Chile report details torture under Pinochet
SANTIAGO, Chile – A massive official report containing 35,000 testimonials of alleged political imprisonment or torture during Chile’s long right-wing dictatorship caused a stir Wednesday when President Ricardo Lagos received it, the first-ever government-sponsored recounting.
Lagos said his country could bear the soul-searching that is likely to be sparked by testimony from thousands of Chileans who say they were tortured during Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s 17-year rule.
Human rights groups criticized Lagos for not making the findings public immediately. He said he wanted a few weeks to review them first and find ways to compensate the victims.
Throughout South America, left-leaning governments such as Lagos’ have been elected in the last five years. They’re now seeking a full accounting of human-rights abuses and disappearances in the 1970s and 1980s, when right-wing dictatorships suppressed leftists and other opponents.
Those who testified before Chile’s National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture described how Pinochet’s regime tortured political opponents, real or perceived. Earlier this month, Chile’s army brass acknowledged for the first time that the abuse was institutional, not the excesses of a few individuals.
The Duke University-educated Lagos, a socialist leading a centrist coalition, is the first Chilean president to investigate fully and seek redress for victims of the Pinochet dictatorship, which began on Sept. 11, 1973, with U.S. help and lasted until 1990.
On Wednesday, Lagos said Chileans should be proud of themselves. “How many countries have ventured to deeply examine their history? How many countries have ventured to get to the bottom of what happened? Chile has ventured. It’s a solid country, stable. We can do it,” he said.
After Chile returned to democracy, a commission in 1991 placed the number of opponents and soldiers killed during Pinochet’s rule at 3,197. But until the new report there had been no look at offenses short of killings.
In response to the report, the dictatorship’s feared first intelligence chief, Manuel Contreras, denied Wednesday in Santiago that Pinochet’s regime had practiced state-sponsored torture.
“In the National Intelligence Headquarters there was not political torture nor detaining of people to kill them or anything like that,” Contreras said as he left a courtroom where he had received a 15-year sentence for the kidnapping of an opposition politician in 1974.
Luis Navarro, one of the thousands of Chileans whom the commission interviewed this year, said he was a photographer with the Roman Catholic Church’s human rights office in 1981 when he was kidnapped. He testified that he was taken to a jail run by the state intelligence agency, held incommunicado for five days, blindfolded, deprived of sleep, tortured and drugged.
“They punctured my gums; I felt them puncturing them. Later, my teeth fell out, one by one. And I didn’t have cavities,” Navarro said. “I have nightmares even today. It’s been difficult to have to remember this.”