teh balance
Augusto Pinochet: How will he be remembered?
(CNN) -- Chilean General and former President Augusto Pinochet died Sunday at 91, without ever being tried on accusations of ordering the torture and killing of thousands of people during his 1973-1990 regime. Considered a horrendous ruler by some and a savior by others, Pinochet is credited with laying the groundwork for Chile's modern market economy. His death sparked demonstrations by supporters and opponents.
Report of the Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation; Part Three, Chapter One (A.1)
d. Abuse and torture
During these months mistreatment and torture were an almost universal feature of detentions, although they varied in nature and intensity. Beating and humiliation were common when people were being arrested, while they were being driven somewhere, at police stations, and upon arrival at the place of detention.
Torture was also usual during interrogation. Many personal testimonies connect interrogation and torture. When the arrested person was being "tough" and not confessing, questioning was coupled with mistreatment. This also occurred in war tribunals. An important former prosecutor involved in the war tribunals in the northern part of the country acknowledged to the Commission that torture was commonly used as a way of putting together the "evidence" later presented to the tribunals.
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 [a torture practice in which a person is hung, head hanging down, by a pole or stick placed beneath the legs and arms], dogs, and mistreating prisoners in front of their relatives or vice versa.
It would be impossible to present a comprehensive list of all the torture sites-there were so many-in our country during the period we are considering. During these months torture was not practiced in every single detention site, but certainly in most of them. Generally torture was less common in the prisons. In the following paragraphs the detention sites that have been most sharply engraved in the memories of those who suffered there will be singled out. In addition we may mention the old Cerro Moreno airport in Antofagasta; navy ships or boats under navy control in Valparaíso; the National Stadium, the Chile Stadium and the Air War Academy in Santiago; Mariquina Island and Fort Borgoño in Concepción; the Maquehua Air Base in Temuco, and various regimental headquarters, police stations, checkpoints, and air and naval air facilities around the country.
All the inmates at the prisoner camp at Pisagua were interrogated, and all the interrogations were preceded or accompanied by beating and the application of electric current. Every day some prisoners were chosen for degrading treatment, many hours of very heavy labor, or physical exercise to the point of exhaustion, such as running on uneven floors blindfolded, or having to run up a set of stairs while their guards were pushing them back down. After twenty or thirty inmates had been interrogated for an entire day, it was a common practice to leave them stretched out in the open for forty-eight hours bearing the day's heat and night's cold. One of them, Nelson M rquez, whose case is recounted in more detail further on, ended up going crazy and tried to run away; a few minutes later he was recaptured below the pier and immediately shot to death.
At the police station in Rahue, Osorno, inmates were raped, beaten with gun butts, had electric current applied, were intimidated with simulated hangings, hung from beams by their arms, and so forth. Disappearances were common here; the bridge over the Pilmaiquén River was used for firing squads; the river disposed of the bodies.
[snip]
Prisoners, sometimes as many as a hundred, were normally kept in the camp and were taken to the school only for purposes of interrogation, after a phone call to that effect came from the school. People were transported in refrigerated trucks provided by port fishing companies or requisitioned from them. From the time they left until they returned to the camp, the prisoners were kept blindfolded or hooded. In the school they were taken to be interrogated either in the basement below the officer's club or on the second floor. Once there the prisoner was stripped naked, tied to a chair or to a metal bed frame, and was beaten, often to the point where bones were broken; electric current was applied on the mouth, genitals, and elsewhere. There were other kinds of torture such as hanging the person by the arms with the feet off the floor for hours until the person passed out. Torture for women prisoners was sexual, and took many and bizarre forms. After the torture session was over, the prisoner was taken from the school back to the camp.
The conditions of crowding, toilets, and food at the camps truly constituted mistreatment. One kind of solitary confinement was to put people in containers with a little food and no toilet facilities. Another form was what were called the "niches" underneath the guard towers. Made with the metal structures of the gates and used on those prisoners who were considered to be most dangerous, the niches held them immobile for days without any toilet facilities and also without food.
One feature of this complex was that doctors, also hooded, were on hand. They supervised torture (to prevent people from being killed) and gave emergency treatment to those who were most seriously harmed by it.
Normally, the prisoner who seemed unlikely to reveal new information was sent back or returned to the public jail in San Antonio, usually in pitiable shape.
A report by a humanitarian organization in late 1973 and early 1974 notes the high proportion of prisoners who needed medical care in this jail-five or six times more than that of the other jails visited. The report also indicates this facility's shortcomings in both housing and sanitary facilities. It provides a record of tortures practiced, including "miscellaneous violations." The report also objects to how the visiting delegation was deceived at the camp, where they were told there were no longer any prisoners to interview when in fact the existing prisoners had been packed into refrigerator trucks and kept there until night when the visitors left.
