CHILE: The masks are falling from the Chilean armed forces. Now that the Chilean army has finally uttered a loud mea culpa for its use of torture and for the other atrocities it committed during the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet from 1973 to 1990, Chileans are wondering whether the navy, whose record was at least as bad, will have the moral courage to follow suit.
Setting aside earlier arguments that torture never happened and, if it did, it had been the responsibility of a few bad soldiers, General Emilio Cheyre last week made a clean breast of it. As commander-in-chief, he declared the army as a institution had been responsible for what he called the "punishable and morally unacceptable events of the past".
He even admitted the army's role in the murder of its former commander-in-chief General Carlos Prats whose car was blown up in Buenos Aires on the orders of General Pinochet a year after the military coup of September 1973.
Cheyre added that it would henceforward do its best to ensure such activities which, he said, could never be ethically justified, will never happened again.
As if to underline the change of tack, he announced the disbanding of the Army Intelligence Battalion and its replacement with a new "Military Security Group".
The general made his decision under the shadow of the report of the Nation Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture which is due to be presented to President Lagos later this month. The commission was set up last year to establish the facts about the dirty war in Chile and decide who should qualify for small cash payments for their sufferings.
In his statement last week, Cheyre made specific mention of the report and claimed that the army had given its complete co-operation to its preparation.
With or without army collaboration, the commission, headed by Sergio Valech, a 77-year-old former auxiliary bishop of Santiago, is likely to reveal much more about Pinochet's dirty war than any so far produced.
The army chief's move has come as a nasty shock for the navy. The naval commander Admiral Miguel Angel Vergara will be faced with a full catalogue of the misdeeds of the navy.
Pinochet's whole coup in 1973 was kindled by a mutiny by senior naval officers in the port of Valparaiso who toppled their legitimate commander, loyal to the civilian government of President Salvador Allende, replacing him with one of the coup plotters.
In a well-timed body blow to naval prestige, politicians of the left are now calling for the navy to confess the truth about the sail training vessel Esmeralda which, despite official denials, is known to have been used by the navy as a torture centre.
This four-masted ship, launched in Spain in 1951, is the sailors' pride and joy and is constantly sent off with a crew of cadets to show the Chilean flag in foreign ports. Senior naval officers are desperate not to have to make such a confession.
The publication of the Valech report will certainly be delayed until President George Bush has left Chile. He is due in Santiago for the November 19th-21st summit of the leaders of APEC group of countries of Asia and the Pacific. His encounter with President Lagos may be sticky. Last year Chile, a temporary member of the UN Security Council, stubbornly held out against pressure from Bush and Tony Blair to accept their views on Iraq's 'weapons of mass destruction'.