REPORTER: Alan Hall
VICTIMS FAMILIES, (Translation): Truth and justice. Always. Truth and justice. Always.
These are the families of Chile's disappeared, the victims of General Pinochet's 17-year reign of terror. For these relatives, the issue of getting justice against the military is still very much alive 30 years on.
General Pinochet is still today a free man and the victims' relatives want him, and those who tortured and murdered their loved ones, put on trial.
MAN,(Translation): The very humble ceremony we're holding here today will be the testament of our commitment to the cause of justice and freedom.
Viviana Diaz has dedicated her entire adult life to leading the Association for the Relatives of the Disappeared in Chile. Her father, Victor, a leading Communist Party official, fled the family home on the morning of the coup, never to return. Viviana's endured the agony of never knowing what happened to her father ever since.
VIVIANA DIAZ, (Translation): That's the drama of relatives of the detained and disappeared because we don't know what happened. There's nothing more terrible than to live with uncertainty, not knowing where they are. It would be better to know if they've been assassinated.
These relatives of the disappeared believe that 13 years of democracy has failed to deliver the justice they need.
VICTIMS FAMILIES, (Translation): There's no justice, no truth. Impunity is all there is.
They're gathered here tonight to listen to leftist President Ricardo Lagos's nationwide TV address where he's to deliver the government's latest proposals on the human rights situation.
PRESIDENT RICARDO LAGOS, (Translation) Chilean women, Chilean men, my compatriots, today we take another step in this long process that the Chilean state is taking to respond, at least in part, to those who have suffered serious human rights violations in the recent past.
With only a smattering of successful convictions against the military, President Lagos here tonight offered military collaborators an incentive. They could get reduced sentences if they informed on those who gave the order to kill or kidnap a victim.
PRESIDENT RICARDO LAGOS, (Translation): My compatriots, there is no tomorrow without a yesterday.
The President also offered to double the compensation pensions of the victims' families to about $300 a month. But here it felt like once again the government had sold out to the military.
LADY, (Translation): Personally, I'm very angry and also very sad because our demands have been put on hold again.
LADY 2, (Translation): We won't exchange our relatives for a few pesos of miserly justice. Part of the truth isn't enough.
The election of Socialist Party leader Salvadore Allende to the presidency, in 1970, triggered this bloody chapter in Chilean history. Allende set about nationalising land and industry with a program he dreamed would deliver equality for all.
GENERAL GUILLERMO GARIN, FORMER DEPUTY COMMANDER (Translation): Together with our family, we were suffering the effects of the policies of the Marxist government. They were trying to impose a totalitarian regime on Chile.
General Guillermo Garin rose to become second in command of the Chilean armed forces under General Pinochet.
GENERAL GUILLERMO GARIN, (Translation): Well, we were absolutely apolitical. The military wasn't involved in the politics of the country. But as military officers, we couldn't ignore the situation in which we were living in Chile under the Marxist government in the three years until 1973.
The Chilean military attacked the presidential palace, La Moneda, on September 11, 1973, overthrowing the Allende government and unleashing a brutal 17 years of military dictatorship.
VIVIANA DIAZ, (Translation): After the bombing of La Moneda everything I remember was grey. It was as if even the sky of our country had changed.
GENERAL GUILLERMO GARIN, (Translation): All I can say is that we were lucky in Chile to have the right person during those critical moments. Ex-president Pinochet is first of all a great patriot. He loves Chile above all else. He's an extremely sensitive person but he's very tough and authoritative.
Chief judge Juan Guzman has led the judicial charge in Chile to hold General Pinochet accountable for his crimes against humanity. But back in September 1973, the judge supported the military's claim that they needed to restore economic calm to the country. On the day of the coup, he celebrated.
JUAN GUZMAN, COURT OF APPEALS CHIEF JUDGE: I had a toast of champagne with my parents and with my wife till I knew that Allende had died. Then, as a human being, I thought that that was a very sad price already of the coup. That was the first victim and we never thought that there were going to be victims.
WILLIAMS ROBOLLEDO VERA, MAYOR OF LINARES (Translation): Overnight they'd become beasts, real criminals. Each one of the military who detained people had their eyes popping out like in a horror movie. They were beasts, not human beings.
Williams Robolledo Vera was the independent mayor of Linares, in the south of Chile, when the coup occurred. A personal friend of Salvadore Allende, Williams was detained in October 1973 and made to run a line with 30 police on each side, each one of whom kicked him. He was then pushed inside the police's horse stables.
WILLIAMS ROBOLLEDO VERA: A peasant was on the ground, barely alive. And chief Valdebenito, whose surname I'll never forget, 'Negro' Valdebenito, a real lunatic, pulled out his gun, shot the peasant and said, "This is what's going to happen to you."
