By Benjamin Dangl
Workers and activists gathered in the central plaza of Asunción, Paraguay on May 1st to commemorate International Workers Day. Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo marked the day by raising the minimum wage by 5%, half of what many of the unions present were demanding. But another piece of news set the tone for this annual gathering: the return to Paraguay of an ex-minister from the dictatorship who orchestrated the murder and torture of thousands of political dissidents.
In the early hours of May 1st, Sabino Augusto Montanaro, the Interior Minister in Paraguay during the repressive Alfredo Stroessner dictatorship (1954-1989), returned to his country after 20 years in Honduras. Doctors say 86 year old Montanaro is suffering from senility and Parkinson’s disease. Montanaro’s lawyer Luis Troche said his client returned to the country not to apologize for his crimes or face justice, but because, “according to Paraguayan law, he is too old to go to jail.”
Montanaro served as a minister under Stroessner from 1966 to the end of the dictatorship, and played a key role in the regime’s repression, directing the abduction, torture and murder of political opponents of Stroessner. Now, upon his return to Paraguay, he faces various criminal charges, and thousands of angry citizens, many of whom greeted his return to the country with protests, and calls for the ex-minister’s imprisonment.
Martin Almada, a human rights lawyer and former political prisoner, discovered documents which prove that Montanaro played a key role in Operation Condor, a unified, cross-border network of repression coordinated by military dictatorships in the region throughout the 1970 and ‘80s.
In 2006, Stroessner died at age 93 in Brasilia without facing justice for the repression that took place under his watch, including the disappearance of some 400 people and the torture of 18,000, according to a Truth and Justice Commission.
Paraguayan Bishop Mario Melanio Medina told the ABC Color newspaper that Montanaro was Stroessner’s “right hand man” and “number one [in command] after Stroessner.”