In today’s LA Times, Dave Zirin once again brings the issues of human rights and justice home to Americans in a way we can understand very well. Sports.

IN 1995, I went to Chile’s National Stadium to watch a soccer match. Soccer was something I neither enjoyed nor understood, but the game was hardly on my mind; instead, it was the arena.

. . .

All I could think of was: My God! This is National Stadium, where the bleachers were once filled with dissidents of every stripe after the coup, a mass waiting room for those about to be executed or tortured. This is where women were raped for the crime of wearing pants.

December 10 was Human Rights Day, and it was also the day Agusto Pinochet of Chile died. How ironic that this man—who was never held accountable for his human rights abuses—died on the day that celebrates those very rights. How tragic that the United States was so caught up with the Cold War that we supported Pinochet and his coup of the freely elected Salvador Allende. Colin Powell has said we are not proud of this part of our history.

May we learn from the lessons of history and not turn a blind eye to human rights abuses anywhere (even at home) as we fight the war on terror, now known as the Long War.