Fifty years have passed since the Chilean coup d’état of 11 September 1973, but only today has Argentina decided to withdraw the honors granted to the Chilean general at the time Augusto Pinochet. With a decree signed by Argentine President Alberto Fernández, published on Thursday 7 September in the local Official Gazette, the right to wear the insignia of the «Order of May for Military Merit» and the «Order of of May to Merit», both in the rank of «Grand Cross», as well as the insignia of the Collar of the «Order of the Liberator San Martín». the first two had been received by Pinochet in 1975 and 1993, the first under the government of Isabel Peron and the second when Carlos Menem was president. The third was attributed to Pinochet by Argentine dictator Jorge Rafael Videla in 1976.
Commenting on the head of state’s decision, the spokeswoman for the Argentine government, Gabriela Cerruti, underlined that it fits “in the imminent anniversary of the coup d’état in Chile and in the celebration of 40 years of democracy in Argentina, as well as in the permanent struggle of the our country against denialism, for justice, for truth and memory”. Finally, Cerruti announced that according to the decree, “Pinochet does not deserve the gratitude of the Argentine nation, since he is a person who has carried out policies that have subjugated life and degraded the human condition, and also because his actions have offended the values and the guiding principles of the heroes of our past, making it incompatible with said decorations».
The long blood trail of the Pinochet era
The military coup of 1973 was intended to overthrow the democratically elected Allende government. On 11 September, at 6.30 am, the military uprising began and, just seven hours later, at 1.30 pm, the announcement of the death of Salvador Allende barricaded in the Palazzo de La Moneda had preferred suicide rather than capture.
After the coup, Chile plunged into a period of terror. «In 1973 and 1974 the atmosphere among the people I met – students, journalists, intellectuals, artists, workers – was really gloomy. We were scared, we were almost paralyzed with fear. Most people didn’t want to get into trouble, they wanted to be able to move on with their lives, keep a low profile,” recalled the writer Isabel Allende, daughter of Salvador’s cousin, in a 2007 Amnesty International interview. «There was no information, only rumors – she continued. We had heard of the torture centers, the concentration camps, the murders, the raids on poor neighborhoods. We had heard of thousands of people arrested and others who had fled the country, but we had no way of confirming these rumors.”
A climate of hidden, occult terror, confined to the walls of prisons, concentration camps, or in the ocean, a place where an indefinite number of people were thrown during the so-called “flights of death”.
The Pinochet regime also engaged in the hunt for intellectuals. One of the first victims was Pablo Neruda, who officially died of prostate cancer, but probably murdered with the poisonous botox bacteria. Luis Sepúlveda was also captured and brutally tortured.
The total victims of the Pinochet regime are still controversial. According to data from the Valech Report, there were over 40,000 victims of human rights violations between 1973 and 1990: 3,216 officially recognized as missing, while 38,254 recognized as survivors of detention. But it is assumed there were many more. Many were segregated in distant and inaccessible places and lived hellish experiences. One of these “sad villas” was the so-called Colonia Dignidad.
The Colony of Death
The history of Villa Baviera is linked to the darkest events in the history of Latin America, crossed by ambiguous and controversial relationships between military dictatorships and fleeing Nazis. It was he who had founded the colony Paul Schäfer, former Nazi, member of the Hitler Youth and later corporal and doctor in the Wehrmacht. After the war he joined the Evangelical Free Church, but was later removed from his post for pedophilia allegations. He then left as an itinerant preacher and arrived in Chile in 1961. There, relying on anti-communism, he convinced many compatriots to follow him. Thus was born the Colonia Dignidad. In the colony everyone – even children over the age of seven – were forced to work, even 12 hours a day, without wages or weekly rest. In the colony there was a regime of terror: for the slightest offense one was sentenced to painful corporal punishment and deprived of food. But the worst aspect concerned the sexual abuse that Schäfer perpetrated against children, taken from their biological parents and entrusted to the hands of the “permanent uncle”.
With the coup of September 11, many opponents were captured and locked up in the basement of the colony, where they were subjected to the worst tortures. The most common was electroshock, applied to the whole body, even to the private parts. In the colony some victims were used as human guinea pigs: the effects of the lethal gas Sarin were tested.
The lack of justice
Pinochet’s victims never got justice. In October 1998, while in London, he was arrested following an extradition request made by the Spanish judiciary which accused him of serious crimes committed against Spanish citizens. But in March 2000 the former dictator was released for “humanitarian reasons”. Back in Chile, he served only a few months of house arrest.
Schäfer was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2006, when he was now 84 years old. He died in 2010 in the former prison hospital in Santiago de Chile.
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