Williams owes his life to a police officer who, when ordered to take him away and shoot him, instead had Williams transferred to a jail. After being in prison for two years, Williams was released and fled to France, where he lived in exile for 22 years.
GENERAL GUILLERMO GARIN, (Translation): It was never the military government's policy to actively engage in any systematic abuse of anyone's human rights. There were isolated cases over 17 years that were not, I think, of great magnitude.
The Galaz family believe their son David's assassination by the military, back in January 1976, was more than just an isolated case. The military returned David's bones to his parents on the morning of this memorial service, just over two weeks ago, more than 27 years after he disappeared. He'd been killed precisely because he was a communist.
GUILLERMO URRUTIA GALAZ, VICTIMS BROTHER (Translation): They killed him because of his ideas, because he thought differently.
David Galaz was just 1 of the more than 3,200 Chileans murdered or disappeared by the Pinochet regime. Many more were threatened or tortured. Emilio Vergara Manzur, raised here in Til Til, felt the full force of the regime's brutality. Not only did his father, the local mayor, disappear, but Emilio himself was twice arrested and tortured. Like his father, Emilio was a communist.
EMILIO VERGARA MANZUR, (Translation): The techniques included electrodes all over my body. And I spent day and night in a 50 square centimetre box. They'd pull me out and my whole body ached. More blows and then more electrodes. I came out with burst eardrums and I was bleeding all over... through my ears, nose, mouth. My neck was all swollen.
After enduring this living hell for three months at the hands of his torturers, Emilio was discovered by a Red Cross delegation and saved.
EMILIO VERGARA MANZUR, (Translation): But I was lucky. I'm still alive. And I'm a living testimony to the dictatorship's atrocities.
GENERAL GUILLERMO GARIN, (Translation): I've always said one Chilean should never kill another for political reasons. But regrettably what led to that situation was a government that was trying to impose a Marxist-Leninist regime.
ALEJANDRO MONTECINI, FORMER CHILEAN AMBASSADOR: The only thing who was true in the Chilean society for many years, was the terror, the feeling of a threat, the non-security for nobody.
Alejandro Montecini, a former Chilean ambassador to Switzerland and youth president of Allende's Popular Unity Coalition at the time of the coup, now works his property here in the south of Chile.
ALEJANDRO MONTECINI: It is already demonstrate that the military coup was to save their own pockets, their own interests. They don't save nothing. They destroy this country from the social point of view and from a cultural point of view, and now we are paying the price of this situation.
Perhaps the biggest price of all has been the difficulty in prosecuting the military for their crimes. Under the dictatorship, a time when even funerals like this one weren't safe from attack, the judiciary was compliant to the wishes of the regime.
JUDGE JUAN GUZMAN: I was surprised to see that the whole judiciary, beginning with the Supreme Court, was practically tolerating and accepting the state of things as they were occurring. Many judges, Supreme Court judges, would say that they didn't have the choice, that it was either accept the things as they were, or have a cannon in front of the tribunals, making us decide as they wanted to.
General Pinochet also took out his own insurance policy while in office, granting an amnesty for all human rights violations between 1973 and 1978.
VIVIANA DIAZ, (Translation): It affects almost all those detained and disappeared. That's why it made it so hard for us, why we had such a struggle during the dictatorship and now, in this transition, against this decree, being accepted as law. It's never been sanctioned and it was Pinochet who imposed it.
General Pinochet's arrest in London in October 1998 by British police for human rights crimes is the closest most of his opponents have come to tasting judicial satisfaction.
MARCO ANTONIO PINOCHET, SON: I think that was primary motive political. I think the government there was a government with people against my father.
REPORTER: Do you think he is ultimately responsible, though, for any commands of his people under him?
MARCO ANTONIO PINOCHET: When my father was in England, he sent a letter to Chile and his letter said that he realised that he's responsible for all the acts in his government, that he's responsible political for all the things that happened in his government.
REPORTER: So does that mean then that he's also responsible for any human rights abuses for those under him?
MARCO ANTONIO PINOCHET: I think when you handle the country, you have many people under your power or your government, or your administration, and you can't control everyone. So I didn't found any proof that he ordered, "Kill these people," or do this. So I don't think he's guilty. To me, somebody's guilty when you can prove that he's guilty.
The former dictator was finally released by the British on health grounds after 503 days detention. The General rose from his wheelchair on touching down in Chile and was warmly embraced by the military. But his newfound freedom was short-lived.
