In August of 2023, as the 50th anniversary of Augusto Pinochet’s bloody 1973 coup d’état drew near, President Gabriel Boric of Chile stood before the presidential palace in downtown Santiago and spoke about memory. “During these days in which there are people who dare to deny all of this,” he said in Spanish, referring to the country’s rising denialism of Pinochet’s spate of crimes, “how do you respond to those people who invite us to forget?”
The question wasn’t merely rhetorical. Beneath a wide canopy blocking the midday sun, a few hundred people — relatives of Pinochet’s victims, journalists, a coterie of government officials — had gathered to hear Boric unveil his administration’s response: The Plan Nacional de Búsqueda, or National Search Plan, a highly anticipated initiative harnessing new technologies and scientific techniques to uncover the remains of Chileans abducted and likely killed as part of Pinochet’s infamous, post-coup crackdown. More than 1,000 victims of such enforced disappearance have never been found. Of those who disappeared, Boric said, “we want to recover their stories to be able to reconstruct our own, because when we forget, we also lose a fragment of ourselves, of what we can be.”
“My memory,” he added, “is incomplete because I am missing the disappeared.”
https://undark.org/2025/02/19/history-future-chile-disappeared/