U.S. Human Rights Stand Helps Chile’s Opposition in Drive to Unseat Pinochet

SANTIAGO, Chile — The Chilean opposition has taken up Washington’s condemnation of human rights violations in Chile as a weapon in its struggle to unseat President Augusto Pinochet.

And as a new political season approaches with the end of the Andean summer and the reopening of the universities, the sound of terrorist bombs and tear-gas grenades is being heard with renewed intensity.

For the broad-based civilian opposition to Pinochet, it has been a summer of good signs. Jean-Claude Duvalier was brought down in Haiti and Ferdinand E. Marcos in the Philippines, and the United States proposed a United Nations resolution attacking the Pinochet dictatorship.

The draft resolution, presented to the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva last week, urged an end to torture and the “excessive use of force by security and police authorities.” It called for “a legal and political structure based on the consent of the governed.”

On Friday, the commission adopted by consensus a resolution similar in language to the U.S. proposal. It called for an immediate end to torture by Chile’s security authorities.

The U.S. draft resolution was based on a report prepared by former Costa Rican Foreign Minister Fernando Volio. Working in Chile for the United Nations, with the permission of the Pinochet government, Volio found what he described as a serious and disturbing human rights climate.

The American delegate in Geneva, Richard Schifter, assistant secretary of state for human rights, explaining the U.S. move, told reporters that “we go public when it appears that our quiet entreaties have not been adequately responded to.”

Regarded as Enemy

Harry G. Barnes Jr., the U.S. ambassador in Chile, is chary of being described as an enemy of the Pinochet government, but that is how some of its supporters regard him. For Barnes has not gone out of his way to hide his feelings since he arrived here from India late last year.

“We have to be as clear as we can about what we stand for--democracy and human rights,” he said in an interview.

This is disconcerting to an authoritarian government already alarmed by Washington’s evident satisfaction with developments in Haiti and the Philippines. And on Friday, the Reagan Administration sent to Congress a policy statement that put into plain language what could be inferred from its stand in those countries: The statement declares U.S. opposition to all dictatorships, of the right as well as the left.

“There has been a change in U.S. policy; that is a fact,” Chilean Foreign Minister Jaime del Valle said a day earlier. He said the Pinochet government, which just celebrated the fifth anniversary of a disputed constitution that gives Pinochet power for at least three more years, will undertake to explain the errors it sees in the U.S. position.

The prospect of a new American attitude is pleasing to the opposition, which has failed repeatedly to have any effect on Pinochet.

“We have seen the re-sprouting of the spirit of Jefferson and Lincoln,” Gabriel Valdes, president of Chile’s largest political party and a persistent U.S. critic, told a cheering crowd of Christian Democrats this week. “After Haiti, after the Philippines, the conscience of the world has turned toward Chile. It is Chile’s time, the time of the final choice between dictatorship and democracy.”

Valdes also sounded a note of caution, saying: “The dictatorship will not fall like objects fall because of the laws of physics. It will not fall through the work of third parties. No one can do our work for us.”

Valdes echoed the call of other opposition leaders for popular mobilization of the sort that proved effective in Haiti and the Philippines--work stoppages and street demonstrations. Such action has been undertaken frequently since Pinochet came to power, but they have usually brought quick repression by the security forces. Earlier this month the police used clubs and tear gas to break up a crowd of about 1,000 people, mostly women who were nominally observing International Womens’ Day.

With the protest-related violence has come increasing terrorism that is usually ascribed to the well-organized Communist Party. There were 1,647 bombings and 154 fatalities in 1984 and 1985, by government count. Terrorist bombs interrupted electric power in Santiago this week.

So far the public protests have failed to move Pinochet, who has said he despises all politicians but Communists the most. Still, for many in the opposition, public protest is now the only alternative to surrender.

Communists Excluded

Last August, at the behest of Cardinal Juan Francisco Fresno, 11 political parties and movements ranging from the socialist left to the conservative right proposed a “National Accord” in an effort to establish the ground rules for restoring democracy. It was signed by representatives of the non-Marxist 80% of the electorate, and it pointedly excluded the Communists. Implicit in the proposal was that Pinochet would remain in office until 1989, but Pinochet flatly rejected it.

“If there are no grounds on which we can talk, then the opposition is pushed toward confrontation,” said Sergio Molina, coordinator of the accord at the cardinal’s request. “There is no other option. The government is provoking it.”

Even the possibility of increasing violence is enough to shatter the fragile alliance that forged the accord. Eleven organizations put their names to it, and of the two most conservative, one will not support mobilization and the other will not take part in further discussions as long as the opposition uses violence.

In political circles it is universally accepted that Pinochet, now a healthy 70, intends in one way or another to stay in power beyond 1989. For the moment, at least, he probably lacks the necessary military support to stay on beyond his present term, but there is no indication that the armed forces are anxious to jettison Pinochet before then.

Whether renewed confrontation will drive key military leaders away from Pinochet or closer to his hard line in defense of their institutions is hotly debated within opposition parties.

Either way, even with Washington more openly on their side than ever before, few opposition leaders look for Pinochet to leave soon. Perhaps the most realistic assessment is for a hardening of the present impasse and with further polarization.

Ricardo Claro, a prominent conservative commentator who opposes Pinochet, said he fears “a year of increasing violence without any solution at the end of it.”