In a critically acclaimed documentary, Elizabeth Farnsworth '65 casts a spotlight on a notorious reign of terror—and one man's desperate pursuit to bring the perpetrators to justice.
By Meghan Laslocky '89
Photographs by Max S. Gerber
In 2001, PBS NewsHour correspondent Elizabeth Farnsworth ’65 asked Henry Kissinger why human rights weren’t really at the top of his list of priorities when he met with Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1976. “Why did you not say to him: You’re violating human rights. You’re killing people. Stop it!” she asked the former National Security Advisor and secretary of state. Kissinger punted: “Human rights were not an international issue at that time, the way they have become since. That was not what diplomats and secretaries of states and presidents were saying generally to anybody in those days.” Winning the Cold War, at whatever cost, was the only thing that mattered; in South America, this meant preventing what Nixon referred to as a “red sandwich”—a continent of communist movements anchored by Cuba and Chile.
When Farnsworth posed the question to Kissinger, she did it with her trademark grace and impeccable NewsHour decorum. But when one watches the exchange several times over, knowing that she’s since coproduced The Judge and the General,
a documentary film that delves deep into the Pinochet-era human rights abuses in Chile, one notes how her gently gaveling fist punctuates the question: gesture of a confident journalist or an indication of something deeper, more personal?
Seven years have passed since Farnsworth’s Kissinger interview; 35 years since the U.S.-supported coup that resulted in the death of the first democratically elected Marxist president in history, the installment of Pinochet, and the disappearances of thousands of people who opposed him; and 38 years since Farnsworth herself lived in Chile. Even though The Judge and the General is free of narration and of Farnsworth’s personal experience, it unveils her long-standing determination to document Chile’s human rights abuses—during what was the seminal era and the backdrop of human rights activism.
Just two months after interviewing Kissinger, Farnsworth met Judge Juan Guzmán, the man at the center of The Judge and the General, at a dinner party. The film revisits the “disappearing” of 3,195 Chileans during the first years of Pinochet’s rule, when Pinochet co-opted a disappearances policy known as “Night and Fog” straight out of the Nazi playbook. In Guzmán, she found one man who could poignantly illustrate why the term “human rights” was slow to enter the global lexicon and be the poster boy for what’s known as “the good German” syndrome—a term referring to individuals in any country who remain silent while observing terrible things taking place.
The Judge and the General follows Guzmán—a man who toasted with champagne Pinochet’s abrupt rise to power back
in 1973—as decades later, he painstakingly investigates the cases of thousands of men and women who disappeared in the wake of the coup. A conservative from a military family, Guzmán was assigned in 1998 to investigate the disappearances and Pinochet’s role in them. The film accompanies him as he uncovers the overwhelming evidence of the disappearances and murders of hundreds of people during Pinochet’s rule and gathers the legal ammunition to ultimately indict the former Chilean leader.
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| At the beginning, many considered Guzmán's pursuit a quixotic affair, but by 2007 more than 700 agents of the Pinochet regime had been indicted. |
Day by day, year after year, harvests the evidence: interviews with family members of “the disappeared” and other victims of Pinochet-era torture who survived; gritty exhumations that reveal headshot wounds; crumpled bones resting at the bottom of mine shafts; and watery graves where the only thing that remains of a
desaparecido is a button seared by rust to an iron rail. These are the tiny scraps left by the “Caravan of Death”—the founding act of Pinochet’s dictatorship, when a small group of the general’s specifically appointed loyalists traveled up and down the ribbon of Chile, culling from prisons those to be assassinated: professors; artists; intellectuals; and union, student, and political leaders.
Guzmán brings his own moral complexity to the project: during his investigation, he comes across rejections of the writs of habeas corpus (the petitions challenging unlawful detentions filed on behalf of the desaparecidos) penned in his own hand circa 1974. He was shockingly naïve about the evidence that literally crossed his desk; and in the ’70s when he saw photographs of people who had been shot by the soldiers, he reflects years later, “I honestly thought that they were isolated cases …We couldn’t believe that an honorable army as ours could be involved in such crimes. We thought, frankly, that this was communist propaganda.”
As Farnsworth and her team document in The Judge and the General, decades after he dismissed the significance of those photographs, Guzmán travels from site to site, often in a suit and tie, to see the evidence for himself. At one graveside, as the fragment of a cheekbone of a victim surfaces, Guzmán’s face betrays a tender riot of sadness. “To touch those bones is like working in the most sacred thing a person could leave in this earth after departing,” he says at another point in the film.
