ESSAY - The Chilean Dictatorship and the Judiciary

Revista Política, 2013

This article argues that Chile has had a disproportionate effect on the international politics and law of human rights. Understood in traditional realist terms, Chile is a relatively small country that only recently joined the OECD and that should not have a great deal of impact on international affairs. Yet, for the 40 years since the 1973 military coup that overthrew the government of Salvador Allende it has received a tremendous amount of attention from other states (particularly the United States), intergovernmental organisations and international non-governmental organisations, while at the same time has had a great deal of impact on the public discourse and understanding around human rights in ways that have advanced international law and policy making. The article examines the unlikely nature of Chile's influence on human rights at the international level while recognising that very little true justice has been achieved at the domestic level for the gross violations of human rights that had been committed during the Pinochet dictatorship. The case of Chile is thus an illustrative example of 'the power of human rights' that has contributed to the 'justice cascade' in significant ways, even though true justice at home has been slow in coming.

The Hispanic American Historical Review, 1977

NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHERS: "Ever since 1973 coup in Chile there has been considerable speculation about what really happened and about the involvement of the U.S. government and U.S. business interests. Now, this explosive account by a Chilean journalist who lived through it all reveals the military, industrial, and commercial conspiracy, abetted by North American interests, to bring down the Allende government. "Beginning on the day of the coup with Allende's murder and the military's artful staging of his "suicide", the book goes on to reveal the background of intrigue and counter-intrigue; the participation of the CIA, the Pentagon, and U.S. business interests, as well as that of the Braziliangovernment; the sinister roles of the Chilean armed forces, police forces, and political parties; the events throughout Chile on the day of the coup as the massive military apparatus got under way; and the reign of terror and torture unleashed on the civilian population. This is a fast-moving, well-paced narrative, with a "State of Siege" quality to it. It will be an important and controversial book which neither Allendistas nor the conspirators and their respectable fronts will like. It shows the latter as a gang of premeditated murderers and the former, including Allende, as honorable but very foolish men, who, until the very last moments, believed that the military was made up of loyal soldiers, faithful to the Constitution they were sworn to uphold. The author is an excellent reporter and has carefully woven together the strands of seemingly unrelated events into a coherent, compelling, and well-documented story of who did what to whom, when." ===================================================== (excerpts from "A Necessary Explanation") "This book is an accusation. As such, it is written in the manner of an extensive police report. It recounts the story of an assassination: the assassination of one particular man, of thousands of other men and women, and of the ideas of those men and women. Here is the story behind the assassination of Dr. Salvador Allende Gossens, the constitutional President of Chile. The main actors in this drama are his murderers: their habits, their ideologies, their meetings, their plans, their conspiracies. "This is not a book that analyzes what happened. It is a book that tells what happened and how it happened. And because I am writing as a journalist, a Chilean, a leftist, and a personal participant in the events in Chile from 1970 to 1973, the reader will also find an Allende very different from the image created by the funeral eulogies, the statues, the posters, the worl-wide homages. Here is an Allende stripped of the mask of perfection, of "everything he did, he did well", that so many people have been at such pains to present. Here the heroic picture of Allende changes to one of a vacillating, contradictory man attempting to defend "the Chilean way to socialism" but making the political mistakes that opened the door to the forces of fascist repression in Chile, aided and abetted by U.S. interests, both commercial and governmental. "This is not to say that Salvador Allende was not a hero. No one doubts that. No Chilean is unaware that Allende went down fighting, without any hope of survival unless he surrendered. And he did not surrender. Heroes die like that, and that is how he died. And that is how many thousands of his fellow Chileans also died, hopelessly defending a democracy crushed by the tanks, armored cars, fighter planes, and machine guns of the rebel soldiers. Allende once said: "Let them know this, let them hear this very clearly, let it make a deep impression on them: I will defend this Chilean revolution and I will defend the Popular government. This people have given me this mandate; I have no alternative. Only by riddling me with bullets will they be able to end our will to accomplish the people's programa". So they riddled him with bullets. A few hours before his death, as the rebel attack was under way, he broadcast a speech to his countrymen: "Thus the first page of this story has been written. My people and the people of the Americas will write the rest." This is the Allende you will find in this book. And you will read how the common people, the victims of the coup, were denied the opportunity to organize for their own protection. In sum, while this book is a denunciation of Allende's assassins, the generals and admirals in Santiago, Chile, and in Washington, it is also a denunciation of the tragic and vacillating conduct of those who called themselves leaders of the people, but left their people defenseless against the fascist-imperialist attack... ...The Chilean people paid for this mistake with more than 15,000 dead, more than 30,000 prisoners, more than 100,000 brutally tortured, more than 200,000 dismissed for political reasons, and more than 30,000 students expelled from the university by the military...The Chilean military unleashed their reign of terror against the Chilean people in order to protect the interests of the great North American consortia (Anaconda, Kennecott, ITT, et al), as well as the strategic interests of the military-industrial complex in Washington...R.R.(1975)" CHAPTER 1. The Artful Staging of a "Suicide" "A disciplined, organized, and aware people is, along with an honest and loyal armed forces and military police, the best defense of the Popular government and of the future of the country."

