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CHILE: LAGOS PRESENTS TORTURE REPORT TO NATION, PENSION FOR VICTIMS

“A truth owed to us to complete the work of recovery and justice”. This was how the President of the Chilean Republic, Ricardo Lagos, in a radio-TV address to the nation, officially presented the report of the National Commission on political detention and torture (‘Comisión Nacional sobre la Detención Política y la Tortura’), presided by the Catholic Bishop Sergio Valech and consigned to him after a year’s work on Wednesday, November 10. The document, undisclosed until yesterday, contains the testimonies of 35,000 people submitted to torture during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet Ugarte (1973-1990); the stories were gathered throughout Chile and in other 40 nations, through diplomatic delegations. In expressing himself “moved” by the content of the report, President Lagos stated that “if the responsibility of State agents was compromised” in those years, due to the barbaric acts committed by the dictatorship, the State must therefore “adopt measures to indemnify the effects of such sufferance”. For this reason, the President of the Republic announced the prompt introduction in Parliament of a bill that foresees the recognition of a lifetime pension of 112,000 pesos (equivalent to around 150 Euro), as well as home and health benefits, in favour of the 35,000 torture victims of the Pinochet regime. “How could we have lived 31 years in silence, a silence that enhanced the damages of the sufferance of what we had wanted to occult? Lives were destroyed, covered with a thick blanket of silence, and this must end”, stated a visibly tense Lagos, reminding that political detention and torture represented an institutional practice in the 17 years of the regime, during which at least 3,000 political opposers were assassinated.