The chill of Chilean justice
By Alejandra Matus Posted Fri, Dec 1 2000
As I write a new article about this story, which I have told a hundred times, I search for words that haven’t lost their meaning. Each time I tell my story, I do so thinking that it will be the last time, that I will write my next column in my native Chile. But once again here I am. I’ve been living in exile in the United States for a year and a half, and although I’ve built up hope with each step, reality comes close to crushing it.
This wasn’t what I had in mind when I attended the April 1999 launching of my second book, The Black Book of Chilean Justice (El libro negro de la justicia chilena). I am a simple journalist, one who is reluctant to get involved in political causes. I am more comfortable in my role as someone who observes and records reality. I’ve always liked this profession, especially when I can sit in the corner of a room and watch life unfold before my eyes, or when I can jot down a pair of words on a piece of paper and later tell the citizens of my country — or what used to be my country, I should say now — what I have seen. That was what I did with The Black Book of Chilean Justice, a six-month investigation that recounts the observations of an inconspicuous witness. It’s also an immersion in the history of the Chilean judicial system. I did my best to stick to the facts in the book’s six chapters. If I planted any sort of thesis in those 350 pages, it would be that the judicial system in Chile has never been independent, no matter who is in power.
There are plenty of facts to back up this thesis. First, there was the Chilean Supreme Court’s dramatic obedience to Gen. Augusto Pinochet and whatever his administration said about human-rights abuses. Second, there was Pinochet’s degrading use of the Supreme Court during his years in office (1973-1990), which historians have all but ignored in their analysis of Chilean history. And, of course, there are instances of corruption, abuse of power, nepotism and ignorance.
All of this, I repeat, came from the perspective of a journalist who is more adept at describing facts and human behavior than espousing abstract analysis. I’m a journalist motivated only by a certain sense of professional duty. However, my work led to a serious crime in the eyes of the Chilean courts. They called it a crime against national security.
On April 14, 1999, less than 24 hours after the public presentation of my book, civil-police agents, equivalent to the FBI in the United States, arrived at Editorial Planeta, the publisher of The Black Book of Chilean Justice. They brought a tiny piece of paper empowering them to enter the building but not offering reasons for the confiscation of the first edition of my book nor for the prohibition of reprinting it.
The general editor of Editorial Planeta, Carlos Orellana, called me at the apartment where I was staying to tell me the news. We agreed almost instinctively to notify the press. The company’s general manager, Bartolo Ortiz, accompanied the police agents to Planeta’s warehouses. Waiting for them were camera crews and reporters who captured images of employees hauling out boxes of books to turn over to the police. Those images circulated all over the world and provoked heated discussion about Chilean politics. People thought it was unacceptable that after nine years of democracy, the authorities were confiscating books in Chile as the Spaniards did during the Spanish Inquisition. But that wasn’t enough to stop the fury of Servando Jordán, the Supreme Court justice who accused me of offending him, or the diligence of the prosecutor in charge of my case, Rafael Huerta.
Almost immediately after receiving Orellana’s call, my brother Jean Pierre, who is a lawyer and professor of law, called to advise me of the severity of the situation. He told me that authorities had accused me of violating Chile’s National Security Law. According to the law, anyone who libels or defames any of Chile’s principle authorities, including the Supreme Court justices, can face up to five years in prison.
My brother urged me to flee the country before a detention order kept me from leaving for a long time or destroyed my personal and professional plans.
Along with my boyfriend, Jorge Junco, who is a U.S. citizen, we packed up our belongings as fast as we could and headed to the airport. We bought plane tickets, and without enough time to say goodbye to our families and friends, we went to Buenos Aires, Argentina. We waited there for 10 days until all the commotion, which I thought was temporary, died down. However, I soon found out that the controversy wasn’t going to taper off, and I had to move to Miami, where I’ve been for a year working as a staff writerfor El Nuevo Herald, the local Spanish-language paper published by The Miami Herald.
A lot has happened since I left Chile. The editors of Editorial Planeta, Orellana and Ortiz, were put in jail for two and a half days and were accused of the same crime that I had been accused of until the courts finally determined that only I could be charged with such a crime. In the United States, I filed a lawsuit against Chile before the Organization of American States’ (OAS) Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which I hope will entail a punishment for Chile for this flagrant violation of freedom of expression and the right to be informed. I also requested political asylum by alleging that the fate that awaits me in Chile is unlawful and persecutory. In record time, almost a year ago, I was granted asylum.
Journalism organizations around the world, especially those in the United States, have sent letters of protest to the Chilean government. The person in charge of freedom-of-expression issues for the OAS, Santiago Cantón, visited Chile to review this case. Still, nothing has been sufficient to put my book back in circulation, nor can I return to my country without the threat of imprisonment.
The Chilean courts have rejected each and every one of the proposals that my publishers and my brother have made. Huerta retired, but his successor hasn’t changed his position, and he won’t even let me know the grounds for the accusations. The only possibility for a change is a new piece of legislation that would repeal the National Security Law, which is considered anachronistic and antidemocratic by international jurisprudence.
Ex-President Eduardo Frei, who was the Chilean head of state when my book was initially banned, seemed to agree with these assertions about the National Security Law. His ministers said last year that what was happening to me was unfair and should change. However, he didn’t adopt the necessary measures that the OAS ordered him to, and during an event in Washington to discuss this issue, a representative from the Chilean government tried to discredit my complaints. Frei’s administration presented a bill that would have repealed Article 6b of the National Security Law I’m accused of violating, but at the same time, his government fortified similar laws that accomplish the same objective as the article does. Frei’s administration ended last year, and his proposal got stuck in the congress.
Ricardo Lagos, Chile’s current president, has been explicitly more empathetic toward my situation. He personally called me when he was still a presidential candidate to tell me that his government would do its best to change Article 6b so that it would be possible for me to return to Chile and that the absurd censorship of my book would finally come to an end. Yet Lagos’ proposal, which was attached to a press law that has been discussed for 10 years, was killed in the congress, and a second proposal looks likely to fail as well.
What remains certain is that the books confiscated a year and a half ago are still locked away in a police warehouse because some judge in Chile says that my book offends him and, therefore, should be banned. These days I’m glued to my computer screen, to e-mail, to the phone. I feel as if I were suspended in an immutable reality, receiving and distributing information about my situation and the limited freedom of expression in Chile.
Instead of resuming my role of interviewer, I’ve assumed the unwanted role of protagonist. From my living room, I’ve been the spokesperson for a cause that seems to have as much support as it has obstacles. My life during the past 18 months has been dedicated to keeping the spotlight on my cause and to blocking out icy moments of indifference. My personal plans have changed time and time again because they’re subject to the ups and downs of legal proceedings, petitions and commitments that I’ve taken on since the banning of my book.
However, I know I can’t separate myself from this reality. I can’t even describe how much I miss my friends and family, but I also know that giving up now would only make the possibility of reuniting with them in Chile even farther away. I know that while my book is banned in Chile, I will have to continue reinventing the meaning of words so that this case isn’t forgotten, so that it’s not just one more assault on the freedoms of Chile’s fragile democracy.
If The Black Book of Chilean Justice remains in a police warehouse, all my work will have been in vain. That’s what the abusers are betting on. My silence would be their winning card.
—Translated by James Reed