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policies. One of the detained Miguel Angel Aquino and another leader of BPD José Luis Rodriguez Alcalá Zuccolillo (who appears to have gone to ground) are ex Professors of Sociology at the Universidad Catolica, not noted for its Government sympathies, but were fired for their emphasis on Marxists teachings and for their involvement with the left in Chile. Ruben Bernardo Lisboa of the Bank of Brazil has been one of the most militant union leaders. Nevertheless not in the remotest way would I describe the other members of the staff I have met as actively subversive or plotting the violent overthrow of the Stroessner regime. They must however have been a constant irritant to the Colorado hard-liners and have been singled out for heavy criticism in the tame Government mouthpiece Patria.
4.
Consequently when I read of the round-up and before I received a spate of telephone calls from Roger Bourne and others in London, I had requested a meeting with Minister of the Interior Montanaro. I had already expressed my concern to the Foreign Minister who, as usual, professed his ignorance. I saw Dr Bestard the Sub Secretary today in the absence of Montanaro. I told him of my concern and asked why an organization providing a valuable service to the community whose publications at worse had contained no more than honest and modest criticism and the bulk of whose staff to my knowledge were loyal Paraguayans (two of the detained are Argentines and one is Chilean) should have been closed in such a crude manner and the staff put incomunicado into detention.
5.
Bestard's reply was that the Government has no objection to the publications as such. I asked in that case why had the printers been arrested to which they replied that they have now been released. He went on to say that the true reasons for the detention was that the Paraguayan Security Service had discovered close links between some members of BPD and the Organisación Político Militar (OPM). OPM was a largely student organisation active in the mid 70s which sought a socialist solution to Paraguay's problems and, according · to Bestard, the revolutionary overthrow of Stroessner. The Group was led by a Jesuit priest Samarti Garcia and in the suppresion of the group by the police in 1976 two students were killed. Many regard the OPM as a figment of the Government's imagination and an excuse to clamp down on Student dissent.
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