Where are they? ¿Dónde están?

Today, August 30th, is designated International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances. To explain its importance, Helia López Zarzosa considers the experience of the Chilean dictatorship.

The purpose of enforced disappearance is to erase the very existence of unwanted human beings. The enforced disappearance of people is above all a brutal practice that constitutes the most serious form of torture of all the crimes against humanity. In this way, the disappearance of a loved one turns into one of the worst psychological torture techniques. It is superior to the cross, the guillotine, the electric chair and, I would say, even the gas chambers of the Nazi genocide. There are neither explanations nor corpses to honour or say goodbye to, no successful legal dealings to pursue or even perpetrators to prosecute. For many years there is only silence and uncertainty and no one knows about the forced disappeareds’ whereabouts.

Many dictatorial and authoritarian regimes have practised, and are practising, the enforced disappearance of those people they consider internal ‘enemies’ and a threat to national security. Southern Cone Latin American right-wing dictators of the 1970s were no exception. They used enforced disappearance as a tool of terror, which played a key role in the structuring of violence as state terrorism in those societies. Augusto Pinochet in Chile was one of them.

After the September 11th 1973 civil-military coup d’état in Chile, mass detention without trial in military establishments and detention camps was an extensive practice. In December 1973, by Decree Law N° 228, the Military Junta granted itself the powers (retrospectively) to make such mass arrests. From that fateful day until June 1974, when the DINA was created, there was total arbitrariness and widespread random repression.

The DINA, the National Intelligence Directorate, was characterised by its systematic and secret repressive activities and was equipped with an infrastructure of secret agents, unmarked vehicles, the creation of numerous nationwide clandestine torture centres and total freedom of action for its agents. The DINA started a more targeted phase of repression.  Its ‘politicide’ started with the intended extermination of the MIR (Movement of the Revolutionary Left), then the Socialist Party and the Communist Party. Between 1974 and 1977, the DINA was responsible for national and international repressive actions and would be the intelligence service with greatest responsibility for the gross violation of human rights.

In September 1974, the DINA assassinated General Carlos Prats, former head of the Army, and his wife Sofía Cuthbert in Buenos Aires. In September 1976, the DINA assassinated Orlando Letelier and his American secretary Ronni Moffit in Washington D.C. Letelier had been Allende’s Foreign Affairs, Interior and Defence Minister. With the recent release and re-imprisonment of ex-Army Brigadier and DINA agent José Zara, a key perpetrator of these assassinations,  the DINA is in the news again.

Enforced disappearance of people, along with extrajudicial executions, became a ‘game’  for the extermination of ‘enemies’. It was during this chaotic and terrorising first stage of repression that our family relative, Héctor Roberto Rodríguez Cárcamo, my sister’s fiancé, was arrested by Carabineros (Chilean police) at around midnight from his parents’ house and made to disappear on September 19th 1973. His ID number was 258.835, Concepción.

A new category of citizens had emerged in Pinochet’s Chile, the relatives of the disappeared, who would bravely form the Agrupación de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos (AFDD) in 1974 that was formally constituted in 1975. They were the first in Chile to denounce the atrocities of the dictatorship.

During the Pinochet dictatorship, lies and misinformation became one of the ideological underpinnings of his civil-military regime. Lies justified their denial of the gross violations of human rights that were taking place in Chile and their de facto legislation. We must remember that after the 1973 civil-military coup, the Chilean Constitution of 1925 was virtually superseded by over 3,500 decree laws and Constitutional Transitory articles. The purpose of this de facto legislation was supposedly to guarantee national security, legitimise the dictatorial regime, act ‘legally’ in public and suppress opposition. To illustrate the degree of authoritarianism, between  September 11th 1973 and November 6th 1973, the Junta promulgated one hundred decree laws. The political and human cost would be catastrophic, something never experienced on such a scale before in Chile.

Confronted with such repressive architecture and the ensuing tortuous silence, relatives desperately tried to find out the fate and whereabouts of their loved ones. There were 1,469 cases of enforced disappearances in Chile. According to the Servicio Médico Legal, out of all the victims of enforced disappearance certified by the Truth Commissions, the remains of 307 victims have been recovered, identified  and returned to their relatives. This means that there are still 1,162 disappeared persons whose circumstances of disappearance and/or death has not yet been clarified.