Since 1998, Judge Guzman had been investigating the General's involvement in a number of killings and kidnappings committed during the dictatorship. In January 2001, he ordered that General Pinochet be placed again under house arrest.
JUDGE JUAN GUZMAN: You know very well that I cannot speak about a case that I am acknowledging at the moment, but that evidence must have been very revealing to make me take the decision of sending the brief to the Court of Appeals in order to have Pinochet's immunity lifted.
Judge Guzman, now under a 24-hour police guard and banned from speaking to the Chilean media, succeeded in convincing his fellow judges on the Court of Appeal to strip Pinochet of his immunity from prosecution. But the politicians were getting nervous.
JUDGE JUAN GUZMAN: I was invited as innocently to dine at friend's houses and finally I realised that there were one or two Senators from any party, sometimes from right, sometimes from the centre, sometimes from the left wing, and they did not want Pinochet to be imprisoned nor tried. I had telephone calls from the government also, telling me that it was rather unusual and very - and not very comfortable for them to have Pinochet under that situation. I was very annoyed with them also and I said that if they continued to put pressure I was going to say this openly to the press.
But for the second time, Pinochet avoided facing justice when the Chilean Supreme Court ruled in July 2002, that he was mentally unfit to stand trial.
ALEJANDRO MONTECINI: While Pinochet will be unpunished, will be free, will be smiling, of any sense, possible sense of justice, this problem will be never solved. This is the biggest mistake of our coalition and government.
JOSE MIGUEL INSULZA, MINISTER OF THE INTERIOR: I understand that many people have lived so many years around the coup and what happened. It was so dramatic that some of them cannot probably adjust themselves to the idea that Pinochet is to be 88 this year. He's very old, he's very ill, or ill, and it's over. I mean Pinochet is over in Chilean history.
JUDGE JUAN GUZMAN: The politicians say that there is going to be justice, and the judges, we are trying to obtain justice, but I have the sensation that politicians want to finish with all these procedures as fast as possible because they are something like a big load over them.
For the families of the victims, like Miriska Juica Rocco, whose father disappeared when she was just 16, General Pinochet's continuing freedom is an enduring symbol of the government's failure to confront the terrible grief they carry.
MIRISKA JUICA ROCCO, (Translation): We feel as if they're mocking us and they don't care what happened to us. The governments we've had are only concerned about the economy and other problems that are certainly important, but they refuse to deal with our pain. Our pain will be us with till we die.
VICTIMS FAMILIES, (Translation): Truth and justice. Always. Truth and justice. Always.
These are the families of Chile's disappeared, the victims of General Pinochet's 17-year reign of terror. For these relatives, the issue of getting justice against the military is still very much alive 30 years on.
General Pinochet is still today a free man and the victims' relatives want him, and those who tortured and murdered their loved ones, put on trial.
MAN,(Translation): The very humble ceremony we're holding here today will be the testament of our commitment to the cause of justice and freedom.
Viviana Diaz has dedicated her entire adult life to leading the Association for the Relatives of the Disappeared in Chile. Her father, Victor, a leading Communist Party official, fled the family home on the morning of the coup, never to return. Viviana's endured the agony of never knowing what happened to her father ever since.
VIVIANA DIAZ, (Translation): That's the drama of relatives of the detained and disappeared because we don't know what happened. There's nothing more terrible than to live with uncertainty, not knowing where they are. It would be better to know if they've been assassinated.
These relatives of the disappeared believe that 13 years of democracy has failed to deliver the justice they need.
VICTIMS FAMILIES, (Translation): There's no justice, no truth. Impunity is all there is.
They're gathered here tonight to listen to leftist President Ricardo Lagos's nationwide TV address where he's to deliver the government's latest proposals on the human rights situation.
PRESIDENT RICARDO LAGOS, (Translation) Chilean women, Chilean men, my compatriots, today we take another step in this long process that the Chilean state is taking to respond, at least in part, to those who have suffered serious human rights violations in the recent past.
With only a smattering of successful convictions against the military, President Lagos here tonight offered military collaborators an incentive. They could get reduced sentences if they informed on those who gave the order to kill or kidnap a victim.
PRESIDENT RICARDO LAGOS, (Translation): My compatriots, there is no tomorrow without a yesterday.
The President also offered to double the compensation pensions of the victims' families to about $300 a month. But here it felt like once again the government had sold out to the military.
LADY, (Translation): Personally, I'm very angry and also very sad because our demands have been put on hold again.
LADY 2, (Translation): We won't exchange our relatives for a few pesos of miserly justice. Part of the truth isn't enough.
The election of Socialist Party leader Salvadore Allende to the presidency, in 1970, triggered this bloody chapter in Chilean history. Allende set about nationalising land and industry with a program he dreamed would deliver equality for all.
