Chile's Army Accepts Blame for Rights Abuses in the Pinochet Era (NYT)

Amazing! Yesterday Honduras's President apologized for death squads in his country. Today this.

New York Times
November 6, 2004

Chile's Army Accepts Blame for Rights Abuses in the Pinochet Era

By LARRY ROHTER

RIO DE JANEIRO, Nov. 5 - After years of characterizing the human rights violations that occurred in Chile under the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet as "excesses" by individual officers rather than a deliberate government policy, the Chilean Army reversed course on Friday and acknowledged that it must bear collective "institutional" blame for such abuses.

"The Army of Chile has taken the difficult but irreversible decision to assume the responsibility for all punishable and morally unacceptable acts in the past that fall on it as an institution," the current army commander, Gen. Juan Emilio Cheyre Espinosa, wrote in an essay published by La Tercera, a daily newspaper in Santiago, the capital. "Never and for no one can there be any ethical justification for human rights violations," he said.

An official commission is readying a comprehensive report, expected to be made public this month, on torture and other systematic human rights abuses by state security and intelligence agents during the Pinochet dictatorship. Human rights groups estimate that about 4,000 people were killed after General Pinochet took power on Sept. 11, 1973, in the American-supported coup that overthrew Chile's elected left-wing civilian president, Salvador Allende. Thousands were tortured, jailed, forced to leave the country, stripped of their jobs or sent into internal exile.

The "new vision" that General Cheyre announced Friday clashes directly with the views General Pinochet has always expressed. Now 88, ailing and under almost permanent investigation in connection with human rights abuses that occurred during his 17 years in power, General Pinochet maintains that he and other members of the military high command never issued orders to eliminate opponents of their dictatorship and that any abuses were the work of a few rogue officers.

<More...>

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/06/international/americas/06chile.html

for human rights violations"

Methinks the timing is calculated to send a message.

"I accept all of the blame", but .

Fuck them.

Gyre

.