyers have asked for the charges to be dismissed.

A ruling is expected next week.