Chilean human rights activists and former student protesters discussed the trauma of Augusto Pinochet’s regime’s crimes and the importance of preventing oppressive regimes at the Elliott School of International Affairs on Monday. 

Chilean human rights activist Veronica De Negri and Marco Echeverría, a Latin American Youth Center case worker and former student protester, discussed the importance of remembering the victims of the Pinochet regime’s crimes and Chile’s struggle to address its traumatic past. The panel was hosted by LATAM@GW, a student organization that discusses Latin America and Caribbean topics, and was moderated by Rosela Millones, a collective memory researcher at the University of Chile.

On September 11, 1973, Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected government of President Salvador Allende, a self described Marxist. With the support of the United States through covert operations against Allende, Pinochet began a 17-year period of authoritarian repression within Chile. 

During his time in power thousands of bystanders and dissenters were tortured, kidnapped and killed by the regime.

“What I can tell you is this thing happened. Not as an accident, these things happen by political decision, be very clear about that, always have the government involved,” De Negri said.

Millones said the Pinochet regime’s violence, oppression of opposition and other dictatorial acts still deeply affect social, political and cultural sectors of Chilean society today. She said human rights violations committed by the Pinochet regime killed thousands of Chileans and that people’s hesitancy to acknowledge this past has left thousands of “disappeared” Chileans still missing and no investigations have occurred. 

Pinochet remained in power until a vote was held in 1989 to oust him from power and a new president was sworn in in 1990. Millones said only in recent years have there been efforts by some Chileans to research the effects of the Pinochet regime. 

“In 2023 on the 50th anniversary of the coup, a nationwide research plan was launched to find those more than 1000 people who are still being sought by their families. That’s how present, that’s how painful are the open wounds of the dictatorship,” Millones said. 

De Negri said her eldest son, Rodrigo, was arrested by police and burned alive during an anti-Pinochet demonstration on July 2, 1986. She said the government denied her son any necessary medical attention at the hospital, despite being burned from the knees up, and ignored her demands to see her son in the emergency room until he was already dying.  

De Negri said in the over 30 years since the end of Pinochet’s rule, many Chileans have begun to forget the violent past of the regime or deny it and emphasized the importance of remembering the memory of the victims as well as the crimes committed against them. De Negri said the police had arrested her multiple times while she was protesting and during normal activities and said a colleague who was arrested with her denied it ever happened and chose to forget that the arrest occurred. 

“After I was arrested, and I was arrested with other two women, one of them is dead, and the other is denying everything. But the truth is, I look at her, and I look at me, I feel sorry because she’s still thinking that she was the only one that suffered.” De Negri said

Echeverría said during his time as a student activist for the restoration of democracy he was subpoenaed three times. He said Chile has not fully confronted these horrific past events because the democratic government that followed the regime chose to move on. 

“With the new wave of democracy in Chile, there was a big effort to not remember, to keep moving forward, to not dwell on the past,” Echeverría said through a translator. 

Echeverría said creating public sites or memorials is an important step toward confronting the past regime’s crimes and forming a public understanding of why the crimes must not happen again. De Negri said the memories of the things she saw cannot be forgotten because when things are forgotten they can be repeated. 

“Memory is something that we cannot forget because we have a responsibility in this world,” De Negri said. “And one of the responsibility, is the thousands of things we have to do, is never forget. Because when we forget these things still happening, and unfortunately, many people forget, and many governments forget, and the situation is still repeating.”