Pinochet invented a war to assassinate Chileans

Hernán Uribe

06/09/2013

Opinión

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The assassination of Chileans by troops commanded by four generals risen against President Salvador Allende began forty years ago on the morning of September 11, 1973 and soon, the next day, they decided to "legalize" the killings with the singular and faulty decision to create, by decree, a war in which the only adversary would be the unarmed people.

In the Official Journal (1) of 22/9/73 we find the Decree-Law N5 of 12/9/73 which says: "[we] declare that the State of Siege decreed because of internal commotion should be understood as ‘A state or time of war’” (quotation marks in the original). The explanation of this measure is found in article 2* which reads: "When the security of those attacked (obviously the military) demands it, the person or persons involved can be killed in the act."

Other specifications in the aforementioned Decree illustrate the ferocity and the intention to kill of the authors. Examples: "In wartime in accord with article 418 of the Military Code of Justice, the penalties established will be respectively, imprisonment in the minimum degree to death and imprisonment in the maximum degree to life incarceration". It is further clarified: "In a time of war the penalty will be imprisonment in the minimum degree to the death penalty." (Our italics)

Perogrullo continues: "If for concurrent circumstances the penalty that corresponds be death, precisely this will be applied." Later, in November of 1973 another Decree-Law noted: "Anyone who comes clandestinely into the country will be sanctioned with the penalty of imprisonment or death." This is further clarified: "The judgment of the crime corresponds to military tribunals and their judgments will be in accord with the Code of Military Justice” (1).

Note that eventually some Chileans would be eliminated for coming into their own country. The signers of this "legislation" were the members of the quartet of death: Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, Commander in Chief of the Army, José Toribio Merino Castro, Admiral and Commander in Chief of the Navy, Gustavo Leigh Guzmán, Air Force General, commander in chief of the Air Force and César Mendoza Durán, Director General of the Carabineros.

In the same act Pinochet was designated president of the Junta and they immediately began to eliminate social, political, trade union and professional organizations, and prohibited any elections, even those of sports clubs. The primary-school level of the writing of the junta decrees evokes the derisive comments of Rabelais centuries before, but lamentably in Chile there was only tragedy with thousands of persons assassinated, tortured , exiled and families destroyed. A nightmare that was to last for 17 years.

The details of the trials in the framework of the supposed military justice are totally unknown, but the details of assassination without trial were soon to be known. On November 30, 1978, the bodies of 14 persons were discovered in the kilns of a former limestone mine. In this case the investigation was undertaken by civil tribunals and the bodies were recognizable due to the effect of the mineral.

It was established that the victims were campesinos from the locality, a rural area near Santiago, the capital of Chile. It was shown that they were detained by Carabineros and executed in the same kilns in which they were interred (2). After this episode the denunciations of homicides committed without trial increased. Forty years after the coup d'état, disappeared persons in Chile still count in the thousands.

The first decree-law dated September 11 relates to the creation of a Governmental Junta and necessarily, given its character, contains a gross falseness. It involves only the following "Considering": That the Public Authority, formed constitutionally by the Army, the Navy, the Air Force and the Corps of Carabineros, represents the organization that the State has assumed for the defence of its moral and physical integrity and its historical-cultural identity."

Until this disastrous date, Chile had been regarded as a democratic nation and then by force of arms it became a huge military barracks. On September 24 the disappearance of the national workers organization was decreed, with a decree-law whose first article declared: "The juridical personality of the Central Unica de Trabajadores (CUT) is cancelled since it has been transformed into a political organization, under the influence of tendencies that are foreign and alien to the national identity. The other article threatens: "The infraction of this norm will be punished with prison, relegation or estrangement in any of its degrees."

On September 22 the mandate of the Mayors and municipal councilors was declared terminated, although the decree adds, unperturbed: "From the present decree Mayors will be named by the Governing Junta. "On the 24th of the same month the elimination of Parliament was decreed: Article 1*: The National Congress is dissolved, and members of Parliament will cease to exercise their functions as of this date."

The saying is that ignorance involves daring and this happened with the Junta decision to proclaim illicit and dissolve a dozen political parties that according to the golpistas were "marxists"; it then declares: "That the Marxist doctrine on the State and the class struggle is incompatible with national unity." In a separate article one reads: "Any activity involving propaganda, by word or in writing or in any other medium, of Marxist doctrine or of any other that is in accord with their principles and objectives, is prohibited" (3).

The dictatorship closed newspapers, radio stations, other publications and authorized only the circulation of two newspapers that supported the coup.

To this tyranny can also be attributed the installation in Chile of the first Latin American State to "launch" a regime of savage capitalism. This also created enormous corruption in numerous sectors.

On September 4, 2013 the country witnessed a public declaration of the National Association of Magistrates (ANM) asking pardon for the role of judges from 1973 to 1990. "Judicial power, and in particular the Supreme Court at that time failed in their essential mission to safeguard fundamental rights and protect those who were victims", according to the text that has created a public commotion.

(Translated for ALAI by Jordan Bishop)

Notes

(1) See: Primeros Decretos Leyes, Editorial Jurídica, Santiago de Chile 1973

(2) Vid: Hojman, Eugenio, Memorial De la Dictadura, Santiago, Editorial. Emission, n.d.

(3) A survey by the BBC (London) proclaimed Marx as the most relevant philosopher of all times.

- Hernán Uribe is a Chilean journalist and writer.

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