Pinochet Tax Evader

Pinochet may never face trial for his Coup and the deaths of thousands of Chileans under his regime of terror, but he and his family face tax evasion charges. Reminds me Al Capone. The government may not get ya for murder but they will hunt you down like a dog to get them taxes.

Pinochet daughter seeks US asylum

9.20AM, Thu Jan 26 2006

A daughter of former Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet is seeking asylum in the US after being arrested at Washington's Dulles airport.

Lucia Pinochet has been indicted by a Chilean judge on tax evasion and false passport charges and a warrant was issued for her arrest.

She was detained after she got off a plane in the US from Argentina.

Chilean Foreign Minister Ignacio Walker said he ordered his country's consul in Washington, Felipe Cousino, to try to interview Lucia Pinochet.

He said she apparently has three alternatives, to have US authorities send her back to the country from which she arrived, Argentina; to voluntarily return to Chile and appear in court; or go back to Argentina by herself, which would open the way for an extradition request by Chile.

Lucia Pinochet and several members of her family are implicated in a scandal involving the now-defunct Riggs Bank of Washington.

Congressional investigators alleged that General Pinochet worked with bank managers to set up phoney offshore companies to hide the existence of about $8 million at the bank.

A subsequent judicial investigation in Chile determined that Pinochet had deposited as much as $28 million in accounts in several countries.

Last year, Gen. Pinochet issued a statement denying any wrongdoing and claiming his advisers had paid all of his outstanding taxes.

Investigators say the defendants together evaded $2.05 million in taxes.

Daily Journal

Pinochet family out on bail Daily Journal, Venezuela - 24 Jan 2006 SANTIAGO – Augusto Pinochet’s wife and three of his five children were released on bail Tuesday, after a judge ordered them to stand trial for tax evasion. ...

Santiago Times

PINOCHET’S DAUGHTER ON THE RUN IN CHILE Santiago Times (subscription), Chile - 24 Jan 2006 25, 2006) Former dictator Augusto Pinochet’s eldest daughter failed to appear before the Santiago Appeals Court Tuesday morning with her mother and four ...

Pinochet's wife and children arrested
Swissinfo, Switzerland - 23 Jan 2006
SANTIAGO, Chile (Reuters) - The wife and five children of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet were arrested on Monday on tax evasion and fraud charges as ...

Tags
Latin America
Chile
Pinochet
USA
Asylum
tax evasion
fraud
crime

50 years later, wounds of Pinochet regime are still raw

By AFP
PublishedSeptember 9, 2023

Patricia Herrera visits the basement of the Chilean presidential palace where she was tortured 50 years ago - 

AFP GABRIEL BOUYS

Magdalena ADVIS

In the basement of the presidential palace in Chile’s capital, Patricia Herrera was detained and tortured for months before being sent into exile. It was early in a military dictatorship that would kill or cause the disappearance of thousands of people.

Fifty years after the US-backed coup that snuffed out Chile’s democracy, the wounds from all that suffering are still raw.

– Torment –

As she returned from class at the university, Herrera was detained by officers in plain clothes because she was “a woman and a socialist.” She was 19.

Herrera was taken, blindfolded, to the basement of La Moneda, as the presidential palace is called. It was then also known as “El Hoyo,” or the pit, as it was one of the first detention and torture centers set up by General Augusto Pinochet’s new regime after the ouster of Socialist president Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973.

“From the very first night we got there, there was sexual humiliation. At first I thought it was just the guard who was overdoing it with me. I did not think it was an established thing that women had to suffer sexual, in addition to political, violence,” said Herrera, now 68 and a historian.

Herrera was held for 14 months at the palace and in two other buildings in Santiago that were converted into torture centers by the Pinochet regime. She was then sent into an exile that would last 15 years, first in France and then in Cuba.

Two commissions created to study the dictatorship concluded that at least 38,254 people were tortured under the Pinochet regime, which lasted until 1990.

The basement in the presidential palace where Herrera was held was also known as Cuartel, or barracks, N°1 and is now used as office space. People taken there blindfolded could identify it because of its curved wall.

On August 30 of this year, the current president, Gabriel Boric, had a plaque installed in the basement space to mark the horrors endured by around 30 people who were held there.

“We want to put up a marker for everyone to see,” Herrera said, “that here, in the political heart of the nation, there was a torture center.”

Allende committed suicide rather than be captured.

– Disappearance –

Agents of the dictatorship killed 1,747 people, and detained and made another 1,469 disappear, according to an official government tally.

While 307 of the disappeared have since been identified, the other 1,162 remain missing. Fifty years later, their families still wonder where they are.

In 1974, when Pinochet’s police detained a man named Luis Mahuida — a 23-year-old university student active in leftist politics and the father of two young daughters — they also brought an abrupt end to the childhood of his sister Marialina Gonzalez, who was then nine years old.

Their mother, Elsa Esquivel, spent all her time looking for her son; it was a full-time occupation. Marialina Gonzalez looked after her brother’s daughters, who were three and 11 months old when he vanished. “I stopped playing with dolls. My nieces were dolls for me,” said Gonzalez.

She never finished her education. She went to hundreds of places asking for her brother. Gonzalez even staged a hunger strike and recalls being arrested several times while taking part in protest marches in honor of missing people.

She regrets the childhood she never had. “I was not capable of saying: ‘Stop, let me be. I want to go out dancing. I want to have friends.’ I kept quiet,” she said.

Now 59, she dedicates herself to caring for her elderly mother and expects to carry suffering with her into her own old age. “There is no closure just because my brother is still missing. There will be no closure.”

– Exile –

The dictatorship triggered the biggest migratory movement in Chilean history. Just over 200,000 people went into exile, according to the non-governmental Chilean Human Rights Commission.

Employees of the Allende government, union leaders, workers, students and farmers left the country, taking their families with them. Sweden, Mexico, Argentina, France and Venezuela were the main recipient countries.

Most of the exiles were able to return home starting September 1, 1988, when the regime issued a decree allowing them back, a year and a half before the dictatorship ended.

A communist activist named Shaira Sepulveda was tortured in secret prisons called Villa Grimaldi and Cuatro Alamos. After her release she left in 1976 for France, along with her husband at that time. She left relatives and friends in Santiago.

“My family was here, my sister, my parents. But what really hurt was having to go to a country where you are a nobody,” Sepulveda recalls.

She returned to Chile 17 years later with two children, but again her family was broken apart. The eldest child could not adapt to life in Chile and returned to Europe.

“I am an old woman, so my grandchildren there will barely know me,” said Sepulveda, who is 74.

Pinochet: Images of a dictatorship

Emilia Rojas-Sasse
13 hours ago13 hours ago

Fifty years after the military coup in Chile, historians describe why Augusto Pinochet's coup had such a huge impact in Europe. A major factor was the power of images.

https://p.dw.com/p/4VwHv

Media coverage of the 1973 coup, including this picture of General Augusto Pinochet, was seen around the world

Image: AFP/epa/dpa/picture-alliance

Everyone knows the image of Che Guevara, his steely gaze directed confidently into the distance. In the counterculture of the 1960s, the "Comandante" emerged as a symbol of the idealistic revolutionary and long remained an icon of youth culture.

