RIGHTS-CHILE: Praise, Cautious Optimism for Army Acknowledgement of Responsibility

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Gustavo González

SANTIAGO, Nov 5 2004 (IPS) - Relatives of victims of Chile’s 1973-1990 military dictatorship reacted with cautious optimism Friday when army chief Gen. Juan Emilio Cheyre said the army took full responsibility for the human rights violations committed during those years.

Socialist President Ricardo Lagos and most of the country’s political leaders praised Cheyre’s “courage” and termed the decision “historic”.

With Friday’s announcement, the army seems to have severed all remaining ties with the legacy of former dictator Augusto Pinochet, army chief from August 1973 to March 1998.

“The Chilean army has taken the tough, but irreversible, decision to assume responsibilities as an institution for all of the punishable and morally unacceptable acts of the past,” Cheyre wrote in a declaration that was widely published by the local press.

“Human rights violations never, and for no one, have an ethical justification,” added Cheyre, alluding to the murders, forced disappearances, torture and other abuses committed by the Pinochet regime, which ruled this South American country from Sep. 11, 1973 to Mar. 11, 1990.

The declaration came out just before a report is handed to Lagos next week by a special government Commission on Torture and Prison, which has been collecting testimony on around 35,000 cases of torture of political prisoners during the dictatorship.

In 1991, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission headed by jurist Raúl Rettig delivered to then president Patricio Aylwin (1990-1994) a report that documented 3,000 murders and forced disappearances under the dictatorship.

Pinochet, 88, has never accepted that either the regime or the army were responsible for the abuses. In November 2003 he said there were “excesses”, which he blamed on “junior officers who did things and kept silent.”

Prior to that, the elderly former dictator discredited Argentine army chief Martín Balza when he apologised to the Argentine people in the name of his institution for the human rights crimes committed by the de facto military regime that ruled that country between 1976 and 1983.

Retired Gen. Ricardo Izurieta, who succeeded Pinochet as head of the army from 1998 to 2002, said in 1999 that the military committed “errors”, but that it would be a distortion to say that there was “an institutionalised policy of human rights violations”.

Cheyre’s “mea culpa” could be designed as a kind of safeguard against the predictable impact of the report on torture that will be handed to the president next week, especially since the question of torture has not been discussed since the “Rettig Report” came out in 1991, sources with the Group of Families of the Detained-Disappeared (AFDD) told IPS.

The army chief’s declaration “is an important step, but it is not vital for us,” said Viviana Díaz, vice-president of the AFDD. What is essential for us is for “the army to decide to hand over to the courts the information needed to find our family members.”

Díaz added, however, that Cheyre’s acknowledgement has shown that the human rights groups have been right all along in maintaining that it was the military as an institution that violated the human rights of thousands of Chileans.

Human rights lawyer Pamela Pereira, daughter of one of the disappeared and the plaintiff in numerous human rights trials, called the army commander-in-chief’s declaration “historic”, and said that it would “qualitatively change” the context in which roughly 100 cases of disappearances and political killings are currently being tried.

These cases include the investigation by prosecuting Judge Juan Guzmán into Pinochet’s responsibility for the creation of Operation Condor, a covert military intelligence-sharing strategy used by South American dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s to track down, capture, and eliminate leftist activists and other opponents.

Pinochet was stripped of his immunity from prosecution by the Supreme Court to be investigated in this case, but could once more avoid trial as a result of his alleged senility. In 2001, he was deemed mentally unfit to stand trial in a case involving 58 murders and 18 “kidnappings” (disappearances).

Speaking from Rio de Janeiro, where he is attending the Rio Group Summit of South American leaders, Lagos expressed his satisfaction and pride over the acknowledgement of responsibility made by the commander in chief, calling it “an important and active contribution to building the Chile of tomorrow in peace.”

He called this new vision on the part of the military “the continuation of a process of gradual change, part of its institutional modernisation and full integration into the democratic era in which Chile is living today.”

Former defence minister Michelle Bachelet and former foreign minister Soledad Alvear, the two leading contenders for the centre-left governing coalition’s presidential candidacy, also applauded Cheyre’s gesture.

Gonzalo Martner, president of the co-governing Socialist Party, praised the stance taken by the army chief but stressed that the pending trials for human rights abuses “should follow their course in the courts” with this new precedent of “institutional responsibility.”

Pereira, also a Socialist, said that the declaration made by the Chilean army should now be followed by the other branches of the military, particularly the navy.

It was in fact a former commander in chief of the Chilean navy, Admiral Jorge Arancibia – now a senator for the right-wing Independent Democratic Union – who sounded one of the few discordant notes, referring to Cheyre’s declaration as “senseless”.

According to Arancibia, a military commander in chief can only assume hierarchical or institutional responsibility for acts that take place under his command. “Assuming responsibilities that fall outside of my scope, my context and my time seems senseless to me,” he said.

“In my institution, the Chilean navy, there was neither an institutional policy, nor an institutional doctrine, nor an institutional mandate at the time that led us to violate human rights,” the retired admiral declared.