20 years ago today, in London…

Protesters in London after Pinochet was placed under house arrest.

It was a trip he had been looking forward to, surgery and shopping in London. Britain, he told the journalist Jon Lee Anderson, was his favorite country.  He had just retired as Chile’s army commander, a post he kept after being forced to turn the presidency over to an elected civilian eight years earlier. He and his retinue visited Fortnum and Mason, had a drink with Margaret Thatcher before checking into a private clinic for hernia surgery.

And then he was arrested, held for 15 months while his lawyers and British authorities haggled over a Spanish judge’s extradition request. His supporters argued he was too frail and sickly to stand trial. But when his plane touched down in Santiago General Augusto Pinochet stood up from his wheelchair and walked briskly to his well-wishers, making little use of the cane he was carrying.

Pinochet survived another six years, eluding prosecution for human rights abuses, arms trafficking and corruption, hiding behind vague claims of illness and memory loss.  But his legacy still lives on in some sectors of Chilean society. Earlier this month a ceremony honoring one of his dictatorship’s most egregious human rights abusers,, Miguel Krassnoff, was held at the Chilean army academy, the Escuela Militar. Two army officials behind the tribute were demoted, but not fired.

Ugh

It is probably not surprising that the Pinochet dictatorship has its admirers among U.S. hate groups, but a photograph of one particular man in Charlottesville exceeds all levels of ugliness.  His black t shirt promotes “Pinochet’s helicopter tours” and shows a body falling from a helicopter.  It is a reference to the way the regime disposed of some of its victims, and for more background, check out this PBS documentary on a brave Chilean judge’s investigation into these killings: The Judge and the General. 

Journalist Uki Goñi published the photograph on his Twitter account, and noted that the t shirts are sold on…Amazon.

Fake news from Chile

On July 24, 1975 Chile’s afternoon tabloid La Segunda published a front page story headlined “Exterminated like mice.”  The article described a shootout between rival factions of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left and other Chilean leftist groups who had fled to Argentina after the 1973 military coup in which dozens of people were killed.

La Segunda is part of the El Mercurio newspaper chain, whose publisher, Augustin Edwards, died at his estate south of Santiago this week. The supposed shootout never took place and the newspaper report was part of an elaborate disinformation campaign by the Pinochet regime’s security agency, the DINA, aimed at discrediting victims of forced disappearances and their families.  The Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation later described the report as “the high point of manipulating disinformation.”  And Edwards’ newspapers were often willing participants in these operations. 

According to the Commission, the DINA published two lists totalling 119 Chileans who had disappeared after their arrest via two obscure publications, the Argentine magazine Lea and the Brazilian newspaper Novo O Dia.  

“Subsequent investigation revealed that Lea was the first issue of a magazine that did not legally exist and provided no names of anyone involved in it and that Novo O Dia was published irregularly in the city of Curitiba, Brazil. Further investigation into the source of the single issue of Lea led to a print shop linked to ultraright groups in the Argentinean government at that time. It also became clear that such unusual publications were used because despite considerable efforts the more serious media refused to publish the news.”

But Edwards’ El Mercurio newspaper chain was quick to pick up and republish this disinformation, with sensational headlines and additional material of questionable origin about Chilean subversives operating in other countries. The result, the Commission report noted, was “confusion within public opinion, and humiliation and isolation for the relatives of victim and those circles involved in defending human rights.”  And throughout the Pinochet dictatorship’s 17 years in power, Edwards’ newspapers routinely helped cover up human rights abuses, maligning the victims and casting doubt on the credibility of witnesses to such crimes.

The Chilean Journalists Association finally expelled Edwards two years ago. And last year his name appeared in the Panama Papers  as one of the clients served by the Panama City law firm Mossack, which had helped wealthy individuals from around  the world establish offshore  bank accounts.

The literary assassin

Mariana Callejas, former secret police agent and one of the more notorious figures from the Pinochet dictatorship, died in a care home this week.

I interviewed her in Santiago in 1989.  She was astonishingly frank, but then she was used to talking about her past, having given extended statements to FBI officials investigating the 1976 car bomb assassination of Chilean exile Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C.  Her husband, Michael Townley, an American working for the regime’s Direccion de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA), had placed the bomb which killed Letelier and his co-worker Ronni Moffitt.

