Chile faces its dark history by tracking down torture centers

Posted on Wed, Jul. 30, 2008
Chile faces its dark history by tracking down torture centers
By JACK CHANG

This quiet town nestled in the hills of central Chile has a horrifying history.
In 1978, in a stone oven on the town's outskirts, the Roman Catholic Church found the bodies of 11 poor farmers and four youths who were executed by Chile's military dictatorship. Police had accused the victims of being leftist subversives and arrested them five years earlier, but no charges were ever filed.

After the 15 bodies were discovered, government agents buried them in a common grave, and the site's landlord blew up the oven. However, the oven's ruins, which now are next door to a gated community, have become a memorial for hundreds of people who come every year to honor the victims.

''They sing and pray here, crowds of them,'' said Eliana González, who with her husband runs an almond farm near the oven's ruins. ``I think a lot about what happened there. As a mother, I'm pained by everything that's happened.''

As Chile and other countries wrestle with whether it's better to exhume their dark pasts or to leave them buried and try to move on, the current, elected government of President Michelle Bachelet, who herself was detained and tortured by the U.S.-backed regime of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, has moved to make that black period in Chile's history part of the country's national heritage.

Official estimates have found that the Pinochet regime, which ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990, carried out the political executions or was involved in the disappearances of nearly 3,200 people in its campaign to root out opposition leaders and left-wing dissidents. Tens of thousands more were tortured but survived.

Now Chilean officials and human rights activists are working to find more than 800 sites where the country's military government committed its gravest crimes.

More:
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/americas/story/623651.html

Obituaries
David H. Popper, 95; Ambassador to Chile During Pinochet Era
By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 31, 2008; Page B07

David H. Popper, 95, a career Foreign Service officer who became U.S. ambassador to Chile months after Gen. Augusto Pinochet overthrew socialist President Salvador Allende, died July 24 at Georgetown University Hospital of complications from a fall last week.

Mr. Popper had experience in politically volatile countries, having completed a tour as ambassador in embattled Cyprus before arriving in Chile in 1974.

Mr. Popper spent the next three years balancing U.S. policy to support anti-Communist military regimes, against public demands from Congress and humanitarian groups that the Chilean junta stop killing, jailing and torturing its political opponents.

The New York Times reported in 1974 that Mr. Popper was warned by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to separate the issues of human rights and military aid.

When the ambassador is said to have ignored Kissinger's warning by challenging high-level Chilean defense officials on their human-rights record, Kissinger cabled the embassy in Santiago: "Tell Popper to cut the political science lectures" to the Chileans.

John Dinges, author of "The Condor Years," on the Pinochet era, said Mr. Popper's staff members "universally said he had tried to walk a fine line between promoting the Kissinger policy of 'defend, defend, defend' Pinochet -- that's a quote from the Chile desk officer -- and letting the officers report to Washington on the human rights violations."

Dinges said Mr. Popper "presided over the delivery of such an ambiguous message on human rights that the Pinochet government heard what they wanted to hear -- that the U.S. supported the dictatorship, including the repression."

More:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/30/AR2008073003069.html



He must have laughed his head off
when they gave him his Nobel Prize.
My God.