Pinochet Case Reviving Voices of the Tortured January 3, 2000 By CLIFFORD KRAUSS ANTIAGO, Chile -- It was only when Mario Fernández saw the headline, "Pinochet Under Arrest," that the dam broke and he finally found it possible to talk about the beatings, the electric shocks, the cigarette burns, the terrible sense of humiliation and alienation. "My body froze; I had an intense allergic reaction, and I didn't know whether to laugh or cry," said Mr. Fernández, trembling at the memory. He ran to his wife and wept on her shoulder, and, at long last, took her advice to seek therapy. "I needed to talk about the terror inside that hood they put on me, of not knowing whether they would kill me from one minute to the next," he said. Mr. Fernández is not alone in the anguished release that has come with the arrest of Gen. Augusto Pinochet in London on human rights charges in October 1998. Psychologists report that hundreds if not thousands of people like him have begun to see therapists, to organize group therapy, to share their long-hidden horrors with spouses and children. Although no accurate count exists, at least 40,000 Chileans were tortured under the Pinochet dictatorship from 1973 until 1990, people who had been members of leftist parties, unions, student groups or even merely bureaucrats in the Socialist government of President Salvador Allende Gossens. Some were tortured for information, some to drive them into exile, some purely to intimidate them. In a systematic campaign run by the armed forces and the police at special sites across the country, they were raped, beaten, shocked, hooded, drugged, held under water and deprived of sleep; they were subjected to mock executions and months of solitary confinement. And when it ended in 1990, they were forgotten, overshadowed by the 4,000 Chileans who disappeared altogether, resented by a majority still suspicious of the political left, hounded by guilt and anger, silently enduring the terrible mental scars of their ordeal. Now 44 and unemployed, Mr. Fernández, who was a factory metal worker in the Allende era, still suffers from insomnia, chronic head and joint aches and red blotches that he calls an allergy. He said he seriously contemplated suicide four times, once very nearly jumping off a bridge before some passers-by stopped him. To this day no torturer has been investigated, no torturer has been tried, no compensation has been paid. Too many military officers were involved for the new civilian government to pursue the issue without threatening the stability of a still-incomplete transition to civilian rule. "Torture is the great dark secret in Chile's closet that is just beginning to open a crack," said Alfredo Joselyn-Holt Letelier, a historian at the University of Santiago de Chile. "If we can't deal with 4,000 disappeared easily, how are we going to deal with 40,000, 70,000, or maybe even 100,000 torture victims? The fact that we don't even have good statistics is a sign of how we treat this issue." But since the arrest of General Pinochet on a warrant issued by a Spanish judge, reports about the torture charges against him have begun to appear regularly in the press. Newly reinvigorated human rights groups have come to victims, first seeking testimony they could use in the courts in London and Madrid, then urging them to seek help. One group of torture victims said 500 people sought its help this year, three times as many as last year. A mental health program sponsored by several Christian churches reported that monthly demand had climbed from 60 patients a month before General Pinochet's arrest to 90, and was still rising. Of 300 torture victims interviewed for testimony by the Group of the Families of the Disappeared, for instance, at least 100 have sought or plan to seek therapy. In the small agricultural center of Rancagua, 50 miles south of Santiago, newly organized torture victims recently held meetings with 3,000 people who were fired from their jobs for political reasons after the 1973 coup. They have identified 200 who suffer various physical and psychological problems from torture, and who have now said they are willing to give testimony and seek help for themselves. "It's like a snowball gathering momentum," said Jorge Pantoja, a psychologist and director of the Christian program. Paz Rojas, chief of neurological services at the University of Chile, said a growing number of torture victims were appealing for help from private doctors and psychologists. "Pinochet's arrest was a great catharsis that has begun to break the silence," she said. Victim: Torture Memories 'Always Inside Me' Viviana Uribe, a 48-year-old human rights activist with a warm smile and confident countenance, dug through her pocketbook for some pills as she prepared to leave her Santiago apartment to do some errands the other day. "I feel a lot better, I really do," she said in a strong, steady voice. "I still get my headaches, but maybe they are a little better. Ever since I heard Pinochet would be judged for his crimes, it has been a tremendous relief for me." Given the horrendous torture she experienced -- Ms. Uribe said that she was raped four times and that among other things, electric