She ‘Couldn’t Stay Away’ : Burn Victim Symbolizes Repression, Hope in Chile

Carmen Gloria Quintana still can’t quite smile. When her eyes light up at a cheerful thought, the plastic surgery scars prevent her mouth and cheeks from reflecting her mirth.

The 20-year-old Chilean has had more than 50 operations in the last two years, so many that she can’t remember the exact number. First came the life-saving surgery, then the basic reconstruction of her body. At least 10 more operations lie ahead.

On July 2, 1986, Quintana suffered second- and third-degree burns over 67% of her body. She and another youth testified in the following days that during a protest against military rule, soldiers soaked them with fuel and set them on fire. The second victim, Rodrigo Rojas, 19, who had lived for 10 years in Washington with his exiled mother, died four days later from his burns.

The government says the girl caused the blaze herself by kicking a firebomb at her feet after her arrest, a version that her doctors and lawyers challenge, given the severity of her burns.

What matters most now to Quintana, however, is being home and finding a place again in the campaign against military rule. She has resolved to transform her personal agony into an expression of broader suffering in Chile and to make her conquest of that trauma a sign that the nation, too, can build a new life.

Two years later, her case remains an emotional and explosive issue, as much for the opposition as for the military government. Her return to Chile in July, after 21 months of treatment in Canada, resurrects painful memories at a time when her country is poised to choose between two contrasting futures.

In October, voters will say yes or no in a plebiscite on whether the military’s nominee should be president for an eight-year term. A No victory will force the calling of open elections and pave the way for a return to democracy for the first time since a bloody military coup in September, 1973.

Quintana said she had thought of settling in Canada. But she realized that she had acquired, however unwillingly, an importance that obliged her to act, she said. During one of her two brief trips home, Pope John Paul II had taken her disfigured face in his hands and said he knew that she had suffered but that she must keep working for human rights.

‘Living Example of Repression’

“I am a living example, living evidence of the repression in Chile,” she said. “It pains the regime greatly that I am alive. They would much rather that I had died.

“It would have been easy and comfortable to stay in Canada. It is a democratic and free country,” she said in an interview in her family’s small home in the poor Nogales section of Santiago. “But there are thousands of victims here, so many violations of human rights that I couldn’t stay away.”

The moral support and financial help that poured in from Chileans and others around the world “made me want to live, to be able to denounce these people, because so many others who died weren’t able to complain,” Quintana said.

She has set to work in the local No campaign in Nogales and has spoken to human rights forums and Christian encounter groups. So far, her work is low key, in part because she is thinking about routine things as well, such as taking the entrance exam to resume her university studies.

Another unspoken factor, however, is the apparent reluctance on the part of the No campaign leaders to invoke her case too vividly. In emotion-charged Chile, many in the No movement fear that emphasizing human rights abuses could awaken counterproductive sentiments. Thus, the focus is on the positive aspects of a return to democracy, not the polarizing conflict of the last 15 years under Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who directed the 1973 uprising that toppled an elected Marxist-led government.

Exploitation Charged

Even before she came home, pro-government media accused Chile’s left of exploiting her. The newspaper Black and White complained in November that “Communists have projected her to the world press and made her do and say things that she never would have imagined . . . to provoke shame and commiseration.”

The case attracted worldwide attention from the outset, and Quintana traveled widely in her final months in Canada, speaking to a U.N. committee in Geneva and groups in the Netherlands, Australia and the United States in the name of the World Federation of Christian Students.

The Pinochet government seemed uncertain how to react at first. Initially, the army denied any involvement, but then, for the first time during the dictatorship, a soldier was formally charged in a human rights case.

Patrol leader Lt. Pedro Fernandez was accused of negligence--failure to provide prompt and adequate medical care for Quintana and Rojas. Then, a military court raised the charge to unnecessary violence leading to death and serious injury. But that charge was quickly dropped and the negligence one reinstated.

The case is still pending. Fernandez is free on bail and was promoted to captain a year ago.

The army always has denied that the patrol either doused the pair with fuel or set them afire. The government contention is that the two were arrested in Nogales, a few blocks from Quintana’s home, at about 7:30 a.m. that day. They were allegedly preparing or carrying firebombs to burn tires and block a main avenue on the first day of a two-day nationwide protest strike against the military regime.

The army says that while being questioned against a wall on a narrow side-street, Quintana kicked a firebomb at her feet, which ignited a nearby bowl of fuel and set her and Rojas on fire. All 18 soldiers present have sworn to that account.

