Chilean President Gabriel Boric announced Wednesday that he would favor the repeal of the amnesty law for human rights violations committed during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990). Boric revealed this measure, as well as the criminalization of forced disappearances during official events marking the 51st anniversary of the coup that overthrew the democratic government of Salvador Allende in 1973.
“We will put urgency in dealing with a bill that seeks to exclude the application of amnesty, pardon and prescription with regard to crimes against humanity committed by state agents or with their authorization,” Boric said.
“Although the amnesty is no longer applied thanks to a solid jurisprudence of the courts, ending its effects definitively and irreversibly is an unpaid debt that we have as a country,” said the president from the Palacio de La Moneda (seat of government) in a solemn but sober official act.
Boric also announced that he would present a bill to classify the crime as enforced disappearance and reiterated his intention to declassify information from the Valech report, prepared two decades ago by the Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture to clarify the identity of opponents imprisoned and tortured during the civil-military dictatorship.
“With this, we are only complying with the obligations of the State of Chile established in the recommendations of the United Nations Human Rights Committee, as well as in two judgments of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in 2006 and 2013,” added the president.
The aim is for the information collected by this commission, created in 2003, to be made available to the courts and authorities in charge of the unprecedented National Research Plan promoted by the current government.
A year ago, the progressive Boric government presented a national research plan to clarify the circumstances of the disappearance and death of people who were victims of enforced disappearance.
This is the first time since the return to democracy that the Chilean state has taken on the task of searching for the disappeared. Until now, this task was carried out by family groups, groups of victims of the dictatorship and human rights organizations.
In Chile, there were dozens of trials for human rights violations under the Pinochet regime, although he died in 2006 at the age of 91 without having been convicted of his responsibility for these crimes.
The dictatorship left a toll of nearly 40,000 victims, including at least 3,200 opponents assassinated, including 1,469 victims of enforced disappearance. After decades of research, the remains of 307 people have been found and identified and 1,162 others remain to be found, according to the latest official figures.
