He Chilean President Gabriel Boric signed this Wednesday the decree that gives way to a Unpublished search policy for victims of enforced disappearance during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990).
“I am convinced that democracy is memory and it is the future, and one cannot be without the other,” said the Chilean president during an emotional ceremony that continued visibly moved and surrounded by politicians, human rights activists and relatives of the victims. .
“We take charge as a State, not only as a Government, of moving all the barriers to clarify the circumstances of disappearance and/or death of the victims of forced disappearance,” he stressed.
The plan aims to establish itself as a “permanent and systematic national policy” to clarify the fate of the disappearedwhich are estimated at around 1,469 people, of which only 307 have been found. For decades, the search for the disappeared was carried out almost exclusively by families.
Among the goals outlined in this public policy is to “locate, recover, and identify and return the mortal remains of the victims of forced disappearance”, all political opponents of the dictatorship and/or leftist militants.
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“The State has failed to respond to the families, and to the entire society, in delivering the answers that the country needs, the disappeared are missing from all of us,” stressed the Chilean head of state.
One of the most complex challenges facing this policy is “reconstructing the trajectories of the victims of forced disappearance, including his arrest and kidnapping until his final destination”, one of his main objectives.
The State has failed to respond to families, and to the entire society
The process also includes accountability to Chilean society on the progress of these proceedings, along with implementing reparation measures and guarantees of non-repetition of the commission of this type of crime.
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“There was never an explanation given or an act of deference from the Chilean State with the wives, sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, grandsons and granddaughters of the disappeared, while their relatives desperately searched,” said the president of the the Association of Relatives of the Detained-Disappeared (AFDD), Gaby Rivera.
The AFDD leader highlighted the “political will” of the president and insisted on the follow-up that family groups will carry out on the execution of this plan.
Until now, the main obstacle to finding the disappeared has been the little collaboration of the Armed Forces, which the relatives attribute to a “pact of silence” that has been in place since the dictatorship (1973-1990).
At a dialogue table set up at the end of the 1990s, the military provided data on some 200 detainees whose bodies, they claimed, had been thrown into the sea. However, some of those remains were found in mass graves.
*With AFP and EFE
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