SAN SALVADOR — El Salvador’s president says the country will award its highest honor to six Jesuit priests murdered by the army in 1989.

President Mauricio Funes says the National Order of Jose Matias Delgado awards are a “public act of atonement” for mistakes by past governments.

They will be presented on Nov. 16 to mark the date 20 years ago when soldiers killed Spanish-born university rector Ignacio Ellacuria, five other Jesuits, a housekeeper and her daughter.

The killings sparked international outrage and tarnished the image of U.S. anti-communism efforts after it was found that some of the soldiers involved received training at Fort Benning, Georgia.

Funes made the announcement on Tuesday.

By EVA VERGARA, The Associated Press

SANTIAGO, Chile

Hundreds of former military draftees rallying outside Chile’s presidential palace were asked Sunday to come forward and reveal crimes they committed and witnessed during Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship.

The draftees have long feared that if they name names and reveal where bodies are buried, they will face prosecution by the courts or retaliation by those who ordered them to torture and kill.

But now the information they once promised to carry to their graves has become both a heavy psychological burden and a bargaining chip. By offering confessions, some of these now-aging men believe they can improve their chances of getting government pensions and mental health care.

“Perhaps today is the day when the moment has come, for us to describe what we saw and what we suffered inside the military bases, the things that we witnessed and that we did,” said Fernando Mellado, who leads the Santiago chapter of the Former Soldiers of 1973.

Mellado told his fellow former soldiers that he’s made little progress with lawmakers as he lobbies for military draftees to be recognized as victims of the dictatorship, in part because no one understands what they went through.

“Our human rights were also violated,” he declared. “The moment has come for former military draftees to tell our wives, our families, the politicians, the society, the country and the whole world about the brutalities they subjected us to. I believe the moment has come for us to speak, for our personal redemption.”

Mellado has been working with similar groups across Chile to figure out whether and how to turn over the information. He urged those in the crowd to provide their evidence to him, and promised to protect their anonymity.

Of the 8,000 people drafted as teenagers from Santiago alone in the tumultuous year when Pinochet overthrew Salvador Allende’s government and cemented his hold on power, Mellado believes “between 20 and 30 percent are willing to talk.”

A small crowd among the former draftees was inspired enough by Mellado’s call to immediately approach Associated Press journalists at the rally.

“They made me torture — I am a torturer — because they threatened me that if I didn’t torture, they would kill me,” volunteered Jorge Acevedo. He said several prisoners died when he applied electricity during torture sessions, and that their bodies may have been dumped in abandoned mines at the Cerro Chena prisoner camp.

Chilean security forces killed 3,186 people during the dictatorship, including 1,197 who were made to disappear, according to an official count.

In nearly two decades of democracy since then, less than 8 percent of the disappeared have been found, said Viviana Diaz of the Assembly of Family Members of the Disappeared Detainees.

Hundreds of recovered remains, some just bone fragments, have yet to be identified. Only those who buried the bodies know where other common graves lie. Diaz, for one, hopes the former draftees do start talking, even if they do so in a way that avoids prosecution.

Chilean law allows for a “just following orders” defense if people submit to the mercy of the courts, naming names and providing information that could help resolve some of the thousands of crimes committed under Pinochet’s 1973-1990 rule.

The defense “theoretically applies and exists” in Chile, and judges can even have people testify in secret, said attorney Hiram Villagra, who represents families of the dead and disappeared.

But most former soldiers fear the consequences for themselves and their families. Some worry that judges who rose through the ranks under Pinochet might protect their former superior officers instead.

Mellado maintains that the former draftees also are victims — forced into service as minors and made to do unspeakable things — and that many now want to get it off their chests.

One confessed to shooting an entire family. Another — now an alcoholic who sleeps in the street in Santiago — said he was forced to drown a 7-year-old boy in a barrel of hardening plaster. Others describe harrowing torture sessions, and loading bodies onto helicopters to be dumped at sea.

“Our mission was to stand guard outside, and listen to their screams,” former draftee Jose Paredes said as he told the AP about his service at the Tejas Verdes torture center. “They would end up destroyed, torn apart, their teeth and faces broken.”

