the story of those who defended human rights against the Chilean dictatorship

2023-09-07 05:12:01

SANTIAGO (AP) — The hallway smells of old paper. Some boxes are stacked on others. The shelves hold folders. There are files in alphabetical order.

It is not a library, but memory. “Repression in universities,” says a file. “HRD press clippings”, formulates another. The rest are keys that the average visitor does not understand. “SAD” lists the disappeared detainees. “SAE” registers those executed.

In this, the archive of the Vicaría de la Solidaridad, each page is history. Remember that 50 years following the coup that gave rise to the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, the past still pervades Chile with its deaths and absences.

The origin of the Vicariate was somewhat peculiar: unlike other Latin American countries like Argentina, where the Catholic Church sat down at the table with the dictators instead of confronting them, in Chile there was a man in a cassock who put his power at the service of the victims.

The first project led by Cardinal Raúl Silva Henríquez was the Pro-Peace Committee (1973). From that ecumenical body, Catholics, Christians, Jews and leaders of other religions provided spiritual, judicial and material accompaniment to those first affected by the regime.

Pinochet exerted pressure until the Committee closed on December 31, 1975, but the cardinal kept an ace up his sleeve: a day later he opened the Vicaría de la Solidaridad – this time with the full weight of the Catholic Church behind him – to commit to defending human rights.

And so, in this thin country that the Pacific and the Andes embrace at the southernmost tip of America, social workers, lawyers, and other professionals formed a group that for 16 years offered legal, medical, and emotional advice to those who had been torn in two by authoritarianism. . They received mothers whose children did not return from a protest, young people whose parents disappeared following work, wives who were already widows without knowing it.

They listened and gave comfort. They went to court. They identified remains in the morgues. They got used to the telephone threats, to the stalking glances in the streets and, on harder days, they buried their collaborators and friends: José Manuel Parada, head of the Vicaría’s analysis department, was kidnapped and executed by state agents in 1985.

The documentation they gathered is the story of a resistance. In 1992, two years following the return to democracy, the Vicariate closed and the foundation that now preserves the archive was created: habeas corpus, medical records and declarations of 47,000 files that have facilitated claims for justice and reparation.

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The file began on day 1 because the paper allowed the government to stand up: by gathering evidence, the blame might not be denied.

María Luisa Sepúlveda was also there from the beginning. After the 1973 coup she joined the Pro-Peace Committee and three years later, when the cardinal established the Vicariate, she began working as a social worker. She later collaborated in political prison and torture commissions, advised a president on human rights and supported the installation of the Museum of Memory.

“This job has been the meaning of my life,” he says.

The name of the Vicariate reached the ears of the people through the parishes. Help me, father, my husband has disappeared. And the priest answered: Go to the Archbishopric and they will support you there.

When a person arrived, the first contact was a social worker like María Luisa. She took notes and assessed the situation. Depending on the scenario, she acted. If there was someone in the crosshairs of the dictatorship, she tried to get a safe place or a visa to get him out of the country. If the person was detained, she would pass information on to a lawyer who would prepare legal proceedings.

“It was already known of deaths, of people arbitrarily detained,” he recalls. “From one day to the next, the State’s support network for people ended.”

The worst thing, he adds, was “not knowing”. Looking for your brother or your father without understanding what had happened to him. Will he be in jail? Will they have killed him? But what did he do? “People arrived totally disoriented by the unprecedented situations.”

Soon individual attention was no longer enough. Due to the accumulation of cases, the Vicaría began to promote organizations of relatives of prisoners and disappeared. This is how they coordinated to visit prisons far from Santiago, gather resources and information.

“There were people who entered and did not feel strong enough to continue,” says María Luisa. “I was there until the end.”

The work days of those who defend human rights in the midst of a dictatorship harden the skin. In her days from nine to six, before running home to care for her three children, María Luisa lived with suffering in various ways. She sometimes attended to the public and reviewed reports. Other days she went to the morgue. There she saw corpses without eyes, pregnant women with slit bellies, victims without fingertips and toes.

It’s not that tragedy doesn’t shake the mind, but it learns and gets used to living with the past.

“I remember a mother who had two children. One was killed and the other was expelled. The lady said the name of her son and she fainted. I have the sound of the son’s name here, in my ear. I am listening and watching. I had a feeling that her heart was squeezing me, but if I started crying with her, I didn’t give her a solution ”.

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Where there were victims, the Vicaría was also there. Although her work was broader in Santiago, she opened offices throughout the country.

“The main religious metaphor that feeds his work is the story of the Good Samaritan,” explains historian María Soledad del Villar, who specializes in the Catholic Church and wrote a book regarding the Vicaría’s social workers.

According to the Bible, a man meets an injured person on his way and, instead of passing by, stops and treats his wounds. Under this principle, the Vicaría assisted everyone who needed it —regardless of their ideology— and organized activities related to social work, such as soup kitchens, job vacancies, and solidarity fasts.

Although Chile today has one of the largest religious disaffiliations on the continent and the Catholic Church has never recovered from allegations of abuse that erupted in 2010, the dictatorship-era church was respected by all. Pinochet himself attended mass on Sundays and said that the Virgin saved him from an attack in 1986.

It was also an institution close to the people. When the coup occurred, it was going through a period of reforms that led the priests to reach out to marginal populations, explains Del Villar. Thus bridges were built and society saw in the church a safe and neutral institution.

“That’s why when people start to disappear, people didn’t go to the police. The police and the army were the ones who were making them disappear, so they asked the church for help.”

