Indictment a victory for international law

[Judi Lynn]

Posted on Thu, Dec. 30, 2004




CHILE'S PINOCHET


Indictment a victory for international law

BY SAUL LANDAU

[e-mail]


Former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet is finally being brought to justice. This represents a victory not only for Chilean civil society but for international law. It also reopens the possibility of prosecuting Pinochet for a 1976 murder in Washington.

On Sept. 21, 1976, Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt died in a car bombing on Washington's Embassy Row. Letelier, exiled in Washington, had served as defense minister under the deposed government of democratically elected President Salvador Allende. Moffitt was his colleague at the Institute for Policy Studies, a think tank where they both worked.

The FBI traced the plot to the highest offices of the Chilean government and indicted the two top officials of its intelligence and secret police agencies. But Pinochet's name was dramatically absent from the indictment despite the fact that two FBI special agents and U.S. prosecutor Lawrence Barcella all stated publicly that it was ''inconceivable'' that Letelier could have been targeted without Pinochet's authorization. Successive attorneys general, reflecting presidential political proclivities, have not placed Pinochet's name on the still-open Letelier-Moffitt murder indictment.

Before leaving the post of president, after he lost in a 1988 referendum, Pinochet granted himself amnesty, made himself senator for life and then used this protected status to systematically evade the clutches of the law in Chile and abroad.
(snip/...)

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/opinion/10527072.htm
(Free registration is required)



Pinochet liked to say that no blade of grass moved in Chile without his order.

http://www.time.com/time/europe/magazine/article/0,13005,901020701-265371,00.html

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Chile's torture victims to get life pensions

Report details 'insanity of intense cruelty'

Tom Burgis in Santiago
Tuesday November 30, 2004
The Guardian

The Chilean government is to compensate 28,000 victims of torture after a comprehensive report published yesterday concluded that Augusto Pinochet's military government had orchestrated a state policy of terror.
Addressing the nation, President Ricardo Lagos spoke of "the magnitude of the suffering, the insanity of the intense cruelty, the immensity of the pain" detailed in the findings of the national commission on political detention and torture, led by the archbishop emeritus of Santiago, Sergio Valech.

The year-long commission heard testimony from 35,000 people who had been victims of torture during the dictatorship of 1973 to 1990.

Mr Lagos revealed that 94% of those detained had been subjected to torture and that, of the 3,400 women who gave evidence, almost all had been victims of sexual violence.

"How can we explain such horror?" Mr Lagos asked. "I do not have an answer."

He called the report "an experience without precedent in the world" and said it presented Chileans with "an inescapable reality: political detention and torture constituted an institutional practice of the state". He acknowledged that the armed forces had been the instruments of state-sponsored repression.
(snip/...)http://talk.workunlimited.co.uk/chile/story/0,13755,1362579,00.html

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Kissinger Encouraged Chile's Brutal Repression, New Documents Show

by Lucy Komisar


READ
"Pinochet Case Makes U.S. Media Squirm"

(AR) NEW YORK -- The secret government files on Chile, which the Clinton Administration says will be opened to the Spanish prosecutor of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, will prove a major embarrassment for Henry Kissinger, the American most tied to the U.S.-assisted plot to the 1973 overthrow the elected government of President Salvador.
They will show how, in the months and years following the 1973 coup, Kissinger covered up U.S. information about atrocities in Chile and sought to persuade Pinochet that the U.S. government did not consider his behavior a major problem.

A newly declassified memorandum about Kissinger's only meeting with Pinochet, in 1976, details just how hard the former Secretary of State under President Gerald Ford tried to shield the Chilean general from criticism. Kissinger also served as Secretary of State from 1973 to 1974 under former President Richard Nixon.

The memorandum describes how Kissinger stroked and bolstered Pinochet, and how, with hundreds of political prisoners still being jailed and tortured, Kissinger assured Pinochet that the Ford administration would not punish him for violations of human rights. Kissinger assured him that he was a victim of Communist propaganda and urged him not to pay too much attention to his American critics.
(snip/...)http://www.monitor.net/monitor/9903a/kissingerchile.html

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HOW BODIES OF PRISONERS WERE UNEARTHED AND BURNED IN REGIMENTS AS PART OF "OPERATION REMOVE TELEVISIONS"

La Nacón, 16 July 2004. by Jorge Escalante

Disappeared in Barracks from Hell

It was almost night in early 1979 when the Intelligence Subofficial received the category cryptogram in the Regiment Húsares de Angol marked A-1, indicating "maximum urgency". He flew to the machine to decipher and translate the text. The content made him run with the paper to the unit commander. The order came directly from the commander in chief of the Army, Augusto Pinochet, and it was decisive. Pinochet was ordering that all the bodies of the bodies of the executed political prisoners that were within the regiment's jurisdiction be dug up and made to disappear.