“There are things that I’ve always said I will take to the grave,” Paredes said, his grizzled face running with tears as he named a half-dozen officers who he said gave the orders. “I’ve never told this to anyone.”

The Chilean government has made several high-profile efforts to resolve dirty war crimes, but Mellado said former draftees who wanted to testify were turned away: The Defense Ministry sent them to civilian courts, while civilian authorities considered them to be military.

Villagra agrees the time is overdue for the soldiers to seek redemption — and sent a message of support for Mellado’s efforts to gather their testimony.

“Clearly there is no desire from our part for these soldiers to carry the burden of guilt of the officers, who were the ones who made the decisions,” Villagra said.

An AP review found 769 current and former security officers, most of them military, have been prosecuted for murders and other human rights violations. Almost all deny committing crimes. Only 276 have been sentenced.

Much of the evidence came from former prisoners. Testimony from former soldiers could do much to resolve these cases.

Twenty four years after the military left power in Brazil, the government is to create a Truth Commission to investigate crimes committed by the security forces between 1964 and 1985.

Brazil is the only country in Latin America which has not investigated deaths, disappearances and torture which took place during its dictatorship, or put alleged perpetrators on trial.

Although the number of victims is far smaller than those who died during military rule in neighbouring Argentina and Chile, nearly 500 people were killed or disappeared in Brazil. Thousands more were tortured, exiled or deprived of their political rights.

All attempts to bring people to justice have foundered on the blanket provisions of the 1979 Amnesty Law.

This not only authorised the release of political prisoners and the return of exiled opponents, but amnestied all political crimes and “connected crimes”, which was understood to mean torture.

Now, just a year before he leaves office, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has decided to set up a commission to investigate crimes committed during the dictatorship. Several of his ministers were themselves arrested and tortured by the military.

Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, Brazil’s representative on the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, said that President Lula would formally announce his decision on 9 December.

The terms of the truth commission, its members and its powers, are not yet known.

“Democracy cannot be consolidated unless the torture, disappearances and executions are faced and investigated,” said Mr Pinheiro, who has also been UN rapporteur for human rights in Burundi and Burma.

Contradictory signs

President Lula’s decision is believed to have been influenced by the decision of some of the victims’ families to take their cases to the Inter-American Court of Justice.

The 1964 coup was bloodless but heralded two decades of military rule

Recently, government advertisements have appeared on TV appealing for anyone with information or documents about events during the dictatorship to come forward.

While some government files have been declassified, campaigners say the armed forces still hold other files that contain key information on the fate of those who disappeared.

Military chiefs deny this, saying all their files had been burned or destroyed.

Opinion in President Lula’s coalition government is divided on the issue of pursuing those responsible for military-era crimes. While some ministers have said those who tortured and killed should be held to account, others are opposed to this.

Defence Minister Nelson Jobim has said the efforts by families and torture survivors to obtain justice amounted to “revenge”.

The government recently extended the Secrecy Law, so that government files considered sensitive can be kept from public view for 60 years.

These contradictory signs indicate that the government’s purpose in setting up a truth commission is far from clear, and therefore its results are uncertain.

There is a need to come to terms with these periods and not leave unfinished busines Priscilla Hayner Director, Internatinal Center for Transitional Justice

For the families of the 140 Brazilians who disappeared during the dictatorship, the commission would be a final chance to find out what happened to them.

Laura Petit, now in her 60s, has spent the past 30 years searching for her sister and two brothers who were members of a rural guerrilla movement in the Amazon region of Araguaia in the early 1970s.

Sixty men and women of the Maoist-inspired Communist Party of Brazil disappeared after being surrounded and killed or captured by the army.

So far she has only found the remains of her sister.

“We want justice, it is our right,” said Ms Petit.

For Suzana Lisboa, whose husband, a student leader, was tortured to death in prison, the commission will only be worthwhile if it has free access to the information in the archives.

“There can be no reconciliation without the recognition of what happened,” she said.

Edson Teles, whose parents were tortured and killed during the dictatorship, believes that in revealing the past, the commission could avoid it being repeated.

Torture, he said, was still being practised in Brazil’s police stations, with impunity.

No explanations

Experts on truth commissions around the world, who met last week in Sao Paulo, said the success of the Brazilian initiative would depend on whether it was given the power to subpoena witnesses and access military files.

