CHILE The Repression of Women under the Military Dictatorship
Chile is a Latin American country with a population of 10,000,000. It is a country divided by class where the women are suffering and have suffered the repression of poverty which is imposed upon the people by the ruling class.
In September, 1973, a military coup supported by the national bourgeoisie, assisted and financed by the CIA and multinational companies, took power in Chile. President Salvador Allende and thousands of women and men who resisted the coup were assassinated.
The ruling class considered that the military coup and the dictatorship that followed were justified because the people, women and men, — workers, peasants, slum-dwellers, white-collar workers, students — had been fighting for freedom from the economic exploitation and dehumanization which capitalist society had imposed upon them.
The dictatorship removed the people's political rights and suppressed their trade union, judicial and economic rights. But the ruling classes, their military lackeys and international allies, have not been totally victorious. The people's desire to win their liberation is still very strong and they have rebuilt from scratch their political assassination within the resistance.
Political consciousness is repressed by prisons, torturers, and threats of death. Right from the beginning of the dictatorship, women and men were arrested, thrown in makeshift detention centers and subjected to the same treatment, the only differences being in the way sexism is used.
In two and one-half years, the junta is refining its system of torture imprisonment and assassination. A secret police has been created, the DINA, with unlimited powers. At their disposal is a network of secret prisons and concentration camps throughout the country.
Political repression always has two stages for its victims. The first is in the secret prison, where the prisoners are massed together and subjected to interrogation and torture. The are kept there on a pitifully meager diet, sometimes days, sometimes months (journalist Gladys Diaz Armijo was held for three months), and there are many who never leave. There was the case of the 119 "desaparecidos", among them 21 women, whom the junta pronounced dead and out of the country in July, 1975; these "desaparecidos " are prisoners whom the junta does not admit to having arrested, yet the Council of Churches Committee for Cooperation for Peace in Chile has been keeping a careful and detailed account.
The time spent in the secret prison is the most degrading brutal period of physical and mental torture. Here the prisoners live under constant threat to their physical and mental integrity; threats against children are made to put pressure on the prisoners, a method that is used in the extreme against women. Sexual lascivity and aggression is another weapon used against the women. There is no rest: night and day the guards and torturers take turns working on the prisoners,
Once the prisoners have sufficiently recovered from the physical tortures, and they are lucky, they are recognized as being political prisoners and are then transferred to the concentration camps or to the ordinary prisons.
The only concentration camp which now has a section especially for women in Chile is Tres Alamos in Santiago. Since December, 1974, the number of women detained in Tres Alamos has never been less than 100. They have the right to receive weekly visits and to a higher quality of food, thanks to the women's organization within their prison section; they have fixed times set aside for sleeping at night and most have their own bed. But the guards are always present and always watching. The threats, punishments and arbitrary actions by the camp authorities continue as always. Regulations restrict the times the women can leave the cells, their topics of conversation, songs (songs are now forbidden), etc.... Any violations of the rules, real or imaginary, are punished with the suspension of visiting rights, restrictions on the pleasanter activities of the women, solitary confinement in filthy cells, and return to the secret prisons. The possibility of being returned to the prisons where they have been tortured is a constant threat to which all the detainees are exposed. The camp is extremely small, without external windows, hot in summer and cold in winter.
The fate of those women held in normal prisons is practically the same. The guards try to turn the ordinary prisoners against the political prisoners through lies and deceit. The political prisoners eventually undergo a farcical trial and afterwards must live condemned by this "justice".
Women have been detained as hostages for their husbands, sons and daughters; even worse, the authorities detain or threaten to detain their children as hostages. This isn't all; the wives of political prisoners frequently lose their jobs and suffer the hardship which follows. In the minds of employers in Chile, it is a stigma to be the wife of a political prisoner.
The repression to which the people are subjected includes all women, not only those involved in the resistance movement but also those who show their solidarity with their class, and those who profess to neither know nor care anything for politics. The violent nature of the economic crisis and the police state affects everyone. (01460)
Great Britain "Women's Campaign for Chile"