The Healing of Nations by Amstutz Mark R

Author:Amstutz, Mark R. [Amstutz, Mark R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781461644255
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
Published: 2013-06-27T00:00:00+00:00

MILITARY RULE AND THE ABUSE OF HUMAN RIGHTS

In carrying out the coup, military authorities imposed swift and total control over all major geographical and economic sectors of society. In taking control of the state, the military used force whenever they met resistance. In a number of locations in Santiago, some militants engaged in brief gun battles, but by the end of the first day, armed resistance had virtually ceased. To prevent popular uprisings by armed revolutionary groups,19 the military junta (the leaders of the army, navy, air force, and police) instituted a two-day curfew and imposed martial law. The lifting of constitutional constraints gave security officials the right to search, detain, and imprison people suspected of supporting revolutionary causes. Accordingly, security personnel rounded up potential opponents, including leftist activists, union militants, and members of revolutionary groups. Hundreds of government officials and radical political leaders were immediately imprisoned or killed and many simply disappeared. To gather information about radical groups, alleged troublemakers were tortured and then secretly killed to avoid accountability. It has been estimated that within the first days of the coup, several hundred people were killed and more than 10,000 detained, most of them in Santiago’s national stadium. By the end of the first year of military rule, more than 1,200 people had disappeared or been killed. Of the more than 3,000 people who were killed during the era of military rule, more than 1,000 were classified as disappeared detainees (detenidos desaparecidos).20

Since Marxism was viewed as the cancer that had destroyed Chile’s democratic values and traditions, military authorities determined that the only effective solution to this political disease was to eliminate groups committed to the Marxist ideology. As Edgardo Boeninger, a former president of the University of Chile, has pointed out, “from the outset, the military government interpreted its mission as a war against Marxism.”21 Accordingly, the government banned the Communist Party and other leftist parties of Allende’s UP coalition and sought to eradicate all radical organizations and movements through political repression, including widespread intelligence gathering, censorship of the media, and imprisonment, exile, or killings of leaders and militants. Subsequently, all political parties were suspended and the National Congress dissolved.

In announcing the transfer of political authority from elected officials to the military, Pinochet indicated that the military chiefs—the Junta—would serve as “the Supreme Command of the Nation with the patriotic duty to restore chilenidad, justice, and the institutions, which have broken down.”22 Only the courts were left intact, and even the decision to honor judicial authority was quickly compromised by the imposition of martial law, which effectively gave military tribunals final judicial authority. In sum, the Pinochet government decided that the Chilean political system must be purified of its Marxist, revolutionary virus, and that to carry out this task, it was necessary to depoliticize the country altogether.

In 1974 Pinochet established a secret police force, Directorate for National Intelligence (DINA), to direct the gathering of intelligence and to carry out clandestine operations as a means to depoliticize society. In its

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