Fear, Censorship, Curfews Mark Chile’s State of Siege

In Chile, a country under siege, emotions are as raw as the storms of ice and snow that pummel the mountains. Life is as uncertain as sleep.

Ricardo Lagos was awakened by five men ranged around his bed with leveled guns.

“At least they were real policemen,” Lagos said later.

Luis Toro was awakened by men in ski masks trying to break into his house after curfew.

“They had come to kill me,” Toro said.

Leila Hales slept restlessly for 46 days. “It is hard to explain to young children why their father is in jail,” she said.

Former Beacon

The state of siege is the dominant reality today in this string-bean-shaped country of 10 million people that was once one of South America’s most durable democracies.

President Augusto Pinochet is the law. After 13 years of military dictatorship, he wages an unremitting anti-Communist crusade with no holds barred.

Pinochet rules under special decrees that restrict the rights of Chileans at every level. There is a state of internal commotion, a state of emergency and, since Communist guerrillas tried unsuccessfully to assassinate him Sept. 7, a formal state of siege. The restrictions are familiar. Except for one period of eight months, one or more have been in effect since 1973.

“The sensation is that the arbitrariness is absolute, that they can do anything they want with you,” said Lagos, a Socialist politician jailed for 19 days without charge in a continuing crackdown that followed the attempt to kill Pinochet.

Powers to Exile

The government muzzles the press and enforces a curfew from 2 a.m. to 5 a.m. in Santiago and environs. It forbids public assembly. It authorizes arrest without warrant and permits prisoners to be held without charge or appeal. It taps telephones and opens mail. It can exile its foes or refuse them entry.

Pinochet’s opponents charge that government security agencies have spawned death squads that kill by night. Four Chileans have been dragged from their homes and slain since the assassination attempt--by armed civilians who circulate after curfew, when only those on government business or with written permission may be on the streets.

No Chilean escapes the psychological impact. People without the remotest political connection imagine that their telephone conversations are monitored. A conservative commentator will talk about politics only with his stereo playing--to foil electronic eavesdroppers, he says.

One Santiago matron refuses to let her 25-year-old daughter leave the house alone at night. The young woman once attended a party where a fugitive guerrilla was also present.

‘We Are Frightened’

“At night we are frightened; they could come for you and you’d never know why,” complained a young office worker who says she has no politics.

A European priest reports a marked decline in attendance at parish functions, from catechism classes to women’s societies to self-help groups involved with local housing and water problems.

“People are afraid that their routine meetings will be interpreted as political, and you can’t blame them,” the priest said. “Preaching the Gospel is political in Chile today. Use my name if you have to, but remember that I’m dangling by a thread in terms of my own permission to stay here.”

Three French priests who worked in a slum on the southern outskirts of the city have been expelled under the state of siege.

Help From Neighbors

“If they can’t do something under the siege decree, there is always some other law that lets them do what they want,” said Toro, a lawyer who works for the Vicarate of Solidarity, the human rights office of the Roman Catholic Church. When the intruders came to Toro’s barricaded house after curfew on Sept. 13, neighbors helped save him. Alerted by a primitive alarm system, they switched on lights, made a racket, and startled the intruders into flight before the police arrived.

The church, like the U.S. government, urges a negotiated transition to democratic rule when Pinochet’s presidential term ends in 1989. Pinochet wants another eight-year term. He rejects all appeals for change, warring simultaneously on a violent Communist minority and a peaceful democratic majority that he says is the dupe of international Marxism.

According to church figures, the government arrested 307 people in Santiago in the first weeks of the 90-day state of siege, which is renewable at the government’s pleasure. Doubling the Santiago figures is a good measure of nationwide numbers, Vicarate lawyers say.

Of the total arrested, 160 were anti-Pinochet demonstrators and 147 were arrested selectively. The government has freed 210 and sent 45 to courts on charges, and continues to hold the remaining 52 without charge.

Communist Spokesman

Patricio Hales was one of those charged. An architect who used to greet reporters in a double-breasted blazer, a designer necktie and a whiff of French cologne, Hales was the official spokesman for the Chilean Communist Party, a frequent partner with democratic forces in anti-Pinochet protests.

“He is an idealist who believes in social justice and doesn’t think that violence is the answer to anything,” his wife, Leila, said. “We had been trying to prepare the kids. They know their father is in the opposition, that something like this might happen.”

Hales’ sister Carmen Andrea, who is not a Communist, was kidnaped and brutalized by armed civilians three times in one year. Armed men in civilian dress kidnaped a sociologist friend of the family and slit his throat last year.

Patricio Hales was accused of aiding terrorism. Under interrogation, a jailed guerrilla is reported to have said that a second guerrilla, whose name he did not know, told him that in 1984 he, the second guerrilla, had telephoned Hales in a fruitless appeal for medical aid for a wounded comrade. Hales, who comes from a prominent political family and is the son of a Cabinet minister in the 1964-70 Christian Democratic government, says there never was any such phone call.

