Apolonia Flores drove a spade into the damp red earth, prising out a root left by a recent sugar cane crop.
This area of the Paraguayan region of Caaguazú is now open farmland, but the last time she was here, in 1980, it was thick forest.
She was just 12 years old at the time – and the youngest witness of one of the most notorious events of the US-backed, rightwing dictatorship (1954-1989) of General Alfredo Stroessner.
“In this place, I was shot six times, I was tortured, I suffered sexual violence,” she said. “It left a scar, a giant wound across my entire body.”
Ten campesinos – small farmers – were tortured and disappeared by state forces and militiamen in a massacre that has come to be known as the Caaguazú Case. Nine more, including Flores, were imprisoned after torture.
“There was a war against us here,” she said, surveying the scene. “It seems like yesterday.”
Flores is one of a group of survivors and relatives who, after decades of campaigning, have returned to the site – a farm near the town of Doctor Juan Manuel Frutos – in search of a long-overdue reckoning with the legacy of Stroessner’s dictatorship. They are accompanying a dig for the remains of the disappeared.
“I have hope and faith that we can find the bodies of the others so that they can finally have a grave where we can mourn,” she said.
The incident began early on 8 March 1980, when a group of 20 campesinos left the community of Acaraymi in eastern Paraguay to travel to the capital, Asunción. They planned to protest against a general and his wife who were attempting to force them from their lands.
The community formed part of the Christian Agrarian Leagues, a group of campesino organisations whose collectivist principles had already attracted cruel violence from the staunchly anti-communist regime.
Intercepted by police, they took refuge in the forest near Doctor Juan Manuel Frutos but an enormous contingent of soldiers, police and members of the regime’s Colorado party arrived to pursue them.
Ten campesinos were captured, tortured and then disappeared: Gumersindo and César Brítez Coronel, Secundino Segovia, Sergio Ruiz Díaz, Feliciano Berdún, Trinidad Concepción González, Estanislao José Sotelo, Fulgencio Castillo, and Federico and Reinaldo Gutiérrez.
Flores, one of a further nine people who were tortured and imprisoned, was described as a “girl guerrilla fighter” on her police record. She was jailed for a year after refusing Stroessner’s offer to have her adopted and pay for her education. The regime is reported to have organised the systematic sexual abuse of children.
“Why haven’t you ever offered that to the others, to all the people that need education?” she said she told Stroessner, Latin America history’s longest-reigning dictator, when he visited her in hospital.
The Stroessner regime was characterised by fierce repression, forming part of the US-backed Operation Condor under which rightwing dictatorships across South America cooperated to crush opposition.
The 2008 Paraguayan Truth and Justice Commission report recorded at least 423 people murdered, 18,722 tortured and 3,470 forced into exile by the regime. Only 37 victims’ bodies have been recovered, and just four identified. Only a small number of the hundreds of known perpetrators have been prosecuted.
Dr Rogelio Goiburú, face reddened by days in the sun, is head of the Paraguayan justice ministry’s department for historical memory and reparation, and lead of the excavation that began on 12 October. His own father was disappeared by the regime.
“This really is a shared national cause,” he said at the dig’s inauguration. “I don’t think there is a sound, reasonable person in our country who wants the events being investigated here to be repeated.”
But although Stroessner was ousted in 1989 and died in 2006, his grip remains on Paraguay. The Colorado party, one of the pillars of his dictatorship, has maintained power for all but five years since the start of democratisation in 1989.
The current president, Mario Abdo Benítez, is the son of Stroessner’s personal secretary, was a pallbearer at the exiled dictator’s 2006 funeral and has repeatedly praised him during his presidency.
“To this day, one of the aims of this Stronista government is to erase memory,” Goiburú told relatives and volunteers camping at the dig.
Cristina Sotelo, whose father is among the disappeared in Caaguazú, said relatives had continually pressured successive governments since 1984 for the recovery of the bodies but to little avail. Remarkably, their efforts led to the recent release of some state funding.
“If we manage to recover their remains, then the torturers, those in power, the president – those who never paid us any attention – will see that we can demonstrate that it really happened,” she said. “We’ll demand justice, even if there is no justice in Paraguay.”
However, the search in Caaguazú is set to be difficult. It is believed that the bodies were thrown into wells up to 20 metres (65ft) deep, which were later filled in.
“There are witnesses that saw the well filled using machinery because curious locals would come and look. And those curious locals said that they saw bodies,” says geophysicist Andrés Peralta, standing over a light dip in a field that may be one of the five wells.
Survivors and family members say they are determined to stay until the search is complete – however long it takes.
Goiburú said the remains of other victims may also be found. He said that the military remained at the site for two years after the 1980 massacre, raining terror on the local population.
Cirilo Céspedes, a well-built, softly spoken local campesino, said he was tortured by soldiers while gathering straw in a field.
“I said, ‘I’m not a communist! I’m not a terrorist! I’m from here!’ Two or three of them hit me. I couldn’t get up – they hit me so hard,” he said, tears filling his eyes as he looked out over the landscape. “That was the Stroessner era: they tortured and killed.”
Apolonia Flores said other deep wrongs in Paraguay must also be corrected. The issue of land distribution – which fuelled the Caaguazú group’s fateful excursion – has only intensified, largely due to the usurpation of lands by elites during the Stroessner era. The country, dominated by agribusiness, has the world’s highest inequality of land ownership according to the World Bank.
A 2021 law has unleashed a fierce wave of forcible evictions of Indigenous and campesino communities. Most recently, the 15 de Enero Ava Guaraní Indigenous community, located in Caaguazú, was violently evicted by security forces in favour of soya farmers on 19 October.
“I think we’re heading back to the dictatorship,” said Flores. “They started to evict the campesinos, the Indigenous people. There’s so much injustice in Paraguay.”
Around the morning campfire, Flores said she was experiencing severe leg pain after her exertions on the first day of excavations. She said the pain had been with her since the horrific events of 1980. A recent scan revealed the cause: a bullet still lodged in her body, 42 years later.
Nevertheless, her resolution to continue searching in the red earth remained unshaken.
“When I was a girl, I wished intensely for justice in Paraguay – that’s what still drives me to keep going,” she says. “I won’t ever stop; I’ll fight until the end.”
