Reports

This 60-page report shows how Mapuche defendants charged with terrorist acts face unequal trials for crimes that do not pose a direct threat to life, liberty or physical integrity.

While Chile has taken impressive steps forward on justice and accountability since 1998, the underpinnings of accountability remain fragile. This briefing provides an overview of recent developments.

Chile's record on freedom of expression has improved little since the end of military rule, Human Rights Watch charged in this report. Although the country has made great progress in prosecuting the abuses of the Pinochet dictatorship, the same repressive defamation laws that the military regime regularly employed against its critics are still in use.

As Chile prepares for presidential elections in December 1999, the Pinochet arrest has prompted debate about the human rights legacy of the military. The crisis has also highlighted the undemocratic aspects of the constitution which Chile inherited from Pinochet. In this report, Human Rights Watch describes encouraging developments in Chilean courts during the year since Pinochet's arrest.

On the night of October 16, 1998, London police arrested Gen. Augusto Pinochet. They were acting on a Spanish warrant charging the former dictator with human rights crimes committed in Chile during his seventeen-year rule. The British courts rejected Pinochet's claim that he was entitled to immunity and ruled that he could be extradited to Spain to stand trial.

Since the 1980s, the term “transition to democracy” has been used to describe those processes of political change that aim toleave behind a dictatorial past, a situation of internal armed conflict or another type of radical breakdown of the political orderor absence of the rule of law, and to advance toward the foundation or reconstruction of a democratic system.

President Clinton will begin his Summit trip with an official state visit to Chile. Almost eight years have passed since Chile returned to democratic rule, and during this time the country has benefitted from economic growth unparalleled elsewhere in Latin America.

Under former President Aylwin's four-year “transitional” administration, Chile took notable steps toward consolidating democracy, reestablishing civil and individual rights, and healing the wounds caused by decades of political strife and gross human rights violations under military rule.

When Patricio Aylwin became President of Chile, on March 11, 1990, he had promised to resolve the human rights legacy of over sixteen years of military dictatorship, through a process of exposing the truth about past abuses and seeking justice. President Aylwin's efforts have been hampered by the Constitution of 1980 that defines a form of government that falls short of full democracy.