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Sat 6 Sep, 2003 09:44 am
RIGHTS-CHILE:
Heavy TV Coverage Surrounds 30th Anniversary of Coup
by Gustavo González - IPS - 9/4/03
SANTIAGO, Sep 5 (IPS) - As the 30th anniversary of the Sep. 11, 1973 coup d'etat in Chile approaches, TV coverage of the crimes against humanity committed by the 1973-1990 dictatorship is so heavy that some analysts warn against overload.
Others, however, welcome the new media openness towards issues that remain highly divisive and controversial.
The new focus has even been taken up by TV stations that until recently shied away from reporting on and investigating questions surrounding the 3,000 political murders and forced disappearances committed by Gen. Augusto Pinochet's de facto military regime.
Local stations have not only dusted off their footage of the bloody coup that overthrew democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende (1971-1973), but are taking a new approach to human rights questions, no longer merely echoing the official version of events imposed by the dictatorship.
For example, the media have stopped using terms like the ''alleged detained-disappeared'' or ''supposed torture victims,'' and the right's claim that the dictatorship's human rights violations were an invention of ''international communism'' has been laid to rest.
''Enough years have gone by to allow Chilean society to gain a more realistic view of this event (the coup) that was so far-reaching in Chilean history, and for that reason it is recalled or commemorated by the media,'' Douglas Hubner, chairman of the Santiago Metropolitan Council of the Journalists' Association, told IPS.
''I think this country is gradually achieving the media freedom that will allow the whole truth to come out,'' he added.
The secretary-general of the government, Francisco Vidal, said the current ''boom'' of TV programmes on human rights issues has come in response to high ratings.
Vidal told foreign reporters that the 21 in-depth reports on the issue broadcast in July and August were produced because the TV channels found that human rights programming draws viewers, which he decribed as a positive development.
TV, which has a much greater scope of influence than other media, is thus helping to uncover the truth about the full extent of the dictatorship's repression, said the spokesman for Chile's centre-left coalition government.
Some of the programmes on the 1973 coup and its consequences have scored ratings of 40 points as measured by the ''people meter'' system, which meant 480,000 TV sets were tuned in to the broadcasts, said Vidal.
''Los zarpazos del Puma'' by journalist Patricia Verdugo, the top-selling book in Chile on the dictatorship's human rights abuses, has sold 150,000 copies at the most, including both legal and pirate editions, Vidal pointed out for the sake of comparison.
But experts say the heavy coverage could lead to overload.
''In Chile, the media tend to all cover the same news items at the same time, and that poses a serious danger of overkill, which is perhaps already occurring,'' María Elena Gronemeyer, director of the School of Journalism at the Catholic University of Santiago, commented to IPS.
''The important thing in order to keep that from happening is for the media to take on the challenge of being creative, and to respond to the public's need for news while weighing the dosage of information that the public is capable of handling, even about such a key event as the coup,'' said Gronemeyer.
Santiago Pavlovic, a reporter with the Informe Especial programme produced by Chile's state-run channel Televisión Nacional de Chile (TVN), agreed that ''coverage has been excessive,'' but said ''that has provided the public, and especially the youngest generations, with more complete information.
''We have to remember that more than 60 percent of the population of Chile is under 30. That means they did not experience the coup, and perhaps this overkill is compensating for everything that was not talked about or explained during 17 years of military government, when only one voice was heard,'' Pavlovic remarked to IPS.
''Although there has been some overload in terms of media coverage (of the coup), I think that due to historical reasons, and because of the time that has passed, it is important to look back,'' said Claudio Mendoza, a journalist with the Contacto programme produced by the Catholic University channel.
''The issue isn't just going to go away. It will keep cropping up for one reason or another, because someone was arrested, or because charges were brought against someone after new evidence emerged when someone else decided to talk (about the rights abuses). But probably on the 40th or 50th anniversary (of the coup), there won't be another explosion of news like the one we're seeing now,'' Mendoza said in an interview.
In 1998, on the 25th anniversary of the coup in which Allende died, there was no media onslaught like today simply because ''Pinochetismo was still alive,'' said Hubner.
''Five years ago there was no possibility for truth and justice (regarding the human rights abuses). Today, that is becoming a possibility in this country,'' he added.
According to Gronemeyer, ''everyone now admits that the human rights abuses took place.
''Today, many members of the military are being prosecuted. Many opinion leaders with close ties to the left are even recognising their share of responsibility in the polarisation that occurred in the country 30 years ago and led to the coup,'' she said.
