Nase Novine, February 20, 1986

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Michael Parker — Calgary
On Sept. 11, 1973, Chile's armed for-ces,
under orders from Gen. Augusto
Pinochet, stormed the presidential pa-lace
in Santiago and overthrew the de-mocratically
elected government of
Salvador Allende.
Since then, hundreds of thousands
of Chileans have been jailed and tortu-red,
and thousands more have disap-peared.
Over a million Chileans — one tenth
of the country's population — have
been forced into exile.
Many of those exiled have sought re-fuge
in Canada.
Victor Gavilan, Emilio Herrera and
Juan Dini are former Chilean political
prisoners who now live and work in
Calgary.
The stories these men tell — of what
was done to them and what they saw
done to others — are harrowing.
In prison they suffered almost un-bearable
agonies. But Gavilan, Her-rera
and Dini all insist their suffering
was nothing compared to what others
went through, and what many must
still endure.
Gavilan says Pinochet has declared
a war on his own people that demons-trates
daily the brutal cowardice of his
dictatorship.
"What kind of war is it," he asks,
"when only one side is armed?"
Gavilan, who was a social worker at
the time of the 1973 coup, spent two
years in prison before he was sent into
exile. Like most of those who were tor-tured,
he has had a hard time recove-ring.
"We have so much anguish now," he
says, searching for the right words in
a language that is still not his own.
The anguish never leaves Gavilan.
When he talks about prison his voice
strains with emotion and his foot taps
out a constant staccato on the floor.
When he listen, he sits stiff-back- ed in
his chair, fidgeting with his coffee cup.
Gavilan believes the repeated elec-trical
shocks he received to his head
in prison have done much more than
cause him emotional problems. They
also have destroyed his memory.
Now, he says, there are lengthy pe-riods
in his life that he can't remember
at all. It frustrates him because no mat-ter
how hard he tries he can't fill the
gaps.
But sometimes Gavilan catches
himself wishing the shocks had bur-ned
out more of what was done to him.
A few months after his arrest, a
group of soldiers came to the jail at
Temuco in southern Chile. It was
about 10 o'clock in the evening. Gavi-lan,
in the cell he shared with hun-dreds
of others, lay on the cement floor
jammed in among a mass of bodies.
The soldiers barged into the cell.
They stomped on arms and legs and
necks as if they were marching across
an empty floor. Within minutes they
grabbed the twenty men they had
come for and hauled them off to the
military barracks. Gavilan was one of
them.
"They made us line up in the com-pound
and then they started shoo-ting",
he says. "When they stopped,
only three or four of us were left stan-ding."
Gavilan falls silent. He crosses his
arms tight against his chest, and tears
well up in his eyes.
"People think memory is a good
thing — but I tell you, your memory
can kill you."
In Chile's prisons and concentration
camps it is often the psyhological tor-ture
that hurts people the most, Gavi-lan
says.
Interrogators try to break the priso-ners'
self-este- em by such methods as
bullying them into humiliating confes-sions
about their lives and forcing
them to eat their own excrement.
According to Gavilan, many who
were tortured have since had to seek
psychiatric help to overcome such de-grading
treatment.
"When you are in jail you are not a
person," he says. "You have to do
things that you would never in your
life think you could do, because they
treat you like an animal."
Juan Dini, a maintenance worker in
Calgary, was 19 when the military
struck down Chile's Popular Unity go-vernment.
Then an economics student in the
northern city of Arica, he was arrested
near the gates of the University of Chi-le.
He spent two years in prison.
While in jail, he was charged before
a military tribunal with belonging to
an illegal political party. The charge,
Dini says, was farcical because Pinoc-het
had abolished all political parties
right after the coup.
To his prosecutors, however, such
details were irrelevant. Being arrested
was enough to establish guilt — the
charges were merely a formality.
The tribunal wasn't interested in
facts, Dini says. Instead, it was like an
ancient inquisition looking only to
root out and punish political heresy.
As such, there was no correct answer
to the barage of fictional charges, and
when Dini didn't say the right things,
he was tortured.
"They tortured me three times," he
says, his voice cracking sligthly.
Soldiers took him from the tribunal
to police headquarters. In a basement
cell, his interrogators strippedliim na-ked
and strapped him to a cold metal
bed that had no mattress.
"First they put electricity to the bed,
so you jump," he says. "They called
that the horse... It had a voltage of al-most
220."
Dini stops to butt out one cigarette
and light another. When the words start
again, they are slow and drythroated.
He remembers how, when the offi-cers
had tired of their fun with the
"horse", they clamped electrodes to
his head and genitals. The searing pain
of the shocks knocked him uncon-scious.