“There is a need to come to terms with these periods and not leave unfinished business,” said Priscilla Hayner, director of the International Center for Transitional Justice in Geneva, who has studied all 45 such commissions.

“The right to know the truth is increasingly being recognised in international law.”

Ms Hayner acknowledged that while Brazil has never had a truth commission, some steps had been taken.

A government committee has been paying compensation to people who suffered exile or imprisonment during the military regime, including President Lula himself.

Individual families have begun lawsuits against alleged torturers.

But many families remain scarred, still not knowing what happened to their relatives, nor why.

The family of Manoel Fiel Filho, a factory worker who was arrested and tortured to death in 1976, said they were only allowed to mourn him for a short while, in silence, before his coffin was taken to a cemetery and buried by strangers.

They were given no explanations and kept under constant surveillance.

Listen to the Story

A judge in Chile has issued arrest warrants for more than 100 former security officials. They are accused of the worst killings and other human rights violations during the rule of General Augusto Pinochet from 1973 to 1990. Peter Kornbluh, director of the Chile Documentation Project at the National Security Archives in Washington, talks with Ari Shapiro about the crimes committed during the so-called “dirty war.”

Entre los encartados hay al menos 60 nuevos ex agentes que hasta ahora no habían caído en las redes de la justicia por delitos de lesa humanidad. Del total de procesados, todos en retiro, 50 son del Ejército y el resto de la FACh, Armada, Investigaciones y Carabineros.

El más masivo procesamiento en la historia de los juicios por violaciones de los derechos humanos, dictó ayer el juez Víctor Montiglio en contra de 120 ex agentes, todos de la DINA.

Entre los encausados hay cerca de 60 nuevos ex represores que hasta ahora no habían sido procesados en algún juicio por delitos de lesa humanidad cometidos durante la dictadura.

El magistrado resolvió los nuevos encartamientos por los crímenes cometidos en las llamadas operaciones Colombo, Cóndor y los episodios conocidos como Calle Conferencia I y II.

En estos dos últimos, en 1976, la DINA secuestró e hizo desaparecer a dos direcciones clandestinas completas del entonces encubierto Partido Comunista.

Aunque el juez Montiglio mantuvo la información lejos de la prensa, se conoció que de los 120 procesados, hay al menos 50 que pertenecen al Ejército y el resto a la Fuerza Aérea, Armada, Investigaciones y Carabineros.

Entre los oficiales procesados y ya retirados del Ejército que cumplieron misiones operativas en la DINA, al menos están César Manríquez Bravo, Manuel Carevic Cubillos, Hernán Sovino Novoa, Humberto Chaigneau Sepúlveda y Sergio Castillo González.

Este último es uno de los ex agentes represores que continúan recibiendo un sueldo mensual del Ejército, recontratado como empleado civil, según el reportaje “La DINA a honorarios” publicado en la última edición de La Nación Domingo.

Esta vez el ministro Montiglio incluyó entre los procesados a varios ex agentes que montaron guardia en los recintos clandestinos de detención, pero que también fueron agentes operativos en el traslado de prisioneros para su exterminio y desaparición.

Incluso, no pocos de ellos integraron las brigadas operativas de la DINA deteniendo opositores y participando en las torturas o en golpizas.

El juez Montiglio explicó ayer este masivo encausamiento, manifestando que ello se debe a que “aquí estamos investigando a todos quienes han tenido participación en los cuarteles (de la DINA)”.

El magistrado ordenó además el arresto preventivo de una gran parte de los procesados, y aquellos respecto de los cuales no lo decretó, se explica porque ya se encuentran encausados por otros casos y en situación de libertad provisional, esperando condena.

La Operación Cóndor, o Plan Cóndor, fue una coordinación de los servicios de inteligencia del cono sur para reprimir y eliminar a militantes de izquierda, y nació en Santiago el 28 de noviembre de 1975.

A esa reunión, en la que se formó el acta de constitución, asistieron por Chile el jefe de la DINA, coronel Manuel Contreras; por Argentina el capitán de navío Jorge Casas; por Bolivia el mayor de Ejército Carlos Mena; por Uruguay el coronel de Ejército Jorge A. Pons, y por Paraguay el coronel de Ejército Benito Güanes Serrano.

