Documents / FOIA release
This is a Central Intelligence Agency cable dated 14 August 1985 and sent to Washington. It forwards news clippings and magazine articles on Josef Mengele, released under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act. The attachments include an Argentine magazine report on claims that Mengele lived in La Banda, Santiago del Estero, as Adolfo Gualterio Ascher, along with an interview with the judge investigating those claims. They also include a newspaper article on Mengele's protection in Paraguay and on past efforts to extradite him. The file has no UFO content.
“University of Colorado”2 pages
Left Col. Alejandro von Eckstein, according to a document, was a witness for the citizenship papers of the Nazi war criminal Josef Men gob. For the right price, Paraguay has been a haven loran assortment of Foreigners ,rr the run. Public criticism of the general is barely tolerated. Humberto Rubin, below, had his radio station shut Iowa after he liscussed corruption rn the courts. He says c)'s beer: in rail IO times ;eneral Stroessner losed down the lewspaper of Aldo 5icolitio, far right, her the publisher ruestionod Is authority. country nate trie neat OR a gas stove. No one holds power anywhere for 39 years without acquiring a sense of relative measure. The bodies don't float down the Paraguay River the way they did 20 years ago; torture Is real but no longer systematic; the number of political prisoners has di- minished, and Dr. Mengele, the "Angel of Death" of Auschwitz, is be- lieved to have disappeared within the last four or five years — either after plastic surgery or, as a former Amer- ican Ambassador, Robert E. White, put it, "paid back, finally, in his own coin." While democratic change is coming to Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, Paraguay remains frightening be- cause its regime proves that evil is not always needed in job lots to cow a people or appropriate a state. Com- pared with General Stroessner, Presi- dent Somoza of Nicaragua was an ap- prentice, says Aldo Zucolillo, the pub- lisher of a newspaper, ABC Color, put out of business this year by the gen- eral. Mr. Zucolillo and a few other Para- guayans are rare men and women: They talk on the record in a place where almost nothing is verifiable and the only certainty is the effi- ciency of the police. Another man, no less admirable but not at ease about his name appearing in print, observes that in a historical perspective, Gen- eral Stnaessner't paragtray;probai?ly ' CULLUAILJ 01 a bilWttu.v.. cacy cam.. might t"--changing. When the army goose-s ed through the streets of• AsunciOn on Aug. 15, the 30th anniver- sary of General Stroessner's rise to the presidency, the question for those watching was, "How much longer?" After the Trujillos and Somozas, Gen- eral Stroessner, at 71, is almost the last of a breed of Latin American dictators who, unlike Fidel Castro or Gen. Au,gusto Pinochet of Chile, ad- mitted to running their country as if It were a theme park in their own image. For longevity, the general has few rivals; only Enver Hoxha of Albania and Kim II Sung of North Korea are his seniors. For personalization of power, Nicolae Ceausescu of Ruma- nia has some of the same reflexesebut he has yet to name an airport after himself, or a city (Puerto Presidente Stroes.sner), or to put a neon sign atop a building like the one at the Plaza of Heroes in Asunci6n that blinks orange through the night: "Stroessner — Peace, Work, Well-being ... Stroess- ner— Peace, Work, Well-being...... In a strange way, President Stroessner has claimed an area of ab- surdity that none of his peers thought to expropriate. For the general, a man who can arrest, imprison or ban- ish anyone he plea ses without trial or explanation under the capital's per- manent state of siege, Paraguay has achieved perfect peace and democra- cy...it by lf-acclamationthe U vanac y cc:A UI twv Its entire history, the s Inspire as much fear as HE GENERA_L GE• up at 5 A.M. Sin Somoza's assassir tion in Paraguay 1980, after his oust from his own count the year before, one is sure where t general spends t night, but his offic residence, part of compound wit the a police hospital e grounds (torture victims are tci& taken to a ts fifth-floor ward for temp at rean ward pr imation), sits in av thcrximit Embassy, to the United Stcu , dim The across the street e general 's day begins with te phone calls, a.nd it is said that, I tween 6 A.M. a of nd 7 A.M., a ring on o the 82,000 phones in a country just over 3 mu cally lion people is automs answer dente." "Sf, Senor Prc " Visitors parade through t office starting clear at 7 A.M. By 8 P.M. i mwho cae, because the vis lead the newscasts on the two tele sion channels. It may be the Chile Ambassador military or the South Afric attache, but more often I parade is an e respectable, in trying to lc , s passing cooping up whoever throug the town.ed In mid-Augu ee nightly nws l off with Prt dent Stroessner extending his ha_nc will be more interesting in its per- verse nuances than in the mass of its outrages. "Add up the horrors," he says, "and you get a substantial piece of ugly business. But what is interest- ing, really — original, you could say — is how after 30 years a place can be run through a perfect distillation of fear. By now, it's only a touch, a nod. One man disappears, one woman is tortured. It is enough, and the Stroessner people know it. It's a horri- ble truth, but some of us wait ner- vously to hear such stories. And too many of us are relieved to hear them, because then we touch the bars of the cage, and we know where we stand." These are wary rinv,z in Pa rri minv United States' best friend. The word "democracy" soUs every official sheet of paper, every state proclama- tion, hundreds of pages daily in the of- ficial Press. Even General PinoChet talks about an eventual return to par- liamentary rule; even Mr. Castro says his "Socialism" aspires to achieving a more faultless Commu- nist existence. But in Paraguay, Gen- eral Stroessner has elevated himself to the level of democracy apotheo- sized. For the people who reach out to touch the bars of the cage, all signals count. They look at the general and see his passive stare, his stiffened movements, his hands swollen to lob- stor rlrtwc ;lc ci p nc nf na ccino of a visiting veterinarian, describe the chief of the department of at cial insemination at a cow collei West Germany. Then the general visits things opens banks, he hands out diplor he inaugurates telephone booths is conscious of his image. As an pointed out, he never cuts ribbot Paraguayan red, white and blut =knots them— a man who cares The rest of the day, from noon more opaque. No one can remer the general ever holding a press ference, and interviews are rain request for an interview for this cle never received an officio' sponse.) Some of those whose jot volve watching the general, and
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 81 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.