Chilean torture ship visit to North Vancouver ignites protest

[Judi Lynn]

Chilean torture ship visit to North Vancouver ignites protest
Pinochet-era floating prison to dock in North Vancouver Aug. 5
By Benjamin Alldritt, North Shore News August 3, 2011

WHEN the Chilean naval training ship Esmeralda ties up at the City of North Vancouver's pier Aug. 5, it will bring with it painful memories and complicated emotions for the North Shore's Chilean community.

Known as the White Lady, the four-masted barquentine is the second-largest sailing vessel in the world and an undeniably beautiful ship, but it carries with it a horrific past. Following the military coup in Chile in 1973, the Esmeralda was used as a floating prison and torture chamber by the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. Amnesty International, the U.S. Senate and Chile's own investigations have concluded there were more than 100 cases of imprisonment without trial, beatings, torture and sexual assault on board. A priest, Michael Woodward, is believed to have been tortured to death on the Esmeralda.

Protests have dogged the ship on its training voyages over the years, most recently in Victoria, where the city council called on senior government to deny the ship entry to the harbour.

On July 18, with several councillors absent, the City of North Vancouver's council passed a motion to deny the Esmeralda the formal welcome usually extended to foreign naval vessels. Sponsoring the resolution, Coun. Craig Keating argued that while the Chilean government acknowledges what happened aboard the ship, its navy has not. Furthermore, said Keating, the current captain denied any torture took place onboard during a [e-mail] recent interview in San Diego.

More:
http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Chilean+torture+ship+visit+North+Vancouver+ignites+protest/5198819/story.html

[Judi Lynn]

1. Torture Ship is Chile’s Brand Ambassador

Torture Ship is Chile’s Brand Ambassador
By Supriyo Chatterjee
Wednesday, June 04, 2008

The U.S. Navy is certainly not the first to torture prisoners aboard its ships. It was beaten to that moral wasteland by Pinochet’s Chile and the obscenity is that the graceful tall ship, La Esmeralda, known affectionately as the White Lady, once a torture centre in Valparaiso, is now the country’s floating ambassador. Having just set out on its 54th round the world voyage this year, it will call at ports like Haifa (Israel), Alexandria (Egypt) and Cochin (India) with a crew that for the first time includes Bolivian personnel.

The Chilean Navy was the advance guard of Pinochet’s coup. Soon after the overthrow of the Allende government, naval patrols began scouring the streets of Pablo Neruda’s beloved Valparaiso, asking people, whose names were read over loudspeakers or on the radio, to hand in themselves. Among them was the Anglo-Chilean worker priest, Father Michael Woodward. At first Woodward fled to a friend’s house but returned to his own – which he had himself built – in the working class district of Cerro Placeres after a few days, saying he had nothing to hide. He dismissed the idea of taking help from the British authorities.

Father Woodward was arrested at his home by a naval patrol and taken to the headquarters of the local Carabineros, Chile’s notoriously brutal armed police, where he was badly assaulted. He was transferred to a cargo ship, Lebu, commandeered by the Navy as a holding vessel for the prisoners at Valparaiso and then to La Esmeralda where he was tortured. Close to death, he was taken in an ambulance to the Navy hospital but died en route. The hospital doctors made the risible claim he had died of a heart attack on public highway.

The Navy refused the church’s request that Father Woodward be given a burial. His body was dumped at a mass grave on the edge of the Playa Ancha cemetery in the city. Later that part of the cemetery was built over, allegedly as part of a road building programme, and many bodies were tipped over to the Pacific at that time or burnt by acid by the Carabineros. His remains have never been located.

More:
http://www.zcommunications.org/torture-ship-is-chile-s-brand-ambassador-by-supriyo-chatterjee