Torture Center
Reports from Amnesty International, the US Senate and Chilean Truth and Reconciliation Commission describe the ship as a kind of a floating jail and torture chamber for political prisoners of the Augusto Pinochet regime from 1973 to 1980. It is claimed that probably over a hundred persons were kept there at times and subjected to hideous treatment, among them British priest Michael Woodward, who later died as a result of torture.
Due to this dark part of its history, the international voyages of the Esmeralda are often highly controversial - especially at the time when Pinochet was still in power but even after the restoration of Chilean democracy. The ship's arrival in various ports being accompanied by protests and demonstrations by local political groups and Chilean exiles. Such protest actions were recorded, among other places, at Dartmouth, Pearl Harbor, Quebec, Vancouver and Victoria, British Columbia, Wellington, Pireus and Haifa, as well as at Santiago in Chile itself,
Read more about this topic: Esmeralda (BE-43)
Famous quotes containing the words torture and/or center:
“One line typed twenty years ago
can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint
to glorify art as detachment
or torture of those we
did not love but also
did not want to kill.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“Children can’t be a center of life and a reason for being. They can be a thousand things that are delightful, interesting, satisfying, but they can’t be a wellspring to live from. Or they shouldn’t be.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)