In each case, the relatives’ painful journey started with the search (‘La Búsqueda’). They enquired at police stations, hospitals, jails, military headquarters and Registration Offices. When answers were negative, they went to nationwide ad hoc detention centres like the National Stadium  and Estadio Chile in Santiago. In all these places authorities denied their relatives’ arrest and usually told them either to “don’t look for him/her anymore!” or to “go to the morgues”.

As Roberto’s family was so distraught and my sister close to a nervous breakdown, my father decided to go to the  morgue and asked me to go with him. I agreed. What I saw there in the midst of a potent stench of the unclaimed piles of corpses has stayed with me ever since. Some of the victims lying there had been so badly tortured that they would only be identified from their teeth. As the mortuary attendant showed us the teeth of some of the victims we could not see Roberto but saw people we knew. We kept the macabre scenes we saw to ourselves, and only said to the family and my sister that Roberto wasn’t there. It was a most overwhelming experience, yet again, there were no answers. Our quest to find Roberto and that of many other relatives who had visited the morgues was chillingly mirrored in Costa Gavras’ 1982 film Missing. This Hollywood thriller wasbased on Thomas Hauser’s book The Execution of Charles Horman. An American Sacrifice (1978).

Given this agonising silence, relatives embarked on lengthy, risky and futile legal proceedings such as ‘complaint for presumed misfortune’ (querella por presunta desgracia) and writ of habeas corpus (recurso de amparo), but the judiciary and the Chilean Supreme Court were complicit. They allowed the Carabineros and all branches of the Armed Forces through their respective intelligence services, in collusion with right-wing civilians, to continue with their savage repression.

Writs of habeas corpus were also interfered with by the Home Office (Ministerio del Interior). In November 1973, a response letter by the Intendente (highest regional authority) to Roberto’s mother stated: “It has been impossible to find your son. I was informed that it was necessary to identify your son with other detained members of the MIR. Your son was released the following day and he was advised to leave Concepción in order to avoid a vendetta that could put his life at risk from other members of the MIR.” This was a misleading lie.

In June 1977, Roberto’s parents received a letter from the Foreign Office Minister Patricio Carvajal. It informed them that their son had been killed on September 19th 1973 in Santiago. According to the forensic pathologist, Roberto had been killed at 10.25am that day and his body arrived at the morgue in Santiago September 19th 1973 at 22.30pm. His ID card number was 289.515 from Santiago. Indeed, this ID did not correspond to his real ID.

This and other types of false and contradictory versions or accounts appeared in misleading official reports that reached courts, foreign embassies and even the United Nations. Amnesty International UK reported that “information provided to the UN in 1975 claimed that many names of supposedly ‘disappeared’ prisoners did not correspond to names of people whose existence had ever been officially recorded and suggested that the names were assumed or invented.”

Throughout this long and painful search, relatives encountered only cynical and hurtful lies as responses. There was always a refusal to acknowledge the fate of the disappeared or their whereabouts. When relatives asked: “Where is my son?’” “Where is my daughter?’” “Where is my husband?’” “Where is my fiancé?” “Where is my brother or sister?’” – WHERE ARE THEY? – they were ordered to keep calm and told cruel lies. These falsehoods ranged from “He/she ran away with a lover”, “He/she is in exile abroad now”, “He/she committed suicide” or the classic ‘vendetta’ argument: “He/she was killed by his/her own comrades!”

Regarding the latter, the security Operación Colombo or the ‘Case of the 119’, as it is also known, was a case of fake news. The mutilated bodies of 119 missing people who had been detained in 1974 (mainly MIR) were discovered in 1975 in Argentina and other countries. The right-wing press El Mercurio, La Segunda and La Tercera printed sensationalist stories blaming deadly vendettas.

However, extreme cruelty did not stop there in Chile. On one occasion when Roberto’s mother, whose psychological survival strategy was the religious cleaning and airing of her son’s room, went to the Registry Office with her husband to get a copy of Roberto’s birth certificate, she was asked “Are you sure you had that son?” Behind this despicable question was the Office’s ‘failure’ to find Roberto’s birth certificate which, we all thought, was intentional. They wanted to erase his existence; he had ‘disappeared’.

