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Carrying Kissinger's sentiments further than he wanted them to go, Congress passed an amendment to the 1976 foreign military aid and arms sales bill that would have required reports on human rights conditions in countries receiving U.S. aid. President Ford vetoed the entire bill, but the rider's sponsor, Democratic Representative Donald Fraser of Minnesota, says the measure will come up before the White House again early next year.
Next to murder, torture is the most egregious violation of personal rights one human being can inflict on another. Sadly, the practice is almost as old as history. During the Middle Ages, suspected heretics were racked, scourged and burned by representatives of the Inquisition in order to make them recant, while in this century Hitler's concentration camps and Stalin's Gulag Archipelago institutionalized torture and brutality on a scale hitherto unknown. The 1948 United Nations' Declaration of Human Rights condemning torture was one notable reaction of the world community to the excesses of the Third Reich. But torture did not stop. The French used it systematically during the eight-year Algerian War. The British relied on torture to gain information about I.R.A. terrorists in Northern Ireland, while the Saigon regime brutally mistreated suspect Communists throughout most of the Viet Nam War.
Worst Fears. Of the dozens of nations accused of practicing torture today, it is difficult to single out the worst violators. The examples most frequently cited by experts are Chile and Iran.
In the three years since the overthrow of the Marxist Allende government, according to respected church sources, an estimated 1,000 Chileans have been tortured to death by the ruthlessly efficient secret police, the DINA. In one wave of arrests 18 months ago 2,000 people were brought in; 370 have never been seen again. These gruesome statistics confirm the worst fears of many Chileans, that certain suspects are marked first to be tortured—generally for information about their political associations—and then executed.
The torture takes place in clandestine and ever changing places of imprisonment; one center is the Villa Grimaldi in Santiago, a former discotheque. Many suspects who live through their tortures are simply transferred to a detention camp, like Tres Alamos in Santiago. According to one report by reliable groups within the country, there were 85 female prisoners at Tres Alamos as of May; 72 of them insisted that they had been tortured. The most common methods: beating, rape (sometimes by trained dogs), electric shock and burnings with lighted cigarettes.
The DINA is fairly ecumenical in finding victims; former parliamentarians and army officers have been tortured, as well as suspect leftist terrorists. Recounts Carlos Pérez Tobar, once a lieutenant in the Chilean army arrested by the junta after he tried to resign his commission: "I was tortured with electric shock, forced to live in underground dungeons so small that in one I could only stand up and in the other only lie down. I was beaten incessantly, dragged before a mock firing squad, and regularly told that my wife and child and relatives were suffering the same fate."