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Chile's Bachelet visits site of her own torture
15 Oct 2006 01:41:56 GMT
Source: Reuters

By Manuel Farias

SANTIAGO, Chile, Oct 14 (Reuters) - Chilean President Michelle Bachelet returned on Saturday to the place where she was imprisoned and tortured more than 30 years ago under military rule, paying homage to those who didn't survive.

This was the first presidential visit to Villa Grimaldi, one of the most infamous of the secret detention centers used by Augusto Pinochet's secret police in a brutal crackdown on leftist dissent during the 1973-90 military dictatorship.

Bachelet toured the memorial park built amid the ruins of the detention center, peering at a mock-up of the center before its demolition and stopping at a wall bearing the names of the 229 prisoners who were kidnapped and killed.

She also went inside a replica of the small tower where detainees were often sent before being murdered.

"These are painfully evocative hours, they are minutes of sad memories, at an instant when terror reigned, but above all this is a time to reaffirm life, liberty and peace," Bachelet said during the inauguration of a new theater in the park.

A medical doctor who became Chile's first woman president this year, Bachelet and her mother were held and tortured at the center before fleeing the country in 1975 to exile in Australia and East Germany.

Her father, an air force general, died of a heart attack in a prison camp where he was tortured.

"We were the privileged ones because we were lucky enough to survive ... . Thousands of Chileans, among them my father and so many other loved ones, did not survive prison or torture," the president said.

Bachelet had visited the memorial park before she became president.

During Pinochet's rule, more than 3,000 people were killed and nearly 30,000 were tortured. The Villa Grimaldi Web site describes torture by electric shock, asphyxiation and beatings.

In September, Chile's Supreme Court cleared the way for Pinochet to face possible charges of murder, torture and rights abuses at Villa Grimaldi.

Pinochet, 90, has lost his immunity from prosecution -- a privilege of former heads of state -- in several other human rights cases.

However, the cases have stalled and he has never been either convicted or acquitted. His defense lawyers cite his poor health and say he was not aware of the acts being carried out by his former agents.

Bachelet is a socialist from the center-left coalition that has governed the South American country since democracy returned in 1990.
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PICTURES OF THE YEAR 2006 A student is detained by police during a protest in Santiago, Chile, May 31, 2006. In the largest student movement in the past 30 years in Chile, hundreds of thousands of students from around the country are pressuring the government to cede to their list of demands whose main points are free passes to public transportation, free college entrance exams, more teachers and improved secondary school buildings.