“If there are any doubts about what really went on under the regime, well, I had it straight from the horse’s mouth,” she told me. “These army people, the captains, the majors, when they talked about assassinations it was as if they were talking about the last movie they saw.”

The interview took place at her home in Lo Curro, an affluent municipality in eastern Santiago.  She brought out some short fiction to show me, saying she was writing more in English than in Spanish these days. I quickly read through one of the pieces, about an emperor and a butterfly and have to admit, she had writing talent. In the mid-seventies she hosted all-night literary gatherings (a curfew was in effect), even as their basement was being used as a holding pen and torture site for political prisoners. The late Roberto Bolaño wrote a fictionalized account of these dark events in his novella By Night in Chile; Callejas was called “Maria Canales.”  She published a collection of stories, La Larga Noche, which contained descriptions of torture and bomb making.  Another story was awarded a prize sponsored by a Chilean literary magazine, causing an understandable outcry; the magazine explained that the entries were submitted under pseudonyms and that the author’s identity was not known until after the winning story was announced.

I asked her how she came to work for the DINA.  She said the regime knew of her and Townley’s “resistance work” against the ill-fated socialist government of Salvador Allende, when far-right groups set off bombs and engaged in other sabotage.  She claimed to have been concerned when Townley told her of the plan to murder Letelier, and that the DINA chief had promised him a commission in the Chilean army after completing this deadly mission.

But Callejas was not exactly a cowed wife.  A Chilean court later found her guilty of involvement in another car bomb assassination: former army commander General Carlos Prats and his wife Sofia, in Buenos Aires in 1974. She was given a 20-year prison sentence in 2008 but Chile’s Supreme Court later reduced this to five years under house arrest.

Last year Callejas and 14 other DINA agents were indicted in the 1976 murder of a Spanish diplomat, Carlos Soria; Chile’s Supreme Court ruled that the victim had been kidnapped and brought to the Townley-Callejas home in Lo Curro where he was interrogated and killed during torture and that the perpetrators sought to cover up their crime by staging an automobile accident.  But Callejas, now in a care home, was suffering from dementia and was not formally charged.

 

 

 

 

A story about Victor Jara, Chilean folk songs and….Condoleezza Rice

He was Chile’s Bob Dylan, the folk singer whose music provided the soundtrack to the Sixties and early Seventies, and whose brutal killing after the 1973 military coup has made him a legend. In her memoir of their life together, Joan Jara describes how she went to the Santiago morgue and walked past a long line of bodies on the floor  and found her husband’s body with “his chest riddled with holes and a gaping wound in his abdomen. His hands seemed to be hanging from his arms at a strange angle, as though his wrists were broken.” But more than four decades after his death, his accused killer has gone on trial in Orlando, Florida.

That’s right. Retired Chilean army officer Pedro Pablo Barrientos moved to the United States in 1989, a year before the military dictatorship grudgingly handed over the government to an elected civilian president. The Los Angeles Times reports that Barrientos, who was indicted in Chile along with eight other former officials, is facing civil accusations brought by Jara’s family that he is the gunman who killed the singer. (For the record, Jara was not held in the National Stadium but in the smaller Estadio Chile).

Now Jara’s family has forced Barrientos into a U.S. federal courtroom, where he will face civil accusations that he was the gunman who killed the singer.

And here’s an account by my friend and colleague Lezak Shallat on singing one of Victor Jara’s songs in Santiago decades after his death:

“During the presidency of Ricardo Lagos (2000-2006), I sang in a choir (Bellas Artes) that was regularly invited to entertain visiting dignitaries at state dinners in La Moneda, Chile’s Presidential Palace. (After it was restored from having been bombed to bits in 1973, that is.) We sang for Brazil’s President Lula, Argentina’s Nestor Kirchner and Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, the presidents of Algeria, China and for all 30+ presidents of the Americas (everyone but Bush and Castro, including two from Costa Rica, outgoing and incoming. I have a great story about that event, but that would be a digression).

