First modification: Last modification:
Five decades have passed since the Chilean Army, led by Augusto Pinochet, overthrew the elected government of Salvador Allende. Although the country has had truth commissions, there are still more than 1,100 missing persons and many of the victims have not received reparation, amidst complaints of a ‘pact of silence’ between the military to avoid exposing themselves to revealing the horrors of the dictatorship. . The wounds of the past remain open.
September 11, 1973 began a dark era for human rights in Chile. The dictatorial regime that was established by force of cannon against the democratic Government of Salvador Allende established with it a secret police that would dedicate itself in the following years to persecuting all forms of opposition to the new order.
This repressive force, the Directorate of National Intelligence, kidnapped, tortured, sexually assaulted, executed and disappeared thousands of people. Today, after the passage of the National Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1990-1991) and the National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture (2003-2004, second report in 2011), there are more than 40,000 direct victims of the regime of Pinochet. Of them, the vast majority were tortured and political prisoners, about 37,000, while 3-200 people were executed or forcibly disappeared, of which 1,162 have not yet been found.
One of the biggest open wounds in contemporary Chile, if not the biggest, is with the victims of this period and their families. Both with those who have not been found decades after their disappearances, as well as with more than 200,000 exiles and the children of those murdered or disappeared, who were not considered in the reports of the two commissions. Furthermore, these organizations have been criticized for having carried out their work in a few months and for having left out many people who were not able to report their own cases or those of family members.
Until a few days ago, the Chilean Government had never had a national plan to search for the missing. Led by the progressive Gabriel Boric, the first state initiative for this purpose was launched at the end of August. Until now, the task had been carried out by families with their own resources. With the search plan, the Government will undertake excavations in places where it is feared that the remains of many victims rest and will create a common database to compare them electronically.
But this new plan faces challenges of various kinds. As the years go by, the clues become blurred and more of the victims’ relatives, who had the most information about them, have died. A collapsed judicial system also puts limits on the rush to resolve cases, but the biggest obstacle is obtaining the truth from the perpetrators: victims’ associations blame a ‘pact of silence’ and they demand that they hand over files from the time, which according to the former uniforms do not exist.
The challenges for full reparation to the victims of the dictatorship continue to be notable. Even more so with a growing political polarization in the country. 36% of Chileans still consider that there were reasons for a military coup, according to a CERC-Mori survey, a percentage that has grown since the last measurement of that same parameter, in 2013.
There are many challenges ahead. Chile continues to face its past 50 years after the emergence of a dictatorship that was intolerant of criticism and that brought all its force against dissident voices. The clarification of these crimes, reparation to the victims and the creation of a collective memory to avoid repeating a tortuous past will depend on whether those who endured the worst of the 17 years of military rule find a path to healing.
#minutes #open #wounds #Chile #decades #coup