Profile of Martin Almada

Martin Almada is the founder of the Archives of Terror, the most important collection of documents of state terror ever recovered.

Citing his 1974 doctoral thesis, Paraguay, Education and Dependency, state authorities branded him an "intellectual terrorist". He spent three years in a concentration camp, where he was regularly tortured. During this time his wife died. Almada says she was "psychologically murdered" by the police. He was released in 1977, following a sustained campaign by Amnesty International and went into exile with his mother and three children. His book about his prison experience, Paraguay: la Carcel Olvidada, el Pais Exiliado (Paraguay: the Forgotten Prison, the Exiled Country), was published in 1978 and is a powerful resource for human rights activists world wide.

When the dictator Alfredo Stroessner was overthrown in 1989, Almada returned to Paraguay taking a leading role in its burgeoning human rights movement with a focus on bringing torturers to justice and obtaining compensation for their victims. In 1992, he was instrumental in the discovery and public release of dictatorship papers documenting repression and torture the Archives of Terror.

In 1992, Almada was named "Man of the Year" by Paraguay's National Television. In 1997 he received the Human Rights Prize from the French Government in recognition of his exposé of the machinery of state terror.

For his fight for Human Rights in Latin America, Almada received the Right Livelihood Award in the Swedish Parliament in 2002. For his work on Ecology he received the award Europa Solar 2005 in Berlin.

• Weblinks
• Archives of Terror
• The Right Livelihood Award
• Kansas State University
• Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International