Chile Asserts New Liberties, Digs Into Past

In a tiny cemetery, nestled between green fields and scrub-covered Andean foothills, a judge supervises workers digging up the bodies of three unknown people who were killed in the bloody repression after Chile’s 1973 coup.

Police officers block the dirt lane leading to the cemetery from a paved road, where a dozen reporters and cameramen wait through the cold, misty morning. As the sun emerges after noon, several people show up across the road with signs expressing hope that Chileans who disappeared after arrest under the past regime will be accounted for and that justice will be done.

“Trial and punishment for the guilty,” a hand-lettered banner urges.

“16 years of desperate searching,” a poster reads.

The scene on a recent Saturday near the town of Huelquen, 25 miles south of Santiago, offers a telling sample of what is new in Chile.

Nearly six months after Gen. Augusto Pinochet surrendered power to an elected civilian government, a vibrant climate of freedom and change is spreading through this nation of 12 million people. And, as Chile asserts its new liberties and rebuilds its democratic institutions, it is also digging into dark corners of its troubled past.

The bodies of scores of people, killed and buried secretly under the dictatorship, are being discovered and exhumed around the country. A presidential Commission for Truth and Reconciliation is methodically collecting testimony and other information about political killings.

The government of President Patricio Aylwin, a centrist Christian Democrat, also has created a commission to help exiled Chileans return to the country.

Meanwhile, in the city of Valparaiso, the reopened Congress is beginning to tinker with Pinochet-era laws--including one that removed the legislative branch from Santiago and another that made Sept. 11, the date of Pinochet’s 1973 coup, a legal holiday. Recently, however, the senate rejected a measure for returning the Congress to Santiago.

Other bills being debated by the Congress include proposed legislation more favorable to labor and to persons charged with guerrilla activities.

International music stars who opposed Pinochet, including the rock star Sting, will come to Chile in October for two concerts to benefit Amnesty International, the London-based human rights organization.

Movies censored by the old regime are being shown without fear, books recounting the repression are best-sellers, and once-taboo posters of the late President Salvador Allende are on open display. Today, the body of the Marxist president who died in the coup will be transferred to an official presidential tomb amid mass gatherings and public ceremonies.

But, as Allende’s controversial memory is being rehabilitated, Pinochet’s stiff, brass-buttoned figure still looms large. One of the most remarkable aspects of the new Chile is that all the changes are happening while the ex-dictator continues to hold the powerful position of commander in chief of the army.

Today, Pinochet and his army will stand aloof as Allende is honored by Aylwin’s administration, which includes ministers from Allende’s Socialist Party. When asked by a Chilean newspaper if the ceremonies would include military honors, as befits a dead president, Pinochet replied curtly: “No.”

After seizing power in 1973, Pinochet’s new regime announced that Allende had committed suicide during a military attack on La Moneda, the presidential palace. Evidence supports that version, although some who were close to Allende say he was shot by the attackers.

Pinochet made sure then that Allende was buried quietly in the coastal city of Vina del Mar. He also ordered security forces to round up thousands of Communists, Socialists and other leftists who had supported or participated in Allende’s administration.

More than 800 of the detainees disappeared, according to the current civilian government, and at least 1,000 others were executed.

Human rights organizations have documented much of the brutality under Pinochet, and some bodies were discovered as early as 1978. But only since Pinochet allowed free elections in October, 1989, has the extent of the brutality been freely reported in Chile.

And, since Aylwin took office March 11, authorities have been helping victims’ relatives find out where the bodies are buried. The long map of Chile is now sprinkled with Xs marking the spots.

At Pisagua, a town on Chile’s northern desert coast where the military government operated a concentration camp, a mass grave uncovered last June yielded the bodies of 21 executed prisoners. At the hamlet of Chihuio, west of the southern city of Valdivia, searchers turned up the skeletons of 18 peasants who were detained and killed by the army in 1973.

At the southern coastal town of Constitution early in August, diggers found the remains of 12 corpses, hands tied with wire, in a single clandestine grave.

“Chile: A long search for graves,” summarized a headline in the government newspaper La Nacion. Chile’s now-unfettered media has riveted public attention on those and other finds of osamentas , a Spanish word for bones that has come to symbolize the rediscovered horrors of past repression.