The photo of Augusto Pinochet, on the other hand, embodies the dictator par excellence. The general who violently overthrew Salvador Allende's government in Chile on September 11, 1973, was commonly regarded as the ultimate evil. But why, compared to other Latin American dictators, Pinochet in particular?

Coup caught on camera (& TV)

While the coup d'etat in Chile shocked the world, the 1964 coup in Brazil went relatively under the radar.

The spotlight on the Chile coup was due in large part to the widespread media presence in the country, noted Caroline Moine, professor of political and cultural history at the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines in France.

"This coup d'etat did not take place in the middle of the night and in secret, but in front of running cameras," she told DW of the events of 1973. "There were many journalists there, so the images flickered quickly across the screens, even abroad."

This was probably in the interests of the putschists, she said.

"The military wanted people to see what had happened. They wanted to impress not only their opponents, but also their supporters inside and outside the country," she said.

Through media coverage, the scenes were burned into the collective memory. The images of the bombing of the presidential palace, La Moneda, went around the world — as did the photo of the usurper Pinochet in uniform, with dark glasses and an expressionless face, sitting in front of his men.

The government palace in Santiago de Chile was attacked in 1973, and seen on TV

Image: AP/picture alliance / AP Photo

For Joan del Alcazar, professor of contemporary history at the University of Valencia, the image of this dictator was projected in stark contrast to overthrown president, doctor Salvador Allende.

"The figure of a friendly, empathetic doctor, an undeniably attractive man, contrasts with the odious image of an unpleasant, authoritarian, despotic and, moreover, criminal military man," he told DW.
Allende a fallen symbolic figure of left-wing intellectuals

When viewed against the backdrop of the Cold War, events in Chile transcended national borders.

"In West Germany and in Europe, Allende was an important symbolic figure because he represented the democratic path to socialism; he was a very strong symbolic figure for many left-wing intellectuals," said Lasse Lassen, a historian and researcher at the University of Würzburg.

"When he was overthrown, especially in such a brutal way — with the bombing of the government palace and his suicide — he became a shining beacon for the left in Western Europe. And Pinochet embodied the image of the enemy."

Legends of socialist struggle — Ernesto 'Che' Guevara, center, Chilean late President Salvador Allende, right, and Cuban independence hero Jose Marti, left — have been remembered in art

Image: AP

At the time in Europe, the left was divided, said Caroline Moine.

"There were attempts, for example in France and Italy, to unite communist and socialist forces" in the same way as the Unidad Popular, an electoral alliance of leftist Chilean parties led by Allende.

"The coup put an end to that project and destroyed those hopes," she said. Nevertheless, the communist party in particular, but also the socialist party in Chile, very quickly launched a major international campaign after Pinochet's coup.

This not only stylized Pinochet as the embodiment of evil, but also glorified the ousted president.

"Allende was the one who wanted to defend democracy in Chile and died for it. In Europe, too, the idea of heroes who are willing to die for their ideas is highly emotionally charged," said the French historian.

The body of Salvador Allende was carried away after his death on September 11, 1973, along with hope for a democratic Chile

Image: El Mercurio/AP/picture alliance

Yet, she added, the various parties within the Unidad Popular were not always so united.

"It was always said that the UP was a victim of the dictatorship; there was never any public talk of internal tensions. There was a kind of myth."
Brutal repression shocked the world

The extreme brutality on the part of the coup plotters in Chile shocked more than just members of the political left.

Similar repression was being imposed by other dictatorships in the region, including in Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay during the so-called Operation Condor camapaigns.

"[Nonetheless] this military coup stands out for its cruelty, its extreme viciousness," said Joan del Alcazar.

Historian Lassen believes knowledge of human rights abuses in Chile and simultaneous Cold War tensions in the West contributed to the coup in Chile being particularly present in people's minds.

Ultimately, however, "neither Franco nor Pinochet were condemned as Hitler was, not even in their own country," he added. "It's a complex process."

This article was originally written in Spanish.

Artists After the Escape: Chile's coup, dictatorship and the path to democracy

DW
13 images

September 11, 1973 changed the lives of many Chileans forever. A coup against President Allende brought Augusto Pinochet to power. Sixteen years later, a spectacular campaign toppled the dictator.Image: DW/S. Spröer

Chile's September 11

September 11, 1973, changed the lives of many Chileans forever. General Augusto Pinochet, commander in chief of the Chilean army, overthrew the incumbent socialist president, Salvador Allende. The military bombarded the presidential palace "La Moneda" in the capital Santiago, arrested government supporters, leftists and Pinochet opponents.

OFF/AFP/Getty Images

Salvador Allende, a people's president

The socialist president had only been in office for three years before the coup. After having nationalized companies and dispossessed great land owners, his government faced massive opposition. The US didn't approve of the socialist leader in South America either. With the help of the CIA, Washington boycotted Allende's economic policies and incited Chile's media against the government.

Image: picture-alliance/dp

Chile begins probing 'disappearances' during Pinochet regime

August 31, 2023

A process has begun to try and determine what happened to those who disappeared during dictator Augusto Pinochet's brutal regime 50 years ago.

Relatives of victims at a march commemorating the victims of Augusto Pinochet's regime

Image: Martin Bernetti/AFP

Chile's government launched a program on Wednesday which seeks to determine what happened to more than 1,000 people during Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship 50 years ago.

"Justice has taken too long," President Gabriel Boric said as he announced the government project at the presidential palace.

"The only way to build a future that is more free and respectful of life and human dignity is to know the whole truth," he said.

A legacy of abuse

Pinochet seized power in a bloody coup backed by the US on September 11, 1973 and would remain in power until 1990.

During his dictatorship, some 40,175 people were executed, detained and disappeared, or tortured as political prisoners, according to Chile's Ministry of Justice.

Government reports show 1,469 people were victims of forced disappearances, of whom 1,092 were secretly detained and 377 were executed.

Their remains were never returned to families.

Pinochet died in 2006 at the age of 91, and was never convicted for his role in the crimes. Many have been pushing the government for more answers and accountability.

Chile: Pinochet victims want transparency and justice 01:59

Project to uncover truth, a government first

Until now, the circumstances of those who were declared missing has not been looked into, the weight only carried by bereaved loved ones.

The project, officially known as Truth and Justice, will have a dedicated budget and staff, with investigators tasked with reconstructing the victims' final days.

Earlier this week, the US State Department declassified briefings presented to Richard Nixon, the US president at the time, on September 8 and September 11.

The reports show how we was briefed on Chile's impending coup which was part of the wave of military dictatorships in the region in the 1970s.

In Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, families have also pushed for more information on those who were declared missing during military regimes.

rm/kb (Reuters,

Child victims are the forgotten voices of Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship from 1973 to 1990


Eliana Rodríguez holds a photograph of herself with her daughter Yelena Monroy at home in La Serena, Chile, Friday, Sept. 1, 2023. The photograph was taken one year after they were released from a detention center where Rodriguez and her two young daughters were imprisoned for over a year during the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who was brought to power in Chile after a military coup in September 1973.

