Chile: Four years after the social uprising

Through an Open Letter issued by our sister organization Casa Memoria José Domingo Cañas in Chile, we learned of the suicide of our comrade Nadia Romero Vidal. It is with great sorrow that we have learned that Nadia is the fifth victim of violent police repression to take her own life. These suicides represent yet another consequence of the violence with which the Chilean State responded to the just demands of its citizens during the social uprising that began in October 2019.

At Fundación para la Democracia, we express our solidarity with the families of the victims who have had to face this new suffering. That sentiment extends to the thousands of victims, women and men, who suffered serious violations of their fundamental rights in the context of the citizen uprising in the final months of 2019 and the first half of 2020. We must remember that more than 500 people were maimed with eye injuries as a result of violent action by State agents; that more than 8,000 complaints of torture were filed, including multiple cases of sexual abuse; and that the National Human Rights Institute filed nearly 2,000 criminal complaints for cases of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.

For us, who together with Rigoberta Menchú, the Guatemalan Nobel Peace Prize laureate, accompanied several of those peaceful demonstrations in the streets of Santiago, it is a matter of great concern to see how little progress has been made in investigating, prosecuting and providing reparation for these serious violations.

We endorse the complaints filed by various Chilean human rights organizations, to the effect that the measures adopted so far by government bodies have not met international standards regarding the notion of "comprehensive reparation." Among other shortcomings, the recommendations presented so far do not take into account the psychosocial trauma resulting from the repression and do not cover victims who suffered other injuries from the impact of pellets and other weapons wrongly called less lethal. According to data from the Movimiento Salud en Resistencia (2023), the Carabineros police fired more than one million pellets during the uprising, and to date nearly 700 people live with this type of ammunition lodged in their bodies.

The fact that, to date, five victims of repression in Chile have gone as far as taking their own lives, and that an enormous number of people have been condemned to live with pellets embedded in their bodies, leads us to reiterate the global call to ban the use of so-called less lethal weapons. In addition to the hundreds of Chilean victims, there are the thousands of victims that continue to occur to this day in many countries of Latin America and the Caribbean and in the rest of the world.

Download the full statement:

Comunicado Chile.pdf