Juan Carlos Da Costa
Juan Carlos Da Costa (born 1944 in Asunción, Paraguay) was a writer, politician, activist and leader of the OPM (Political Military Organization) clandestine movement, created in the mid 1970s, against General Alfredo Stroessner's dictatorship. He died fighting the police, on 3 April 1976.
Juan Carlos Da Costa | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1944 Asunción, Paraguay |
| Died | 1976 Asunción, Paraguay |
| Occupation | Politician, writer |
| Nationality | Paraguayan |
Youth and studies
Born in 1944, he was the child of a Bolivian woman who married Juan Da Costa, a Paraguayan citizen that took her to Asunción to live with him. Juan Carlos Da Costa studied in the Colegio Nacional de la Capital, from which he was expelled in 1956, for being too much of a "troublemaker". During his youth, he had was briefly active in the Liberal Party. His literary knowledge led him to contribute to some cultural magazines like Pendulum and Criterion.
He was imprisoned for the first time in August 1967, when he was determined to create a clandestine organization of resistance to then-president Stroessner's dictatorship. Alfredo Stroessner had become the president of the Republic of Paraguay in 1954, through a coup d'état. In that time, Da Costa was brutally tortured and remained there until 1971 when he was deported to Argentina. Once he got there, he didn't desist with the idea of creating an organization that could start a revolution in Paraguay.
Exile
In Argentina, Da Costa established many relations with socialist organizations, mostly with Montoneros. In 1973, after Salvador Allende's victory, he traveled to Chile and met with leaders of the Unidad Popular and the Revolutionary Left Movement. During those years, he began to live with Nidia González Talavera, who would be his companion during the rest of the revolution attempt. In 1974 he entered Paraguay clandestinely, where he began contacting and organising the first members of the organization that would become the OPM. The movement defined its political view as "revolutionary nationalism", a euphemism of a Leninist movement, which was willing to use guerrilla warfare to fight the dictatorship.
The OPM
His leadership and constant planning, were fundamental to the growth of the organization in the capital and in certain farmer groups, most of them associated in the past with the Ligas Agrarias Cristianas movement. During the next few years, the OPM grew unexpectedly; in fact, so unexpectedly that it had more militants than his poor security system would allow it. The organization even military trained a small group of his members not heavily armed. It never really did anything, even though in the first few months of 1976 the organization counted with a group of leadership that was composed by a small number of Paraguayans students that studied in Corrientes, Argentina.
His death
In March 1976, one of the students, Carlos Brañas, was caught by the border police in Encarnación, surprising the OPM and even the police. After investigating him, the police found out about the OPM and its members. In the next days, the government replied with a repression extremely harsh in which every revolutionary found lead to the next one. Finally, the night of 4 April, the police arrived at a house located in a neighborhood called Herrera, in Asunción. There, Juan Carlos Da Costa, Mario Schaerer Prono and his wife, Guillermina Kannonikoff, important leaders of the OPM, were found. Once the police entered the property, they started to shoot the house and Da Costa died, but not before shooting the police commissioner, Alberto Buenaventura Cantero, in the chest. Shaerer Prono and Kannonikoff escaped through the back door of the house and hid in a school that was nearby, where they both used to teach. However, a priest decided to turn them in to the police, with the promise that they wouldn't be tortured. Years later, information from the Archives of Terror established that the police had lied to the priest and the prisoners were in fact tortured. Mario Shaerer Prono was tortured to death, in the department of Investigations and Guillermina, his wife, gave birth to their son during her imprisonment.
The painful easter
The repression against the OPM continued during the next weeks, taking the lives of twenty people and more than 1,500 people in jail. Most of them didn't even know what the OPM was. The press called it the "Painful Easter".
The repression against the OPM was the biggest one during the dictatorship of Stroessner. The name of Juan Carlos Da Costa remained in the collective unknown, and just a few men knew his attempt to establish a revolution in the country until the discovery of the Terror Archives in 1992. Those secret documents showed all the horrors perpetrated by the police, including massive repressions and tortures but it also showed the great number of Paraguayans heroes that gave their lives to fight for their freedom and the freedom of the land in which they were born.
References
- BOCCIA PAZ, Alfredo, "La década inconclusa. Historia real de la OPM", Editorial El Lector, Asunción, 1997
- BOCCIA PAZ, Alfredo, GONZALEZ, Myriam y PALAU, Rosa. "Es mi informe. Los archivos secretos de la Policía de Stroessner". Centro de Documentación y Estudios, Asunción, 1994.
- CAMPOS, Daniel y BORDA, Dionisio. "Las organizaciones campesinas en la década de los ochenta. Sus respuestas ante la crisis". CIPAE, Asunción, 1992.