By Ascen Arriazu
November 2006
This article has been translated/adapted from an original Spanish articleTranslator: Isabel Negreira
“To create a democracy, blood must sometimes be spilled”. These would be wise words were it not for the fact that they were pronounced by Augusto Pinochet, one of the greatest mass-murderers of the 20th century. Pinochet’s seizure of power on September 11th 1973, an earlier 9/11 which produced a similarly catastrophic scene - that of the storming of La Moneda in Santiago, Chile, where the then president, Salvador Allende, died. One of Allende’s daughters described her escape during a BBC documentary: “We escaped in a taxi and the police let us through because my sister, who was pregnant at the time, pretended to be in labour”.
Since then, thousands of cases of murders, disappearances and torture have been and continue to be investigated by several pro-human rights NGO’s throughout the world. Amnesty International has been the most active of these groups and publishing detailed reports regarding the torture techniques carried out in prisons during Pinochet’s dictatorship. Among those who have expressed concern for the administering of justice is one of Chile’s greatest activists, Ariel Dorfman. Without mincing his words, he has come dangerously close to the underlying truth. The author, despite a consistently full schedule, kindly shared his time and experiences with Three Monkeys Online. CONTINUE
November 2006
This article has been translated/adapted from an original Spanish articleTranslator: Isabel Negreira
“To create a democracy, blood must sometimes be spilled”. These would be wise words were it not for the fact that they were pronounced by Augusto Pinochet, one of the greatest mass-murderers of the 20th century. Pinochet’s seizure of power on September 11th 1973, an earlier 9/11 which produced a similarly catastrophic scene - that of the storming of La Moneda in Santiago, Chile, where the then president, Salvador Allende, died. One of Allende’s daughters described her escape during a BBC documentary: “We escaped in a taxi and the police let us through because my sister, who was pregnant at the time, pretended to be in labour”.
Since then, thousands of cases of murders, disappearances and torture have been and continue to be investigated by several pro-human rights NGO’s throughout the world. Amnesty International has been the most active of these groups and publishing detailed reports regarding the torture techniques carried out in prisons during Pinochet’s dictatorship. Among those who have expressed concern for the administering of justice is one of Chile’s greatest activists, Ariel Dorfman. Without mincing his words, he has come dangerously close to the underlying truth. The author, despite a consistently full schedule, kindly shared his time and experiences with Three Monkeys Online. CONTINUE
No comments:
Post a Comment