La Operación Colombo fue un montaje preparado por la dictadura entre fines de 1974 y 1975, para hacer creer a la sociedad chilena y los países extranjeros que ya reclamaban por la represión tras el golpe militar de 1973, que los detenidos desaparecidos eran una mentira del “marxismo internacional”.

Para ello, inventaron que 119 chilenos que se reclamaban como desaparecidos, habían muerto en Argentina y Brasil, enfrentados entre ellos por rencillas políticas o en intercambio de disparos con las policías o fuerzas militares de esos países.

EL CASO CONFERENCIA

Se conoció como Calle Conferencia, según el nombre de la calle de Santiago con el número 1587 donde se produjeron las primeras detenciones, al episodio por el cual la DINA secuestró e hizo desaparecer en mayo de 1976 a la primera dirección clandestina del Partido Comunista.

Entre ellos cayeron Víctor Díaz López, secretario general del PC en la clandestinidad, además de Jorge Muñoz Poutays, Mario Zamorano Donoso, Uldarico Donaire Cortez, y Jaime Donato Avendaño.

El capítulo conocido como Conferencia II se le llama también “El caso de los 13″, por el secuestro y desaparición de 11 integrantes de la segunda dirección clandestina del PC junto a dos militantes del MIR, ocurrido entre el 29 de noviembre y el 20 de diciembre de 1976.

La investigación judicial estableció que tanto los miembros de la primera, como la segunda dirección del PC, fueron detenidos por integrantes de la Brigada Lautaro de la DINA, comandada por el capitán de Ejército Juan Morales Salgado, y por los integrantes de dos grupos operativos liderados por Ricardo Lawrence y Germán Barriga, capitán de Carabineros y Ejército, respectivamente.

Santiago Araya Cabrera (MIR) fue detenido el 29 de noviembre de 1976. El 13 de diciembre fue arrestado el dirigente PC Luis Lazo San Martín.

Dos días más tarde fueron secuestrados Horacio Cepeda Marinkovich, Lincoyán Yalú Berríos, Fernando Navarro Allendes, Fernando Ortiz Letelier, Héctor Véliz Ramírez, Reinalda Pereira Plaza y Waldo Pizarro Molina.

El 9 de diciembre fue detenido Armando Portilla, finalizando la operación el 18 de diciembre con Lisandro Cruz Díaz y Carlos Durán González (MIR), y el 20 de ese mes, con el secuestro de Edras Pinto Arroyo.

Sólo en 2007 se conoció judicialmente el infierno que vivieron los detenidos, porque ningún prisionero salió con vida desde el cuartel Simón Bolívar de la Brigada Lautaro.

Respecto del destino de los dirigentes, el testimonio del suboficial de Carabineros (R) Raúl Valdebenito Araya fue decisivo para abrir la causa.

Según él, por esos días, “tres o cuatro” detenidos, todos miembros del PC, fueron llevados hasta el gimnasio del cuartel, para ser interrogados.

No recuerda si fue ese día o al siguiente que vio a las personas “ya ensacadas”, aludiendo a que habían sido eliminadas y puestas dentro de sacos paperos.

El mismo Valdebenito se encargó de conducir a la comitiva de automóviles hasta la cuesta Barriga, al poniente Santiago.

“Al llegar nos detuvimos y recuerdo que los vehículos que venían custodiándonos sacaron de sus maleteras unos tres o cuatro bultos, los que fueron trasladados hasta el interior de una cueva”, declaró en el sumario.

Según recuerda, “pocos días después”, llegaron cinco detenidos más al cuartel Simón Bolívar, también miembros de la dirección del PC, quienes habían sido detenidos por los equipos operativos de Lawrence y Barriga.

Otro agente entregó antecedentes trascendentales para probar la estadía en ese cuartel del profesor Fernando Ortiz, Reinalda Pereira y Lincoyán Berríos.

A Chilean judge ordered today the arrest and indictment of more than 120 former intelligence agents from the Pinochet dictatorship under charges of crimes against humanity in three major operations that took place in the 1970s.

Judge Victor Montiglio’s decision marked the first massive indictment for human rights crimes here since the courts began serious efforts in 2000 to investigate human rights violations during the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990).

