2023-09-10 20:00:00
Five decades without answers, fifty years without knowing where their children are. in a new anniversary of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochetmothers and relatives of those missing in Chile continue searching for their children.
In a small rented boat, Luz Encina, 94, carries a handful of red flowers. In the sea she believes that her son may be there, one of the thousands of people disappeared by the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile.
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For three decades, the woman – today physically handicapped by age and who depends on her family to move – has traveled about 110 kilometers from Santiago to the port of San Antonio, in Valparaíso, to fulfill her August ritual: throwing carnations into the sea with the wish that Mauricio “be well where he is.”
“The military said that they threw several people into the sea and my son could be there,” says Encina.one of the few mothers of missing detainees still alive.
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On August 5, 1974, Mauricio Jorquera turned 19 years old. It was the last time Encina saw his son, a leftist militant university student.
Jorquera was captured by Pinochet’s political police. His mother searched for him without success in the centers where detainees were taken and tortured. Neither the military nor the justice system gave him an answer.
Encina, with Mauricio’s photo attached to her chest, senses that her son was thrown into the sea, perhaps from one of the “death flights” organized by the army to make the bodies of detained prisoners disappear.
Last week, the Chilean State committed for the first time to assume the search for just over a thousand missing detaineesthrough a plan launched by President Gabriel Boric on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the military coup that installed the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990) for almost two decades.
Without tears
For decades, the search for the missing was carried out almost exclusively by families, with only 307 remains being found. The whereabouts of others are still unknown. 1,162 victims.
Encina was one of the guests at the event led by Boric. Even with little hope, she believes that she will be able to receive some news about her son.
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“I have a lot of faith, I believe that everything will turn out well”said the woman after the launch of the National Plan for the Search for Truth and Justice.
In Santiago, Emilia Vásquez, 87, walks down the street where she watched her five children grow up. At the end of the passage there is a mural with the face of her first-born son, Miguel Heredia, who disappeared on December 26, 1973, when he was 23 years old.
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Air Force personnel took him from his workplace and transferred him to a detention centerwhere Emilia arrived to give him blankets and medicine, but she couldn’t see him.
Heredia was active in the communist youth, as a child he suffered from an illness that damaged his lung for life. He was a volunteer firefighter.
After the arrest of his son, The military raided the family home and took almost all of their belongings.including the firefighter’s suit, Vásquez evokes.
The woman later found out that Heredia was handed over to the Army and held in the Tejas Verdes regiment, in San Antonio, one of the main detention and torture centers of the dictatorship.
His mother also went there, but they did not give her any news about the fate of her son. Vásquez remembers crying bitterly in front of the military headquarters.
Almost five decades later she feels like her tears have dried up. Her eyes barely shine. “This is my cry, the one you see,” he laments.
Without the discovery of the bodies, the Chilean justice system began to treat the case of the forcibly disappeared as a “permanent kidnapping”, to prevent them from being covered by an Amnesty Law for the period 1973-1978, when the bloodiest crimes of the dictatorship were committed, which left more than 3,200 dead or missing.
In 2014, six retired soldiers were sentenced to between 5 and 15 years in prison for the kidnapping of Miguel Heredia. Last March, the Supreme Court convicted 59 former soldiers for the “kidnapping and torture” of 16 leftist militants, including Mauricio Jorquera.
However, it could not be determined where they are. “I have no hope, because my son was thrown into the sea, nothing else can be done”Emilia Vásquez resigns.
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