Brazil & Southern Cone - September 2013 (ISSN 1741-4431)

Falling just over two months before the 17 November general election, the 40^th anniversary of the coup that ushered in the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet (1974-1990) inevitably took on added political resonance. Legacies of the Pinochet era, like the privatized higher education system and the binomial electoral system, are key issues in the 2013 campaign.

Forty years on from the 11 September 1973 coup against the left-wing former president Salvador Allende (1970-1973) and his Marxist Unidad Popular government, Chile remains politically divided, albeit less so than a decade ago.

In a report* released on 3 September by the Santiago-based think tank and pollster Centro de Estudios de la Realidad Contemporánea (Cerc), 55% of respondents considered the Pinochet dictatorship “bad” or “very bad”, up from 35% in December 2009. Just 9% said it was “good”, down from 21% in 2009.

Yet a not insignificant 16% of respondents still considered the military “justified” in its actions in 1973, down from 36% in 2003; 41% held General Pinochet directly responsible for the coup, up 17 points on 2003.

A full three quarters of respondents (75%) believe that traces of the dictatorship remain today. The Pinochet regime is most synonymous abroad with its notorious human rights record, with 3,216 people still officially missing and 38,254 others recognised as survivors of political imprisonment and/or torture.

*The Cerc interviewed 1,200 people across Chile on 10-22 June, with a 3% poll error margin. The report, entitled ‘Barometro Cerc a quarenta años del golpe militar’ is available at  http://www.cerc.cl/cph_upl/A_4_decadas_del_Golpe_Militar.pdf

Apologies

The build-up to the 11 September anniversary was marked by some unprecedented apologies. On 4 September, the national magistrates association issued a statement apologising for the judiciary’s actions during the dictatorship. “The time has come to ask for the forgiveness of victims... and of Chilean society", the judges’ statement ran. Two days later, Supreme Justice Court (CSJ) President Rubén Ballesteros acknowledged that the court was responsible for “serious actions and omissions” during the Pinochet era, although he notably stopped short of issuing an apology.

The country’s national TV network, Televisión Nacional de Chile (TVN), which under the dictatorship complied with government censorship and avoided mention of reports of police brutality or opposition rallies, commemorated the anniversary by broadcasting previously unseen footage of the era and running powerful documentaries.

On 12 September lawyers presented a criminal complaint on behalf of 119 individuals against Agustín Edwards, the owner of Chile’s leading business daily, the conservative El Mercurio newspaper and its eponymous media network, for his role in collaborating with the Pinochet regime. A Santiago appeals court justice, Mario Carroza, who since January has been working on an investigation into who instigated the coup after admitting a complaint by relatives of the disappeared, said that Edwards would be called to testify as a witness in the case.

Some key political figures made similar gestures. Interior Minister Andrés Chadwick, a former advisor to Pinochet, reiterated sentiments he first expressed last year when he said that he had regretted being part of a government that violated human rights. Senator Hernán Larraín, a former president (2006-2008) of the conservative Unión Demócrata Independiente (UDI), the senior partner in President Sebastián Piñera’s ruling Coalición por el Cambio, also made headlines on 27 August when he apologised for the coup.

Yet the issue is still divisive for the Piñera government. The president himself has previously stressed the fact that he voted ‘no’ in a 1988 plebiscite on whether Pinochet should stay in power for a further eight years. In an interview with the national daily La Tercera on 31 August, Piñera ruffled feathers within both the UDI and his own Renovación Nacional (RN), the junior party in the Coalición, by stating that there were “passive accomplices that knew and didn’t do anything, or didn’t want to know and also didn’t do anything”.

This prompted complaints from the leaders of both the UDI and the RN, Patricio Melero and Carlos Larraín respectively. Melero said Piñera’s remarks were “unjust”, while Larraín said it caused “discomfort”. That Piñera’s conciliatory bent was not shared by everyone in the ruling coalition was also evident in remarks by UDI figures like Deputy Iván Moreira, who ahead of the coup anniversary told reporters that “Pinochet saved the lives of a complete generation” by preventing the country from descending into civil war. The UDI also came under fire from the opposition for refusing to sign up to a statement issued by the legislature explicitly condemning the military coup that brought Pinochet to power. Gustavo Hasbún, the UDI bench leader in the lower chamber, dismissed it as a “political stunt” and said that “history could not be reinterpreted”.

