Global Issues
CHILE: The Journalist Who Caught His Own Killer - On Film
Leonardo Henrichsen turned his film camera on the soldier who was aiming at him and held it steady until he was shot to death. But the justice system never caught up with the killer of the Argentine journalist, murdered 36 years ago in Chile while he was filming a military uprising for Swedish television.
Less than three months later a coup d'état against socialist President Salvador Allende (1970-1973) ushered in the 17-year dictatorship of the late general Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990).
The abortive military rebellion known as the 'tanquetazo' (tank putsch) was put down in a few hours by troops loyal to the leftwing Popular Unity government, in a battle in central Santiago close to the presidential palace of La Moneda, where Allende died 11 weeks later in an aerial bombardment unleashed by Pinochet's forces.
The tanquetazo left 22 civilians dead, among them Henrichsen, a 33-year-old correspondent in Chile for Swedish Public Service Television (SVT) who filmed the soldiers who shot him at close range.
The images from his camera were seen around the world, but the crime remained unpunished. A feature film of Henrichsen's story has just been released in Argentina.
'It's a huge paradox that in spite of the evidence left behind, it has taken so much time for the killer to be named,' Andrés Habegger, the director of Imagen Final (Final Image), the film about Henrichsen's death, told IPS. 'That was one of my main motivations for making this documentary.'
The film, which was commercially released in Buenos Aires on Aug. 6, will be launched in Chile in September, and later on in Sweden. But it has already been screened at international film festivals, where it has won several prizes awarded by audiences and juries.
Henrichsen died on Jun. 29, 1973, covering the tanquetazo, an uprising by a group of officers of the Second Armoured Tank Regiment in Chile, commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Roberto Souper. They rose up against a series of arrests ordered by the military brass following an earlier failed conspiracy against Allende.
The revolt, which turned out to be a rehearsal for the coup led in September 1973 by Pinochet, was put down the same day by armed forces loyal to Allende, commanded by general Carlos Prats. Prats and his wife, Sofía Cuthbert, were assassinated in Buenos Aires in September 1974 by killers acting on behalf of the dictatorship.
Despite lasting only a few hours, the tanquetazo not only left a toll of 22 civilians dead but also some 500 bullet holes in the facades of the La Moneda palace and the Defence Ministry building.
But unquestionably the most hard-hitting image associated with the attempted coup was Henrichsen's footage of the corporal who aimed and shot at him in the street a few metres away from La Moneda palace, and immediately afterward of the soldier who fired on him from a truck on the corporal's orders.
Fifty seconds later, Henrichsen collapsed and fell and the camera on the pavement was left pointing at the sky. Witnesses portrayed in Habegger's film said the soldiers took the camera away and flung it in a gutter, but journalist Eduardo Labarca went back for it, and Henrichsen's images were broadcast on Chilean and Argentine television.
'The Sept. 11 coup was so huge that it overshadowed previous events,' the filmmaker said. On that date, Allende died and thousands of people fell victim to Pinochet's dictatorship. The statute of limitations on the cameraman's murder elapsed, and his murder went unpunished.
'The film could help to raise the profile of this issue and push it back into the spotlight,' Habegger said. He recognised that the issue is complex: Henrichsen's murder cannot be considered a crime against humanity, for which there is no statute of limitations, because it was not committed during the dictatorship but under democracy.
'It's a matter for political decision. Chile's pathway toward clarifying such cases after the dictatorship seems rather more complex than Argentina's,' the director said, referring to crimes committed by the 1976-1983 dictatorship in Argentina after the overthrow of former president María Estela 'Isabel' Martínez de Perón (1974-1976) by a military junta.
That is why Habegger believes the film has more than historical value. 'It evokes the way Chile's history has marked the present, and makes the point that certain people don't want any records of the painful past to survive, because they would rather sweep it under the carpet than learn to live with it.'
Henrichsen's sister, as well as eye-witnesses to his death and colleagues who remember him as a fearless, dedicated journalist, are featured in the film.
The testimony of Chilean journalist Ernesto Carmona carries particular weight. He discovered in 2006 that the intellectual and probably the material author of Henrichsen's shooting was Corporal Héctor Bustamante Gómez, who died in December 2007 without ever having been tried in court.
Another valuable witness is Labarca, of the public television channel Chile Films, who recovered the camera and got its images televised at least once in his country before the justice system confiscated the material.
The film also contains an interview with Jan Sandquist, Henrichsen's boss in SVT, who was with him when he died.
Sandquist made available Henrichsen's filmed work on the decades-long Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua, and on Uruguayan prisons during the persecution of leftwing guerrillas in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
As a cameraman for 'Sucesos Argentinos' (Events in Argentina), a newsreel for cinemas, Henrichsen also filmed interviews with people like Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and Fidel Castro, the leader of the Cuban Revolution, and covered a score of uprisings and coups in different Latin American countries.
Habegger worked with Carmona to reconstruct the crime. They analysed files held by the military justice system, and came up against strong resistance when they investigated the soldiers standing next to the truck from which the shots were fired.
'The film achieves more than the justice system, because the justice system did virtually nothing,' the film director said.
© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service