MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Chilean Army accepts responsibility for human rights abuses.

Chilean Army Commander in Chief General Juan Emilio Cheyre Friday accepted the military's responsibility for human rights abuses committed during the 1973-1990 dictatorship.

"The Chilean Army has made the difficult but irreversible decision to assume institutional responsibility for its role in all punishable and morally unacceptable deeds of the past" said General Cheyre in reference to the document "The Chilean Army: the End of a Vision," published in Friday's edition of Santiago's La Tercera.

"Human rights abuses are never, and in no case, ethically justified" he highlighted. Chilean president Ricardo Lagos interviewed in Rio do Janeiro praised the courage of General Cheyre and said that "as President of Chile I'm filled with satisfaction and pride that the Army signals with undisputed clarity that regarding human rights abuses, never and in no case, are they ethically justified".

The document states that during the 17 years of Augusto Pinochet's regime the Cold War was in full force and the prevailing view was that in that struggle all procedures and means were legitimate; a view from which Chile and its military were not exempt.

"The military acted with the absolute certainty that its conduct was correct" the document states, underlining the context in which the 1973 coup took place, but the general stressed that nothing justifies such abuses.

General Cheyre added that his words must not be interpreted "as a mitigation of what happened, but as one more effort in the quest for truth, because truth sets you free and brings peace to the soul". However such truth should be complete and always understood in the historical context in which events took place, he underscored.

President Lagos underlined that with this historic step, the Army consolidates the integration process to "the democratic Chile of our days and reinforces its condition of permanent institution of the Republic, in which all Chileans see themselves recognized". "This is an active and significant contribution to the building of tomorrow's Chile in peace".

The Army's Commander in Chief message comes just days after the government released a high-level commission's report on politically motivated imprisonment and torture during the military regime. The committee chaired by Catholic Bishop Sergio Valech confirmed some 35,000 instances of torture under the Pinochet regime, refuting the claim that systematic human rights abuses did not take place in Chile.

In 1991 the Rettig Report revealed that 3,197 people were killed by the dictatorship, of which 1,197 simply disappeared. Human rights groups claim that more than 800,000 Chileans were jailed, tortured or forced into exile during that time.