Youngster victims are the forgotten voices of Chile in the course of the Pinochet dictatorship from 1973 to 1990

SANTIAGO, Chile — Yelena Monroy was 3 years outdated when she was imprisoned for greater than a 12 months alongside together with her youthful sister and her mom, a socialist activist focused by the regime of Gen. Augusto Pinochet after he got here to energy in Chile in a army coup in September 1973.

“We were scared, we were crying,” recalled Monroy, now a 53-year-old industrial engineer and one in every of greater than 1,000 youngsters and adolescents who have been detained within the identify of combating communism and leftist guerrillas throughout Chile’s army dictatorship from 1973 to 1990.

When Pinochet put in himself as chief, the age of majority in Chile was set at 21 years. But being a minor was no safety from the dictatorship’s crackdown. Children have been detained, tortured, killed, and even used as decoys to apprehend their dad and mom.

The trauma of that interval has made most of the younger victims of the army regime reluctant to talk out, and the method of prosecuting that period’s crimes and making reparations usually has made no distinction amongst victims based mostly on age. So, the kid victims of the Pinochet period haven’t had a lot visibility, although minors characterize almost 10% of the deaths attributed to the regime.

“We don’t classify them by age, because they all suffered,” Gaby Rivera, president of Chile’s Association of Relatives of the Detained-Disappeared, advised The Associated Press.

However, the National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture figures present that the Pinochet regime detained 1,132 minors below the age of 18. Of these 88 have been below 13 and 102 have been arrested together with their dad and mom – or have been born in jail.

Some 307 youngsters below the age of 18 have been killed throughout that interval, in response to human rights teams’ evaluations of documentation from the National Truth and Reconciliation Commission. About 3,200 folks general have been killed in the course of the dictatorship, or went lacking and are believed useless.

Chile’s National Stadium, within the nation’s capital, grew to become the most important detention middle of the army authorities. That is the place they arrested – and beat – Roberto Vásquez Llantén, when he was 17, for being an energetic militant of the Revolutionary Left Movement.

He had been in hiding because the begin of the coup, however was arrested on Jan. 15, 1974. Vásquez Llantén, who’s 67 at this time, spent a 12 months within the Chacabuco Prison Camp within the Atacama desert together with 16 different minors. There was no electrical energy or sizzling water, he recalled. There have been antipersonnel mines outdoors the barbed-wire to maintain prisoners in line, whereas guards saved watch from towers.

If minors had political significance, they have been detained identical to adults. But in addition they have been used as lures to lure and detain their dad and mom.

The Fernández Montenegro sisters have been imprisoned in February 1974 once they have been youngsters.

Viviana, 14, and Morelia, 17, have been accused of being guerrillas within the Chilean port of Valparaíso the place they lived, some 120 kilometers (75 miles) northwest of the capital. Their mom was arrested and launched after 24 hours. The entire household, except the daddy, have been energetic communists.

The sisters have been first held collectively within the Silva Palma Navy Barracks, on one of many many inhabited hills of Valparaíso.

“I was in a cell, wearing a hoodie, while some guys put electricity cables on my fingers, yelling and screaming profanities and threats,” demanding to know the place the weapons have been, Viviana Fernández recounted.

“The only thing I did was cry and cry … I felt very afraid, very afraid,” she mentioned.

Fernández, who’s 64 at this time, and Yelena Monroy are members of the Association of Former Minors Victims of Political Imprisonment and Torture, created 9 years in the past partly to lift consciousness in regards to the destiny of kids and adolescents below the dictatorship.

Fernández, who’s the spokesperson, says the group has about 100 members, however she thinks there are various extra, and that many are nonetheless afraid to speak about what occurred to them throughout these years.

Many different minors of that point didn’t survive to inform their story.

José Gregorio Saavedra González, a militant of the Revolutionary Left Movement, was executed on the age of 18 by troopers in Calama, within the north of the nation, along with 25 different political prisoners on Oct. 19, 1973. He was one of many disappeared who years later have been positioned – and recognized.

“They gave us a little bit of a finger in a small box, and a little bit of what I imagine was a small tooth,” remembers his sister, Ángela Saavedra, who’s 81.

Monroy and Fernández fault the Chilean authorities for not absolutely acknowledging previous violations of kids’s human rights.