GENERAL GUILLERMO GARIN, FORMER DEPUTY COMMANDER (Translation): Together with our family, we were suffering the effects of the policies of the Marxist government. They were trying to impose a totalitarian regime on Chile.
General Guillermo Garin rose to become second in command of the Chilean armed forces under General Pinochet.
GENERAL GUILLERMO GARIN, (Translation): Well, we were absolutely apolitical. The military wasn't involved in the politics of the country. But as military officers, we couldn't ignore the situation in which we were living in Chile under the Marxist government in the three years until 1973.
The Chilean military attacked the presidential palace, La Moneda, on September 11, 1973, overthrowing the Allende government and unleashing a brutal 17 years of military dictatorship.
VIVIANA DIAZ, (Translation): After the bombing of La Moneda everything I remember was grey. It was as if even the sky of our country had changed.
GENERAL GUILLERMO GARIN, (Translation): All I can say is that we were lucky in Chile to have the right person during those critical moments. Ex-president Pinochet is first of all a great patriot. He loves Chile above all else. He's an extremely sensitive person but he's very tough and authoritative.
Chief judge Juan Guzman has led the judicial charge in Chile to hold General Pinochet accountable for his crimes against humanity. But back in September 1973, the judge supported the military's claim that they needed to restore economic calm to the country. On the day of the coup, he celebrated.
JUAN GUZMAN, COURT OF APPEALS CHIEF JUDGE: I had a toast of champagne with my parents and with my wife till I knew that Allende had died. Then, as a human being, I thought that that was a very sad price already of the coup. That was the first victim and we never thought that there were going to be victims.
WILLIAMS ROBOLLEDO VERA, MAYOR OF LINARES (Translation): Overnight they'd become beasts, real criminals. Each one of the military who detained people had their eyes popping out like in a horror movie. They were beasts, not human beings.
Williams Robolledo Vera was the independent mayor of Linares, in the south of Chile, when the coup occurred. A personal friend of Salvadore Allende, Williams was detained in October 1973 and made to run a line with 30 police on each side, each one of whom kicked him. He was then pushed inside the police's horse stables.
WILLIAMS ROBOLLEDO VERA: A peasant was on the ground, barely alive. And chief Valdebenito, whose surname I'll never forget, 'Negro' Valdebenito, a real lunatic, pulled out his gun, shot the peasant and said, "This is what's going to happen to you."
Williams owes his life to a police officer who, when ordered to take him away and shoot him, instead had Williams transferred to a jail. After being in prison for two years, Williams was released and fled to France, where he lived in exile for 22 years.
GENERAL GUILLERMO GARIN, (Translation): It was never the military government's policy to actively engage in any systematic abuse of anyone's human rights. There were isolated cases over 17 years that were not, I think, of great magnitude.
The Galaz family believe their son David's assassination by the military, back in January 1976, was more than just an isolated case. The military returned David's bones to his parents on the morning of this memorial service, just over two weeks ago, more than 27 years after he disappeared. He'd been killed precisely because he was a communist.
GUILLERMO URRUTIA GALAZ, VICTIMS BROTHER (Translation): They killed him because of his ideas, because he thought differently.
David Galaz was just 1 of the more than 3,200 Chileans murdered or disappeared by the Pinochet regime. Many more were threatened or tortured. Emilio Vergara Manzur, raised here in Til Til, felt the full force of the regime's brutality. Not only did his father, the local mayor, disappear, but Emilio himself was twice arrested and tortured. Like his father, Emilio was a communist.
EMILIO VERGARA MANZUR, (Translation): The techniques included electrodes all over my body. And I spent day and night in a 50 square centimetre box. They'd pull me out and my whole body ached. More blows and then more electrodes. I came out with burst eardrums and I was bleeding all over... through my ears, nose, mouth. My neck was all swollen.
After enduring this living hell for three months at the hands of his torturers, Emilio was discovered by a Red Cross delegation and saved.
EMILIO VERGARA MANZUR, (Translation): But I was lucky. I'm still alive. And I'm a living testimony to the dictatorship's atrocities.
GENERAL GUILLERMO GARIN, (Translation): I've always said one Chilean should never kill another for political reasons. But regrettably what led to that situation was a government that was trying to impose a Marxist-Leninist regime.
ALEJANDRO MONTECINI, FORMER CHILEAN AMBASSADOR: The only thing who was true in the Chilean society for many years, was the terror, the feeling of a threat, the non-security for nobody.
Alejandro Montecini, a former Chilean ambassador to Switzerland and youth president of Allende's Popular Unity Coalition at the time of the coup, now works his property here in the south of Chile.
