Chile: Repulsive honors for a murderer

Elias Vera Alvarez

Clarín

There’s a disgusting effort afoot to rehabilitate Pinochet-era torturers, said Elias Vera Alvarez. Last month, Cristián Labbé, the right-wing mayor of a district in Santiago, held a rally to honor Miguel Krassnoff, a brigadier general who personally tortured people during the 1973–90 dictatorship. Krassnoff is serving 144 years in prison for his role in kidnapping, torturing, and killing scores of leftists. Labbé, who was a police officer during the Pinochet years, claims that his hero has been unjustly convicted for his patriotic efforts in a war against a Marxist enemy. But it was, of course, not a war; it was “an armed force acting against an unarmed citizenry.”

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Labbé, Krassnoff, and their ilk had a “deep hatred” for those who held political beliefs different from theirs. They truly believed that leftists “deserved to be tormented and killed in the most sadistic ways possible,” including by electric shock and dismemberment. Now, in a breathtaking example of doublethink—or outright hypocrisy—Labbé this week condemned victims’ relatives and human-rights activists who protested his event, calling them “intolerant.” Such a “degree of dishonesty and cynicism” can only be achieved by the morally loathsome or the “pathologically deranged.”