In 1974, the dictatorship declared Sep. 11 a holiday, and it remained so until 1998, when it was eliminated by an accord sponsored by Pinochet himself in the Senate.
The former dictator became a life senator, a privilege granted to ex-presidents by the 1980 constitution, the day after he stepped down as army chief on Mar. 10, 1998, after holding that post since August 1973.
The elderly Pinochet celebrated the 25th anniversary of the coup in moderation, determined to cultivate a new image as a senator-for-life, as he prepared to travel to Europe to undergo surgery on a slipped disc and negotiate an arms deal on behalf of the army.
But on Oct. 16, 1998, as he recovered from his operation in a London clinic, he was arrested on the basis of a warrant issued by Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzón and held under house arrest until March 2000, when British Home Secretary Jack Straw released him on humanitarian grounds.
That was the beginning of the decline of the former dictator, who today, at age 88, watches while TV provides a continuous diet of information on the dictatorship's deeds, which were still censored even during the first years of Chile's transition to democracy.
September 11th meant only one thing to us Latin Americans before 2001.
Now that the US has its own September 11th to mourn about, I bet the other September 11th, the one who bled Chile with the help of the US government, will not be very much on American tv.
fbaezer
fbaezer, that's why I posted the article. Isn't it eerie about the 9/11 date coincidence? Makes one wonder if it had any importance to the date the terrorists chose to attack the U.S.? Repayment for US crimes against Chile?
----BumbleBeeBoogie
I had considered Allede a decent man. Back then I wondered how the US could so blatantly interfere in other nations with no real public outcry. Today I still wonder the same thing.
It is a sad coincidence.
I don't think the terrorists had the Chilean date in mind. I see no link between Islamic fundamentalists and moderate Marxists. No link between the extreme right and the left.
Documents have appeared that prove that Nixon's government was involved in destabilizing Allende's regime right after the elections he won.
While Allende made several mistakes during his aborted administration -and it is possible that Unidad Popular would have lost the Presidency in later elections-, the bloody coup, which cost more than 15 thousand people killed or tortured to death by the military, is unforgivable. And while Pinochet and his croonies should be punished, we all know who the puppetmasters were.
Yep - we do.
Lots of Chilean refugees came here after the coup - so many of us knew far more than we wanted to know, first hand, as well as from reading about it - but I guess my "many" was a small group, really. There were certainly protests aimed at US interests in Australia....
The Pinochet files reveal extend of US involvement in coup
Analysis - The Pinochet files
A series of declassified US documents have revealed the extent of America's role in the Chilean coup, reports Jonathan Franklin
Wednesday September 10, 2003 - Guardian
In this never-before-published photograph, General Augusto Pinochet (second from left) and President Salvador Allende (in white jacket) are seen on a trip in northern Chile in the months before the 1973 coup that left Allende dead and Pinochet in command of the government. Photograph: Fundacion Salvador Allende
September 11 1973 was a day of terror and bloodshed in Chile. After months of rising tension, army troops stormed the presidential palace, leaving President Salvador Allende dead and thousands prisoners throughout this previously democratic nation.
Now, on the 30th anniversary of the coup, professors, journalists and citizen activists around the world are continuing to expose the full role of the US government in financing and promoting this bloody coup, which ushered in the 17-year military dictatorship headed by General Augusto Pinochet.
Thousands of top secret documents which were declassified over the past five years have now been synthesized in a new book, The Pinochet File, by investigative reporter Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archives, a Washington-based investigative centre. "The US created a climate of a coup in Chile, a situation of chaos and agitation," said Kornbluh. "The CIA and state department were worried that the [Chilean] military ... were not ready for a coup."
The top secret documents accumulatively detail the crude workings of Washington during the Cold War. "It is firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup," reads a CIA document from October 1970. "It is imperative that these actions be implemented clandestinely and securely so that the USG [US government] and American hand be well hidden."
Two days after this document was written, top CIA officials proposed a terrorist campaign to stun the Chilean people into accepting a military regime.
"Concur giving tear gas cannisters and gas masks ... working on obtaining machine guns," reads a CIA memo dated October 18 1970.
"Use good officers ... Some low-level overflights of Santiago and bomb drops in areas not likely to cause casualties could have great psychological effect and might swing balance as they have so many times in past in similar circumstances."
While conservative Chileans argue that the coup was a home-grown affair, the current Chilean minister of education, Sergio Bitar, says: "That internal crisis was activated by the North American policies against it. We see how they energetically obstructed all types of credit from the World Bank and the InterAmerican Bank ... these were decisive actions. This were political and financial pressures that were very relevant [to the ensuing coup.]"
