San Francisco
Chronicle
Chronicle Sunday
Insight
From
She seeks justice
for a war crime committed 30 years ago
Sunday,
June 22, 2003
Page D-1
Rachel
Barron
URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/06/22/IN245887.DTL
Zita
Cabello-Barrueto remembers well the Chilean
commander's look of pure shock when he opened his front door to the 56-year-old
professor and resident of
She said
she wasn't there to blame him. She just wanted the truth.
The
commander let her in.
"Sitting
in front of people whom I know have blood on their hands" was the most difficult
thing, said Cabello-Barrueto, a small woman who wears
wire-rimmed glasses.
But the
testimony she gathered during that and other trips to
The
center was involved in the July 2002 lawsuit that found two former Salvadoran
generals liable for $54 million for the torture of three civilians.
"We were
so close," she said of her brother, who was two years her senior. "He really
protected me. So now I'm protecting his memory."
Winston
Cabello was working as director of economic planning for two of
A day
after the coup, Cabello was arrested. Five weeks later, on Oct. 17, 1973, he and
12 other prisoners were taken from their cells, tortured and executed, according
to reports by the Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation, a
committee appointed to investigate abuses during the military rule.
The next
day, local papers published the official account: 13 prisoners shot and killed
while trying to escape.
Not
until July 1990, eight months after Pinochet lost presidential power, were the
bodies exhumed from a single shallow grave and given to their families for
funerals. Some of bodies bore bullet wounds, while others had been slashed with
knives, according to forensic reports conducted by the Chilean government.
"My
father's spirit died with my brother," said Cabello-Barrueto. "He stopped talking. Never
played the guitar again. His pain was always a reminder that we had to do
something."
Now,
nearly 30 years later, Cabello-Barrueto, her mother
and two siblings are suing Fernandez Larios for torture and unlawful killing.
The
Center for Justice and Accountability believes Fernandez Larios was a member of
the military campaign known as the "Caravan of Death," the name given to the
squad of military officers who systematically carried out acts of torture and
killing in October 1973. The center alleges that the caravan is responsible for
the murders of at least 72 political prisoners, including Cabello.
In 1987,
Fernandez Larios pleaded guilty to being an accessory to the 1976 car bomb
assassination of Allende's former foreign minister,
Orlando Letelier. The explosion took place a few
blocks from the White House. Fernandez Larios was accused of trailing Letelier to identify his car and daily routine in
The
Cabello family instigated the civil suit under two federal statutes -- the Alien
Tort Claims Act and the Torture Victim Protection Act -- that allow claims
against individuals linked to human-rights violations that occurred outside the
Fernandez
Larios denies that he tortured and murdered Cabello. His lawyer maintains that
his client worked as Gen. Sergio Arellano Stark's bodyguard, as the general and
other officers delivered the execution orders.
Steven
Davis of the law firm Boies, Schiller and Flexner in
"We
seriously question the veracity of Diaz's testimony," said Joshua Sondheimer, litigation director for the Center for Justice
and Accountability. And at trial, he said, evidence will contradict it.
"There
is no denying that Fernandez Larios was a member of the Caravan of Death," said
Sondheimer. "We will show that he was an active
participant in everything the Caravan did."
The
greatest challenge of litigating human rights cases, such as the Cabellos' suit, is finding and persuading witnesses to
testify. Even after decades have passed, Sondheimer
said, people either are too scared of repercussions or don't want to revisit the
past.
Cabello-Barrueto decided to track down witnesses herself.
She
began by getting hold of more than 30 volumes of testimony collected during a
Chilean government effort to build a case against Pinochet for violating human
rights. She went through every page, taking detailed notes whenever Fernandez
Larios' name was mentioned.
With
list in hand, she started knocking on doors.
Since
the lawsuit was filed in February of 1999, Cabello-Barrueto has traveled to
Although
none of the former commanders were willing to testify even now, she said some
agreed to talk to her.
"If you
approach them in the right way and you give them that little bit of opportunity,
they want to tell part of the story," said Cabello-Barrueto. "They want to go down into history not as
criminals. They want to justify somehow their participation."
A priest
confided in Cabello-Barrueto that he had heard
confessions and offered advice to 15 people minutes before Arellano's military
squad executed them. But he didn't want to testify.
"You can
tell the truth," she told him. "And you're a priest. Don't you value the
importance of the truth?"
"You
have to know," he responded, "even Jesus didn't always
say the truth."
"Maybe
Jesus did not have the opportunity to tell the truth the way I'm giving you the
opportunity to do it," said Cabello-Barrueto.
He
wasn't persuaded. He told her, "I'm going to pray that you get the truth that
you want."
To which
she said, "Well, I'm going to pray for you that you change your mind."
Rachel
Barron is a freelance writer working toward a double master's in journalism and
Latin American studies at UC Berkeley.