The Case of Pinochet

Reconciliation...
 

"Lasting reconciliation can only come from establishing the full truth and punishing those who abused their position of authority to order and carry out human rights violations."

Amnesty International

“Remembering helps the people of a country avoid committing the same crimes, calling things by their name; a criminal is a criminal….  The worst thing that could happen in Chile…would be for oblivion to do away with this problem.”

Sola Sierra, President of the Association of Relatives of the Disappeared

                                                                                                    "The cause of the Irish problem, suggested William
                                                                                                    Gladstone, is that the Irish never forget, while the English
                                                                                                    never remember. Is there then a golden mean, some
                                                                                                    'proper' degree of collective memory appropriate for
                                                                                                    bearing in mind the cruelties and lessons of a troubled past,
                                                                                                    while not so consuming as to stifle the possibilities of
                                                                                                    reconciliation and growth?"

Henry Steiner
Truth Commissions: A Comparative Assessment,
HLS Human Rights Program, 1997

 
"... the continued existence of human rights is a necessary
condition for any reconciliation... In a country in which everybody
ends up mutually fearing each other, in which those who abused
their power and situation do not want to leave the top because of
their fear of revenge, only justice, which affords each individual his
right, can objectively mete out the sanctions which correspond to
each of those involved. Only justice can open the path to peace.
True reconciliation will not be achieved with deceitful conciliation,
with cover ups, by erasing and starting over again. True
reconciliation must base itself on the strong rock of established
human rights.”

 
Remembering What?

the right to life

the right to liberty

the right to physical integrity

the right to personal freedom

the right to personal security

the right to live in one’s country

the right to legal defense

 
What Is A Forced Disappearance?

A forced disappearance consists of a kidnapping, carried out by agents of the State or organized groups of private individuals who act with State support or tolerance, in which the victim "disappears". Authorities neither accept responsibility for the deed, nor account for the whereabouts of the victim.

 
Who Were the Victims?
 
 

"At first I was afraid, I couldn’t control myself. When I was left on my own, isolated... I never cried. I thought of dying, I thought of my son, and I asked myself if everything I was doing was really worth it. My convictions and ideologies were strengthened. I didn’t feel sadness, only great anger and impotence."     Testimony of young woman tortured by repressive agents, 1984, from Persona, Estado, Poder. Chile 1973 - 1989. CODEPU

                                                                    Read more:  http://www.derechoschile.com/english/victims.htm

Testimonials

"Everything happened very quickly.  From the moment they took me out of the car to the beginning of the first electric shock session took less time than I am taking to tell it.  For days they applied electric shocks to my gums, nipples, genitals, abdomen, and ears. . . . [A]lthough the shocks made me scream, jerk, and shudder, they could not make me pass out. . . . At first the pain was dreadful.  Then it became unbearable. . . . The normal attitude of the torturers and guards toward us was to consider us less than slaves. We were objects.  And useless, troublesome objects at that.  They would say:

                                                                                                        A Torture Survivor
                                                                                                        Excerpted from Terence S. Coonan,
                                                                                                        Rescuing History: Legal and Theological Reflections

Dancing "La Cueca" alone. Relatives of the disappeared perform Chile´s national dance without their partners, March 8, 1978 in the Caupolican Theater, Santiago. Photo by Luis Navarro

THE SOLITARY "CUECA" I am mother, I am wife, I am daughter, I am sister... My name is Pisagua and I dance the cueca. I dance for you. I dance the cueca and I dance alone, I dance alone so that you see me, with you and without you I dance, approaching and moving away, I dance the cueca alone. I make a toast to truth, justice and reason, so that oppression and insecurity do not exist with courage and dignity, We must overcome this evil, we will reconstruct, with firm foundations, so that never again does this happen in Chile.

 
Case No. 4
Anonymous

Personal details
She is 19. Before her arrest she was training to be a social worker. Since her release she has been unemployed. She is unmarried. The man she lived with before her arrest is now in prison and she lives with her uncle.

