Pinochet Meets the Press : Conscience Demands a Word for Chile’s Silenced Journalists

When Gen. Augusto Pinochet, Chile’s dictator, inaugurates the general assembly of the annual Inter-American Press Assn. in Santiago next week, the members who are gathered there may find themselves somewhat embarrassed. They will, after all, be addressed by a man whose first action, upon seizing power in the 1973 coup that killed democracy, was to raid the newspapers and bomb the radio stations that had been loyal to the deposed constitutional president, Salvador Allende. In the weeks and months and long years that followed, hundreds of journalists were arrested, tortured and sent to concentration camps. Many were executed. A number are still among the disappeared.

Given this collective experience of terror, it is extraordinary that the opposition in Chile should now have several magazines, radio stations and even two newspapers. Though this is partly due to the government’s need to prove to the outside world that some semblance of free expression is tolerated, it should be attributed, more than anything else, to the courage of Chilean journalists and their tradition of an independent, critical press. They have stubbornly continued spreading the word in spite of frequent shutdowns and arbitrary prohibitions, in spite of long bouts of prior censorship, in spite of harassment and beatings by the secret police.

In spite of murder.

One morning in early September, 1986, I was awakened by an urgent long-distance call from my country. During the night, a journalist friend, Jose Carrasco, had been dragged from his house by a group of men in ski masks; 24 hours later his body was found in a cemetery, ripped apart by bullets.

Although the crime occurred during a strict military curfew when only official vehicles can circulate, the government has, of course, denied any involvement. What it cannot deny is its incompetence (if that is the adequate term) in finding the murderers. That they have not been apprehended is no surprise. Never, in the 14 years since the military takeover, has anyone accused of human-rights violations been brought to trial and condemned.

The message being sent to all independent journalists is therefore quite clear. When you go to bed at night, when you open your eyes the next day, you cannot know what lies in store for you. You are unprotected, exposed, totally vulnerable.

This attempt at silencing the press through fear is not an accidental feature of the dictatorship; it is essential to its survival. If Pinochet is to win an upcoming plebiscite (which most observers believe will be fraudulent) and if he is to continue governing after that until the end of the millennium, he must control the media.

In recent months, wary that the civil courts might not play the game his way, he has been using military tribunals to suppress recalcitrant journalists. When Marcelo Contreras and Sergio Marras, the top editors of APSI magazine (of whose board I am a member), decided to publish the fictitious musings of the dictator in a make-believe diary, they were accused of “character assassination”--of paving the way for any attempt against the life of Pinochet, should such a thing ever happen again. Thirty-thousand copies of their special satirical supplement were confiscated; they spent two months in jail and are now awaiting a verdict--which will depend on “a psycho-political examination,” whatever that might be, by experts called by the regime. It is indeed a pity that dictators are so notoriously humorless. Recently also, Monica Gonzalez of Analisis magazine was imprisoned, ostensibly not because of anything she wrote, but because she asked a centrist Christian Democrat his opinion about the government, which predictably turned out to be quite vehement and unfavorable. It cannot be a coincidence that this happens to be the very journalist who, in the past, uncovered the financial corruption involving a mansion Pinochet was building for himself in the foothills, or that she has researched the assassination, not of a character but of a former commander of the army under Allende, Carlos Prats Gonzalez.

There is something so bizarre and ridiculous about this sort of persecution that one would be tempted to laugh if not for the realization that it forms part of a relentless strategy to silence dissidence. Article 8 of Pinochet’s sham 1980 Constitution allows people on the left (45% of the vote in Chile’s last legal election) to be declared non-persons. It follows that any medium that quotes them can be suspended for 10 issues and given stiff and unpayable fines. And any journalist who interviews someone “subversive” can lose his or her civil and political rights.

Gen. Pinochet is giving us a taste of what his future “democracy” will be like. What, then, should the members of the Inter-American Press Assn. do when this rogue comes before them and begins to deliver his speech?

My suggestion to them is simple: Muzzle yourselves, gentlemen, gentlewomen. Take out a handkerchief, a scarf, anything, and tie it over your mouths.

If this should be considered discourteous to someone who is after all a head (although I wonder if the term is well- employed) of state, there is another possibility: Stand up. And then walk out.

The journalists of Chile deserve a visible, dramatic, unambiguous message that tells them they are not alone, and, whatever the tyrant may do in the years to come, the eyes of the hemisphere will be watching.