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The Pinochet Case
review by Gregory Avery, 27 September 2002
"This is Pinochet's
government," says one man, at the beginning of Patricio Guzmán's
documentary, The Pinochet Case, pointing to a bare field in
northern Chile where some of the victims who were murdered under the
dictator's fifteen-year rule were dumped anonymously. The army
general Auguste Pinochet headed the military junta that overthrew
the country's democratically-elected president, Salvador Allende, on
September 11, 1973: Allende dismissed his staff while he himself
remained inside the presidential palace, La Moneta, in the capital
of Santiago, while he remained inside as tanks and planes shelled
and bombed the building. Allende was trying to institute social
reforms in Chile while working within the country's constitution.
The reason for his overthrow? He had been elected as a member of the
U.P. (Popular Unity) party, made up of Chile's Communist, Radical,
and Social-Democratic parties.
After Pinochet assumed power in
1975, he ruled the country under a system of total terror, wherein
the secret police, the DINA, arrested, detained, tortured, and
murdered thousands of people: a light perusal of the records show
that the DINA apparently arrested any and everyone they wanted. Many
of their victims became part of a vast body of the
"disappeared," people who were arrested and, when their
whereabouts were later inquired after, turned out to have no record
with the authorities of their arrest or even of their existence.
Proof that they had, indeed, been under the custody of the DINA was
often only confirmed by other prisoners who had been held in the
same facility at the same time. Even before Pinochet left power,
under a plebiscite that restored democratic government to Chile in
1990, meticulous dossiers were being assembled and collected on the
identities of everyone who became part of the
"disappeared," along with other victims of crimes
committed under Pinochet's rule.
Pinochet was visiting London -- on
what was an annual shopping visit, where he visited the city's best
stores -- when Spain moved to have him extradited on charges of
genocide and murder: by this time, a 1992 report estimated that over
2,000 people had been killed in Chile between September, 1973 and
March, 1990, over a thousand of which had become
"disappeared." One of the reasons, an attorney
representing the victims tells Guzmán, is simple
"solidarity": after the end of the Spanish civil war,
arrangements were made for over 2,000 refugees to enter Chile -- the
Spanish consulate who made the arrangements was Pablo Neruda, and
the government official who received them at the other end, in
Valparaiso, was Salvador Allende.
Guzmán has previously made a
monumental three-part documentary on the events that occurred in
Chile during and after the Allende overthrow, The Battle of Chile,
which was released between 1975 and 79: one of the cameramen on his
crew was shot and killed while operating a film camera, and Guzmán
had to complete post-production on his film abroad, smuggling the
footage out under dangerous circumstances. When he returned to Chile
in the late 'nineties to make a follow-up documentary, he found many
instances where Chileans, young and old, were beginning to forget
what had happened under Pinochet's rule. The Pinochet Case
emerges, in part, as a film about memory. Guzmán films many of the
people who suffered under the dictatorship as they arrived in Spain
to give testimony during the legal proceedings, and he records their
stories, without sensationalism or reducing them to something flat
and dry. We hear how people were taken to the infamous Villa
Grimaldi, or to "special detention centers," essentially
torture houses set up by the DINA, where detainees were subjected to
electrical shock, suffocation, or systematic beatings or sexual
assault. Many of the victims were not told why they were arrested,
or how long they would be imprisoned. Those who died were disposed
of, individually or in mass graves, in the countryside. One of the
most moving testimonies comes from a woman who keeps a photo of her
son (many of the "disappeared" turn out to have been
alarmingly young when they were taken away), in a clear plastic
sleeve, in her pocketbook, the religious icon to which she prays
every day.
Pinochet was made "senator for
life" when he left office, a status that made him immune to
legal prosecution, but he was in what amounted to protective custody
in a house in London while the British authorities debated over
whether to accede to Spain's extradition request. Persons both for
and against Pinochet kept up a noisy daily vigil outside the gates
of his residence, with
each side, as shown in the film, trying to make as much racket as
possible to drown the other side out, as if, by doing so, they could
declare themselves the winner. Guzmán shows supporters of Pinochet
who say (or reiterate what Pinochet himself said) that it was his
subordinates, not he, who were responsible for all those crimes,
even that Pinochet helped route the possibility of godless Communism
in Chile with a "minimal loss of life." Pinochet even
receives a visit from Margaret Thatcher -- no longer a Prime
Minister, but now a Baroness -- who tells him, to his face and while
news cameras clack away in the background, how much he did for
"democracy" in Chile. (The 1973 coup was backed by the
C.I.A.; in the 'nineties, the then-present U.S. government forwarded
secret documents showing the general's involvement in the
suppression of political opposition to Pinochet's prosecutors in
Spain.) Meanwhile, floorboards are being yanked up in former
"detention center" houses, corpses are found still clad in
the clothes they died in, and forensic experts, including a
"forensic archaeologist," are piecing together skeletal
remains and examining bone fragments that show traces of point-blank
gunshots.
In the end, Pinochet would end up
leaving Britain -- for Chile, where he was met with a formal
reception. On the other hand, the ranks of those calling for
Pinochet's accountability for his crimes were being swelled by
Chileans who weren't even born, yet, when he first took power. And
while showing the survivors of Pinochet's terrible rule, Guzmán
ends up revealing something quite unexpected: while what was done to
those who tell their stories for his camera was inhuman,
inexcusable, and left them with scars they shouldn't have to have,
they also seem to have been granted a strength that enables them,
now, to fight to make the old monster accountable for the misdeeds
that were perpetrated under his regime. The film becomes a document
of human resiliency, tried but unthwarted, even after being
subjected to the most terrible of ordeals -- of human spirit that
people simply refused to have taken away from them.
As of July, 2002, Auguste Pinochet,
living under house arrest in Chile, was judged mentally unfit to
stand trial by Chile's Supreme Court. Prior to that decision, a
statue of Salvador Allende was erected in Santiago, standing between
the Judicial Ministry and Government House.
The Pinochet Case is
currently held-over at New York's Film Forum; it will be showing at
the Northwest Film Center, in Portland, Oregon, on October 3. |
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