The president of Chile, the leftist Gabriel Boric, announced this Sunday (11) the official launch of the plan to search for political prisoners who disappeared during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990). The date was chosen because it marks the 49th anniversary of the coup d’état.
“Our commitment is to continue relentlessly searching for missing detainees, 1,192 missing detainees who still don’t know where they are. This is not acceptable, it’s not tolerable, it’s not something we can naturalize,” the president said.
The initiative, which Boric had already anticipated in June during the annual speech of accountability to the nation, envisages working together with organizations of family members of disappeared and executed for political reasons.
“This commitment is to advance in truth, in justice, in the reparation of all victims of violence perpetrated by State agents, because this is the only and main guarantee of non-repetition that we can offer”, said Boric.
The president made the announcement as part of official activities in remembrance of Pinochet’s coup against the government of socialist Salvador Allende (1970-1973), on September 11, 1973, which started the military regime. This Sunday marked the beginning of the ceremonies for the 50th year of the coup, in September of next year.
Boric said that earlier in the day he visited Allende’s grave at the Santiago General Cemetery, which received a pilgrimage from the families of victims of the dictatorship, as it does every year.
Throughout the day, several groups of politicians and citizens gathered to honor the statue of Allende in front of the presidential palace of La Moneda and left red roses in his honor – the same flowers were placed on the balconies of the government headquarters.
The Chilean dictatorship lasted 17 years and left 40,175 victims, including those executed, detained, disappeared, political prisoners and tortured, according to data from the official commission that collected testimonies from victims and family members.
Today, various initiatives, including state ones, seek to find the disappeared in different ways. In January, still under Sebastián Piñera’s administration, the government launched a project that aims to speed up the search for babies kidnapped in the regime, making contributions of money and buying DNA kits for organizations dedicated to this search to carry out their work.
The subject was among Piñera’s campaign promises in 2017, but the way in which the initiative was designed drew criticism.
“These are crimes committed by the State, so we ask that the State establish a National Commission for Truth, Justice and Reparations” that can centralize the searches, he said in a statement to Hijos y Madres del Silencio. The organization that began its work in an organized way in 2014 is dedicated to identifying minors kidnapped from their parents in the 1970s, similar to what the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo do in Argentina.
Hijos y Madres del Silencio is looking for at least 579 babies who were taken from their parents mainly in the 1970s, at the beginning of the Pinochet dictatorship.
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