Chilean Carries Her Cause to D.C. : 20-Year-Old Tells Her Torture Story on Capitol Hill

“There have been two parts to my life,” Carmen Gloria Quintana, 20 years old, begins, “one before the 2nd of July 1986, and what’s come after.”

She speaks in soft, steady Spanish, and sits erectly in a hotel room chair, her posture stiffened perhaps by the therapeutic body garment, a Jobst stocking, which encases her from neck to feet under her slacks, blouse and sweater. It covers both hands like a pair of gloves with the fingertips cut out.

Personal Revelation

“Before, I was just like any other young person in Chile. I was studying at the university. I had projects for my life. I was thinking about having children, maybe,” she continues, “but after the 2nd of July, it changed my life so much, it necessitated a growing up well beyond my 18 years.”

Even this personal revelation has a slightly rote sound to it. She has answered this question before, no doubt; she has given this speech before. She has offered up the cruel facts of her young life in pursuit of a cause. And she has done it a lot.

“It’s a draining situation when you have to relive what happened,” says Veronica DeNegri, who accompanied Quintana as she made her way through the government offices and hearing rooms of Washington last week. “And she’s had to do it three times today.”

The details are hideous.

On July 2, 1986, Quintana and DeNegri’s son, Rodrigo Rojas, a 19-year-old Chilean exile visiting his native country after spending most of his life in Washington, were walking with a group of people en route to an anti-government demonstration when they were stopped in Nogales, a shanty town of Santiago, by a patrol of soldiers. Demonstrators at the time often built street barricades with tires set afire, and members of the group were carrying some of the materials necessary to do this. When the soldiers appeared, the young people scattered, but Quintana and Rojas (there are reports that he was carrying a Molotov cocktail that had been handed to him by another youth in the group, but some witnesses and Quintana deny this) were caught.

According to witnesses, the soldiers took them away to another street where they beat the two teen-agers, doused them with gasoline from a confiscated jerrycan, set them on fire, and hit Rojas again when he tried to smother the flames on his body. After the flames died down, the soldiers put the pair into a truck and drove them to the outskirts of Santiago, where they were dumped in a ditch and left for dead. They both managed to wander out of the ditch onto a road, where they were found.

Rojas died four days later. The next day Quintana was transferred to a private hospital in Santiago where she remained, sedated with morphine for the pain, fighting infections of her lungs. Like Rojas, she suffered third-degree burns over two-thirds of her body. The first month she was almost continually unconscious, she says.

A Psychological Respite

Meanwhile, she had become a cause celebre, and people all over Chile raised funds at meetings and masses and through advertisements to pay for her hospital bills.

In September, 1986, to get further treatment and a psychological respite, Quintana left the country with her parents, five sisters and one brother for Montreal. She says that several countries with facilities for the burn treatment she needed offered to take her, but only Canada would allow her entire immediate family entrance into the country. One of Quintana’s sisters and her husband had been arrested and questioned by the military police after they witnessed the initial detainment of the teen-agers. They had no desire to remain in Santiago.

Since then, Carmen Quintana has spent much of her time being treated in Montreal’s Hospital Hotel-Dieu (she says the Canadian government is paying her medical expenses). “When I first arrived,” she says, “I could hardly walk.”

She was not told of Rojas’ death until she arrived in Canada.

“When I knew,” she says, “it gave me more strength.”

Quintana and Rojas, a photographer, were barely acquaintances. She says she saw him for the first time taking photographs at a soup kitchen a few days before the demonstration. Now they are irrevocably intertwined, his death and her survival making them martyr and symbol, respectively. An enormous number of people in Chile and around the world see the burning as another example of the government-sanctioned brutality that has existed for years under Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean president who defends his strong-arm tactics as necessary to combat communism.

‘The Best and the Worst’

“You represent the best and the worst in Chile,” Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) told Quintana at an event in her honor on the Hill. A small turnout--congressional aides, human rights activists, former ambassador to El Salvador Robert White--in a vast hearing room turned this into that rarest of occasions, an intimate congressional reception. People practically pulled up chairs and gathered round.

“The best is represented by your courage and determination to see justice done,” Harkin continued. “By your very scars, you represent the worst -- Pinochet and what he has done to that country.”