cables had repeatedly been clamped to her eyelids, lips, tongue and around her head for bolts of shock during interrogation sessions -- she appears to be the picture of a well-adjusted woman. Ms. Uribe has no ticks or obvious nervous habits as so many other torture victims do. And although she refused to have her photograph taken for this article, she spoke with surprising ease about the disappearances of her husband, Fernando, and her sister Bárbara -- whose pictures, of each smiling broadly, one at a wedding, the other at the beach -- she keeps posted on the wall next to her desk. For years, Ms. Uribe managed to cope by helping around the office of a human rights group and marching with other relatives of the disappeared for an accounting of her husband's and sister's fates. She took it upon herself to find her torturers, looking up their addresses in the telephone book, and even to confront the wives of men she believes raped her. She says the repeated torture sessions -- some combined with interrogations -- still made no sense to her. She had belonged to a radical group that supported the Allende government, but she said she never did anything more extreme than to plaster walls with posters. Her interrogators' claims that she had been a threat to the state were absurd, she said. But through her years of exile in Mexico and her eventual return to Chile, she mainly kept silent about her terrible experience. "My own torture always took second place," she said. Everything changed a few weeks after General Pinochet's arrest, when her daughter Bárbara sat down with her on her living room couch to discuss the disappearance of her aunt and namesake. The two had discussed the terror of the Pinochet years many times in the past, but this time was different. Like many other relatives of the disappeared, Bárbara was gathering testimony for the human rights lawyers in London and Madrid. Under her daughter's urging, for the first time Ms. Uribe told her of the rapes. "It was like vomiting, all the horrible things flowing out uncontrollably," she recalled. "The torturers are always inside of me." The very next day, Ms. Uribe entered therapy. Government: Official Position Angers Victims Torture had always taken a distant second place to the disappearances as a political crime and public issue in Chile, but the Pinochet case has finally pushed the subject front and center. Soon after he took power in 1990, President Patricio Aylwin established a commission that documented more than 3,000 disappearances during the Pinochet years. But the panel left torture out of its report, except for cases that ended in death, leaving many torture victims feeling abandoned and cheated. The reason for their exclusion goes to the heart of Chile's slow democratic transition. General Pinochet remained a potent political force as commander in chief of the army until he stepped down from that post in early 1998, and human rights investigations would have threatened the uneasy civilian-military balance. Torture was a particularly sensitive subject because it involved a far greater number of military officers and units than the disappearances, which were largely the work of two quasi-independent military intelligence agencies. Since General Pinochet's arrest, President Eduardo Frei has pressed to block the general's extradition to Spain, contending that any trial should be in Chile. His position has been supported by Ricardo Lagos, a Socialist Party member who is the presidential candidate of the Socialist-Christian Democratic coalition that has governed the country for the last nine years. That position has caused anger and pain among many torture victims, including Mr. Fernández, the unemployed metal worker. "Their betrayal," he said, "is the cause of my pounding headaches." Repeated attempts were made to interview senior officials in the presidential palace and Health Ministry, but aides said they were unavailable for comment. The emergence of democracy spurred only modest efforts to help torture victims resuscitate their lives. The government established a small unit in the Ministry of Health called the Program for the Integral Repair of Health and Human Rights to treat torture victims, former political prisoners and family members of the disappeared. From 1991 through 1998, 31,102 people received at least some attention, but over time the program has withered and several administrators have resigned in frustration. Today many of the program's original 13 teams -- which were to include a doctor, a nurse, a social worker and a psychologist -- are now down to a nurse and social worker. Foreign financing for private and public agencies that help torture victims has dried up, in part because the government has refused to pitch in matching funds. Still, Patricia Narváez, a senior administrator at the health ministry program, said first-time visits of torture victims this year for treatment at her agency were up 20 percent from 1998. "The needs are great," Ms. Narváez said. "Some, especially on the right, wanted to shove this subject into the past, but we have all been full of silence. It's macabre. It's a phenomenon of silence." If there is a conspiracy of