SANTIAGO, Chile — Carmen Gloria Quintana still can't quite smile. When her eyes light up at a cheerful thought, the plastic surgery scars prevent her mouth and cheeks from reflecting her mirth.
The 20-year-old Chilean has had more than 50 operations in the last two years, so many that she can't remember the exact number. First came the life-saving surgery, then the basic reconstruction of her body. At least 10 more operations lie ahead.
On July 2, 1986, Quintana suffered second- and third-degree burns over 67% of her body. She and another youth testified in the following days that during a protest against military rule, soldiers soaked them with fuel and set them on fire. The second victim, Rodrigo Rojas, 19, who had lived for 10 years in Washington with his exiled mother, died four days later from his burns.
The government says the girl caused the blaze herself by kicking a firebomb at her feet after her arrest, a version that her doctors and lawyers challenge, given the severity of her burns.
What matters most now to Quintana, however, is being home and finding a place again in the campaign against military rule. She has resolved to transform her personal agony into an expression of broader suffering in Chile and to make her conquest of that trauma a sign that the nation, too, can build a new life.
Two years later, her case remains an emotional and explosive issue, as much for the opposition as for the military government. Her return to Chile in July, after 21 months of treatment in Canada, resurrects painful memories at a time when her country is poised to choose between two contrasting futures.
In October, voters will say yes or no in a plebiscite on whether the military's nominee should be president for an eight-year term. A No victory will force the calling of open elections and pave the way for a return to democracy for the first time since a bloody military coup in September, 1973.
Quintana said she had thought of settling in Canada. But she realized that she had acquired, however unwillingly, an importance that obliged her to act, she said. During one of her two brief trips home, Pope John Paul II had taken her disfigured face in his hands and said he knew that she had suffered but that she must keep working for human rights.
'Living Example of Repression'
"I am a living example, living evidence of the repression in Chile," she said. "It pains the regime greatly that I am alive. They would much rather that I had died.
"It would have been easy and comfortable to stay in Canada. It is a democratic and free country," she said in an interview in her family's small home in the poor Nogales section of Santiago. "But there are thousands of victims here, so many violations of human rights that I couldn't stay away."
The moral support and financial help that poured in from Chileans and others around the world "made me want to live, to be able to denounce these people, because so many others who died weren't able to complain," Quintana said.
She has set to work in the local No campaign in Nogales and has spoken to human rights forums and Christian encounter groups. So far, her work is low key, in part because she is thinking about routine things as well, such as taking the entrance exam to resume her university studies.
Another unspoken factor, however, is the apparent reluctance on the part of the No campaign leaders to invoke her case too vividly. In emotion-charged Chile, many in the No movement fear that emphasizing human rights abuses could awaken counterproductive sentiments. Thus, the focus is on the positive aspects of a return to democracy, not the polarizing conflict of the last 15 years under Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who directed the 1973 uprising that toppled an elected Marxist-led government.
Exploitation Charged
Even before she came home, pro-government media accused Chile's left of exploiting her. The newspaper Black and White complained in November that "Communists have projected her to the world press and made her do and say things that she never would have imagined . . . to provoke shame and commiseration."
The case attracted worldwide attention from the outset, and Quintana traveled widely in her final months in Canada, speaking to a U.N. committee in Geneva and groups in the Netherlands, Australia and the United States in the name of the World Federation of Christian Students.
The Pinochet government seemed uncertain how to react at first. Initially, the army denied any involvement, but then, for the first time during the dictatorship, a soldier was formally charged in a human rights case.
Patrol leader Lt. Pedro Fernandez was accused of negligence--failure to provide prompt and adequate medical care for Quintana and Rojas. Then, a military court raised the charge to unnecessary violence leading to death and serious injury. But that charge was quickly dropped and the negligence one reinstated.
The case is still pending. Fernandez is free on bail and was promoted to captain a year ago.
