Chile: Torture victims: Give us real recompense [View All]

Your tax dollars in action. This article refers to torture under the US installed military dictatorship of the 1970s and 1980s.


Torture victims: Give us real recompense, The Miami Herald

BY KEVIN G. HALL

Knight Ridder News Service

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/world/americas/10403326.htm

SANTIAGO, Chile - Many Chileans tortured during the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet are rejecting a government offer of symbolic payments more than 30 years later, demanding substantial compensation instead and legal action against torturers.

Chile has been reliving the horrors of the early 1970s since the late November release of a multiple-volume report on state-sponsored torture. That report, by a government-appointed commission led by a retired Catholic bishop, documented more than 27,000 cases of torture. It also determined that torture was state policy under Pinochet, not the work of renegade officers, as Chile's armed forces had contended. . . .

Many Chilean torture victims feel the offer is paltry, given that many of their lives were destroyed and that the torturers live among them unpunished. Moreover, victims, once released, often were denied the right to study in state universities and, in effect, the ability to pursue professional careers. . . .

Torture victims also are upset that the report leaves out the names of accused torturers and keeps all cases private for 50 years, unless individuals decide to publicize their cases. The civil rights group Human Rights Watch immediately warned that this stipulation gives torturers a half-century of privacy and effectively covers up their acts."