Chile’s Bachelet Honors Human Rights Victims At Lonquen

[Judi Lynn]

Chile’s Bachelet Honors Human Rights Victims At Lonquen
Written by Charles Pham
Friday, 11 December 2009 04:27
As she leads Human Rights Day celebrations

President Michelle Bachelet on Thursday acknowledged Chile’s past crimes as a major human rights violator during the 17-year military regime of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. The president made the statement during a memorial held at the Lonquèn (30 minutes south of Santiago) and as part of Human Rights Day memorials world wide.

Fifteen people were killed at Lonquèn by Pinochet supporters and then buried in a kiln. The bodies were uncovered in 1978 by a group of farmers. Of the 15 bodies uncovered, four were children.

~snip~
Bachelet suffered her own personal tragedy during the coup. Her father, a member of the military but a supporter of President Salvador Allende, died in 1974 as a result of repeated torture. Later, in 1975, she was tortured and then exiled along with her mother to Australia.

More:
http://www.santiagotimes.cl/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=17837%3Achiles-bachelet-honors-human-rights-victims-at-lonquen&catid=43%3Ahuman-rights&Itemid=39

~~~~~~~~~~~~ NEW KISSINGER ‘TELCONS’ REVEAL CHILE PLOTTING
AT HIGHEST LEVELS OF U.S. GOVERNMENT

Nixon Vetoed Proposed Coexistence with an Allende Government
Kissinger to the CIA: “We will not let Chile go down the drain.”
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 255
Posted - September 10, 2008
Washington D.C., September 10, 2008 - On the eve of the thirty-fifth anniversary of the military coup in Chile, the National Security Archive today published for the first time formerly secret transcripts of Henry Kissinger’s telephone conversations that set in motion a massive U.S. effort to overthrow the newly-elected socialist government of Salvador Allende. “We will not let Chile go down the drain,” Kissinger told CIA director Richard Helms in one phone call. “I am with you,” the September 12, 1970 transcript records Helms responding.

The telephone call transcripts—known as ‘telcons’—include previously-unreported conversations between Kissinger and President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State William Rogers. Just eight days after Allende's election, Kissinger informed the president that the State Department had recommended an approach to “see what we can work out .” Nixon responded by instructing Kissinger: “Don’t let them do it.”

After Nixon spoke directly to Rogers, Kissinger recorded a conversation in which the Secretary of State agreed that “we ought, as you say, to cold-bloodedly decide what to do and then do it,” but warned it should be done “discreetly so that it doesn’t backfire.” Secretary Rogers predicted that “after all we have said about elections, if the first time a Communist wins the U.S. tries to prevent the constitutional process from coming into play we will look very bad.”

The telcons also reveal that just nine weeks before the Chilean military, led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet and supported by the CIA, overthrew the Allende government on September 11, 1973, Nixon called Kissinger on July 4 to say “I think that Chilean guy might have some problems.” “Yes, I think he’s definitely in difficulties,” Kissinger responded. Nixon then blamed CIA director Helms and former U.S. Ambassador Edward Korry for failing to block Allende’s inauguration three years earlier. “They screwed it up,” the President declared.

Although Kissinger never intended the public to know about these conversations, observed Peter Kornbluh, who directs the National Security Archive’s Chile Documentation Project, he “bestowed on history a gift that keeps on giving by secretly taping and transcribing his phone calls.” The transcripts, Kornbluh noted, provide historians with the ability to “eavesdrop on the most candid conversations of the highest and most powerful U.S. officials as they plotted covert intervention against a democratically-elected government.”

More:
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB255/index.htm

[struggle4progress]

1. indigenous instruments and new technologies orchestra - lonquen

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvQl-u6jGpc

[struggle4progress]

3. ... a case could be made that, text aside, percussion has more potential than most instrumentation

to sound viscerally political. Indeed, the piece that came closest to sounding political on the evening was ‘Lonquén’ by the Chilean composer Sergio Ortega. Ortega himself perhaps comes closest to fitting the description of ‘political composer’, having written music for the Chilean socialist movement in the early 1970s, and most famously the anthem, ‘El pueblo unido jamás será vencido’ (The People United Will Never Be Defeated). ‘Lonquén’ was written in response to the discovery at Lonquén in 1978 of dozens of bodies hidden there after the military coup of 1973. It is based on Mapuche music, and is fiercely rhythmical, with angry chanting and blasts on a conch shell. Even without knowing the background to the piece, one feels a powerful sense of anger at injustice. Moreover, the music builds to a climax perhaps suggestive of popular mobilisation ...

Wednesday 21 February 2007
D’you wanna be in my gang, my gang, my gang?
The audience new music needs
Dolan Cummings
http://www.culturewars.org.uk/index.php/site/article/dyou_wanna_be_in_my_gang_my_gang_my_gang/

[struggle4progress]

2. Chile's President Michelle Bachelet (L) comforts a human rights abuse victim whose five relatives -

her husband and four sons - were killed under former General Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship, during International Human Rights Day at Lonquen town in the outskirts Santiago December 10, 2009. Bachelet visited "Los hornos de Lonquen" (Lonquen's ovens) where 15 bodies of opponents of Pinochet's dictatorship were found.
http://cache.daylife.com.nyud.net:8090/imageserve/0b7b18k2RT0OF/610x.jpg
http://www.daylife.com/photo/0b7b18k2RT0OF

[Peace Patriot]

4. Ah, me! It's good of you to make it real, with photos. We need that reality, for events then and now

because our warmongering corpo-fascist media utterly fails to show us the consequences of our government's actions. I am always shocked, for instance, at the hideous callousness of U.S. media and politicians when they mention the death toll in Iraq as being composed only of U.S. soldiers (latest death toll, 4,683) and FAIL to mention the estimated 100,000 innocent Iraqis slaughtered in the first nights of the U.S. bombing of Baghdad alone, and the one million total who have died due to the U.S. war and occupation (not to mention the thousands tortured, and the 1 to 2 million displaced people). Our wars since Vietnam have been "cleansed"--cleansed of the blood and gore of millions of innocents' bodies, cleansed of responsibility, and sometimes hidden in "dirty wars" that the U.S. funded and supported, as with Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Guatemala (200,000 Mayan villagers slaughtered), Nicaragua, El Salvador and many other countries. Currently, the U.S. has a 'dirty war' going in Colombia and growing evidence of one in Honduras. We must not shut our eyes to it. We, as the funders of these horrors, have an OBLIGATION to know what our government is doing, and to oppose it as well as we can, here, in our own battered and nearly destroyed democracy.

Thank you for the photo of this poor, broken-hearted woman, whose entire family was ripped from her by the U.S.-SUPPORTED dictatorship in Chile. There are many thousands more like her in Colombia, Honduras, Iraq and Afghanistan as the result of U.S.-inflicted or U.S.-supported atrocities.

[Judi Lynn]

5. The President and the lady crying have a lot in common. Both lost irreplaceable loved ones

to unimaginable brutality. The lady crying has had to absorb, accept five separate nightmares.

I have heard Michelle Bachelet also lost her fiance who was disappeared.

The anguish in the image of the citizen is clearly with her all the time. It won't be anything she can ever "get over." I hope she will find a bit of peace.

Thank you so much for posting this photo.