Word: stroessner
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...Joel Filartiga is a medical philanthropist and artist whose portraits of peasant life have recently circulated internationally. Filartiga runs a free medical service, the only one for miles, in the southeastern region of Paraguay. His condemnations of General Alfredo Stroessner's dictatorship in Paraguay have won him the government's enmity and led to the political murder of his son in 1976. Taking on his nation's reform as a solo mission, he came to the United States last month to rally support in American colleges and to lobby in Washington...
...people of Paraguay have captured me," he explained in an interview following his address to a Harvard and Cambridge crowd which packed Phillips Brooks House to listen in shocked silence to his story, or rather to the story of Paraguay's ordeal since General Alfredo Stroessner took over in a coup d'etat in 1954. Despite Stroessner's stranglehold on the country, Filartiga believes he is "a slave of my people," not of the government...
...goes home to draw in stark angularities and symbolic distractions, the suffering of the people he serves. The blatantly political message in his drawings of peasant life--which have circulated widely, in California and Mexico two years ago--and his outspoken criticism of Stroessner's human rights violations have forced him into direct confrontation with Stroessner's secret police. He has been arrested and interrogated several times, his family called in for questioning. In 1976, Filartiga paid a devastating price for his political views: His 17-year-old son Joelito died after torture in a local police station...