Santiago – “Where are they?” is a question asked thousands of times in Chile, which the government wants to settle with an official plan to broaden the search for information on the people that the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet made disappear, which is being launched just days before the 50th anniversary of the coup.
The leftist president Gabriel Boric had announced it last year and the Government has been preparing it for months with the participation of groups of victims and their relatives.
The so-called National Search Plan, which seeks to synthesize information that may still be available or unclassified in files, court cases and other instances, was presented yesterday by the president, two weeks before the anniversary of the coup on September 11. against the socialist Salvador Allende.
“Starting today, it will be a new institutional tool against oblivion,” Boric said at a ceremony, adding that the information that can be collected could also be used for ongoing judicial processes.
“This policy is permanent and we take charge as a State, not only as a Government, to do everything in our power and overcome the barriers to clarify the disappearances and deaths,” he added.
hopes
Juana Andreani, victim of abuses and detained during the dictatorship, was a friend of a person who disappeared. “We had the illusion that they were alive, but over the years we thought that they were not,” she said. “But, at least, that they tell us what happened, what happened to them, what they did with them. I think that is the most ungrateful of these 50 years, ”she added.
The objective of the plan is “to clarify the circumstances of disappearance and/or death of the victims of forced disappearance, in a systematic and permanent manner, in accordance with the obligations of the State of Chile and international standards,” says the program’s website. .
Victims of human rights violations during the dictatorship and relatives of victims consider that the Armed Forces could also have more information that they have not yet provided to clarify the fate of their missing or dead relatives.
Dozens of trials and convictions for human rights violations have been held in Chile during the Pinochet regime (1973-90). The dictator, however, who died in December 2006 at the age of 91, was never convicted in court of his responsibility for those crimes.
After the dictatorship, the Chilean State promoted the preparation of reports on the crimes of the period.
The different official commissions to clarify the facts estimated the total number of qualified victims at 40,175 people, which includes political executions, disappeared detainees and victims of political imprisonment and torture, according to the website of the Ministry of Justice. The dictatorship also sent thousands of people into exile.
For its part, the search plan indicates that there are 1,469 people who were victims of forced disappearance, of whom
the majority are missing prisoners and 377 executed whose remains were never delivered.
“Obviously there is a responsibility of the high command of the Armed Forces and of ‘the old men’; What did they do with the corpses? It can’t be that we don’t know that there are around a thousand Chileans that we don’t know what happened to them. It cannot be”, said Carlos González, detained and tortured by the military.
Source: Ambito
