Human rights victories stir resentment

SANTIAGO, Chile — Amid jubilation from human rights groups at the unprecedented flurry of victories before Chile’s highest courts, a silent storm is brewing among retired and current members of the country’s armed forces who feel the quest for justice has gone too far.

“There’s a feeling of frustration, of being abandoned and hung out to dry,” said retired Gen. Rafael Villarroel, summing up the sentiments of the more than 200,000 retired military officials who make up the veterans union Chile mi Patria (“Chile my Homeland”), of which he is president.

This frustration found a disturbing expression Jan. 17 when retired Col. Germain Barriga Munoz leapt from the 18th floor of an office building.

He was facing four separate trials on human rights charges stemming from his years as a member of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), which with other branches of the military was responsible for the deaths or disappearances of more than 3,000 people in Chile between 1973, when Gen. Augusto Pinochet seized power from an elected government, and 1990, when he was ousted.

In his suicide note, Col. Barriga said the years of public persecution related to his past had become overwhelming, and he told of his difficulties in trying to support his sick wife after losing his job for a third time.

In the note, he complained of “being subject to legal restrictions, which meant I had to testify before four different courts a month, having my resume tarnished by special-interest groups, having friends turn their backs on me, and finding it impossible to find work in an honorable way. … Please forgive me and try to understand that for me, this has become unbearable.”

After retiring from the army in 1991, Col. Barriga worked for two years but was fired after his employer learned he had been part of the DINA. He later found work in a frozen-foods company but was let go. The third firing came last year, after he was targeted by a “funa” — a march by family members and sympathizers of those he was accused of killing. The marchers, carrying signs and chanting “assassin,” appeared outside his home and at the supermarket chain where he worked training security guards.

Such demonstrations have taken on strength in recent years.

In response, Col. Barriga had begun organizing an underground group called the 10th of September Movement, made up of 300 retired military officials opposing the funas — some say with violence.

David Alvarez, a researcher with the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences, an independent think tank, said the funas were born of the frustration of families who weren’t finding justice before the courts. “So they decided to take matters into their own hands, to try to ensure that these people wouldn’t live in impunity, leading a normal life.”

The human rights abuses committed by military and police officers after Chile’s 1973 coup were protected for decades by an amnesty law. But in November, a Supreme Court ruling struck down the amnesty in the cases of “disappeared” detainees. Human rights attorneys successfully argued that because the detainees’ bodies have never been found, these constitute “permanent kidnappings,” which go beyond the 1973-78 amnesty period, and thus can be prosecuted as continuing crimes.

Retired military officers have expressed outrage at the court’s acceptance of what they call a “legal fiction.”

The amnesty ruling already has started to yield convictions in the more than 300 disappearance cases before the courts, and the government of President Ricardo Lagos has announced the construction of a new penitentiary to house convicted retired generals.

Other military cases also are making headway. Gen. Pinochet is facing trial on charges of ordering nine kidnappings and a murder.

On Jan. 28, 15 former members of National Information Central were convicted after a six-year investigation of Operation Albania, which involved the slayings of 12 foes of the military regime in 1987.

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