Pablo Neruda

“ If an Argentinian is a tyrant and has ideas that retard us, Argentina dies. If elsewhere is liberal and has progressive ideas, that place lives.
Rosas was unable to have Sarmiento or Alberdi in his hands, and once the tyranny had fallen, Sarmiento was president of his country.
It could be neverending, the quotes of all the free men who have found themselves compelled to judge the tyrannical regimes that subjugated their homes and sent accusations of treason and antipatriotism against them. ”

“ Should it be that in a country the phenomena of treason and antipatriotism repeat? I do not believe so. The names of those who were accused unjustly are names that the whole world now respects; they included, once past the persecution and treachery, even the highest leaders of their countries and their compatriots trusted their honorability and their intelligence in order to direct the destiny of their homelands, and they always carried like a badge of honor, the greatest badge of honor, the persecution they faced. ”

“ Where would it end if it did not make the courts tolerate its politics and did not use us as instruments? If it does not reign in every part, it will not be secure in any. It is by nature so weak that the smallest attack puts it in danger. The presence of the smallest right disrupts it and threatens it. ”

“ In accusing me of having damaged the reputation of my homeland through having published abroad the truth that in my country a regime of extraordinary abilities and censorship, does not insult me, but rather humanity's greatest men and the Father of the Homeland. It is curious to see oneself accused of antipatriotism for having done the same thing that was done abroad by those who gave us independence and established the bases of what should have always been a free and democratic nation. ”

“ The slander of treason that was applied to me was applied with equal reason by Juan Vicente Gomez and Juan Bisonte against others that fought it. And once more we find ourselves at a time when the populace there just anointed president-elect one of them, Romulo Gallegos, a personal friend of mine who suffered in his time the persecution that I now suffer. From these facts comes the lesson: the examples of Argentina, Peru, Venezuela and Chile herself indicate that, sooner or later, justice makes way for imperial justice. ”

“ And as judicial power finds itself bound much more intimately to society than any other, as anything ends or can end in judgments, that power will have to come out of its legitimate sphere in order to excercise itself in that area which the Government has not been able to manage itself. ”

“ It is another world that President Truman as well as Presidents Trujillo, Morinigo, and Gonzales Videla desire.
In Chile there is no freedom of speech, people do not live free from fear. Hundreds of men that fight so that our homeland can live free from misery are persecuted, mistreated, insulted, and condemned. ”

“ In Chile, in 1868, our very own Supreme Court and our President, don Manuel Mott, were brought, for political reasons, before Parliament. The accusation, accepted by the House of Deputies, did not survive in the Senate. Of this accusation the lawyer Mr. Larrain Zañartu says the following: "It's about prosecuting a man by bringing about the ruin of his party, for undermining a solid building to take advantage of its foundation, for destroying the Constitution in order to exact a futile personal vengeance." ”

“ But no one will be able to repair the damage that has been caused to the country by obligating the tribunals to abandon their task in order to free the Government from the results of the errors it has committed and that it does not know how to remedy. ”

“ It is not possible, they must think, that the serene and circumspect scholar has abandoned the scrupulous use of technical-legal vocabulary to fall into such arbitrary confusion and layman's use of terms that each have a precise definition; and more, why? To come to a conclusion that does not honor a scholar. ”