I Sunday mctgcine inside: page five- perspective Number 1 Editor: Stephen Hersh Associate Editors: Ann Marie Lipinski, Elaine Fletcher November 211 1976 The Tah-n U mski th e 'dem ocra cy o f tor tur .***.* Tgk ORTURE AND TERROR. The two words g 9, Doily Photo by PAULINE LUBENS Isabel Allende Isabel What Allende: were spoken again and again during the four-day-long Teach-In on Latin America last week. But as chilling as fthose words are, they somehow didn't seem powerful enough to relate the full impact of what the current fascist govern- ments of Latin America do to their citi- zen s. The University auditoriums echoed with descriptions of brutal treatment. Some of the descriptions were first hand; others were accounts by friends and relatives of the victims. There 'were also films, some of which gave accounts of the bru- talitie in graphic detail. Who are the victims? Many of them are leftists, opponents of the regimes. Some of these worked actively against their governments, others are merely ideologic- ally opposed to their country's leaders. But it's not only leftists who are subj ect to arrest and torture. Priests, law- yers and doctors; poor people and rich peo- ple; young people and old people - in short, anyone who isn't willing.,to give in to any order by the government - is vul- nerable. Said one victim of repression who appeared in Saul Landau's film Brazil, "The only democracy is democracy of tor- ture." Which are the countries where this takes place? Chile is the most prominent example, and also the most relevant to Americans -= the coup which introduced fascism there three years ago was precipi- ' ated by American intervention. And the list goes on; there's Brazil, Ar- gentina, Nicaragua, El Salvador. ;tis such leftist leaders as Salvador Al- lende, the late Chilean president who died in a rightist coup, who represent the in- terests of the- Latin American people. But the Latin American left has not proven itself strong enough, to establish much firm control. Most of the blame for this must be at- tributed to the United States. The Ameri- can government has consistently set itself up as an active enemy of the left, in Latin America as around the world. It was the Teach-In's goal to/publicize Is, Foft ISABEALLENDE, the fury' of the As the daughter of the late Chilean !President Salvadorf Allende, she was able to watch from close quarters tI' e pro- gress of her country along. the "peace- ful road to socialism" from 1970 to 1973. Her father took charge of Chile with the support of a coalition of political parties of the left and the center. At the time, the country was in, the grip of poverty : hunger was rampant, housing was a dis- grace, education was serving only a frac- tion of the children, health care was in- adequate, and industry - most of which was owned 'and controlled by investors in the U.S. and other foreign countries - was operating at. less than full capacity. and was consistently paying the workers less and less. Salvador, Allende, a Marxist, moved to shake Chile up. Always careful to work within the law - he considered his Donu- lar mandate tor be partly based on the assumption that he would administer the country according to its constitution-Al- lende charted a course of radical econonm- .ic reform. He nationalized a large chunk of the country's industry, mast prominent- ly the copper companies. He put more wages in the, hands of the workers and reorganized production to get it working close to its potential. He started a pro- gram of agrarian reform, and poured mon- ey into such essentials as food production and distribution, which in the past had been all but ignored. But Allende soon came up against a hard reality: foreign economic interests don't like to cooperate with socialist gov- ernments. The United States cut off its flow of credit to Chile. And under the aegis of then-President Nixon and Secre- tary of State Henry Kissinger, the U.S. funneled millions of dollars into the coun- try clandestinely, with the aim of "destab- ilizing" the government. The money sup- This article was wvritten by Stephen Hlersh, and is Partly based on~ an interview with Isabel Allende conduc'ted by the writer along with Robert Miller and Paul O'Donnell. The latter, a teaching fellow in the University's Spanish de- partment, doubled as translator. ported rightist parties and several lengthy strikes which hurt Chile's economy. Then cainetthe coup. A handful of fas- cist generals, led by Augusto Pinochet, used the armed forces to take over the presidential palace in an attack which killed the president. As his daughter Isa- bel said in her Teach-In speech, the coup managed to "impose the interests of im- perialism and the bourgeoisie on policies in Chile." In a conversation after her Rackham Auditorium= speech Thursday, Allende dis- cussed her feeling that her father's social- ist government was placed in' a position of checkmate by the hostility of both the Chilean right and the United States. Speaking calmly but with obvious con- viction, she also talked about the tasks now facing opponents of Latin Ameri- can repression. f, Daily Photo by PAULINE LUKENS~ Teach-in discussion panel (from left to right): Enrique Kirkberg, former rector at the Technical University in Chile, Amy Congers, former teacher and political prisoner in Chile, and Abe Fein- glass, Amalgamated Meatcutters Union Vice President. the facts of life under the Latin Amerftan regimes. FOR TWO MONTHS NOW, Isabel Lete- lier has known exactly what the Chilean government meant by its f are- well words to her and her husband. "We were told before we left Chile that DINA (the Chilean secret police) had a long arm and would; catch us wherever we were doing something against the junita," she told a Teach-In audience Tues- day. This story was compiled by Elaine Stephen Hersh, Ann Marie Lipinski, Toole, Mary Watson and Linda Willcox. Fletcher, Pauline See ISABEL, Page 4 September 21, a year and a half- after his exile from Chile, Orlando Letelier was killed in a car bombing in Washington kD. C. Isabel confidently blames the DINA, and the U. S. In part, for, her husband's murder. Orlando, Letelier, the former Chilean ambassador to the U. S. under Salvador Allende, was an outspoken critic of na- tional lewder Gen. Augusto Pinochet's economic policies. He fought for more than a year an~d a half in the U. S. to block foreign aid and loans to the Chilean gov- erment's record of repression; torture, murder and denial of human rights to the general population. This didn't sit well with the. Pinochet regime -- her hus- band's assassination is ample proof of that, says Isabel- Letelier. She also attributes partial blame to the U. S. for not listening'to her husband. "If they (the U.S.)_ had stopped sending mon- ey -.the (Pinochet) government breathes money -- then, without that money the- government could not breathe and would die," she told students. It follows, she said, that the Pinochet government would not have killed her husband. During Teach-In discussions, Isabel Letelier spoke of atrocities allegedly com- mitted against political prisoners and the population of Chile. She recalled Gen. Carlos Prats, Allende's 'army chief, who was exiled in Argentina and killed two years ago in a car bombing similar to the one which took her' husband's life. She spoke of Bernardo Leighton, a liaison be- tween exiles in Europe and the European Christian Democrats, who was seriously wounded by a gunman in Rome in 1975; and Pascal Allende, nephew of the former Chilean President, who was the target of an assassination attempt in Costa Rica. But no case was more poignant, because of the immediate tragedy, than that of her husband. In the last two months of the Allende regime in 1973, Letelier was called back to Santiago where he served, as the Foreign Minister, Minister of the Interior, and- Minister of Defense in the final days. In the aftermath of the coup, he was taken prisoner by Pinochet's forces. Detained in the basement of the Air Force buildings in Santiago, hp learned "the sounds of torture,'-which he never forgot," his widow said. Daily Photo by PAULINE LUBENS Doily Photo by ANDY FREEBERG Isabel Allende Isabel Letelier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . g How VStrange... How strange that my bones don't bleed How funny they don't take the shape of my body Tafter so many years, How hollow months, -"My tortured body"-seems ;,.days. to say to me every'day. Body so dry that it seems like a mistake And it's so real! that there's still skin, It's so real. i' and flesh, f'.and life. I look at myself and I can't accept it as mine. I can't be this fleshless ghost. Strange sensation this one of being alive. There must be some mistake in God's big machine At first I though that there is no dignity without that repeats the same thing like a scratched record ___________________freedom, innocently persistent.