When judge Jos Agustn Fernndez and lawyer and human-rights activist, Dr. Martn Almada, searched a police station in a suburb of Asuncin on 22 December 1992 for files on a former prisoner, they were not prepared for what they found instead.
They stumbled across archives describing the terrible fates of thousands of Latin Americans. It described how these people were secretly kidnapped, tortured, and killed by the security services of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay in an operation now known as Operation Condor. The archives were named the 'Archives of Terror.'
The archives listed 50,000 people murdered, 30,000 people disappeared and 400,000 people imprisoned. Paraguay was under the dictatorship of Stroessner until 1989, and according to Dr. Almada, "The documents are a mountain of ignominy, of lies, which Stroessner used for 40 years to blackmail the Paraguayan people."
The terror archives revealed that countries such as Colombia, Peru, and Venezuela also cooperated by providing intelligence information requested from them by the security services of the Southern Cone countries.
Dr. Almada wants the archives listed as an international cultural site in order to make funding for the preservation and protection of the documents possible. A UNESCO mission visited Asuncin in 2000 to help put these files on the Memory of the World Register.
