Baltasar Garzón whipped Piñera in an open letter

 
Baltasar Garzón whipped Piñera in an open letter 
"He seems not to understand that the people are not enemies but victims"
The exjuez was in Chile for the Latin American Forum of Human Rights, held between January 23 and 25. His message contains criticism of the judiciary and security forces, and praise of protesters for their "courage and dignity."

By Baltasar Garzón:
Chile in the heart: Open Letter to the People of Chile

Dear Chileans and Chileans:

I write again and this time I am addressing the people of Chile, after the open letter to President Piñera published on October 23 on which, by the way, I have not received an answer.

In that letter I expressed my pain and deep concern about what was happening in Chile, a country with which a perennial bond joins me and for which I feel a special affection. It seemed to me then, and it still seems to me now, that the Government's response to the social outbreak has been absolutely disproportionate, against a town that demonstrates on the street expressing that it no longer supports so much inequality, so much injustice, abuse and corruption.

I also said in that letter, and I have said it in other forums, that the army is not prepared to control public order but to make war, to bend the enemy or destroy it and that when it goes out, things only get worse. . But with stupor I have been able to see how Piñera has tried again and again the intervention of the military. He seems not to understand that the people are not the enemy but the victim, and that the people must be protected and not punished with exceptional measures.

It is paradoxical that this social outbreak took place in a country that - it was said - was an oasis in Latin America and intended to be displayed before the world as a guarantor of the environment to lead a coordinated global response to the climate emergency at COP 25 of the one that Chile had to have hosted. It was not so because Piñera and his government could not allow the leaders of the rest of the planet to see how the executive was unable to manage social demands, giving as the only response repression and more repression against his own countrymen, without any shame.

You will surely know that after that letter I traveled to Santiago de Chile to participate in the Latin American Forum of Human Rights, held between January 23 and 25. I met with associations of victims, human rights organizations and civil society to learn their impressions of what happened since October 18. I confess that it was a very hard day personally and what I have known has increased my degree of outrage. An outrage that has accumulated during these three months, but has already reached a level of stupor in the face of such cruelty, carelessness and incompetence.
Senseless repression

During my brief stay in Santiago, I went to personally check what civil society had transmitted to me through hundreds of messages from Chile, but also from many other countries and from the Chilean community itself in Spain. I went to the Plaza de la Dignidad (ex Plaza Italia), where I witnessed how the public force is not being exercised to control public order and guarantee the right to protest, but to damage, injure and injure those who exercise their right to Freedom of expression The members of the First Line, with whom I had the opportunity to speak in the historic building of the Senate, had exposed me their despair and fear of repression deployed and sustained by the State. In the vindictive act, they lent me a helmet, surrounded me and protected me so that I was not injured myself, during the time in which recklessly, I insisted on verifying the reality of what they had denounced me.

I must admit that I did not know what the guanaco applied to a protest was until I saw a boy flying with his bicycle because of the impact of pressurized water; I didn't even think that the tear gas tube housing would have such an impact on my face until I checked it on one of the young women who accompanied me; or that the fat and acid of its composition, irritate so much; nor that the pellets that empty innocent eyes were shown as sinister trophies so as not to forget the pain ... In the face of it, wooden or plastic shields, the anger contained in impotence and the certainty that one had to be there, between women and men of all ages that showed their determination to face the risks against their safety, with exemplary strength. I evoked there in La Alameda to Pablo Milanés pointing out the crimes of the dictatorship in his song, "I will step on the streets again of what was bloodied Santiago 
.".

Protesting in Chile may well cost you your life or an eye of the face, as in fact unfortunately it has happened and continues to occur. But I am excited to think that despite this high price, hundreds and thousands of people go out to demand guarantees of a better future. The Chilean people are an example of courage and dignity for the entire world. The emotion in writing these phrases is present to me again, as in the Alameda, when I hug and be embraced by hundreds of you. They have all my respect and admiration.