The film also traces Guzmán’s reckoning with his own naïveté. When he comes across his own handwriting in the habeas corpus rejections, he reflects on his “good German” role: “I had no authority to reverse those decisions, and so,
I would write the rejections. If I hadn’t done it, someone else would have, but that was the first knocking in my conscience.”
Yet Guzmán does not shirk his own culpability—which perhaps applies to us all. “I myself believe that if I had been a young lieutenant or young captain, and I was ordered to shoot one or more people, I would have shot them,” he confesses. Before launching the investigation, he says, his only experience with evil was through literature.
Farnsworth’s fascination with the “good German” syndrome, she says, was part of what drew her to Guzmán. “Even as a teenager, I was fascinated by how—in a situation of terrible human rights crimes—some would protect their neighbors and others would turn them in. What makes people ignore evil?
In a former life, did this happen to me?” When she first met Guzmán, he was deep into his investigations and had little hope of an indictment of Pinochet standing up in court. “He seemed like a character out of a novel,” she recalls.
Then, after brooding about Guzmán’s story while covering the post-9/11 Middle East for NewsHour, Farnsworth arranged to meet with Guzmán to discuss her idea for a documentary. “He was at a very low point then,” she shared in an e-mail.
“He was the target of smear campaigns by opponents and
was exhausted. I remember that while I spoke with him one afternoon, he received a call from a friend—a Pinochet supporter—taking him to task about something or another.
He listened politely and hung up, taking it in stride, but I could tell the pressures weighed heavily.”
In the film, Guzmán reflects on what he was going through: “Hearing the people tell me how their relatives had been withdrawn from their homes violently, how the courts didn’t respond to the petitions of habeas corpus, made me acknowledge how blind I had been. I would say it opened
the eyes of my soul,” he says sadly.
Farnsworth’s interest in Latin American politics dates to her college years. When she was at Middlebury in the early ’60s, Farnsworth studied the modern European revolutions under Pardon Tillinghast’s tutelage. (To this day, Farnsworth attributes her discipline as a journalist to her training with Tillinghast and the painstaking footnotes he demanded.) Then in 1964, the summer after her junior year, she traveled to Peru, where she volunteered in a clinic in a barriada—a shantytown in Trujillo. There, she helped to measure medications for children and saw the evidence of a botched abortion: blood all over a shanty floor. “The experience had a big impact on me,” she wrote in an e-mail. “One hundred thousand people in a barriada with little access to water or sewage. People pouring out of the Andes seeking better lives on the coast, squatting on land, erecting shacks—you’d see hundreds of new shacks each couple of days—and conditions were appalling.”
Upon her return to Middlebury, Farnsworth shifted her focus from European history to Latin American history, and found herself fascinated by the similarities between modern European revolutionaries and their liberty-and-justice-seeking compatriots in Peru.
Farnsworth then pursued an M.A. in Latin American history at Stanford, where she met her husband, Charles Farnsworth, a law student. Together they went to Peru in 1966, where she worked as a secretary and a teacher while her husband studied tax policy under a Ford Foundation grant. In 1967, they went to Chile for the first time.
“Chile was such a peaceful and easy place after Peru,”
she recalls. “I remember seeing the president, Eduardo Frei, walking without bodyguards. Chile seemed to be more economically developed. It grabbed me because it was so different.”
But the truly personal seeds of The Judge and the General were sown when Farnsworth lived in Santiago, Chile, for several months in 1970, while working on a feature film set against the backdrop of Chile’s political turbulence called ¿Qué hacer? The film was made by a Chilean-American team, including Richard Pearce, later the executive producer of The Judge and the General, and it mixed feature filmmaking with documentary and a score by psychedelic rocker Country Joe McDonald.
Salvador Allende was elected president that year, by a narrow plurality. (Allende won 36.2 percent of the vote, edging out his rival, former president Jorge Alessandri, by 1.3 percent of the vote.) Farnsworth was there for the elections and witnessed first-hand the tense time when the anti-Allende faction were trying to prevent Allende’s inauguration.
After her time in Santiago, Farnsworth spent several years writing about Chile and editing a book on the country. Then came the 1973 coup: Several people she knew, including Jorge Muller, one of the cameramen on ¿Qué hacer? and Charles Horman, the journalist whose story is told in the Costa-Gavras 1982 feature film Missing, died in its immediate aftermath.
