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What Bush Missed in Chile
 
What Bush Missed in Chile
Ariel Dorfman Los Angeles Times November 23, 2004

It's a pity George W. Bush does not truly understand Spanish — or 
much 
English, for that matter — because he could have learned a thing 
or two 
during his trip last weekend to Chile for an Asia-Pacific Economic 
Cooperation summit. All it would have taken was for him to have listened 
to the national debate raging in my country, a discussion shamefully 
absent from the United States. 

What has Chile in turmoil is a report by a commission designated by 
President Ricardo Lagos to investigate how the dictatorship of Gen. 
Augusto Pinochet, in power from 1973 to 1990, subjected thousands to the 
most savage forms of torture. What is scandalizing our citizenry is not 
only the overwhelming narrative of extraordinary cruelty — the 
child 
tormented in front of his mother to make her speak, the prisoner forced 
to defecate into the mouth of another victim, the electrodes in the 
penis, the rats in the vagina, the needle in the eye, the fire on the 
skin. All of this was known — though perhaps not in such 
excruciating 
detail and magnitude. 

No, what is intolerable to Chileans is that after this report, their 
country cannot deny that the terror inflicted on defenseless bodies was 
both systematic and systemic, essential to the survival of the Pinochet 
regime. The same horrors and humiliations were repeated in every corner 
of this land, in a cellar in the far north and in an attic in the 
extreme south, identical mock executions carried out in regiment after 
regiment, the same recurring methods to extract a confession, to 
devastate a life. 

The incontrovertible evidence of this widespread, ubiquitous aggression 
demolishes the thesis sustained for decades by Pinochet and his 
followers that tried to explain away such excesses. This report makes it 
impossible to claim that these were isolated cases, a few rotten apples, 
merely some pathological individuals gone wild or bad. 

As a result, Gen. Juan Emilio Cheyre, commander in chief of the Chilean 
army, has astonished the nation by declaring that he recognizes the 
institutional responsibility of the army for this use of torture, 
stating that there can never be a justification for these violations of 
human rights — not even to safeguard national security. 

Cheyre's admission that the army is itself as a whole to blame for these 
abuses has sparked Chileans to an anguished examination of their past. 
Calls have been made for the navy, air force and national police to 
follow suit, and for the many civilians who served in the Pinochet 
government to also accept that they did nothing to stop their countrymen 
from being tortured and, indeed, encouraged such brutality. And the time 
is approaching when the citizens of this land will need to scrutinize 
their own complicity, the moment when we must each respond to a few 
burning questions: When did I first know that someone was being 
tortured? And what did I do with that knowledge?

And so, we come to George W. Bush. 

I doubt that he paid attention to this dilemma shattering the Chile he 
briefly visited, and I would wager that he has never allowed the 
misgivings and moral questions we Chileans are facing to surface in his 
soul. Bush has not, of course, directly ordered the torture of his 
adversaries. But nothing could be more crucial to his second term than 
to deal with the issues we are working through: how men with immense 
power are ultimately responsible for the violence perpetrated on remote 
bodies, how death and destruction can rain down on so many faraway 
innocent thousands in the name of security and freedom.

In a post-9/11 world, where the "war" on terrorism has led to the 
disastrous invasion of Iraq, to the obscenity of Abu Ghraib, to the 
preventive detention of countless men inside and outside the United 
States without recourse to counsel, in a world so full of fear that any 
ferocity that renders us safe seems justifiable, Bush would do well to 
listen to the words of Cheyre. Unfortunately, it seems all but certain 
that for the next four years, the president of the United States will 
continue to imitate what might be called the Pinochet model of shirking 
responsibility for any ethical catastrophe that might ensue from his 
policies. 

Another missed chance. There Bush was in Chile, an entire country that 
is shouting to the world that violations of human rights, no matter what 
the circumstances and what the dread, can never be excused. There was 
Bush, eyeless and deaf in Chile, unable to hear what Cheyre was saying, 
what should be heard and valued by every ruler and every soldier on this 
planet, an inspiration to us all in these turbulent and dangerous times. 

There was Bush in Chile and he saw and he heard and he learned nothing.