Freedom in the World 2001 - Chile

2001 Scores

Status: Free
Freedom Rating: 2.0
Civil Liberties: 2
Political Rights: 2

Overview

In January 2000, Ricardo Lagos, 61, a moderate socialist and the leader of the Chile's Concertación coalition, won the presidency in a tight runoff race. Although former military dictator Augusto Pinochet escaped extradition to Spain to face human rights charges, returning to Chile in March following 503 days of house arrest in Great Britain, in April a court opened deliberations on whether he could face trial despite being a senator for life with immunity from prosecution. In August he was stripped of his immunity and a judge ordered the 84-year-old Pinochet to undergo mental and neurological tests before deciding to try him on some or all of the 177 criminal complaints lodged against him, a process that dragged on past year's end due to legal challenges. In December 2000, a judge stunned Chileans by indicting Pinochet on homicide and kidnapping charges.

Throughout the year, the judiciary expanded human rights protections by ruling that allegations of crimes against humanity, including torture, kidnapping, and genocide, fall within its purview and are not subject to amnesty decrees. The right held out the possibility of cooperation with Lagos in pursuing necessary constitutional reforms only if he cooperated in getting Pinochet and other senior officials, such as the former secret police chief and a former army commander, from Pinochet's regime out of harm's way in the courts. In November two Chilean generals, one on active duty, were indicted for allegedly covering up a 1982 political assassination. The "Pinochet effect" appeared to be strengthening resolve in several neighboring countries to investigate their own once all-powerful military forces and to hold them accountable for acts those forces committed while presiding over de facto regimes.

The Republic of Chile was founded after independence from Spain in 1818. Democratic rule predominated in the twentieth century until the 1973 overthrow of Salvador Allende by the military under Pinochet. More than 3,000 people were killed or "disappeared" during his regime; some of them were pitched from aircraft into the Pacific Ocean or pushed out of helicopters over the Andes. The 1980 constitution provided for a plebiscite in which voters could reject another presidential term for Pinochet. In 1988, 55 percent of voters said no to eight more years of military rule, and competitive presidential and legislative elections were scheduled for 1989.

In 1989, Christian Democrat Patricio Aylwin, the candidate of the center-left Concertación for Democracy, was elected president over two right-wing candidates, and the Concertación won a majority in the chamber of deputies. But with eight senators appointed by the outgoing military government, the coalition fell short of a senate majority. Aylwin's government was unsuccessful in its efforts to reform the constitution and was stymied by a right-wing senate bloc in it efforts to prevent Pinochet and other military chiefs from remaining at their posts until 1997.

Eduardo Frei, a businessman and the son of a former president, was the Concertación candidate in the December 1993 elections, and he won handily over right-wing candidate Arturo Alessandri. Frei promised to establish full civilian control over the military but also did not have the votes in congress. In 1995, the military defiance of a supreme court ruling that Pinochet's secret police chief be jailed for the 1976 murder of an exiled opposition leader in Washington, D.C., finally ceased, and the army general was imprisoned. However, Frei had to retreat from demanding full accountability for rights violations that occurred under military rule.

The senate has 48 seats, including a senator-for-life position for Pinochet and 9 designated senators mandated by the 1980 constitution. In October 1997 Frei selected the army chief of staff as Pinochet's replacement from a list of names Pinochet submitted. In December, the ruling coalition won a convincing victory in an election in which all 120 lower house and 20 of 49 senate seats were open. However, the binomial electoral system, which allows a party receiving only 33 percent of the votes to share power in two-seat constituencies with a party receiving as much as 66 percent, resulted in pro-Pinochet forces retaining their veto on constitutional reforms.

Pinochet's detention produced a strong political polarization in Chile and resulted in several emergency meetings called by the new leadership of the armed forces, as well as a reunion of the National Security Council. The country, said one top general, was "in a critical situation." However, as the months of imprisonment lengthened for Pinochet in 1999, tempers subsided somewhat. A number of the general's cronies were called to account by the courts for their own repressive roles, while the current armed forces sought a dialogue with rights groups and relatives of the missing.

On December 12, 1999, Lagos faced right-wing Alliance for Chile candidate Joaquin Lavin, the mayor of a Santiago suburb and a former advisor to Pinochet, winning 47.96 percent to Lavin's 47.52 percent. Both candidates, however, fell short of the 50 percent majority needed to win outright in a first round, whose results showed a strong polarization between right and left. Lavin's strong showing – historically the right never received more than 40 percent of the votes – was fueled by an 11 percent unemployment rate and concerns about crime.

Lagos won the January 16, 2000, runoff election, taking a 2.6 percent lead over Lavin. However, he was initially hampered by the fact that his congressional opposition, bolstered by a group of designated senators left over from the Pinochet period, was in a position to block both labor and constitutional reforms. Although the Concertación coalition had 70 seats to the opposition's 50 in the lower house, it held just 20 seats in the senate, to 18 held by the opposition. A bloc of 11 others were either senators for life or had been designated under Pinochet's rules. Lagos's strong early performance appeared, by late 2000, to be threatened by economic woes and transparency issues. The return to the front pages of the Pinochet case, and Lagos's firm position that the courts would have the final say, helped end the honeymoon period with the right and created new tensions in the military high command.

