Santiago

A Sea of Doubts

Within twenty-four hours, the military report proved to be a political and public relations debacle of monumental scale and, inadvertently, a gold-plated gift to human rights activists. The military's acknowledgment that it had disappeared people into the ocean was, indeed, a historic breakthrough. But a detailed analysis of the report revealed much more ham-handed politicking than historical truth-telling.

The report brought forth a tidal wave of negative reactions. Even those human rights attorneys who had participated in the roundtable with the military were now seething. Lawyer Pamela Pereira, who had been the chief human rights negotiator with the military, went on TV and challenged the head of the National Police to "look me in the eye and swear you are not still withholding information." The issue of torture was left unaddressed in the report. Not one case involving the disbanded secret police, the DINA--responsible for an estimated 700 disappearances--was mentioned.

Most unsettling, some of the information given by the military glaringly contradicted evidence already unearthed by the courts. Specifically, some of the disappeared whose whereabouts in jails and concentration camps had been tracked to a certain date were now shown as having been cast into the Pacific at an earlier date. A consensus quickly arose among human rights lawyers that they were now face to face with the most cynical of political strategies. Before Pinochet left power he had decreed an amnesty law that blocked prosecution for any human rights abuses committed before 1978. In the past two years, Chilean courts have found a novel loophole in the amnesty: Even if a victim was disappeared before 1978, if the body could not be accounted for, the case was still an active kidnapping and therefore not covered by the amnesty. It's under this interpretation that the major human rights cases in Chile are proceeding in the courts.

But if the military was now reporting that bodies had been thrown into the sea before 1978, it could claim amnesty. "What a wonderful coincidence it is," said respected lawyer Carmen Hertz sarcastically, "that most of the people the military says it threw into the ocean are precisely the cases most vigorously being investigated by the courts. How convenient." Said Fabiola Letelier: "The only thing this perverse report produced was more pain. Now the surviving relatives are going to rightfully demand all the details: Who really did or did not get thrown into the ocean? Were the victims dead or alive? Who flew the planes? Who opened the doors?"

The silver lining to this national trauma is its boomerang effect. A veritable human rights offensive is now fully under way. Lawyers talk about filing eighty new cases naming more than 100 military officers. One complaint just filed accuses the current military top command of obstruction of justice (a court has just ordered the matter fully investigated). Another suit names Pinochet's lead lawyer, Pablo Rodriguez, as an active collaborator with the former secret police. Yet another accuses Pinochet in the theft and trafficking of the children of disappeared prisoners. Fabiola Letelier is carrying forward a new suit in the case of Charles Horman, the young American coup victim immortalized in the film Missing.

If that were not enough, a time bomb with potentially catastrophic effects was recently set ticking by the appearance of the book The Thin White Line and by the publication of a yearlong investigation by the London Observer, both alleging that in the 1980s the Pinochet regime marketed tons of cocaine in the United States and Europe. No one, for example, has yet explained how it is that Pinochet himself had by 1997 managed to amass $1,169,308 in his Washington, DC, bank account on an official salary of $16,000 a year.

But most important, in endorsing the discredited military report, the Lagos government has robbed itself of one of its most coveted but unstated goals: some sort of "full stop" legislation that would forever shut down the human rights trials. All political sides now concur that in the wake of the report on the disappeared there is no chance of such a law passing. "This story still has a long way to run," says Sebastian Brett, the Santiago-based representative of Human Rights Watch. "There are many more trials to come, more generals ready to fall. The roundtable report is not likely to put people in any mood to negotiate."

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