“Que las promesas se vuelvan ciertas”: Truth, Justice, Reparations, Memory and Guarantees of Non-Repetition in Chile: 25 Years of Criminal Cases

The year 2023 marks various anniversaries relevant to transitional justice concerns in Chile: in particular, 50 years have elapsed since the 1973 military coup, and 25 years since criminal complaints brought by victims’ relatives reactivated justice efforts in domestic courts for grave human rights violations committed during the 1973-1990 dictatorship. 1998 was also the year of the ‘Pinochet case’, which saw Chile’s former dictator arrested in London under an international arrest warrant requested by Spain. This year’s annual report chapter accordingly adds consideration of Chile’s overall transitional justice trajectory since 1998, to its usual focus on the detail of recent events. It also contains detailed statistical comparisons for two twelve month periods: July 2022 to June 2023, inclusive; and July 2021 to June 2022.

One notable trend in Chile’s recent, and now mid-to-long-term, transitional justice trajectory has been a diversification in the types of transitional justice dilemma that arise, combined with a notable tendency to their judicialisation. The courts have become a first resort not only for criminal and civil cases, but also for actions primarily associated with the search for truth, symbolic reparations, public memorialisation, and prevention-oriented reforms. In the area of criminal justice we observe a consolidation in the courts’ acknowledgement of the State’s international obligations in issues ranging from reparations, to sexual violence. There has been less progress in ex officio prosecution of torture, the holding to account of civilian perpetrators, and preventing defendants going on the run once convictions are confirmed. Overall, however, the principal outer limit to a more complete criminal justice response is, increasingly, biological impunity, with perpetrators dying before their convictions are confirmed or sentences served. The courts are meanwhile increasingly called on to counter denialism, dissolve spurious dictatorship-era convictions of political prisoners, and ‘purge’ public spaces and military training facilities of symbols associated with the dictatorship and its protagonists. In civil claim-making, there has been an important recent breakthrough in interpretation of cosa juzgada, the prohibition on double jeopardy.

In the area of public policy, there are some signs of progress towards the fulfilment of longstanding promises. A National Search Plan was launched on 30 August 2023 to resolve remaining questions surrounding hundreds of cases of enforced disappearance, thereby contributing to truth and justice, and ideally leading to the recovery and restitution of at least some of those still missing. A legislative agenda announced in September 2023, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the coup, promises measures in other long-running issue areas including the secrecy provisions that still surround the Valech truth commission archive; the introduction of enforced disappearance as a specific class of criminal offence, and attention to hitherto overlooked harms including the practice known as “irregular adoptions”. There is nonetheless a question mark over the likely viability of some of these measures, given a prevailing political climate that has seen a surge in far-right political currents unremittingly hostile to outstanding truth and justice matters despite their clear moral urgency. These promises however cannot wait any longer: in words often attributed to Seneca, “nothing is as akin to injustice, as justice long denied”.