The Pinochet Case
Directed and written by Patricio Guzmán
First Run Icarus Films
110 min, 2001
Showing at Film Forum September 11th - 24th, 2002
Published on THE THING (reviews)
Victoria is looking through her bag for the picture of her son. It is a large bag, cluttered with medicine and makeup, with all of the things a woman's purse can accumulate over the years. She finds the laminated photo, kisses it, and warmly pins it to her chest. Her son, who went missing after September 11th, is her "saint," and for her the picture is a shrine. She is radiant with his memory, and perhaps one day Victoria will learn what exactly happened to her son. More than 3,000 people died or went missing after that day in September when planes rained terror on her country's most cosmopolitan and vibrant city. The images are still lodged in everyone's memories: powerful explosions, black plumes of smoke, fleeing civilians. That country's democracy, shaken and irrevocably scarred, has never been the same since.
Victoria's pain, like that of her compatriots, began 29 years ago on September 11th, 1973, when General Augusto Pinochet was installed as the leader of Chile in a barbarous, US-backed military coup. Patricio Guzmán, a young, inexperienced Chilean filmmaker, was documenting the political prelude to the coup with a small, hard-working crew. On the 11th of September, amid the dropping bombs, fleeing Allende supporters, and trigger-happy, jackbooted thugs, the crew found themselves filming the terror-stricken streets of Santiago. All of the filmmakers would be arrested, Guzmán would be imprisoned and later survive the cells of Santiago Stadium, and their 27-year-old photographer Jorge Muller Silva would be murdered in the torture chambers of Villa Gramaldi. With the help of the Swedish embassy and the filmmaker's uncle, the film reels survived, and were assembled in Cuba. The film that resulted was "The Battle of Chile: The Struggle of an Unarmed People" (1975-79). It became one of the most important documentaries of the period, and ignited Guzmán's career as a documentarian of the first order.
Guzmán's latest film, "The Pinochet Case", opened at Film Forum on the first anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and on the 29th anniversary of the coup. It is the third installment in a series of films about the coup, and like the second, "Chile, Obstinate Memory," it investigates his country's inability to come to terms with its own history. Now, however, the battle's front line is the European court system, far from the ruined torture chambers and broken lives of Chile. The film alternates regularly between the legalistic intricacies of the trial, and the absorbing intimacies of the victims of Pinochet's fascistic police state. "The Pinochet Case" has been labeled a "legalistic thriller," which may be somewhat accurate, but more importantly it is a judgement in itself, a 110-minute indictment of one of the United States' most adored authoritarians.
Pinochet's health is what got him into his legal trouble, and it is the ex-dictator's health, or something resembling it, that got him out. In September of 1998 the "Senator-for-life" flew to England to visit such "friends" as Margaret Thatcher, and to do a little high-end shopping at Harrods. He was 82 at the time, and back problems sent him to the London Clinic, thus delaying his return to Chile. The Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon took the delay as an opportunity to press the British authorities to extradite Pinochet to Spain to stand trial for crimes against humanity. After a series of rulings, it looked as if Pinochet was to be extradited. Garzon seemed to do the impossible, but Pinochet's lawyers played their wild card: Pinochet was in ill health, they claimed, and was not fit for the rigors of such an arduous trial. They "proved" as much, and Pinochet was sent home, wheelchair-bound, to Chile. Among other things, the doctors explained that the former dictator "could not remember events from the past." They were more correct than they knew.
Interspersed among the legal intrigues and manipulations of the English courts, Guzmán includes the testimonies of the survivors of Pinochet's torture chambers. The former prisoners are introduced by their first names only: we meet people such as Gabriela, Santiago, Gladys, and Victoria. They relate what becomes the too-familiar details of their detentions: electrodes wired to genitalia, routine rapes, psychological humiliation, interrogations that last days, weeks, months. Many of them are coming forward with their stories for the first time, and they speak as if they are giving testimony for a trial that will never take place. Their detentions are, curiously, not given any political framing by the filmmaker; whether they were socialists, communists, journalists, or democratic dissidents does not seem to concern Guzmán here. It is their suffering that he focuses on; their testimonies are overwhelming for their strength, unflinching in their detail, appalling for the hardships they relate.
Many people step forward to speak in the film, but many more do not. Pinochet's lawyers turned down the opportunity to present their client's case. Clinton Administration officials who released crucial information about the coup are mentioned only in passing. Chilean President Ricardo Largos did not respond to Guzmán's requests for an interview. But the strongest silences emanate from the trial's two main players: Garzon and Pinochet. Pinochet is seen on an embarrassing shopping spree, under house arrest, and pompously welcomed by his Chilean lapdogs after his semi-triumphant return to Santiago, but we never hear a word from him. Guzmán shoots Garzon in some silent medium shots and close-ups while working in and around his offices; however, because of the judge's involvement in the trial, he is not allowed to comment. The two figures at the center of the film are to some degree absent and frustratingly untouchable.
Another man of great importance to the coup is also absent: Henry Kissinger. There are many similarities, and shared flaws, between Guzmán's film calling for the arrest and trial of Pinochet, and Alex Gibney and Eugene Jarecki's film about Kissinger, "The Trials of Henry Kissinger." Both statesmen are infinitely dislikable; both have enough evidence against them to almost render a trial moot. But both did not do it alone, and there may be some merit to Pinochet's defense that it was those below him that carried out the atrocities in his country. Where are the heads of the Chilean secret police? Where are the local leaders of Operation Condor? Where is his camarilla of generals and policymakers? Like "The Trials of Henry Kissinger", "Pinochet" is perhaps too concerned with one man; and it is one man who unfortunately seems too old and too slippery to face trial at all.
If you're disappointed that the right-wing roll call is a little short, rest assured, a brief cameo by one Margaret Thatcher makes up for it all. Pinochet, while under house arrest, is visited by his favorite local reactionary for a chat and some tea. It seems that Pinochet is Mrs. Thatcher's favorite as well, and the ex-Prime Minister tells her chum in all seriousness that she is "very much aware that it's you who brought democracy to Chile." What does not come across in the quote is Thatcher's eerily robotic, almost drugged delivery. One can't decide which is worse: Thatcher's mendacity, or her honesty.
And then there are Pinochet's more commonplace supporters. Guzmán has recorded their rationalizations before, and many presented here will be familiar to some viewers. "Pinochet saved Chile from becoming like Cuba," is one defense. "Pinochet did not do so badly when it came to economics," is another. It seems he did not do so badly when it came to murder either -- time and again you hear that over 3,000 dead and "disappeared" is actually not a bad figure for a Latin American dictatorship. There is a new defense invented for the European trials as well: evidently Chilean rightists are a little upset by the "colonists" in Spain getting mixed up in their affairs. If satire died when Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, then irony was dealt a solid body blow by this new defense. It seems the United States doesn't have a monopoly on willful amnesia after all.
And then there are people like Victoria, who are living with nothing but the weight of their memories. They've borne them with anger, with cold detachment, with occasional humor and eruptive emotion. The fact that they are alive is enough of a triumph for many of the torture victims; as one of them patiently explains: "We live. You tried and failed to eliminate us." In that way, yes, perhaps Pinochet failed. But when one thinks of Chile as a democracy that can come to terms with its crimes, things seem less than certain.