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UNDER CONSTRUCTION...
"Where were these thousands and thousands of men who throughout the country have become our killers, our jailers and our torturers? What did they do? What did they look like? How is it possible that we never noticed them, that we did not suspect their resentment, or their future ferocity? Did they live in a world apart?
It is easy to understand now - unfortunately too late - that they lived among us. That they were fellow citizens, neighbors, sometimes our own relatives, and, on occasion, even our friends. We would come across them each day in stores, in public buses, at the movies and never did we associate them with the terrorist vanguard of the ultra-right, and if they spoke against the government (UP) or if they sounded their pots and pans or organized their rallies "to save democracy," we responded with good-humored insults. Perhaps they are not the same ones who have fired upon us or beaten us, but the military would not have gone as far as they did without them. They were the military's masses,.. they cowardly expressed their ferocity by denouncing their leftist neighbors, washing the city walls clean of graffiti calling for revolution, gave away their wedding rings to fund the Junta...
How did we fail to understand that they who appeared so inoffensive an enemy... comprised an ultra-right front that had a plan of war and extermination?"
Excerpt from Tejas Verdes: Diario de un Campo de Concentracion
by Hernan Valdes, Coleccion Septiembre, LOM Ediciones - CESOC, 1996.
This page will contain information on the individuals and institutions that perpetrated the human rights violations under the dictatorship.
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