Chile Recalls Coup With Flurry of Events and New Openness
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Version 0 of 1. SANTIAGO, Chile — Sunday dawned with the dark shadow of a Hawker Hunter jet painted on a Santiago street, pointing toward the presidential palace. Hours later, tens of thousands of Chileans marched through the capital to commemorate when 40 years ago Chilean Air Force jets bombed the palace, helping to overthrow an elected socialist government and obliterate what had been one of South America’s healthiest democracies. The resulting military dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who ruled for 17 years, suspended political and civil rights; censored the press; and imprisoned, tortured, exiled, abducted or killed tens of thousands of its opponents. Though there have been official reports about the human rights abuses since then, and some military officers have been prosecuted, many Chileans say the country has not yet fully come to grips with what happened. “It’s been 40 years, but we still don’t have real justice,” said Valeria García, a 56-year-old psychologist who joined the crowd marching to Santiago’s general cemetery on Sunday carrying signs bearing the faces of victims. “The officers who have been imprisoned are living wonderfully in a resort; they have parties and watch soccer on cable TV — it’s a joke,” Ms. García said. “Only when there is real justice and the last murderer is behind bars will we be able to put the past behind us.” The date of the coup, Sept. 11, 1973, is commemorated annually, but the weeks leading up to the anniversary this year were marked with an avalanche of related events that some Chileans found emotionally exhausting. There have been conferences, book launches, plays, photo exhibits, documentaries and performances. Over the weekend, human rights activists hung banners on several of the capital’s bridges over the Mapocho River, where dozens of victims’ bodies were dumped in the first few months after the coup, and have painted murals along the river bank. One of the banners reads, “Where are the disappeared?” The police took the banners down Sunday morning. Perhaps most striking is the vastly increased attention the mainstream news media have given the subject this year, with few exceptions. Television channels have dug up and broadcast previously unseen film footage from the years of the ousted socialist president, Salvador Allende; the coup; and the repression that followed. Special programs about dictatorship, dramatic series based on real events and extensive interviews have broken through previous self-imposed limits on what television channels would show or say. “The wall of disinformation and lies in the media, especially on TV, has been knocked down,” said Alicia Lira, whose husband, Felipe Rivera, was one of four men killed by a secret intelligence agency in reprisal for an ambush against General Pinochet in 1986. “No one can be silenced anymore.” In late August, a televised confrontation between a man who was orphaned at 2 when his parents were killed in northern Chile shortly after the coup and the military officer, now retired, who delivered him to a convent afterward led to the resignation of the officer from his current post as director of the country’s Electoral Service. The story had been told before, but the politically charged atmosphere and the fact that it was televised prompted his resignation. Political figures from different parts of the spectrum have expressed regrets for their actions in 1973. Some Socialist politicians have apologized for contributing to Chile’s political polarization before the coup; Senator Hernán Larraín, who was one of General Pinochet’s most loyal supporters, apologized “for what I may have done or failed to do.” Even so, the conservative parties now governing Chile, whose leaders flourished during the Pinochet years, remain reluctant to call his rule a dictatorship, and objected when the new municipal council of the Providencia district of Santiago voted that a street the Pinochet government had renamed 11 de Septiembre should be restored to its original name, Nueva Providencia. Most notably, the National Association of Judges apologized for the failure by the courts, and particularly the Supreme Court, to protect victims of abuse. Of the thousands of petitions filed with the courts asking that the government be ordered to release or account for abducted opponents of the Pinochet government, all but one were rejected. President Sebastián Piñera, a right-wing billionaire who says he voted against General Pinochet in a 1988 plebiscite on his continued rule, weighed in as well, saying that the courts should have “done much more” and that the news media “could have investigated the human rights situation more rigorously, more in-depth, instead of sticking to the military government’s official version.” Mr. Piñera called on anyone with information on what happened to the disappeared to come forward. But the army insists it has no more information to provide, and judges who investigate human rights violations from the Pinochet era usually run into a wall when they try to obtain information from the military. “Many people thought that time would quiet things down, but it’s been the other way around,” said Pamela Pereira, a human rights lawyer. “As more time goes by, the truth of what happened and the full dimension of the violence becomes even clearer, and the country’s institutions are forced to assume their responsibility.” Ms. Pereira’s father disappeared in 1973, when she was 20; his remains were identified in 2010. |