Anyways… one day we were called to sing at La Moneda for an event that we were not given the details of, just that we should show up and enter through the underground parking lot and install ourselves in the room next to the bank-vault-converted-into-a wine-cellar as we always did.

Since the wait between call and concert was always long, I happened to grab a newspaper on my way there. We changed into our concert clothes and were given our music to look over. We were going to be singing our standard two songs by folklorist Violeta Parra, in this case “Que he sacado con quererte”  and “Casamiento de negros.” This last song talks about a wedding where everyone and everything is black and then the black bride dies and even the wake is black.)

Nothing unusual there, so I opened my newspaper to wile away the time and saw a headline about a fancy state dinner in honor of a slew of visiting African heads of state, with special guest Condoleezza Rice (US Secretary of State under George W. Bush). Hmmm, I thought… that must be the event we are singing for, said I to myself. And maybe a song about the wedding and death of little black people isn’t really an appropriate choice of music…

So I took my concern to our choir director, Vicho, who looked at me like I was crazy and told me that I was being too, too gringa and how could I still be so gringa after all those years in Chile, where everyone loved and understood Violeta Parra and how could Chileans be viewed as racist if there weren’t even any blacks in Chile…

OK, OK, it’s your decision, I told him, but think about it. You might not agree with me, but somebody who understands something about protocol might.

About 20 minutes later, I noticed that Vicho had left the room and was returning with a new set of scores. “We’re not singing Casamiento de negros, We’re singing this…” and he passes out “Te Recuerdo Amanda.” This is, of course, the song that Victor Jara is most famous for. No explanation for the change, just a slight nod to me.

Finally we are summoned to sing, between the main course and dessert, as is usually the case. The dinner is taking place in the Patio de los Naranjos, a big indoor patio, with the guests seated in dozens of round tables and President Lagos and wife seated with the Chilean Foreign Minister (I think it was Ignacio Walker) and Condoleezza Rica at a long table at the front.

The choir lines up behind the Presidential table. There isn’t much space so we are literally inches behind the honored guests. I am right behind Condoleezza Rice. In fact, I am so close to her that I can see the backs of her clip-on earrings and I could have touched the back of her head by stretching out my hand.

And we start to sing…. “Te Recuerdo Amanda.”

At this point, Foreign Minister Walker, who is sitting next to Rice, leans over and starts to whisper in her ear. She nods to show she is taking in this information until Walker suddenly places one hand flat on the table and makes a gruesome chopping gesture with the other… like he is cutting off his own hand at the wrist. Rice pulls back in surprise and horror and says, softly, “oh no!”

I could tell that, as we are singing, Walker is explaining to Rice just who Victor Jara is and silently demonstrating to her what happened to him while he was in military custody, before he was killed. his hands were broken.

And we kept on singing. Except for me…. I was biting my tongue to keep from bursting out in laughter and tears.”

 

 

The Honeckers in Chile

Erich Honecker’s funeral in Santiago in 1993. His widow Margot stands with her hands folded.

Margot Honecker, widow of the former East German leader Erich Honecker, died last week in Santiago, where the couple found a kind of refuge after the fall of the Berlin Wall. How this came to be is an interesting footnote to the Cold War, and has also spurred some debate in Chile over double standards when examining dictatorships.

After the 1973 military coup, thousands of Chileans sought political asylum in other countries and a significant number ended up in what was then East Germany. These included future President Michele Bachelet and her mother, along with prominent members of Chile’s Socialist and Communist Parties. Fast forward to Christmas 1991, when Chile had returned to civilian rule and the Berlin Wall had collapsed: Erich Honecker, now wanted for embezzlement and the killing of nearly 200 people attempting to flee East Germany during his rule, arrived at the Chilean Embassy in Moscow. The Chilean ambassador was Clodomiro Almeyda, a Socialist and former exile who had lived in East Germany and become good friends with the Honeckers, whose daughter had married a Chilean. Honecker had not officially sought asylum, but was treated as a kind of guest while Chile’s new civilian government found itself entangled in a diplomatic and political quandary as it negotiated with Russian and German authorities.

