Valech Report - Criticism

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. 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" 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, Colonia Dignidad, Víctor Jara Stadium or 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, 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 . The number of testimonies received is consistent with the geographic distribution of inhabitants in the capital city and the provinces . 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.