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.

SANTIAGO – The Chilean government said it will invoke a controversial Pinochet-era anti-terrorism law to prosecute acts of violence in the southern region of Araucania, where armed Mapuche Indian militants have set two trucks on fire over the past 48 hours.

“We’ve taken the decision to invoke the Anti-Terrorist Law to prosecute these groups of people who only want to cause disorder, commit crimes and stir up trouble in a region that wants a peaceful path” to resolving land disputes, Deputy Interior Minister Patricio Rosende said.

“We’re not going to allow or tolerate actions of this type again by these groups,” Rosende said, referring to the protesters’ burning of two trucks and other acts of violence in recent days.

He said the violent actions had nothing to do with the Mapuche Indians’ claims to ancestral lands.

The law, which was drafted during Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s 1973-1990 dictatorship and has been criticized by human rights groups, triples prison sentences for crimes such as arson or land seizures.

In August, the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination urged Chile not to use the law in cracking down on violent protests linked to the Mapuches’ land claims.

The law has been applied in the cases of 34 people who are being prosecuted or have been sentenced or jailed for crimes related to the Mapuche struggle, according to a report prepared by the Ethical Commission Against Torture, a coalition of more than a dozen Chilean human-rights groups formed during the dictatorship.

Over the past 48 hours, assailants have attacked two trucks traveling in the Araucania region, home to much of the 650,000-strong Mapuche nation, Chile’s largest indigenous group.

The first attacks occurred Sunday morning in Victoria, some 620 kilometers (385 miles) south of Santiago.

In a span of four hours, a least 20 hooded assailants attacked a toll plaza, set fire to a truck, fired pellets at three vehicles – including a police van -, robbed the driver of a fourth vehicle and tried to rob another driver.

Another group of hooded assailants on Tuesday morning robbed and set fire to a truck on a highway near the town of Collipulli.

The attackers lit a bonfire to obstruct the passage of the vehicle, threatened the driver, set the truck ablaze and fired into the air with shotguns, a prosecutor in Collipulli, Ricardo Traipe, told reporters.

The attacks, in which no one was injured and no arrests have yet been made, occurred two days after the Chilean government announced it had concluded the process of purchasing land from 115 Mapuche communities in Araucania.

Mapuches are demanding constitutional recognition of their tribal identity, rights and culture, as well as ownership of the lands that belonged to their ancestors.

Their struggle to reclaim ancestral lands from farmers and timber companies led last month to the death of an Indian activist, shot in the back by a police officer. EFE

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.

British authorities and the financial sector are linked for the first time to the late Chilean dictator’s £1bn fortune. Hugh O’Shaughnessy reports