Nearly 1,200 people are still missing. Fifty years after Augusto Pinochet’s coup, families are still tirelessly demanding justice and truth.
A march was organized in the center of the Chilean capital Santiago, Sunday September 10, in memory of those who disappeared from Operation Colombo carried out in the months just after the military coup of September 11, 1973. It was on this date thatAugusto Pinochet takes power in Chile, with the support of the CIA, against the socialist president Salvador Allende, democratically elected three years earlier. Until 1990, the regime imposed a military dictatorship marked by bloody repression. Around 40,000 people were tortured and 3,200 were murdered or remain missing.
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The names of the 119 missing from Operation Colombo were announced one by one. In the procession, Luisa Martinez Jimenez was 26 years old when her husband, a member of the MIR (Revolutionary Left Movement), disappeared. “The majority of victims were part of the MIR. None have been found to date.” The 76-year-old Chilean continues: “It was us who did all the investigations that were carried out. It was the families who did all the work.”
“As long as my husband has descendants, the quest to find him will not end.”
Luisa Martinez Jimenez, 76 years oldat franceinfo
A past that mobilizes all generations
This quest for truth will undoubtedly rest on Eduardo, 14 years old, Luisa’s grandson. He wanted to accompany him to honor the memory of his grandfather. “It makes me a little sad because I feel that there are people who have lived their whole lives with the feeling of not being able to find their loved ones. I have a brother, Camilo, and a sister, Antonia, and we will not stop fighting to find our grandfather”, assures the teenager. The father, also called Eduardo, was two years old when his family’s life changed. He remembers “fear, persecution, searches” in their house. “For a very long time, my mother did not rebuild her life, she never had other children”he says.
>> Chile launches a national plan to search for those missing from the dictatorship
Today, fifty years after the coup, Eduardo demands the truth: “To know what happened to our loved ones, our fathers, our brothers, our grandfathers, our sons. There has been no justice in this country!” Among the 1,500 victims of enforced disappearance, only 307 have been identified to date.
“It is the State which planned and executed these crimes. It is therefore the State which must assume this quest for the truth.”
Gabriel Boric, President of Chile
To try to find the missing, President Gabriel Boric launched a National Search Plan. This is the first time since the return of democracy more than 30 years ago that the Chilean state has implemented such a public policy.