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PROLOGUE Dr. Joel Filártiga and I met through our mutual friend Roberto Thompson, then the editor of ABC Color, Paraguay’s largest newspaper. Roberto had agreed to publish an article of mine about the Jesuit Missions of Paraguay, in four consecutive Sunday Supplements. After reading the first installment, Filártiga stopped by the office in Asunción to check out the rest of the essay. And, in a burst of generosity and creativity , on the spot he drew pen-and-ink drawings for the remaining three episodes. But it was not until two years later that I first met Filártiga, when in 1975 I returned to Paraguay to continue my dissertation research on Dr. José Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia, the controversial George Washington figure of Paraguayan independence. Through our long discussions of world events and Paraguayan politics and history, Joel and I discovered a shared philosophy of life and grew to become close friends. He drew illustrations for each chapter of my book, graphically capturing their central themes. At his rural clinic in Ybycuı́, I came to admire his philanthropic work with the peasants. There I grew to love the whole Filártiga family, and I developed an independent friendship with Joelito, Joel’s sixteen-year-old son. During this time, we set into motion plans for Filártiga to come to UCLA to display his art and draw attention to conditions in Paraguay. Joel’s January 1976 trip was a great success, his speeches and exhibitions expanding to other institutions throughout southern California. Just six weeks after Filártiga’s return to Paraguay, Joelito was tortured to death by the police of General Alfredo Stroessner. By then, I had received my Ph.D. in Latin American history from UCLA and was preparing to return to Paraguay as an Organization of American States postdoctoral fellow to conduct further historical research. At the behest of my friends, I arrived in Paraguay to live in the Filártigas’ home. For the next seven months, I shared their terror, agonies, and degradation. As a trained historian, I happened to be on the scene before, during, and after what turned out to be a historical event. As Dr. Filártiga years later ironically observed: ‘‘It was almost as if you won the lottery—backwards.’’ It is only because of these improbable circumstances that it has been possible to write Breaking Silence from the vantage point of a participant -observer. Following Joelito’s murder, the Filártigas did not buckle under to the fear and misdirected shame that is characteristic of human rights victims, not unlike those of child sexual abuse and domestic violence. Contrary to the reasonable expectations of the xviii 兩 P R O L O G U E dictatorship, they refused to go along with the official cover-up and discreetly bury Joelito. Instead, breaking the silence of human rights victims, the Filártigas did everything in their power to reveal the truth. Upon arriving in Paraguay in 1976, I joined the Filártigas in their cause, tapping into the network of media, political, and other influential people I had built as a graduate student researching my doctoral dissertation in Paraguay. My semiofficial status at the U.S. Embassy as a Fulbright-Hays scholar had accorded me wide-ranging access, both within the American community as well as among Paraguayan intellectuals and politicians. Also, my historical work on Dr. Francia attracted quite a bit of attention. The Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas Dr. José Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia gave me the honor of becoming its only non-Paraguayan member. Even before I had completed the final version of Paraguay’s Autonomous Revolution: 1810–1840, it had been translated and published in three lengthy installments in Estudios Paraguayos, the academic journal of the Catholic University. Its first Spanish edition came out a few months later. Because of this, I was regularly invited to give newspaper interviews and lectures on Paraguayan history. The public exposure created the opportunity to form personal relationships with a number of influential people, some of whom later greatly contributed to the Filártigas’ struggle; from Congressman Domingo Laino, the leader of Paraguay ’s principal opposition political party, to Colonel Robert LaSala, the disillusioned Green Beret Vietnam veteran serving as a U.S. military adviser to the Paraguayan Army. As I helped investigate the murky circumstances of Joelito’s death, I began collecting primary and secondary source materials on the Caso Filártiga, an undertaking I...

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