An altar has been lit up in Estación Central on the evening of every 29th March for 37 years. Near the corner of 5 de Abril and Las Rejas they celebrate the life of Rafael and Pablo Vergara Toledo and mourn his death, which has yet to find justice. Songs are sung to revive nostalgia, speeches are made and people promise not to forget or forgive, a promise that the young people of the emblematic Villa Francia have been able to keep with an active memory and an iron fight against the repressive forces that stole the lives of these two brothers during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, the same forces that today, without trial or punishment, still torture, mutilate, shoot and even kill the youth who fight against social inequality and demand their right to demonstrate.
By Ximena Soza
The Villa Francia knows of those killed by the police and also of responses to them, its streets, in murals, pamphlets and voices shout “not a minute of silence, a life of struggle”, but this sector of Santiago is not the only one that rises at night to occupy the paralysed city during the commemoration of the Day of the Young Combatant. In Pudahuel, Lo Hermida, La Victoria and many other neighbourhoods, rituals of memory are held and occasionally an abandoned bus writes in smoke signals that nothing and no one is forgotten, even if some names are called more than others on that date. Paulina Aguirre, for example, is a name that like many women of the resistance does not fill so many mouths, but having been assassinated on the same day, she reminds us that the historical struggle of the Chilean people is full of feminine courage. The murder of Paulina, crude and cowardly, gave between three and five years to the police perpetrators, with 8 bullets, according to El Ciudadano.
The so-called “Beheaded Case”, which also took place around that fateful 29 March 1985, shows the brutality with which the Chilean repressive forces operated during the dictatorship, abandoning the tortured and beheaded bodies of painter Santiago Nattino, professor Manuel Guerrero and sociologist José Manuel Parada in Quilicura, afterwards having arrested them in broad daylight (Cooperativa. cl). The perpetrators of the bloody deeds were convicted belatedly and, in some cases, had their sentences revoked, receiving prison benefits such as Sunday release and even “extended release” or parole (Ciper, Chile). In fact, nine of the fourteen implicated are at liberty and those with other sentences for the accumulation of other crimes are serving their sentences in the prison of Punta Peuco, a prison identified as a five-star prison built for human rights violators.
Unfortunately, as horrors continue to happen at the hands of the police in Chile, those responsible, being police officers, still enjoy privileges in relation to their trials, sentences and how and where they serve them. In some of the most notorious cases of police brutality in recent years, the police officers enjoy house arrest, as in the case of Carlos Alarcon, a policeman convicted of the murder of the young Mapuche Camilo Catrillanca from behind. Similarly, according to La Tercera, former Carabineros lieutenant colonel Claudio Crespo Guzmán, who was charged with shooting young Gustavo Gatica, leaving him blind during the social unrest of 2019, only has to sign in every fortnight. Added to these is the case of Senator Fabiola Campillai, who also lost her sight and her senses of taste and smell after being shot in the face by special forces on her way to work. In her case, only Patricio Maturana, who fired the shot, was convicted, not the person who commanded the operation, nor his team.
Recently, the new interior minister, Iskia Siches, said that the Carabineros de Chile have the full support of the government. The minister was also photographed with a carabinero who shot a 19-year-old man on 25 March. Although Boric’s government assured in its presidential campaign that it would carry out a wide-ranging reform of the Carabineros de Chile, it ratified Ricardo Yáñez as the institution’s director. Yáñez, who has held his post since the government of Sebastian Piñera, has been extensively involved in human rights violations. Although on 5 April 2022, an agreement on the respect of fundamental rights was signed (El Dinamo), during the last days of protests, among other violations, the aforementioned shooting, the running over of a demonstrator by a police car and the heavy fall with a blow to the head of another demonstrator (caused by a policeman), who despite his loss of consciousness, was brutally arrested without receiving medical attention on the spot.
According to the National Institute of Human Rights, INDH, two years after the social outbreak, the state has not taken charge of working on processes of truth, justice and reparation. Since then, human rights have been severely violated by the police. According to INDH figures, more than 450 people suffered eye injuries, some of them mutilations. According to health brigades working at ground zero of the Santiago protests, the number of eye injuries is higher and the levels of repression using chemicals, tear gas and pepper spray are frequent during the days of protest. The inadequate judicial procedures, the low or non-existent penalties, the lack of responsibility assigned to the high command of the police forces and the support given by the government mean that in Chile there is no guarantee of non-repetition, which is why the young combatants of today are victims of constant repression and could at any moment suffer the same fate as those of yesterday.
Symbolically, a small fire near the altar for the Vergara Toledo brothers on March 29th becomes the torches that will open the path of the walk towards the trench of the usual encounter with the police and light the flame of small and large barricades that know how to shelter the night of the Santiago autumn and illuminate the eyes that can be glimpsed between the folds of the hoods and those of the neighbours who appear with the fresh memory of many similar days. Just like yesterday, these young people are ready to give their lives, because no matter how many reforms they have achieved in the 80’s, how much they have influenced drastic changes in education, how they have forced the government and the political class to open the way for a new Constitution, the young fighters of today continue to be tortured, mutilated, shot, beaten and even killed before the complicit look of governments that change their names and surnames, but not their military tactics to prevent them from exercising their legitimate right to social protest.
