Taking Note
MF
Chile's Latest Victim A CARTOON IN THE SANTIAGO WEEKLY Andlisis shows a man holding a newspaper. "The Rettig Report is incomplete," he says to the woman at his side, referring to the work of...
...His body was found the following night, with knife wounds, on a road near the hydroelectric plant....According to the autopsies both bodies had multiple contusions and signs of electric shock....The causes of death were suffocation by submersion in water and neck wounds inflicted by blunt instruments...
...ODAY'S POLITICIANS LIVE OFF OLD LEGAcies...
...In many ways, he was the architect of the transition, the skillful Pinochet adviser who over the course of a decade convinced the general that a controlled democracy would best preserve the post-coup system of privilege...
...Five days after the final installment appeared in the press, Senator Guzmdin was gunned down, allegedly by an ultra-left commando...
...The next day terrorism was considered the monopoly of the Left, the Report was ancient history, and crime the only issue worth debating...
...Pinochet, after all, got 43% of the vote last year...
...The public meetings were cancelled, the book publication postponed...
...During the month of March, the Report was serialized in the daily papers...
...At a rally I attended, Vice President Enrique Krauss sounded like just one more law-and-order politician...
...One day the country grieved for its thousands of dead and disappeared, and seemed prepared to castigate the state terrorists responsible...
...there is rank discrimination against women and youth...
...The hegemony of elite politicians at the helm of worn-out parties is certainly better than dictatorship, but it is hardly the great success they claim...
...Even the Socialist Party, the only one to undergo serious renovation, re-elected its old unrenewed leadership...
...Guzmin was known to protect persecuted members of the elite, including several Communists...
...Like neighboring regimes before it, the Aylwin administration had been walking a fine line on human rights, trying to calm an outraged public while not provoking the military...
...Politicians could talk of nothing else...
...The leaders of the mass movement of the early 1980s are now comfortably ensconced in Congress, or have been sent into elegant exile as ambassadors to distant countries...
...Following the protests that nearly toppled Pinochet in 1984, Guzmdn engineered a pact between the military high command and politicians of the Right and the Center-Left, the opposition most removed from the struggle in the street...
...The Report is filled with grisly details of kidnapping, torture, disappearance, assassination...
...However, more than a few suspect hard-liners like Gen...
...The political class, Cgrdenas adds, is hardly democratic: Its members move in a hierarchical white male world, attend the same exclusive schools, belong to the same clubs, marry each other...
...The mood was somber, almost bitter...
...By favoring the parties, the transition punished the nonparty entities which played a much more important role in the multi-faceted struggle to overthrow the dictatorship...
...Manuel Contreras, exchief of the secret police, whose undying enmity (and death threats) Guzmfin earned when he implicated Contreras in the murder of former foreign minister Orlando Letelier...
...The task is to build a Left that is not stifled by traditional party organization and dogma, a Left that pursues the struggle for change at many levels throughout society...
...Hobnobbing with the politicians in April was a delegation of Soviet parliamentarians and economists who had come to congratulate Pinochet and to ask his advice...
...Most of the stories end with a variation of this conclusion: "The Commission is convinced that the person was executed by agents of the state...
...Fear, always under the surface, suddenly flowered...
...the woman asks...
...Traditional party rhetoric appeals to few...
...The Rettig Report is incomplete," he says to the woman at his side, referring to the work of Chile's Truth and Reconciliation Commission on rights abuse under Pinochet...
...But buried along with the Report was an opportunity to redefine the nature of Chile's transition...
...The detention and disappearance of the Rettig Report was a tragedy not only for the victims of Pinochet's thugs...
...What was his name...
...Most politicians are congratulating themselves on the success of the transition, on the maturity with which compromise was reached, on the dynamism of the economy...
...I landed in Santiago in April, six weeks after the Report shocked the nation, and two weeks after the assassination of Senator Jaime Guzmin buried it forever...
...every case has names, dates, places...
...Individual court cases may yet indict some of those directly responsible, and Congress is debating compensation...
...The pact seems to have worked with precision...
...Jaime Guzmin was more than a senator...
...Andlisis editor Juan Pablo Crdenas estimates that of six million voters only 200,000 belong to parties...
...Taken from his home blindfolded by four armed youths who forced him into a dark blue car...
...The problem, of course, is not only Chile's...
...T HE POLICE INSIST GUZMAN WAS KILLED BY one of the small groups of teenagers armed and encouraged by certain established left parties, then abandoned to fate and the agents who infiltratedthem...
...Sales skyrocketed...
...The transition also strengthened the erroneous notion that the struggle for socialism can be condensed into the activities of a political party...
...The incorporation of the human rights commission into the ranks of the government, for example, cost it the trust of those ready to denounce continuing abuse...
...The streets are quiet...
...The outsiders are the Communists and the MIR, which were always different animals and were so beaten down by repression and desertion that they can hardly muster a dissonant voice...
...There's another case, a recent one: he was detained, didn't get a fair trial, was eliminated and buried without anyone noticing...
...The Report was to be published as a book...
...The government planned to hold public meetings across the country...
...Guzmin's assassination, worrying though it was, offered a way out of the bind, an excuse to bury the issue, "without trial" as it were...
...The government leapt at the opportunity...
...Besides co-opting movement leaders, democracy robbed non-governmental agencies of their best people (who left to join the government), while drastically cutting into their capacity to attract funding...
Vol. 25 • July 1991 • No. 1
