Pinochet/globalization/amnesty
MichaelP
Pinochet's own goal
Ariel Dorfman
Sunday December 3, 2000
The Observer (London)
General Augusto Pinochet has just been deliciously trapped in the web of
his own perversity. When Chile's former dictator made thousands of
political prisoners disappear into the night and fog of his dictatorship,
leaving them without a burial, not even in his saddest nightmares could he
have anticipated the joke that history was going to play on him: that many
years later, those very crimes would lead Judge Guzman to indict him for
crimes against humanity.
The Chilean judge is able to proceed with Pinochet's trial because last
August the supreme court of Chile stripped the general of his self-granted
parliamentary immunity by interpreting the disappearance of prisoners as a
case of kidnapping.
Denying families the bodies of their murdered relatives must have seemed
like a brilliant idea to Pinochet and his disciples. The authorities could
have their cake and eat it. They could kill their adversaries and not be
held accountable, invest themselves with total power over life and death
and simultaneously insist that there were no prisoners. Habeas corpus
could be rejected because, there was, to put it bluntly, no corpus. Dead
or alive. And therefore no evidence and no crime. But there is terror,
because everybody in Chile understood what was really happening in nearby
basements and remote deserts. Happening interminably.
Torture was transformed from something physical into an event that was
repeated incessantly in each citizen's inner world, paralysing him or her
with fear.
Pinochet was sure that he would never be taken to task or brought to
trial. He absolved himself of any possible prosecution by dictating an
amnesty for whatever crimes could have been committed during the most
terrible years of his reign.
It is particularly marvellous, then, that it should be precisely those
missing and supposedly dead bodies that have come back to haunt Pinochet.
To get off the hook, Pinochet will now have to prove that he killed - or
ordered the assassination - of the prisoners; he would have to disinter
them from their anonymous graves, drag them out of the rivers and the seas
where they were cast. Then and only then could his amnesty be applied to
him: he would be freed because he had, admittedly, committed murder.
Poetic justice indeed.
This new development in the Pinochet case is the result of many factors;
first and foremost, the unending struggle of the relatives of the missing.
And they were accompanied in their search by vast groups of Chileans who
understood that while those bodies were not given a funeral, there would
be no peace and no reconciliation.
We should not forget, however, that this immense social movement had been
demanding justice for years without being heard. What jerked the machinery
of state into motion, made the democratic government and the judicial
system, the army and the right-wing Pinochetistas, react, was the arrest
of the General in London by order of the Spanish judge, Baltazar Garzon.
The shameful fact that the outside world was judging Pinochet while we had
been unable to do so, changed the moral climate for good.
It is still too early to guess what the repercussions of this decision by
Judge Guzman will be, or what pressure the armed forces might exert.
But there is already an ethical consequence of enormous importance for
every corner of this planet. The strategy of 'disappearing' prisoners,
that extreme form of violence that has soiled so many regimes all over the
world, has been proven a boomerang.
This new victory against impunity belongs, then, above all to our
disappeared, los desaparecidos, those men and women arrested one night and
who are somehow still alive, beyond death, still accusing the man who
thought he could extinguish them.
The author's latest novel is 'The Nanny and the Iceberg'.
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ariel dorfman
Ariel Dorfman on Memory and truth
URL: http://www.amnesty.org.uk/journal_july97/carlos.html
"There is another kind of pressure to erase the past. In all the
transitions to democracy, people are living in global market economics.
This model says: you are what you produce, what you consume. Your value is
your market value. The ethic is based on breaking with your past and
creating a new identity: forget your past. Not only what was done to you,
but many pasts. The pasts of the identity, the cultural past.
Many of the human rights violations we look at in the world today are
created by governments modernising their system, to quell people, to
make them afraid, to turn them into mere consumers and mere producers.
For Stalin, If 20 million peasants starve, too bad'. For the market
today, If 20 million people in the third world haven't got a job, too
bad, who cares?'
The problems of memory are not only the problems of how we remember
horrors that were done to us, it also has to do with where identity
is. We have to start looking at these questions carefully."
=====================
* News Release Issued by the International Secretariat of Amnesty
International *
6 December 2000
Amnesty International today urges President Ricardo Lagos to stand by his
commitment recently made to the organization that his government would not
interfere with the judicial proceedings involving Augusto Pinochet and
would resist all military pressure.
The human rights organization calls on President Lagos to resist the
strong military pressure which has been placed on him to consider that the
order of Augusto Pinochet's house arrest may constitute a threat against
national security.
Reacting to the news that the Chilean army-commander-in-chief has
requested an immediate session of the National Security Council (created
by Augusto Pinochet), Amnesty International stated that: "The attempts of
the armed forces to make this judicial issue a matter of national security
is simply unacceptable. It amounts to intolerable pressure upon Chile's
judiciary."
The organization believes this request represents yet another example of
the armed forces trying to protect their impunity.
"The armed forces are clearly continuing to seek protection for themselves
from prosecution and to restrict the judicial investigation into human
rights violations in Chile."
Amnesty International received personal assurances from President Lagos
that he would not interfere in the judicial process when the
organization's Secretary General visited Chile in October 2000. In a
meeting , President Lagos gave the organization his agreement that there
would be no political interference from any political actors in Chile
throughout the judicial process involving Augusto Pinochet and others
implicated in human rights violations.
Amnesty International is concerned at signs of political interference in
the judicial process, including the level of pressure which has been
placed upon Judge Guzman. The supporters of Augusto Pinochet have
demonstrated outside his home, and Judge Guzman is on the record stating
he has been put under "great pressure" on this case.
Amnesty International's Secretary general said: ''We urge President
Lagos to stand by his commitment to human rights and ensure the rights of
the victims are guaranteed by the government keeping out of the judicial
proceedings,''
Background
On 1 December 2000, Judge Juan Guzman ordered that Augusto Pinochet be
placed under house arrest for his role as the "intellectual author" of the
"disappearances" during an October 1973 military operation known as the
"Caravan of Death" ("Caravana de la Muerte"). This security force
operation toured the country killing or "disappearing" scores of people
linked to the political left.Yesterday, the Santiago appeals court
suspended the order pending a full hearing of the habeas corpus submitted
by Augusto Pinochet's lawyers against the arrest warrant.
======================
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