Introduction
John Dinges
"I'm a journalist, not a human rights activist. For me the decision was how I could investigate and tell the truth about what was happening and overcome the veil of fear, secrecy and impunity that kept most people -- willingly or not -- from seeing what was going on in Chile, both inside and outside the country."
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Mark Ensalaco
"Few anticipated that Guzmán -- a conservative judge who openly confesses that his support for the coup was his "original sin" -- would conduct a serious prosecution in the foreboding political climate in Chile ... [but his] commitment to the rule of law, his sense of common human decency and his empathy towards those who had suffered under 'Pinochetismo' drove him on."
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Naomi Roht-Arriaza
"It takes the confluence of courageous individuals and social conditions to create change. Happily, even though Pinochet died without a final trial and conviction, some 300 of his officials, including the major remaining masterminds, have been indicted, tried and convicted."
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Carol Tavris
"Evil acts are far more commonly perpetrated by good people who justify the evil they do in order to preserve their belief that they are good people. This documentary shows that there but for the grace of our circumstances and decisions most of us, too, could be Pinochet -- and we could be Guzmán."
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John Dinges
John Dinges
The author of The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents stayed in Chile during part of Pinochet's reign. He explains why he risked his life to report on the murders and human rights abuses in Chile.
Once I decided to stay on in Chile after the military coup in 1973, I placed myself in a situation in which I would be confronted by human rights abuses and would have to decide what to do. I didn't think much about it at the time. It wasn't even the most important reason I stayed in Chile. I'm a journalist, not a human rights activist. For me the decision was how I could investigate and tell the truth about what was happening and overcome the veil of fear, secrecy and impunity that kept most people -- willingly or not -- from seeing what was going on in Chile, both inside and outside the country.
I was influenced by my very wobbly Christian faith and by the example of the Catholic Church in Chile: Both put me in front of a reality I could not turn away from. There was nothing abstract about it. Because I was in a position to investigate and write stories, and because Cardinal Silva and the Church had created the Vicariate of Solidarity, an institution whose function was to gather secret information about the deaths and disappearances, my only decision was to do what I was called upon to do. Being young and naïve also helps because you are not paralyzed by fear. You just get up in the morning and go to work: the work in this case being gathering information about the atrocities, confirming my facts as best I could, and writing stories for The Washington Post and my other clients. The solidarity with other journalists was also very important. They were facing more dangers than I was, with the relative security afforded by my us passport. In some cases, when they discovered something that could not be published in Chilean media, we collaborated: I would publish it outside Chile, and it would bounce back through the news services. In other cases, when I had done an investigation with details that were especially important inside Chile, I arranged to write with a pseudonym -- Ramon Marsano -- in a Chilean magazine willing to take the risk.
Later, after relative democracy returned to Chile, it was easier to talk openly about the facts of what had happened. Some people, even journalists, continued to avert their eyes from these facts even then. Ideology, pusillanimity, careerism, even residual hate from the past were factors. Each must judge himself or herself according to their own conscience. Most people in Chile, I feel, eventually opened their eyes, and the veil of impunity for the military finally dissolved.
John Dinges was a stringer correspondent in Chile from 1972 to 1978 for The Washington Post, Time and other publications and is the author of two books on the period, Assassination on Embassy Row (1980) and The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents (The New Press 2005). He is currently the founder and co-director of the Centro de Investigación e Información Periodistica (CIPER) in Chile and professor of journalism at Columbia University. Find out more about his work in Chile at www.johndinges.com/condor. He is also featured in The Judge and the General.
Mark Ensalaco
Mark Ensalaco
The author of Chile Under Pinochet: Recovering the Truth ponders why so many Chileans acquiesed to the state's repression and terrorism, and what it took for Chileans to break that cycle.
There is a societal corollary to Newton's First Law of Motion -- "an object in motion tends to remain in motion unless an external force is applied to it."
The military junta that seized power in Chile on September 11, 1973, set in motion 17 years of dictatorial violence that shocked even those Chileans who welcomed military intervention as salvation from national ruin, but who never imagined that the military would wantonly murder political prisoners. Even some senior officers were outraged. "The people gave us arms to defend them," one officer protested, "not to kill them." That officer later gave damning testimony against Augusto Pinochet.
But Pinochet, the army commander-in-chief who became president on the day of the coup, had adopted an unmerciful doctrine of national security that motivated a dirty war of state terrorism.
