Slaking a thirst for justice (Economist re: Argentina & Chile)

[struggle4progress]

Apr 12th 2007 | BUENOS AIRES AND SANTIAGO
From The Economist print edition

FOR the past 31 years, Viviana Díaz, a small, gentle woman now in her 50s, has devoted her life to finding out what happened to her father, Victor Díaz López, a former leader of Chile's Communist Party. Following the bloody coup against Salvador Allende's left-wing government in 1973, he became one of the military regime's most wanted men. After nearly three years in hiding, he was finally picked up by the DINA, the secret police of Chile's dictator, General Augusto Pinochet. His family never saw him again. ~snip~

Take Mr Díaz's case. His family learnt of his arrest through an anonymous phone call. Then silence. After four months of searching, Ms Díaz and her mother, a washerwoman, met a woman recently released from Villa Grimaldi, a secret detention centre. She had a message for them from Marta Ugarte, another of the many communist leaders interned there. Ugarte's wrists had broken after she was strung up from the ceiling and her breasts were burned with a blow-lamp. She wanted them to know that neither she nor Mr Díaz would ever get out alive.

For years, Ms Díaz staged demonstrations, petitioned the pusillanimous courts and badgered officials. But she was met only with death threats, repeated arrest and continuing silence. When democracy returned to Chile in 1990, the government set up an independent inquiry into the “disappeared”. Even then, the perpetrators could not be brought to justice. It was not until Pinochet's arrest in London in 1998 in response to an extradition request from Spain, and the British House of Lords' rulings that he lacked immunity under international law, that Chile's judges began to grow much bolder.

In a series of landmark rulings, Chile's Supreme Court removed most of the obstacles to trying the dictatorship's crimes. In 1999 it declared “disappearances” to be a continuing crime until death is proved. That meant they were not covered by the 1978 amnesty. In December 2006 it ruled that because Chile was in a situation of internal conflict after the 1973 coup, the Geneva Conventions applied. Serious violations of those conventions were war crimes and crimes against humanity, for which a statute of limitations could never be invoked, it said. Nor could they be subject to amnesty, it ruled last month. ~snip~

http://www.economist.com/world/la/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9017531