Given these mixed signals, President Piñera’s speech commemorating the coup was much anticipated. Delivered on 9 September at a ceremony at the presidential palace, Piñera was clear to condemn the human rights violations under Pinochet, stating: “Phenomena like torture, terrorism, political assassinations or forced disappearances can never be justified without falling into a serious moral vacuum”. He stressed that much more could have been done to safeguard human rights. He also asked for help in healing the country and made a plea for anyone with information about the ‘disappeared’ to come forward.

Yet, at the same time, Piñera also said the coup was not “a surprise” given “repeated violations of the rule of law” and “political, social and economic chaos” under the Allende government. He noted that “responsibilities for the coup were more shared than some maintain”.

This echoes one of the two basic arguments used to defend the Pinochet legacy – that by 1973 Chile was a deeply polarised country on the brink of civil war and economic collapse. The other is that the free market reforms implemented under the Pinochet regime provided the basis for Chile’s subsequent economic prosperity.

Illustrating Piñera’s difficulties in trying to act as a voice for national reconciliation, only three of the nine presidential candidates accepted Piñera’s invitation to attend the 9 September ceremony at the presidential palace: the ruling coalition’s Evelyn Matthei (of the UDI), Alfredo Sfeir of the Partido Ecologista and Ricardo Israel of the centrist Partido Regionalista de los Independientes (PRI).

The Agrupación de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos (AFDD), which groups family and friends of the disappeared, later criticised the various apologies as too “abstract and insufficient”.

Meanwhile Former President Michele Bachelet (2006-2010) of the centre-left opposition Concertación, who is the leading presidential contender in the 2013 race, spoke at Santiago’s museum of memory and human rights the same day. While acknowledging an “absence of dialogue, intolerance and polarisation” under Allende, she was clear that the “responsibilities for installing the dictatorship, crimes committed by State agents, the violation of human rights, are not justifiable, are not inevitable and are the responsibility of those who committed them and those who justify them”. Bachelet, who, along with her mother was tortured before going into exile while her father, an air force general, died of a heart attack in prison (following torture) under Pinochet, went on to demand an end to impunity surrounding crimes committed under Pinochet.

• Clashes on the day

The government deployed an additional 8,000 Carabineros to the capital in anticipation of any violence or demonstrations on 11 September. In the event, 264 people were arrested and 42 Carabineros injured – including General Rodolfo Pacheco, the head of the Carabineros in the Santiago metropolitan area. Yet Interior Minister Chadwick described the events as “much calmer” than other commemorative acts in recent years, like the ‘Day of the Young Combatant’ marking the deaths of the brothers Eduardo and Rafael Vergara Toledo, slain by police on 29 March 1985. Last year there were 228 arrests and 22 people injured in clashes between police and protestors marking that incident.

Calls for justice

Bachelet was not the only one calling for an end to impunity. To mark the 40^th anniversary of the coup local and international human rights organisations like Amnesty International (AI) demanded an end to the 1978 Amnesty Decree Law, which excludes all individuals (on both sides) involved in human rights violations between 11 September 1973 and 10 March 1978 from criminal responsibility.

On 10 September AI issued a statement highlighting that at least 262 individuals have been sentenced for human rights violations and that there are more than 1,100 judicial proceedings still open. While noting that “some judicial decisions have circumvented the application of the amnesty law”, AI said that the law’s continued existence was “incompatible with Chile’s international human rights obligations.

However on 13 September, Justice Hugo Dohmestch, a CSJ spokesperson announced that as of 1 October an unspecified number of judges would be exclusively assigned to investigating human rights violations committed under the dictatorship, up from the current seven. The Agrupación de Familiares de Ejecutados Políticos (AFEP), which groups relatives of executed politicians, welcomed the move.

