He The State of Chile will assume for the first time the search for 1,162 disappeared detainees during the dictatorship of that country. This was announced by the president on Wednesday. Gabriel Boric, to settle one of the main justice debts 50 years after the military coup led by Augusto Pinochet.
During decades, the search for the disappeared was carried out almost exclusively by the familiesbarely finding the remains of 307. 1,162 people still need to be found. “This figure should hurt us and make our blood burn, because it accounts for the magnitude of the debt that we have as a State and as a society,” said President Boric, when launching the National Plan for the Search for Truth and Justicethe first official initiative of its kind, and one of its main government promises.
Boric signed the decree making this plan official during a ceremony outside the La Moneda presidential palace, which was attended by ministers and relatives of the victims but not by right-wing opposition forces. A few days after the five decades of the coup d’état who overthrew the socialist government Salvador Allende and established the 17 years of Pinochet’s dictatorship, the ruling party and the opposition are divided on how to approach this anniversary.
“President Boric in each milestone that is related to this date makes an additional mistake,” criticized Javier Macayapresident of the Independent Democratic Union, one of the main opposition parties after claiming not to have been invited to the ceremony.
With state funding, The search plan aims to reconstruct the route of the victims after their arrest and disappearance. It also seeks to guarantee access to information for family members and implement reparation measures. The search will now be a permanent duty of the State and not only of the families, assured Boric, who was moved and recognized that “Justice has taken too long.”
The relatives of the victims participated in the preparation of the plan., who after years of denouncing abandonment of the State thanked the efforts of the Boric government. “No other government had this political will that was necessary so that this ordeal is not only for the relatives, but for the entire society and the State that made our relatives disappear,” he said at the ceremony. Gabby Riverapresident of the Association of Relatives of the Detained-Disappeared.
Most of the disappeared were workers and peasants with an average age of 29 years. The arrests began as soon as the military uprising took place, on September 11, 1973. 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 It has been maintained since the dictatorship (1973-1990).
At a dialogue table set up at the end of the 90s, 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.
Among the commitments signed in that instance, was the appointment of special judges for cases of human rights violations that occurred during the dictatorship. The clues that were obtained from these judicial processes are the basis of the information that the search plan intends to synthesize. announced on Wednesday. The Minister of Justice, Luis Cordero, assured on Wednesday that within the Armed Forces “it is evident that there are people who have information about the fate of the disappeared.”
In 1990, when democracy returned, A National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation was established, which recognized the more than 3,200 victims, including those killed and disappeared.who left the dictatorship. In 2003, another official Commission was opened that recognized nearly 38,000 tortured.
Source: Ambito
