The Chilean State will support, for the first time, research to try to find more than a thousand people who disappeared during the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), announced President Gabriel Boric on Wednesday, a few days before 50th anniversary of the military coup.
For decades, this search was almost exclusively the responsibility of families, and only 307 remains were found. The fate of 1,162 others remains unknown.
“Justice is long overdue,” said President Boric, launching the National Plan for the Search for Truth and Justice, the first official initiative of its kind.
“The only way to build a future that is freer and more respectful of life and human dignity is to know the whole truth,” he added during a ceremony held outside the presidential palace, in which right-wing opposition forces did not attend.
Funded by the State, this plan aims to reconstruct the trajectory of victims after their detention and disappearance. Most of the missing were workers and peasants aged on average in their thirties.
“No other government has had the political will to ensure that this ordeal does not only concern loved ones, but society as a whole and the state that made our loved ones disappear”, reacted Gaby Rivera, president of the Association of Relatives of Detainees and Disappeared at the ceremony.
On September 11, 1973, Augusto Pinochet organized with the support of the CIA a military coup in Chile against the socialist president Salvador Allende, democratically elected three years earlier, and imposed until 1990 a military dictatorship marked by a bloody repression.
About 40,000 people were tortured and 3,200 were murdered or are still missing.
Until now, the main obstacle to the search for the missing has been the lack of cooperation from the armed forces. Family associations accuse them of having all the information but refusing to give it in the name of a “pact of silence”.
In the late 1990s, the military provided information on some 200 detainees whose bodies were allegedly thrown into the sea. However, some of these bodies were found in mass graves.
Augusto Pinochet died in 2006 without ever having been convicted for the crimes committed by his regime.
08/30/2023 23:03:49 – Santiago du Chili (AFP) – © 2023 AFP