Hague Journal on the Rule of Law, 2021

Chile has often drawn the global spotlight, serving as a laboratory for some of the most dramatic political experiments of the past fifty-plus years. In 1970, adhering to well-established democratic rules of the game, Chileans elected Marxist president Salvador Allende, who sought to lead his country to socialism through legal means. Three years later, a military junta led by General Augusto Pinochet violently overthrew the Allende government, committing massive human rights violations that terrorized the population into submission, and proceeded to restructure the Chilean state and society along radical neoliberal lines, entrenching the model in a new constitution in 1980. After fifteen years of dictatorship, the democratic opposition managed to use some of the military regime's own constitutional rules and institutions to beat Pinochet in a plebiscite on his continued leadership, triggering a negotiated transition to civilian rule in 1989-1990. In the thirty years that followed, democratic political elites gradually reformed institutions and introduced social policies that helped lower the poverty level dramatically and raised the country's human development indicators into the "very high" bracket. However, inequality remained stubbornly high and middle-class status precarious, and the 1980 Constitution, despite several rounds of reforms, continued to place strict substantive and procedural limits on what democratic majorities could do to address these problems. Popular discontent with the economic system and the political institutions that maintained it thus grew, and in October 2019, boiled over in massive street protests referred to as the "social explosion" (estallido social). After a month of upheaval, elected officials from across the political spectrum negotiated a formal agreement, acceding to one of the key demands of the protestors: a democratic path to constitutional replacement. 1 Chile is thus once again drawing international attention as it pursues an experiment in constitutional rewrite within democracy. This special issue of the Hague Journal on the Rule of Law brings together topnotch analyses by experts on Chilean law and politics that dissect and reflect upon

As with most of my bibliographies, this list has two constraints: books, in English. I have included titles that deal with periods both before and after the coup, as well as works of political economy and specialized topics (e.g., human rights, transitional justice) related in one way or another to the effects and consequences of the military coup that replaced Salvador Allende's democratic government with authoritarian rule. Allende, a physician and Marxist, was elected president of Chile on the strength of the Unidad Popular (an alliance of much of the

International Journal of Constitutional Law, 2017

Scholars debate about why constitution-makers create constitutional courts, and what the conditions are for making these tribunals politically relevant. This article examines how the understudied Chilean 1970-1973 Constitutional Tribunal has contributed to this discussion. That Tribunal was created in 1970, through an error made by constitution-amenders who believed that someone else was going to be elected president. Although the Tribunal generally benefited the unexpectedly elected president (Allende), it finally lost its relevance because of its refusal to alleviate a significant political conflict. Judicial review theories based on rights and political competition are not applicable to the Chilean case. The separation of powers theory, which claims that constitutional courts develop because of their function in solving inter-branch disputes, partly explains the creation of the Tribunal. However, the Chilean example suggests that that theory does not apply in highly controversial contexts.

2020

Collation and analysis of 50 major judicial, political and legislative milestones in three decades (1990-2020) of efforts, in Chile, to prosecute crimes of repression committed by the 1973-1990 military dictatorship. Each milestone is briefly described, and its significance is analysed. Data allowing the location of original texts of judicial verdicts is provided where applicable. The analysis includes relevant Inter-American Court cases over Chile. This document is ongoing and periodically updated by the team of the Observatorio Justicia Transicional of the Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago de Chile

du.edu

Chile holds special significance for scholars. Not only was it the first country to democratically elect a Marxist president who sought to lead a peaceful transition to socialism, it was also a prominent example of democratic breakdown and brutal military ...