RIGHTS-CHILE: Victims Criticise Proposed Human Rights Formula

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Gustavo Gonzalez

SANTIAGO, Aug 7 1999 (IPS) - The families of victims of the 1973-90 dictatorship in Chile criticised a formula to close pending cases of human rights violations, proposed by Defence Minister Edmundo Perez, as non-viable.

Perez suggested the start of a dialogue between the armed forces and the Group of Families of the Detained-Disappeared (AFDD) as the basis for an agreement acceptable to all political sectors.

But lawyer Carmen Hertz, the widow of journalist Carlos Berger, assassinated by the military in 1973, said that sitting the victims across the table from the victimisers who acted during the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet was an unacceptable idea that implied “a return to the view that the problem involves only them, when in reality it affects society as a whole.

“Since when are murders resolved at negotiating tables?” asked Hertz, a former human rights adviser to the foreign ministry.

“It is impossible to rebuild Chilean society with this model of transition, which proposes impunity for the policy of extermination,” she argued.

According to the defence minister’s initiative, attorneys for the plaintiffs in pending cases on repressive crimes and academic groups with links to the justice system and the fight for human rights would also take part in the dialogue.

The president’s chief of staff Jose Miguel Insulza invited the heads of the AFDD to a meeting next Thursday to hear the human rights group’s views on Perez’s proposed formula.

Viviana Diaz, president of the AFDD, said she was pleased that the government of Eduardo Frei now considered it important to incorporate the families of the victims of human rights violations in an eventual agreement.

Since the restoration of democracy in March 1990, there have been eight attempts at reaching a political or legislative solution to the trials pending over the nearly 1,200 forced disappearances committed under the Pinochet regime.

The initiatives, which ended in failure, all sought agreements between the governing centre-left coalition and the right-wing opposition, including the designated senators representing the armed forces. But none of them took the AFDD into account.

The issue, pushed to the backburner during the transition to democracy, has reemerged into the national spotlight over the past nine months, since the October arrest of Pinochet in London and the major international debate on his possible extradition to Spain.

Courts in Chile, meanwhile, have begun to apply new criteria in cases against officers who formed part of the repressive apparatus of the dictatorship, thus questioning the amnesty law issued by Pinochet in 1978.

The Supreme Court set a new precedent last month, when it backed Judge Juan Guzman’s June decision that five retired army officers could be tried on charges of qualified kidnapping.

The five retired officers, including General Sergio Arellano Stark, participated in the so-called “caravan of death,” an army operation in which 73 political prisoners were summarily executed in various Chilean cities in October and November 1973.

The Supreme Court upheld Guzman’s ruling that since the corpses of 19 of the 73 victims had never been found, the 1978 amnesty was inapplicable in what really constituted cases of qualified kidnapping, a crime with no statute of limitations.

The Supreme Court ruling upset the military brass, and especially the army, which accounts for the largest number of retired officers implicated in the 1,200 cases of forced disappearances.

In June, the Senate Human Rights Commission proposed a new law that would facilitate locating the remains of the disappeared, by offering confidentiality and automatic application of the 1978 amnesty to officers who provided information.

But that idea was frustrated by the Supreme Court ruling, which right-wing senators and the lawmakers designated by the military termed a “reinterpretation” of the amnesty law.

President Frei said last week that his government would not back any legislative accord on the pending cases of disappearances until the military personnel implicated in the cases agreed to provide information on the whereabouts of the remains.

That sealed the fate of the draft law presented by the Senate Human Rights Commission, and Defence Minister Perez’s initiative began to take shape. It was made public over the weekend.

The AFDD’s Diaz expressed scepticism over the plausibility of Perez’s proposal, but said she would not make a final analysis until after the meeting called by Minister Insulza, scheduled for Thursday.

Hertz, however, said she believed the government had not changed its position on the issue, but was simply reacting to the Supreme Court ruling on the “caravan of death” and the uneasiness expressed by the military brass.

The lawyer, whose husband was one of the victims of that military operation, served as human rights adviser to the foreign ministry until November 1998, when she resigned in disagreement with the government’s decision to defend Pinochet in the British courts, and in order to take part in lawsuits filed against the former dictator.