December 24, 2020
As is often the case in Paraguay, which is a North American colony now ruled in the fashion of right-wing dictator Alfredo Stroessner, the Joint Task Force (FTC) has arrested Laura Villalba, the mother of one of the girls recently killed by the army, and is trying to pin all kinds of crimes on her.
In this case, prosecutor Federico Delfino has already confirmed that he will charge Villalba “with terrorist association” after she was arrested at an FTC roadblock on Wednesday night. To add to the official story, the Paraguayan hegemonic media (adhering to the checkbook of the government of Mario Abdó Benítez) pointed out that: “these women are considered an important logistical element of the structure of the self-proclaimed Paraguayan People’s Army (EPP)”. In other words, in the absence of evidence, the sentence is already prepared.
The Paraguayan Attorney General’s Office (linked to the repressive forces) is preparing a new montage to accuse another member of the Villalba family.
Laura Villalba is the sister of Carmen and Osvaldo Villalba and at the same time the mother of one of the Argentine girls murdered with total impunity by the government last September. Laura, like another of her sisters, Miriam, has been living in Argentina for years, taking care of several children of her relatives who, because they are fighters in Paraguay, are in danger.
Now, faced with this new “operation” of the corrupt FTC (several of its leaders are accused of all sorts of corruption, including distracting money and criminal violence against the poor peasants of northern Paraguay), the prosecutors, including Delfino, are putting together a new case, with the same characteristics as they did with the two girls who were tortured and murdered, and will send Laura Villalba to prison, even though they have no evidence to accuse her. When she was detained at a checkpoint, Laura was not carrying any weapons or anything that would compromise her, but the people who put this new montage together later found a grenade and an agenda and of course they said these items belong to Villalba.
The detainee was taken in a military plane, handcuffed and with her face covered by a black hood, arriving in Asunción in the morning, to appear before the Anti-Kidnapping Prosecutor’s Office in Asunción, and then a court will decide on her place of confinement.
“She is going to be charged in the next few hours, we have her as an important logistical element of the criminal structure according to the latest evidence we have collected that accounts for this situation,” said prosecutor Delfino, full of pride for “the conquest.”
He added that “one of the pieces of evidence against her is that the backpack found after the November confrontation in which three of the group members died, is hers”. This is how “justice” works in Paraguay for the heirs of the Stroessner dictatorship: a prosecutor assumes something and a conviction is handed down immediately, without any evidence being produced.
But Delfino continued to assume, and confided to the prosecutors that “the woman planned to leave the area of influence to go back to her normal life again, which we have on record would be in the Argentine Republic or remain in hiding elsewhere,” he said. Faced with so many assumptions, Delfino told one truth: Villalba has been stranded in Paraguay for months because of the pandemic and the closure of borders. She had arrived from Argentina and suffered the same problem as her daughter and her little cousin since they had to remain there at the expense of the danger of being persecuted just because their names were Villalba. The girls were murdered and now Laura is arrested and accused without them having a single piece of real evidence.
For his part, Lieutenant Colonel Luis Apesteguía, a spokesman for the FTC, reported that Villalba was arrested as she was leaving a “retreat” on a motorbike and had to pass through a Joint Task Force checkpoint. She reportedly identified herself and “only asked that her life be respected.”
From Argentina, the Lawyer’s Union denounced these facts and made an appeal to prevent Laura Villalba from being tortured or killed as happened to her little daughter.
Source: Resumen Latinoamericano, translation North America bureau