Robert Christensen and Dr. Jeffrey Shumway, Department of History

One of the least studied aspects of the Cold War in Latin America has been the complex relationships between guerrilla organizations. The project I undertook aimed to begin a dialogue on the interchange of ideas that took place, focusing on how that was expressed through the masculinity of the mostly male combatants. After a careful study of available documents, this proved unsuccessful. Simply put, current archival sources do not provide a sufficient body of material for quantitative study. I instead made use of my time in the archives to assemble a detailed case study of one of the most important individuals among Argentine and Paraguayan rebel gropus, Agustín Goiburú.

Goiburú was a founding member of the MOPOCO (People’s Colorado Movement) resistence group in Paraguay, considered by the ruling regime to be the most dangerous. After he was forced into exile, he joined the Argentinian ERP (People’s Revolutionary Army) and became an important leader. All this worried the Paraguayans much more than the Argentinians, and they began covert surveillance of Goiburú in 1964. As he traveled through northern Argentina to attend covert coordination meetings, Paraguayan security forces tracked his movements and even succeeded in infiltrating the meetings. The most relevant of his actions were two incidents in which the Argentine military had to mediate between the Paraguayans and Goiburu. In one such occasion Goiburu had managed to give his Paraguayan tails the slip and had dropped off their map. Panicking, they kidnapped his son, then a student in Asuncion, to force Goiburu to materialize. Well aware of his fate if he presented himself to the authorities in Paraguay, he sought out the subprefect of police in Buenos Aires and negotiated for the release of his son. Goiburu’s ultimate fate was a common one for his era: walking down the street one day he was forced into a car and was never seen again. It later came to light that this was the work of Paraguayan police.

My study primarily has focused on the documents recorded by Paraguayan security forces about the actions of Goiburu. This includes transcriptions of meetings he attended, records of his day to day activities, briefings that include him as a suspect in completely unrelated cases, dispatches between Argentina and Paraguayan police forces exchanging information related to him, incriminating testimonies forcibly extracted from captured dissidents.

Since my research trip only took place three weeks ago, analysis of the documents is still incomplete and none of that work has been presented or published yet. A presentation on my preliminary research was given to the last winter to the BYU President’s Leadership Council however, and an abstract to present at the Utah Conference on Undergraduate Research has been submitted and is pending approval. The majority of the analysis and writing will be done in my senior capstone course next semester.

Working in the archives was a valuable experience because it taught me to be prepared to retool a project. I was lucky that the archive personnel were so helpful in making that transition when the documents proved inadequate, though I am now better prepared to do that on my own. I also learned the somewhat random nature of archival sources that necessitates browsing. That same randomness led me to the best find in documents with only 30 minutes left to look at them (I hope to investigate them more fully in another ORCA grant this coming year).