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   Vol.65/No.28            July 23, 2001 
 
 
25 and 50 years ago
 
July 23, 1976
Evidence of torture of political prisoners in Chile was covered up by Alejandro Orfila, secretary general of the Organization of American States, when he reported on a trip to the Tres Alamos detention center held during the OAS meeting in Santiago.

In a June 19 television broadcast, Orfila said that none of the prisoners he spoke with had said they were undergoing coercion "at the moment."

The cynicism of this statement was revealed by the prisoners themselves.

"I told him I had been raped and given electric torture," Alicia Alvarado, a former university professor who has been imprisoned more than a year, told Washington Post reporter Joanne Omang.

Orfila also met with jailed civil liberties lawyers Hernán Montealegre and Fernando Ostornol. According to a report in the June 22 New York Times, "The meeting lasted an hour and both attorneys provided specific accounts of torture undergone by prisoners in the hands of security agents before reaching Tres Alamos. They included accounts of prisoners identified by persons now in the camp who were last seen in interrogation centers such as Villa Grimaldi, a former discotheque now used to conduct questioning of prisoners."

July 23, 1951
As more and more news begins trickling in from Korea as a result of the slight relaxation of military censorship in connection with the resumption of "cease-fire" negotiations, it is becoming increasingly evident that the Korean people, both in the South and the North, are filled with bitterness and hatred over the wholesale destruction that has turned their country into little more than a vast cemetery.

They've had their fill of "liberation." They want the war to stop and they are not particularly concerned whether the Communists come to power. This news was cautiously relayed from Tokyo by R.P. Martin, correspondent of the New York Daily Compass, in the following words:

"If a Gallup poll could be taken in both South and North Korea, more than likely the great majority of the people living in that unhappy land would vote for peace at almost any price. The poll result would probably be the same even if they were certain, as many are, that once the United Nations armies are withdrawn the Communists would come to power, either through revolution or aggression."

This annihilating admission is so universally accepted, that even the Tokyo censors permitted it to pass.  
 
 
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