An Interview with Viviana Diaz
Chile Has Not Forgotten

By Chris Ney

met Viviana Diaz in 1991 while researching a master’s thesis on Chile’s Sebástian Acevedo Movement Against Torture, a human rights movement that used direct action to protest torture under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. It was the second time I had been in Chile; the first was in 1988, when I was a human rights observer during the plebiscite that ended the junta and restored democracy to Chile. Last November, when I came back to Santiago as a visitor, I saw Díaz again and conducted the following interview with her (in Spanish).

In the Peace Park where the Villa Grimaldi concentration camp used to be, a wall of remembrance for the camp’s victims. Photo by Allison Ney.

That was a few months after Díaz had become president of the Agrupación de Familiares de los Detenidos-Desaparecidos—the Association of Families of the Detained and Disappeared—following the sudden death of its former president, Sola Sierra, from complications after surgery. The AFDD had long been viewed as one of the most daring components of Chile’s human rights community; since the 1998 arrest of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in London, the organization—and Díaz in particular—had become international spokespeople for the effort to extradite Pinochet to stand trial for torture and crimes against humanity. This conversation took place while Díaz , the AFDD and the world waited for a final decision about the extradition from British Home Secretary Jack Straw. On March 2, Straw ruled Pinochet unfit to stand trial and allowed him to return to Chile, where he faces dozens of charges in the Chilean courts.

To begin, tell me a little of your own story and how you became involved in the Agrupación.
Well, my father, Victor Díaz López, has been detained-disappeared since May 12, 1976, the date on which security agents of the Pinochet regime found him after searching for 32 months. At the time of the military coup on September 11, 1973, my father was Subsecretary General of the Communist Party and National Director of the Central Unica de Trabajadores de Chile [Chile’s central labor union], so he was sought immediately and had to begin living clandestinely. We did not see him during those 32 months, but we knew through third parties that he was well, that he was in Chile, and that he relied on us not to do anything that would lead the authorities to him.

‘Imagine that! I have spent half my life looking for my father.’ Viviana Díaz tells her story. Photo by Allison Ney.

Until that time in May when someone advised us by telephone that he had been detained by an operative of the DINA [the junta’s intelligence service]. Someone who knew where he could be found communicated with agents of the DINA, and about 25 agents arrived. According to the testimony of people who witnessed the event, the agents interrogated him and beat him in that house where they found him. From there they said they were going to take him to a detention camp known as Cuatro Alamos, but he did not arrive there. People who were detained at another camp, Villa Grimaldi, reported that [he arrived there] and remained in solitary confinement for many months in a place inside Villa Grimaldi which was known as the Tower. That was the place for the prisoners the regime considered most dangerous, most subversive; the treatment that those prisoners received was the most horrific. A witness who saw him at the end of the first month said he was in very bad condition. He had been brutally tortured—they hung him by his wrists for many days, and they burned his chest with a blowtorch.

We went to the Tribunals of Justice and asked for an interview with the president of the Supreme Court, who at that time was José Maria Izaguirre. We told him everything related to the tortures. He said to us, “What an imagination you have. These things don’t occur in Chile. You are lying.” We went to the Vicaría de la Solidaridad [the human rights arm of Chile’s Catholic church, established after the coup], and they offered us legal assistance. Through them we submitted the first recurso de amparo [analogous to a writ of habeas corpus] but it was rejected [as were subsequent recursos] with the response that the Ministry of the Interior gave to the Tribunals of Justice at that time: That the person on whose behalf the petition had been filed had not been arrested, nor did there exist an arrest order against him. Yet my house had been raided many times by the military forces looking for my father, and on more than one occasion I had been shown the arrest order for him. So when they said that the order did not exist we knew they were lying to us.

That had such an impact on me. When I left the Tribunals I promised myself at that moment that I would struggle and do everything within my reach to get justice in Chile someday. In some parts there are still people who do not believe us, or they act like they don’t believe us, when we talk about [places like] Villa Grimaldi. They say that such a place did not exist and that these things don’t happen in Chile.

Little By Little
How did you get involved with the AFDD?
At the Vicaría we were greeted by other families who had also lost one or more of their loved ones. During the first months, my mother and I resisted joining them because we could not accept that prisoners could disappear after being arrested. It took a lot of time for me to accept the reality. We went running from the hospital, to the police stations, to the jails, to the concentration camps that existed; we made the same rounds that many other families had made before us. And little by little, we began to incorporate ourselves into this organization, the Organization of Family Members of the Detained-Disappeared. We acted together in hunger strikes and street demonstrations. Today it is easy to go into the street and do any kind of demonstration, but before, it was a genuine risk, a true audacity.

When did the demonstrations start?
We began to go into the street in 1977. In that year we did the first hunger strike in the office of CEPAL [the Economic Commission for Latin America, a U.N. agency based in Santiago]. In ’78 there was a much larger strike in response to Decreed Law of Amnesty 2191 that was Pinochet’s law of self-pardon—during all these years it has been the principle obstacle to justice. Our hunger strike lasted 17 days and received international solidarity. After the coup many Chileans went into exile. The doors of Europe opened for Chileans, so in about 100 cities of Europe and Asia and Africa there were Chileans who went on the hunger strike in solidarity with us. All of the mobilizations that we did helped our country because until that moment they doubted the existence of the problem. They said that we were the supposed families of the people who supposedly disappeared in strange circumstances.

