Chilean President Gabriel Boric announced the “National Search Plan” for those who disappeared from the Chilean dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet between 1973 and 1990. On Wednesday, Boric signed a decree in order to find the more than a thousand disappeared forced by the military dictatorship. “I am convinced that democracy is memory and it is the future, and one cannot be without the other,” said the Chilean leader during a ceremony attended by politicians, activists, and relatives of the disappeared.
“We take charge as a State, not only as a Government, of moving all the barriers to clarify the circumstances of the disappearance and/or death of the victims of forced disappearance,” Boric explained. According to the president’s statements, the plan will be implemented as a “permanent and systematic national policy” to find the victims. The Chilean dictatorship claimed 40,175 victims (among those executed, detained or disappeared). Forced disappearances are estimated at 1469, of which 377 are estimated dead but their remains have not been recovered.
According to the authorities, among the objectives established in the ceremony, is “to locate, recover, and identify and restore the mortal remains of the victims of forced disappearance.” According to the testimonies, the disappeared were classified by the Pinochet regime as “political opponents of the dictatorship or leftist militants.”
According to Boric, “The State has failed to respond to the families, and to the entire society, in delivering the answers that the country needs, the disappeared are missing for all of us.” The authorities of the Latin American country have established that the so-called ‘ Plan de Búsqueda’ will be carried out in commemoration of the fifty years of the overthrow of the democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, by the military. Boric plans to reconstruct what the victims experienced, from their kidnapping to their final destination, according to their statements.
“There was never an explanation or an act of deference from the Chilean State with the wives, sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, grandsons and granddaughters of the disappeared, while their relatives desperately searched,” said the Association of Relatives of Detainees. Disappeared (AFDD), Gaby Rivera at the ceremony.
Boric reached the presidential house in 2022, and the ‘Search Plan’ is one of the measures that he will implement during his term. The initiative proposes finding the victims, but also prohibiting coups in the country. “We are going to invite all the political parties in Chile to sign a declaration precisely in this sense. There are always those who try to find justifications according to the context of the breakdown of democracy and I believe that the breakdown of democracy in a legally constituted government that he exercised his functions democratically is simply unacceptable,” said the president.