Witness Disputes Account

Quintana and another witness, who now lives in Australia after being kidnaped briefly and allegedly threatened in Chile, say Fernandez doused the two with fuel, and then another soldier threw a firebomb at her feet that exploded, turning them into human torches. Rojas gave similar testimony to a magistrate before he died. Thirteen other civilian witnesses have testified on aspects of the incident, but they did not see the burning.

It is not disputed that the soldiers put the two aboard a truck and drove them to an area about 10 miles away, near the city airport, and let them go, even though there was a clinic near the site of the incident.

Fernandez and the other soldiers in the patrol say the two victims asked to be freed because they feared arrest if they went to a hospital, and therefore were let go on a main boulevard.

Luis Toro, Quintana’s lawyer, is trying to prove that the patrol dumped them on a dead-end dirt road to die, not on the main street.

Military investigators found human hairs on the side of the dirt road where Quintana says she was released, and Toro seeks to prove they are hers. He said workers saw the two victims stagger from the dirt road to the main street, where a passer-by helped them.

Toro, who works for the Roman Catholic Vicariate of Solidarity, one of the principal human rights organizations here, also wants the court to burn two dummies, one according to each version, to see which method produces injuries like those the victims incurred.

The lawyer himself escaped an apparent assassination attempt in September, 1986, shortly after guerrillas tried to kill Pinochet. Four other human rights activists were kidnaped and killed that night, but Toro’s family and neighbors scared off the attackers.

Dr. Jorge Villegas, a respected Chilean plastic surgeon, began treating Quintana shortly after the incident. The U.S. Embassy had asked him to help Rojas, but the youth died before Villegas saw him. Rojas’ mother said the boy might have lived had the initial care been better.

18 Operations

Villegas performed major surgery on Quintana, doing 18 operations and treating complications, including a respiratory infection. He reconstructed her face and hands, replacing all the skin on one leg and then the other.

“We wanted to assure that she wouldn’t have grave deformities if she survived,” he said. Among other problems, “her lips had nearly disappeared.”

He said she went through a severe depression typical of burn patients, “a mourning for the loss of part of oneself, until the person stops crying for what was lost and starts being glad for what was saved.” She was especially devastated when she first looked in a mirror, several months afterward, when she began to walk again.

Villegas sought out another burn victim, who worked with Quintana and her family.

“We said to her that she must live so that never again in Chile would they burn another young person,” Villegas recalled.

“Many people compare Carmen Gloria to our country--that this country has suffered as grave a wound as she did, and that even though we have suffered such wounds in human rights, like her, we can also reconstruct our life,” he said. “She is a person who is able to show that however great the aggression, one can find the strength to survive. I believe Carmen Gloria lives to demonstrate that we are capable of reconstituting ourselves.”

In April, Villegas was dismissed as chief of the burn unit at the Workers Hospital, where he treated Quintana, after he publicly criticized the discovery of some of her medical records in a trash can.

Cruel Graffiti

On the side street where the burning happened, cruel slogans have sometimes been scrawled on the wall: “Burned meat sold here,” or “The Reds are flammable.”

Quintana’s father, Carlos, says that intimidation is not unlike the burning itself.

“They wanted to scare other students,” he said. “They looked for victims to scare others, and they chose her.”

The neighborhood, though, has responded warmly. Sometimes the site is adorned with flowers and candles, and Nogales youths painted a collage of determined faces on the wall of the Quintanas’ house as a welcome-home gesture.

Quintana, soft-spoken and articulate, had been studying engineering. Now she wants to be a psychologist and to work with other burn victims. The dark-haired, round-faced woman is no longer as nervous as she was on her two previous visits home. “Now I have quite a lot of hope for the future. I hope this year we will end the dictatorship, and put all our energy into a No victory.”

Quintana must always wear white gloves to protect her still-damaged hands and keeps a turtleneck bundled around her scarred neck. She is reacquainting herself with old friends who stop by each evening.

Her father, an electrician who moved with the entire family of eight to Montreal during the initial treatment, is trying to rebuild his small business and provide for the six remaining family members--two daughters remained in Montreal.

He recalled that when Carmen despaired in the hospital in Canada, her mother Audelina reminded her that the girl had once said she would be willing to die if that would change her country.

“My wife told her: ‘This is the price you have paid for taking part in the struggle. It won’t help to cry or give up hope, but to get strong.’ She had to make a decision, to fight or give up. And she chose to keep fighting.”