Pinochet's Troops Willing To Confess Their Sins

Hundreds of former military draftees rallying outside Chile's presidential palace over the weekend are being asked to come forward and reveal crimes they committed or witnessed during Gen. Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship.

The draftees have long feared that if they name names and reveal where bodies are buried, they will face prosecution by the courts or retaliation by those who ordered them to torture and kill.

"Perhaps today is the day when the moment has come, for us to describe what we saw and what we suffered inside the military bases, the things that we witnessed and that we did," said Fernando Mellado, who leads the Santiago chapter of the Former Soldiers of 1973.

Of the 8,000 people drafted as teenagers from Santiago alone in the tumultuous year when Pinochet overthrew Salvador Allende's government and cemented his hold on power, Mr. Mellado thinks "between 20 and 30 percent are willing to talk."

"They made me torture - I am a torturer - because they threatened me that if I didn't torture, they would kill me," said Jorge Acevedo. He said several prisoners died when he applied electricity during torture sessions, and that their bodies may have been dumped in abandoned mines at the Cerro Chena prisoner camp.

One confessed to shooting an entire family. Another - now an alcoholic who sleeps in the street in Santiago - said he was forced to drown a 7-year-old boy in a barrel of hardening plaster. Others describe harrowing torture sessions, and loading bodies onto helicopters to be dumped at sea.

"Our mission was to stand guard outside, and listen to their screams," former draftee Jose Paredes said as he told the AP about his service at the Tejas Verdes torture center. "They would end up destroyed, torn apart, their teeth and faces broken."