The US effort to destabilise Chile was led by a policy of massively funding and bribing non-leftwing Chilean politicians.
Throughout the 1960s, the US secretly spent millions funding political parties of their choosing - usually the moderate Christian Democrats led by Eduardo Frei Montalva. By the early 1970s, Chilean society had become so leftwing that Washington decided to change tactics. First, President Nixon authorised $10m to be spent "to make the economy scream".
He also authorised pro-coup initiatives designed to destroy the traditional reluctance of Chilean military men to take over civilian government.
"Pinochet will not be a stumbling block to coup plans", reads one memo written six months before the coup, in which the American government looks to build a veritable Dream Team of coup plotters. "The navy and air force are ready ... the military is getting ready to move."
As part of a particularly crude effort to remove army officers who supported democratic rule, the CIA organised to kidnap Rene Schneider, a Chilean army general.
That plot was botched; Schneider died, and today his family is suing the US government and Henry Kissinger in particular for playing a role in his murder.
Citing documents declassified in the past few years, the lawsuit alleges that the US government paid $35,000 to the men who plotted the actions against Schneider.
"I don't want revenge, I want the truth to be established," said a son of the murdered general, also named Rene, who now lives in Santiago and works for a television station.
Immediately after the coup, US officials worked hard to ease international criticism of the human rights record of the Pinochet regime. Rather than fear Washington¿s reproach, the military regime repeatedly sought help and advice.
Just weeks after the coup, the US ambassador in Chile sent a memo to Henry Kissinger noting that "the military government of Chile requires adviser assistance of a person qualified in establishing a detention centre for the detainees ... adviser must have knowledge in the establishment and operation of a detention centre".
Even when the full extent of the torture and executions in Chile were well known, the US government sought to integrate the Pinochet regime into international business circles.
Probably no figure more personalised the cruelty of the Pinochet regime than the head of its secret DINA police force, Manuel Contreras.
Previously classified documents now confirm that, not only was Contreras on the CIA payroll, but that when he came to Washington during the height of human rights abuses, the US state department had specific tasks for him.
"Contreras was also asked to check in with Anaconda [Copper] and General Motors to encourage them to resume operations in Chile."
· A documentary, The Other 9/11, is broadcast at 11pm on Thursday September 11 on BBC Four
CHILE: The Seemingly Interminable Transition to Democracy
CHILE: The Seemingly Interminable Transition to Democracy
Gustavo González - IPS 9/11/03
SANTIAGO, Sep 10 (IPS) - An incomplete transition to democracy and unattainable reconciliation, seasoned by a range of interpretations of the past, make up the political panorama in Chile on the eve of the 30th anniversary of the 1973 coup d'etat.
Sep. 11, 1973 marked the start of the longest military dictatorship in the history of Chile, which 30 years later still finds itself in the midst of a political transition that looks like it will never end, according to analysts like journalist Manuel Cabieses, director of the leftist magazine Punto Final.
In an international seminar on ''Journalism, Memory and Human Rights'' which ended Wednesday in the University of Chile in Santiago, Cabieses and Argentine journalist Horacio Verbitsky pointed to vestiges of the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet that continue to stand in the way of the country's complete transition to democracy, which began on Mar. 11, 1990.
They agree with President Ricardo Lagos, a moderate socialist, that the transition will not be complete as long as relics like the designated senators representing the branches of the armed forces or an electoral system that excludes small parties from the legislature are still alive, and until civilian authorities regain the power to remove senior military officers from their posts.
The ceremony held Wednesday in La Moneda, the government palace, in homage to former president Salvador Allende, who died in the 1973 coup, triggered debate about the Chile of three decades ago and the country that has taken shape after 17 years of dictatorship and 13 years of transition to democracy.
In the presence of Hortensia Bussi, Allende's widow, parliamentary Deputy Isabel Allende, his daughter and the current president of the lower house of parliament, and other special guests, a commemorative plaque was unveiled near the spot where Allende apparently took his own life while the palace was bombed.
Two enormous photographic images were also unveiled. In the first, Allende is waving from a balcony of La Moneda on Nov. 4, 1970, the day he took office. The second shows the same balcony destroyed by the bombing of the palace on the day of the coup.
The vindication and reappraisal of Allende, the predominant theme of the heavy media coverage that has surrounded the 30th anniversary of the collapse of one of South America's strongest, most vibrant democracies, has annoyed the right-wing opposition.
''The truth has been modified, and what we've been seeing is an attempt to revive the hatred and confrontation of 30 years ago, while the country's institutions are shamelessly used to vindicate the figure of Allende in the worst possible way,'' said Senator Hernán Larraín of the rightist Independent Democratic Union (UDI).
