What a day...
we started with an excellent lecture from a human rights lawyer here in Chile. Very insightful perspective on pre-dictatorship polarization in society, the coup itself, then the introduction of a systemic torture apparatus. That lecture was followed by a tour of the ¨park of peace¨, a former torture center, that was led by a torture survivor. Very powerful stuff. A valuable experience but left us all (i think i can safely say all of us, or nearly so) exhausted.
tomorrow we return to the relative banality of trade policies and economic integration in South America.
then it´s on to Buenos Aires.
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2 comments:
Your lectures sound quite interesting. I wish there had been blogs about such things when I took history classes. As a psychologist, I would certainly be interested in the presentation by the torture survivor. Some people have amazing inner strength.
Pam...
couple of things you might find interesting about this man's story:
1. He didn't tell us directly, but this morning we learned he'd probably been held captive for several months.
He described multiple torture methods that were applied to prisoners, though we didn't ask which ones he'd been subjected to personally. Something he emphasized several times was that torture is systematic and very carefully controlled, not just a collection of randomly brutal acts. When a prisoner was deemed to be no longer of any use he or she was released or killed (in the case of Chile a great many prisoners were released, in Argentina they were almost all murdered at the end of their incarceration). Once he was released our presenter described himself (and others) as a "living zombie". He went to the U.S. to live for 15 years which he says was critical to his recovery and renewal. He now teaches and does investigations on missing persons cases from that time.
2. There is a general amnesty law in Chile that protects army personnel from 1973 (the beginning of the dictatorship) to 1978 for human rights violations. (there are some prosecutions, even for crimes during this period, I don't understand the technicalities). Practically what this means is that there are many torturers still living openly in Chilean society. Our presenter described an occasion a few years ago where he saw an officer from his torture center in a shopping mall. He (the guy who was tortured) yelled his name and called him a criminal (this was a sort of ritzy shopping area in in Santiago). That sort of encounter is not unusual in Chile we are told.
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