In the words of the Subofficial, that the Fifth Investigative Department and Judge Guzmán revealed in the past few weeks, Pinochet threatened in the document to "retire" any regiment commander if, after the "cleaning" order was given, bodies of the disappeared were still found in his jurisdiction.

The discovery in November 1978 of the bodies of 15 campesinos murdered in Lonquén had alarmed the regime. Throughout Chile, "Operation Remove Televisions" began. This sentence was used to cover up the job, according to those who have testified in the trial. The same order was received in all the regiments in those same days, although some arrived at the end of 1978. Thus the double crime was consummated: unearth the bodies of those murdered years earlier in order to make them disappear. It was an operation different from the way in which DINA disappeared people shortly after they were killed, largely by throwing them in the ocean. Although some of these exhumed bodies also appear as thrown into the water in the Armed Forces report issued in response to the Human Rights Roundtable (Mesa de Diálogo).
(snip/...)

http://www.tni.org/pin-watch/watch56.htm#4

13 GENERAL AUGUSTO PINOCHET
President of Chile
On July 2, 1986, 18 year old Carmen Gloria Quintana was walking through a Santiago slum when she and photographer Rodrigo Rojas were confronted by government security forces. According to eyewitnesses, the two were set ablaze by soldiers and beaten while they burned. Their bodies were then wrapped in blankets and dumped in a ditch miles away. Witnesses who spoke out about what they saw were beaten and arrested. Such events are not unusual since "Captain General" Augusto Pinochet seized power from democratically elected President Salvador Allende in 1973, and buried Chile's 150 year old democracy. "Democracy is the breeding ground of communism," says Pinochet.
The bloody coup, in which Allende was assassinated, was carefully managed by the CIA and ITT, according to the Church Committee report. Tens of thousands of Chileans have been tortured, killed, and exiled since then, according to Amnesty Intemational. A U.S. congressional delegation was told by inmates at San Miguel Prison that they had been tortured by "the application of electric shock, simultaneous blows to the ears, cigarette burns, and simulated executions by firing squads." Despite Chile's bad human rights record, the U.S. government continued to support Pinochet with international loans.
(snip/...)

http://home.iprimus.com.au/korob/fdtcards/SouthAmerica.html



The couple: Gloria, Rodrigo.
He died from his burns, she was taken to Canada for treatment.



Carmen Gloria Quintana with the Sebastián Acevedo Anti-Torture Movement


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You may find these Pinochet "human rights violation" torture methods sound a little familiar, although they were used in the early 1970's in Chile:

Torture methods were extremely varied. An almost universal technique was violent and continual beating until blood flowed and bones were broken. Another form was to make detention conditions so harsh that they themselves constituted torture, for example, keeping prisoners lying face down on the ground or keeping them standing rigid for many hours; keeping them many hours or days naked under constant light, or the opposite, unable to see because of blindfolds or hoods, or tied up; keeping them in cubicles so narrow-sometimes made just for this purpose-that they were unable to move; holding them in solitary confinement along with one or more of these conditions; denying them food or water, or clothing, or sanitary facilities. It was also common to hang prisoners up by their arms with their feet off the ground for very long periods of time. They might be held under water, foul smelling substances, or excrement to the brink of suffocation. There are many accusations of sexual degradation and rape. A common practice was a simulated firing squad. In some places, torturers used highly developed tortures, such as the pau de arard , dogs, and mistreating prisoners in front of their relatives or vice versa.
(snip/...)

http://www.usip.org/library/tc/doc/reports/chile/chile_1993_pt3_ch1_a1.html

[Elise]

1. All true

but too late for the man himself, so, yes, important for International Law and for those like Pinochet, but more current ....

[Disturbed]

2. Another shameful period of U.S. Govt.

support for murderers and torturors.

There is a long list.

Next> GW Bush and his Junta.