Reply #19: AP, I read this article some time ago [View All]

[Judi Lynn]

Don't know if you've run across it, but it's worth reading:

(snip) SANTIAGO, Chile, Sept. 7 — Felipe Agüero says the nightmarish evening in late September 1973 is forever fixed in his mind. Then 21 and a student at Catholic University, Mr. Agüero had been arrested for having leftist pamphlets in his car five days after the military coup led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet. At the National Stadium in Santiago, a hood was put over his head, and he was stripped, burned and beaten, he said. When his captors allowed him to dress, the hood came loose for a moment, and he caught a glimpse of one of his torturers.

Fifteen years later, Mr. Agüero, by then a professor, was at an academic conference in Santiago. Among the 15 or so professors at the table, Mr. Agüero said, was the face he saw that night. "I never forgot that face," Mr. Agüero said in a telephone interview from Miami, where he now lives.

The face that Mr. Agüero said he remembered belongs to Emilio Meneses, a prominent and popular professor of military studies at the Institute of Political Science at Catholic University in Santiago. Mr. Agüero, who teaches at the School of International Studies at the University of Miami, said he was too shaken to confront Mr. Meneses at the 1988 conference and didn't make any accusation until February this year, prompted by a more open atmosphere in Chile.

Mr. Meneses said he was shocked by the charges. He denies torturing Mr. Agüero or anyone else. "I had no relation of any kind with Professor Agüero's interrogation or stay in the stadium," Mr. Meneses said in a written response to questions from The New York Times. "I did not know him then, nor did I see him." Mr. Meneses said he did spend about three weeks as a naval reservist at the stadium at the time, but his job was to process arriving prisoners and he was too far away to hear or see any abuse. Only weeks after he left the stadium did he hear word of the torture and murder, he said. In May, Mr. Meneses filed suit in Chile, accusing Mr. Agüero of libel, a crime punishable there by three years in prison.
(snip)

(snip) Mr. Agüero said he had finally found the resolve to confront Mr. Meneses this year after details about the torture of a family friend who later died, Eugenio Ruiz Tagle, came to light.

Three former prisoners accused the second in command of the Chilean Air Force, Gen. Hernán Gabrielli, of torturing Mr. Tagle and others. This was the first time someone so high in the military and on active duty had been charged with human rights violations. (General Gabrielli brought a libel suit against the prisoners, but it was dismissed; five cases brought by other former prisoners or their families are still pending. Under Chilean law, the statute of limitations on the crime of torture is five years, which has long passed.)

Mr. Agüero said that when he learned about Mr. Tagle's suffering — his nose was smashed, his ears were sliced off and his back was broken in several places — he decided that he shared responsibility for those torturers who had escaped punishment. "I am a silent accomplice," he said.
(snip/...)

http://homepages.nyu.edu/~pdn200/news/NYT20010908.htm

I have a really hard time actually trying to view torture and murder as simple "human rights violations," don't you? Quite the euphemism.