Her life these days is divided between regaining her health and using her newfound political stature. “When I’m not in the hospital, I’m traveling,” she says. She’s spoken in Canada, Geneva (the U.N. Human Rights Commission), Sweden, Holland, East Germany, West Germany, Belgium. She’s been back to Chile twice. The first time she was part of a group that met briefly with Pope John Paul II; the second time she testified before a military court and went through a reenactment of her burning. She plans to go to Australia next month.

Quintana speaks no English, so Cynthia Brown, the associate director of Americas Watch and its specialist on Chile, came from New York to translate for her.

Her appointments included a meeting with Robert Farrand, State Department senior deputy assistant secretary for human rights--a requested meeting with Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs Elliott Abrams did not materialize--and testimony before the Inter-American Commission at the OAS.

Some Activities Curtailed

She says she does not particularly enjoy the traveling. In New Orleans last week, she developed an abscess on her leg (she’s continually battling infections) that sent her to a hospital and forced her to curtail some activities on this U.S. trip.

Carmen Quintana estimates that she has had 36 operations--maybe more--initially for skin grafts and later for reconstruction. There will be another two to three years of operations to reconstruct her face and body. She has lost hearing in her right ear. Today, parts of her face bear masses of scarred, almost rubbery-looking pink and brown flesh. Plastic surgery will improve much of this, but she will never look the way she did when she was just a very pretty first year engineering student at the University of Santiago with a mild interest in politics.

“There will always be scars on my face that will be too deep to get off and some discoloring,” she says. “I always feel sad that my legs are terribly scarred--and my arms as well and part of my back.”

Anyone who watched the November, 1986, “60 Minutes” segment on her case, however, can see how far she’s already come. Her own mother, the television news show reported, did not recognize her when she first saw her in the hospital.

“You’re looking much better,” Sen. Harkin told her.

She nods and smiles a little when she hears that people notice improvement. There is still some pain, she says--”little twinges from time to time.” She describes them as “lots of little pricks on the skin.”

Dignity and Stoicism

If she flinches inside from the intensity of recounting what she went through or the intensity of the reception she commands, she doesn’t show it. There is a dignity, even a stoicism about her--or maybe it’s just a 20-year-old woman’s shyness--and a certain inaccessibility. A response to a question about her early medical treatment, for instance, begins with her describing a respiratory tube being hooked into her nose and ends with her imploring U.S. presidential candidates to take stands on human rights in Chile.

When Quintana’s family moved to Montreal, they first stayed in a house that was larger than they could afford, then moved to more crowded quarters--an apartment where all except her sister and brother-in-law lived. Her mother found work in a factory, her father as an electrician. “He’s had to lower the level of skill at which he works,” she says.

Does she like it there?

She looks confused. “Montreal? Or the apartment?”

The apartment, the neighborhood. . . .

“Yes,” she says vaguely. She laughs ruefully. “I haven’t really thought about it.”

During her stays in the French-speaking hospital, she easily picked up the language so she could talk to other people.

“I kept my spirits up,” she says of the long rehabilitation process, “mainly because I wanted to be able to go ahead and get through it and keep denouncing what happened.”

There is little hint now in her voice of the anger she says surfaced in the early days of her treatment. “I felt a real helplessness and rage that a human being could have burned two other human beings,” she says steadily, quietly. “It took me a long time to assimilate that--that people could do what those people had done to me. It was also terrible for me to take account of my body, which was deformed and burned. I was 18 years old.”

Reduced the Charge

The lieutenant in command of the army patrol was originally charged with unnecessary violence, but a military court last year reduced that to negligence and freed him on the equivalent of $25 bail.

Almost all the dozen witnesses in the case have reported being harassed or threatened in some way; at least one was jailed for carrying incendiary devices. Last July the State Department issued a statement decrying the slow progress in the Chilean investigation of the burnings. “This is the paradox--the witnesses are in prison instead of the soldiers who did it,” Quintana says.

DeNegri, a Chilean exile and a Washington resident, and Quintana and her parents filed a $10 million lawsuit against the Chilean government in U.S. federal court in November 1986, but even if they win a favorable judgment there is little chance they could collect any money.

Quintana plans to return to Santiago in several months, and hopes to study sociology. Her mother and brother and three sisters are already back, living in the house that they left.

“I want to continue with my treatments there,” she says, “and keep struggling so that liberty can come back to my country and justice will be done. . . . Sometimes I get tired, but I know I have to do it. It’s my duty to do it.”