Valech Report

The Valech Report (officially The National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture Report) was a study published on November 29, 2004 that detailed abuses committed in Chile between 1973 and 1990 by agents of Augusto Pinochet's military regime. The report of November 2004 detailed the results of the six month investigation. A second part was released in June 2005. Testimonies have been classified, and will be kept secret for the next 50 years. Therefore, they can not be used in trials concerning human rights violations in Chile.

Related Topics:
November 29 - 2004 - Chile - 1973 - 1990 - Augusto Pinochet - November 2004 - June 2005

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The report was prepared at the request of President Ricardo Lagos by the eight-member National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture headed by Bishop Sergio Valech and it was made public via the Internet. The commission included María Luisa Sepúlveda (executive vice president), lawyers Miguel Luis Amunátegui, Luciano Fouillioux, José Antonio Gómez (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 prisonners.

Related Topics:
Ricardo Lagos - Bishop - Sergio Valech - Internet - PRSD

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The report was based on testimony given to the commission by 35,868 people, of which approximately 28,000 were regarded as legitimate. A further 8,000 cases were studied over the next six months. On June 1 2005, a second report included 1,201 new cases, 86 of which were children younger than 12 years old, including unborn children, which makes a total of 29,000 cases (an estimation, following United Nations' definition of torture, counts about 400,000 victims of torture). Most of these new cases had not been included in the first report because their parents were either executed political prisoners or among the "disappeared" detainees and there were no witnesses to endorse the situation. Sixty-seven point four percent of the cases of abuse that were approved by the commission took place during 1973.

Related Topics:
June 1 - 2005 - United Nations - Disappear

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The state provided lifelong monetary compensation (a pension of about 140 euros, which is inferior to the minimal wage salary, equivalent to 150 euros) to the victims as well as health benefits, equivalent to what indigents are entitled to. Families of the victims (3,000 of them were already dead) are not entitled to anything. Most importantly, all the testimonies uncovered by the Commission on Political Prisonners and Torture, created by decree-law 1040 (which is at the origin of the report), are classified and put to secret for 50 years. Therefore, none of them can be used in trials concerning human rights violations, nor given public. Associations of ex-political prisoners have been denied access to those testimonies.

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Associations of ex-political prisoners underlined the harsh conditions required for a testimony to be taken into account by the Valech's Commission, which has given a different definition of torture than the one accepted by the United Nations:

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• 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 for a duration of four days and a half).
• Detention must have been in one of the 1,200 official detention and torture centers listed by the Commission (including Villa Grimaldi, for example), excluding all cases of torture in the streets or in vehicles (starting in the 1980's, the CNI, which succeeds to the dissolved DINA, no longer brought victims to detention centers; thus, the fact that 67.4 percent of the cases of abuse that were approved by the commission took place during 1973 must be taken carefully). Carmen Gloria Quintana, who was burnt alive in the middle of the 1980's, was not recognized, following this definition of torture.
• Detention must not have taken part in another country (excluding all victims of Operation Condor).
• Detention must have been made by the DINA, Chile's secret police, excluding all cases of torture by ordinary armed or police forces.

They also underlined the fact that the Commission worked for only six months, and with very little publicity, despite United Nations' demand to it to accept testimonies for a longer period. In the country side, victims who managed to be informed (Internet being the only real way of that, since other media hardly spoke about the Commission) had to give testimony to local authorities, the same which had tortured them a few years before. The Commission worked only during offices labor hours, forcing victims to ask to their employer permission to testify - which, in Chile's present day society, is not always an easy thing to do... No psychologic assistance was provided to the victims, who had to live again horrible experiences of the past, some of them suffering flashbacks (giving sense to the concept of "re-victimization"). Ex-political prisoners informed that many of the testimonies 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).

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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, while 250 Mapuche indians are detained under the dictatorship's "antiterrorist laws".

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Valech Report: Excerpts ►