There will be no impunity

I reiterate my solidarity with all the victims, with the families of the deceased and the disappeared, with the sexually assaulted women, with those who have been tortured, with the wounded, with whom they have lost an eye and, of course, also with Gustavo Gatica and Fabiola Campillay to whom the vision has been completely taken away. They will not be forgotten. There will be no impunity. They have my word. It is my commitment.

I never thought that I would return to Chile to witness such a serious social emergency. Nor did I imagine that in the 21st century a government, supposedly democratic, was going to recreate the worst of the fiercest times. I have lived it in the first person and - I must tell you - it is also what is being seen from outside. Piñera, Rozas, Chadwick, Blumel and Guevara are in the sights of the international community. History will not absolve them.

Not for nothing the popular support of the government is of a scarce 4%, a figure low enough to resign and call elections or to carry out a change of direction in the direction that the citizens are asking for. But no. They prefer to hold on to power, they don't care how many more deaths occur, they don't care how many more eyes they have to blind; how many more bodies to torture; how many more women have to be vexed and how many more people have to be jailed. Unfortunately, these complaints are not answered and the hardness is used again to preserve expired privileges; to sow the constituent process with traps, limiting as much as possible the need for profound change that the Chilean people demand. The new norms, instead of guaranteeing freedoms, restrict them and put the penal code before any other option, which leads to impunity for those who repress them.

They are wrong. The effort must be oriented to generate meeting spaces and dynamics of social dialogue that have not occurred so far, returning to the citizenship the role they should have in every democracy.

Your boss is the town, president

I turn to you President Piñera again to say: You are a president, that is, an errand, your boss is the people of Chile. It cannot govern as if the country were one of its companies. You cannot demand to be applauded and supported. Citizens have every right to disagree with you and express it, because the country belongs to all Chileans, not you or the five or six families that are believed to be their owners, who profit from money every month. of pensions and deprive men, women, girls and boys of water.

I am also addressing the prosecutors and prosecutors of Chile, judges and lawyers in general: I have been able to verify with concern that Chilean institutions, including the Prosecutor's Office and the Judiciary, are not generating the necessary trust in citizens, those who do not perceive that there is an act of good faith, but think that other interests are defended and not the legitimate social demands. This absence of connection nodes between society and state institutions causes a level of rejection and confrontation that is a highly dangerous drift.

In this context, and, in the same direction that jurists who defend human rights are doing when trying to limit their complaints to excesses, I ask them not to be pressured, not to allow justice to be instrumentalized, that remain impartial, thoroughly investigate all human rights violations and fearlessly formalize, accuse, judge and condemn those in law, regardless of their position and position. You are currently, in my opinion, the only thing that guarantees that Chile continues to be considered as a country in which the rule of law can be proclaimed. The limit to succumb to arbitrariness is very close and with it the most absolute helplessness for a people very punished for impunity.

Justice is not and cannot be repressive against that people, but it must defend those who need it most against the breaking of the law and the violation of human rights, by those who have more obligation to respect and protect it. It is a requirement of every democratic State of Law.



Repression in Chile leaves hundreds of protesters with eye injurie

I quote here the words that a citizen told me: “The State of Chile has been built under the logic of impunity. Lack of state conviction. There will be no justice for the victims. ” What despair denotes this phrase! What a lack of faith in those who administer the country! This being the case, the protest is understood, it is understood that, when there is no more response than the harsh repression, the people who know their rights demand, in this era of Internet and almost magical technology, the freedoms that they want to snatch away of projectiles in the face or tear gas. Reflect on it.

To General Rozas and to the body of Generals of Carabineros of Chile I say: Do you think it is logical that there have been more than 20 fatalities and about 770 complaints of torture including more than 150 of sexual connotation? Do you think that 405 eye injuries or traumas have been caused in three months or that more than 2,000 people have ended up in prison or that more than 3,600 people have been injured and more than 2,000 of them have been shot by bullets, pellets, pellets and bombs? tear? These are all official figures of the National Institute of Human Rights, creepy figures.

