On June 26, 2007 the Ethic Committee Against Torture presented the Panel Discussion "Aspectos Pendientes del Informe Valech," with participation by international political analyst Raul Sohr, Lutheran Pastor Helmut Frenz, sociologist Felipe Portales and CODEPU attorney Federico Aguirre. The event also honored Fr. Jose Aldunate, founder of the Sebastian Acevedo Movement Against Torture, who was present, as well as many former members of the movement.

RICARDO FRODEN, President, Ethic Committee Against Torture
I welcome everyone here tonight in this legendary building of the Public Employees Union (ANEF), home of the legendary Clotario Blest and Tucapel Jimenez.

Once more we are people are standing up for their rights. Students raised their voices but were swiftly answered with repression. For claiming the right to their ancestral lands, many Mapuches have been jailed, including Ethics Committee cofounder Lonko Juana Acufanao still held in the Temuco city jail with her family, with no trial so far. The forestry companies made their point when Rodrigo Cisternas fell under the bullets shot by police who are agents of this government.

Yesterday Transantiago employees were on strike. Today copper subcontract workers are striking. The renewed social action has been met with repression that has the appearance of a thing of the past.

In 2001 a coalition of human rights organizations and victims associations formed the Ethics Committee Against Torture, with the objective of obtaining truth, justice and reparations for those who were subjected to torture during the military dictatorship. A direct result of Committee action was the government decision to create the National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture on November 11, 2003.

The Ethics Committee has continued to demand inclusion of various categories of victims the Valech Commission did not consider, such as people arrested in public demonstrations, children arrested with their parents or born in prison, foreigners arrested and tortured in the context of Operation Condor, and persons killed by explosive devices.

We also demand the repeal of the clause Parliament approved in record time that prevents the judicial branch from accessing testimony on torture and names of torturers victims identified in their testimony, during 50 years.

Above all, the Ethics Committee demands that an accreditation office be established to receive testimonies of victims indefinitely.

As we commemorate the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, the Ethics Committee proudly accepts the legacy of the Sebastian Acevedo Movement against Torture, whose example and testimony will be remembered by generations to come.

RAUL SOHR, International Political Analyst
Unfortunately, today we are witnessing deterioration worldwide in human rights, and specifically, in relation to torture. When we though torture was a vanishing practice employed only in the darkest corners of the globe by certain dictatorships, it turns out that once again it has become a prevalent throughout the world.

In Washington DC individuals with immense power uphold torture as valid in the new culture of war against terrorism. That is an abstraction. It is like waging war against war. You can fight in a specific war, like the War of the Pacific, but you cannot fight against wars. Likewise, specific organizations can fight against terrorism but it makes no sense on an abstract level.

Precisely, this abstract war against terrorism permits the use of torture and repressive methods under the guise of prevention, as many conflicts have been called preventive wars.

A primary justification for torture is the concept of ticktock, the clock that will detonate the bomb. . What is preferable?, we are asked. Allow a terrorist to blow up a kindergarten or torture the guy to prevent the tragedy? In this context torture is seen as the lesser evil. This is a completely fallacious argument that never occurs in real life.

In Chile, of 100,000 torture victims, practically none was tortured to obtain information. About 99.9 percent of cases, torture is used as a measure of political repression to break the spirit so that the victim will never again engage in political activity. That is the role of torture.

The prisoners in Abu Ghraib, Iraq were not tortured to obtain information. They were not subjected to humiliation, dogs barking in their face, nor were they forced to commit sexual acts in order to obtain information. It was done to break their spirit. Only for that reason. So that once they got out of jail, they would hide in their houses and never get involved in any kind of activity ever again.

Once United States Vice President Dick Cheney was asked if he thought it right to submit prisoners to waterboarding (known as submarino in Chile). He replied, "I have no doubt at all that it is right."

That was the Vice President of the United States, asked whether he thought it was right to submerge a person in a barrel of water. That gives you an idea of the extent we have lost ground in human rights protection.

