Word: sons
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
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...
Filartiga did not retreat to nurse his pain in private. Instead he laid his son's naked body, mauled and burnt, in state on the bloody mattress just as he found him. He encouraged hundreds to file by and see the evidence for themselves. Filartiga next distributed photographs of his son and the details of his death to the Paraguayan papers. Several newspapers printed the pictures and ran the full story. Finally, Filartiga filed a homicide suit against the police inspector and three other members of the force...
...place of his son, Filartiga appears to have adopted a nation. He speaks of "my people," not as a politician would carelessly sling around the tired buzzword, but as a father who has expanded his household to embrace a country...
...draws on dignity and faith to combat that hatred. Dignity Filartiga fosters every day as he promotes health among the peasants. Faith in the human capacity to overcome a dark political world allows him to continue his practice and sketch 100 drawings a year--in the shadow of his son's memory...