Chile’s Pinochet Dictatorship at 50 Years: The Lessons for America in One Judge’s Search for the Truth
The coup d'etat of September 11, 1973, Judge Juan Guzman Tapia, and the Rule of Law
Finding the truth in a complicated world where darkness often obscures even the brightest of light is never easy. Fighting to bring the truth out into the light when powerful interests are arrayed against you is even harder.
Before I was a lawyer, I met and worked with a humble, yet larger than life judge in Chile who taught me much about the courage to uncover and hold onto the truth when things are hard. The experience of Chile’s Judge Juan Guzman Tapia can teach America’s legal system much about the coming threats to its independence and the rule of law. In the next few years, our legal and constitutional system will be tested as never before.
Almost a decade ago, I was a law student embarking on an international law work abroad program to Chile. The program, run by a consortium of law schools and funded by the US State Department, offered students the chance to see the rule of law in “development” in modern Latin America, learn the foundations of international law, and participate in the training of Chilean police and lawyers as the nation found its way out of its authoritarian past and into its new democratic future. To put it mildly, this was high irony, given the fact that the Nixon Administration was widely known to have been responsible for encouraging and supporting the coup that wiped the fledgling Chilean democracy out in the first place in 1973 in the name of keeping communism out of South America. Now the United States was trying to band-aid the gaping wound it had inflicted.
But the purpose of the program was hard to take issue with: to help legal systems become stronger and more independent in countries where they had once been intimidated into silence by dictators, military juntas, and strongmen. In these nations, one of the foundations of democracy, the rule of law, had been destroyed for the sake of the centralization of power and authority in one man, one group, one party. Equal justice succumbed to justice for the few and elite. I jumped at the opportunity to be a part of these efforts to develop the rule of law.
By that point I was three-years into law school. But I hadn’t yet understood the stakes of the rule of law, and what it means to live without it in a country at war with itself. And although I couldn’t put my finger on it quite yet, fundamentally I was looking for an example of the highest aspiration of the rule of law and the work of the system: the unbiased search for the truth and justice.
When I met Judge Juan Guzman Tapia, he was in his seventies and had long-since retired from his work as a judge. He was a humble man who graciously invited me into his home to discuss the legal writing I was to do with him, part of my clerkship thesis required by the law school program. We discussed the justice system in his country and the politics of neighboring Argentina and Latin America more broadly. We also discussed the topic of my thesis, namely the legal and constitutional benchmarks along the way towards the strengthening of democracy across the region over the previous 30-years. His fame and apparent wisdom was something that didn’t stop him from chatting with a law student more than half his age as if we were equals. The experiences of his fight for the truth were still present with him, and they had made him who he was.
Nearly three decades ago now, Judge Juan Guzman began his fight to bring to justice members of Chile’s police, intelligence services, and military dictatorship who had committed atrocities including summary executions, forced disappearances, and torture against Chilean citizens and others during and after Chile’s 1973 military coup.
On September 11, 1973, a right-wing military junta seized control of the Chile’s government from the socialist Administration of President Salvador Allende (Human Rights Watch). Shortly thereafter, Allende was dead and his democratically-elected government disbanded, ushering in a decades-long era of illegal repression and human rights abuses perpetrated against broad swaths of Chilean society (Id.) Entire stadiums became execution centers, detention and torture centers run by the military sprang up across the country, and tens of thousands were executed and many others forced to flee (Juan Guzmán Tapia - En El Borde del Mundo: Memorias del Juez Que Proceso a Pinochet. Olivier Bras (2005). Anagrama. ISBN 978-84-339-2570-1). Rumors of Cuban troops and unsupported fears of a communist takeover were used as justification for the coup and subsequent massacres of innocents (The Guardian). The rule of law completely disintegrated as the military government consolidated all power and quashed any dissent from civil society (Id.) The checks and balances of what had been a developing democracy were eliminated, and the judicial system was threatened and cowed into silence and complicity for years despite the murder and repression happening all around the country. Dictator Augusto Pinochet became President for life, and would not cede power for another 20-years (Washington Post).
