By means of an Open Letter issued by the sister organization to the Home Memory José Domingo Cañas de Chile hear the news about the suicide of the classmate Nadia Romero Vidal. With a lot of pain, we have learned that Nadia is the fifth victim of violent police repression that takes the determination to take his life. These suicides are another of the consequences of the violence with which the State of Chile has responded to the just demands of citizenship during the social eruption started in October of 2019.
From the Foundation for Democracy we express our feelings of solidarity with the families of the victims who have had to face this new suffering. That feeling extends to the thousands of victims who have suffered serious violations of their fundamental rights in the context of the uprising citizen in the final months of 2019 and the first half of 2020. We must remember that more than 500 people were maimed with the loss of the eye by the violent action of agents of the State; that there were more than 8,000 complaints of torture, including multiple cases of sexual abuse; and the National Institute of DD.HH. filed nearly 2,000 complaints for cases of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.
For us, that next to Rigoberta Menchú, Nobel Peace Prize guatemalan accompany you on the streets of Santiago, several of those mobilizations peaceful, is of great concern to see the little progress made in the field of research, justice and reparation in respect to these serious violations.
We do our complaints filed by various entities, chilean human rights defenders, in the sense that the measures taken so far by the government agencies are not welcomed to the international standards with respect to the notion of “full reparation”. Among other shortcomings, the recommendations presented so far do not take into consideration the psychosocial trauma arising from the repression, and does not provide to the victims, who suffered other injuries resulting from an impact of bullets and other weapons, so-called less-lethal. According to data of the Movement Health in Resistance (2023), the police fired more than a million of pellets during the Outbreak and, to date, nearly 700 people live with this type of ammunition lodged in his body.
The finding that the date in Chile five victims of the repression, have gone to the extreme of killing yourself and the enormous amount of people who have been sentenced to live with pellets embedded in their bodies, leads us to reiterate the global call for the prohibition of the use of the so-called less-lethal weapons. To the hundreds of victims chilean add the thousands of victims who continue to occur until the day of today in many countries of Latin America and the Caribbean and in the rest of the world.
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