Soldiers from ‘dirty war’ urged to speak out

By EVA VERGARA and MICHAEL WARREN

The Associated Press

Roberto Candia

In September 2008, relatives of dissidents who disappeared under the Pinochet regime displayed their pictures.

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SANTIAGO, Chile | Hundreds of former military draftees rallying outside Chile’s presidential palace were asked Sunday to come forward to reveal crimes they committed and witnessed during Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship.

The draftees have long feared that if they name names and reveal where bodies are buried, they will face prosecution or retaliation by those who ordered them to torture and kill.

But now the information they once promised to carry to their graves has become both a heavy psychological burden and a bargaining chip. By offering confessions, some of these now-aging men believe they can improve their chances of getting government pensions and mental health care.

“Perhaps today is the day when the moment has come, for us to describe what we saw and what we suffered inside the military bases, the things that we witnessed and that we did,” said Fernando Mellado, who leads the Santiago chapter of the Former Soldiers of 1973.

“Our human rights were also violated,” he declared. “The moment has come for former military draftees to tell our wives, our families, the politicians, the society, the country and the whole world about the brutalities they subjected us to. I believe the moment has come for us to speak, for our personal redemption.”

Of the 8,000 people drafted as teenagers from Santiago alone in the tumultuous year when Pinochet overthrew Salvador Allende’s government, Mellado thinks “between 20 and 30 percent are willing to talk.”

Chilean security forces killed 3,186 people during the dictatorship, including 1,197 who were made to disappear, according to an official count.

In nearly two decades of democracy since then, less than 8 percent of the disappeared have been found, said Viviana Diaz of the Assembly of Family Members of the Disappeared Detainees.

Posted on Sun, Nov. 01, 2009 11:22 PM

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