Although they found Lagos highly popular personally, Chileans faulted Lagos's government for Chile's soaring unemployment, price increases, and charges of government corruption. In October municipal elections, Lavin won 61 percent of the votes against 29 percent for Marta Larraechea, Frei's wife, in the contest for the Santiago mayoralty, one of 300 that were up for grabs. Although the ruling coalition won 51.2 percent of the votes nationwide, the opposition – capitalizing on the government's inability to bring down a 10.7 percent unemployment rate – raised its number of mayors' seats to 163 from 126, out of a total of 341, and garnered 40.9 percent of the vote. Both the army and navy threatened that Pinochet's trial would jeopardize the initiative to determine the fate of the "disappeared." In late December 2000, the Chilean top court dropped homicide and kidnapping charges against Pinochet, but appeared open to the possibility of trying the former dictator for responsibility in the 1973 "Caravan of Death" in which 73 political prisoners were executed.

Political Rights and Civil Liberties

Citizens can change their government democratically. The 2000 and 1999 elections were considered free and fair, although low registration rates among young voters are a cause for concern. The Pinochet extradition crisis showed that Chile's democratic transition requires constitutional reforms to ensure civilian control of the military. Failure to eliminate some of the most egregious features – such as nine appointed senators, four named by the military – of the 1980 constitution imposed by the Pinochet dictatorship heightened the sense of emergency sparked by the retired general's October 1998 detention in London.

In 1990, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission was formed to investigate rights violations committed under military rule. Its report implicated the military and secret police leadership in the death or forcible disappearance of 2,279 people between September 1973 and March 1990. However, in 1978, the Pinochet regime had issued an amnesty for all political crimes, and the supreme court, packed by Pinochet before leaving office, had before 2000 blocked all government efforts to lift the amnesty.

Chile's civilian governments have investigated hundreds of human rights cases involving incidents occurring after 1978 brought to civilian courts. The investigations have resulted in a handful of convictions. In June 1999, a civilian judge decided that five senior military officers – members of the so-called Caravan of Death that summarily executed 73 political prisoners in several cities – should be tried for the crimes committed in 1973. In 1999, the army commander, General Ricardo Izurieta, began a dialogue with human rights groups not only to clarify the fates of many disappeared political activists, but also to identify those military officers who had ordered their torture and death. In September 1999, the supreme court ratified a lower court ruling that the amnesty declared by Pinochet's regime was not applicable to cases in which people disappeared, because the absence of the victims' bodies meant the crimes committed were kidnappings, not murders. Thus the crimes continued beyond the 1978 deadline established by the regime and could be prosecuted.

In Chile, freedom of expression is compromised by a variety of factors, most important of which are constraints on access to sources of information, although scores of publications present all points of view. Radio is both public and private. The national television network is state-run, but open to all political voices. Self-censorship regarding Chile's recent political history is common, although less so than in earlier years. Judges may withhold information on cases being tried before them. Military courts can bring charges against civilians for sedition, which is defined as any comment that may affect the morale of the armed forces or police. As the offended party is the armed forces, the military tribunal plays the role of victim, prosecutor, and judge. In 1999, a Chilean judge ordered the immediate confiscation of all copies of The Black Book of Chilean Justice, a well-researched exposé of corruption in the judiciary. Its journalist author was forced to flee to the United States. In 2000, an alternative press law was rejected by the Chilean lower house.

The Carabineros, uniformed national police, have primary responsibility for public order and safety, and border security. The civilian Investigations Police are responsible for criminal investigations and immigration control. Although they are formally under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Defense, which prepares their budgets, both organizations are under operational control of the Interior Ministry. The police are often the targets of complaints about brutality, and the due process rights of detainees are not always respected.

Chile has a strong trade union movement comprising 10 percent of the workforce, but one that has been hamstrung by a Pinochet-era labor code that restricts forming unions, prohibits collective bargaining at the multicompany level, and allows companies to hire replacement workers during a strike. Anti-union practices, such as layoffs, threats and surveillance by private security forces, are subject to weak sanctions that are rarely enforced. In 2000, Lagos promised to strengthen collective bargaining for union workers and to bring local legislation in line with International Labor Organization conventions establishing the right of workers to organize and to engage in collective bargaining.

Government corruption is comparatively minor, when compared to corruption in other governments in the region, although military graft has been allowed to remain largely uninvestigated. A scandal in May involving compensation payments to government officials helped Lavin win the Santiago mayoralty.

Chile has around one million indigenous people, nearly all of them Mapuches. A 1993 indigenous rights law guaranteed that Indian lands could not be embargoed, sold, expropriated, or taxed. New development projects, promoted by the government, continue to threaten Mapuche lands in the south of Chile, where highly charged land disputes have resulted in the region's being dubbed the country's "little Chiapas," in allusion to Mexico's trouble southern state. At the end of the 1990s, Indian rights groups, which have few ties to traditional political parties, became increasingly radicalized in the face of government inaction.

In March 2000, one of Frei's last acts in office was to persuade the comptroller's department to overturn its own previous finding and authorize construction of the Ralco hydroelectric complex on the Bio-Bio river, a move bitterly opposed by indigenous communities. Upon taking office, Lagos began to make good on a campaign promise that the "Indian question" would receive priority attention. In May, he announced the creation of a "historical truth and new deal commission" to consider the needs of Mapuche communities. He also announced that the Mapuche will be given 370,000 acres of government-owned land, one third of it before the end of 2001. There was evidence that some of the acts of violence alleged to have been committed by Indian activists were actually the work of agents provocateurs in the pay of the rapidly expanding logging companies.

In 2000, Lagos appointed five women to his 16-person cabinet. Violence and discrimination against women and violence against children remain problems.