Legalized Repression in Chile

After recently spending a month in Chile—meeting with teachers, human rights workers and lawyers— it is clear to me that the contradictory maze of constitutional laws, penal codes, executive decrees, and ministerial directives provides the Pinochet regime with a constitutional facade it uses to legitimate the sophisticated, brutal forms of violence by which its security forces make innocent people their victims in the name of “peace and order.”

Chile’s new constit...