Of course, there were military and Catholic chaplains who supported the dictator under the argument that he was saving the country from Marxism, but the religious hierarchy remained on the side of the people.

It was the bishops who summoned the lawyers and assistants to work in the Vicariate, recommended denouncing abuses and argued that their actions were not political, but humanitarian.

A handful went a step further: one followingnoon in 1989, when a military prosecutor stood in front of the Vicariate and demanded that Bishop Segio Valech hand over the medical records from his archives, the religious confronted him like someone who puts his chest to bullets and Said no”.

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When the investigative police kidnapped him in the heart of Santiago one followingnoon in 1980, journalist Guillermo Hormazábal was leaving lunch with a colleague who had asked him for help in finding his missing brother.

Guillermo was studying journalism when the military bombardment hit La Moneda and Salvador Allende shot himself following delivering his mythical speech on Radio Magallanes. After the coup, opposition media outlets closed and many left-wing journalists were expelled or killed. Guillermo was lucky and found work in a local radio station until the end of 1973.

Months later, when the church called to commemorate a “Chilean holy year” to unify society, he was appointed in charge of communication for the program and over the years he was press officer for the Vicariate and for Cardinal Silva Henríquez. “What the Church was trying to do was reconcile the Chileans because the horrors were tremendous,” he recalls.

Silva Henríquez used every means at his disposal to raise his voice: through Radio Chilena, which was owned by the Church and which Guillermo directed at the time of his kidnapping, the press became a means of courageous and constant denunciation.

Guillermo thinks that his work saved him: following his capture, Radio Chilena changed its programming to focus on his disappearance and, perhaps due to pressure, he was released in less than 24 hours. “It was the only thing that existed. There was no other weight apart from the dictatorship”.

The renewal of bishops that came following the departure of Silva Henríquez changed the panorama and the clergy became closer to the upper class, but during the dictatorship it was “a Church that was not in the sacristy. I was with men, with the human being”.

“If the position that the Church had had not been there, for example, unlike Argentina, which was a church that surrendered to the dictatorship, in Chile it would have been a massacre, it would have been something more terrible than it was.”

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Anyone might think that María Paz Vergara knows each file by heart. She walks among the 47,000 folders of the Vicarage as if she might close her eyes and say: “I know what is here, here and there.”

Her role as executive secretary of the foundation that preserves the archive is to respond to inquiries from investigators, lawyers, survivors, and relatives of victims. She also participates in activities that promote human rights in museums, schools and other institutions.

Although he started this work in 1993, he had a first approach since Pinochet times. Like thousands of other people, she asked the Vicariate for help when her husband was temporarily detained.

“I would have dreamed of working at the Vicariate. For me working at the foundation has been a gift from God”.

He says that documentation has been essential to settle outstanding accounts. Thanks to this and the work of the National Truth and Reconciliation Commission, many cases were reopened following the return to democracy.

While it operated, most of the offices of the Vicariate were regarding arrests and executions. Today, 80% of the requests are made by people that the Political Imprisonment and Torture Commission has recognized as victims. This allows them to qualify for remedial benefits, such as primary health care.

“There are also victims who come to remember what happened,” says María Paz. Some want to know who filed an amparo to help them. Others to share her story with her grandchildren.

He remembers a man whose father was arrested in 1973. As an illegitimate child, he did not know him or have access to the benefits his family got, but when he saw him in photos for the first time, his wife told him: “He looks like to our son.”

The archive consists of a legal fund, which keeps more than 85,000 documents such as protections and processes for deaths, kidnappings or torture; an iconographic collection, consisting of photographs; the bibliographic collection, which has material related to fundamental rights; the magazine collection; that of press clippings and the audiovisual, which is made up of films on human rights.

“The archive is giving an account of how the repression is behaving,” says María Paz. “It is formed according to the needs of the documents that need to be generated.”

The first files mention, above all, detainees. In the subsequent ones the disappeared appear and with time the dead arrive. One can find affidavits from witnesses who witnessed arrests, letters from mothers or wives asking to explain the arrests, and “anthropomorphic files,” which began to be created in 1978 following the discovery of 15 bodies in Lonquén.

“There it is verified that the disappeared not only existed, but that they had been assassinated and buried clandestinely,” explains María Paz.

The anthropomorphic files were integrated with material that physically describes a person to identify him in case his remains were found. She is height, weight, hair color and the clothes she was wearing at the time of the arrest. They also include x-rays, medical records, birth certificates, and college records.

“The government said ‘this person has not been arrested.’ He even went so far as to say that they had no legal existence,” says María Paz. “The committee was concerned that there were supporting documents that would make it impossible to deny the facts.”

According to María Luisa Sepúlveda, the Vicaría’s social worker, almost 70% of the victims registered during the first three months of the dictatorship and that is key to understanding why society was hit so hard. “It was the entire government apparatus once morest the entire union apparatus, the radio, the population organizations. No one was saved.”

That wound drags on because Pinochet was never sentenced to prison. In addition, adds María Luisa, there are sectors that minimize that period. “The right, the economic power… They have never wanted to acknowledge the seriousness of the coup or the violations of human rights. Whenever one tries to advance in truth, in justice, they say ‘let’s forget’”.

For thousands, like her, it is impossible. “I would have liked these 50 years to have been different, that society would have understood the need to have had a real commitment to human rights and democracy, that the coup would have been rejected by the majority of society.”

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The Associated Press’s religious news coverage is supported through a partnership with The Conversation US, with funding from the Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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