The Pinochet regime had its civilian collaborators: Ultra-facists who enlisted in the DINA, Pinochet's secret state police; entrepreneurs who bankrolled the regime; journalists who blithely spread the regime's implausible denials of human rights crimes; judges, including Supreme Court justices, who abdicated their judicial duty to defend Chileans' most basic human rights. A murderous animus toward Communism, desire for corporate profit, moral turpitude -- these were some of the motives for collaboration.
The overwhelming majority of Chileans never collaborated in the repression, but their acquiescence permitted the repression, once in motion, to remain in motion. A naïve denial of evidence of the regime's criminality, worries about social isolation for daring to admit the truth in polite company, a valid fear of the personal consequences of denouncing the repression -- there was an array of motives for Chilean civilian acquiescence.
But there were those whose courageous resistance to the repression was the external force that counteracted it: grieving family members who demanded the truth about the fate of their loved-ones; attorneys, dismayed by the collapse of the rule of law, who meticulously filed habeas corpus petitions before contemptuous courts; religious leaders, outraged by the regime's distain for human dignity, who openly challenged the regime with the moral authority of the Church.
Their efforts to counteract the repression during the dictatorship translated into a struggle to defeat impunity after Chile's thorny transition to democracy. Judge Juan Guzmán's relentless prosecution of General Pinochet is something of a parable of this struggle.
Few anticipated that Guzmán -- a conservative judge who openly confesses that his support for the coup was his "original sin" -- would conduct a serious prosecution in the foreboding political climate in Chile. But when the Santiago Court of Appeals vested him with the authority to prosecute Pinochet, Guzmán's commitment to the rule of law, his sense of common human decency and his empathy for those who had suffered under "Pinochetismo," drove him on.
This is the meaning of the parable. An abiding belief in the rule of law as the safeguard of human dignity is an inestimable force that can slow even the fiercest repression.
Mark Ensalaco, the Rev. Raymond A. Roesch Chair in the social sciences and the director of the human rights program at the University of Dayton, is the author of Chile Under Pinochet: Recovering the Truth. He is nearing completion of its sequel, The Mark of Cain: The Prosecution of Pinochet and the Search for the Disappeared.
Naomi Roht-Arriaza
Naomi Roht-Arriaza
The author of The Pinochet Effect: Transnational Justice in the Age of Human Rights writes about the groundwork that made Judge Guzmán's ruling possible. Although the courage of one individual can make the difference, the background work of a great many unsung heroes is also necessary to effect change.
Judge Juan Guzmán is clearly a humanist, a compassionate man susceptible to the suffering of family members who had lost someone to the secret death camps run by Augusto Pinochet's secret police. But that isn't always enough to overcome the fear, inertia and sense that "they must have done something wrong" that keeps most people immobile in the face of stark injustice. A few things made the difference here.
First, there was a network of lawyers and activists who, right after the coup in 1973, began to document each and every case of killing and forced disappearance. The Church's Vicariate of Solidarity made sure that each such violation was the subject of a habeas corpus petition. Even though only one percent of those petitions were ever investigated, the records were left behind for later judges.
The family members created organizations that, like the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in neighboring Argentina, steadfastly pushed for information about the fate of their loved ones. When the Chilean courts were closed and judges stamped "denied" on habeas petitions without reading them, activists went elsewhere, working at the United Nations and through the Inter-American system to push for sanctions on the Chilean government and for investigations of wrongdoing.
Second, Judge Guzmán's investigations took place within a wider framework of attempts to come to terms with Chile's dictatorship. When civilian government was restored in 1990, the new president, Patricio Aylwin, found it impossible to overturn an amnesty law that the military had granted itself. But President Aylwin did set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to find out what had happened and what institutions had been responsible. The commission's report detailed military responsibility for more than 3,000 killings and 1,000 disappearances. The names of all the victims were listed, a copy of the report was presented to their families and the president apologized on national television in the name of the Chilean state. The government then passed a reparations law, providing a pension, medical and psychological care, scholarships for children, and an exemption from military service for the families of the dead and disappeared. Memorials were created at the cemetery and elsewhere. By the time Judge Guzmán began investigating, these earlier efforts had made denial difficult and set the stage for justice.
