Carmen Vivanco is 83 years old. She looks fragile and timid at first glance, but after a few minutes of conversation her strength and courage are unmistakable. She, like hundreds of other Chileans, lost family members to the brutal military dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Five to be exact.
On August 4, 1976, her brother was dragged away from his home by heavily armed men. On the morning of the following day they returned for her sister-in-law. Later that afternoon they came to Carmen’s home and took away her husband and her son. Five days later, her nephew, who was hiding out at Carmen’s home, was also kidnapped and whisked off into the night. None of them were ever heard from again.
Since then, Carmen has been a prominent leader in Chile’s human rights movement. She and women like her have been struggling for over 20 years to find out the fate of their loved ones, kidnapped and disappeared by agents of the military dictatorship. They faced a solid wall of impunity, put in place by the dictator himself, which protected him and his cronies from prosecution for human rights crimes committed during the dictatorship.
That wall of impunity was fundamentally shaken last October with the arrest of Pinochet by London police and his likely extradition to Spain to stand trial for crimes against humanity. Now, with Pinochet safely tucked away, the unthinkable has happened: For the first time since Chile’s return to civilian rule nine years ago, several high-ranking military officials have been charged with human rights crimes and face public trials. [See “Impunity Challenged in Chile,” NACLA Report on the Americas, Nov/Dec 1999, Newsbrief]
This—more so, it would seem, than the arrest of the Generalísimo—has ruffled the feathers of the Chilean Armed Forces. Shortly after last year’s arrests of several generals and other military officials, the Minister of Defense proposed that the Chilean government convene a “Roundtable for Dialogue” in which representatives of the armed forces would sit down with the victims of human rights violations and try to sort out their “differences”—hoping, presumably, to avoid embarrassing trials in the future.
Chilean human rights groups immediately cried foul. Ever since Pinochet handed power back to civilians, the ruling Concertación governments refused to press charges against human rights violators, arguing that justice should be worked out in the courts and not through politicking. Now that the courts seem poised to at least consider the possibility of meting out real justice, the politicians—presumably under pressure from some sectors of the armed forces—are trying to cut a deal to circumvent the process. A few lone human rights lawyers have sat at the government’s Roundtable, but most have opposed it altogether. Justice, they say, is the realm of the courts, and that is where they have chosen to do battle.
If the past is any indicator, the politicians will try to cut a deal. As this issue went to press, the two top presidential candidates, Ricardo Lagos, of the ruling Concertación (and member of the Socialist Party), and Joaquín Lavín, of the right-wing Independent Democratic Union (UDI), had virtually tied in Chile’s presidential elections, forcing them into a run-off vote in mid-January. If Lavín, a Pinochet ally, were elected, it is almost certain that he would seek to impose a “Punto Final”—a “Full Stop Law”—like that imposed in Argentina a decade ago to put an end to trials against military personnel for human rights crimes.
Lagos, on the other hand, has said he favors full disclosure on the issue of human rights. (The army has refused to give any information whatsoever on the 1,198 disappearances between 1973 and 1989.) But he has also told human rights groups that they could not expect the army to give up information on the disappeared without a guarantee of immunity from prosecution. This pains human rights activists, who point out the irony of the situation, given that Lagos himself was a victim of the dictatorship.
It also reveals the very real limits to Chilean democracy. Chile scholar Brian Loveman has long pointed out that the problem is not that there are authoritarian “enclaves” that persist in the Chilean political system; rather, he argues, the system itself is designed to be authoritarian. Real change means overturning the 1980 Constitution and refashioning Chilean institutions so that they are truly based on democratic principles. Otherwise, cynicism and disillusionment over what most Chileans refer to as “democracia entre comillas”—”democracy in quotation marks”—will surely continue to grow.
Carmen Vivanco is not optimistic about the possibility of ever finding the bodies of her loved ones. And while she does hold out the hope that someday the truth will be known, she doubts whether justice will ever be served. That, she says, would be a personal tragedy for her, but a larger national tragedy for Chile.