While torture breaks many spirits, we also know it also can generate resistance. United States is increasingly bogged down in a a war with no end in sight, in part, because it uses methods that aggravate hatred and resistance of a nation, in this case the Iraqi nation, as an oppressed people.

The struggle against torture has a greater urgency today. The dangers from legitimizing such methods are far greater than a decade ago. We thought international treaties were protecting us. I believe it is quite the contrary. At this moment the world faces an incredibly precarious situation with the United States as dominant force in all aspects of international life, from financial, political, scientific, and economic, and that dominant force openly condones torture. It has even passed a law that legalizes torture.

And I repeat. Torture is not used to obtain information.

If intelligence services had done their job before September 11, 2001 the United States could have detected and prevented plans to attack it. A Marine Mr. Palamara, wrote a book about intelligence issues. He says real intelligence, the ability to obtain information is a result of a methodical, and systematic work, not torture

Moreover, we know some people are able to resist torture and lie under torture. It is not an effective method and absolutely unnecessary. He who claims to the contrary has a special interest in applying torture.
Thank you.

HELMUT FRENZ, Lutheran Pastor, Pro PazCommittee founder
Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the foundation of our coexistence as brothers and sisters in democracy and peace. Equal rights and dignity leads us to ban capital punishment. For that reason the Universal Declaration in article 2 underscores that all persons have inherent dignity.

To torture a human being is a crime. To execute a human being is crime. To make a human being forcibly disappear is a crime. Because these action damage human dignity. Human dignity is the worth of each human being and what distinguishes the human being from all other creatures. Torture deprives the human being of dignity, the essential quality that makes him human and reduces him to a thing...

As president of the Allende Qualifying Commission, for the President Salvador Allende Foundation, the organization based in Madrid that manages the funds Pinochet hid in the Riggs Bank. The Qualifying Commission was designated in Santiago to identify and give reparations for victims of torture and political persecution, similar to the Valech Commission, but a non governmental organization with more limited funds than the State of Chile.

I read thousands of testimonies of political persecution and torture.

Reparations were central to the concept of both the Valech Commission and the Allende Commission. The idea was to give a symbolic pension, that I dare not call compensation because I believe there is no way to compensate a person who was tortured.

Recognition of the victim is the first step towards achieving internal reparation. The second step is justice. A person who endured torture may have great difficulty in writing or speaking about it. I read this between the lines of testimonies survivors wrote. Authentic testimonies reveal difficulty in finding the right words to communicate what happened. Language simply is inadequate to communicate to the enormous suffering experienced.

Still, pain remains, accumulated in the chest, the soul and spirit, retained without expressing outward, for lack of words. In this situation, one can only embrace the person and cry together. That is perhaps an initial way to understand the inhumanity endured.

Yet this understanding and participation cannot be transmitted to others, for example to a judge or any human rights commission.

There is a second difficulty. If the experience of torture is to be articulated adequately, it must be made known. But ears close rapidly because the experience of torture is so humanly impossible to talk about or hear. If the listener truly listened, not only with the ears but with the heart, will be changed because of it.

What happened in Chile? The malicious Law 19.992 entitled Establece Pensión de Reparación y Otorga otros Beneficios a las Personas Indicadas. It has such a positive sound. Do they think that medical benefits, education and pensions suffice as integral reparations?! And this was a Christmas present because the law was published in the congressional record December 24, 2003.

Listen to what Article 4 says because it is unbelievable. It states as follows:
"The documents, testimonies and information victims provided the National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Tortura, created in 2003 by the Justice Ministry, shall be secret. The reserve established in the previous sentence shall be maintained for 50 years, during which all documents shall be in the custody of the Interior Ministry. During the period this secret is enforced, no person, group of persons, official or magistrate shall have access to the documents indicated in the first sentence. Any communication, dissemination or revelation of these documents and information protected by secrecy, shall be punished as set forth in article 241 of the Criminal Code."

