Pablo Neruda taping his poems in the U.S. Library of Congress in 1966. Credit: Public domain

By Marianela Jarroud
SANTIAGO, Nov 11 2013 (IPS)

Ongoing efforts to determine the causes of the deaths of high-profile Chileans – singer-songwriter Víctor Jara, former presidents Eduardo Frei Montalva and Salvador Allende, and Nobel Literate Prize-winner Pablo Neruda – indirectly bring visibility to thousands of other victims of Chile’s 1973-1990 dictatorship.

“A search for the historical truth is being driven by penal proceedings,” Luis Emilio Rojas, director of the master’s programme in penal law at the Alberto Hurtado University, told IPS.

“While the goal is to determine criminal responsibility, the reopening of legal proceedings indirectly helps to establish the occurrence of events that are milestones in the history of Chile,” he added.

Human rights lawyer Eduardo Contreras was the first to file, in conjunction with the Association of Relatives of Politically Executed Persons (AFEP), a lawsuit to establish the cause of the death of socialist president Salvador Allende during the military’s bombing of the La Moneda presidential palace in the Sep. 11, 1973 coup.

Today Contreras is demanding clarification of the death of poet Pablo Neruda, which occurred on Sep. 23, 1973 – just 12 days after his close friend Allende was overthrown.

Neruda’s remains were exhumed in April from the final resting place he shared with his last wife, singer and writer Matilde Urrutia (1912-1985), at their home in Isla Negra, 110 km west of Santiago.

On Friday Nov. 8, seven months after the exhumation, the Forensic Medical Service reported that international forensic experts ruled out the presence of toxic chemical substances that could have caused Neruda’s death.

Contreras noted, however, that the forensic exams by Chilean and foreign experts were just the first part of the investigation. He said that on Monday Nov. 11 “we will request that other laboratories take part in the investigation, in search of toxicological agents that are biological, not chemical, in nature, such as sarin gas, mustard gas, or bacteria.”

Judge Mario Carroza, who investigated whether third parties were involved in the death of the 1971 Nobel laureate, said it could not yet be established judicially whether Neruda was killed or died of cancer 40 years ago.

If the results of the forensic experts do not satisfy all of the concerned parties, “we will have to look for other alternatives,” he added.

Neruda, who was 69 years old and was being treated for prostate cancer when he died, had been a member of the Communist Party of Chile for 28 years.

At the time of his death, he was getting ready to go into exile in Mexico, where he would have been a prominent voice of opposition against the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.

In the days before his death, Neruda was demoralised when his three houses were raided by agents of the dictatorship.

His most beloved home, in Isla Negra, was looted by the troops, who overturned his seashell and butterfly collections and destroyed paintings, his incomplete writings, and the books, masks, wooden carvings, bottles, pipes and ocean-related memorabilia that filled the shelves of nearly every room.

The military had all of his staff fired, and only his wife and his driver and personal secretary, Manuel Araya, were allowed to stay.

Although Neruda was being treated for prostate cancer, Araya alleges that he was killed by an injection to his stomach given by someone posing as a doctor in the private Santa María clinic on the supposed orders of the dictatorship.

Nine years later, former president Eduardo Frei Montalva (1964-1970) was killed in the same clinic, with a biological toxin, according to the legal investigation of his death.

Frei Montalva’s case shocked Chilean society, because it proved that the Pinochet regime had used toxins against its opponents. It also helped “raise awareness among some incredulous people,” AFEP president Alicia Lira told IPS.

But the perpetrators of abuses during the dictatorship still enjoy impunity, even though the regime’s human rights violations are now talked about openly, Lira said.

“There is impunity when many cases were closed by the military prosecutors office, which is both judge and plaintiff, and when more than 178 agents of the state who murdered and ‘disappeared’ people have not spent a single day in prison because of the application of ‘media prescripción’ [by which a sentence may be reduced when more than half the statute of limitation has elapsed] or because they were granted a suspended sentence,” she said.

Singer-songwriter and activist Víctor Jara was killed Sep. 15, 1973 while he was being held in Chile’s national stadium along with thousands of other opponents of the coup. His body showed signs of torture and was riddled with bullet wounds.

But it was not until 2008 that an investigation was launched into his death. The man accused of ordering his torture and firing the fatal shot, army Lieutenant Pedro Barrientos, is still at large, living a quiet life in the United States.

Contreras said it is a “moral duty” to investigate these deaths in the face of contradictory elements.

“Just as the law requires an inquiry into the death of a homeless man who dies of cold, which seems fair to me, why not investigate the death of a president? To me that is absolutely despicable,” he said, referring to Allende’s death.

For many years, doubts surrounded the death of Allende, who entrenched himself in the presidential palace along with a number of armed civilian supporters to resist the coup and the bombing of La Moneda. As a result of the lawsuit brought by Contreras, it was finally confirmed that he committed suicide.

In Neruda’s case there are also contradictions, which means “you are ethically and morally obligated to investigate, and if you don’t, you are a scoundrel,” Contreras said.

During the regime, 3,065 people were killed and/or forcibly disappeared, and 37,000 were held as political prisoners.

Some 1,300 human rights cases are making their way through the courts in Chile, involving crimes like extrajudicial executions, forced disappearances, torture, or illicit association committed between 1973 and 1990.

