IF THERE are over 150 of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s military personnel now languishing in prison, it is largely due to the ceaseless and determined work of Chile’s foremost human rights lawyer, Eduardo Contreras, who has just died in Santiago aged 84.

My companero Ricardo and I have been friends with Eduardo since we first met in his native city, Chillan, in 1969. Then a young lawyer, Eduardo had already been elected a municipal councillor representing the Communist Party of Chile.  

It was the year before the historic victory of Socialist Salvador Allende, who was elected Chile’s president in September 1970, leading an alliance of socialist and progressive parties called Popular Unity (PU).  

The next few years were frenetically busy for all who supported that government. In his little Fiat 600 Eduardo would drive all around the agricultural province of Nuble, holding meetings with the peasants, helping them to organise in favour of the land reform that was an important part of the PU government’s programme.

If we had arranged to have dinner with Eduardo and his wife Maruja at a nearby pena (restaurant where there’d often be folk-singers performing), Eduardo would invariably have to call at someone’s house en route, to fix a meeting or get them to promise to do something important. Ten minutes here, 15 minutes at another’s, and we would finally get to the pena, never earlier than 9pm.

I have never known anyone who could cram so much into a day. His capacity and work ethic were enviable, and throughout his life he used them solely to benefit the cause of the working people of Chile, many of whom at that time lived in abject poverty.

Eduardo soon became mayor of Chillan and, together with several Socialist Party councillors, he negotiated deals with the then Soviet Union to import snow-clearing machinery and tinned food products which were invaluable when the right-wing forces started mobilising to “make the economy scream” (as US president Nixon told the CIA to do) and do everything possible to bring down the Allende government, finally managing to do that on September 11 1973 by means of a savage military coup in which many thousands were killed, tortured, made to disappear and forced into exile. 

But during the Allende years, as mayor, Eduardo commissioned a huge mural from the famous muralist, Julio Escamez, to be painted on the high wall of the city council’s Salon De Honor. Chillan was already famous for another mural in the city’s Escuela de Mexico, donated by the Mexican government after Chile’s devastating 1939 earthquake, painted by world-famous muralist David Siqueiros. It took Julio over a year to complete Principio y Fin (Beginning and End). The mural was inaugurated in 1972 by president Allende himself.

After the coup, the mural was initially painted over, and later the entire wall was bulldozed to eliminate any possibility of the mural’s restoration.

Eduardo was elected to Chile’s parliament in March 1973. Six months later, on the morning of the military coup, he and another Socialist Party congressman were driving to Santiago for a session of parliament. They were stopped at a military checkpoint near the capital, but, as Eduardo told us subsequently, the conscript checked their parliamentary credentials and let them pass.  

This gave them the chance to go into hiding and later, on instructions from his party, to seek exile in the Panamanian embassy.

Eduardo then spent the next 15 years in exile in Panama, Cuba and Mexico, where he taught law at various universities and in Cuba, helped formulate new legislation. By the late ’80s, now a widower, Eduardo returned to Chile with his son, and worked clandestinely to defeat the dictatorship.

He wrote articles for the Communist Party underground paper, El Siglo, and later, when the paper became legal in 1989, had his own weekly column Brujula Politica (Political Compass).

In January 1998, with General Pinochet still in power, Eduardo, together with communist leader Gladys Marin, launched the first lawsuit against Pinochet. This would be followed by thousands more legal actions to bring the coup participants and their backers to justice. 

In his autobiography, Habitante de dos Siglos — Memorias de un Hombre Feliz (Inhabitant of Two Centuries — Memoirs of a Happy Man), published in 2022, Eduardo outlined the dogged legal work he carried out, which saw hundreds of indictments against many of the coup-plotters and participants.  

Though the still powerful Chilean right has ensured that these convicted criminals are serving out their sentences in luxurious prisons, Eduardo had the satisfaction of knowing that, while Pinochet did not end his days in prison, he did die a convicted criminal in the eyes of Chileans and the whole world.

Eduardo was instrumental in forming a new generation of lawyers prepared to take on the detailed human rights work he and his close legal associates had begun in the ’90s. Together, they set up and worked with groups of disappeared and executed prisoners, both to get the military to disclose what happened to their relatives and to seek compensation through the courts. Much has been achieved, and this work is still ongoing.

In July 2000, on the eve of an important legal decision, Eduardo narrowly survived an attempt on his life, when a heavy truck ploughed at speed into their parked car, Eduardo’s wife Rebeca suffering terrible injuries as a result.

Parliamentarian, academic, journalist, ambassador to Uruguay during the presidency of Michelle Bachelet, Eduardo Contreras was a man of enormous intelligence, talent, humour and culture. Coming home after his packed day of activities, he liked nothing more than to play the piano or listen to favourite tangos.

He will be sorely missed by his family, Chile’s Communist Party, the human rights movement and his countless friends in Chile and many parts of the world.