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Why Would Anyone Celebrate the Death of Margaret Thatcher? Ask a Chilean
Why Would Anyone Celebrate the Death of Margaret Thatcher? Ask a Chilean
Dave Zirin on April 9, 2013 - 1:17 PM ET
Never have I witnessed a gap between the mainstream media and the public quite like the last twenty-four hours since the death of Margaret Thatcher. While both the press and President Obama were uttering tearful remembrances, thousands took to the streets of the UK and beyond to celebrate. Immediately this drew strong condemnation of what were called "death parties," described as “tasteless”, “horrible” and “beneath all human decency.” Yet if the same media praising Thatcher and appalled by the popular response would bother to ask one of the people celebrating, they might get a story that doesn't fit into their narrative, which is probably why they aren't asking at all.
I received a note this morning from a friend of a friend. She lives in the UK, although her family didn't arrive there by choice. They had to flee Chile, like thousands of others, when it was under the thumb of General Augusto Pinochet. If you don't know the details about Pinochet's blood-soaked two-decade reign, you should read about them but take care not to eat beforehand. He was a merciless overseer of torture, rapes and thousands of political executions. He had the hands and wrists of the country's greatest folk singer Victor Jara broken in front of a crowd of prisoners before killing him. He had democratically elected Socialist President Salvador Allende shot dead at his desk. His specialty was torturing people in front of their families.
As Naomi Klein has written so expertly, he then used this period of shock and slaughter to install a nationwide laboratory for neoliberal economics. If Pincohet's friend Milton Friedman had a theory about cutting food subsidies, privatizing social security, slashing wages or outlawing unions, Pinochet would apply it. The results of these experiments became political ammunition for neoliberal economists throughout the world. Seeing Chile-applied economic theory in textbooks always boggles my mind. It would be like if the American Medical Association published a textbook on the results of Dr. Josef Mengele's work in the concentration camps, without any moral judgment about how he accrued his patients.
Pinochet was the General in charge of this human rights catastrophe. He also was someone who Margaret Thatcher called a friend. She stood by the General even when he was in exile, attempting to escape justice for his crimes. As she said to Pinochet, "[Thank you] for bringing democracy to Chile."
Dave Zirin on April 9, 2013 - 1:17 PM ET
Never have I witnessed a gap between the mainstream media and the public quite like the last twenty-four hours since the death of Margaret Thatcher. While both the press and President Obama were uttering tearful remembrances, thousands took to the streets of the UK and beyond to celebrate. Immediately this drew strong condemnation of what were called "death parties," described as “tasteless”, “horrible” and “beneath all human decency.” Yet if the same media praising Thatcher and appalled by the popular response would bother to ask one of the people celebrating, they might get a story that doesn't fit into their narrative, which is probably why they aren't asking at all.
I received a note this morning from a friend of a friend. She lives in the UK, although her family didn't arrive there by choice. They had to flee Chile, like thousands of others, when it was under the thumb of General Augusto Pinochet. If you don't know the details about Pinochet's blood-soaked two-decade reign, you should read about them but take care not to eat beforehand. He was a merciless overseer of torture, rapes and thousands of political executions. He had the hands and wrists of the country's greatest folk singer Victor Jara broken in front of a crowd of prisoners before killing him. He had democratically elected Socialist President Salvador Allende shot dead at his desk. His specialty was torturing people in front of their families.
As Naomi Klein has written so expertly, he then used this period of shock and slaughter to install a nationwide laboratory for neoliberal economics. If Pincohet's friend Milton Friedman had a theory about cutting food subsidies, privatizing social security, slashing wages or outlawing unions, Pinochet would apply it. The results of these experiments became political ammunition for neoliberal economists throughout the world. Seeing Chile-applied economic theory in textbooks always boggles my mind. It would be like if the American Medical Association published a textbook on the results of Dr. Josef Mengele's work in the concentration camps, without any moral judgment about how he accrued his patients.
Pinochet was the General in charge of this human rights catastrophe. He also was someone who Margaret Thatcher called a friend. She stood by the General even when he was in exile, attempting to escape justice for his crimes. As she said to Pinochet, "[Thank you] for bringing democracy to Chile."
