Chile, 50 Years Beyond the Coup

 

Pascale Bonnefoy

We spent two hours on Sunday at the Art Museum listening to a marvelous lecture about Chile's recovery from the Pinochet coup.  The speaker was Pascale Bonnefoy, an investigative journalist based in Santiago, Chile, and associate professor of journalism at the University of Chile, Santiago.

Seventeen years after the 1973 coup which ended the Allende presidency the Chileans voted the dictator out of office.  That unique termination of a dictatorship was accomplished only with carefully crafted compromises, the first of which was to grant amnesty to Pinochet and to leave him as the commander of the armed forces for eight years after he stepped down from the highest office.

While many of those responsible for the torture and murder of thousands of Chileans remained safe from prosecution for a time as well, the advocates of human rights gradually assembled the facts of the period and identified the perpetrators, many of whom are only now being brought to justice.  Pinochet, however,  escaped that justice.  He always denied any direct knowledge or responsibility for the human rights abuses and in the end he threw his subordinates under the bus.  So, while he was able to die in his own bed, he did ultimately earn the hate, not only of most of the citizens, but also of the army that had supported him.

Bonnefoy spent years assembling the story of the search for justice in Chile and produced a detailed account of it in her book, The Investigative Brigade.

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The story continues:

Aljazeera 29 Aug 2023

Chile court upholds jail term for retired soldiers over Victor Jara murder.

Victor Jara

There have been a lot of articles appearing lately about the the 1973 coup in Chile which took place 40 years ago yesterday.  The one I found most affecting appeared today in El País describing an appearance by Bruce Springsteen in Santiago.  He honored the anniversary of that terrible event with a tribute to the Chilean singer/songwriter Victor Jara who was executed by Pinochet's thugs.  As was the case with the killing of García Lorca, by murdering a gentle poet the dictator only  helped to ensure that the voice of his victim would remain strong for generations.



There is also a good over-view of the literature of the period available in the "Cultura" section of El País.