This is a scandalous concealment of perpetrators of crimes against humanity. This is an effort to protect an entire generation of torturers. With this law, the government legalized impunity for perpetrators and torturers. And how can the executive branch exercise such control over the judiciary? If we want to demonstrate solidarity with torture victims, our government must have the courage to repeal Law 19992 to permit justice and recover human dignity, rather than only giving survivors money.

FELIPE PORTALES, Sociologist
Throughout all stages of the Valech Commission, one sensed that the government was trying to find a way to keep this bothersome issue from being such a nuisance, and at the lowest possible cost.

First, the announcement was practically secret, with very little publicity, clearly to limit the numbers of people who registered. It had to be done with the least possible political cost for former President Ricardo Lagos and his administration.

In earlier interviews Lagos expressed that he did not favor opening up the issue of reparations because the nation had to look towards the future rather than the past. He finally reached the conclusion that something had to be done, among other reasons, because of the way the right wing party UDI manipulated the issue of human rights violations in 2003. Later, when victims and legislators requested that the qualifying period be extended, the government absolutely refused to consider it.

The law established such a miserly, low pension, that it does not provide a true reparation, and then the law restricted the classes of people who could register with the Commission. Such was the situation of widows, who due to their insistence, were able to register the cases of their deceased husbands. But these women do not receive a single peso in reparations. The same is the case with children who were taken with their parents. The Commission recognized their cases but excluded them from reparations.

Moreover the Valech Commission recommended moral reparations that were not enacted. Only now is the government preparing a map of sites of torture as a way to reclaim historic memory. However other Commission proposals have not been enacted.

Not only the testimony documents are secret. A copy of the Valech Commission report itself has only been distributed to victims. You cannot find the report in bookstores, it was not widely distributed, and, like the Rettig Report, has not been incorporated as teaching material in the schools. A summarized version of both the Rettig and Valech Reports should be provided to all high schools, so they may learn lessons for the future.

As Helmut Frenz expressed, the secrecy that cloaks the report is a aberration, and one of the most serious monuments to illegality of these 17 post dictatorship years.

FEDERICO AGUIRRE, CODEPU staff attorney
The objectives enshrined in the decree that created the National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture originally, were to compensate people who were tortured and deprived of freedom for political motives, and second, to establish an integral reparations policy. These objectives were enacted primarily as a result of the perseverance of family members, torture survivors, and human rights organizations such as the Ethic Committee, that demanded that the nation be informed of the truth about torture and the government acknowledge it as officially as true.

Out of fear and lack of information thousands of Chileans did not come forth to give their testimonies to the National Commission. That creates a class of victims, political prisoners, who the State has not recognized as such.

By mandate of the Salvador Allende Foundation of Spain, in 2005 CODEPU received authentic testimonies from 4000 men and women who had been omitted from the National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture for the reasons I described earlier. They constitute an ethical demand, an imperative that all the human rights community must demand of the President. She has the authority to correct the situation through a discretionary decree to include and provide reparations for all those excluded from the Report.

Regarding reparations policy, there is also a debt, although we certainly recognize the report represents important progress in recognizing the crime of torture. It involves assuring all victims access to justice to obtain a determination on criminal responsibility for these crimes. Of 300 defendants indicted, of the 50 or so sentenced for serious human rights violations, there is not a single conviction so far for the crime of torture. Yet at least 16 criminal complaints have been filed, involving at least 10 torture centers. This is a demand and a challenge.

The first element of reparations is to guarantee access to justice. Not out of revenge, but simply in order to restore the dignity of persons who suffered and to leave as legacy, because this is the best mechanism to prevent that such things occur in future generations. If torture is unacceptable in this country, then the perpetrators, accomplices and accessories to past crimes must be punished with sentences proportional to the damage caused.

That challenge is still pending and, as Helmut Frenz indicated, unlike the Rettig Commission, information gathered by the Valech Commission were not provided to the courts. The logic for the decision to withhold those documents was that it might infringe the privacy of the victims who testified before the Commission. But that precaution need not prevent the courts from accessing the documents to determine penal responsibilities for the crimes.

