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= Daniel Rey Piuma = Daniel Rey Piuma (1958, Montevideo – 20 August 2016, Amsterdam) was an Uruguayan graphic designer, photographer, undercover agent and activist. He served as a key witness during the trails against human rights violations committed by the Videla regime in Argentina.

Background
From 1973 till 1985, Uruguay was a civic-military dictatorship with a powerless president serving as a figure head whilst the actual power was in the hands of the military. All political activity was suppressed. Especially members of the Left were victims of the regime.

Conscript
Piuma was born in the capitol Montevideo. As a young man, he joined the Navy as a conscript. Since he had skills in photography, Piuma was assigned to a technical department of the intelligence service. The office where he worked was also used as a prison and interrogation center by the military regime. Piuma infiltrated the organization so that he could pass information on to underground political organizations and human rights organizations. He had access to the archives which contained information on usage of torture by the military regime of Uruguay.

Documenting the death flights
Occasionally bodies would wash up on the shores of Uruguay. These were bodies of alleged dissidents of the Videla regime in Argentina, people who posed a political or ideological threat. Thousands of such Argentinian people were abducted and tortured by agents of the Videla regime. It was a common procedure to drug the victims, load them in an airplane and to drop them alive whilst flying above the Rio de la Plata or the Atlantic Ocean. The missing people are referred to as los desaparecidos and the number of victims is estimated to be 30.000.

The military leaders in Uruguay were complicit in these murders as they knew about it yet did nothing to prevent it. Evidence of the death flights was collected in the archives in Montevideo. This evidence included photographs of the murdered victims. Piuma made many of these photographs himself. Eventually Piuma was betrayed. He made copies of the archive before fleeing to Brazil with his wife in 1980. At this point he had worked for the intelligence service for three years.

Asylum in the Netherlands
Whilst they were hiding in Brazil, they were visited by a Dutch delegation led by Liesbeth den Uyl, wife of the former Dutch prime minister Joop den Uyl. The delegation arranged an asylum for Piuma and his wife as political refugees in the Netherlands. Piuma smuggled the copied evidence from the archives with him during the flight to Europe. Due to his work, he became one of the key witnesses in later trails of human rights violations in Argentina. He handed over photos of victims and documents on secret torture locations in Argentina and the addresses of war criminals.

In the Netherlands
After coming to the Netherlands, Piuma remained active as a left-wing activist in the Dutch squatting movement and in solidarity movements for Latin America. In 2002 he also campaigned shortly before the wedding of Crown Prince Willem-Alexander and Máxima Zorreguieta with a protest sign on Dam Square. The father of Máxima Zorreguieta was a minister of agriculture in Videla's cabinet. After this incident he was arrested and his computer was seized. After a short illness he passed away in 2016.