VOXXI: Chile closes the “Golden Prison” of Penal Cordillera

Chile closes the "Golden Prison" of Penal Cordillera
W. Alejandro Sanchez
VOXXI
October 2, 2013
Originally published: http://www.voxxi.com/chile-closes-golden-prison/

The Chilean government will close a detention center called Penal Cordillera, known for being a “golden prison” for Pinochet-era military officers who were jailed for human rights abuses during the military regime.

This important development has occurred  less than a month after the 40^th anniversary of the military coup that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power (September 11, 1973).

The closure of the Penal Cordillera is a positive step in bringing more just punishments to individuals that committed human rights abuses during the Pinochet era. Hopefully this model will be followed by other Latin American nations that have their own “golden prisoners.”

Life in a “Golden Prison”

For years, human rights organizations have complained that Chilean military officers imprisoned for having committed abuses were receiving a golden treatment at Penal Cordillera (full name: Centro de Cumplimiento Penitenciario Cordillera).

The center only has ten inmates, which  include: Marcelo Moren Brito, a retired army Colonel and member of the DINA (Pinochet’s dreaded intelligence service), José Zara (accused of killing General Carlos Prats and his wife in 1974) and Pedro Espinoza (a DINA agent accused of being part of a death squad that killed dissidents such as Orlando Letelier).

These high-level members of Pinochet’s military all hold senior rank, which include eight generals and two colonels.

It has been widely reported that the ten inmates enjoyed a lavish lifestyle during their stay in Penal Cordillera. Media reports reveal that the inmates had 35 guards that took care of the center’s security, as well as an assistant, three paramedics, two cuisine teachers, and a nutritionist to supervise their meals.

The one recent incident that appears to have been the boiling point for Chilean society was a proposed dinner in honor of General Miguel Krassnoff, another inmate of Penal Cordillera.

Namely, Chileans were outraged that prison inmates were planning to organize a dinner (a barbeque, to be specific), in honor of another inmate, particularly someone like Krassnoff, who was a member of DINA and is serving a 120-year prison sentence.

It has been reported that these inmates will be moved from the Penal Cordillera to a detention center called Punta Peuco, which also harbors Pinochet-era officers.

As journalist Jorge Molina Sanhueza explains, “At the Cordillera prison, there weren’t cells, there were cabins that held 1 or 2 people each. At the Peuco prison, each will have his own room in a cell. Peuco is actually a prison […] and it’s also further from Santiago rather than right inside it.”

After news became public of the government’s intention of closing down Penal Cordillera, a bizarre event happened: one of the inmates, General Odlanier Mena, committed suicide on September 28^th. Preliminary assumptions hint that Mena took his own life upon learning that the Penal Cordillera will close and its inmates will be transferred to another detention center.

The officer was the director of the National Information Center (the successor of the DINA) from 1977 to 1980 and was sentenced in 2008 to six years in jail for the murder of three socialist militants.

Contrary to orthodox prison protocol, Mena was allowed to leave the detention center on weekends, and he used this opportunity to kill himself in his own apartment in Los Condes district of Santiago this past weekend.

And Justice for All?

The decision to close Penal Cordillera and end the luxurious lifestyle that its inmates have been enjoying will give some popularity points to the outgoing Sebastian Piñera presidency (and which may help him win the presidency again in 2017).

But this development should also be placed in a more regional context, namely that other Latin American nations have their own “golden prisons” for high-profile individuals.

One prominent example is former Peruvian dictator Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000). The former head of state is the sole prisoner of a detention center on the outskirts of Lima, which also serves as the headquarters of the Peruvian police’s special forces (DIROES).

According to reports, which embarrassed the Peruvian government when they became known worldwide, Fujmori has three nurses who take care of his health, as well as a hospital-style bed and a telephone.

But perhaps the most shocking aspect of Fujimori’s prison lifestyle is that he owns a private 375 square meter garden, in which he grows roses and other plants. As means of comparison, the capacity of Peru’s overcrowded prisons is around 28,900 inmates, but they currently have about 64 thousand prisoners.

Even more shocking, in the past months, Fujimori and his supporters have been lobbying so that the government will allow the former head of state to leave his “golden prison” and fulfill the rest of his 25-year sentence under house arrest.

This initiative has sparked wide outrage among Peruvian policymakers and society in general, and so far it seems that (hopefully), the former dictator will remain behind his golden bars.