 (AP Photo/Esteban Felix)

Yelena Monroy poses for portrait by photos of detainees who disappeared during the dictatorship Gen. Augusto Pinochet in La Serena, Chile, Friday, Sept. 1, 2023. Monroy was 3-years-old when she was imprisoned for more than a year along with her younger sister Natacha and her mother Eliana Rodriguez, a socialist activist persecuted by the regime Pinochet, who was brought to power in Chile after a military coup in September 1973. (AP Photo/Esteban Felix)

BY EVA VERGARA
 September 8, 2023

SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) — Yelena Monroy was 3 years old when she was imprisoned for more than a year along with her younger sister and her mother, a socialist activist targeted by the regime of Gen. Augusto Pinochet after he came to power in Chile in a military coup in September 1973.

“We were scared, we were crying,” recalled Monroy, now a 53-year-old commercial engineer and one of more than 1,000 children and adolescents who were detained in the name of fighting communism and leftist guerrillas during Chile’s military dictatorship from 1973 to 1990.

Eliana Rodriguez adjusts her glasses as her daughter Yelena Monroy searches through a photo album at Rodriguez’s home in La Serena, Chile, Friday, Sept. 1, 2023. Rodriguez and her two young daughters were imprisoned during the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who was brought to power in Chile after a military coup in September 1973. (AP Photo/Esteban Felix)

Photographed through a plastic window, an entrance leads to the center of “El Buen Pastor,” or The Good Shepherd, originally built to hold detained, female minors and run by Catholic nuns, that was turned into a detention center for political prisoners during the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, in La Serena, Chile, Friday, Sept. 1, 2023. Yelena Monroy was incarcerated here for more than a year when she was only three-years-old with her mother Eliana Rodriguez and younger sister Natacha. (AP Photo/Esteban Felix)

Yelena Monroy shows a 1973 photograph of her mother Eliana Rodriguez, bottom left, sitting with other political prisoners during the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet at “El Buen Pastor” or The Good Shepherd detention center, originally built to hold detained, female minors and run by Catholic nuns that was turned into a detention center for political prisoners during Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, in La Serena, Chile, Friday, Sept. 1, 2023. Monroy was incarcerated here with her mother and younger sister for more than a year. The 1973 photo is from a visit by the International Red Cross to verify detainees’ condition. (AP Photo/Esteban Felix)

When Pinochet installed himself as leader, the age of majority in Chile was set at 21 years. But being a minor was no protection from the dictatorship’s crackdown. Children were detained, tortured, killed, and even used as decoys to apprehend their parents.

The trauma of that period has made many of the young victims of the military regime reluctant to speak out, and the process of prosecuting that era’s crimes and making reparations generally has made no distinction among victims based on age. So, the child victims of the Pinochet era have not had much visibility, though minors represent nearly 10% of the deaths attributed to the regime.

OTHER NEWS

Chile president defends democracy 50 years after coup ushered in brutal military dictatorship

The Catholic Church defended human rights during Chile’s dictatorship. An archive tells the story

Movie Review: Pinochet as a vampire in surreal, frightening ‘El Conde’

“We don’t classify them by age, because they all suffered,” Gaby Rivera, president of Chile’s Association of Relatives of the Detained-Disappeared, told The Associated Press.

However, the National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture figures show that the Pinochet regime detained 1,132 minors under the age of 18. Of these 88 were under 13 and 102 were arrested along with their parents — or were born in prison.

Some 307 children under the age of 18 were killed during that period, according to human rights groups’ reviews of documentation from the National Truth and Reconciliation Commission. About 3,200 people overall were killed during the dictatorship, or went missing and are believed dead.

Chile’s National Stadium, in the country’s capital, became the largest detention center of the military government. That is where they arrested — and beat — Roberto Vásquez Llantén, when he was 17, for being an active militant of the Revolutionary Left Movement.

Roberto Vásquez Llantén, 67, poses for a portrait on the stairs that leads to a tunnel at the National Stadium where he was held during the dictatorship in Santiago, Chile, Saturday, Sept. 2, 2023. (AP Photo/Esteban Felix)

View of the women´s dressing room of the National Stadium, which was used as a prison and place of torture during the coup orchestrated by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, Santiago, Chile, Saturday, Sept. 2, 2023. (AP Photo/Esteban Felix)

He had been in hiding since the start of the coup, but was arrested on Jan. 15, 1974. Vásquez Llantén, who is 67 today, spent a year in the Chacabuco Prison Camp in the Atacama desert along with 16 other minors. There was no electricity or hot water, he recalled. There were antipersonnel mines outside the barbed-wire to keep prisoners in line, while guards kept watch from towers.

If minors had political significance, they were detained just like adults. But they also were used as lures to trap and detain their parents.

The Fernández Montenegro sisters were imprisoned in February 1974 when they were teenagers.

Viviana, 14, and Morelia, 17, were accused of being guerrillas in the Chilean port of Valparaíso where they lived, some 120 kilometers (75 miles) northwest of the capital. Their mother was arrested and released after 24 hours. The whole family, with the exception of the father, were active communists.

The sisters were first held together in the Silva Palma Navy Barracks, on one of the many inhabited hills of Valparaíso.

“I was in a cell, wearing a hoodie, while some guys put electricity cables on my fingers, yelling and screaming profanities and threats,” demanding to know where the weapons were, Viviana Fernández recounted.

“The only thing I did was cry and cry ... I felt very afraid, very afraid,” she said.

Fernández, who is 64 today, and Yelena Monroy are members of the Association of Former Minors Victims of Political Imprisonment and Torture, created nine years ago in part to raise awareness about the fate of children and adolescents under the dictatorship.

Fernández, who is the spokesperson, says the organization has about 100 members, but she thinks there are many more, and that many are still afraid to talk about what happened to them during those years.

Many other minors of that time did not survive to tell their story.


Cecilia Aguilar is reflected in the mirror at home where a photo of her with her then 6-year-old sister Alicia stands in Santiago, Chile, Wednesday, Sept. 6, 2023. Her sister was assassinated on Sept. 18, 1973, the day their portrait was taken, by soldiers who arrived shooting into a public square in the Yungay neighborhood where they played during Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. Cecilia said she was saved because she ran, but later was found by a soldier who applied “the escape law,” telling her to run as he counted to 30. “If I catch you, I’ll shoot you and kill you,” she recalled him saying. (AP Photo/Esteban Felix)

Cecilia Aguilar holds a photo of herself with her then 6-year-old sister Alicia in Santiago, Chile, Wednesday, Sept. 6, 2023. Cecilia’s sister was assassinated on Sept. 18, 1973, the day their portrait was taken, by soldiers who arrived shooting into a public square in the Yungay neighborhood where they played, during Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. Cecilia said she was saved because she ran, but later was found by a soldier who applied “the escape law,” telling her to run as he counted to 30. “If I catch you, I’ll shoot you and kill you,” she recalled him saying. (AP Photo/Esteban Felix)

José Gregorio Saavedra González, a militant of the Revolutionary Left Movement, was executed at the age of 18 by soldiers in Calama, in the north of the country, together with 25 other political prisoners on Oct. 19, 1973. He was one of the disappeared who years later were located — and identified.

