[ Chile’s government has announced its much-anticipated plan to
search for the victims of forced disappearance and political execution
under Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, which began with a coup 50
years ago next month.]
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CHILE ANNOUNCES MUCH-ANTICIPATED PLAN TO SEARCH FOR PINOCHET’S
VICTIMS  
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John Bartlett
August 30, 2023
The Guardian
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_ Chile’s government has announced its much-anticipated plan to
search for the victims of forced disappearance and political execution
under Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, which began with a coup 50
years ago next month. _

A woman works to restore a mural in honour of those executed and
disappeared under the Pinochet dictatorship, featuring the question
‘where are they?’, Photograph: Esteban Félix/AP // The Guardian

 

The _plan __nacional de __búsqueda__, _or national search plan,
will seek to establish the circumstances and conditions under which
each person was forcibly disappeared, guarantee access to government
records and provide reparations and guarantees for victims’
families.

It is the first time that the Chilean state has assumed responsibility
for the search for victims of the Pinochet dictatorship, which ran
from 1973 to 1990, despite families’ tireless efforts and hundreds
of legal cases taken on by the judiciary.

Chile’s president, Gabriel Boric, announced the plan in a ceremony
outside La Moneda, Chile’s presidential palace, on International Day
of the Victims of Forced Disappearances on Wednesday.

“This plan is considered a permanent state policy, and as such is
essential,” he said .“The commitment to truth and justice is
inextinguishable, and will accompany us forever.”

A total of 40,175 people are registered victims of crimes under the
Pinochet dictatorship ranging from imprisonment and torture to
execution.

Of these, 1,092 are listed as forcibly disappeared and 377 as victims
of political executions. Some were thrown into the Pacific Ocean or
dumped in shallow graves in the Atacama desert and elsewhere.

Chile’s president, Gabriel Boric (centre), observes a memorial with
the faces of students and workers who were detained and disappeared
under Pinochet.   (Photograph:  Pablo Vera/Agence France-Presse
(AFP)  //  The Guardian)
The remains of only 307 previously missing victims have been
identified since the return to democracy in 1990.

“The plan transforms the families’ efforts into a permanent public
policy,” said Luís Cordero, the minister for justice and human
rights. Two of his family members were kidnapped in 1973 and neither
they nor their remains have ever been found.

“This is the first time ever that the state has assumed
responsibility for the search, which is essential because the crimes
were committed by the state and its agents in the context of a policy
of repression.”

After eight months of consultations with victims’ families and other
organisations, the Chilean state will now centralise information on
its missing citizens – who have been symbolically included on the
electoral roll since 2021 – for the first time. A budget for the
plan will be determined in mid-September.

Campaigners, however, have said more still needs to be done. “It
signals good intention from the government, and it is essential that
we have a state-led policy,” said Álvaro González, the
vice-president of the _Agrupación de Familiares de Detenidos
Desaparecidos_, a national organisation of families that has spent 50
years tracking down victims.

“But we still have doubts about how effective this can be without
the cooperation of the armed forces, who say they don’t have any
information when we know that they do.”

 

Relatives hold cardboard cutouts of their disappeared relatives at a
rally in Santiago in July.  (Photograph: Esteban Félix/AP  //  The
Guardian)
“Pacts of silence” among the perpetrators of human rights abuses
and members of the armed forces have consistently thwarted attempts to
seek justice. This was complicated further by a 1978 amnesty law that
excused perpetrators and accomplices of all crimes committed between
11 September 1973 – when Pinochet’s coup overthrew the socialist
president Salvador Allende – nd 10 March 1978, without
distinguishing between common and politically motivated crimes.

Since the return to democracy, the armed forces have handed over
specific information and allowed limited access to facilities and
records in the context of judicial investigations. Other individuals
have made confessions or led investigators to locations of graves and
other evidence as Chile continued its excruciating crawl towards
justice.

Victims’ families have taken up the task of piecing together the
last known traces of their loved ones since the early days of the
dictatorship. In 1976, _La Vicaria de la Solidaridad_, a civil rights
organisation, drew up giant grids known as _la sábana_, or the
sheet, by hand with details and locations.

The search picked up in the 1990s, although the conditions of the
delicate transition to democracy meant that progress was painstaking.
Chilean courts have since processed 584 kidnapping cases, 169 murders
and 85 illegal burials under the dictatorship.

In the most recent, Chile’s supreme court on Tuesday ordered 25-year
sentences for aggravated kidnapping and homicide to seven former
soldiers convicted of murdering the singer and folklorist Víctor Jara
in 1973.

His British widow, Joan Jara, and her children were also given 150m
pesos (£140,000) each in compensation.

Jara was brutally tortured at _Estadio Chile_, a small covered
stadium in central Santiago, in the days after Pinochet’s coup. His
body, riddled with 44 bullet holes, was dumped in a ditch near the
city’s main cemetery with its neck and other bones broken.

Pinochet died in 2006 without being punished for the crimes he
presided over, despite his arrest in London in 1998 by police acting
on a request from Spain.

Forced disappearance “is a crime which re-victimises families every
day with the absence of their loved ones”, said Cordero.

“For most of us, 50 years is a long wait. But for the families this
is their today, their yesterday.”

_[JOHN BARTLETT is a journalist based in Chile writing on Latin
American politics and current affairs for The Guardian, The New York
Times, the BBC, The Washington Post and other outlets.]_

* Chile
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* Augusto Pinochet
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* Americas
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* Latin America
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* Fascism
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* Gabriel Boric
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* CIA
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* Henry Kissinger
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* US policy towards Latin America
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