In AI’s annual report on human rights (May 2013), the NGO pointed to other signs of progress towards national reconciliation in Chile, including the indictment of eight former military officers in connection with the murder of the well-known singer-songwriter and political activist, Víctor Jara, one of the most emblematic cases of human rights violations under Pinochet. In late December 2012, two of the officers — Pedro Pablo Barrientos Núñez, a former lieutenant who is now a US citizen, and a former colonel, Hugo Sánchez Marmonti — were accused of direct responsibility for the murder, with the six held to be accomplices. On 30 January Chile’s supreme court approved a judge’s request to have Barrientos extradited from the US to face trial in Chile, although Chile’s foreign ministry has not yet moved on this request. The Jara case is under renewed scrutiny after a San Francisco-based human rights organisation, the Center for Justice and Accountability (CJA), on 4 September filed a lawsuit in a US federal court on behalf of Jara’s wife and daughters against Barrientos, in line with two laws that allow US courts to hear allegations of human rights violations committed in another country.

On 30 August, the International Day of the Disappeared, a representative of the Santiago appeals court, Leopoldo Llanos, announced new charges against Manuel Contreras, the jailed former chief of Pinochet’s secret police force, Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA), as well as some 20 other military officials in relation to the disappearances of Juan Aurelio Villarroel Zárate and Clara Canteros Torres, as well as the murder of Eduardo Canteros Prado, all linked to Chile’s Partido Comunista. Contreras is already serving more than 200 years for human rights violations

First step to replace binomial system

On 10 September Chile’s 38-member senate approved an initiative to reform the country’s electoral system. Among other things, the initiative, now being discussed in the 120-member lower chamber, proposes amending article 47 of the 1980 constitution, which fixes the lower chamber should be fixed at 120 deputies.

This is widely considered the first step to replacing the binomial electoral system, which assigns two seats to each constituency and under which electoral candidates must win by a two-thirds majority of the votes cast, stacking the odds in favour of Chile’s two main political alliances.

The initiative is based on an unexpected deal reached in July by the RN leader Carlos Larraín and Senator Patricio Walker of the Concertación’s largest and most moderate party, Democracia Cristiana [RBS-13-07].

• Line-up

On 19 August, the registration deadline, nine candidates registered to run in the 17 November elections. This is the highest number of presidential election candidates in Chile for the last 75 years. The leading four are: former president Michelle Bachelet (2006-2010), who is running for the left-wing opposition Concertación; Evelyn Matthei of the ruling Coalición por el Cambio; Marco Enríquez-Ominami of the Partido Progresista (PRO), and Franco Parisi, an independent. The other five candidates (who barely register in the polls) are: Roxana Miranda (Partido Igualdad); Alfredo Sfeir (Partido Ecologista Verde); Marcel Claude (Partido Humanista) Tomás Jocelyn-Holt (independent) and Ricardo Israel (Partido Regionalista de los Independientes).

• Juan Emilio Cheyre

On 21 August Juan Emilio Cheyre, the head of Chile’s electoral service (Servicio Electoral, Servel), resigned. A former head of the military (2002-2006), Cheyre quit after appearing on the TV programme ‘El Informante’ the previous day in which he spoke publicly about his role in handing over to a convent a two-year child, Ernesto Lejderman, the son of two left-wing activists killed during the military coup. Lejderman, who was subsequently raised by his grandparents in Argentina, also appeared on the programme. Cheyre, who was carrying out military functions in La Serena at the time he handed over Lejderman, had appeared as a witness in a case against three former military officials in 2007. On 9 September lawyers presented a new case against Cheyre in a La Serena court for kidnapping and torture.

• Dictatorships united

On 14 September the Brazilian daily O Globo shed new light on the cooperation between the Pinochet regime and Brazil’s last military dictatorship (1964-1985). According to 17 September report in the daily O Globo, Brazil’s military provided the Pinochet government with toxins including Botulinum toxin that political prisoners allege were used against them by Chile’s DINA. According to the report, the toxin may have been sent to Santiago in diplomatic pouches.