The state of Chile will – for the first time – carry out investigations to ascertain the fate of more than a thousand of those who disappeared during the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), President Gabriel Boric announced on Wednesday, a few days before the 50th anniversary of the military coup.

For decades, research was done almost exclusively by families. Only 307 bodies have been found. The fate of at least 1,162 people remains unknown.

“Justice has been long overdue,” President Borich said, announcing what he called a national truth and justice inquiry project, the first state initiative of its kind.

“The only way to build a freer future, with more respect for human life and dignity, is to learn the whole truth,” he added during a ceremony held outside the presidential palace.

No representatives of the right-wing opposition attended the event.

The publicly funded project aims to find out what happened to the victims after they were detained and disappeared.

Most of the missing were laborers or farmers, about thirty years old on average.

“No other government had the necessary political will” to take on this “torturous” job, which “not only concerns the relatives, but society as a whole and the state that disappeared our own people,” commented Gabi Rivera , the president of the Association of Families of Imprisoned and Disappeared Persons, during the ceremony.

On September 11, 1973, Augusto Pinochet staged a CIA-backed military coup in Chile, overthrowing the socialist president Salvador Allende, who had been democratically elected three years earlier. The dictatorship he imposed ruled until 1990 and was marked by bloody repression.

About 40,000 people were tortured and at least 3,200 left-wing activists and alleged opponents of the military regime were killed or disappeared, according to human rights groups.

To this day, the main obstacle in the search for missing persons has been the lack of cooperation of the armed forces. Victims’ family organizations accuse the army of having all the information at its disposal, but refusing to disclose it under a “silence agreement”.

In the late 1990s, military officials released information about about 200 political prisoners who were thrown into the sea. But some of the bodies of the specific victims were later revealed to have been buried in mass graves.

Dictator Augusto Pinochet died in 2006, never having been convicted of the crimes of his regime.