Read more: http://www.voxxi.com/chile-closes-golden-prison/#ixzz2gbLql86f

Blouin Beat: Politics - Pinochet’s legacy still alive and still divisive

Pinochet's Legacy still alive and still divisive
W. Alejandro Sanchez
Blouin Beat: Politics
September 11, 2013
Originally published: http://blogs.blouinnews.com/blouinbeatpolitics/2013/09/11/pinochets-legacy-still-alive-and-still-divisive/

Wednesday, September 11, marks the 40th anniversary of the military coup in Chile that brought Army General Augusto Pinochet to power. As the violent clashes between police and protesters that flared up on the anniversary show, the general’s legacy is still a bitterly divisive one. The remains of the roughly 1,200 desaparecidos (the “disappeared”) of Pinochet’s brutal rule have yet to be found; it is estimated that some 3,100 people were murdered and over 38,000 were tortured by Pinochet’s security forces, including the infamous National Intelligence Directorate (DINA).

Yet even as the Pinochet regime carried out these repressions, it laid the groundwork (primarily by privatizing state-owned enterprises and decreasing state control over private enterprises) for making modern-day Chile a regional economic powerhouse, with flourishing industries and a generally stable economy. One of his most memorable decisions was to rely on the famous Ley de Cobre (Copper Law) which was originally established in 1958 and maintained under Pinochet’s rule. Thanks to the law, 10% of the profits of copper sales of the state-owned mining company CODELCO were used for military purchases, which aided Chile in becoming the local military big fish that it is today. During Pinochet’s rule, the country also became an exporter of goods such asfish, flour and fruits.

Pinochet still has his defenders, thanks in large part to that economic legacy. Yet an astonishing move that may signal a change of attitudes regarding how Chilean society perceives Pinochet’s rule, an association of Pinochet-era judges recently released a statement to the public asking for forgiveness for aiding the dictatorship by not protesting the detentions of prisoners. The judges’ statement declares that “the Judiciary, and the Supreme Court of that era in particular, capitulated their duty of protecting fundamental human rights and protecting the individuals that were victims of abuse by the state.” Moreover, a plethora of new studies and analyses have appeared over the years, revising Chile’s economic successes during the Pinochet era. As analyst Farid Kahhat has argued, the average 1% growth of the gross domestic product in the 1980s in Chile is not in itself remarkable, and indeed is significantly less than the economic growth under the democratic governments that followed the end of the dictatorship.

All this, however, is not to say that Chile’s political system is coming out from the shadow cast by Pinochet. After all, he and his cadres never really faced accountability: trials of military servicemen that committed human rights abuses during the dictatorship progress painfully slowly and Pinochet himself avoided actual punishment even though he was tried several times; he died a free man in 2006. And that shadow looms especially large now, in the months before the nation’s November presidential elections.  There’s a visceral connection to that era at play. The frontrunner, former President Michelle Bachelet is known for having been an opponent of Pinochet. In 1975, she and her mother were detained and tortured by the DINA in the regime’s infamous detention center, Villa Grimaldi. Another candidate, Evelyn Rose Matthei Fornet, had a better life during the dictatorship. Her father served as Minister of Health and commander of Chile’s Air Force during the Pinochet years.

At the time of this writing, it is all but certain that Bachelet will be elected for a new presidential term. A recent poll carried out the Centro de Estudios Públicos (CEP) between July and August show that 44% of polled Chileans would like to see Bachelet win. The closest runner up is Matthei Forner, with a distant 12%. And the public’s sense of Bachelet’s inevitability outdoes even her popularity: 75% of that same pool of respondents believe that Bachelet will be re-elected, compared to only 6% who see Matthei pulling a major upset.

With the results of the upcoming November elections seemingly a foregone conclusion, it’s not too early to begin an assessment of Bachelet’s second-term, especially her economic ones. So far, it seems that the former president wants to carry initiatives such as hiking (or attempting to hike) public spending in order to appease citizens infuriated by the current Sebastián Piñera government, particularly the university students who have carried out occasionally violent protests since May 2011. At the international level, look for a continuation of her welcoming stance on free trade agreements. Of particular interest are the future negotiations of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an ambitious free trade area that would unite major economies from the Asia-Pacific region with the U.S. and Latin America’s rising economic stars (of which Chile is one of the brightest). So far, statements by Bachelet’s entourage hint that she will maintain Chilean participation in the TPP negotiations.

So there is an irony here, and one worth remarking on: as rightly reviled as Pinochet was for his political repressions, his economic legacy has been cautiously embraced even by men and women of the left like Bachelet — an embrace that looks likely to tighten even as his political legacy becomes ever more toxic.