Headlines, Human Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean, Press Freedom

CHILE: Demanding the Media Admit Role in Cover-Up of Killings, 30 Years On

Gustavo González

SANTIAGO, Aug 1 2005 (IPS) - Thirty years after the Chilean dictatorship mounted “Operation Colombo” to cover up the forced disappearance and murder of 119 leftists, the newspapers and reporters who helped spread the regime’s disinformation still refuse to admit their share of responsibility.

An art and multimedia exhibit outside the government palace of La Moneda in Santiago late last week completed 10 days of activities commemorating the 100 men and 19 women victims of one of the largest scale repressive operations mounted by the 1973-1990 dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

The 119 victims, whose bodies have never been found, were leftist activists and guerrillas arrested or abducted by the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) – the de facto regime’s secret police – after the Sept. 11, 1973 coup d’etat that overthrew the government of socialist president Salvador Allende (1970-1973).

Fabricated reports later said the victims were killed in Argentina by their own comrades in a settling of political scores.

On Jul. 23 and 24, 1975, the Chilean bureau of the U.S. news agency UPI (United Press International) and the local daily newspapers El Mercurio, Las Ultimas Noticias, La Segunda and La Tercera printed, in alphabetical order, the names of 119 people who were supposedly killed in Argentina by fellow members of their leftist groups.

The reports originally appeared on Jul. 15 in a mysterious Argentine magazine, Lea, in Buenos Aires and on Jul. 17 in O’Dia, a small newspaper in Curitiba, Brazil.


The articles were part of a communicational ploy, says a pamphlet printed by Comité 119, a group that represents the victims’ families, which points out that both the Argentine publication and the Brazilian daily were remarkably short-lived: each consisted of a sole edition, printed on those dates in July 1975.

Lea was put out by the state-owned Codex publishing house, which at the time was under the control of José López Rega, the founder of the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance (Triple A), a right-wing death squad.

Operation Colombo – the name DINA gave to the forced disappearances and subsequent cover-up – was in some ways a forerunner to Operation Condor, a coordinated plan that emerged in late 1975 among the military governments that ruled Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay in the 1970s and 1980s, aimed at tracking down, capturing and eliminating left-wing opponents.

Most of the victims of Operation Colombo were “Miristas” or members of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR), a political and guerrilla movement.

“Miristas Exterminated Like Rats” was the headline of the article published in July 1975 by the La Segunda newspaper, which picked up the reports that had appeared earlier in the Lea and O’Dia publications.

Lucía Sepúlveda, head of the human rights department of the Journalists Association of Chile, who carried out an extensive investigation, said 94 of the 119 victims belonged to the MIR, nine were members of the Communist Party, nine were socialists, and the rest belonged to the United Popular Action Movement or were independent activists.

“They were social and political activists; 25 of them were leaders in their parties,” said Sepúlveda in a recent meeting with journalism students.

“Six of them had served as bodyguards to president Salvador Allende. They were mainly young people: 102 were between the ages of 18 and 30, while 13 were between the ages of 30 and 40. Among the 119, there were six couples,” she added.

“The victims of Operation Colombo left behind a total of 97 children, 13 of whom were born after their fathers fell into the hands of DINA, which meant their fathers never saw them,” added Sepúlveda, who is herself the widow of journalist Augusto Carmona, a MIR leader who was killed by the dictatorship on Dec. 7, 1977.

The 119 victims were kidnapped in Chile and taken to Argentina, where they were summarily convicted of treason and executed.

Since early 1975, as international pressure for the Pinochet regime to explain reports of forced disappearances was mounting, the Chilean press had been publishing reports about the supposed presence of “Chilean guerrillas” in Argentina.

Only newspapers that toed the official line continued to circulate in Chile after the 1973 coup, like the El Mercurio chain, which owns Las Ultimas Noticias and La Segunda, and the Consorcio Periodístico S.A. (COPESA), which puts out La Tercera.

These compliant newspapers helped create a climate favourable to Operation Colombo. In the campaign, the short-lived Argentine and Brazilian publications Lea and O’Dia played a key role in giving media coverage and justification to the ruse hatched by the dictatorship.

Thirty years later, the role of the press and its responsibility is still being debated in Chile, while investigations carried out by prosecuting Judge Juan Guzmán have clearly demonstrated that the reports on the killings of the 119 activists were entirely fabricated by the Pinochet regime’s secret police.

Based on the investigations by Guzmán, who retired in April, the appeals court of Santiago voted on Jul. 7 to strip Pinochet’s immunity from prosecution in connection with Operation Colombo.

Comité 119 and the Rights of the People Corporation Committee have brought action before the Journalists Association’s ethics tribunal, demanding that it hand down a decision on the role played by the reporters involved in the case.

The journalists who took part in the media cover-up include two National Journalism Prize-winners: Arturo Fontaine Aldunate, assistant director of El Mercurio in 1975, who won the award that very year; and Héctor Olave, assistant director of La Tercera in 1975, who was awarded the prize in 2003 and is currently chief news editor at El Mercurio.

The legal action brought before the ethics tribunal also mentions Mercedes Garrido, chief political editor at El Mercurio, who in 1975 was assistant director at La Segunda and was responsible for the headline “Miristas Exterminated Like Rats”, considered one of the most brutal in the history of Chilean journalism.

The Comité 119 is also demanding reparations from the newspapers that picked up the original Lea and O’Dia reports. But the only success they have had so far was to get El Mercurio to publish part of an open letter, in its letters to the editors section.

La Tercera, owned by COPESA, completely ignored the group’s open letter.

IPS sought out the opinions of the heads of the Journalists Association, but one of the organisation’s legal advisers said they were not able to comment until the ethics tribunal hands down a decision.

Journalist Lidia Baltra, who was chair of the Association’s ethics tribunal until 2004, told IPS that “the least that they (newspapers like La Segunda and La Tercera) should do is put out a statement retracting the reports they published 30 years ago, and apologising to the families of the ‘disappeared’ and to their readers.”

In Baltra’s view, the local newspapers hold a greater share of the responsibility for the media cover-up than those who mounted the Lea and O’Dia “publications”, because the Chilean papers were long-established media outlets.

“The duty of the media is to seek out and report the truth, and it is inconceivable that they would lend themselves to political propaganda, and even worse, to help cover up an act of genocide,” she said.

Ernesto Carmona, who heads the minority leftist faction in the leadership of the Journalists Association, supports the demand for an ethics trial for the reporters and media outlets involved in spreading the Pinochet regime’s disinformation.

“Just as the statute of limitations never runs out on crimes against humanity, ethical wrongdoing by journalists do not expire,” he commented to IPS.

“The media outlets belonging to Agustín Edwards (who owns El Mercurio) and Alvaro Saieh (chief executive of COPESA), who control practically all of the national press, owe an explanation not only to the families of the 119 victims, but to all of the citizens of Chile,” Carmona argued.

 
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