Valech Report
Encyclopedia
The Valech Report was a record of abuses committed in Chile
Chile
Chile ,officially the Republic of Chile , is a country in South America occupying a long, narrow coastal strip between the Andes mountains to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west. It borders Peru to the north, Bolivia to the northeast, Argentina to the east, and the Drake Passage in the far...

 between 1973 and 1990 by agents of Augusto Pinochet
Augusto Pinochet
Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte, more commonly known as Augusto Pinochet , was a Chilean army general and dictator who assumed power in a coup d'état on 11 September 1973...

's military regime. The report was published on November 29, 2004 and detailed the results of a six-month investigation. A revised version was released on June 1, 2005. The commission was reopened in February 2010 for 18 months, adding more cases.

The commission found that 38,254 people had been imprisoned for political reasons and that most had been tortured. It also found that 30 people had been executed or "disappeared"; that is in addition to those recorded by the earlier Rettig Report
Rettig Report
The Rettig Report, officially The National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation Report, is a 1991 report by a commission designated by then President Patricio Aylwin encompassing human rights abuses resulting in death or disappearance that occurred in Chile during the years of military rule...

.

Testimony has been classified, and will be kept secret for the next 50 years. Therefore, they cannot be used in trials concerning human rights violations, in contrast to the "Archives of Terror" concerning Paraguay
Paraguay
Paraguay , officially the Republic of Paraguay , is a landlocked country in South America. It is bordered by Argentina to the south and southwest, Brazil to the east and northeast, and Bolivia to the northwest. Paraguay lies on both banks of the Paraguay River, which runs through the center of the...

 and Operation Condor
Operation Condor
Operation Condor , was a campaign of political repression involving assassination and intelligence operations officially implemented in 1975 by the right-wing dictatorships of the Southern Cone of South America...

. Associations of ex-political prisoners have been denied access to the testimony.

Commission

The report was prepared at the request of President Ricardo Lagos
Ricardo Lagos
Ricardo Froilán Lagos Escobar is a lawyer, economist and social democrat politician, who served as president of Chile from 2000 to 2006. He won the 1999-2000 presidential election by a narrow margin in a runoff over Independent Democrat Union candidate Joaquín Lavín...

 by the eight-member National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture headed by Bishop
Bishop
A bishop is an ordained or consecrated member of the Christian clergy who is generally entrusted with a position of authority and oversight. Within the Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox Churches, in the Assyrian Church of the East, in the Independent Catholic Churches, and in the...

 Sergio Valech
Sergio Valech
Sergio Valech Aldunate was the Roman Catholic Auxiliary Bishop Emeritus of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Santiago de Chile, Chile. He was the head of the eight-member National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture panel in Chile, which investigated instances of torture that occurred...

 and it was made public via the Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

. The commission included María Luisa Sepúlveda (executive vice president), lawyers Miguel Luis Amunátegui, Luciano Fouillioux, José Antonio Gómez
José Antonio Gómez
José Antonio Gómez Urrutia is a Chilean lawyer, Social Democrat Radical Party politician and a former Minister of Justice. He is currently a senator and president of his party.-External links:*...

 (PRSD president), Lucas Sierra, Álvaro Varela and psychologist Elizabeth Lira. It did not include any representative of the victims or members of the associations of ex-political prisoners.

First part

The initial report was based on testimony given to the commission by 35,865 people, of which 27,255 were regarded as legitimate ("direct victims"). Of these, 94% said they were tortured. Eleven people were born in prison and 91 underage children were detained with their parents (including four unborn babies); these were not considered "direct victims". Another group of 978 people were minors at the time of their arrest. One woman was raped in prison and four women were pregnant at the time of their arrest and were tortured; their children were considered "direct victims". Victims were detained for six months, on average.

Out of the more than 8,600 rejected cases, 7,290 people requested that their cases be revised. The commission also agreed to investigate a further 166 cases which were not considered the first time. The updated report added 1,204 new cases, bringing the total number of victims to 28,459. The total number of arrests was 34,690 (some were detained multiple times).

