In the run-up to the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the coup d’état in Chile on September 11, the Government of Gabriel Boric has presented this Tuesday a battery of legislative proposals for human rights. Among the initiatives it has included one that seeks to partially lift and under reserve the secrecy of the testimonies given before the Political Imprisonment and Torture Commission, created in 2003 and which documented the torture of thousands of Chileans during the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship. The objective is for the Truth and Justice Search Plan, presented by the left-wing Executive last week, to access the information provided by the victims, provided they or their heirs consent.
The announced proposal has been resisted in the past by sectors of the center-left, who defend that the State promised to keep the testimonies confidential for 50 years. The Commission for Political Imprisonment and Torture, led by the ex-bishop of Santiago, Sergio Valech, -for this reason it is known as the Valech Commission-, was established in 2003, during the government of Ricardo Lagos (2000-2006). The following year, a report was presented that gave an account of more than 30,000 victims, 28,459 for illegal detentions, torture, executions and disappearances and more than 800 torture centers. During the first government of Michelle Bachelet (2006-2010), a new commission was formed, called Valech 2, which established the existence of 9,795 new victims of political imprisonment and torture during the dictatorship.
When the Lagos Administration established half a century of secrecy, the then socialist president explained that one of the victims had made him see that if they uncovered the privacy of her testimony before 50 years, she would probably still be alive and did not want her grandchildren to know the atrocities he had suffered.
Asked about the potential rupture of the commitment with those who gave their testimony, Boric’s Justice Minister, Luis Cordero, said this morning that the information will only be used to comply with the program he leads to search and identify 1,092 people, intended to find out the circumstances that the victims went through and compare the data with the hundreds of judicial investigations that are still open in the courts. “The purpose is to comply with one of the objectives of the plan, which is to trace the trajectories of each of the people detained and made to disappear so that this information can be revealed at the moment relevant findings are found, with the prior consent of the victims. or their heirs,” Cordero said.
The power will also be established so that people voluntarily decide to lift that secret and it will be sought that the information collected by the Valech Commission is available to the courts of justice, as is the case of the Valech Commission 2. Currently, the way in which that the courts access the testimonies is through the actions that the victims make available or by requesting the National Institute of Human Rights with the consent of the victim.
“I want to be very emphatic. Ultimately, it is the victims who decide what is done with that information”, added the Minister of the General Secretariat of the Presidency, Álvaro Elizalde. “If a victim objects, it is her right and we will always respect his decision,” he added. At present, the affected people can request their folder with all their testimonies. More than 8,000 have been requested.
The lifting of the secret of the Valech Commission can only be done through a bill in Congress, where Boric’s government does not have a majority in either the Chamber of Deputies or the Senate. “There is a reason of sufficient persuasion for us to get the votes,” defended Minister Cordero.
Among the other legislative proposals announced this Tuesday is the creation of the legal qualification of absent due to disappearance that seeks to establish a special registry in the Civil registration and identification and a correlative certificate. Also the criminalization of the crimes of forced disappearance and extralegal execution and a national memory and heritage policy to improve the financing and maintenance mechanisms of memory spaces and strengthen the regulation of these sites. Finally, the elimination of the secret, reserved or restricted circulation nature of a set of laws that were enacted during the dictatorship.
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