Following litigation initiated by the late owner of El Clarín, Víctor Pey, the Spanish justice system ordered the State of Chile to pay the sum of 520 million euros to the shareholders of the newspaper that was confiscated during the Pinochet dictatorship.
The morning paper was closed down by the military on the day of the coup, after 19 years of existence. Its assets were confiscated, and its journalists and editors persecuted and imprisoned. That day the newspaper did not come out, the military arrived at 04:00 to stop the presses to prevent its circulation. According to its owner, Víctor Pey, the machines were given to El Mercurio.
In addition, as stated The country, “the assets of the newspaper in Chile are still occupied by the military almost half a century later”. And it is that El Clarín was the Chilean newspaper with the highest assets and sales of the time, with an editorial line of support for the government of the Popular Unity (UP) headed by President Salvador Allende.
“The ICSID settled the legal dispute in 2020 by reiterating that the owners of El Clarín have the right to be compensated ‘for any damage susceptible to financial evaluation that they may establish’ and that their 1972 investment is under the protection of the Convention on the Protection of foreign investment between Spain and Chile. This right has the authority of ‘res judicata’ since 2008 in the 155 countries that have ratified the ICSID Convention, including Spain and Chile”, added the aforementioned medium, pointing to the court’s decision.
The ruling of the Spanish justice follows others where the Chilean State has had to disburse large sums of money as compensation for the acts committed by the Pinochet dictatorship, which go hand in hand with what was ordered by the International Center for Settlement of Differences Relating to Investments (ICSID), the international arbitration body of the World Bank; a court to which foreign investors go to claim for their rights not respected.
The compensation falls into the fiscal coffers of the government of President Gabriel Boric, after the previous administration of Sebastián Piñera, and Michelle Bachelet, delayed the payment of this resolution, which dates from 2008, with an application of 5% per year per concept of interest in arrears.
“When communicating the order on December 20 to the representation of the Chilean State in Madrid and its Attorney before the court, the Government of Sebastián Piñera refused to receive it and asked to send it to Santiago, which the court did. However, when it is still to be resolved whether the communication had the legal effects established by the procedural law in December, it is on the Boric government that the consequences fall that Piñera in his two terms at the head of the country has not fulfilled the obligation to compensate , despite the fact that he publicly promised to do so, ”said the Spanish media.
It is worth mentioning that the first action of the military rebels was to silence the media in favor of the constitutional regime. El Clarín was one of them, if not the main one, by virtue of the almost 250 thousand copies sold daily. The owner of the morning paper, the Chilean-Spanish businessman Víctor Pey Casado, maintained that Army troops broke into the offices and workshops of the newspaper El Clarín, located at that time on Calle Dieciocho 263, at around 4:00 a.m. print media, the nascent Military Junta inflicted a devastating blow on freedom of expression and informative pluralism.