The commission found that approximately 69% of arrests occurred between September 11 and December 31 of 1973, and 19% between January 1973 and August 1977.

Second part

Under the presidency of Michelle Bachelet
Michelle Bachelet
Verónica Michelle Bachelet Jeria is a Social Democrat politician who was President of Chile from 11 March 2006 to 11 March 2010. She was the first woman president of her country...

 the commission was reopened. It reviewed about 32,000 new requests from February 2010 to August 2011. It was to be opened for 12 months but due to the high number of requests it was extended for six months. 9,795 cases of torture and 30 cases of disappearances or executions were certified. The new report was presented to president Sebastián Piñera
Sebastián Piñera
Miguel Juan Sebastián Piñera Echenique is a Chilean businessman and politician. He was elected President of Chile in January 2010, taking office in March 2010.- Education :...

 on August 18, 2011 and released on August 26, 2011.

Benefits

The state provided lifelong monetary compensation to the victims as well as health and education benefits. These are detailed in Law 19,992 and include a monthly payment of about 113,000 to 129,000 thousand Chilean peso
Chilean peso
The peso is the currency of Chile. The current peso has circulated since 1975, with a previous version circulating between 1817 and 1960. The symbol used locally for it is $. The ISO 4217 code for the present peso is CLP. It is subdivided into 100 centavos, although no centavo denominated coins...

s (in December 2004 prices, subsequently adjusted for inflation), depending on the victim's age; free healthcare in the public system for victims and their parents, spouses or children under 25 or incapacitated children of any age; free education (primary to tertiary) for victims whose studies were interrupted by their imprisonment.

There is also a special bonus of 4 million Chilean pesos for victim's children who were born in captivity or who were detained with their parents while they were minors.

Criticism

According to the associations of ex-political prisoners, the commission used a different definition of torture than the one accepted by the United Nations
United Nations
The United Nations is an international organization whose stated aims are facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and achievement of world peace...

. The UN's definition of torture, counts about 400,000 victims of torture, but there is no clear source on how this estimation was reached). Most of those new cases of children had not been included in the first report because their parents were either executed political prisoners or among the "disappeared
Forced disappearance
In international human rights law, a forced disappearance occurs when a person is secretly abducted or imprisoned by a state or political organization or by a third party with the authorization, support, or acquiescence of a state or political organization, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the...

" detainees and there were no confirming witnesses. About two-thirds of the cases of abuse that were recognized by the commission took place during 1973.

The associations say that testimony was accepted under the following conditions:
  • Detention must have been of more than five days (in 1986, in Santiago de Chile, 120,000 people were detained by the armed forces. Of those 120,000, 24,000 were detained by Carabineros (the Chilean police force) for a duration of four days and a half). However, the Commission's requirement was not about time but about politically motivated detention or torture. In those cases where evidence of either was found, even if the period of detention was of few days, the testimonies were accepted (see article 1, paragraph 2 of Supreme Decree 1,040 of 2003, that created the Commission and established its mandate ).

  • Detention must have been in one of the 1,200 official detention and torture centers listed by the Commission (including Villa Grimaldi
    Villa Grimaldi
    Villa Grimaldi was a complex of buildings used for the interrogation and torture of political prisoners by DINA, the Chilean secret police, during the government of Augusto Pinochet. The complex was located in Peñalolén, in the outskirts of Santiago, and was in operation from mid-1974 to mid-1978...

    , Colonia Dignidad
    Colonia Dignidad
    Villa Baviera , formerly known as Colonia Dignidad is a hamlet in Parral Commune, Linares Province, Maule Region, Chile. Located in an isolated area of central Chile, it lies 35 km southeast of the city of Parral, on the north bank of the Perquilauquén River. It was founded by a group of German...

    , Víctor Jara
    Víctor Jara
    Víctor Lidio Jara Martínez was a Chilean teacher, theatre director, poet, singer-songwriter, political activist and member of the Communist Party of Chile...

