August 30, 2024, 11:19 PM
August 30, 2024, 11:19 PM
Chilean President Gabriel Boric announced on Friday (30.08.2024) a bill to allow courts and other state bodies to access the testimonies of thousands of people tortured by the dictatorship that were secretly collected by an extrajudicial commission.
In the framework of the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances, the president explained that the initiative is aimed at supporting the work of judges who seek to determine the whereabouts of more than a thousand people who disappeared under the power of the Augusto Pinochet regime (1973-1990).
“We are going to introduce the motions to lift the secrecy imposed by law on the documents, testimonies and background information of the report on political imprisonment and torture, the Valech report, allowing access by the courts of justice,” Boric said at a ceremony.
Information will not be public
In this regard, he stressed that the information will not be made public and will only be available to judges and state agencies involved in the plan to search for missing persons that his government launched exactly one year ago.
The commission headed by Bishop Sergio Valech collected detailed statements from some 36,000 people tortured by Pinochet’s agents. Pinochet died in 2006 at the age of 91 without being tried for his crimes.
Their testimonies were kept confidential for 50 years.
A year ago, the Chilean state took on the task of searching for missing detainees for the first time through a special program that has yet to yield results.
The Pinochet dictatorship left at least 3,200 opponents murdered, of whom 1,469 were victims of forced disappearance. After decades of searching, the remains of 307 were found and identified, and another 1,162 have yet to be found, according to the latest official figures.
Relatives ask military to break “pact of silence”
Relatives of those detained and disappeared during the military dictatorship asked the Armed Forces on Friday to break the “pact of silence” and collaborate in the National Search Plan launched by the Government.
During an event at the General Cemetery in front of the memorial for victims of the regime, the president of the Association of Relatives of Detained and Disappeared Persons (AFDD), Gaby Rivera, said that “the Armed Forces are hierarchical institutions” and that, therefore, they did not carry out “individual actions,” but rather “there was a plan that must be revealed.”
“The information is in the Armed Forces and we must demand it, Mr. President. We must break this pact of silence that we have waited 50 years for and move forward in truth and justice,” said the activist on the occasion of the commemoration of the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances.
The main obstacle to progress in this quest has been the lack of cooperation from the military in legal proceedings and the absence of a state policy.