Chilean officials were divided as to whether Honecker should receive asylum in their country. Some members of the center-left coalition were strongly in favor, while others worried about what it would mean for Chile’s image if it were to protect a notorious human rights violator. Even some right wing politicians did not want to seem as submissive to Germany, which was making increasingly sharp demands for Honecker’s extradition. A year and a half later Honecker was finally escorted from the Chilean Embassy in Moscow and made to appear in a German court, after which German officials released him on grounds of his age and illness.

So Erich and Margot Honecker lived rather quietly in Santiago until the former’s death in 1993. A few years later a correspondent for Chile’s El Mercurio newspaper visited the archive at the Stasi Museum in Berlin and was able to examine some of files collected on Chilean exiles living in East Germany during the Pinochet dictatorship. Some exiles were spied on by fellow exiles, who dutifully reported to East German officials and dossiers were compiled even on younger Chileans who had little political experience. The reports noted that many Chileans complained about the jobs they were assigned, and at least 21 Chilean exiles were deported from East Germany in 1974.

“These are persons who cannot adjust to normal behavior in the RDA,” one of the files said.

But Margot Honecker, whom some called the Purple Witch for her hair dye and hardline Stalinist views, was unrepentant and occasionally surfaced in public. She was sometimes spotted taking part in activities with the Chilean Communist Party and in 2012 she said in an  interview that the Stasi secret police were a necessary institution and that those killed while trying to escape over the Berlin Wall were “stupid.”

In response, a municipal official in the Santiago suburb of La Reina, where the Honeckers had been living, declared her persona non grata and said her comments “showed no respect for life” and that the Berlin Wall had been “a symbol of intolerance and authoritarianism.” The municipal official, Francisco Oleo, just happened to be a member of Chile’s Socialist Party.

The Caravan of Death

Retired General Sergio Arellano, charged with some of the most egregious human rights violations during Chile’s military regime, died without ever going to prison.

General Sergio Arellano Stark, sometimes referred to as “the butcher” for his role in a series of summary executions in wake of Chile’s 1973 military coup, has died. Here’s part of the story from his notorious tour.

The northern city of Calama, located near Chile’s massive Chuquicamata copper mine, was relatively tranquil on the morning of September 11, 1973, the day the country’s military overthrew the socialist government of President Salvador Allende. The commander of the local army regiment, Colonel Eugenio Rivera, was meeting with a municipal government official to discuss plans for Chile’s two-day fiestas patrias celebrations to be held the following week. When the radio broadcast news of the military uprising, that meeting ended abruptly and Rivera telephoned the army general in charge of the region for instructions. As it turned out, neither he nor the general had been informed of the plans for the coup, as was the case with a number of senior Chilean military officers.

There was little open resistance to the coup, and many of the prisoners arrested in its aftermath had complied with radio and television announcements ordering them to report to authorities. Detainees were prosecuted by a provincial military court, which sentenced them to jail terms but found no evidence of weapons or armaments. One of the shorter sentences, sixty-one days,  was for the director of a local radio station, who had defied orders to shut down the station on the day of the coup.

But the Calama military court’s handling of these cases did not satisfy the authorities in Santiago, and the tribunal’s commander was ordered back to Santiago, where he was arrested, court-martialled and held in three different military installations where he was interrogated and tortured. On October 19 the Calama army base was visited by a senior army general from Santiago, General Sergio Arellano Stark. No one had been told the reason for the visit, and in an interview years later Colonel Rivera told this blogger that he had prepared a schedule for the general that included a formal luncheon and a visit to the copper mine. The Calama troops were standing at attention and the regiment’s band was waiting to perform when a Puma helicopter landed. General Arellano and his committee emerged, dressed in combat uniforms and brandishing their weapons “as if they expected to be met with enemy fire,” Rivera recalled.

Arellano showed Rivera a document designating him as General Augusto Pinochet’s delegate, and asked to see the files on political prisoners held at the base. After looking through the papers the general announced that a military tribunal would be convened after lunch. One of Arellano’s officers asked for and received permission to interrogate the prisoners before the tribunal met, and Rivera took the visiting general on a tour of the Chuquicamata copper mine.

