Santiago

Backfire: Bones of Contention

Letelier turned out to be prescient, to say the least. After months of roundtable talks, the military agreed last summer that it would conduct a six-month internal investigation and, by offering anonymity to informants, would compile and make public an official report on everything it knew regarding the fate of 1,100 Chileans considered disappeared. Theoretically, this was a chance to heal Chile's gaping social wound.

As the January 7 deadline to make that report public neared, Chile stood politically breathless. The day began with Pinochet refusing to show up for his first day of court-mandated mental exams. Judge Guzmán waited patiently at the hospital for the former general for two hours, noted his absence and then went back to his office to ponder his legal options.

President Lagos was scheduled to address the nation at 10 pm to publicize the military's long-awaited report. As darkness fell, a crowd began to gather downtown in front of La Moneda palace--the seat of government that Pinochet bombed in the 1973 coup and in which deposed President Salvador Allende took his own life.

A hand-painted banner reading No One Is Forgotten. Nothing Is Forgiven was draped on the police barricade in front of the presidential palace. Some in the crowd had pinned fading black-and-white photos of missing relatives over their hearts. Hundreds of candles were lit and placed in front of the steel barricades. Shortly before Lagos's speech was to begin, a column of about 200 marchers led by Communist Party leader Gladys Marín appeared on the scene clapping and chanting "Pinochet to Trial!" Marín's husband was among the disappeared, and she had the distinction of having filed the first criminal action against Pinochet--exactly three years before.

As people in the crowd hugged one another and radios were switched on in anticipation of the president's speech, as the long line of candles flickered in the warm evening breeze, as another clump of candles was placed at the foot of the newly erected statue of Allende bearing some of his last words ("I have faith in Chile and its future"), there was both a sense of great drama and great sadness and disappointment. On this most historic of evenings, no more than 500 people had gathered, and only the small Communist Party had mobilized. Although Chilean opinion polls have consistently shown clear national majorities in favor of holding Pinochet and the military accountable for the crimes of the dictatorship, and even though President Lagos is a member of the same Socialist Party as Allende, the Chilean government long ago pushed aside human rights as a political issue. If Lagos had put out a simple call for Chileans to peacefully assemble to honor the missing and to show support for the rule of law, hundreds of thousands would surely have come out.

No such call was made. And, rather astoundingly, as Lagos gave his fifteen-minute address, the name Pinochet never crossed his lips. Instead, Lagos methodically revealed the outlines of the military report, prefacing the details by warning that what he had to say was going to be "raw and painful." Previous to that evening, 171 of the 1,100 cases of the disappeared had been cleared up. Now, the long-awaited military report had information on another 181 cases. Of those, some 151 were names of Chileans whom the military now acknowledged it had dumped in the ocean. The remaining cases consisted of a group of twenty-four reported to be buried in the northern desert and another group of six reported to be buried in a rural site near the capital.

At first the crowd outside the palace was stunned by hearing what had always been known but never admitted. But the shock soon turned to anger. After twenty-seven years, this is all the military had to report? More than 700 cases were still unaccounted for, and the 181 cases now reported as solved were suspiciously scant on details. The ire in the street turned incandescent as Lagos concluded by saying how proud he was that Chile could so fully probe its past. When he lauded the military for its "strength and courage" the crowd outside burst out with yells of "Murderers!"

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