Make no mistake, the perspective that is being given out is that in Chile human rights are being violated at this time, that whoever would have to defend them is not doing it and once again they are the victims, it is society, it is the people the one who is demanding that protection that the institutions do not offer him. If Carabineros de Chile controlled public order and at the same time allowed anyone who wants it to manifest peacefully, the so-called First Line would not exist.

To the colonels, captains, elders and lieutenants, to the sergeants, capes and the simple carabineros I say: they belong to a hierarchical institution, but in accordance with Chilean law and international law, when a superior gives a manifestly illegal order (such as is to torture, sexually assault or vex, shoot the face, strike to harm and in general use force without justified cause), that order cannot be heeded because if it is complied with, criminal liability is incurred. There is no due obedience regarding manifestly illegal orders.

To those who are part of the government of Chile, I say: it is not typical of a democratic government to allow so many abuses and abuses, but rather to take preventive and corrective measures regarding human rights violations. Despite all the reports, both from national and international organizations, such measures have not been adopted or have been insufficient, while publicly endorsing the police chief, who in turn supports the police who violate rights. humans, thus guaranteeing impunity. And in the meantime, who supports the victims? Who gives real and not merely bureaucratic response from the institutions to the violation of their rights? The authorities are only dedicated to preserving the tranquility of a few, while citizens lose it by demanding that they change course towards a more egalitarian and more just country.
 
Government of Chile admits human rights violations in protests

I have been able to verify that those who protest do so because they lack the most essential. What they ask for is human rights, they are economic, social and cultural rights. We are talking about Education, Health and Housing, we are talking about the human right to water, to live with dignity. How will the social reaction not be justified when water is privatized in this country and its agricultural use is put before large plantations to human supply, as the different groups denounced me with evidence, which also identified serious conflicts of interest in members of the government?

Mr. President, what preventive measures is your government taking to avoid the regret of more dead, wounded, tortured, one-eyed or blind people in the coming months? Months that will be key for the future of Chile, with a constituent process underway that is already trying to dynamit the most extreme right that, once again, reveals its true intentions.

The support of the international community

The global human rights landscape today has two aspects, one to develop them progressively, as a product of a growing social conscience in defense of the most vulnerable. The other is reactionary, driven by the extreme right that seeks precisely involution and the return to past positions that we already thought were overcome, of intolerance, discrimination and denial of anyone who is different or thinks differently from them. That inertia of the denial of the extreme right, of coercion, of the absence of justice, of the elimination of rights is a fact that Chile is experiencing. It is fascism that has remained dormant and also seems to have awakened in too many parts of the world.

This is a historic moment in which the international community is very attentive to what is happening in Chile and therefore will continue to support the people in their legitimate social demands and observing and denouncing human rights violations. There is a unique opportunity to build a truly democratic State in common that guarantees equality between men and women, that does not discriminate against their original peoples but that feels proud of them, that stops treating the Mapuche ethnic group as terrorists for demanding their rights That really protects children, that educates without class differences, that takes care of their older adults guaranteeing decent pensions and quality health, in short, it is time to build a State that guarantees the well-being of everyone.

That phrase, Never Again !, that became famous in Argentina and Chile for the struggle of the victims for so many years, will have to be coined again here, because you can not consent to impunity to radiate this part of Latin America again .

Don't forget, Mr. Piñera: your political responsibility is clear. His criminal responsibility is under investigation, after several complaints of crimes against humanity. We hope that the Office of the Prosecutor and the Chilean Courts maintain their independence and impartiality, because there are very good jurists in Chile who know perfectly well that there is criminal responsibility for acquiescence in the face of massive and systematic violations of human rights, and that this responsibility corresponds to the hierarchical superior and to the entire chain of command over those who directly commit the facts, including who ultimately has the supreme command of the country. I did not forget it.

Baltasar Garzón is a lawyer, member of CLAJUD and president of FIBGAR