By Stella Calloni, December 28, 2020
Lilian Mariana and Maria Carmen Villalba
The shocking silence of the Paraguayan government on the disappearance of 14-year-old Carmen Elizabeth Oviedo Villalba, daughter of political prisoners Carmen Villaba and Alcides Oviedo, after the Paraguayan army’s Joint Task Force (JTF) murdered Lilian Mariana and Maria Carmen Villalba last September, both 11 years old, from the same family, who lived in Misiones, Argentina and had travelled to Paraguay to see their parents, has provoked a wave of indignation and urgent demands from human rights organizations.
On September 2, the government of Abdo Benítez celebrated the “intelligence” operation conducted by the JTF in a wooded area in the district of Iby Yaú on the border between the departments of Concepción and Amambay, declaring that two guerrillas had been killed “in a confrontation whose outcome was successful”.
The girls had been dressed in clothes supposedly used by the guerrillas, in an operation similar to what the Colombian military called “false positives”, taking young people and adolescents hired to work with them and killing them to present them as guerrillas and obtain rewards, in one of the most aberrant acts among the violations and crimes against humanity committed daily in Colombia.
In fact, the Colombian army is advising, together with Israelis and US troops, the military and police of Paraguay. The most serious thing is that it is not known how many cases there will be in that country of people killed in “practices” of alleged “combat” and “training” in counter-insurgency of which peasants are victims of whose deaths nothing is known.
In the case of the 14-year-old girl, she has been missing since 30 November when she lost contact with her aunt Laura Villalba, who was arrested this week and taken to a military barracks. Other testimonies speak of civilians.
Carmen Elizabeth had lived in Argentina for ten years, like her two murdered cousins, and had also travelled to Paraguay like them and her aunt Laura, but was unable to return when the borders were closed because of the coronavirus pandemic.
This was denounced at a virtual press conference in Buenos Aires, with broadcasts from Paraguay and the province of Misiones, by her aunt Miriam Villalba, Nora Cortiñas, Mother of Plaza de Mayo Línea Fundadora, members of the Argentinean Lawyers Guild, and other local and Paraguayan human rights organizations, such as the Argentina League for Human Rights,
“What is happening today in Paraguay is the continuation of a plan conceived during the Alfredo Stroessner dictatorship that has the support of the United States, Colombia and Israel,” denounced Pablo Pimentel of the Permanent Assembly for Human Rights in La Matanza, the most populous municipality in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area, as stated in Resumen Latinoamericano
In a statement, the Union of Lawyers of the Argentine Republic denounced that “the strategy of the Paraguayan government’s military intelligence” supported by the United States, Israel and Colombia “detected that last summer several children living in Argentina crossed over to visit their parents -whether they are in the countryside or in prison- and tried to obtain superiority in the fight against the Paraguayan People’s Army (EPP) by hitting “where it hurts”: on the children. This forced the parents to move in a different way and at a disadvantage, considering the danger that weighed on their children” They emphasize that in this situation the girl Carmen Oviedo Villalba and her aunt Laura were hiding.
They also denounce that this is a “typical case of Forced Disappearance by the Paraguayan State”. In view of this situation, a national and international campaign has been launched to end the impunity that surrounds these crimes, to demand the appearance of the disappeared girl and the freedom of Laura Villalba.
On the other hand, it is worth analyzing what other intentions the instigators of this real humanitarian tragedy have. Last September, with the murder of the two girls, Paraguay attempted to impose the idea that Argentina was a refuge for Paraguayan “guerrillas”,
In this development, as a special effort is being announced to recover the Southern Common Market, and a possible meeting between the presidents of Paraguay and Argentina Alberto Fernández within the existing differences, this fact is a new trigger since nobody can ignore that in the case of the three girls, two murdered and one disappeared, they lived and studied in Misiones, a province bordering Argentina, with Paraguay.
Historically, thousands of Paraguayans took refuge in Misiones, Formosa or Chaco, fleeing from the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner (1954-1989) and also those who were victims of the economic consequences that made thousands of Paraguayan peasants dispossessed of their land by the big soybean companies, which have their own death squads, leaving hundreds of victims in the neighboring country for whom there was never any justice.
It is impossible to forget that along the Misiones border with Paraguay the victims of Operation Condor, the coordinator of the death of the Southern Cone dictatorships in the 1970s, were handed over to that country. Several of their documents were found on December 22, 1992 in the dictatorial archives in the Paraguayan capital, Asunción, as a result of complaints by the survivor of the dictatorship, Martín Almada, and relatives of the disappeared, such as the doctor Agustín Goiburú, who was kidnapped by the Argentine military and handed over and disappeared by Stroessner’s criminal regime.
In the same way, Argentines were handed over to the local dictatorship and joint operations were carried out to hunt down political activists who denounced these dictatorships. For all these reasons it is more than urgent for international organizations to act to halt the terrorist escalation that is being attempted in the region once again.
Source: Solidaria, translation Resumen Latinoamericano, North America bureau