2023-08-30 16:48:02
SANTIAGO (AP) — Chilean President Gabriel Boric announced Wednesday that, for the first time, the state will search for more than 1,100 people who disappeared during the bloody dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet through a national search plan.
The president chose the International Day of Victims of Enforced Disappearance to fulfill one of his government promises.
Until now, the search had been carried out by groups of relatives, groups of victims of the dictatorship and human rights organizations.
Boric also promised that 14,000 million pesos (regarding 18 million dollars) will be allocated to modernize and strengthen the Medical Legal Service, which exhibits delays in expert reports in cases related to human rights violations.
The plan “seeks that this responsibility (of search) be a permanent obligation of the State,” said the Minister of Justice, Luis Cordero, during its launch at the La Moneda presidential palace. “It was the State with its officials who committed these crimes and it is the State, with its resources, that has to carry out the search,” he added.
Cordero said that among the members and ex-members of the Armed Forces “it is evident that there are people who have information regarding the fate of the disappeared.
The Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990) left a balance of more than 40,000 victims, including some 3,000 murdered opponents of whom more than 1,400 disappeared. After decades of searching, the remains of 307 people were found and identified, and another 1,162 remain to be found, according to the latest official figures.
“It is a way not only to repair the victims but also to address the repair of a collective scar”, Cordero synthesized, excited. Two of his great-uncles are among dozens of peasants arrested and executed a month following the military coup of September 11, 1973.
The launch of the program was a process of several months and 67 meetings with more than 700 people, family organizations and human rights.
In the past, authorities have made some unsuccessful efforts to locate the missing. In 1991, the remains of 126 people were found in 107 graves that were believed to be those of opponents of the dictatorship. Although the government at the time announced that they had been identified and even handed them over to their relatives, in 2006 it was determined that the identification was not rigorous and almost fifty families had to return the remains to the forensic institute.
Some 82 boxes with the skeletal remains of the presumed disappeared returned to the Legal Medical Service following remaining in a warehouse at the University of Chile and were added to many more still pending expert inspection.
Boric recalled at the beginning of June in his speech to the nation that the government will not give up on its moral duty to exhaust all efforts and resources so that the disappeared “can rest in peace. As long as they are still lacking, Chile is incomplete”.
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