The crimes include the disappearance of the entire Communist party leadership in 1976, in a case known as “calle Conferencia,” in reference to the street where they were abducted, and an operation known as “Colombo,” in which 119 opponents were made to disappear in 1975. This was a scandalous case — the regime, with the cooperation of its counterparts in Argentina and Brazil, mounted a cover-up operation by fabricating newspapers in those countries listing the names of the victims as having been killed in political infighting within their own organizations.

The indictments also include those responsible for crimes in “Operation Condor,” a network of intelligence services in the Southern Cone set up in the mid-70s at the behest of the Chilean agency National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) to collaborate in the exchange of information and prisoners in member countries. The Chilean partner in Condor, DINA, took this cooperation one step forward by carrying out assassinations abroad, such as the car bomb murder of Orlando Letelier and his U.S. colleague Ronni Moffit in Washington, D.C. in 1976, among others.

Over half of the agents indicted today had never been indicted or arrested for other human rights crimes previously. Montiglio is indicting everyone involved in these events, from those who transported prisoners or were guards in clandestine detention centers, to those directly responsible for their death and disappearance.

They include retired army officers, dozens of non-commissioned army officers, and  members of the Air Force and Carabineros police.

A sister’s quest to find out what happened to the only U.S. citizen who disappeared during Chile’s military dictatorship.

SANTIAGO — On his death bed in a Santiago prison hospital, the 88-year-old German child molester, weapons trafficker, torturer and sect leader Paul Schafer still refuses to say what happened to the only U.S. citizen who disappeared during Chile’s military dictatorship.

Boris Weisfeiler, a 43-year-old Russian-born mathematics professor at Pennsylvania State University, was last seen in January 1985 during a hiking trip in a remote area in the Andean foothills, 250 miles south of the Chilean capital and near a secretive German settlement called “Colonia Dignidad.”

Two months later, a far from thorough police inquiry determined that Weisfeiler had drowned trying to cross a river, and no more questions were asked. Almost a quarter of a century later, the only sure thing about Weisfeiler’s disappearance is that it was no accidental drowning.

Documents declassified in 2000 told an entirely different story from the official line, leading Weisfeiler’s sister Olga to open a judicial investigation. But it has been dragging on for nine years, with no visible progress. She came to Chile this July for the eighth time.

The secret memos and reports revealed not only negligence and inaction by the U.S. government to determine his whereabouts at the time, but evidence indicating that her brother may have been abducted by the military and handed over to Colonia Dignidad under the suspicion he was either a Russian or Jewish “spy.” A still unidentified U.S. Embassy source using the alias “Daniel,” spoke of seeing Boris living in “animal-like conditions” in Colonia at least two years later.

Olga, a retired microbiologist, spends most of her time trying to make sense of documents, analyzing possible leads, reading the Chilean press and writing many letters. Untiring but frustrated, she has written to the presidents of Chile and the U. S., members of Congress, judicial authorities, army chiefs, human rights institutions and others.

In 2002, Olga traveled to the rugged, isolated riverbank where her brother was last seen. Two years later, she paid an unannounced and unprecedented visit to Colonia Dignidad with relatives of other human rights victims who disappeared there and members of Amnesty International. Mid-level leaders received her reluctantly. They said they couldn’t confirm or deny that her brother had been there, and denied knowing what had happened to him.

“This has dominated all my life. I can’t do anything else right now. I can’t dedicate to my children, grandchildren, not even to myself. I can’t even read books, because I am thinking about Boris 24 hours a day,” Olga said.

Boris Weisfeiler is the only U.S. citizen on the list of more than 1,100 missing during the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship of 1973 to 1990. A nature lover who obtained U.S. citizenship in 1975, he regularly took solitary hiking trips to remote, non-touristy places.

He knew nothing about Chile, didn’t speak a word of Spanish and wasn’t interested in politics. He was aware the country was under military rule, but it wasn’t on the State Department list of dangerous places, and he obtained a tourist visa. He never imagined he would be considered suspicious for hiking near the Argentine border, and close to Colonia Dignidad.

