The Constitution and Codes Committee of the Senate approved the bill that recognizes the right of victims of the armed guerrilla groups that operated in the 1960s and 1970s to receive reparation”moral, social and economic”. This bill passed to the Senate and will be voted on Wednesday.
In the articles of the project it is recognized “the right to reparation for all those persons who have suffered damage to their person and property as a consequence of unlawful acts committed between January 1, 1962 and December 31, 1976, by members of armed organizations of an ideological or attributable to these“. In the fifth article it adds: “The State undertakes to pay the aforementioned victims or their successors, a reparation pension that will be determined by the regulations approved by the Executive Branch.”
In addition to the payment to the victims, the project also contains, in its article 4, “the construction of one or several memorials addressed to their consideration as victims of criminal actions for political reasons“.
A Special Commission will be created that will be in charge of the investigation, substantiation and resolution on the requests for protection of the benefit, as well as its granting. Its integration, tasks and functions will be designated by the Executive Branch.
In his own project -presented at the end of 2020 and which was never discussed- Cabildo Abierto set certain parameters to quantify pensions. There, the type of affectation was considered (from the “impairment of a right” to death, going through minor, disabling or permanent injuries). According to this scale, eventual beneficiaries could opt for a single repair in indexed units of between $10,000 and $2.8 million, or receive a pension of between $22,000 and $56,000 per month. It would cover about 80 cases. This was not included in the approved project.
The text was signed by the Executive Branch on Tuesday the 20th, entered Parliament on Thursday the 22nd and between Tuesday and Wednesday it will be ratified in the Senate. It comes after the 9th of this month, and at the impulse of the Cabildo Abierto, the senators of the coalition sent a “minute of aspiration” to the government asking for an initiative in this sense.
in dialogue with The Observer the lobbying senator Guillermo Domenech justified the speed of the process. As he recalled, it is not a new project, but rather it includes the essentials of the proposal that his party had presented in December 2020 and that was never considered. The same was pointed out by his co-religionist Raúl Lozano.
The few days of deadline motivated the suspicions in ranks of the Broad Front, which will not vote on the project. Deputy Gustavo Olmos described as “obscene” the haste of such an important text without discussion and ventured that everything responds to a “toll” that Cabildo Abierto is charging the rest of the government coalition in exchange for your vote on pension reform. consulted by The Observer, Olmos maintained that the “signs” in this sense are clear.
Senator Eduardo Brenta expressed himself along the same lines, saying on Monday that he hoped that the project related to the victims of the guerrilla was not a “sort of exchange” for the reform.
The opposition’s arguments were rejected by several nationalist senators. Jorge Gandini, for example, pointed out that the will of the ruling party responds to fulfilling a “old engagement” to make progress on an issue that has been in Parliament for two years and thus prevent “a third party from passing” without being defined.
