The crowd that stood in line to bid farewell to the mortal remains of the dictator Augusto Pinochet, and the inflammatory speeches claiming the work and legacy of the tyrant, both at the Military School of Santiago, reveal a deep and open wound in Chilean society and the moral fracture in which we live and of course overlook.

The speeches of admiration and cries of mourning for the leader of one of the most sinister machines of genocide that the continent has ever known, and the silent complicity of the majority of the local press, has left us simply shocked.

I live just a block away from the home where Marta Ugarte was kidnapped on August 9th, 1976. Marta was a 42 year old seamstress and teacher, a member of the Communist Party, and was abducted by a patrol of Pinochet’s secret police, the much feared DINA (National Intelligence Directorate)

She is taken to Villa Grimaldi, the dictatorship’s main center for detention, torture and disappearances. There Marta is subject to the most brutal tortures imaginable, until the military decides she must “disappear”, that is to say, they drug her, tie her to a piece of railway so that she does not float, and transport her by a Chilean army helicopter out to sea, where she is thrown into the depths of the ocean.

But Marta’s dismembered body surfaces soon thereafter in a fishermen’s cove, bearing witness of the terrible fate of the missing Chilean detainees.

Of course, these kinds of deeds have not been remembered in the funeral of he whom the press lovingly refers to as the “former commander in chief” or “former general”, in a shameful manner that we would do well to remember.

Pinochet’s crimes are so numerous and diverse – murder, kidnapping, torture, theft and embezzlement, that it seems hopeless to dwell on the details of the sordid work that is his legacy. However, the brutal demonstration of ignorance, cynicism and hypocrisy of his supporters, now forces us to reconsider our memory of things past.

Nevertheless, the discovery that we lived among a group of so many proud fascists would not be complete if we did not recognize those responsible, with a distinguished place for the self-proclaimed left-central ruling coalition, the Coalition for Democracy, who – and in that the Pinochet supporters are right – ended up administering the legal basis of the dictatorship.

“We risk ending up just managing the legality of the dictatorship”, said a cynical ex president Ricardo Lagos just after the dictatorship ended, in a description of the plan followed to the letter by the successive democratic governments.

Nevertheless, I wanted to focus for a minute on one thing. And it is that in the time of the now deceased tyrant, freedom of expression was a risk paid sometimes with your life, but the Coalition governments ended up surrendering the media monopoly to the Right and with it, an important part of the way in which Chileans are informed, educated and then express themselves and form their opinions.

The crowd of Chileans paying homage to the killer of Marta Ugarte and thousands more, shows us today the depth of this surrendering.

Perhaps what is truly admirable is that, in spite of the media bombarding of TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines, and the control of popular culture and the Church, the majority of Chileans were relieved to know that one of the monsters of the twentieth century had reached his end.

In May of 1945, after the fall on the national socialist regime, the allies began to implement what they called “a cleansing” of society, culture, press, media, justice and politics in Germany and Austria of any nazi influence.

For Germany, the Allied Control Committee passed in 1946 a series of directives on de-Nazification which defined certain groups of people and later conducted a judicial investigation.

Although a bad example, it is necessary that we ask ourselves about it, so that we can anticipate and prevent it from happening again.

It is necessary to have a deep education regarding life in Chile, and a de-Nazification of post Pinochet Chile. Only in that way will one of the bloodiest dictatorships in Latin America definitively die.

* Chilean journalist, robertomanriquez@hotmail.com

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