The Art of Healing Paraguay

Dr. 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, D.C.

The 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.

In non-descript double-knit vest and mute-grey suit, his shirt bulging conspicuously at the waistline, Filartiga looks more like the semi-retired family g.p., benevolent but dilapidated. Nearsighted bug eyes peered out of thick spectacles. His roly-poly, bumbling figure gives him the image of a jolly plump man, not one laden by the responsibilities of nursing 37,000 mestizos who depend on him alone for health care.

Filartiga has run a free medical clinic in the Ybycui Valley in southeastern Paraguay for the last 18 years. He runs the clinic single-handedly, performing all operations alone, with the assistance of his wife, one assistant--last year, Elisa Kleinman, a Harvard medical student --and two peasant aides he has trained as paramedics. Open from 8 a.m. until late evening, the clinic provides the only medical assistance to the isolated countryside.

After Filartiga leaves the clinic, sometimes as late as 2 or 3 a.m., he 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.

As an artist, Filartiga wishes to expose his nation's pain, force outsiders to examine Paraguayan wounds and ultimately to heal them. As a doctor, Filartiga's artistic vision finds literal expression. But in his son's case, his physician status could not save the battered body that he found four hours after the child was kidnapped by the police.

Although Filartiga is certainly not the first victim of the repressive regime, few families in Paraguay will discuss their experience, much less launch a protest because they fear reprisal. When torture ends in death--as is often the case in countries such as Paraguay where political violence in standard state policy--most families bury their dead quietly and lay low, hoping to be forgotten. According to Amnesty International reports, the main human rights violations committed under Stroessner's rule are indefinite detention without trial, torture, often resulting in death, and "disappearance" following arrest. (In Filartiga's case, the government has made extensive use of all three techniques.)

But 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.

The husband was quickly ushered into the nearest police station where he "confessed" to the murder and has been imprisoned ever since. The wife "disappeared." Overwhelming evidence points to a government kidnapping. An autopsy by three doctors showed Joelito died from multiple cuts and burns often caused by beating and electroshock treatment. The police testimonies, in addition, contradict.

Stroessner's regime has its reasons for singling out Filartiga as a politically dangerous figure. As the sole physician to almost 40,000 peasants in the poorest country of the continent, Filartiga had attained the unofficial status of folk hero and rural leader. If anyone can mobilize revolt, he is in the most strategic position to do so. Though Filartiga does not aspire to organize politically subversive activity, his art publicizes the repercussions of Stroessner's reign on an international scale which seriously threatens the dictatorship's security.

Stroessner and the Filantigas weren't always on opposite sides of the fence. According to Chris Hager '66, who assisted Filartiga at the clinic last year, Filartiga's father was an influential industrialist, tobacco exporter, and personal friend of Stroessner's.

Sickened by his father's social circle and economic exploitations, Filartiga began to work with his father's laborers "out of curiosity." He recalls with satisfaction earning his first check for a solid week's labor. He soon after announced to his father that he intended to work full-time. Many long family battles followed. He eventually left and continued to work alongside laborers, leaving only to get a medical degree. In these early work years, "I learned compassion," he says.

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.

Despite his publicity campaign, the case was still unsettled when Filartiga arrived at Harvard three years later. The government has revoked the license of the lawyer representing Filartiga, then imprisoned him. Without a lawyer, Filartiga will undoubtedly lose the trial, and, according to Paraguayan law, the loser must pay the damages and the other's legal fees. Such payment will cost him the clinic.

In 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.

The Filartiga clinic is in fact home to the 30 to 40 people who line up on the patio daily. Filartiga's patients, some of whom travel several days to reach his clinic, suffer from malnutrition, anemia and diseases caused by inadequate hygiene. Lately many of his patients have arrived with kidney infections, rashes and appendicitis, which he believes are caused by the phosphate insecticide the government bought from the United States, a type banned in the United States. "Anything they throw away in other countries," Filartiga says, "is sold over here." Filartiga often returns to this metaphor of his nation as dumping grounds for the world, observing that Nazi criminals flocked to Paraguay for refuge following World War II. Somoza likewise retreated to Paraguay temporarily last summer. "My country is the trash heap of the world," Filartiga states calmly, but his thick lenses magnify the pain in his eyes.

The phosphate poisoning case is only one instance in which Filartiga holds the United States accountable for his nation's woes. Filartiga outlines the relationship between Paraguay and the United States in blunt, unsparing words: "The government of Paraguay was created in the United States State Department in the year 1959." Carter's human rights stance does not move Filartiga; he calls it a "make-up policy," which makes "the regime swallowable" and allows repression to continue.

But a deep faith in the "strength of people to free themselves" from oppression once they are educated has led him to travel to the United States whenever he can slip out of Paraguay--usually without a visa--and come speak to students. At Harvard, he told a hushed audience, "By liberating the people of Latin America, Americans will become free themselves."

Filartiga refuses to be affiliated with any party. Neither does he support a violent revolution. Human decency alone, he contends, dissolves dictatorships. More threatening to Stroessner than violent rebellion is caring. "I am serving the part of the country hated most--the people." Filartiga 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.