At the time, Colonia leaders were not only collaborating with the Chilean military in security, border control and espionage, but had also offered their facilities to hold and torture political prisoners. According to the few surviving prisoners, Schafer himself was an efficient, scientific torturer who would instruct Chilean officers on his methods.

Schafer, a former Nazi soldier who had fled his home country after being charged with sodomizing boys, had founded the seemingly peaceful 37,000-acre agricultural community in 1961. Subsequent judicial investigations and testimonies of former members disclosed another reality.

Schafer forced couples to live apart and separated children from their parents, assuring himself a permanent pool of boys to sexually abuse at night. He used a variety of torture methods and drugs to keep members obedient and working long hours without pay. Colonia members were prohibited from leaving the enclave, never learned Spanish, didn’t have access to Chilean currency and were led to believe the outside world was evil. It was also a hideout for Nazis fleeing from Europe, a vacationing spot for the military junta and their friends, and a center for weapons trafficking.

Schafer has not said a word since his arrest and expulsion in 2005 from Argentina, where he had been hiding out. But now, gravely ill while he serves a 20-year sentence for sexual abuse of minors, arms trafficking and human rights crimes, a new generation of Colonia residents have relaxed the rules and timidly cooperated in some of the investigations. But not in the Weisfeiler case.

No one interrogated by the police — including members of Colonia Dignidad, local residents and police and military patrols in the area at the time — has admitted direct involvement in Weisfeiler’s disappearance. Their statements are plagued with contradictions and overt lies. Some say they suffer loss of memory, others say they were drunk and can’t remember, while others refuse to admit to having been in places where they were seen.

Olga and her lawyer accuse the judge, Jorge Zepeda, of delaying the proceedings, saying he has withheld important files from the plaintiffs and refused to follow leads or check inconsistencies and, alleging jurisdictional sovereignty, has blocked assistance offered repeatedly by the FBI in Santiago.

In September 2006, the FBI legal attaches assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Santiago opened their own investigation into this case. FBI officers have traveled to the location of Weisfeiler’s disappearance, conducted interviews on site and processed evidence. Now, they are ready to deliver several reports to Zepeda. However, for the FBI to submit the results of its own investigation, the judge must request it. But he hasn’t.

“I believe Boris was arrested and taken to Colonia and maybe survived for some period of time, and I don’t know, killed later,” Olga said. “I just want to find out what happened, when it happened and where his body is. That is my main goal, not to see these old men sitting in a comfortable military prison for a couple of years before getting freed. It doesn’t make any difference to me. But I do want the Chilean government to assume its responsibility for my brother’s fate.”

By Pascale Bonnefoy – GlobalPost.com

The consideration of military pardons reveals that Chile still has a lot of healing to do.

SANTIAGO — The possibility that human rights violators may be included in a general pardon next year is revealing how far Chile is from healing the wounds of its past of torture, executions and disappearances.

When the Catholic Bishops Conference announced last month that it would submit a proposal to the government for a massive pardon of prisoners on occasion of Chile’s Bicentennial celebrations, the right-wing opposition jumped on the opportunity to include its imprisoned military allies.

For years, these rightist parties, founded in the ’80s by civilians supporting the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, were accomplices to its well documented human rights atrocities, refusing to acknowledge they ever took place. With the return to democracy and their need to become politically palatable to the electorate, they timidly began to admit the truth, but have nevertheless worked hard to put an end to human rights trials.

President Michelle Bachelet initially said she would consider any and all proposals for a pardon but alleges that her words were misinterpreted and that she is not seeking any sort of pardon for the military. Her father, an air force general, was arrested after the military coup that toppled socialist president Salvador Allende in 1973 and died in prison after repeated torture sessions. She and her mother were arrested and held in the infamous torture center Villa Grimaldi before being forced into exile.More than 50 agents are serving prison terms for human rights violations, while another 700 are still subject to excruciatingly slow judicial investigations. So far, very few have cooperated in providing any information that could lead to finding the more than 1,000 missing, or establish responsibilities for thousands of other deaths. In 2001, a government initiative to have the military provide information on the disappeared produced a list of 200 victims and their supposed whereabouts. Much of the information turned out to be false.

Many families of those imprisoned or killed are still waiting for the culprits to be charged and say that justice is far from served.

