the judgment does few days in which qualified itself Eduardo Frei Montalva’s death as a murder, has shaken public opinion and returned to question the institutional, political and moral consciousness of Chilean society. Not only in relation to the crimes of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, but also the cultural average of acceptance or rejection of the people in relation to the facts of that Government, given the way in which many have reacted to the fact.
After 19 years of a difficult and counter judicial inquiry, which had to deal all possible obstacles in the investigation of a fact criminal, such as destruction and concealment of evidence and a generalized complicity of silence of their authors, accomplices and accessories after the fact, the examining magistrate – thanks to their determination and perseverance – managed to rebuild domestic and political ecology in which occurred the cruel death of the former President, while receiving “medical care” in the clinic Santa Maria of Santiago.
Handed down the sentence, we are witnessing a new Act of bad conscience, with the emergence of arguments that mitigate the results of the judicial investigation, and an elliptical shape to express a denial of this serious crime.
That they point to the statements of lawyers and commentators when they imply that it has not arrived to a legal truth, for them pristine and timeless, in which little or nothing considered that they had to pass to power decades difficult to put the puzzle together, with influential people and important institutions trying to prevent it, as it was the case of the medicine Faculty of the Catholic University of Chile and several of its renowned doctors and authorities.
Acting in the social and as an expression of a negligent subjectivity, the guilty national conscience still hiding evidence, denies access to information and relativizes: “judge not arrived to irrefutable facts,” said some. Not identified exactly what poisonous substance found in his body (but found all the efforts of the perpetrators so that they do not detect them) was that “really” took life and not determined, the sentencing, who gave the order to kill him, they have also said. Forgetting that in the criminal justice system often the killings must be tested by assumptions, there is no other possibility, to the extent that the judge reached the conviction that there was a punishable and who participated in it, either as authors accomplices or accessories after the fact, which here actually took place.
Without prejudice to the necessary judicial efforts by reaching the greatest possible legal certainty in the process of Appeal who have decided to confront the parties, something essential is that it is perfectly accredited that the assassination was organized and carried out nurturing of the voluntary complicity of members of the elite, cultural and ideologically, he supported the dictatorship. It is not here gunmen violent and brutal agents – which by the way also there were – but an assassination committed by people fine, educated, professionals of high level, capable of producing poisons and toxic substances of high danger and complexity, move in select environments such as the clinic Santa Maria, and generate isolation and helplessness of the victim, exactly there where it believed it would be cured.
Volunteer executioners are to run a crime system, to which concur to be part of the power and have the confidence of this.
As played by the Group hechor, in which there are people very close to the former slain President and his party, the Christian Democrats, remembers the German debate on knowledge, tolerance or ignorance that German society had about the Holocaust and the claim that this was possible by the “complicity active and voluntary of thousands of ordinary Germans in the largest criminal enterprise of the century: the extermination on an industrial scale of European Jews by the Nazi dictatorship”. Which, in the opinion of Primo Levi, an Auschwitz survivor, indicated that “the monsters exist, but are few in number, to be truly dangerous. The most dangerous people are normal, officials willing to believe and Act, without asking questions”. The “banality of evil”, it was called Hannah Arendt.
Judicial activity was a particularly difficult investigation, because it was something that almost no one wanted to talk about, including several members of the family of the victim, and resembles a struggle for truth in the middle of a conspiracy of silence.
The murder of Frei Montalva largely has the entire burden of the shakesperianas political tragedies. A bit of King Lear by tensions in the family, and much of Macbeth, as the story revolves around the power, the dangers posed by political action, betrayals between friends, in a vicious politics, filled with physical damage environment moral and psychological, in this case caused by the dictatorship.
Like all historical drama in development, there is still space so that someone tell the truth and is expressly granted the fact that this assassination is a homicide qualified, may commit under the circumstances that took place by political and social control exercised by the dictatorial Government of the time and the political and doctrinal adherence received from those who were their volunteer executioners.
In which there should be no error, is that the murder of Frei was a homicidal intelligence operation by the secret services of a State of national security and that is the classic example of how operates a military dictatorship. In it, members of the elite wet is hands, while the domineering, dictatorial socialite images and media, acted as a cultural Horde unpunished, creating ambiguities and false truths. And that now, again, it’s spirited his responsibility, putting doubt on the social evidence of the murder. This is not the only result of some passive accomplices, but voluntary torturers of the dictatorship, returning to act.