Into this situation stepped Guzman. At the time of the coup, Guzman had supported the military takeover, even by his own admission toasting Pinochet and his generals with champagne (Juan Guzmán Tapia - En El Borde del Mundo). He would later become a legal aid lawyer, moving up through the ranks of Chile’s legal profession until he became a judge in the mid-1980’s (Id.) Over the years, he had heard but never believed the stories told about the abuses of Chile’s military, the torture and executions en masse. Such stories, he thought, were only the slander of left-wing radicals intent on using lies to undermine the legitimate right-wing military government, a government that had to resort to seizure of power from the socialists in order to save democracy from itself (Id.; BBC). In Guzman’s eyes, these were the saviors of Chile’s independence and society. He would tell himself that an honorable, professional army, such as Chile’s, could never do such awful things to innocent people.
But here was a man with the power to change his own mind in the face of the truth, truly a rare thing. By the time that he had been assigned on the Appeals Court one of the first investigations into the Pinochet dictatorship in the “Caravan of Death” case, the floodgates of his country’s suffering had begun to open for him. Judge Guzman had begun to see the evidence showing that the Pinochet dictatorship had committed murder against and forcibly disappeared thousands of innocent people in the name of national security (Human Rights Watch). In the Caravan of Death, after the coup the military had rounded up thousands of suspected leftists, dissidents, and ex-Allende government officials in a small northern province and forced them to march to their deaths (Id.) Hundreds died, or were thereafter executed and mutilated to send a message of ruthlessness to the rest of the country (Id.)
During months of hearings, Judge Guzman heard the testimony of the victims’ families, government officials, and the recounting of the crimes of the government in open court and for all the nation to witness (Human Rights Watch). Then he made his findings. After seeking the truth, he made his conclusions based on the objective evidence and the law, the truth of the matter, and without regard to politics, bias, pressure, or the threats of violence that were often leveled against him by those in the right-wing (The New York Times). He was the first Chilean justice to seriously investigate the human rights abuses of the Pinochet government (ABC). The vast body of his work resulted in his indictment of the former President Pinochet for crimes against humanity (BBC). In doing so, he dealt a massive blow to the enemies of the rule of law. He vindicated the suffering of those who had lost loved ones and those who had been disappeared.
But more than any of his individual motivations of giving a voice to the voiceless or asserting the independence of the judiciary, Judge Guzman simply sought the truth. This simple but overwhelmingly powerful idea, the notion that there is an objective truth that can’t be ignored, is the idea that drove Judge Guzman. And more than anything else, it is the only idea which is essential for democracy. Truth is objective reality informed by the subjective experiences of each individual, coalescing into one objective telling of events. A democratic legal system, at its best, seeks to find this objective reality from the presentation of differing viewpoints and advocacy. This is finding the truth in action. Often misunderstood, and in our era increasingly contested, this truth is never easy to come by. But democracy and the rule of law cannot survive without it.
On this 50th anniversary of the Pinochet dictatorship’s seizure of power, Judge Guzman’s work, and the experience of Chile’s battered democracy attempting to hold those in power accountable can teach America much about the perils of losing sight of the truth. Where those in power abuse their authority and break the law with impunity, the legal system is the primary means of imposing justice. But where, as in Chile, the nation becomes divided and powerful factions break the rule of law from within, the truth is unattainable. Justice then, will not be done.
If we are to move towards a stronger democracy, now and in this coming century, we would do well to know the example of Chile and Juan Guzman. For where others wouldn’t listen, content to live in fantasy and allow thousands of murdered innocent sons and daughters to remain vanished into oblivion without name, he listened and found the truth. His country is better for it. As I found him, Judge Juan Guzman Tapia was a humble man who taught me much about having the courage to listen. America can be better by his example of unwavering dedication to the truth, no matter the cost.