In fact, when victims were arrested, mothers, sisters, wives, fiancés, fathers and other members of the family, ignored what was behind the regime’s lies. There were only rumours. Their loved ones had been tortured, interrogated, moved from prison to prison, assassinated and then buried in secret graves. Other times they were assassinated abroad or, under the effect of the drug Pentothal, thrown alive from Puma helicopters into the Pacific Ocean, a French practice during the Algerian War (1954-1962) known as the infamous “death flights”.

Unbelievably, one  of these Puma helicopter’s empty hulk, the H-255, is being used for ‘recreation’ at the Dogtag Airsoft Park in Horsham, UK! (“Participants use low-power airguns to simulate combat”. See “How a Pinochet ‘death flight’ helicopter became UK gamepark prop”, The Guardian, Friday August 4th 2023.) A campaign for the repatriation of the fuselage started in January 2024.

But Chile’s dictatorship went further. In 2000, when it was revealed that two companies (shipping and haulage) were linked with the disappearance of political dissidents, Viviana Díaz, the President of the AFDD whose father was disappeared in 1976 and thrown into the Pacific Ocean, commented on the “monstrosities” revealed by Pastor Enrique Vilches during the ‘Month of Dialogue’. (Mesa de Diálogo: following the arrest of Pinochet in London in October 1998, the Chilean government convened a Mesa de Diálogo de Derechos Humanos (1999-2001) in which members of the Armed Forces, human rights lawyers, religious, culture and science representatives discussed the unresolved human rights issues in Chile. The objective was to revisit the seriousness of human rights violations during the Pinochet dictatorship but above all to know the whereabouts of the forcibly disappeared.)

Pastor Vilches had testified that, in the case of those victims thrown into the sea, in order “to cut costs, the perpetrators didn’t use lead to weigh the bodies down, they used rail sleepers instead and sprayed their bodies with a liquid so that fish would eat them quickly and also that the bones would dissolve in less than five days.” (Patricio Guznán’s documentary film El Botón de Nácar deals with the horrors of both the ravages of colonialism and Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile. The button, in the purchase of an indigenous young man (‘Jeremy Button’) and the encrusted button of a disappeared person, whose tied body to a railway sleeper had been thrown into the sea from a helicopter, connected the horrors in Chilean history. The film is available here.)

Heinous crimes such as these, perpetrated in Pinochet’s Chile, should not be emulated elsewhere, never, ever! The disappearance of a loved one is perverse both ethically and juridically. It is also a horrific historic and political tragedy, a hurtful truth in Chile. For the relatives it is a continuous psychological torture that should never be forgotten, let alone forgiven.

Today, when there is a government Plan Nacional de Búsqueda de Verdad y Justicia (National Plan to Seek Truth and Justice) for forcibly disappeared persons in progress in Chile, biological impunity is running against justice. Many perpetrators are dead. Those who are still alive and old, still refuse to contribute with truth and justice. Older relatives have died as well. That is the case of our beloved Roberto. His parents and elder sister have died and there is only one sister who can once again contribute with her DNA to the Plan.

A true democracy would be achieved only when human rights atrocities such as the enforced disappearance of people is no longer practised and when the fate and whereabouts of those who are disappeared are clarified and justice and accountability are achieved for them.

As the fight for justice for the disappeared has been an extremely long one, on this August 30th, the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances, let’s honour their lives and memory and make sure that we will never forget them!

Helia López Zarzosa is a sociologist and former refugee from Chile. She is a former co-ordinator of the Association of the Relatives of the Disappeared Prisoners in Chile, UK Section.

Image: Images of three of 119 people forcibly disappeared in Chile between 1974 and 1975 1 , taken from a protest in Santiago in July 2023. Source: https://www.pressenza.com/2023/08/a-montage-in-three-acts-a-crime-unresolved-in-48-years-links-argentina-and-chile/ Creator: Paulo Slachevsky  Copyright: Paulo Slachevsky Licence: Atribución – NoComercial – CompartirIgual 3.0 Chile CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 CL Deed (CC BY-NC-SA )