silence, the victims are a part of it. Psychologists say many of the victims are still embarrassed that they survived while others were executed. Some feel shame for having given up names of comrades to their torturers, while others feel paranoia at the thought that people may think they did even when they did not. But now their grievances have taken on international legitimacy, and as the Pinochet case has propelled torture to the top of the agenda of international human rights law, many torture survivors say they are happy that their testimony can have legal value for the cause of justice. In March, the House of Lords in Britain ruled that General Pinochet could be extradited to Spain on charges of torture and conspiracy to commit torture committed only after his government signed the international Convention Against Torture in 1988. A judicial panel of seven members of the House of Lords, known as the Law Lords, further ruled that torture was an international crime for which any court in a country that has signed the convention has jurisdiction. Baltasar Garz¢n, the Spanish judge who issued the warrant for General Pinochet's arrest and who wants to try him in Spain, has prominently included charges of torture in his case against the former dictator. Meanwhile, a group of former political prisoners here is preparing to file the first criminal complaint in a Chilean court accusing General Pinochet, as well as an undetermined number of former officers, of torture. The hope, leaders of the group say, is to see the imprisonment of the leaders of the former military government's vast torture apparatus and to collect millions of dollars in reparations from the government. They are beginning with 50 cases and hope to expand their complaint to 500 in the next few months. "Pinochet's arrest catalyzed us," said Ra£l Reyes, a 60-year-old bookseller who is one of the organizers of the complaint. "During the dictatorship, we were stigmatized as criminals and terrorists, and even rebuffed by our families. That's changing now, albeit slowly." Aftereffects: High Alcoholism and Joblessness For all the change, a lot of torture victims say they feel no better. As a group, experts say, they still experience high rates of alcoholism, family violence and chronic unemployment. "It's a mortal sin to be 52 years old and a returned political exile or torture victim," said Antonio Ozimica, who is all three. "People isolate you, and you can't find work." None of that has changed for Mr. Ozimica since General Pinochet's arrest. In fact, he said he has only felt worse watching the government working hard to defend the former dictator against extradition. He has begun therapy at a public hospital under a new government program to help people who lost their jobs for political reasons, but relief appears distant. "If Lavín wins," he said, referring to Joaquín Lavín, the former official in General Pinochet's planning ministry who stands a good chance of winning the presidency Jan. 16, "I am going to put a pistol to my head." Mr. Ozimica appears to be a particularly frail man, even among torture victims. He goes from giddy highs to the deepest lows of depression from one moment to the next. After what he has gone through, his gloom is understandable. As Mr. Ozimica tells it, his only crime was to serve as a low-level accountant in President Allende's agrarian reform in the town of Temuco. Shortly after the coup, he was dismissed and then pulled out of bed by troops in the middle of the night and dragged through the streets naked. For six days he went through torturous interrogation at a police station, and he said he had nothing of value to tell them. For two days he was kept in total darkness, he recalled, the next two under intense fluorescent lights burning into his eyes. Then for two more days, he said, he was hung by his wrists, causing the dislocation of his right shoulder, which is still maimed. He also lost the ability to feel in his right hand. In another torture session, police dunked him repeatedly in a tub of water. As he gasped for air, his torturers pulled him up by his hair and smashed metal plates against his ears until blood flooded from one of them. He remains hard of hearing. After months of imprisonment, Mr. Ozimica said, he was allowed to leave the country, and he settled in an Indian village deep in the Venezuelan Amazon, where he lived for 18 years in a hut under a zinc roof. "The torture made me hate life," he said. "I was so dehumanized, I figured only the Indians were human beings because they were nonviolent and they didn't lie. And I didn't need hearing because it was so quiet in the wilderness." Mr. Ozimica said that he had made a living making cement bricks, but that his wife left him and took their two children back to Chile. He finally came back too, after democracy returned, but he still does not live in peace. "Pinochet's arrest didn't give me happiness or sadness because his falling prisoner doesn't solve anything," he said. "So many of the people who were behind him are still around." Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company url: http://www10.nytimes.com/library/world/americas/010300chile-pinochet.html