At the time of the coup, Farnsworth was living in the Bay Area, working for the North American Congress on Latin America. While she wasn’t surprised by the coup itself—she’d even edited a paper earlier that year that predicted it—she was shocked by its brutality and by the Chilean Army’s involvement in such brutality. When she learned that Americans she knew had been killed, she recognized that the Chilean military, perhaps with help from the U.S., was “out to destroy the progressive movement in Chile and didn’t care who was harmed in the process.”
Richard Pearce, cinematographer of ¿Qué hacer?, executive producer for The Judge and the General and who, like Farnsworth, knew Horman and Muller, sharpens Farnsworth’s personal stake in The Judge and General: “We were all going to be scarred by this to a lesser and a greater extent, but Elizabeth was never able to put it aside. She kept an ongoing relationship to Chile and what was going on with Chile, including her reporting at the NewsHour and before as a freelance writer. It seems to me almost inevitable that she would return to Chile and tell a story about those years.”
"It wasn’t just what happened to my friends,” Farnsworth says. “It was that my government had a role in it.” And, as Farnsworth reported for the NewsHour nearly 30 years later with her interview with Kissinger, the CIA was deeply involved: U.S. government documents released in 2001 indicate that the CIA had a plan to create a “coup climate” in Chile (partly through a credit blockade designed to undercut support of Allende so that the middle class would support a coup); that the CIA sent guns to aid in the 1970 kidnapping of Chilean Army Chief of Staff, Rene Schneider, a constitutionalist who opposed any armed forces intervention that would block Allende’s election; and that after Schneider was killed, the CIA sent $35,000 to the group that killed him. (The CIA maintains that the guns used in the ambush of Schneider in the streets of Santiago were not theirs, and Kissinger maintains that he called off CIA support of the ambush about a week before it happened.) And, while Farnsworth didn’t include this particular detail in her NewsHour coverage, in 1974 the CIA also trained DINA, the secret police created by Pinochet that conducted the disappearances.
From a historical perspective, the tangle of timelines in The Judge and the General brilliantly bookend Chile’s saga. On the front end of the 30-plus years the film documents, it illuminates the beginning of the end of the era Kissinger alluded to, when heads of state didn’t talk about human rights. As Farnsworth explains, events in Chile in 1974 marked the beginning of the human rights movement because the habeas corpus petitions were filed concurrently with the disappearances—the first time in history that there was a systematic effort to take testimonies of victims as repression was occurring. And even though more than 10,000 petitions were rejected, the paper trail established a crucial precedent, and the documentation of the tragedies in Chile and the accompanying publicity triggered human rights legislation and the growth and success of organizations like Amnesty International. Fast-forward to the 1998-2004 period that the film covers, when very meticulous legal work from decades earlier ultimately underpins Guzmán’s 2004 indictment of Pinochet for kidnappings and homicide—arguably one of the human rights movement’s major accomplishments.
Farnsworth remembers the day when the tide turned and Guzmán was finally able to indict Pinochet: “There were rumors swirling in Chile about whether Judge Guzmán would indict [Pinochet], but he gave nothing away . . . we had no idea what would happen. I was walking to work in the morning—in front of Saints Peter and Paul Church on Filbert in North Beach—when the call came from Patricio [Farnsworth’s coproducer and codirector] in Santiago. He had just filmed Juan announcing the decision to indict. Patricio was elated, and I could hear screams of joy around him. I knew then that the indictment would be the climax of the film.”
Pinochet’s indictment led to a cascade of arrests and indictments, including that of Manuel Contreras, former head of DINA—a satisfying denouement in the documentary. “This was an explosion of truth, an explosion of justice, an explosion of memory,” says Carmen Hertz, an attorney long involved in the petitions and the widow of one of the victims, near the end of the film.
Pinochet died in 2006, while under house arrest, but by that time nearly 500 agents of his government had been indicted; 30 had been convicted and imprisoned. The following year, there were 200 more indictments. Today in Chile there are an estimated 120 investigations open related to human rights abuses.
In The Judge and the General, Guzmán considers the role of patriotism, in “good German” psychology, in human rights abuse: “People are sure they are not confronted with evil. They believe that what is happening is good for the country, good for the family, and good for themselves.”
Yet, he says, “A wounded country needs to know the truth.”
Meghan Laslocky ’ 89 is a freelance writer and a producer for KQED Public Broadcasting in San Francisco.