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Chile's forced torture: who bears the blame?
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Almost 40 years after Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s coup d’état and rule of dictatorship in Chile, former soldiers are coming forward to reveal their war crimes. According to the Denver Post, ex-soldiers are opening up in hopes of both freeing their psychological burdens and leveraging their information for mental health care and other benefits. Previously, the soldiers hesitated to reveal the names and burial sites of those they tortured and killed out of fear of being prosecuted.
In 1973 alone, over 8,000 civilians were drafted into the Chilean armed forces. This is where the torment lies: the ex-soldiers wish to reveal what they were forced to do by their superiors. They claim that they were subjects of human rights violations, just as those who endured the government-sponsored torture. One ex-soldier stated:
“They made me torture—I am a torturer—because they threatened me that if I didn't torture, they would kill me.”
They argue that their suffering became a matter of survival, and many of them endure painful memories of what they did and were forced to do. After all, they were just following orders.
Their experiences are reminiscent of the Milgram Obedience Experiment, which measured the extent of obedience to authority – even when torture of an innocent subject is involved. Within the context of a learning experiment, a person was instructed to give increasingly harsher shocks to a recipient. Essentially, the experiment was set up to measure how much pain a person would inflict on another when mandated by an authority figure.
Milgram’s findings revealed that those who questioned the authority and hesitated to inflict pain were in the minority. Sixty-five percent inflicted pain to the maximum level permitted in the experiment.
Augusto Pinochet toppled President Salvador Allende’s leftist government in 1973 and replaced it with a military dictatorship, committed to eliminating all vestiges of Marxism. In the process, Pinochet’s regime was responsible for Allende’s death along with at least 3,000 others (some estimates suggest that as many as 10,000 were killed in the early days of the military dictatorship). Among those killed are 1,197 who “disappeared.” The Denver Post reported that only 8% of the disappeared have been accounted for, while unidentified bone fragments and other human remains have resurfaced over the years.
Milgram’s work demonstrates that ordinary people – even people with high moral codes – can commit heinous acts against humanity. Within the context of Milgram’s experiment and the events of Pinochet’s regime, destructive behavior became acceptable since it was “Okayed” by an authority figure. Both of these circumstances reveal that man is capable of committing the worst atrocities. The soldiers should be allowed to come forward on a case-by-case basis and reveal their experiences without fear of reprisal (and they are, under Chile’s “just following orders” law). This doesn’t necessarily imply a pardon for their actions, but at least the recognition that they, too, were victims of the Pinochet dictatorship.
