CHILE;feminists and other women struggles

July 27, 2020 Women Survivors of Torture Under Pinochet Fight His Grandniece's Appointment as Women's Minister

Macarena Santelices. (Ministerio de Agricultura - Chile via Creative Commons)

SANTIAGO — Marcia Scantlebury, 75, still suffers chronic neck and back pain from the torture she endured during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. “When they torture you with electricity,” she recalled, “your body jumps, like a fish.”
In a US-backed coup in 1973, Pinochet, a military general, seized power from democratically-elected Marxist President Salvador Allende. Allende was killed and his supporters were immediately targeted. And, in the stretch of the 17-year dictatorship that followed, more than 33,000 people were imprisoned in detention centers or concentration camps — 94 percent of those political detainees were tortured.
Scantlebury was a member of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR), a group heavily influenced by the Cuban Revolution, which orchestrated clandestine meetings during the dictatorship to coordinate resistance. Pinochet’s regime suppressed left-wing opponents through exile, torture, and forced disappearance, and Scantlebury worked on the MIR’s “front line” helping the persecuted flee the country. She was 30 years old when she was detained.
Scantlebury said she was subjected to electrocution on the most sensitive parts of her body. “The main torture is the vagina,” she told Women Under Siege. “It is the wettest part of the body, which conducts the most electricity.”
She described the pain as horrific. “I hoped I would lose consciousness, as it would have been a way out. But I never did.”
Pinochet died in 2006, before any of his crimes could be brought to trial.
While Chile continues to process the violent history of the dictatorship — for example, through museums of memory — approximately a thousand former opponents of the Pinochet regime are still listed as missing. And, decades on, court cases against human rights abusers remain unresolved, with ex-military officers pending trials while others have fled Chile to evade prosecution.
Many Chileans, especially torture survivors like Scantlebury, believe the human rights abuses have not been adequately confronted, allowing Pinochet’s legacy to remain intact.
“Although a lot has changed, there is so much more to do,” said Scantlebury. “It’s evident there is no justice in Chile.”
On May 6, Chile’s painful political past was again brought to the fore with the controversial appointment of Macarena Santelices, Pinochet’s grandniece, as the new minister for women’s rights and gender equality. But after just 33 days, in response to the collective furor at her appointment, Santelices stepped down from her role.
Announcing her resignation, she tweeted: “The day when women’s rights are not political is the day we can all move forward.”
Prior to her appointment as women’s minister, she had praised the “good side” of the dictatorship even as she condemned the human rights violations that took place during that time.
Santelices belongs to the Independent Democratic Union (UDI), a party known for its right-wing ideals and close links to Pinochet’s regime, which forms a part of President Sebastian Piñera’s coalition Chile Vamos.
The UDI has been critical of national human rights organizations, accusing the Memory Museum, dedicated to the torture victims of the Pinochet dictatorship, of left-wing bias that “did not tell the whole story.”
In the past, Santelices had argued that the dictatorship improved the country’s economy and stimulated positive change in the country: “We cannot deny the positive side of the military regime,” she said in a 2016 interview.
During her short stint as women’s minister, activists and feminist groups called for her resignation, claiming not only that she lacked experience but also that her appointment erased the memory of the atrocities that took place during the dictatorship.
Sexualized violence was an institutional and systematic method of torture during Pinochet’s regime, particularly utilized to humiliate and abuse female political prisoners. Torture included being beaten, raped, and burned by cigarettes, and having electric shocks administered to the breasts and vagina while prisoners’ hands and feet were tied.
The National Commission for Political Imprisonment and Torture, which was established in 2003, said that 33,221 individuals were detained, of which 27,255 people were officially registered as victims of torture. Nearly all of the 3,406 female victims suffered sexual torture.
Last year, the Chilean government revised the National Human Rights Plan and removed a commitment to create a permanent commission that would assess cases of victims of political torture, dealing yet another blow to Chileans awaiting justice.
For those who were tortured, who were exiled, or whose family members were disappeared during the dictatorship, the government’s links to the past regime are painful — especially with Pinochet’s relative in a political role to protect the rights of women.
“The feminist movement during the dictatorship was very different from what we see today,” said Coca Rudolphy, 76, an actress who was detained and tortured at the beginning of the dictatorship. She was imprisoned for over a year for hiding a fugitive.
Rudolphy explains that, unlike today, political women were considered immoral by the state for not fulfilling the conventional domestic expectations of women, receiving what she called a “double punishment.”
“First we were terrorists,” she said. Then, “we were libertine prostitutes with no values.”
Cristina Navarrete was studying medicine in Santiago when she was arrested in 1974. As a student activist opposed to the regime, she was forcibly disappeared for a month — during which time her family didn’t know whether she was alive — and later moved to a prison where she was incarcerated for over a year. “The sexual torture was particularly against women,” Navarrete, 67, said. And she was not spared.
When Navarrete was first arrested, she was held for two weeks at a detention center nicknamed “Venda Sexy” (“Sexy Blindfold”), the notorious home of a German shepherd dog that security forces had specifically trained to sexually abuse women.
“In that place, the main practice was violating and raping women,” said Navarrete. “They had the dog. It was a horrible place.”
She said the gendered violence was a clear expression of “the patriarchal male chauvinistic society.”
“When we were in prison, we were treated incredibly violently — with physical and sexual violence, but also with names denoting an element of male chauvinism,” she said. “They couldn't accept women involved in politics.”
It’s a history that remains embedded in their lives. “When you still have people who don't know where their family members are, for example, and many legal processes still open, it makes this past feel very recent,” said Carolina Rocha Santa María, a Chilean researcher studying responses to human suffering, at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. “It’s a current pain.”
“It’s a very difficult relationship that I have with my own country,” said Navarrete, who has lived in England since 1976. “They ask for people like me to forget and move on, and then they bring somebody who is the great-niece of Pinochet, and who made that comment. How can you move on?”
“I have a case open against my torturer,” said Rudolphy. “I don’t care if he goes to jail. If they find him guilty of violating human rights, for me, it ends there.”
“There is this reluctance to condemn human rights violations,” said Navarrete. “It’s like a parent that doesn't love you.”
Many of these violent practices remain visible today. In Chile’s 2019 social uprising against inequality, human rights groups condemned the military and police’s brutal tactics used to repress protesters, including sexual assault.
“Women were beaten up; they lost eyes; some were raped or abused [by security forces]; and they weren’t defended,” said Rocha Santa María. “These are human rights violations. That already shows continuity from the dictatorship — that these practices haven’t ended.”
Feminist groups have been fighting against this legacy and the treatment of women for decades. On International Women’s Day in March, more than a million women took to the streets in support of women’s rights. Last year saw the explosion of El Violador Eres Tu, a feminist chant that boldly condemned patriarchal structures and specifically referenced Chilean police violence against women.
Activism among women’s groups in the country led to Santelices’ swift resignation. Despite their inability to protest on the streets during the pandemic, criticism spread on social media and influenced the public’s perception of Santelices, demonstrating the force of today’s solidarity.
“I think the feminist movement knows our actions will take place in spite of the state,” said Rocha Santa María. “Most social movements, and specifically feminists, have learned that we cannot rely on their [government’s] support, but that doesn’t mean we won’t demand the protection we deserve.”
The voices of survivors are heard and felt by the younger generations of women who fought against Santelices’ appointment and forced her resignation. It is an intergenerational show of solidarity, testifying to the power and importance of cultural memory in the women’s movement today.

July 27, 2020 | Naomi Larsson, Charis McGowan

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