Found this on the front page:
"Woman pushes for news of brother’s fate in Chile; Mass. woman hopes Kerry can help" by Bryan Bender | Globe Staff, April 01, 2013
NEWTON — Boris Weisfeiler is the only American on a list of 1,000 people who “disappeared” under the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet and whose fate remains unknown.
This time sister Olga Weisfeiler is armed with new hope: her former senator, John F. Kerry, who has taken a personal interest in the case, is now the nation’s top diplomat. And she is appealing to him to help pressure US and Chilean authorities to open still-secret records.
That's not much hope at all. Or maybe the Globe has been tipped-off to a break in the case like the Gardner art heist.
She wants Chile to bring to justice the security officials who many believe kidnapped and murdered Boris Weisfeiler, a math professor who was 43 when last seen hiking near the Argentine border in 1985....
The fate of Boris Weisfeiler remains a mystery. Her conversations with local officials and US Embassy staff, the findings of a private investigator she hired in Chile, and bits of the official record Olga Weisfeiler has pried out of US files have not answered key questions.
Was Boris mistaken for a spy by Pinochet’s security forces? Did he stumble upon a nearby compound of escaped Nazis? Was he killed immediately, or kept prisoner for a time? Could he possibly still be alive?
Documents show in the months after he disappeared, the US State Department questioned the local authorities’ assertion that he died in a hiking accident.
Then that is that, right? I mean, I never question AmeriKan officials when such things happen here.
US officials raised the possibility that he had been detained by army or police forces and was being held prisoner in the Andean foothills in a compound known as Colonia Dignidad, where an escaped Nazi ran what a Chilean congressional report later described as a “state within a state.”
Please, no more Nazis. I swear I see a reference or two in my paper to either them or Hitler every single day.
Related: Chile's Catholic House of Horrors
I don't know which one was worse.
Peter Kornbluh, a researcher at the National Security Archive at George Washington University and an expert on Pinochet’s reign of terror, believes there are likely more American documents — particularly in the custody of the CIA — and Chilean government records that could help Olga Weisfeiler find the closure she seeks....
Some of the pieces of the puzzle are piled neatly on Olga Weisfeiler’s kitchen table as she prepares for her meetings in Santiago.
(Blog editor not-so-fondly recalling the stack of unread Globes on his)
A cable from a CIA officer assigned to the American embassy in Santiago in the months after her brother disappeared suggested there was information that he “was still alive.”
It's always been a diplomatic CIA. By now they must all be assumed to be CIA stations and nothing more. Simply offering cover to intelligence operatives, that's all.
A State Department memo a few months later stated that “the Chilean judge in charge of the investigation believes there may be another, more sinister explanation for Weisfeiler’s disappearance. So does the embassy.”
Other declassified US documents suggest that Boris Weisfeiler was not a victim of an accident but was in the custody of Chilean security officials.
Who were our allies, right?
Even the Mathematics Society of Chile, acting on behalf of one of their colleagues, tried to find answers, concluding that if Weisfeiler was murdered, “it was done by professionals who do not operate in the usual way of Chilean criminals, and that the motive was not theft since the objects found in his backpack were very valuable.”
Looking more and more like this guy was assassinated, right?
A breakthrough came last year with word that a Chilean judge, citing the evidence from US files, ordered the arrest of eight former police and army officials for kidnapping Weisfeiler and then covering it up. But no one has been arrested and no more information has been revealed.
I checked, and I didn't blog about it so I guess I never saw it in my Globe.
The US Embassy in Santiago insists it is not giving up, saying that the Weisfeiler case is “a top human rights priority for the US government.”
Meaning he's a CIA agent!
“The US government has followed the Weisfeiler case for many years,” said Gabrielle Guimond , the embassy spokeswoman in Chile. “We continue to work closely with the family and Chilean officials, and will continue to support the ongoing judicial investigation in Chile to support a just resolution of this case.”
Olga Weisfeiler is now counting on Kerry to make the difference....
Kerry did not respond directly to the request to release more documents. In a statement sent to the Globe Friday, he compared Weisfeiler’s refusal to give up to the families of soldiers missing in Vietnam.
“I see the same passion in Olga. It takes a moral fortitude and incredible character to go back to Chile 13 times to find answers and refuse to quit,’’ he said. “It’s also important in the context of finding closure regarding a tragic era in Chile’s history,’’ he said.
Former representative Barney Frank, a Newton Democrat who took up Weisfeiler’s case after she approached him during religious services at Temple Emanuel in 2000, believes more can be done.
“We kept raising the issue,” he said. “We complained to the Chileans. We complained to the State Department. We never got very far.”
Yeah, at least Barney is keeping score. And then it occurred to me: Boris is also a top human rights concern after so long because he is Jewish. This country's government is so under thumb that they are more concerned about long-dead Jews (a lot like my newspaper here) than living Americans.
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Weisfeiler is not giving up.
“I never had a feeling Boris died,” she said as she flipped through old photo albums and pointed at her smiling brother, who she said was always finding ways to help people — like the time, she recalled animatedly, when he ran after a train to help a tardy passenger to get aboard with her luggage.
There are pictures of him on his other travels to places like China and India. One of him proudly becoming a US citizen in 1981. And the last time she saw him, in Budapest in 1984.
“She has literally devoted her life to finding her brother,” said Kornbluh. “And I think there are Chilean Army and police officials who know exactly where he is.”
Just lead them to the grave site (if he had a grave).
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More hidden surprises the Globe has given me since I last posted:
"Mason allegedly started brush fire
SANTIAGO — Chilean police have arrested a man they say is responsible for the worst forest fire in decades in the hills above the port of Valparaiso. Police said Carlos Rivas, a 27-year-old mason, conceded Saturday that he accidentally ignited the blaze with a welder’s torch. They said Rivas told them his boss asked him to cover up his role in the fire (AP)."
And all I ever saw was this buried in a crappy Sunday brief.
"Municipal votes test Chile’s parties" Associated Press, October 29, 2012
SANTIAGO — Millions of Chileans voted Sunday for the first time in their lives in nationwide municipal elections that could set the stage for next year’s presidential race.
The results will be a sign of where the heart of the electorate lies just weeks before the campaign for Chile’s presidency formally begins....
The nation has been roiled by more than a year of mass protests over education and environmental policies that brought millions of young demonstrators into the streets, and only about a third of voters approve of the job that conservative President Sebastian Pinera has done since taking office in 2010.
And I saw nary a word in my Globe the whole year.
Related: Chileans Cheer Return of Pinochet
Did they?
But polls say there is even less support for remnants of the center-left Concertation coalition that governed Chile for 20 years after democracy was restored in 1990, ending the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.
Many new voters are part of a younger generation whose huge street protests fed hopes that expanding the electorate would lead to profound changes in Chile’s political establishment. But that appears less likely now, pollsters said.
After many tumultuous months when activists took over streets, schools, and public buildings, choking on tear gas but failing to get Congress to adopt their demands, their faith in the democratic process has waned.
I sure can understand how the kids feel.
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Globe never bothered to give me the results!
Related:
Yeah, those are more important than protests and forest fires.
