Pictures of US soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners jogged memories of Chilean victims of ex-dictator Augusto Pinochet at a time when thousands were telling their own accounts of torture to a new government commission for the first time.
"What they did to those prisoners is exactly the same as what they did to us. The hood over the head, electric shocks, rape of men and women, sleep deprivation, total humiliation at every level," said Carmen Gloria Diaz, a former political prisoner, referring to photographs that shocked the world of US soldiers laughing as they mistreated captives in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.
Estimates of the number of people tortured in Pinochet's anti-communist purges between 1973 and 1990 range from 50,000 to 400,000. Stories abound of survivors bumping into their tormentors in the grocery store or in elevators and there are dozens of lawsuits against torturers but otherwise little public fuss is made over the issue.
Unlike the Iraq case, news-papers in Chile have never published photographs of torture scenes, perhaps because there are none. A 1991 government report on Pinochet-era abuses studied only cases ending in death.
Now, human rights groups hope Chileans may be jolted out of their complacency by the international outcry over the US abuses but also by the government's first official tally of Chilean torture victims and plans to compensate them.
President Ricardo Lagos created a commission last year to receive testimony from people imprisoned for political reasons and tortured during 17 years of military rule and to report on its findings by August.
Lagos, who was briefly jailed after Pinochet's bloody coup, promised an "austere and symbolic" reparation.
Over 30,000 people -- or about 150 a day -- showed up at the commission's drab office over a six-month period that ended last month to relive their abuse in interviews with lawyers, social workers or psychologists, according to a preliminary estimate of commission head Maria Luisa Sepulveda.
"Our hope is that the victims feel that the state assumes responsibility for what happened and which should never have happened ... and that their dignity is restored," she said.
Vicente Campillay was a typical case. Like 80 percent of those interviewed, he was arrested during the first four months following the coup. Like two thirds of those held, he had never reported his experience to anyone outside his own family.
"At first I didn't want to bring this to light because I knew I would suffer a bit, telling this to people I don't know ... I came out of there totally exhausted, short of breath," he said.
Campillay, a long-haired artisan who now lives in Brazil, was a non-political 15-year-old when police raided the fruit and vegetable warehouse where he worked and hauled off workers suspected of sympathizing with deposed leftist president Salvador Allende.
By evening, Campillay had been bashed with rifle butts and kicked so badly he couldn't stand. Between blows, officers held a gun to his head, threatened to kill him, demanded he confess to being a "little communist" and interrogated him about his family.
His 19-day ordeal brought him to the National Stadium -- crammed with some 40,000 political prisoners and notorious from the Costa-Gavras film Missing -- where his adolescent eyes witnessed executions, torture and a man beaten to death for screaming incessantly "The world will know about this some day!"
He left Chile seven years later, carrying a bitter grudge against his country that still exists.
"This has turned out to be an important step for me," he said of finally telling his story.
But some survivors have shunned the commission, seeing it as a superficial gesture by the government to rid itself of a nagging debt with ex-prisoners who regained visibility after Pinochet's 1998 arrest on torture charges.
The prior caution that any reparation would be small contravenes the UN Convention Against Torture, they argue.
The state already pays benefits to families of the 3,000 who were killed or disappeared and those forced out of their jobs under Pinochet.
Rights groups have demanded an extension of the six-month deadline because many victims who waited 30 years for this did not find out about the commission until too late because of poor publicity.
They argue that if Chile doesn't properly redress the systematic violations of the past, it can hardly be expected to take seriously reports of sporadic torture still taking place 14 years after democracy was restored.
Legal researchers at the Diego Portales University found that Chilean prison guards and police occasionally practice torture to maintain security in overcrowded prisons or to subdue suspects at the time of arrest.
Human rights organization CODEPU received 281 complaints of torture between 1994 and this year. Amnesty International and the UN have raised concerns about ongoing abuses in their annual reports on Chile but the government has played down the problem.
"When I saw the news about torture in Iraq, I said, `I bet people here will be scandalized by this, but they're not scandalized by what happened in their own country,'" said Alejandra Mera, a lawyer and human rights researcher at Diego Portales.
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