Accused under military justice, Hales went before a court-martial where two civilian judges voted to free him and three military judges voted to hold him.

An appeal under military rules to a six-justice Supreme Court was heard last week. The five civilian justices found Hales innocent of any charge and voted to free him. The one military justice voted to hold him.

American Missionaries

Among the 52 Chileans held without charge are Marxist and leftist political, student and labor leaders. With them are Claudio Venegas and Carlos Diaz, lay workers for the church. They happened to be at the home of two American Maryknoll missionaries when soldiers and secret policemen came for the priests on the morning of Sept. 8.

The Americans were released without interrogation after a few hours. Their residence visas were canceled, and they now remain in the country tenuously on short-term visas. Government investigators have still not completed their study of the priests’ personal effects, blue jeans, a radio and a tape deck confiscated during the raid.

Politician Lagos met the lay workers as fellow prisoners at the 3rd Precinct jail of the national police.

“They were arrested for praying,” Lagos said. “The government didn’t know what to do with them so it issued a decree to keep them in jail.”

Conditions at the 3rd Precinct are not rigorous. Prisoners provide their own clothing and food. One of the prisoners is a gym teacher who leads daily exercise classes. Hot water has been installed for showers, and there is not only a television set but also a video recorder. Pinochet’s political prisoners idled away a recent weekend afternoon watching the movie “Reds” on cassette. Even the jailers thought it was funny.

Raids on Residences

By the church’s count, about 60 Chileans have fled the country since imposition of the state of siege, and about 100 others are being sought by the government. There have been 60 raids on residences looking for them, 21 kidnapings and 57 death threats. One of the church’s human rights lawyers received a package containing a pig’s head with a bullet hole in it.

Jose Carrasco was the most prominent political figure among the four Chileans killed by armed civilian squads since the start of the state of siege. A journalist and member of a tiny, violence-prone movement on the extreme Marxist left, Carrasco had returned to Chile in 1984 after two years in jail and nine years in exile. He was foreign editor of a strident leftist magazine called Analisis when curfew violators led him away barefoot on the night of Sept. 8 and shot him 13 times.

“Jose was murdered by a paramilitary group which carries arms, circulates during the curfew, commits crimes and is not arrested,” said Juan Pablo Cardenas, editor of Analisis. “We don’t say it was a decision of the government, but we think he was killed by members of a group that belongs or belonged to the secret services.”

Shifting Addresses

Cardenas, 36, is an editor of no fixed address. He changed houses five times to stay ahead of the threats. In August, when Cardenas spent 22 days in jail, a bomb went off in the fifth of his houses. His wife and six children now live outside Santiago and he bunks at random with a series of friends.

“There is no doubt that the government is determined to destroy this magazine,” Cardenas said. “We are watched, 40% of our mail arrives opened, the phones are tapped.”

Analisis, a weekly with a circulation of about 22,450, was one of six opposition magazines closed under the state of siege. Five remain closed. The sixth, Hoy, which is close to the center-left Christian Democratic Party, has resumed publication.

“We went to the government and demanded to know what we had done,” Emilio Filipi, Hoy’s editor, said. “What had we to do with violence, or the attack against the president? After five days the ban was lifted. Now that we are back, we again cover the news. There is no censorship, but we are careful not to irritate unnecessarily; easy on the adjectives.”

The state of siege was a specific response to the assassination attempt on Pinochet by the Manuel Rodriguez Patriotic Front, which by now even fellow Marxists acknowledge as the armed wing of the Moscow-obedient Communist Party. The guerrillas have waged terrorism for the past two years while mainline Communists, historically about 15% of the electorate, cooperated with the democratic opponents of Pinochet in strikes and demonstrations.

Clandestine Conference

Despite the state-of-siege restriction, the guerrillas, who killed five of Pinochet’s accompanying security staff and wounded 11 others, held a clandestine press conference here after the attack to vow more terror against Pinochet and his regime.

Last week, authorities reported the arrest of six young Chilean men and three young women they said had participated in the attacks and issued warrants for about 40 more. One of the accused had been trained for 11 months in Cuba, the government said, and another was the son of a former secretary general of the Communist Party who was last seen in government custody in 1976 and is presumed dead.

Amid the continuing siege and intensifying hunt for the terrorists, Patricio Hales made it home one night last week before the curfew, a free man.

“What a great gift! I am walking on air,” said Leila Hales.

His two children awoke Hales at 6 o’clock the next morning. They had a welcoming breakfast in bed together.

After thinking for a time in the fresh air of his garden about injustice and justice, Hales donned his designer clothes and his outrage and went downtown to the 3rd Precinct to visit friends held without charge there under Chile’s state of siege.