Interviews with Ricardo Lagos

To begin with, quite a number of my friends who remained in the Presidential Palace died right after they were taken prisoners. So I know that some of them had been killed two or three days after the coup.

[In 1973, General Augusto Pinochet led a military coup and established a dictatorship in Chile from 1973 to 1990.]

Others simply disappeared. And the question about those people who disappeared was a really tough question to talk about.

The question is that during those days habeas corpus did not exist. If somebody would take you during the night, the following day –it’s true- they [friends or family of the victim] would go to the Vicaría [Vicariate of Solidarity] (the Vicaría was a part of the Catholic Church) and they had quite a number of lawyers there and normally they would present a habeas corpus in order to see what had happened to them.

[Habeas corpus is a legal concept, meaning a person being held by the government must be brought before a judge or court and is used as a protection against illegal imprisonment. The Vicariate of Solidarity, an agency of the Chilean Catholic Church, was a human rights organization in Chile during the military regime of Augusto Pinochet that opposed the government’s abduction and mistreatment of Chilean citizens.]

And always the tribunal would ask the Government: “do you know what happened to Mr. So and So?” The answer was: “No, we have no idea”. And that was it.

Nevertheless, when democracy was restored, those people had, because of the habeas corpus, the statement of the day and in what conditions they had been taken to prison.

So, when many, many years later, as a President, I established a political presidential commission to register those who had been tortured and those who had been in prison, normally the first point [document] of the paper that they had was the habeas corpus that was sent during those days in Chile.

Ricardo Lagos served as president of Chile from 2000 to 2006. While in office Lagos was known for pursuing free-trade agreements, improving health care and education, and addressing the crimes of General Augusto Pinochet’s military regime.

Lagos was born in 1938 in Santiago, Chile. He earned a law degree from the University of Chile in 1960 and then attended Duke University, where he received a doctorate in economics in 1966. He returned to Chile and served as director of the University of Chile’s School of Political and Administrative Sciences and was subsequently appointed secretary general of the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences.

Lagos was nominated by President Salvador Allende to be Chilean ambassador to the Soviet Union. But in 1973, Allende was overthrown in a military coup d’état led by Pinochet, and Lagos was never confirmed in that position.

Like many in the democratic opposition to the dictatorship, Lagos left Chile. While in exile in the United States and Argentina, he served at the United Nations as a consultant and economist at UNESCO and the International Labor Organization.

In 1978, he returned to Chile, where he became president of the Democratic Alliance, a coalition of parties opposed to Pinochet. In 1987, Lagos founded the Party for Democracy (Partido por la Democracia). During the historic 1988 national referendum to end the Pinochet dictatorship, Lagos was a key leader in the grassroots efforts to register voters and encourage them to vote against prolonging the military regime.

After democracy was restored, Lagos served as minister of education in the government of President Patricio Aylwin and as minister of public works under President Eduardo Frei before being elected president in his own right in January 2000.

Since leaving the presidency, Lagos founded the Fundación Democracia y Desarrollo (Foundation for Democracy and Development) in 2006 and currently serves as its president. He is also vice-chair of the Inter-American Dialogue and was UN special envoy for climate change from 2007 to 2010.

Twitter: @RicardoLagos