Pope, Moved by Tales of Squalor, Tells Bishops to Back Election in Chile

SANTIAGO, Chile — Proclaiming himself deeply moved by accounts of squalor and repression among Chile’s poor majority, Pope John Paul II instructed his bishops Thursday to support moves for free elections that would end the country’s long-lived military regime.

The Pope opened the second day of a six-day Chilean visit at a 42-minute private meeting with President Augusto Pinochet. John Paul prayed briefly with Pinochet, whose rule he has scored as “dictatorial,” at the chapel inside the downtown La Moneda Palace. A Vatican spokesman characterized the meeting only as “courteous.”

Minor street violence again trailed in the Pope’s wake Thursday during an exhausting 15-hour day that carried him from a slum to the sea and on to the soccer stadium where the Chilean regime detained, tortured and killed opponents after the 1973 coup that brought Pinochet to power.

The government said 15 people were injured, one by gunshot, when troops broke up an attempt by about 300 homeless Chileans to squat on a parcel of vacant land north of the city. Nearly 100 people were arrested, according to the government news service.

However, a Chilean Human Rights Commission lawyer said the protester shot by troops later died of his wounds, United Press International reported.

Rock-throwing protesters waving anti-government banners at the La Bandera slum, situated in Santiago’s southern reaches, shattered the windows of police cars in the papal convoy Thursday morning. Then they cheered the passing Pope and stoned the busload of riot police riding behind him. Later, police used tear gas to disperse a pocket of demonstrators outside Santiago’s Pontifical Seminary, where the Pope met with Chile’s 31 bishops.

Said one resident of La Bandera: “The stones speak for years of hate and repression.”

Said one angry policeman as an ambulance took away a colleague wounded by a blow to the head: “I was a Catholic--until today.”

A communique from the police Thursday night said 42 officers had been injured, one seriously, and eight vehicles damaged by “delinquents” since the Pope’s arrival.

The Chilean church, which has emerged as Pinochet’s most credible enemy and Chile’s staunchest defender of human rights, used its media Thursday to broadcast complaints by spokesmen for the poor directed at the Pope. Government-controlled media censored what it could.

In La Bandera, a slum of about 90,000 residents where unemployment is around 40% by the church’s count and alcoholism, drug addiction and prostitution are endemic, three poor Chileans addressed an enormous crowd waving white handkerchiefs of welcome and shaking protest banners like the one that read in Spanish and Polish: “Excommunication for Torturers and Murderers.”

“We lack freedom to participate and express ourselves,” a young slum dweller named Ximena Cornejo told the Pope from atop a high-standing stage at La Bandera. “When we try, we are greeted with repression and blows. Many young people have been arrested and exiled or have been wounded or killed, even burned, for demanding a more dignified life.”

John Paul listened with obvious sympathy from a throne under a cloudless sky against a backdrop of the snow-capped Andes. Work-worn housewife Luisa Rivera complained of unemployment, low salaries, the need for more teachers and doctors to attend slum children and the thirst for a “dignified life for all without dictatorship.” Lay worker Mario Mejias noted the “pain and humiliation of a man who cannot care for his family.” Appealing for “a Chile with justice and liberty,” Mejias told the Pope, “We believe you will have a message for the powerful: that they must abandon their pride and egotism and treat us all like true brothers.”

The church’s radio and television network broadcast the three short, stark statements of despair and hope nationwide. The state’s radio and television network did not. When they were finished, the Pope embraced the three Chileans.

“I have listened to you with much attention, and my spirit is deeply moved,” he told them.

Hailed by the Chilean church as “the messenger of life,” the Pope was measured but emphatic in his remarks to the poor at La Bandera.

“I know your sufferings, and your clamor of hope has reached my ears,” he said, applauding grass-roots efforts at community-building. “Here, as in many other places, I have been able to see with pain the poverty of many in contrast to the opulence of some.”

The Pope’s support for elections was carefully worded with an injunction to his bishops to defend human rights and to “contribute with all your strength to rejecting and avoiding violence and hatred in Chile.”

Disclaiming any political partisanship by the church, the Pope noted that “each nation by its sovereignty has the right to self-determination and to freely construct its future . . . but it is equally necessary, as the Second Vatican Council teaches, that within each country there exist ‘effective possibilities for taking free and active part in the establishment of juridical principles of the political community. . . .’ ”

The Pinochet government has recently legalized political parties and opened an electoral register in preparation for a yes-no vote in 1989 for a presidential candidate chosen by the military.

Pinochet gives every indication that he intends to be that candidate, despite sweeping opposition that includes political parties from the conservative right to the violent Marxist left.

“It is heartening that in Chile measures will soon come into effect which, if properly carried out, would make possible in the not-distant future the full and responsible participation of the citizenry in the great decisions that affect national life,” the Pope said.

“The good of the country asks that these measures be consolidated, perfected and complemented in such a way that they become valid instruments for social peace in a Christian country in which all should recognize themselves as children of God and brothers in Christ.”

Some Chilean bishops opposed the Pope’s appearance Thursday night at the National Stadium, a symbol of violence against political prisoners after Pinochet’s coup against the elected Marxist president, Salvador Allende. Anticipating a crowd hostile to the government, the armed forces returned 1,800 tickets that the church had made available for the military’s officers and men.

“Our world needs profound improvement. . . . God counts with the young and the young of Chile to change this world,” the Pope told the crowd in the stadium, which he called “the site of athletic competitions, but also of pain and suffering in bygone days.”

An appeal for human rights and restored democracy was a common theme among young students at the stadium who were chosen by the church to address the Pope. “We are desperate and repressed,” said one.

Again, the government’s television and radio network failed to broadcast the statements critical of the Pinochet regime.