Her state Chile will carry out – for the first time – investigations to ascertain the fate of more than a thousand of those who disappeared during the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), President Gabriel Boric announced yesterday Wednesday (30/8), a few days before the 50th anniversary of the military coup.
For decades, investigations they were almost exclusively done by families. Only 307 bodies have been found. The luck at least 1,162 people remain unaccounted for.
“Justice has come too late”President Borich said, announcing what he called a national truth and justice research project, the first state initiative of this nature.
“The only way to build freer future, with more respect for human life and dignity, is to learn the whole truth“, he added during a ceremony organized outside the presidential palace on the International Day for the Victims of Enforced Disappearances, which is celebrated every year on August 30in order to draw the attention of the international community to the fate of those imprisoned in places and under conditions unknown to their relatives and legal representatives.
No representatives of the right-wing opposition attended the event.
The plan, with public funding, has a purpose to find out what happened to the victims after their detention and disappearance.
Most of the missing were laborers or farmers, about thirty years old on average.
“No other government had the necessary political will” to undertake this “torturous” job, which “it’s not just about relatives, it’s about society as a whole and the state that wiped out our people”commented Gabby Rivera, the president of the Association of Families of the Imprisoned and Disappeared, during the ceremony.
On September 11, 1973, Augusto Pinochet staged a CIA-backed military coup in Chile, overthrowing the socialist president Salvador Allende, who had been democratically elected three years earlier. The dictatorship he imposed ruled until 1990 and was marked by bloody repression.
About 40,000 people were tortured and at least 3,200 left-wing activists and alleged opponents of the military regime were killed or disappeared.according to human rights organizations.
Until today, the main obstacle in the search for missing persons was the lack of cooperation of the armed forces. Organizations of families of the victims accuse the army of having all the information at its disposal, but refuses to disclose them under a “non-disclosure agreement”.
In the late 1990s, military they had released information about about 200 political prisoners who were thrown into the sea. But some of the bodies of the specific victims were later revealed to have been buried in mass graves.
Dictator Augusto Pinochet died in 2006, never having been convicted of the crimes of his regime.
Source: News Beast
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