Lucía Pinochet Hiriart, Gen. Pinochet's daughter, recently complained that ''history is being distorted. They are trying to turn one (Allende) into a saint and the other (Pinochet) into a demon.''
Pinochet's son Marco Antonio said ''the story is not being told in its true context.''
Until 1998, acts of homage to Allende on the anniversary of the coup were limited to the left, while political leaders and the media kept silent about Pinochet and the human rights crimes committed during the dictatorship, when at least 3,000 people were killed or ''disappeared'', and tens of thousands were tortured.
''In my view, the most significant aspect of this year's anniversary is the resurgence in Chilean society of an enormous interest in Allende, and in what happened'' in the early 1970s, economist Manuel Riesco with the independent National Research Centre on Alternative Development (CENDA) told IPS.
Like never before, Allende has been the focus of debates and recitals and other academic and artistic events not only in Chile, but in other Latin American countries and Europe as well, particularly Mexico and Italy.
''The number of events being held around the world to pay homage to Allende and his (coalition) government of Popular Unity, and to repudiate the 17 years of military dictatorship, is just incredible,'' Lorena Pizarro, the head of the Group of Families of the Detained-Disappeared, said in a conversation with IPS.
But businessman and former senator Sebastián Piñera, the president of the right-wing National Renovation Party, complained that the Allende commemorative plaque reads 1970-1976 -- which would have been the dates of his presidential term if it had not been cut short by the coup.
No matter where they stand on the political spectrum, however, political leaders agree that today's Chile is a very different country than the one that existed when the heady attempt to transform Chilean society by the leftist Popular Unity coalition government led by Allende was abruptly brought to an end.
''The most important thing that has changed (in the past 30 years) is the correlation of forces,'' said Deputy Rodolfo Seguel with the Christian Democracy Party, one of the political forces that make up the ruling centre-left Coalition for Democracy, along with the Socialist, For Democracy and Radical Social Democratic parties.
''Now there is one major political bloc, the Coalition for Democracy, and the old scenario in which the political spectrum was broken up into thirds -- the right, the centre, and the left -- luckily does not exist anymore,'' the lawmaker, a former trade unionist, told IPS. ''Now we have the Coalition and a right-wing bloc.
''The extremist groups -- the extreme right and the extreme left -- have no representation in Congress, with the exception of part of the extreme right, which is represented by the UDI,'' he added.
''From a political, social and economic standpoint, today's Chile has nothing to do with the country that existed in 1973,'' another Christian Democratic Senator, Jorge Pizarro, said in an interview.
The biggest change lies in ''the functioning of a democratic system today that is more unified, more tolerant, and less tied to polarised ideologies, one that allows degrees of expression of the different ideological, political, economic and religious points of view,'' said Pizarro.
The senator added that Chile today is a modern country that is well inserted into the world, although he said it still has some way to go before it achieves ''real tolerance, respect for minority opinions, and full freedom of speech.''
UDI Deputy Felipe Salaberry commented to IPS that ''what matters'' at this point are Chileans' plans and expectations ''for the next 30 years, with respect to the future of their families, their children, education and work -- not what happened 30 years ago.
''What has changed is not only that Chileans are different today in their thinking and way of life, but that 70 percent of the population is under 40 and half of the population of the country was not even born yet on Sep. 11, 1973,'' said the legislator.
But Juan Andrés Lagos, a member of the political commission of the Communist Party, which is opposed to the centre-left coalition but is not represented in parliament, sees things in a very different light.
''Before the conspiracy and the coup, Chile was one of the most pluralistic and democratic countries on the continent and in the Third World,'' he said in a conversation with IPS.
''This was a country with a strong democratic culture, and that culture cut right across political, social and cultural structures,'' he said.
''But today, Chile is a fragmented country marked by great social inequalities. It is a country with a high degree of social schizophrenia, burdened by the weight of a militarism that has taken root in recent history, in a threatening manner,'' he added.
While I agree that there are still some remnants of the Pinochet regime in Chile (the lifelong appointed senators), I think that the full transition to democracy in that country is practically accomplished.
Exclusion of small parties from parliament is something some of us don't like, but is a norm in many democracies (the US and Britain to name a couple).
Chileans have freedom, the military is losing power day after day, and president Lagos is from the same party of late president Allende. "The ample boulevards" of democracy of which the martyred President spoke on his last day did open.
Reconciliation is hard. But it will come.
[and my despise to the PCCh, the only Stalinist -but more primitive- party left in the Western world]
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