“They gave us a little bit of a finger in a small box, and a little bit of what I imagine was a small tooth,” recalls his sister, Ángela Saavedra, who is 81.

Monroy and Fernández fault the Chilean government for not fully acknowledging past violations of children’s human rights.

“We have been totally forgotten by the state, it is very much in debt,” Fernández said.

Yorka Salinas poses for a portrait wearing photos of her 18-year-old brother Isidro Salina and mother Margarita Martin, both who were murdered in 1986, that reads in Spanish “I don’t forget. I demand justice,” in Santiago, Chile, Wednesday, Sept. 6, 2023. The National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation consider her brother, mother and aunt María Martin to have been executed by the Carabineros national police, and consider their deaths violations of human rights under the responsibility of state agents during Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. (AP Photo/Esteban Felix)
___

Follow AP’s coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean at https://apnews.com/hub/latin-america

“El Conde” director breaks down his vampire Pinochet movie and that wild narrator reveal
Christian Holub
Fri, September 22, 2023 at 2:51 PM MDT·5 min read


EL Conde. Jaime Vadell as El Conde in El Conde.
Pablo Larraín / Netflix Jaime Videll as Augusto Pinochet in 'El Conde.'

Warning: This article contains spoilers for El Conde.

Fifty years ago — Sept. 11, 1973 — a violent coup d'etat in Chile by the country's military forces overthrew democratically-elected President Salvador Allende with the support and encouragement of the U.S. government. The coup ended decades of electoral democracy in the South American country, replacing it with a military dictatorship headed by General Augusto Pinochet. Thousands of people were killed or "disappeared" without a trace during the years of the dictatorship, while even more were imprisoned and tortured for the crime of wanting a more equal economy.

Chilean director Pablo Larraín has delved into his country's dark political history before — his 2012 film No covered the 1988 plebiscite in which Chilean citizens finally voted to oust Pinochet, while 2016's Neruda was about the Nobel Prize-winning poet who (recent forensic evidence has confirmed) was among those murdered by Pinochet's regime. But in his new movie El Conde, which hit Netflix just days after the coup's 50th anniversary, Larrain finally tackles the dictator head-on — by turning him into a black-and-white vampire.

"I've made movies related to this subject in the past, but those movies were always around more peripheral characters that dealt with the consequences of the dictatorship, but I had never really made a movie about Pinochet himself," Larraín tells EW. "It's challenging, because you want to face the character without creating empathy. You want to try to understand evil, and figure out a way to shoot it. So the satire, the dark humor, the vampire, the black-and-white were all ingredients to achieve that while having the right distance."

El Conde. (L to R) Antonia Zegers as Jacinta, Diego Muñóz as Manuel, Catalina Guerra as Luciana, Amparo Noguera as Mercedes, Marcial Tagle as Aníbal in El Conde.

Pablo Larrain / Netflix Pinochet's children — played by (L to R) Antonia Zegers, Diego Muñóz, Catalina Guerra, Amparo Noguera, and Marcial Tagle — in 'El Conde'

Larraín has already delved into the lives of other iconic historical figures. His two English-language films, 2016's Jackie and 2021's Spencer, were fascinating biopics of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Princess Diana. But the experience of making those movies (and then watching them alongside audiences) convinced Larraín that he needed to take a different approach to Pinochet. In order to ensure that viewers did not have any empathy with the brutal dictator, Larraín decided to make Pinochet's monstrousness literal by portraying him as a 250-year-old vampire for El Conde.

"Screenwriters and filmmakers all over the world have different tricks to create empathy bridges, but I think that empathy will always happen when there's any form of humanity in front of the screen," Larraín explains. "So in order to avoid it or to have the right distance, you need to be very specific with the behavior of that person — it should represent what they did on this planet. So it was a conversation not only with Guillermo [Calderón], who wrote the script with me, but also with the actors and how we shot it. We want you to be a witness of what's going on, while not necessarily sharing what the character is trying to do. That creates the possibility that the audience can reflect on it and can have a nervous laugh when necessary, but that's the right distance. We cannot cross that wall because then the movie would be impossible and would have a moral problem."

El Conde. Paula Luchsinger as Teresita in El Conde
Pablo Larrain / Netflix Paula Luchsinger in 'El Conde'

El Conde addresses the basics of Pinochet's coup and rise to power, but also dresses them up in metaphor and genre. A more straightforward account of Allende's overthrow can be found in Patricio Guzman's three-part documentary The Battle of Chile (a new restoration of which is currently playing in theaters in select cities). But El Conde's depiction of a 250-year-old vampire still preying on the people of his country can be relevant to the politics of other countries as well — say, America, where the two leading presidential candidates and multiple powerful senators are more than 75 years old.

"I hope the movie could land in different countries or different societies and ring the bells of elements that are universal," Larraín says. "Hopefully you can learn certain things that happened in my country, but then you could probably relate to the reality of your own society, since we're seeing the rise of extreme right-wing movements, candidates, and ideas again. We should know that a fascist is not just someone who is yelling in German. They can come in all different forms."

Speaking of that…Netflix viewers may notice that even when you switch the audio track on El Conde from the English dub to the original Spanish, the narration is still in English. The final act of the film reveals why: The narrator is none other than Margaret Thatcher, here reimagined as another vampire. In fact, she's Pinochet's vampiric mother. It's a powerful reminder that Pinochet wouldn't have gotten anywhere without money, weapons, and encouragement from Anglophone leaders.

"You can feel this patronizing attitude from politicians in Europe and the U.S. They act like they always have something to teach us," Larraín says. "We used to be a colony, and they still have this feeling of superiority that is exhausting. So we had fun with that character. At different points, we considered bringing in Kissinger or Nixon, who supported Pinochet. Nixon was the one who said they should 'make the economy scream' in Chile. I think that relationship is an interesting thing to observe."

El Conde is streaming now on Netflix.

In Chile, One Word Defines the Political Revolution
The Chilean term “facho” evokes the image of Chile’s fascist past—but also of present-day tenacity that thumbs its nose at institutional power.

BY KELLY KIMBALL, AUGUSTA SARAIVA | OCTOBER 24, 2020, 2:02 PM
MAURO ANDRÉS FOR FOREIGN POLICY


It was the image that would define a movement: protesters clinging atop the graffiti-ridden statue of a Chilean general in the heart of Santiago, proudly waving the Chilean and Mapuche flags as a plume of burgundy-colored smoke rose around them. They looked over more than 1 million protesters filling the capital’s main artery as far as the eye could see, like a Eugène Delacroix painting come to life.

