Repression remains tool of Chile’s Govt

Press, 22 October 1983, Page 26

Repression remains tool of Chile’s Govt

NZPA-Reuter Santiago

After years of international condemnation of Chile’s military government for its record on human rights, the issue of repression is still very much alive. Human rights organisations in Chile say the recent series of mass protests against the rule of President Pinochet has persuaded the Government to break with the system of selective persecution it had evolved over the last 10 years. Four days of protest in the last four months were met by an increasingly heavy hand, culminating in a dusk-to-dawn curfew enforced by thousands of troops in the capital on August 11.

More than 30 people died in violence during the protests, most of them as a result of the last one.

“We could say that the opposition demonstrations were repressed by the simple, indiscriminate display of violence and potential violence,” said Hector Contreras, a lawyer with the Catholic Church’s human rights organisation, the Vicariate of Solidarity. ,

The Government holds the opposition morally responsible for the deaths, saying security forces were used in working class neighbourhoods, where the worst of the violence occurred, to prevent looting and vandalism and that troops opened fire only when they were attacked.

But the Vicariate and the Chilean Human Rights Commission, the other major group working in the field, have collected scores of denunciations from people complaining of irrational and ’ uncontrolled acts of •violence by the security forces.

The Archbishop of Santiago, Juan Francisco Fresno, who is responsible for the Vicariate, has sent a dossier of such allegations to the Minister of the Interior, Mr Sergio Jarpa. Previously, the Government used a wide range of weapons against opponents, carefully chosen for each case. These included harassment, arrest, torture, exile, internal exile and imprisonment. Leftist activists were the principal victims. “Before, there was a fairly stratified system of repression which did not affect the great mass of the people,” said Mr Contreras. Serious though the incidents of August 11 were, they bear no comparison to the bloodshed that followed the military coup of September 11, 1973, which many Chileans at first welcomed as saving them from open civil war. Andres Dominguez, co-or-dinator of the Human Rights Commission, said in an interview that an estimated 10,000 people died as the security forces systematically pursued supporters of the Leftist coalition headed by the late socialist President Salvador Allende. “In the first few months, the brutality was unbounded,” he said.

President Allende himself died in the Moneda Palace on the day of the coup. The armed forces said he committed suicide.

Many of the victims died at the hands of the secret police from the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), which was finally dissolved in 1977, a few months after an international outcry at the murder in Washington of President Allende’s former Foreign Minister, Orlando Letelier. But the DINA was replaced immediately by the National Information Centre (C.N.1.), which according to Mr Dominguez has specialised in torture, refining it to a precise art. The London-based human rights organisation, Amnesty International, recently denounced the existence of secret jails and torture centres in Chile. The United Nations General Assembly has also been

a persistent critic of Chile’s human rights record, much to the annoyance of the Government, which allowed a U.N. delegation to visit in 1978 and then promptly called a referendum which rejected its report. Though hundreds of people are now actively involved in human rights organisations within Chile, most recognise that the pioneer in the field was Cardinal Raul Silva Henriquez, who has just retired after 25 years as Archbishop of Santiago. He was responsible for setting up an ecumenical Committee for Co-operation for Peace in Chile after the coup, to defend human rights. When it was wound up under Government pressure in 1975, he immediately founded the Vicariate.

The Human Rights Commission was established in 1978 and has played a more political campaigning role while the Vicariate concentrates on legal help for victims of repression and on the collection of statistics.

The Vicariate, whose figures are regarded by diplomats as the most reliable, estimates that in the last decade 35,000 people died, disappeared or were executed in Chile.

Mr Dominguez said at least as many more were exiled, sought refuge in embassies, left voluntarily for fear of reprisals, or simply never returned to Chile from trips abroad. The Government, which officially estimates the number of exiles at about 10,000, has in the last few months begun issuing lists of those allowed to return

— a 1 process speeded up since Mr Jarpa’s appointment last month. The new Minister has taken a number of other measures, such as lifting the 10-year-old state of emergency, giving rise to hopes that the human rights situation will eventually improve.

Lifting the state of emergency has ended the curfew but has had little other

immediate effect as most of the rights restored are still curtailed under Article 24 of the Constitution.

This forbids new publications, restricts right of assembly, allows the Government to detain people for five days in places which are not jails, exile them, bar them from returning to Chile or deport them to remote parts of the country. The article which gives the President these emergency powers if he decides internal peace is threatened is transitory and expires on September 11. Mr Jarpa has said he would prefer not to use it, but it is likely to be renewed, enabling the authorities to restore the curfew for the next protest. Mr Dominguez, whose father was killed after the coup, and who himself spent a period in exile, says the Constitution, approved by plebiscite in 1980, fundamentally contradicts a number of human rights. Apart from the powers under the transitional articles in force until 1989, it discriminates against people on the basis of their beliefs — specifically Marxist beliefs* — and places national security above all other considerations. Totalitarian doctrines or those based on class struggle, which attack the family or espouse violence are illegal.

Parties based on these doctrines are banned for ever under the Constitution and their members cannot hold public office by election or appointment, or take up jobs in education and the news media. The Government uses Article 24 against Marxists, while against others it contents itself with internal security laws which go through courts.

At least 10 Marxist union leaders are in internal exile for up to three months. Analysts say anyone on the Left is fair game for persecution. But disappearances are now rare.