SANTIAGO, Chile — Yelena Monroy was 3 years outdated when she was imprisoned for greater than a 12 months alongside together with her youthful sister and her mom, a socialist activist focused by the regime of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 navy coup in September 1973.
“We have been scared, we have been crying,” recalled Monroy, now a 53-year-old business engineer and one in all greater than 1,000 kids and adolescents who have been detained within the identify of combating communism and leftist guerrillas throughout Chile’s navy dictatorship from 1973 to 1990.
When Pinochet put in himself as chief, the age of majority in Chile was set at 21 years. However being a minor was no safety from the dictatorship’s crackdown. Youngsters have been detained, tortured, killed, and even used as decoys to apprehend their mother and father.
The trauma of that interval has made lots of the younger victims of the navy regime reluctant to talk out, and the method of prosecuting that period’s crimes and making reparations typically 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, as a result of all of them suffered,” Gaby Rivera, president of Chile’s Affiliation of Relations of the Detained-Disappeared, informed The Related Press.
Nevertheless, the Nationwide Fee on Political Imprisonment and Torture figures present that the Pinochet regime detained 1,132 minors beneath the age of 18. Of those 88 have been beneath 13 and 102 have been arrested together with their mother and father — or have been born in jail.
Some 307 kids beneath the age of 18 have been killed throughout that interval, in response to human rights teams’ evaluations of documentation from the Nationwide Reality and Reconciliation Fee. About 3,200 folks total have been killed throughout the dictatorship, or went lacking and are believed useless.
Chile’s Nationwide Stadium, within the nation’s capital, turned the most important detention middle of the navy authorities. That’s the place they arrested — and beat — Roberto Vásquez Llantén, when he was 17, for being an energetic militant of the Revolutionary Left Motion.
He had been in hiding for the reason that begin of the coup, however was arrested on Jan. 15, 1974. Vásquez Llantén, who’s 67 as we speak, spent a 12 months within the Chacabuco Jail 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 stored watch from towers.
If minors had political significance, they have been detained identical to adults. However in addition they have been used as lures to lure and detain their mother and father.
The Fernández Montenegro sisters have been imprisoned in February 1974 after 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, excluding 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 used to be in a cell, carrying a hoodie, whereas some guys put electrical energy cables on my fingers, yelling and screaming profanities and threats,” demanding to know the place the weapons have been, Viviana Fernández recounted.
“The one factor I did was cry and cry … I felt very afraid, very afraid,” she stated.
Fernández, who’s 64 as we speak, and Yelena Monroy are members of the Affiliation of Former Minors Victims of Political Imprisonment and Torture, created 9 years in the past partially to lift consciousness in regards to the destiny of youngsters and adolescents beneath the dictatorship.
Fernández, who’s the spokesperson, says the group has about 100 members, however she thinks there are numerous 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 Motion, 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 situated — and recognized.
“They gave us a bit little bit of a finger in a small field, and a bit little bit of what I think about was a small tooth,” recollects his sister, Ángela Saavedra, who’s 81.
Monroy and Fernández fault the Chilean authorities for not absolutely acknowledging previous violations of youngsters’s human rights.
“Now we have been completely forgotten by the state, it is rather a lot in debt,” Fernández stated.
___
Comply with AP’s protection of Latin America and the Caribbean at https://apnews.com/hub/latin-america