These cases and others that have been resolved cover 75 percent of the victims of killings or forced disappearance recognised by the state, but only a small portion of the cases of political prisoners who survived torture.

Chilean protester calling for a new constitution. Credit: Marianela Jarroud/IPS

By Marianela Jarroud
SANTIAGO, Sep 11 2013 (IPS)

Sept. 11, 1973 marked the start in Chile of a dictatorship that was synonymous with cruelty. But above and beyond the human rights violations, the reforms ushered in by the regime of General Augusto Pinochet continue to mark today’s Chile – a country of dynamic economic growth but a fragmented society.

Two of these reforms, in the spheres of politics and education, are among the targets of the massive student movement and sectors of the left, which are seeking to dismantle them and consider them key campaign issues for the November general elections.

“These are two essential areas, because they have an impact on the democratic character of Chilean society,” Pedro Milos, a history professor at the private Alberto Hurtado University, told IPS.

“The Chilean path to socialism” that the government of democratically elected Salvador Allende (1970-1973) attempted to follow before he was overthrown by Pinochet’s bloody coup, was systematically squelched by the dictator through a constitution that is still in effect today.

Ruling with an iron fist, Pinochet (1973-1990) introduced free-market policies, privatised and decentralised essential services that had been provided free of cost by the state, such as healthcare and education, and was a pioneer in putting pension funds in the hands of private companies.

At the time the educational reforms began to be adopted in 1981, 78 percent of primary and secondary school students were in the public education system, while the rest went to private schools.

But public education was whittled down, with schools transferred to the jurisdiction of municipal governments and the creation of state-subsidised private schools, with the subventions depending on the number of students they managed to attract.

The proportion of students in municipal schools had fallen to 57.8 percent by the return to democracy in 1990, and to 37.5 percent in 2012, due to the marked decline in the quality of education in these schools. That trend can be seen in the following table:

Click to enlarge

“The worst thing was the municipalisation of primary and middle schools,” Pilar Mella, a 57-year-old secretary, told IPS. “The municipalities with the most money dedicate more funds to education, giving rise to high levels of inequality.”

In 1971, during the Allende administration, the immense majority of students attended public schools. And when they completed 12 years of primary and secondary education, they went to the university free of charge and without the need for pre-college remedial courses.

Those were times of tuition-free public education of the same quality at all levels – a demand that is today expressed loud and clear on the streets of Chile by students who were not even born yet when the 1973 coup happened, and most of whom are not affiliated with any of the traditional political parties.

By the time the Pinochet regime had introduced all of its changes, tuition-free public universities were a thing of the past. And to enter university, students must now take admission exams – where poor students find themselves at a disadvantage due to the lower quality schools they have attended.

“What the dictatorship did was transform education into just another merchandise,” the president of the University of Chile Student Federation, Andrés Fielbaum, told IPS.

And the democratic governments that have ruled Chile since 1990 “continued to strengthen that model,” he said.

The centre-left Coalition of Parties for Democracy, which governed the country from 1990 to 2010, “invented shared financing, which means that each person buys the education they can afford, and created state-backed loans (to pay for university studies) which threw the banks into the banquet of education,” he said.

In modern societies, Milos argued, “educational systems are what make it possible to generate higher levels of equality and opportunities, and possibilities of social and political participation.”

It’s not a question of Chileans not studying. Coverage has grown, to 99.7 percent in primary education, 87.7 percent in secondary education, and 36.3 percent at university level.

But 44 percent of young people between the ages of 15 and 29 do not complete secondary school. And 25 percent of high school drop-outs neither work nor study – the fourth highest proportion among the countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the so-called rich countries’ club.

Moreover, in Chile, families directly finance over 70 percent of the cost of tertiary education, with the state covering just 22 percent – far below the OECD average of 68 percent public funding.

Under pressure from the student protests that have been raging since 2006, governments have introduced a number of changes in education, but without going to the core of the matter – inequality.

Paulina Jiménez, a 22-year-old political science student, says “today’s crisis originated in the political reforms of the dictatorship, especially the crisis of representation that has triggered, and has been expressed by, the student movement.”

Exactly seven years after the coup, on Sept. 11, 1980, Pinochet had voters approve a new constitution in a rigged plebiscite, with no voter lists.

The most emblematic aspect is the so-called “binomial” electoral system. Under that system, only two senators and two deputies are elected for each district. This favours the two large alliances – the Coalition of Parties for Democracy and the right-wing Coalition for Change, which is now in government.

The smaller forces, regardless of how many votes they earn, are excluded.

“That keeps the diversity of society and its social and political interests from being represented in parliament, the depository of popular sovereignty,” Milos argued.

The constitution was reformed many times since 1989, to eliminate the most irksome aspects, such as the lifetime and designated senators, including former commanders of the armed forces. But it continues to guide political life.

The dictatorship put hurdles in the way of major changes, such as the elimination of the binomial system, which require supermajorities in Congress that have never been achieved since 1990.

But the demands of the youth movement are gaining strength – a movement “that was born from having grown up in a country that we clearly do not like, that is unjust and segregated, but also from having grown up without the traumas and the dead that are the burden carried by many of our parents,” Fielbaum said.

“We aren’t afraid of politics or of dissent, because we know that it is the way we will build a different country,” he added. “And that is where our conviction for definitively eradicating Pinochet’s legacy is born.”