The scene in question took place in Plaza Italia (since renamed Plaza Dignidad, or Dignity Plaza, by demonstrators) in October 2019, at the height of what would later be known as the estallido social, or social explosion. A hike in metro fares sparked a revolt, with youth hopping turnstiles and boycotting public transit, and then blew up into much more: a nationwide eruption among Chileans of all walks of life denouncing issues including school privatization, income inequality, and political corruption. Demonstrators chanted, “It’s not 30 pesos—it’s 30 years,” to underscore that the metro fare increase was simply the straw that broke the camel’s back amid injustices that had bedeviled the country since the end of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s reign in 1990.

The largest and most effective protest in the country’s modern history, the estallido social prompted Chilean President Sebastián Piñera to launch a state of emergency, a curfew, and a fleet of military personnel in the capital’s streets—and to call a referendum on a new constitution. This weekend, Chileans will vote on whether—and how—to ditch the Pinochet-era constitution that has ruled them ever since.

But nothing has fully explained the nuance of last year’s social upheaval more than one uniquely Chilean word: facho.

“#PlazaDignidad es del pueblo, no del facho,” as one Facebook page implored in the local slang: “Plaza Dignidad is for the people, not for fascists.”

Despite literally translating as “fascist,” the term “facho” conjures up a kaleidoscopic “rage against the system” disposition. It implies a multitude of images—the same way Americans use “redneck” or “aristotrash” to land a critique of far-right social beliefs or of establishment politics that offer power to some over others. At its core, the term is meant to evoke the 1973 coup that resulted in the death of Socialist President Salvador Allende and made way for the controversial rule of Pinochet and his military junta. It also evokes the memory of the country’s 1988 national plebiscite, which resulted in a two-year transition to democracy. In reflecting these events, the term underscores a spate of simmering political grievances, the legacy of human rights abuses by the dictatorship, and resistance to accept that things have to be the way they are because that’s the way things have always been.

During a Twitter feud last year, prominent Sen. José Miguel Insulza, who served as foreign minister in the 1990s and led the Organization of American States for a decade, wrote to a former presidential candidate that in addition to being a facho, he was a liar. The Chilean broadcast journalist Matías del Río, who was criticized for his tepid interview with Piñera in March, confessed in an interview on the prominent YouTube show Domingos Dominicales that he had been harangued by critics as a “facho” ever since. And as inequality and class struggle have persisted in the country, Chileans have witnessed the emergence of the expression “facho pobre” (poor fascist), a reference to middle- and working-class people who support the Chilean right.

Francisco Javier Díaz, the co-author of Dictionary of Chilean Politics, recalls that the word “facho” was even banned on television during the dictatorship. That itself has contributed to making it so powerful among those who resisted Pinochet—and those who are leading the charge during protests today.

“Words are also political instruments,” Díaz said. Lately, facho and related terms have made a comeback to shed light on the government and Pinochet sympathizers’ use of language to deny Chile’s legacy of political and social injustice. “[They] don’t call the 1973 coup a coup. They call it a pronunciamiento,” or military uprising, he said.

Three decades after democracy came back to Chile, the scars left by the Pinochet regime remain palpable. Nearly 40,000 people suffered human rights abuses during the dictatorship, and 3,000 died or disappeared. Another 200,000 Chileans escaped the horrors in their home country by going into exile. Yet those who benefited from the regime’s orthodox economic policies and the controversial rule of law imposed by the military inherited a fond nostalgia for those years. When Pinochet died in 2006, more than 60,000 Chileans paid tribute at his funeral. And as of 2015, 1 in 5 Chileans still supported the military regime.

If the darker aspects of the Pinochet years struggle to break through into historical memory, it’s partly by design. Much of the world was simply unaware of the extent of the regime’s human rights violations until the end of Pinochet’s dictatorship, contends Loreto Urqueta, a legal advisor at Amnesty International Chile. (Although Pinochet was later arrested in London and endured a 16-month legal battle in the House of Lords, he ultimately dodged a slew of charges and died without having been convicted of any crimes.)


READ MORE


Chile’s Protesters Have Won a Path to a New Constitution
Here’s why they want to replace the dictatorship-era document.
DISPATCH | JOHN BARTLETT

Pinochet Still Looms Large in Chilean Politics
And the ongoing protests prove it.
ARGUMENT | MICHAEL ALBERTUS, MARK DEMING

“After the dictatorship, Chile still sold—internally and externally—this image of a successful, prosperous country,” Urqueta said.

But an intense political bitterness was brewing beneath the surface. Chileans on both ends of the political spectrum still struggle to reconcile with their homeland’s facho past. Around 75 percent say the country is yet to achieve reconciliation, and 85 percent believe the military has pacts of silence to protect those involved in human rights violations. That was abundantly clear during the estallido social last fall.

An Amnesty International report published this month called on the Chilean Attorney General’s Office to open criminal investigations against commanders of the police force for their role in human rights violations during last year’s protests, citing that militarized officers injured 1,938 people with tear gas bombs and metal bullets encased in rubber. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights cited sexual violence, torture, and degrading treatment of arrested protesters, in addition to condemning the excessive use of force as a violation of international protocol.

“This is a consequence of the dictatorship. The police have remained the same, and their approach towards demonstrations has remained the same,” said Urqueta, who contributed to the Amnesty report.

As in two-thirds of the 50-odd countries that have undergone a democratic transition since World War II, Chile’s current constitution was a going-away present from the outgoing authoritarian government. Its lack of social protections has continued to push minorities to the periphery and has pushed inequality to levels similar to those during the dictatorship. This weekend’s vote will determine if a new constitution will be drafted and whether it will be done by a constitutional convention of elected officials or a combination of civilians and politicians.

In a moment when the world is watching a rise in populism and authoritarianism, the Chilean plebiscite—whichever way it ultimately breaks—is just the latest and loudest demand for citizen democracy, something that might allow Chile to finally shed its facho past.


Kelly Kimball is the social media editor at Foreign Policy. 

Augusta Saraiva is an intern at Foreign Policy. 

VICTOR JARA THOU ART AVENGED

Ex-Chilean military officer suspected of killing famed singer 50 years ago nabbed in Florida

SYRA ORTIZ BLANES AND OMAR RODRÍGUEZ ORTIZ
MIAMI HERALD • October 16, 2023

Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Tampa’s Space Coast office and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) Miami’s Orlando suboffice arrested Pedro Paulo Barrientos Nunez during a traffic stop in Deltona, Fla., on Oct. 5, 2023. (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement/TNS)

MIAMI (Tribune News Service) — In one of the last songs Chilean folk singer Víctor Jara ever recorded over 50 years ago, he transformed the ominous verses of one of his homeland’s greatest poets into a ballad of stubborn and hopeful nation-building.

“I do not want the country divided, or bled out by seven knives, I want Chile’s light raised over the new house built,” he sings in “Aquí me quedo,” (Here I stay), blending the words of Pablo Neruda with the thrum of guitars.

Jara never finished what would become his final album. In September 1973, he was tortured and killed during a military coup that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power in the South American nation.

Jara’s wife and children have fought for half a century to hold accountable those responsible. But it wasn’t until earlier this month that Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced authorities had arrested Pedro Barrientos Núñez, an ex-Chilean Armed Forces lieutenant suspected of executing Jara, during a traffic stop in Volusia County, Fla., on Oct. 5.

