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Freedom Collection

Interviews with Genaro Arriagada

Interviewed December 27, 2024

At that time in Chile there was a majority of the country that was infuriated, that believed in and supported the military in an irrational manner. There were very few voices that arose to defend the rights of the persecuted.

Very few initially, no one in the press… Fortunately, at that time the Catholic Church was under the direction of Cardinal Silva Henríquez and he committed the church to the defense of the persecuted.

[Raúl Silva Henríquez, SDB (1907 –1999) was a Chilean Cardinal of the Catholic Church.]

Of course, the right and the military accused him of being a “red priest,” a communist.

We had the great distinction that when the repression occurred in Chile, the Chilean Catholic Church stood in defense of the rights of the persecuted. Who were the persecuted? The left. The “Marxists Leninists,” as Pinochet said.

[Augusto Pinochet (1915-2006) was dictator of Chile between 1973 and 1990.]

[The Church] defended them. By contrast, when the brutal repression hit in Argentina, the Catholic Church stood silent.
When I have written about the transition, I have made a comparison between the Polish Catholic Church, which defended the persecuted of the communist regime, and the Czechoslovak Catholic Church (at that time the Czech and Slovak republics had not divided). The Catholic Church stood silent in Czechoslovakia.

One could say that the Polish Church was more like the Chilean Church, and the Czechoslovak Church was more like the Argentinian Church in its silence. It was a complicit silence.

Those were very bitter times. Very, very bitter.