As will be indicated in connection with particular cases at the Tejas Verdes complex, many people died there or were taken from there to meet their death; some had been sentenced by war tribunals while others were executed without due process of law, and still others were tortured to death. These later deaths as well as those constituted by execution without any court verdict were either covered up by false war tribunals, or with death certificates that were-to say the least-intellectually dishonest about the cause of death. Or there was no explanation provided to the family about what had happened and the body was simply shipped by refrigerated truck in a sealed coffin. Such was the case, for example of Oscar G¢mez Far¡as, who after being tortured to the point of madness (his body showing the visible and terrible signs of how he had been mistreated) while naked, attacked an armed guard-who killed him on the spot (December 27, 1973).
The individual cases of torture centers we have described may not be entirely typical of Chile during this period. It may also be that the complaints we have gathered, which are the primary source for the preceding descriptions, may not always be entirely correct. Those on the other side who also ought to know the facts have not offered their help to counteract and modify that information. The very volume of the virtually unanimous body of information gathered seems to establish that torture was an unquestionable fact. This fact cannot be kept secret or forgotten if we are to make amends and learn the appropriate lessons.
2:31 PM UPDATE, via Counterpunch:
On Tuesday evening, August 7, twenty-four hours before the College of Lawyers' declaration was released, the conspirators in the naval high command had decided to start moving on an idea conceived by Vice-Admiral José Toribio Merino. This was to present the coup they were preparing as a "response" to a phony "Red coup." Naval intelligence had found out about a meeting to which roughly two hundred junior officers and sailors in Talcahuano had invited the Socialist party secretary Carlos Altamirano. The purpose of the meeting was to let him know that since June, the commanders of the Navy's warships had been haranguing their crews at sea, telling them that "we have to get that Marxist President Salvador Allende out of La Moneda," and "we Navy men have the patriotic duty to overthrow the present government." Altamirano, along with Miguel Henríquez, secretary general of the MIR, and Oscar Garretón, from MAPU, explained the Chilean political situation to the junior officers and sailors, emphasizing the threat represented by fascist officers, who were serving the North American multinational companies, and the national oligarchs. They emphasized the necessity of letting all the sailors know that "they should not obey fascist officers" should they give orders for an uprising against the government. (Details of this meeting were published in August 1973 issues of Chile Hoy.)
Toribio Merino and his intelligence advisers decided that this constituted sufficient evidence of a "Red coup" in the Navy. On August 7 they officially announced that "subversion" had been uncovered on the ships Almirante Latorre and Blanco Encalada, and the ringleaders were Altamirano, Henríquez, and Garretón. They announced the arrest of about fifty sailors and junior officers, headed by a petty officer named Cárdenas.
In the days following, reporters from left-wing newspapers managed to find out how, at the Talcahuano and Valparaíso naval bases, these sailors had been forced to sign absurd confessions after being brutally tortured. In the Valparaíso Naval Hospital they found a sailor whose testicles had been smashed. Wives and relatives of arrested sailors gave out to the newspapers the names of naval inteilligence captains in charge of the tortures. There were three basic types of tortures:
1. An open oil drum filled with urine and excrement was employed to submerge the head of the man being interrogated, to the point asphyxiation, every time he refused to answer or to confess to any crime he was accused of.
2. The prisoners were hung naked, head downward, from a gymnastics bar and struck repeatedly on the scrotum and at the root of testicles.
3. The prisoners were forced to drag themselves naked through "pool" full of hammer-broken rocks over which was hung, at about a height of one foot, a strong steel net to keep them from standing. They were made to crawl between the net and the rocks several times during the interrogations.
...and here:
A woman professor at the East Santiago campus of the University of Chile, married, with two children, was detained for forty days in the National Stadium. She wrote me this about the "female prisoners of war":
They were obliged to remain all day long face down with their hands on their necks and their legs spread. . . . There were lines of them kneeling or standing against the walls, and at the slightest movement they were struck or kicked - and, in several cases I saw, shot. In rooms fifteen by eighteen feet there were a hundred women. Food came only once a day, at 4 or 5 P.M. There were mainly two groups of women: workers and university professors. Girls and women were harassed, obliged to disrobe, manhandled, and insulted as a preamble to the interrogations. The academics among us had been taken out of our classrooms at gunpoint. One group of schoolteachers had a typically sad experience: at the investigatory commission one of them had her hair cropped off . . then at Los Cerros de Chena, the eyes were always blindfolded. To go to the bathroom, they had to be accompanied by guards who took the opportunity to manhandle and beat them. They were interrogated naked. Electric current was applied to the mouth, hands, nipples, vagina. Water was poured over their bodies to intensify the pain The language used with them was completely degenerate: they were forced to repeat, over and over: "I am a cunt, I am a cunt A hospital technician was taken to the Quinta Normal naval enclosure. She was kept there for three days without sleep, and subjected to electric tortures every few hours. She also had electricity applied to her vagina. Afterward they brought her t the National Stadium She was taken for interrogation there too, blindfolded as others were. This time she apparently was taken to the cycle track, where by then the torture chamber had been installed. Besides electric shocks, this time she was forced to take something in her hand. They had given her an injection, which she guessed was Sodium Pentothal, and it had made her dizzy but she was still conscious. At once she realized the object was a penis which on contact with her hand became erect. They thrust it into her mouth where it ejaculated.
Full page of links, with more testimony and diagrams, here, again via Counterpunch's Website of The Day feature.
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