Why indeed?! My intent is to continue my unapologetic disrespect for this psychopathic reptile. As the street parties have shown, she has been disowned by the human race, and reduced in status to that of a vicious animal. She was reprehensible in life, and thus I give her contempt in death. Funerals and other events to mark the death of a human being are meant to remember the person in life. Don't worry about that. We remember.
33 replies
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<snip>
a) Sexual Violence: A Widespread, Systematic Method of Torture During Chile's Political Repression and its Purpose
Sexual violence was used as a method of torture throughout the country during the dictatorship from 1973 to 1990. It was practiced systematically and institutionally in almost all known detention centers, concentration camps, stadiums and clandestine prisons, such as Villa Grimaldi, the Cuartel Ollague, the underground parking lot of the Plaza de la Constitucion, the National Stadium, the Tres Alamos and Cuatro Alamos Detention Centers, La Venda Sexy (a detention center suggestively nicknamed "The Sexy Blindfold"
, the house at Londres 38, the Air Force's Academia de Guerra, the Cuartel Borgono, the El Bosque Air Base, and the Buin Regiment, and in the provinces, the Tejas Verdes detention center, the navel training ship Esmeralda, and Isla Quiriquina. These are the clandestine prisons most often mentioned by women in the Metropolitan Region interviewed for this study.
Sexual violence as torture was committed by all three branches of the Armed Forces (Army, Navy and Air Force), the regular police (Carabineros), police detectives (Investigaciones), soldiers, intelligence agents, and by guards and civilians involved in the business of repression.
Sexual violence was practiced during all the periods of repression. Both the DINA (Direccion Nacional de Inteligencia, National Department of Intelligence) and the CNI (Central Nacional de Inteligencia, National Intelligence Agency) used animals as part of the sexual torture of women. Their goal was the maximum degradation of the victim and the greatest possible degree of humiliation. According to the women, this was the worst of all forms of punishment and torture.
From September 11, 1973 (the day Pinochet led the military coup) onwards, women were classified as a "dangerous" group because of the challenge they posed to the new social order and the masculine hierarchy imposed by the dictatorship, feminist scholar Ximena Bunster explains? The detention of women, not only for their own political activism but also for their association with politically active men, was a first sign of the gender domination to come. The dictatorship's system of repression specifically targeted women. While only some women were tortured, all women were terrorized. Women who dared defy the dictatorship's model of appropriate female behavior placed themselves at clear risk of reprisal.
This reprisal took the form of sexual violence as torture--a real and symbolic expression of the dictatorship's new mandate for women. According to Bunster, the mother/ wife role in the private sphere was "... the only respectable role for a woman in a society that defines her as inherently inferior to man and from whom she derives her secondary sexual identity as mother, sister, wife or partner." (3)
Sexual violence was used to dominate, control, intimidate and humiliate victims, ultimately robbing them of their female identity. (4) Bunster describes this process as the "double brutalization" of women; the dictatorship socialized "women in a determined manner, only to later use their socialization as a method of torture." (5) It should be kept in mind that the military coup was conceived as a defensive reaction designed to maintain Chile's traditional system and paralyze transformations occurring in the 1960s and 1970s. The coup sought to maintain hegemony by halting transformations in Chilean society, politics, economy and culture and the changing nature of female/male relationships. The dictatorship's solution was to impose gender policies that reconstituted and reaffirmed traditional gender relationships and to enforce this ideology with military force.
The dictatorship exalted one exclusive female identity, which all women were expected to assume: the virgin, the mother-wife, a loyal partner for the soldier, and the female savior of the motherland (a maternal figure for all Chileans). This religious representation of women was accompanied by a series of discursive and control mechanisms--social, legal and, when necessary, repressive--to forcibly shape a new gender order.
During the dictatorship, women were "punished" both literally and symbolically if they transgressed the culturally prescribed gender role. In accordance with the military State's theory of a "counterinsurgency" and the need for "national security," women were either labeled as "enemies" or "the women of enemies," which then justified gender policies that relied on the systematic use of sexual violence to maintain men's dominance over women. (6) Therefore, sexual violence was not merely a repercussion of this system, but a fundamental aspect of its logic.