“Barrientos will now have to answer the charges he’s faced with in Chile for his involvement in torture and extrajudicial killing of Chilean citizens,” said Homeland Security Investigations Tampa Special Agent in Charge John Condon.

A Chilean court formally accused him of murdering Jara in December 2012. The country’s Supreme Court ordered Barrientos Núñez’s extradition in Jan. 2013. He had relocated to the United States in 1990 on a visitor visa and later became a U.S. citizen in 2010, according to court documents.

Chile’s government has known for years that the ex-lieutenant was in the United States. But his arrest, over a decade after his indictment, puts a spotlight on the challenges the country has faced in bringing to justice the government officials who committed atrocities during Pinochet’s 17-year rule.

Valentina Infante Batiste, a Chilean sociologist who studies how countries remember and respond in the aftermath of human rights violations and dictatorships, told the Miami Herald that it wasn’t until after 1998, when Pinochet was first detained in London at the request of Spanish authorities, “that the engine of justice accelerated.” He died in 2006 without ever going to prison. Jara’s widow first opened a criminal investigation in 1978.

“Justice in Chile has taken a long time,” said Infante Batiste.


Chile’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Alberto van Klaveren said in a recent interview with Chilean radio station Radio Pauta that American and Chilean authorities had been in conversations about Barrientos Núñez for a long time, but kept it under wraps because he was “on the run” and authorities didn’t want him to know they were looking for him.

Barrientos Núñez is currently being held in an ICE facility in Baker County. Van Klaveren said they were waiting for him to be deported. Extraditions from the U.S. are generally a two-part process where a federal court determines if the other country’s request meets the necessary requirements. Then, the State Department secretary determines whether to hand the person over or not. Extraditions can take years and be subject to appeals.

A spokesperson for Chile’s Supreme Court told the Miami Herald that despite the 2012 criminal indictment in Chile, the criminal process had not moved forward because he was in the United States.

“In Chile, people cannot be tried while not physically present ... once he is expelled from the United States, the criminal process against him will have to be resumed,” said the spokesperson over email.

A family’s day in court

Last month, the U.S. Department of State called the 50th anniversary of the military coup in Chile — which resulted in democratically-elected president Salvador Allende taking his life and Pinochet’s rise to power — an “opportunity to reflect on this break in Chile’s democratic order and the suffering that it caused.”

The American government secretly spent millions to weaken Allende and Chile’s left in the ’60s and ’70s. The CIA revealed in declassified documents that it had tried to launch a separate coup right after Allende’s victory. The agency said it didn’t help with the 1973 coup. But it acknowledged in the records knowing about the plan, being in contact with some of its masterminds for intelligence collection, not discouraging the takeover, and “actively” backing the military junta after the ousting.

Over 3,000 people were killed, disappeared and executed for political reasons during Pinochet’s repressive government, according to Chilean government estimates. Tens of thousands more were detained, persecuted and tortured.

A poster with a picture of teacher and singer Victor Jara, who was tortured and shot to death during the Chilean dictatorship, is seen as people demonstrate at the General Cemetery during the commemoration of the 49th anniversary of the 1973 military coup d’etat of Augusto Pinochet and subsequent death of President Salvador Allende, in Santiago, on Sept. 11, 2022. (Javier Torres, AFP via Getty Images/TNS)

One of those victims was Víctor Lidio Jara Martinez, a well-known communist folk singer-songwriter, playwright, university professor, poet, and Allende ally. Jara was a leading member of the leftist Nueva canción chilena movement that wanted to preserve the country’s folk tradition while advocating for social change through music. He sang about Chile’s poor and indigenous people and wrote lyrical ballads against social inequality, war, and imperialism.

“Already in his time he was tremendously popular and influential, especially for the left,” said Infante Batista.

The military took Jara to a stadium in Santiago in the days after the coup. The sports facility would become a detention and torture camp where thousands were held. Barrientos Núñez was a lieutenant overseeing soldiers there and ordered his underlings to torture and kill Jara, according to a lawsuit that Jara’s wife, children, and estate filed a decade ago against him in a federal court in Florida.

One former member of the Chilean military testified in a separate 2009 case that he had watched Barrientos Núñez shoot the musician and witnessed his torture. Jara was brutally beaten and shot over 40 times in the stadium’s locker room, according to the lawsuit. His wife and daughters buried him in secret before escaping to the United Kingdom.

In 2016, a civil jury ruled in the federal case in Florida that Barrientos Núñez was liable in the killing and torture of Jara. He was ordered to pay $28 million in compensatory and punitive damages. An immigration judge revoked his naturalization and took away his U.S. citizenship this July. That left him with no legal basis to be in the United States.

Barrientos Núñez said in his immigration applications and interviews for permanent residency and citizenship that he had not been involved in military service in another country or participated in the genocide killing of people on the basis of political opinion, according to court records.

In August, Chile’s Supreme Court sentenced six former soldiers to 15 years and a day in prison for killing Jara and lawyer Littré Abraham Quiroga Carvajal, former general director of prisons under Allende. It also handed down a decade-long sentence for kidnapping the pair. Another officer was separately sentenced over five years for covering up the crimes.

‘Pinochet’s legacy is still present’

Barrientos Núñez’s arrest and potential extradition comes five decades after the military coup. It’s been over 30 years since Pinochet lost a referendum vote that led to free elections and a transition back to democracy. Chile has a world-renowned museum of memory that commemorates Pinochet’s victims. The stadium where Jara was held carries his name. But the general’s bloody rule still haunts Chileans.

“Pinochet’s legacy is still present. It’s like an open secret,” said Infante Batiste, the Chilean sociologist.

Allusions to Allende, Pinochet, and the military coup are part of today’s political conversation, said Infante Batiste. When former student activist turned president Gabriel Boric entered the presidential palace for the first time, he turned to greet Allende’s statue. Pinochetistas, enabled by the rise of a populist radical right, hold up photos of the general and his junta at protests — which the scholar said would have once been “absolutely unthinkable.”

Mysteries from the Pinochet years still remain unresolved: Scientists announced this February that the remains of Pablo Neruda, the outspoken communist poet whose words Jara made into song — contained high levels of a botulism strain used to poison political prisoners, raising questions about his demise two weeks after the coup. The experts concluded in 2017 it hadn’t been from prostate cancer, the official cause of death.

But even more pressing to many is where the over 1,000 people who were detained and never seen again might be. Boric launched a plan to search for the missing, which Infante Batiste called an important gesture from the government. It’s historically been on the victim’s relatives to push investigations forward, she said. But Infante Batiste acknowledged the big challenges ahead. The military officers who bore witness and perpetrated the kidnappings and killings share pacts of silence. They are growing old and dying without revealing where the missing are.

The Chileans who haven’t buried loved ones bear the open wounds of a nation once divided.

“Addressing the pain of the families, of the victims, is fundamental,” she said, “As long as their mourning isn’t over, Chile will not achieve peace.”

©2023 Miami Herald.

