Chile announces national plan for the State to assume the search for those who disappeared during the dictatorship

Almost half a century after the military coup in Chile, the government of President Gabriel Boric announced on Friday a national plan for the State to assume the search for some 1,100 victims of forced disappearance whose whereabouts are still unknown, a task that for years has fallen to the efforts of relatives and groups of victims of the dictatorship.

The National Search Plan will start with the integration of all the records of the disappeared gathered so far by different special truth commissions, the courts of justice, the relatives of the victims and the previous governments, informed on Friday the Minister of Justice, Luis Cordero, during a meeting with international press correspondents.

The dictatorship led by Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) left a balance of more than 40,000 victims, including some 3,000 murdered opponents, of whom more than 1,400 were victims of forced disappearance. After decades of searches, the skeletal remains of 307 people were found and identified, and another 1,100 remain to be found, according to official figures.

The information on the disappeared will be worked on by multidisciplinary entities, which with resources and specialists, will continue the task that until now rested on the shoulders of the relatives of the disappeared.

Cordero said that it is possible that “indications for new investigations” emerge from the integration of old data.

Andrés Colque, 58, a psychologist, told The Associated Press that “even if a detainee is missing, it is necessary to search for him and have all the resources available, (because) it helps our society to value the rights and lives of people.” President Boric had already committed to developing this task.

The plan will not replace the task of the courts and, for it to work, it is important to have the collaboration of the families of victims and their groups, said Cordero, who is personally close to the issue. Two great-uncles are among dozens of peasants arrested and executed a month after the military coup of September 1973.

The project will formally begin on August 30, when Boric signs a supreme decree on the International Day of Victims of Enforced Disappearance.

When announcing the plan, at the beginning of June, the president said that next year 14,000 million pesos, some 18 million dollars, will be allocated to modernize and strengthen the Medical Legal Service, which exhibits delays in the expertise in cases related to violations. to human rights.

The forensic institute erred in identifying the skeletal remains of presumed forced disappearances in what was a scandal in the South American country: in 1991, in a sector of the general cemetery intended for unknown persons, 126 remains of bodies were found in 107 graves, according to official figures. The majority were opponents of the dictatorship.

After identifying a few dozen remains, the forensic service handed them over to their relatives, who were able to bury them after decades. But 15 years later, in 2006, almost fifty families had to return them to the forensic institute because there were quite a few misidentified.

Some 82 boxes with the skeletal remains of presumed disappeared detainees returned to the Legal Medical Service after remaining in a warehouse at the University of Chile for about 18 years, which were added to many more without expertise.

Boric recalled at the beginning of June that the government will not give up on its moral duty to exhaust all efforts and resources so that the detainees disappeared in the dictatorship that still remains to be found “can rest in peace.”

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