Sexual violence was used as a method of torture throughout the country during the dictatorship from 1973 to 1990. It was practiced systematically and institutionally in almost all known detention centers, concentration camps, stadiums and clandestine prisons, such as Villa Grimaldi, the Cuartel Ollague, the underground parking lot of the Plaza de la Constitucion, the National Stadium, the Tres Alamos and Cuatro Alamos Detention Centers, La Venda Sexy (a detention center suggestively nicknamed "The Sexy Blindfold"
, the house at Londres 38, the Air Force's Academia de Guerra, the Cuartel Borgono, the El Bosque Air Base, and the Buin Regiment, and in the provinces, the Tejas Verdes detention center, the navel training ship Esmeralda, and Isla Quiriquina. These are the clandestine prisons most often mentioned by women in the Metropolitan Region interviewed for this study.
Sexual violence as torture was committed by all three branches of the Armed Forces (Army, Navy and Air Force), the regular police (Carabineros), police detectives (Investigaciones), soldiers, intelligence agents, and by guards and civilians involved in the business of repression.
Sexual violence was practiced during all the periods of repression. Both the DINA (Direccion Nacional de Inteligencia, National Department of Intelligence) and the CNI (Central Nacional de Inteligencia, National Intelligence Agency) used animals as part of the sexual torture of women. Their goal was the maximum degradation of the victim and the greatest possible degree of humiliation. According to the women, this was the worst of all forms of punishment and torture.
From September 11, 1973 (the day Pinochet led the military coup) onwards, women were classified as a "dangerous" group because of the challenge they posed to the new social order and the masculine hierarchy imposed by the dictatorship, feminist scholar Ximena Bunster explains? The detention of women, not only for their own political activism but also for their association with politically active men, was a first sign of the gender domination to come. The dictatorship's system of repression specifically targeted women. While only some women were tortured, all women were terrorized. Women who dared defy the dictatorship's model of appropriate female behavior placed themselves at clear risk of reprisal.
This reprisal took the form of sexual violence as torture--a real and symbolic expression of the dictatorship's new mandate for women. According to Bunster, the mother/ wife role in the private sphere was "... the only respectable role for a woman in a society that defines her as inherently inferior to man and from whom she derives her secondary sexual identity as mother, sister, wife or partner." (3)
Sexual violence was used to dominate, control, intimidate and humiliate victims, ultimately robbing them of their female identity. (4) Bunster describes this process as the "double brutalization" of women; the dictatorship socialized "women in a determined manner, only to later use their socialization as a method of torture." (5) It should be kept in mind that the military coup was conceived as a defensive reaction designed to maintain Chile's traditional system and paralyze transformations occurring in the 1960s and 1970s. The coup sought to maintain hegemony by halting transformations in Chilean society, politics, economy and culture and the changing nature of female/male relationships. The dictatorship's solution was to impose gender policies that reconstituted and reaffirmed traditional gender relationships and to enforce this ideology with military force.
The dictatorship exalted one exclusive female identity, which all women were expected to assume: the virgin, the mother-wife, a loyal partner for the soldier, and the female savior of the motherland (a maternal figure for all Chileans). This religious representation of women was accompanied by a series of discursive and control mechanisms--social, legal and, when necessary, repressive--to forcibly shape a new gender order.
During the dictatorship, women were "punished" both literally and symbolically if they transgressed the culturally prescribed gender role. In accordance with the military State's theory of a "counterinsurgency" and the need for "national security," women were either labeled as "enemies" or "the women of enemies," which then justified gender policies that relied on the systematic use of sexual violence to maintain men's dominance over women. (6) Therefore, sexual violence was not merely a repercussion of this system, but a fundamental aspect of its logic.
<snip>
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Secrets+revealed%3A+women+victims+of+sexual+violence+as+torture+during...-a0134381844
This is just the beginning. Read the whole study and tell me what you think of Mrs. Thatcher then and whether we shouldn't be remembering her as the horrid woman she was. Remember she was Pinochet's good buddy as were Reagan and Kissinger.
From desaparecidos.org:
During the Pinochet regime, thousands of people were "disappeared" by the security forces. Their families and friends continue to look for them and for answers as to what happened to them and why.
This is a place where to remember the people disappeared in Chile, and where to learn about what Pinochet and his followers did. We appreciate any information that we can add to these pages.
Presentes
List of the Disappeared
The names of the 1198 disappeared, includes pages with pictures and information about some of them
by the Agrupación de Familiares de Detenidos-Desaparecidos - Britain
The 119 Chileans supposedly disappeared in Argentina
Chilenos Disappeared in Argentina
Argentinians disappeared in Chile
Where are they?