On the Saturday afternoon when workers at the Huelquen cemetery finished uncovering the osamentas of three men, Judge German Hermosilla let reporters and photographers in for a look. The skeletons lay bunched together at the bottom of a deep pit.

Margarita Nilo, who lives nearby, stood outside her modest home watching the activity on the cemetery lane. She said her 18-year-old son was among 16 peasants who disappeared from the area after being arrested by army troops on Oct. 3, 1973.

“They took him from my mother’s house,” said Nilo, 58. “We have searched heaven and earth, but they never have appeared.”

Now, Nilo expressed hopeful approval of the search for graves.

“It is now when there is freedom, democracy, that all of this is being done,” she said. “Before, it couldn’t be done.”

But neither the discovery of victims’ bodies nor the work of the Commission for Truth and Reconciliation will necessarily help bring the killers to justice. The day before the bodies were exhumed at Huelquen, the Supreme Court in Santiago issued a ruling to uphold a 1978 amnesty law that extended a blanket pardon for all political crimes committed in the five years after the coup, both by security forces and civilians.

Congressman Andres Aylwin, the president’s brother, told reporters at Huelquen that the legal immunity, validated by the high court, was “profoundly immoral.”

“It would imply that there is impunity in the most atrocious crimes committed in the history of Chile,” said the gray-bearded Aylwin, who had come to the cemetery for information on the exhumation.

“When there is no justice, people tend to take justice into their own hands,” he added. “When justice is denied, in essence, it is an incitement to violence.”

Miguel Otero, vice president of the conservative National Renovation Party, agreed in a separate interview that bitterness over human rights abuses could trigger private vengeance and fuel action by three small Chilean guerrilla groups.

“I would prefer not to know who tortured a brother of mine, for example,” Otero said, “because, if I saw him on the street, I might take revenge. For me, the truth is that Chile was sick, we were all sick, some to a greater degree than others.”

Lingering bitterness is reflected on movie screens where Chilean theaters show previously censored films that dramatize human rights abuses under the military government. In one of the movies, Pablo Perelman’s “Latent Image,” a photographer’s marriage falls apart as he obsessively searches for his detained and disappeared brother. Flashback scenes show grisly torture sessions, the panic of victims and the pathetic frustration of their relatives in the face of indifferent or hostile authorities.

“I can’t stop searching for him. He’s my brother,” says the photographer as it becomes clear that his brother is dead.

Vendors on busy downtown sidewalks have profited from brisk demand for books and Allende posters. At the Santa Lucia Handcraft Center, a red and black poster featuring Allende’s familiar horn-rimmed glasses and mustache was on prominent display the other day. Miluska Navarro, who was minding the stand for her father, said police would seize any Allende posters they saw until after Pinochet left the presidency.

“Before, you couldn’t sell them,” said Navarro, 19. “Now the country is in democracy, so you can sell everything.”

Hortensia Bussi de Allende, the former president’s widow, and Isabel Allende, his daughter, lived in exile for 16 1/2 years. Now back in Chile, they are the subjects of frequent attention from news media.

The media, including the government television channel, have also freely interviewed Communists and even people in prison for guerrilla activities.

The Communist Party’s weekly newspaper began publishing legally before the change of government in March. Since then, a monthly journal has been brought out by members of the Revolutionary Left Movement, which operated as a guerrilla group during the Pinochet years.

Leftist parties have begun openly organizing in poor neighborhoods, workplaces and schools, an activity that was severely restricted under Pinochet.

“You could do it, but with great difficulty,” said Luis Guastavino, a former Communist congressman. “Now there is more freedom.”

The main difficulty for leftist organizers since March has been lingering fears of associating with them, Guastavino said.

“People still say, ‘I better not get involved, I better wait a bit.’ ”

Perhaps a motive for such caution is Pinochet’s continuing presence as army chief, as provided for by the constitution written to his specifications and endorsed by a 1980 plebiscite.

Pinochet, 74, has made it clear that the armed forces will not tolerate violations of that constitution or the trial of military officers for human rights abuses.