Time and place of arrest and detention
She was arrested in Santiago in the first quarter of 1981. No arrest-warrant was shown. She was taken to the CNI centre in the city and held there until her release 19 days later.

Interrogation and torture
Her account of events was as follows:

During interrogation she was slapped all over the body and punched in the face, breasts and abdomen. She was kicked on the buttocks and backs of the thighs, usually while lying down. On one occasion when she was in her cell an interrogator seized her hair and banged the back and right side of her head against the wall. She did not lose consciousness. She was electrically tortured. She was stretched out on a metal bed with hands and feet bound. She was given shocks on the temples, chest and heel. A metal object was applied to her vaginal labia and she was electrically tortured there, but the device was not forced inside.

On about the eighth day she was sexually tortured. She was stripped naked and her blind-fold was removed. She was made to lie on the floor then kicked and raped by four men, one of whom subjected her to fellatio. This type of torture lasted about an hour. They also threatened to violate her with a dog and to lock her in a room with rats.

She was told the man she had been living with had been killed. She was then taken into a room where a corpse lay with its face covered and told it was this man. She knew it was not however, as the body's height and build were different from his. The corpse had been split open down the middle and there were wounds on the abdomen. It was beginning to decompose, and she was forced to lie right by it facing it. At one stage the towel was removed from its decomposing face.

She was taken into a room full of rats, but managed to jump up on a bed and so escaped from them. She was threatened: the interrogators said they would kill her, the man she had been living with and her parents. She was also insulted and called a whore.

On each of the last five days of her imprisonment a "friendly" interrogator visited her. He was very fatherly and asked her about her friendships and her life history. He repeatedly assured her (almost hypnotizing her in the process) that she had been very well treated.

 
Read more: http://www.trentu.ca/~mneumann/pinochet.html

The military torture teams, graduates of the Americas School in the Canal Zone, have revealed a degree of human bestiality with Chilean women that puts them way ahead of their American trainers.

A woman professor at the East Santiago campus of the University of Chile, married, with two children, was detained for forty days in the National Stadium. She wrote me this about the "female prisoners of war":

        They were obliged to remain all day long face down with their hands on their necks and their legs spread. . .
        There were lines of them kneeling or standing against the walls, and at the slightest movement they were
        struck or kicked - and, in several cases I saw, shot. In rooms fifteen by eighteen feet there were a hundred
        women. Food came only once a day, at 4 or 5 P.M. There were mainly two groups of women: workers
        and university professors. Girls and women were harassed, obliged to disrobe, manhandled, and insulted as
        a preamble to the interrogations. The academics among us had been taken out of our classrooms at
        gunpoint. One group of schoolteachers had a typically sad experience: at the investigatory commission one of
        them had her hair cropped off . . . then at Los Cerros de Chena, the eyes were always blindfolded. To go to
        the bathroom, they had to be accompanied by guards who took the opportunity to manhandle and beat
        them. They were interrogated naked. Electric current was applied to the mouth, hands, nipples, vagina.
        Water was poured over their bodies to intensify the pain. The language used with them was completely
        degenerate: they were forced to repeat, over and over: "I am a cunt, I am a cunt. A hospital technician was
        taken to the Quinta Normal naval enclosure. She was kept there for three days without sleep, and subjected
        to electric tortures every few hours. She also had electricity applied to her vagina. Afterward they brought
        her to the National Stadium She was taken for interrogation there too, blindfolded as others were. This time
        she apparently was taken to the cycle track, where by then the torture chamber had been installed. Besides
        electric shocks, this time she was forced to take something in her hand. They had given her an injection,
        which she guessed was Sodium Pentothal, and it had made her dizzy but she was still conscious. At once she
        realized the object was a penis which on contact with her hand became erect. They thrust it into her mouth
        where it ejaculated.

I have other memoranda from women prisoners who were able to write to me afterward.

Some novelties appear in those memoranda: "They stretched the women out on tables and dripped candle wax on their stomachs." "There were rapes, either in groups or individually. 'Move, you Marxist whore,' they would tell the victims. 'If you don't respond you're going to have to suck cock, even for General Pinochet, you shitty whore.'"

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