Luis Emilio Recabarren Mena is looking for his family
Carmelo Soria Espinoza
Torturers
Criminal Procedure Against Pinochet
List of Agents of the National Intelligence Commission
La organization that followed the DINA
Documents
Rettig Report
Reports on Human Rights in Chile
Documents by Derechos Chile
Voices
Links
http://www.desaparecidos.org/chile/eng.html
OPERATION CONDOR DOCUMENTS
REVEALED FROM PARAGUAYAN
‘ARCHIVE OF TERROR’
Paraguayan Archive continues to yield Evidence of Coordinated Repression among Military Regimes of the Southern Cone
Documents being used by courts from Paraguay, Chile and Argentina, to Europe and the United States
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 239— Part II
(English Version)
Edited by Carlos Osorio and Mariana Enamoneta
Posted – December 21, 2007
Washington D.C., December 21, 2007 – On the fifteenth anniversary of the discovery of the Archive of Terror in Paraguay, the National Security Archive posted Spanish-language documents that reveal new details of how the Southern Cone military regimes collaborated in hunting down, interrogating, and disappearing hundreds of Latin Americans during the 1970s and 1980s.
The collaboration, which became officially known as “Operation Condor,” drew on cross-border kidnapping, secret detention centers, torture, and disappearance of prisoners—rendition, interrogation and detention techniques that some human rights advocates are comparing to those used today in the Bush administration’s counterterrorism campaign.
The selection of documents posted today included uncensored records relating to the pivotal case of Chilean Jorge Isaac Fuentes Alarcón and Argentine Amílcar Santucho, who were detained in Paraguay in May 1975, and whose interrogation under torture led to the decision by Chilean secret police chief Manual Contreras to formalize coordination against the left among the Southern Cone military states. One document posted today for the first time is the list of questions created by Argentine intelligence agent José Osvaldo Ribeiro to be used in the interrogation of Santucho and Fuentes Alarcón in Paraguay. Chilean agents subsequently rendered Fuentes Alarcón to a secret detention camp in Santiago from where he was disappeared.
The Archive also posted a “thank you” note to the Paraguayan secret police from Col. Contreras for the handling of Fuentes Alarcón, as well as Contreras’s invitation to, and supplementary documents for, the first Condor meeting in November 1975—documents found several years ago in the Paraguayan Archive that have been widely used in books about Operation Condor. The posting includes communications between “Condor 1” (Chile) and “Condor 4” (Paraguay), records of meetings between the D-2 of the Paraguayan intelligence service, and officials from SIDE (the State Intelligence Service) in Argentina, and SID (the Defense Intelligence Service) in Uruguay, and documents related to the coordinated efforts to capture Montoneros in Asunción in 1980—among other facets of the Condor coordination during the era of military dictatorships in the Southern Cone.
"These documents provide a historic passkey into the horror chambers of the Southern Cone military regimes," said Carlos Osorio, who directs the Southern Cone Documentation Project at the National Security Archive. "The atrocities they record from the past remain relevant to the debate over the conduct of counterterrorism operations today and in the future."
Since its discovery in December 1992, the Archive of Terror has become a leading source of evidence for international human rights proceedings in courts across the world, as Paraguayan researchers such as Alfredo Boccia Paz, Rosa Palau and Miriam Gonzalez have worked tirelessly to locate and provide documents to lawyers and judges in countries such as Spain, Italy, France, Chile, Argentina and Uruguay. Their book, Es mi informe: los archivos secretos de la policía de Stroessner (This is my Report: the Secret Archives of Stroessner’s Police), first identified some of the most significant documents from this unique collection.
Since 1998, the National Security Archive has worked with the Paraguayan Center on Documentation and Archive for the Defense of Human Rights (CDyA) that oversees the Archive of Terror. The National Security Archive has collaborated with the Center to create a fully digitalized collection of more than 300,000 records—the Digital Archive of Terror (ATD). This unique data base, now being posted in sections on the world wide Web, is designed to facilitate ongoing research on human rights crimes, and the discovery of new evidence on the history of state-sponsored terrorism in the Southern Cone.
SOURCE:
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB239d/index.htm
These aren't just a few crazy rightwing regimes who happen to be friends of Thatcher and Reagan. These mass murderers are part of the BFEE.
Every now and then... 