I would like to conclude by posing human rights defense workers the challenge to work to prevent torture, not only in the world, as Raul Sohr indicated, but in Chile.

Precisely those who remain silent accomplices or in some way supported the perpetration of crimes against humanity and war crimes, today call to increase punitive authority of the State. They also have been fundamental in lowering the age of criminal responsibility, imposing prison regimes on adolescents. And the harsh repression unleashed against protests and demonstrations should be a concern of all human rights workers.

It is true that torture is no longer systematic, but it remains present in our society. Therefore, we must continue to fight for public policy that reflects an awareness of the past, as a basis for the future, so that the abysmal actions that took place in the past never again occur in Chile
Thank you.

TRIBUTE TO FR. JOSE ALDUNATE
In these days, as Fr. Pepe is about to celebrate his 90th birthday, we will read a fragment from a reflection he wrote in September 1984.

"The Sebastian Acevedo Movement Against Torture has marked its first year. In the course of this past year we have gone out to the streets every month. We came together for the first time September 14, 1983 outside the gray gate of 1470 Borgoño Street. We sat down in the street and unfurled a banner that read "Aquí se tortura" (People are tortured here.). Stretching out our arms, we pointed to the secret premises of the CNI. Then for the first time we sang what would become our anthem, ÒPor el pájaro enjaulado, por El pez en la pecera, yo te envoco libertad."

The next month we were back at 1470 Borgoño. We had learned more people were being tortured. That time we stood next to the gate, singing as loud as we could, in the hope the people being tortured would hear us. We sought to break the loneliness of incommunicado status, take them by their chained hands and embrace their broken bodies.

We believed there were mysterious channels that made it possible for those who suffered to sense, in their pores, the solidarity of friends. Finally, we left the gate, which no lawyer, no trustworthy doctor, family member or friend was allowed to pass. Moreover, even the courts had turned their back on people who were being tortured.

Fifteen days later we went to shout our indignation outside the courthouse. There we unfurled our harshest accusation yet, which no one could deny, "Se Tortura y la Justicia Calla." ("People are tortured and the courts are silent.")

On November 11 in the distant city of Concepcion, a worker set himself on fire outside the cathedral. He died pleading that "the CNI return my two children." It shook the national conscience. We then took the name of the man who died to put an end to torture. From then on we were known as the Sebastian Acevedo Movement Against Torture.

Our fifth action had to be outside the central CNI headquarters on Republica Street, from where General Gordon ran the secret police. At the corner of Republica and Alameda, we opened our banner that read, "The CNI Tortures!" As we began walking down Republica towards the building, singing our anthem, the police appeared, with water cannon and tear gas, and many were arrested. Some 20 of us reached the destination we had set but inside a paddy wagon, that brought us to the Toesca police station.

Our twelfth action had to challenge those directly responsible for the practice of torture in our country. On August 22 we gathered in Plaza Constitution outside La Moneda. A delegation left a letter at La Moneda addressed to the Interior Minister and we sang our anthem to freedom at the top of our lungs. "Por el miedo que te tienen, por tus pasos que vigilan, por la forma que te atacan, por los hijos que te matan, yo te envoco libertad."

It was so moving to hear 200 voices singing the anthem of freedom outside the La Moneda. Police let us sing all six verses. Freedom not only for a fortunate few but for the mass, of people who were more enslaved than ever. Freedom that will have to won by the enslaved, by the person who is tortured, by the disappeared. We had the sense that our song had left the word "freedom" engraved on the walls of the city. "We write your name on the walls of my city."

FR. JOSE ALDUNATE
Objectively, all of you deserve to receive this honor. I so admired the young people, the housewives, the relatives of the prisoners who never missed an action. And they suffered much more than I. The cops had a measure of respect for gray hair but many younger Movement participants were arrested and suffered greatly. I was simply a spokesperson but behind me was whole contingent, that numbered close to 2000 including all who passed through the Movement. We never had less than 100 people at any action. And so many people participated in other 180 such actions. So this honor and recognition is for all of you.

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