On the eve of the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the coup, on September 11, 1973, the left-wing Chilean president, Gabriel Boric, presented the Truth and Justice Search Plan in the Plaza de Constitución, in front of La Moneda, in Santiago, before some 500 attendees, many of them relatives of detained-disappeared and politically executed during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990). It was an emotional ceremony, in which Boric signed a decree, together with the Minister of Justice, Luis Cordero -who received an ovation- in order for the program to be a permanent and systematic policy of the State for the search and identification of 1,092 people.
The Search Plan is the most important project of the Boric Government for the commemoration of 50 years and has been prepared months in advance. It is intended to find out the circumstances and the transit through which the people who were detained, made to disappear and executed by the Pinochet dictatorship passed through, and to trace and compare the data with the hundreds of judicial investigations that are still open in the courts. Chileans.
During the dictatorship, which lasted for 17 years, at least 3,200 people were killed or made to disappear. According to the information compiled by the Ministry of Justice, 1,469 people were victims of forced disappearance and of these, 1,092 correspond to detainees who have disappeared.
There are still 377 executed people whose bodies have not been returned to their families, while only 307 victims of enforced disappearance have been identified. “That figure should hurt us, it should make our blood burn because it accounts for the magnitude of the debt that we have as a State and as a society,” said the president. “With this public policy, which is permanent, we take charge as a State, not only as a Government, of doing everything in our power and going over the barriers of what they have told us is possible to clarify the circumstances of disappearance and/or death, and the final destination of the compatriots who are victims of forced disappearance, in accordance with the obligations of the State of Chile and international standards,” he added.
It is not about resentment, it is about building a future with dignity. It’s not about the past, it’s about the future. Today we present the #NationalSearchPlan to take charge as a State of clarifying the circumstances of what happened to the victims of forced disappearance… pic.twitter.com/eSs7xkhxTn
—Gabriel Boric Font (@GabrielBoric) August 30, 2023
Boric recalled in his speech the recent sentences that have emanated from the Supreme Court, including that of the Chilean singer-songwriter Víctor Jara, in which seven ex-military members were sentenced for his kidnapping and homicide. “Justice has taken too long. By the way, we must appreciate the brave judges and those who continue to push until today, but when we think that yesterday, not metaphorically, in the last days of August 2023, sentences were handed down that condemned the perpetrators of crimes such as the advisers of La Moneda or that of Víctor Jara, one also wonders, and it is a duty of the State to ask it, that they do not teach it in the classrooms of the Faculties of Law: if justice is such, when it is not opportune, it is better that it come to that did not arrive, but something happened on the way and that it happened does not mean that we have to forget it”.
It is the context in which the president has highlighted the Search Plan. “That is why we are here today and we say that this, what we are doing today, is a gesture of democracy because it is an act of State that assumes memory in a way in which we are not mobilized by resentment, but by the conviction that the only possibility of building a future that is freer and more respectful of life and human dignity is to know the whole truth”. And he added that they are not only gestures, but “concrete and financed public policies”, because “we are convinced that they are necessary to have robust democracies that can be projected with courage into the future.”
During the ceremony, the president was preceded by the president of the Association of the Disappeared Detainees, Gaby Rivera, and of the Association of Relatives of Politically Executed, Alicia Lira. Both highlighted the role of the Boric government. Rivera recalled that, after the coup d’état and the crimes of the dictatorship’s agents, that on the part of the State “there was never an explanation or the slightest deference to the families”, for which he valued “the political will” of the current Administration. “The State made the relatives disappear and the State has to take charge. And if we have to be there for another 50 years, that’s how we’ll be,” Rivera said.
The Search Plan has been presented on August 30, the International Day of Victims of Enforced Disappearances.
a divided country
The commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the coup d’état has caused a series of clashes between politicians from the left and from the opposition in Chile. Last August 22, for example, in the Chamber of Deputies there was an episode with shouting and insults between right-wing parliamentarians and left-wing ruling parties.
This, because UDI parliamentarians, together with the Chile Vamos bloc, of the traditional right, backed with the votes of the Republican Party, of the extreme right, promoted in the Chamber the reading of an old declaration of August 22, 1973, 20 days before the coup, which denounced the “serious breach of the constitutional and legal order of the Republic” by the Government of Allende and asked the ministers who were part of the Armed Forces and the Carabineros “to put an immediate end to all situations in fact referred to, that violate the Constitution and the laws.”
On July 15, during his first tour to Europe, Boric announced in an interview with Cadena SER that he would call on the Chilean political parties to sign a joint declaration on the occasion of the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the coup. His idea, which he put forward, that “we agree, all the political forces, regardless of our current positions, that the problems of democracy must be resolved with more democracy and not with less. Therefore, a coup is unacceptable. And, two, that not even the sharpest differences justify the violation of the human rights of those who think differently”.
However, his approach was not accepted by the opposition, since they considered that the president intended to give a single vision of the coup. “We are not available to sign any agreement that is written with the left hand, with a biased vision and co-opted by the Communist Party, with a vision of the past,” said the head of the bench of the National Renewal deputies, from the right. Traditional, Frank Sauerbaum.
And this Wednesday, when he was finishing his speech during the presentation of the Search Plan, the president returned to the point. First, he regretted “the absences in this ceremony because the presidents of all the political parties were invited here and not all of them came.” And then he insisted: “I think it is time for us to agree on something that is very basic, that does not require context, that does not require further explanation, which is that we are never again going to interrupt democracy through violence and never more we are going to violate the human rights of another person for thinking differently, nothing more. And for those who interpret things, we are not talking about the past, we are talking about what is to come, about the society we are building”.
Boric’s government has had problems in the framework of the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the coup. At the beginning of July, the presidential adviser to date, the writer Patricio Fernández, resigned from his position after being accused by communist parliamentarians and human rights groups of having disassociated the coup d’état from the criminal consequences against the population. Later, the Minister of Culture in charge of coordinating the activities, Jaime de Aguirre, was removed from the Cabinet.
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