When they returned to the base Rivera asked about the war tribunal and was told it had finished. There was a dinner for General Arellano that evening, and Rivera noticed that one of his officers seemed agitated. When the general and his committee left in the helicopter, the official told Rivera that the war tribunal had convened but when they ordered the prisoners to appear they were told that the twenty-six men had just been executed on the orders of Arellano’s officer. He and the other officers at the Calama base seemed in a state of shock, Rivera recalled, and said that one of the executed prisoners happened to be the brother of one of the regiment’s non-commissioned officers.

Calama was the last stop on what would become known as the Caravan of Death, a seven-city tour in which 97 prisoners were summarily executed. In 2008 Arellano and six other officers were sentenced to prison for their role in the killings, but by then Arellano was suffering from Alzheimer’s and was spared jail time. He ended his days in a Santiago nursing home.

Here’s a link to a radio interview by my friend and colleague Lezak Shallat with Zita Cabello-Barrueto, the sister of one of the men killed by the Caravan of Death: https://soundcloud.com/lshallat/zita-cabello-barruetos-search-for-spring-how-the-sister-of-pinochet-victim-prevailed-in-a-us-court The interview will air on March 15 at 7 pm in the show La Raza Chronicle on KPFA 94.1 FM.

And a link to Zita’s book, In Search of Spring: a sister’s quest to unearth the truth about her brother’s assassination by Chile’s Caravan of Death:http://www.amazon.co.uk/Search-Spring-sisters-brothers-assassination/dp/1500256757/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1457627941&sr=8-1-fkmr0&keywords=zita+cabello+barrueto+arch+of+spring

 

A special prison in Chile, now full to capacity

Chile’s Punta Peuco prison, the special prison that opened in 1995 to house inmates convicted of human rights abuses during the military dictatorship, is now overcrowded, according to justice officials. The news came as six retired military officers were sentenced this past week for their role in the notorious Caravan of Death case, a series of summary executions of prisoners in several cities in the Atacama desert in wake of the 1973 military coup.

According to Chilean officials, the prison was built to hold 112 inmates and was already filled to capacity before this most recent judgement. And more prisoners are expected when the Supreme Court rules on another infamous case later this year. La Tercera has this story http://www.latercera.com/noticia/nacional/2016/02/680-668050-9-ingresan-seis-internos-a-punta-peuco-y-penal-excede-limite-maximo.shtml

Some haunting images, and an old bank heist

A woman begging on a city street, part of Marcelo Montecino’s photographic essay in Chile’s urban cultural journal Bifurciones.

Marcelo Montecino has a photographic essay entitled Indiferencia in the Chilean journal of urban culture, Bifurcaciones http://www.bifurcaciones.cl/2016/01/indiferencia/ . In one photograph an exhausted-looking woman cradles her child on the steps leading to the Santiago metro while an older child sits behind her. Another shows a street musician sitting on the ground with his guitar, little noticed by pedestrians. There are ten black and white photographs in all. Bifurcaciones began publishing in 2004 and its stated mission is “to support and promote critical and rigorous reflections on contemporary urban life.

The news site OZY (which takes its name from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias,” published a piece by Jose Fermoso on a 1981 bank robbery in northern Chile http://www.ozy.com/flashback/the-heist-that-broke-pinochets-back/65254 committed by two of the Pinochet regime’s security agents. The case gave Chileans a brief glimpse of the criminal elements operating within the secret police organization, the Central Nacional de Informaciones (CNI). It’s a good read.

My fellow bloggers

It’s a post that’s gone viral and was translated into Spanish and reposted on Chilean news sites. Nathan Lustig, an American who has lived and worked in Santiago for several years, takes aim at Chile’s class prejudices and urges Chileans to spend time abroad in order to correct these attitudes. Smart, resourceful Chileans who find their ambitions thwarted at home because of their darker skin and modest backgrounds might enjoy a boost to their careers and self-esteem in other countries, while those with privileged upbringings may get a much-needed reality check. (Lustig also urges Americans to spend time abroad in order to broaden their own perspectives.) http://www.nathanlustig.com/2015/11/26/the-best-thing-a-chilean-can-do-is-to-leave-chile/

On the subject of inequality, Helen Cordery has an interesting piece on conditions in a Chilean state school on her blog Querida Recoleta: https://queridarecoleta.wordpress.com/2015/12/15/state-schools-the-truth/