MUSEO DE LAS MEMORIAS

This museum is a space for reflection and remembrance, a tribute to the victims of General Stroessner's dictatorship (1954-1989). It was created on the initiative of the Celestina Pérez de Almada Foundation, ten years after the discovery of the "Archives of Terror", in December 1992, in a police station in Lambaré, by judge José Agustín Fernández and lawyer and human rights defender Martín Almada. These archives contain the names of over 400,000 people imprisoned by the secret services of Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay, as part of Operation Condor set up by the United States. The foundation is named after Martín Almada's wife, who died in 1974 as a result of the psychological torture inflicted by the political police while her husband was in prison. The museum is housed in the building of the former Dirección Nacional de Asuntos Técnicos ("La Técnica"), which concealed a detention center, where for over 30 years thousands of people suspected of being "subversive" or "communist" were tortured... in fact, anyone suspected of having progressive thoughts or behavior. Photographs of the disappeared, cells (9 m² for 10 people) and instruments of torture, each more horrifying than the last, such as the picana, an electric needle, or the pileta, the bathtub in which the victim, bound with barbed wire, was held until asphyxiated... A 40-minute documentary, Informe final, is available on request.