When Joan Jara went to identify the body of her husband, Victor, she found it riddled with 44 bullets and dumped among a pile of corpses in the Santiago morgue. The poet’s wrists and neck were broken and twisted. Where his belly ought to have been was a gory, gaping void.
The memory of that grim scene soon after the Chilean coup – on 11 September 1973 – is still painful for Jara, but it is not the only cause of her grief. The prime suspect in the killing, a former lieutenant in the Chilean army, is still alive and at liberty in the US, where he has citizenship through marriage.
Now the campaign to extradite him to his homeland has taken a step forward after Pedro Barrientos Nuñez, who lives in Florida, was served notice of a lawsuit in the US accusing him of torture, extrajudicial killing and crimes against humanity
But many of the general’s former supporters argue the events of 1973 are now misrepresented. “Political parties have demonised anything vaguely related to the military government. People talk of abuses of human rights, but that is wrong,” said Roberto Mardones, the administrator of the Pinochet Foundation, which has an exhibition of the general’s medals and books (many on Napoleon) and a mock-up of his office.
“In 1973 citizens were desperate for change. There was a lot of hate. There were strikes, shortages of gas, sugar, matches and nappies. When the junta proclaimed on the radio that they would bring peace and stability, there was euphoria. I went out with my family to celebrate. It was like a carnival.”
The gulf between such views and those of the victims shows the difficulty of reconciliation in Chile after 40 years.
Joan Jara said the US could now help by recognising its role and supporting efforts to bring the accused to justice
“I appeal to people in the United States to put pressure on their government to respond to our appeals,” she says. “The coup was supported and financed in part by the CIA so the American government at that time had some responsibility for what happened. I know many in the US condemned the coup and were in solidarity with the people of Chile and the victims of executions, disappearances and torture. This case is for all of us.”
The Raw Story
Agony of Chile’s dark days continues as murdered poet’s wife fights for justice
Jonathan Watts, The Guardian
Two take-aways for the contemporary US.
First, extreme political polarization and economic inequality are social dynamite that only fools play with.
Second, neoliberal intellectuals and economists have gone of record that dictatorship and fascism are preferable to socialism as long only temporary, as Ludwig Mises said of Hitler, and prominent neoliberal economists Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek took the side of Pinochet's "reform" against Allende's "socialist depredation," while the US not only sanctioned the coup but treated it as a black operation in US imperial and colonial interests. This is a baseless equation of neoliberalism as a political stance with liberal democracy.
