Trigger warning for sexual violence and rape. This post contains graphic descriptions of acts of torture.
Political Scrapbook has been running a series of posts on Tory MP Andrew Rosindell, mostly focusing on the £36,000 of free travel he has claimed in the last year alone, as varies countries paid for his trips to the Cayman Islands, Taiwan, Lebanon, Qatar, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and more. But today, they’ve revealed his astonishing comments about the former Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet.
Defending one of his councillors joining the “Augusto Pinochet Fan Club” on Facebook, Rosindell told the Romford Recorder that:
Pinochet ousted a communist regime in Chile that was butchering its people. Compared with the rest of Latin America during the ‘70s and ‘80s, Chile turned into a free society where people were able to prosper.
If [the councillor] happened to join a group, then so what? I would happily be a member of that group. I have huge admiration for General Pinochet.
These are some of the actions of the man Rosindell has huge admiration for:
In January 1974, Chilean Air Force troops deposited the body of a seventeen-year-old boy, an MIR party member, in a town south of Santiago. Part of the boy’s abdomen had been subjected to vivisection. Both his legs were broken, and also his left arm. His entire body was covered with holes made by cigarette burns. He had also been castrated. . . There were a lot of women as badly beaten up as the men were. They bad also been brutally raped; they had internal ruptures and were bleeding profusely. One kept moaning. The torturers had inserted a sharp object in her vagina, and it had cut through the peritoneum. Some of the people there said they had recognized the interrogators: they were Navy infantrymen trained at the American bases in Panama. [Robinson Rojas Sandford, The Murder of Allende and the End of the Chilean Way of Socialism]
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The methods of torture described in the preliminary reports from COPAHI, the “Cooperative Committee for Peace in Chile” are the following:
- Application of electrical current in various parts of the body, usually the gums, genitals and anus.
- Blows.
- Blindfolding or hoods.
- Burning with acids or cigarettes.
- Immersion in gasoline or water.
- Whipping in general.
- Incarceration in unhealthy conditions or with vermin.
- Being forced to participate in or witness sexual activities [62].
- Being rolled over rocks.
- Being forced to witness torture.
- Ingestion of excrement.
- Rack.
- Hanging by the neck.
- Deprivation of water for a week.
- Deliberate fracture of a wounded arm.
- Being thrown from a height blindfolded.
- Knives inserted under fingernails or toenails.
- Cutting on the hands.
- Being exposed naked to the sun.
- Not identified (caused death). [María Eugenia Rojas, La represión politica en Chile: los hechos]
In some camps, routine sadism was taken to extremes. At Villa Grimaldi, recalcitrant prisoners were dragged to a parking lot; DINA agents then used a car or truck to run over and crush their legs. Prisoners there recalled one young man who was beaten with chains and left to die slowly from internal injuries. Rape was also a reoccurring form of abuse. DINA officers subjected female prisoners to grotesque forms of sexual torture that included insertion of rodents and, as tactfully described in the Commission report, “unnatural acts involving dogs.” [Peter Kornbluh, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability]
“I have huge admiration for General Pinochet”.
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