ALEJANDRO MONTECINI: It is already demonstrate that the military coup was to save their own pockets, their own interests. They don't save nothing. They destroy this country from the social point of view and from a cultural point of view, and now we are paying the price of this situation.
Perhaps the biggest price of all has been the difficulty in prosecuting the military for their crimes. Under the dictatorship, a time when even funerals like this one weren't safe from attack, the judiciary was compliant to the wishes of the regime.
JUDGE JUAN GUZMAN: I was surprised to see that the whole judiciary, beginning with the Supreme Court, was practically tolerating and accepting the state of things as they were occurring. Many judges, Supreme Court judges, would say that they didn't have the choice, that it was either accept the things as they were, or have a cannon in front of the tribunals, making us decide as they wanted to.
General Pinochet also took out his own insurance policy while in office, granting an amnesty for all human rights violations between 1973 and 1978.
VIVIANA DIAZ, (Translation): It affects almost all those detained and disappeared. That's why it made it so hard for us, why we had such a struggle during the dictatorship and now, in this transition, against this decree, being accepted as law. It's never been sanctioned and it was Pinochet who imposed it.
General Pinochet's arrest in London in October 1998 by British police for human rights crimes is the closest most of his opponents have come to tasting judicial satisfaction.
MARCO ANTONIO PINOCHET, SON: I think that was primary motive political. I think the government there was a government with people against my father.
REPORTER: Do you think he is ultimately responsible, though, for any commands of his people under him?
MARCO ANTONIO PINOCHET: When my father was in England, he sent a letter to Chile and his letter said that he realised that he's responsible for all the acts in his government, that he's responsible political for all the things that happened in his government.
REPORTER: So does that mean then that he's also responsible for any human rights abuses for those under him?
MARCO ANTONIO PINOCHET: I think when you handle the country, you have many people under your power or your government, or your administration, and you can't control everyone. So I didn't found any proof that he ordered, "Kill these people," or do this. So I don't think he's guilty. To me, somebody's guilty when you can prove that he's guilty.
The former dictator was finally released by the British on health grounds after 503 days detention. The General rose from his wheelchair on touching down in Chile and was warmly embraced by the military. But his newfound freedom was short-lived.
Since 1998, Judge Guzman had been investigating the General's involvement in a number of killings and kidnappings committed during the dictatorship. In January 2001, he ordered that General Pinochet be placed again under house arrest.
JUDGE JUAN GUZMAN: You know very well that I cannot speak about a case that I am acknowledging at the moment, but that evidence must have been very revealing to make me take the decision of sending the brief to the Court of Appeals in order to have Pinochet's immunity lifted.
Judge Guzman, now under a 24-hour police guard and banned from speaking to the Chilean media, succeeded in convincing his fellow judges on the Court of Appeal to strip Pinochet of his immunity from prosecution. But the politicians were getting nervous.
JUDGE JUAN GUZMAN: I was invited as innocently to dine at friend's houses and finally I realised that there were one or two Senators from any party, sometimes from right, sometimes from the centre, sometimes from the left wing, and they did not want Pinochet to be imprisoned nor tried. I had telephone calls from the government also, telling me that it was rather unusual and very - and not very comfortable for them to have Pinochet under that situation. I was very annoyed with them also and I said that if they continued to put pressure I was going to say this openly to the press.
But for the second time, Pinochet avoided facing justice when the Chilean Supreme Court ruled in July 2002, that he was mentally unfit to stand trial.
ALEJANDRO MONTECINI: While Pinochet will be unpunished, will be free, will be smiling, of any sense, possible sense of justice, this problem will be never solved. This is the biggest mistake of our coalition and government.
JOSE MIGUEL INSULZA, MINISTER OF THE INTERIOR: I understand that many people have lived so many years around the coup and what happened. It was so dramatic that some of them cannot probably adjust themselves to the idea that Pinochet is to be 88 this year. He's very old, he's very ill, or ill, and it's over. I mean Pinochet is over in Chilean history.
JUDGE JUAN GUZMAN: The politicians say that there is going to be justice, and the judges, we are trying to obtain justice, but I have the sensation that politicians want to finish with all these procedures as fast as possible because they are something like a big load over them.
For the families of the victims, like Miriska Juica Rocco, whose father disappeared when she was just 16, General Pinochet's continuing freedom is an enduring symbol of the government's failure to confront the terrible grief they carry.
MIRISKA JUICA ROCCO, (Translation): We feel as if they're mocking us and they don't care what happened to us. The governments we've had are only concerned about the economy and other problems that are certainly important, but they refuse to deal with our pain. Our pain will be us with till we die.