[Previous entry: "Haiti's Preval Calls on Brazil-Led Forces to Stay"] [Next entry: "Wailers' bassist sues Marleys for '£60m royalties"]

03/12/2006:

"Pinochet-Era Police Center to Become Allende Museum"

SANTIAGO, Chile -- The mansion was used as a domestic spying center by the feared secret police of former dictator Augusto Pinochet. Now it will house artwork and be dedicated to the Marxist foe overthrown by the general's bloody 1973 coup.

The Salvador Allende Solidarity Museum, due to open next month, will exhibit work by the likes of Pablo Picasso, Roberto Matta and Joan Miro.

"This is Salvador Allende's revenge," said Jose Balmes, the Spanish-born director of the museum.

The remodeling of the mansion was a journey through the inner workings of the shadowy agency responsible for many of the dictatorship's worst abuses. Workers found passports, papers with instructions to agents, and diagrams of places under surveillance or targeted for operations.

"In the basement, we found a communications center used to tap telephones around the country," Balmes said. "There was evidence many phones were tapped."

Some of the rooms in the big, two-story house in a middle-class neighborhood near downtown Santiago were used for interrogating detainees, although the place was not a jail, Balmes said.

The mansion served as the Spanish Embassy in the 1950s but then stood empty until the secret police took it over in 1973.

Another large house, Villa Grimaldi, served as a detention and torture center. That site, in a southern suburb of the capital, has been turned into a memorial to victims. Among those held there were Chile's incoming president, Michelle Bachelet, and her mother, Angela Jeria.

The mansion converted into the Allende museum was purchased and remodeled with financial support from the Chilean government and European countries including Spain, France, Germany, Italy and Sweden.

Spy equipment found there is being left untouched, as a reminder of what the house was before, said Balmes, 79, who came to Chile in 1939 to get away from Francisco Franco's dictatorship in Spain. "The place is a memorial," he said.

Documents that the workers found were turned over to Hugo Dolmetsch, one of several judges investigating human rights abuses under Pinochet.

Many of the artworks to be exhibited come from a museum established by Allende in 1972. Artists and intellectuals from around the world, such as Ecuadoran painter Oswaldo Guayasamin and Argentine author Julio Cortazar, contributed.

After the coup, the art disappeared. It was not until civilian rule was restored in 1990 that the collection was traced to a basement at another Santiago museum.
washingtonpost.com


O'Higgins the Liberator Is Reclaimed From the Military
SANTIAGO, Chile, March 9 — Not long after seizing power in 1973, Gen. Augusto Pinochet built an Altar of the Fatherland and had the remains of Bernardo O'Higgins, the hero of Chilean independence, moved there. Chilean democrats have been struggling ever since to wrest O'Higgins from the military and restore his legacy to the entire nation, and on Thursday they finally succeeded.

In an emotional one-hour ceremony at a downtown square just off a boulevard named for O'Higgins and barely a stone's throw from the presidential palace, President Ricardo Lagos symbolically reclaimed "the Father of the Nation" for Chile's 15 million people.

He did so, he said, in the name of "Chile re-encountering its democratic values and traditions" and establishing "a new relationship between civilians and the military."

After delivering speeches beneath a statue of O'Higgins on horseback, Mr. Lagos and Gen. Emilio Cheyre, the armed forces commander, visited the new mausoleum, still smelling faintly of fresh paint and damp granite before it opens to public visits. It was as if the tomb of George Washington were returned to Mount Vernon after being sequestered at the Pentagon for 30-odd years.

The restoration of O'Higgins's tomb to civilian control is the culmination of a series of symbolic gestures that Mr. Lagos, a Socialist who leaves office on Saturday, has made during his six years in office. He began by reopening a side entrance to the palace that had often been used by Salvador Allende, the only other Socialist to govern Chile, and allowed the public to move through the main entrance and courtyard.

Then, just before the 30th anniversary of the Pinochet coup, a statue of Mr. Allende was unveiled on the main square that is just behind the palace, known as La Moneda, where he committed suicide on Sept. 11, 1973, after air force planes bombed it. As a parting gesture, Mr. Lagos plans this week to dedicate a small plaque inside the palace to officials killed with Mr. Allende in the coup.

"A lot of my friends died, either there or a few days later," Mr. Lagos said during an interview last weekend, asked about his fondness for such symbolic acts. The common thread, he said, is "to be able to recover a piece of the nation's history" but in a way that "does not divide Chileans again, but unites them."