Chile launches push to find people disappeared in Pinochet era

National Search Plan aims to locate remains of people who were forcibly disappeared during post-coup authoritarian rule.

The Jose Domingo Canas memorial house in Santiago, Chile, displays photos of people who were arrested or went missing under the leadership of Augusto Pinochet on August 30

 [Ivan Alvarado/Reuters]

30 Aug 2023

As Chile approaches the 50th anniversary of its 1973 coup, the country’s government has launched an initiative to search for people who disappeared during the authoritarian rule of General Augusto Pinochet.

Progressive President Gabriel Boric announced the National Search Plan on Wednesday, saying that the country deserves answers about the fate of the people who remain missing. The push coincides with the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances.

Pinochet came to power in the military coup, which saw the overthrow and death of the democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende.

During Pinochet’s 17-year dictatorship, 1,469 people went missing as a result of forced disappearances. Of that number, 1,092 disappeared after being imprisoned, and 377 were executed, but their remains never returned.

“We had the illusion that they were alive, but over the years, we realised they weren’t,” Juana Andreani, a former detainee and friend of a person who disappeared, told the Reuters news agency.

“At least they should tell us what happened to them, what was done to them. That is the worst part of these 50 years.”

Pinochet’s rule came amid a wave of military United States-backed coups in Latin America during the Cold War period.

Reporting from Chile’s capital Santiago, Al Jazeera’s Lucia Newman said successive Chilean governments have failed to seriously search for the disappeared people since Pinochet left power in 1990.

Newman noted that mass graves have been previously discovered in Chile near former interrogation centres, but not all the human remains found have been properly examined or identified.

“The forensic science has advanced quite a lot, so there is hope that at least some of the disappeared will be identified, even if it’s just a bone,” she said.

“A lot of people here told me, even if it’s just a little piece of the person that went missing that [they] can bury, that will help a lot to put their pain to rest.”

Earlier this week, a 42-year-old lawyer, who was taken from his family at birth during the Pinochet era, met his biological mother for the first time after finding her through DNA tracing. He had been raised in the US.

“I was suffocated by the gravity of this moment,” Jimmy Lippert Thyden told The Associated Press after reuniting with his mother in the Chilean city of Valdivia. “How do you hug someone in a way that makes up for 42 years of hugs?”

On Wednesday, Boric said justice had taken “too long” for the victims.

“This is not a favour to the families. It is a duty to society as a whole to deliver the answers the country deserves and needs,” the president said, as reported by the New York Times.

Victims and their relatives have called for the Chilean armed forces to release more information about the fate of missing people.

“Obviously, the higher ranks of the armed forces are responsible. What did they do with the corpses?” Carlos Gonzalez, who was jailed and tortured by the military during the dictatorship, told Reuters.

“It can’t be that we don’t know what happened with around 1,000 Chileans. This just can’t be.”

Advocates have also pushed for US files related to Chile to be made public.

Earlier this week, the US Department of State declassified a 1973 intelligence briefing to then-President Richard Nixon informing him of the “possibility of an early military coup attempt” in Chile, days before the putsch took place.

The US has admitted to engaging in covert propaganda operations against Allende even before his election. It also funded opposition groups during his tenure.

“Broadly speaking, US policy sought to maximise pressures on the Allende government to prevent its consolidation and limit its ability to implement policies contrary to US and hemispheric interests,” a 1975 US Senate report reads.

But it remains unclear whether Washington played a direct role in the coup.

SOURCE: AL JAZEERA AND NEWS AGENCIES

Clashes, arson mar Chile march to commemorate Pinochet victims

Santiago (AFP) – Chileans clashed with police Sunday and committed acts of arson in Santiago during a march to commemorate the victims of Augusto Pinochet's military dictatorship, 50 years after the coup d'etat that brought him to power.

Enfrentamientos entre manifestantes y policía durante el 50 aniversario del golpe de Estado en Chile 10 de septiembre de 2023 en Santiago 

© Pablo VERA / AFP

Civilians and police skirmished outside the presidential palace, La Moneda, where then-president Salvador Allende was overthrown on September 11, 1973, and at the cemetery that houses a memorial to the victims of Pinochet's brutal regime.

Police used tear gas and water cannon in confrontations that left three officers injured, according to the government.

Three people were arrested.

President Gabriel Boric, who had briefly joined the procession of some 5,000 people, according to official estimates, condemned the lawlessness after demonstrators broke through security barriers at La Moneda and damaged the building's facade

"As President of the Republic, I categorically condemn these events without any nuance," he wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.

"The irrationality of attacking what Allende and so many other Democrats fought for is vile," he added.

Some 5,000 people marched in Santiago to commemorate the victims of the coup d'etat 50 years ago that brought dictator Augusto Pinochet to power

 © Javier TORRES / AFP

Half-a-century after the coup, Chile remains divided among those who defend the dictatorship and those who repudiate it.

Boric on Sunday became the first president to take part in the annual commemoration since the end of the dictatorship in 1990.
Government 'adversaries'

There were also clashes with police at other points during the march, with some marchers hurling Molotov cocktails and setting up burning barricades.

Inside the cemetery, some mausoleums were damaged, including the tomb of a right-wing senator killed in 1991.

"Those responsible for this violence are adversaries of the government," said Manuel Monsalve, Deputy Interior Secretary.

The bulk of the participants, bearing Chilean flags and chanting slogans such as "Truth and justice now!" or "Allende lives," marched peacefully.

"September 11 is a date that fills us with memories, but also gives us some anguish, because instead of advancing we have regressed," 76-year-old Patricia Garzon, a former political prisoner, told AFP along the route.

"With this march we remember that 1973 broke democracy in Chile, and now we continue fighting to maintain and strengthen it," added Luis Pontigo, 72, a retired teacher.

Three people were arrested during a march in Santiago to commemorate the victims of the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship 50 years after the coup that brought him to power

 © Javier TORRES / AFP

More than 3,200 people were killed or "disappeared" -- abducted and presumed killed -- by Pinochet's security forces, and about 38,000 were tortured.

The general died of a heart attack on December 10, 2006 aged 91, without ever stepping foot in a court.

Fifty years later, Chile is still trying to find its post-coup identity and shape a new political system.

In May, the far-right Republican Party led by conservative lawyer Jose Antonio Kast -- a Pinochet apologist -- won 23 of 51 seats on the council that will write a new constitution to replace the one dating from the dictatorship era.

In the morning, Boric inaugurated an exhibition dedicated to Allende's memory at La Moneda, in the presence of the deceased Marxist leader's family members.

Issued on: 10/09/2023
© 2023 AFP

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2023/09/50-years-later-wounds-of-pinochet.html

CHILE’S NEW SHADOWS

The army on the streets, demonstrators targeted, activists receiving death threats: Chile’s crackdown of the current wave of protests smacks of the Pinochet years, writes Roxana Olivera.

María Candelaria Acevedo is living through another nightmare.