“Most of our disappeared continue to be an absolute mystery. We don’t know what happened to them, where they were taken, or who, when and how they were killed. Many of those who have been sentenced don’t want to provide information. There is still a long ways to go before we can say justice has been done,” said Laura Elgueta, whose brother Luis disappeared without a trace in 1976. No one has been indicted for his abduction.

On the other side are those who would distinguish between those who willingly committed human rights violations and those who were forced to do so by their superiors; some take an even harder line and insist no crimes were committed.

The pardon suggestion has had several unlikely supporters, including some in Bachelet’s government.

One is her undersecretary of aviation, retired air force captain Raul Vergara. “The military shouldn’t be excluded from the pardon just because they are military,” he said in an interview with the conservative paper El Mercurio.

His comments wouldn’t have caused such uproar if he hadn’t been part of the group of air force officers jailed and tortured along with Bachelet’s father.

In a public statement, the Organization of Officers and Non-Commissioned Officers in the Case “Bachelet and Others 1973” called on the government not to pardon any of their fellow officers.

“The members of the military serving sentences haven’t been convicted because they are military, but because they have committed horrendous crimes … Pardoning them would be a terrible example for future military generations, who could behave in a similar fashion, knowing that in the end, they would also be pardoned,” reads the statement.

The Catholic Church proposal would free prisoners over 70, those suffering from terminal illnesses, mothers with small children, petty criminals and first offenders, and could apply to some 3,000 convicts and another 50,000 already on conditional freedom. Once the president receives the proposal, the executive will draft a bill and submit the pardon to congressional approval.The Bishops Conference insists that it won’t include the worst human rights violators, such as Manuel Contreras, director of the secret intelligence service DINA responsible for most violations, and who has accumulated sentences for almost 300 years for multiple crimes.

But organizations such as the September 10 Movement, which defends the military coup, are calling for the liberation of whom they consider to be “political prisoners.”

“What Chile needs is an end to all these investigations, not a pardon. There is nothing to forgive, because it isn’t a crime to have sworn loyalty to our country,” said Bernardita Huerta, a member of the movement and the daughter of deceased navy admiral Ismael Huerta, Pinochet’s first foreign minister and later Chilean ambassador to the United Nations, where he denied that his country’s military was abducting and disappearing opponents.

“All of our political prisoners should be freed and the legal cases against the rest dropped,” she added. “And if they want to put anyone on trial, then let them be judged by someone who isn’t a Marxist.”

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the length of Manuel Contreras’ sentences. ]]> http://languages.oberlin.edu/hist293/blog/2009/08/20/a-question-of-justice/feed/ 0 http://languages.oberlin.edu/hist293/blog/2009/08/18/uruguay-senate-oks-millions-for-dirty-war-victims/ http://languages.oberlin.edu/hist293/blog/2009/08/18/uruguay-senate-oks-millions-for-dirty-war-victims/#comments Tue, 18 Aug 2009 09:46:32 +0000 svolk http://languages.oberlin.edu/hist293/?p=166 By RAUL O. GARCES (AP), Aug. 14, 2009

MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay — Uruguay’s ruling party wants to pay $17.4 million in reparations to victims of state oppression during its dictatorship.

A reparations bill passed the Senate on Wednesday and now goes to the lower house of the legislature, where the ruling party has a comfortable majority, and leftist President Tabare Vazquez is expected to sign it.

The bill says Uruguay’s ruling military junta violated fundamental individual rights and was responsible for systemic physical and psychological torture, forced disappearances, murders, arbitrary sentences, political exiles and blacklists in the name of national security.

At least 26 victims are officially missing from Uruguay’s 1973-1985 dictatorship, according to an armed forces report released in 2005. But human rights groups say thousands were tortured and many opponents of military rule were forced to flee the country in a “dirty war” against dissidents.

The bill also would pay reparations to victims of state oppression beginning in 1968, when Uruguay was still a democracy. But it excludes reparations for victims of family members of those affected the actions of subversive groups such as the Tupamaro Movement.

Leftists were responsible for an estimated 70 deaths as well as assaults, kidnappings, robberies and fires, according to the opposition National Party. Its presidential candidate, former President Luis Lacalle, said Thursday that the bill discriminates against vi