The woman without a country

Chile's government would like the world to believe its justice system is fair and democratic. Why then has it suppressed a book exposing widespread corruption in that system and forced its author into exile in Miami?

By Alejandra Matus

Jan 4, 2000 | I'd been trying to figure out a new way of explaining my peculiar situation, searching for words that hadn't tired themselves out in seven months of retelling, when the mailman brought me a letter with some news recently: The Immigration and Naturalization Service informed me that I had been granted asylum in the United States "for an indefinite period."

This news was a kick in the stomach that left me reeling. It didn't make me happy at all; it only deepened the feeling that I was somewhere I didn't belong -- a person without a country.

You see, I'm the kind of journalist who likes to be a fly on the wall, watching as things develop in front of me, jotting down a note or two on any old scrap of paper so as not to forget the details. When I've got the story I share it with the citizens of my country -- or what was my country, I guess I should say.

I spent six years quietly collecting anecdotes that revealed the corruption of the Chilean judicial system, and I published it all last April in my second book, "The Black Book of Chilean Justice." This is not an academic study of the judicial system, but rather a detailed chronicle of the activities of the human beings who work in the institution.

The thesis of the book is that Chilean justice has never been blind, and the facts are there to prove it -- in the obsequiousness of the Supreme Court under Augusto Pinochet, most evident in its failure to demand habeas corpus for hundreds of detainees who are still missing; in its remarkable failure to come clean for its miserable performance under the dictatorship; in the fact that it has scarcely been reformed since Spanish rule, when its job was to make sure the king was obeyed.

The book documents many cases of corruption, abuse of power, nepotism and stupidity.

However, as it turns out, writing the book itself was a crime in the eyes of the Chilean courts -- "a crime against national security."

The book was released April 13, 1999 at a Santiago hotel room jammed with journalists. The next morning, agents of the civil police -- roughly equivalent to the FBI -- appeared at the headquarters of the publisher, Editorial Planeta, with a judge's order to confiscate all copies.

When the editor in chief, Carlos Orellana, called me at my apartment to tell me of this news, we agreed that we had to alert the press. So when the police agents, accompanied by Planeta's general manager, Bartolo Ortiz, arrived at the warehouse, reporters and cameramen were there to register the sight of his employees rolling cartloads of the books onto police wagons.

That photo went around the world and provoked angry commentary within Chile. It had been four months since a Spanish judge had requested Pinochet's extradition from England. Yet at the very time the Chilean government was trying to convince the rest of the world that it was capable of trying Pinochet for his crimes in Chile, it was suppressing freedom of speech at home.

The reaction to the banning order was fierce in Chile. Many said that such an inquisition was unacceptable after nine years of democracy. But those words were not enough to restrain the fury of Servando Jordan, a former Supreme Court chief justice who accused me of offending him. Nor did they create any hesitation in Rafael Huerta, the lower court judge who eagerly pursued the case.

Jordan was the perfect example of the slippery reality I described in the book. He was chosen in the 1980s by Pinochet, and considered a pro-regime judge. But in the 1990s, under a new political constellation, he had voted to convict Gen. Manuel Contreras, ex-head of the secret police, for the 1976 assassination of former Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier in Washington.

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