How old were you when all this happened?
When my father was detained I was 23 years old. Imagine that! I have spent half of my life looking [for my father].

Given this very sad story, how do you maintain hope and the energy you need to give to the Agrupación?
When you search for a loved one, a person who was arrested, tortured, murdered and disappeared, who never committed any crime, that gives you the strength to continue searching. I believe that nothing justifies what they did to him or to so many other opponents of the military regime, because a person has the right to dissent. No one can steal that right and take away the life of another. They committed very grave violations of human rights, things so terrible that they cannot remain amnestied. They have to be investigated and punished because these crimes were committed by human beings, by Chileans against Chileans. I have heard so many stories about the detained—for example, the pregnant mothers who gave birth in captivity and no one knows now where the children born in captivity are. What happened to them?

When one sees the other families here, whose children have grown and who now have grandchildren, we realize that much time has passed. Many members of the Agrupación have died; many mothers of the detained have died with the pain of never knowing what happened [to their children], and some of the wives of the detained-disappeared died at the early age of 40 or 50. It is not good for the society, for this country that so many crimes go unpunished because in this way we are permitting the same thing to occur again in the future.

So I feel that it is our duty to continue working. And so the resolution adopted by Judge Ronald Bartle in England is very important to us. He ruled that Pinochet is extraditable and that he can go to Spain and the case of each one of the disappearances of the relatives of the Family Members of the Detained-Disappeared will be investigated.

What is the agenda of the Agrupación now?
The Agrupación has to struggle until there is complete truth and justice in Chile. We want to establish a House of Memory for the future generations so that they know what happened in our country—a center of documentation, a place where students can come and we can exhibit videos, slides, photographs. Because none of what happened is written in the history books of our country. We should leave memories so that they will not be forgotten. The worst that could happen to us is forgetting.

At the site of the ‘Tower,’ a memorial plaque reads, ‘the place of torture and extermination.’ Photo by Allison Ney.

Since the detention of Pinochet in London you have become the international spokesperson for those who want to see him face justice. Is it true that you’ve been threatened again?
Yes. There were always death threats during the dictatorship—more than once I was threatened with death, together with other members of the Agrupación. Despite all of our petitions for [police] protection, we never saw any. But now in the transition [when we’re threatened] we receive protection, a fact which has produced very complicated feelings for me because I cannot believe that in a transition to democracy I have to go everywhere with a carabinero [a member of Chile’s national police force] who accompanies me. At times it’s funny, because before the carabineros detained us and did not walk guarding us.

[Recently] they sent me a letter [that said they would kill me], then they turned the telephone in my house and on and off every 10 minutes. Here at the Agrupación we have new security procedures in place.

So the detention of Pinochet has provoked a strong reaction from the right, but does it seem that Chile has changed much?
For us [Pinochet’s] arrest marked a historic milestone and the greatest achievement of our struggle because we feel that all of the Chilean people have contributed to what the lawyers in Spain accomplished for us. Although Pinochet will return one day, the simple fact of having him under arrest for more than a year in London will be an enormous advance because it serves not only us as Chileans but for all of humanity. It will be an example for the other dictators of Latin America that are accustomed to traveling to Europe without anyone holding them to account.

Arresting the Generals
And after the arrest of Pinochet, justice here in Chile changed a little. There are generals who are under arrest, and so are the former directors of the Central Nacional de Informaciones [which replaced the DINA] and the chief of the Dirección Nacional de Intelligencia del Ejercito [the Army Intelligence Service under the junta] who have been forced to submit to the legal process. The Armed Forces must assume institutional responsibility for their acts and not continue to justify the crimes. At the same time, [they must] stop exerting improper pressure on the government—Chile, as a government, asked that Pinochet be freed for humanitarian reasons when they could no longer claim sovereignty nor territoriality as they had claimed initially when they were not directly defending Pinochet himself. For us it is sorrowful and shameful, that while the world condemns him, the Chilean government defends him. We want him to go to Spain—it is our wish—and in that way we will have advanced.

Have you received support from the people?
The reaction of the people has been very different from when we began. When we began in the street we were very alone. Today we see that the people identify with us, salute us, support us and demonstrate in one way or another their bond with us. They say to us, “We are with you,” and this is very important for us because we have achieved a change in consciousness without ever having had access to significant resources. Television had always been inaccessible for us before Pinochet’s arrest. When they arrested him, the foreign press came here to interview us and then our national television saw that they had an obligation to interview us also. The people began to know us, and when we organized a march, thousands came out into the street. So when they say that Chile has forgotten, it is not true.

WRL’s Disarmament Coordinator, Chris Ney, has visited Chile three times and relishes any opportunity to drink Chilean wine, eat empanadas and listen to the music of Victor Jara.