In her hometown of Concepción, the second-largest city in Chile, five hours south of Santiago, people took to the streets on 25 November banging pots and pans, just as civilians had done to protest against the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet three decades ago. They made their way towards Plaza de la Independencia, where many arrived with their hands in the air to show they had no weapons. Others sang Víctor Jara’s iconic protest anthem ‘El derecho de vivir en paz’ (The right to live in peace.) Some waved the Chilean flag, others the Mapuche indigenous flag. All called for Chilean President Sebastián Piñera to step down.

Armoured police vehicles encircled the square to break up the march. Protesters threw rocks at them. Riot police, dressed in full combat gear, jumped out of the vehicles and, some wielding batons, advanced on the crowd. Police used tear gas and water cannons and fired bullets. Protesters fled in all directions to seek shelter, and as tear gas engulfed the streets, police and soldiers began to make arrests. First responders arrived to tend to the wounded, but they too were assaulted by police.

Similar scenes have occurred throughout Chile since 18 October 2019. A hike in subway fares in Santiago caused thousands of people to take to the streets, but soon demonstrations morphed into broader protests against social inequality, President Piñera’s neoliberal economic policies and abuse of power. The president mobilized the army to impose order. ‘We are at war with a powerful enemy,’ Piñera said on 20 October.

The ‘war’ bulletin so far: some 10,000 civilians have been arrested in just over two months; 3,460 people have been injured, and 26 have lost their lives.

For the past two months, Acevedo​, who is a 61-year-old Communist Party member and the leader of the Sebastián Acevedo Movement Against Torture, has been visiting jails, looking for people arrested by riot police. Most of them, she says, are youth and minors. ‘Many of them are being beaten, tortured and sexually assaulted, but these human rights abuses are not being reported in mainstream media,’ she tells me, the sound of bullets and tear gas still going off in the background.

Acevedo​ is worried: the threats and violent crackdown evoke scenes of the Pinochet military dictatorship (1973-90), as well as painful memories from her own life.

PINOCHET’S CRIMES

On 9 November 1983, Acevedo​ was fast asleep when around 50 armed men, dressed in civilian clothes, stormed into her home to arrest her. The then 26-year-old accounting student, and member of the Communist Youth of Chile, did not attempt to resist arrest as the men planted boxes filled with weapons in her house.

Her father, Sebastián Acevedo, saw his daughter being dragged blindfolded into a white van parked outside his home. María Candelaria’s children, aged five and six, looked on, petrified.
When you’ve survived something like that, it’s hard not to imagine that you could go through it again

An hour later, María Candelaria’s brother, Galo, was detained too. Like his sister, he had joined the Communist Youth of Chile and taken a stand against the Pinochet regime. They were two of the thousands of people detained and tortured or exiled during the Pinochet regime – while more than 3,200 were executed or forcibly disappeared.

Both María Candelaria and Galo were accused of being ‘terrorists’. They were interrogated and tortured. María Candelaria was sexually assaulted and received several rounds of electric shock on her breasts, genitals and rectum. ‘Each session lasted around 20 minutes,’ she recalls. ‘And each time it took place, I thought I would die at the end of it.’ Galo endured beatings in the stomach, knees and ears, as well as waterboarding and electric shocks on his chest and genitals.

After two days of unsuccessful efforts to find his children, in an act of desperation, Sebastián doused himself in gasoline and set himself on fire. As he walked in flames, he screamed his children’s names, demanding information about their whereabouts.

That afternoon, María Candelaria was released from custody. At the hospital, she was not allowed to see her father and was only permitted to speak to him over the phone. ‘He told me that he loved me very dearly, and he asked me for forgiveness,’ she recalls. ‘He said he had no choice but to do what he did, and he also asked me to secure my brother’s release.’

Maria Candelaria Acevedo​ today. Roxana Olivera

Sebastián Acevedo died a few hours later, aged 52. Galo was not as lucky as his sister. He would spend two years in jail. He was not allowed to attend his father’s funeral.

Three weeks later, María Candelaria was arrested again. She would spend one year in prison. She says she never carried or used weapons. Her work was strictly political – distributing pamphlets and setting up barricades during protests. ‘My only crime back then was to stand up to police brutality and human rights violations,’ she says.

IS HISTORY REPEATING ITSELF?

Today, 36 years later, Pinochet may be long gone, but similar police violence, security tactics, and arbitrary detentions have returned to Chile. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and the United Nations have all concluded that grave human rights violations have been committed during the recent protests. So far, 792 lawsuits – 617 of them for torture and inhumane treatment – have been launched against the state.
Luis Manuel Mardones, 57, also a victim of torture under the Pinochet dictatorship, was arrested after trying to shield a 14-year-old girl from police brutality

‘This is a catastrophe both in medical and human rights terms,’ says Dr Enrique Morales, President of the Human Rights Department for the Medical College of Chile. Among the injured, some 357 protesters have suffered severe eye injuries after being shot in the eyes with rubber bullets, rubber-coated steel pellets or teargas cartridges by police. ‘Many of the victims reported being shot in the face while taking photographs or recording events with their cell phones,’ says Morales. He says that more than 100 of those cases will result in permanent loss of an eye. At the time of writing, two of them have lost eyesight in both eyes, while 23 have lost vision in one eye.

Besides, there have been hundreds of reports of abuse of detainees in custody, including brutal beatings and sexual abuse. For instance, Luis Manuel Mardones, 57, also a victim of torture under the Pinochet dictatorship, was arrested after trying to shield a 14-year-old girl from police brutality. Not only did he end up with a broken arm and other injuries – Mardones says he was forced to strip naked and squat on the ground as police prodded his testicles with their batons. ‘Next time we catch you at a protest, we’ll lock you up for good,’ he says policemen told him.

This hasn’t stopped Acevedo from protesting. She and a group of her Communist Party colleagues – all members of the Sebastián Acevedo Movement Against Torture – have been organizing several of the peaceful marches that are now taking place in Concepción. And as a result of their active engagement in anti-government demonstrations, they are being targeted. Several of them have received death threats.

Carla Yáñez, for example, was preparing a demonstration of A Covered Eye, in which students wear blood-stained T-shirts and cover an eye in solidarity of those who have lost eyesight because of police assaults. She was approached by an unknown individual, who said he needed to talk to the person in charge of the Sebastián Acevedo Movement. As she turned to talk to him, he told her: ‘Take care of your children, f***ing bitch!’

Yáñez’s 19-year-old daughter Javiera, then started receiving notes on bits of scrap paper, reading: ‘F***ing communist, I am going to kill you.’

Fellow activist Magdalena Paredes, 28, was just stepping out of her house to join the demonstration when she was handed a similar note: ‘F***ing communist, we are following you.’

The recipients believe that these threats were intended for Acevedo​. Asked whether she fears for her life once again, she admits that she does. ‘When you’ve survived something like that, it’s hard not to imagine that you could go through it again. But I won’t let that fear stop me,’ she says. Now more than ever, she feels the need to keep her father’s memory alive. ‘I feel his presence every day,’ she says. ‘It’s as if I carry his weight on my back… I just can’t let the horrors of the past happen again.’

---30---

Roxana Olivera is an award-winning investigative journalist based in Toronto. 

(c) New Internationalist