Third, the justice system itself changed. Judicial reform brought in a crop of new judges uncompromised by the dictatorship. At the same time, Pinochet decided to visit Europe to have back surgery. When he arrived in London, he was arrested based on an indictment filed by a Spanish court. Back in 1996, Spanish lawyers had filed a complaint for genocide, torture and other international crimes against high-ranking Chilean officers. They based the complaint on a Spanish law -- versions of which exist in more than 120 countries -- that allows Spanish courts to prosecute certain particularly heinous international crimes wherever they take place. Pinochet spent more than 500 days under arrest and was eventually found extraditable. He returned to Chile, ostensibly too sick to stand trial, but when he got there, his aura of invincibility was gone. A few months later, Judge Guzmán issued an arrest warrant.
It takes the confluence of courageous individuals and social conditions to create change. Happily, even though Pinochet died without a final trial and conviction, some 300 of his officials, including the major remaining masterminds, have been indicted, tried and convicted. And Chilean democracy is stronger because of it.
Naomi Roht-Arriaza is a professor of law at the University of California's Hastings College of the Law, and the author of The Pinochet Effect: Transnational Justice in the Age of Human Rights (2005). She was a legal advisor on The Judge and the General and writes extensively about human rights issues in Latin America.
Carol Tavris
Carol Tavris
The social psychologist and co-author of Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) explains how most people can be Pinochet or Guzmán and how ordinary people can justify doing evil.
This marvelous documentary makes viewers wonder about the psychology of cruelty and complacency. How could Pinochet sleep at night? How could his supporters have blinded themselves to evidence of his despotism? Why, even after his crimes had been amply documented, would thousands of Chileans refuse to believe a bad word about him?
The answers do not lie in simplistic explanations of good or evil. After all, here in the United States most Americans have not been protesting in the streets about our own government's endorsement of torture and its flagrant violations of the Geneva Convention. The research in my field of social psychology offers a lesson that many find hard to accept: that "evil" is not something perpetrated by a few bad people. Evil acts are far more commonly perpetrated by good people who justify the evil they do in order to preserve their belief that they are good people. This documentary shows that there but for the grace of our circumstances and decisions most of us, too, could be Pinochet -- and we could be Guzmán.
Imagine that you and your closest friend are at the top of a pyramid, sharing values, politics, beliefs. You see yourselves as good, kind, ethical people. Now something happens that requires you to take a stand or make a decision: Do you agree or disagree with George Bush's claim that the war on terror requires some suspension of civil liberties? Accept or protest our military's use of interrogation methods that the entire world, ourselves formerly included, regards as torture? Help a Muslim friend who is suddenly "detained" and held without bail and deprived of a lawyer or butt out, figuring that our security forces would never arrest an innocent person? You and your friend answer these questions differently -- perhaps after a lot of soul-searching, but perhaps impulsively, even mindlessly. Hey, you're busy; you have your own problems; the government knows what it's doing. As soon as you take a step in one direction rather than the other, however, a hardwired mechanism in your brain sees to it that you will justify your choice as being the wisest, best one -- because, after all, you see yourself as a smart, good person. If your decision causes harm to another person, that person must have deserved it -- hey, he started it! Plus I hate his politics! And because, after all, you see yourself as a kind person who would never harm anyone without good reason. Pinochet himself describes the mechanism of self-justification perfectly, describing why he sleeps soundly without a moment's remorse: "One always sees oneself as an angel."
Once you have made a choice, your brain will now start blinding you to evidence that you might have been wrong. Soon, the decision that each of you made will start taking you farther down one path than the other, until you and your (former) friend are each standing at the base of the pyramid -- miles apart.
We can see this process of decision, justification and entrapment in the actions of the general, the judge and the divided Chilean population. The people who blinded themselves to Pinochet's cruelties may have done so initially because they supported him, valued national security over messy democracy and opposed Communism; later, because they feared for their own safety. Yet after years of self-justification, changing their opinion of Pinochet would have required them to admit that they had been wrong, that they had collaborated in perpetuating their government's crimes -- a realization that is devastating to accept. You can see what it took for Guzmán to realize how wrong he had been: repeated exposure to horrific evidence that not only could not be disputed or wished away, but that also forced him to confront his own self-concept of being a fair and incorruptible judge. That is why the Guzmáns of the world are so necessary -- and so rare.
Carol Tavris, Ph.D., is a social psychologist, writer and lecturer. Her latest book, co-authored with the eminent social psychologist Elliot Aronson, is Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts (Harcourt).