Artículos Destacados

Septiembre 1, 2007

The Ghosts of the Past: Forensic Obstacles to the Truth in Chile

"...beyond creating a formal record of the truth and pursuing criminal justice, there remains a primary human need to reckon with the bones of the dead..."

By Cristian Correa

A year ago this month, President Michelle Bachelet solemnly established August 30th as the National Day of the Detained and Disappeared. The inaugural ceremony-held at the presidential palace and attended by many organizations of the relatives of the disappeared-was clearly meant to have a strong symbolic impact on the national psyche. In her speech, President Bachelet called on the nation to help her with many goals, including the need to remember the past; learn from human rights violations; vindicate the memory of the victims; and bolster a democracy genuinely premised on respect for human rights.

In honour of that day, the President also announced the creation of a National Museum of Memory and Human Rights. Despite already having several memorials, parks, and monuments meant to honour the memory of the victims of past human rights violations, this particular proposal sparked a vibrant debate around the difficult task of agreeing on whose version of the truth would come to constitute the ‘national memory' of the brutal 1973 to 1990 dictatorship.

The social rift caused by this debate demonstrated just how complex and prolonged a national process of reckoning with mass atrocity can be. Chile has already held two separate truth commissions-the 1990-1991 Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the 2003-2005 Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture-along with scores of judicial investigations, that have resulted in the sentencing of more than 100 former military members, with an additional 400 still being prosecuted. Yet, despite what arguably passes as a robust national effort to deal with this dark chapter, the country remains haunted by the ghosts of its past and its own unanswered questions.

One of the primary impediments to a full reckoning lies in the technical difficulties inherent to identifying the remains of the disappeared, few of whom have ever been accounted for. In April 2006, the Chilean Bureau of Forensic Services determined that at least 48 out of 96 disappeared persons whose remains had been found at the General Cemetery of Santiago in the 1990's had been wrongly identified. This declaration had a profound effect on the nation, opening the wounds of the relatives who thought their loved ones had been laid to rest and provoking a lack of confidence on behalf of the relatives of some 400 additional disappeared persons whose bodies had been found and identified before that.

In response, the government appointed a special commission to provide psychological and social support to victims and also enlisted the help of foreign forensic experts to evaluate the process of identifications and give recommendations. A new forensic plan based on this foreign expertise has since been implemented, with some notable progress in identifying remains. However, many of the ghosts of Chile's past continue to inhabit the nation's conscience, slowing its capacity to find peace and showing us all that, beyond creating a formal record of the truth and pursuing criminal justice, there remains a primary human need to reckon with the bones of the dead. For the families of those who were taken and never returned, the painful mysteries of the past remain unsolved and an air of injustice lingers on.

On August 30th-not only in Chile but throughout the world-we pause to remember the missing and the families who have mourned their loss every day since they were forcibly disappeared.