When he awoke they beat him with
baseball bats wrapped in wet towels,
so no marks would be left.
"You didn't know up to which point
you could stand the torture," he says.
"When I passed out there was a a doc-tor
there. He wore a hood to hide his
face and he put a stethoscope to your
heart to see if you could take more."
When the torture stopped, Dini says,
he was put in solitary confinement in
a one-metre-sq- uare cell.
The first time they locked him up,
he was taken out after fifteen days be-cause
the Red Cross was coming to
the prison. The only mark they saw a
cut on his face from the butt of a pistol.
The second time he went to solitary
confinement, he had to be pulled out
after 25 days huge bumps swelled up
all over his body. He isn't sure, but he
thinks he had rickets.
"It was really bad," he says. "But it
was minimal compared to what others
were suffering."
Emilio Herrera, who now works as
a janitor in Calgary, was studying to
be an engineer before the coup. He was
only 17 when police arrested him at
his father's farm near Chilian, in
south-cent- ral Chile.
Herrera says he was beaten and tor-tured
repeatedly during his 541 days
in prison, but that he tried to keep a
sense of homour.
"We were often taken from the jail
to the military barracks to be tortu-red,"
he says, "and we used to call the
barracks the 'Sheraton' because it had
running water, warm beds and electri-city."
As Herrera tells it, the running water
came when the guards urinated on the
prisoners, the beds were warm be-cause
of a 200 volt current running
through them, and the electricity ran
through the electrodes clasped to their
heads and genitals.
"Yes, we had to laugh to survive,"
adds Gavilan. "We were really dying,
but we still made jokes."
Something that none of them can
laugh about though, is the Pinochet
dictatorship's abuse of children.
After Dini was released from prison
he went to live with his father in a city
near Santiago. There, he remembers,
police killed a socialist judge and arre-sted
the. mark's 14 year old daughter.
"They raped her many times, and
they did things like put out cigarettes
on her breasts," he says. "Then they
put her in a box the size of a coffin and
kept her there."
She was tortured so badly that she
often needed to be taken to the hospi-tal.
Dini, even though he was under
surveillance, tried to visit her when he
could.
"They marked her really bad," he
says. "Now, psychologically, she is a
vegetable. She was in prison for four
years and nobody knows how much
she suffered."
Dini shakes his head and lights anot-her
cigarette.
Pinochet, he says, wanted to break
the spirit of the Chilean people, he
wanted to divide them with fear and
suspicion.
He tells how, when he got out of pri-son,
members of his own family would
cross the street to avoid saying hello
to him. "Everywhere you went it was
like you had leprosy... you were cut
from the world."
People were afraid then but their
fear has been overcome by revolusion,
Dini says, adding that in the shanty
towns, where the people are starving,
they are risking their lives every day
to put an end to Pinochet's thirteen
year reign of terror.
Gavilan agrees. He is sure that in
spite of Pinochet's attempts to indoc-trinate
the country's children, there is
no support for the dictatorship.
"We will have democracy in Chile
soon," he says.
Gavilan, Herrera and Dini have lived
through a nightmare that still haunts
them a decade later. But they remain
defiant.
"If they thought that by throwing us
in jail and torturing us that we would
become afraid to be involved, they
were wrong," Dini says, with the hint
of a smile. "It was just the opposite —
your principles are stronger."
'imski kaput
bez krzna
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4 ШШШШШШШКШШШШИШШШШШШШШШвм --'
Elogantni jcdnostavan ovaj zimski
kaput ce nai£i na dopadanjc mnogih na-S- ih
eltatcljki. SaSiven jc od mekog sivog
Stofa.
Najmodernija i najzanimljivija je
kragna koja se spuSta na prcdnji deo
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sa stranc sa tri dugmeta kojja se vide i
Cctiri skrivcna ispod preklopa sa levc
slrane kaputa. Rukavi su krojeni u sti-l-u
„slcpi mis'", ali veoma umereno §i-ro- ki!
Uz kaput se nosi tanmija berelka.
Svecana frizura
Ako niste stigli da odete frizeru i
nacinite frizuru za docek Nove godi-ne- ,
snadite se ovako: operite kosu,
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prema temenu. Kad je kosa suva do-volj- no
je da je sasvim malo natapi-rat- e
i uvijete u ,,pundu" pazeci da
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vec malo uzdignut. Uosta-lo- m
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Naravno, ova frizura dolazi u obzir
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u godini morate potruditi da lepo
izgledate. Zato uz frizuru neka naus-nic- e
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masnu ili snalu ukrasenu strasom.