     Stadium or Esmeralda
    Esmeralda (BE-43)
    Esmeralda is a steel-hulled four-masted barquentine tall ship of the Chilean Navy, currently the second tallest and longest sailing ship in the world.- Construction :The ship is the sixth to carry the name Esmeralda...

     floating center), excluding all cases of torture in the streets or in vehicles (starting in the 1980s, the CNI, which succeeded DINA, no longer brought victims to detention centers; thus, say the associations, the fact that about two-thirds of the cases of abuse that were approved by the commission took place during 1973). The case of Carmen Gloria Quintana
    Carmen Gloria Quintana
    Carmen Gloria Quintana Arancibia is a Chilean woman who suffered severe, almost fatal burns in an incident where she and other youngsters were detained by an army patrol during a street demonstration against the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet...

    , who was burnt alive in the middle of the 1980s, was not recognized, following this definition of torture. This allegation is erroneous. There was no official list of detention centers where victims had to have been detain for their cases to be recognized. The list established by the Commission was the product of the testimonies received (despite the fact that previous lists of detention centers included most places Memoriaviva). The difficulty of accepting testimonies of people detained in vehicles or tortured on the street was of finding enough evidence of them. Those cases where evidence was found of people detained and tortured in police buses or other vehicles were accepted. Ms. Quintana contacted the Commission but didn't present her testimony to it.

  • Detention must not have taken place in another country but in Chile.


They also underlined the fact that the commission worked for only six months, and with very little publicity, despite the UN's demand to accept testimonies for a longer period. In the countryside, in some cases victims who managed to be informed had to give testimony to local civil servants that were part of the local governments when they were detained and tortured. When the Commission knew about this situation demanded the exclusion of those officers of the process and sent new teams to those areas. The Commission coordinated its work with all regional and national organizations of former political prisoners and human rights organizations to help contacting their members and other people to give testimony. Advertisements were broad cast in national and local radios and TV stations and published in national and local newspaper [Commission's report pages 48 to 51,at http://www.comisiontortura.cl/filesapp/03_cap_ii.pdf]. The number of testimonies received is consistent with the geographic distribution of inhabitants in the capital city and the provinces [Commission's report pages 69 and 70, at http://www.comisiontortura.cl/filesapp/03_cap_ii.pdf]. The commission worked only during office hours, forcing victims to ask their employer for permission to testify - which, in Chile's present day society, is not always an easy thing to do... No sufficient psychological assistance was provided to the victims, who had to relive horrible experiences, some of them suffering flashbacks, except of referring statement givers to the Comprehensive Health Care Reparations Program (PRAIS ) and some specialized mental health care NGOs that weren't able to satisfy all the demand (giving sense to the concept of "re-victimization"). Ex-political prisoners said that testimony from minors under 18 years old were refused, because it was impossible for them to recall exactly all the details of the place and time where they had been tortured (children, some of them five years old, and adolescents had been tortured by the dictatorship).

Sixty percent of the ex-political prisoners were unemployed for at least two years, following studies made by ex-political prisoners' associations. Their life expectancy is only of 60 to 65 years. Switzerland and Argentina have recently refused to extradite two of them to Chile, on the grounds that they might be subject to "mistreatments" in Chile. Others are still confined in high security quarters in Chilean prisons.

See also

  • Chilean coup of 1973
    Chilean coup of 1973
    The 1973 Chilean coup d'état was a watershed event of the Cold War and the history of Chile. Following an extended period of political unrest between the conservative-dominated Congress of Chile and the socialist-leaning President Salvador Allende, discontent culminated in the latter's downfall in...

  • Rettig Report
    Rettig Report
    The Rettig Report, officially The National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation Report, is a 1991 report by a commission designated by then President Patricio Aylwin encompassing human rights abuses resulting in death or disappearance that occurred in Chile during the years of military rule...

  • List of truth and reconciliation commissions

External links

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