Torture, disappearance and exile, the wounds opened by the Chilean dictatorship

In the basement of the presidential palace, in the heart of Santiago, Patricia Herrera was detained and tortured before being forced into exile. These were the first weeks of a dictatorship that also killed and disappeared by the thousands.

Patricia, tortured. Luis, missing. Shaira, exiled. When 50 years have passed since the military coup that strangled Chilean democracy in full Cold Warwith the support of USAthe wounds still bleed.

LOOK HERE: Why is Chile commemorating the 50th anniversary of the coup d’état divided and with the figure of Pinochet on the rise?

The torment

When she was returning home from university, she was detained by plainclothes officers for “be a woman and a socialist”. Patricia Herrera He was then 19 years old.

She was taken blindfolded to the underground The cointo the “Barracks No. 1″, also known as “The hole“, one of the first detention and torture centers enabled by the dictatorship that overthrew and led to suicide the president Salvador Allendealso a socialist, on September 11, 1973.

“From the first night we arrived there was sexual harassment. At first I thought the guard was going too far with me, I didn’t think it was something established that women had to be punished. sexual violence besides politics”, evokes the 68-year-old historian.

She was detained for 14 months in Barracks No. 1, in London 38 and Tres Alamosmansions in Santiago converted into torture rooms by the regime of Augusto Pinochet. He left Chile for a forced exile that lasted 15 years, first in France and then in Cuba.

According to two truth commissions, at least 38,254 people were tortured during the dictatorship that lasted until 1990.

Barracks No. 1 today functions as an office in the presidential headquarters. The victims, who were led blindly, were able to identify the place thanks to a curved wall.

On August 30, the president Gabriel Boric He installed a plaque on the ground floor of La Moneda to remember the horror to which around 30 detainees were subjected.

“We want to put a milestone that everyone sees (…) that here, in the political center of the country, a torture center was found”says Herrera.

MORE INFORMATION: What the documents declassified by the US say about the hours before the coup in Chile

Missing

The dictatorship murdered 1,747 people and detained and disappeared another 1,469, of whom 307 have been identified, according to official reports.

The rest, 1,162, are still missing. Where are they? Their families still wonder half a century later.

When the political police arrested in 1974 Luis Mahuidaa 23-year-old university student who was active on the left, also ended his sister’s childhood, Marialina Gonzalezthen nine years old.

Mother, Elsa Esquivel, dedicated himself to looking for his son full time. González took care of Luis’s two daughters, ages 11 months and three years. “I left the dolls. My nieces were dolls to me”, he relates.

He never finished school. She went to hundreds of places asking about her brother. She even went on a hunger strike and remembers being detained several times while she participated in marches for the disappeared.

González regrets his childhood and youth lost because of the dictatorship: “I wasn’t able to tell them ‘stop, let me be, I want to go out dancing, I want to have friends’. I was quiet”.

At 59 years old, and dedicated to the care of her elderly mother, she feels that suffering will follow her into old age. “There is no closure for the fact that my brother is still missing, there will be no closure.“, sentence.

Exile

The dictatorship generated the largest migratory movement in the history of Chili: Just over 200,000 people went into exile, according to the independent Chilean human rights commission.

Allende government officials, union leaders, workers, students, and farmers had to leave the country with their families. Sweden, Mexico, Argentina, France and Venezuela were the main destination countries.

The majority were able to return to Chile on September 1, 1988, when a decree authorized their return, a year and a half before the end of the dictatorship.

ALSO SEE: “50 years after the coup against Allende, Chilean society is frozen… We are walking on tiptoe”

The communist militant Shaira Sepulveda She was tortured in the clandestine prisons of Villa Grimaldi and Four Poplars. After being released, she left in exile in France in 1976 with her then husband, leaving her parents, her sister and her friends in Santiago.

“My family was here, my sister, my parents, but the impact of having to go to a country where you are nobody was (greater)”, he recalls.

She returned 17 years later with two children. Her family broke down again. The eldest of his children did not get used to Chile and returned to Europe. “I am an older woman, so my grandchildren there will hardly know me.”, laments Sepúlveda at 74 years old.

Source: Elcomercio

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I am Jack Morton and I work in 24 News Recorder. I mostly cover world news and I have also authored 24 news recorder. I find this work highly interesting and it allows me to keep up with current events happening around the world.