Chilean President Ricardo Lagos has said his government will pay compensation to about 35,000 victims of torture during the dictatorship of general Augusto Pinochet, who seized power in a coup in 1973. The payments will reach 112,000 pesos, or about 215 US dollars, per person per month.
"The government must do something to alleviate the pain of those who have suffered so much," the socialist president said in an address to the nation late Sunday. "We have to take measures to heal the wounds, not to reopen them." The announcement came after Lagos studied a new report on the use of torture by the Pinochet regime that remained in power until 1990.
The document, prepared by a commission chaired by Bishop Sergio Valech, contains the testimony of 35,000 people, who were arrested and thrown in jail under military rule. The commission has accepted 28,000 of these testimonies as credible.
Ninety-four percent of them said they had suffered torture in detention, while 3,400 women testified they had suffered sexual abuse of one kind or another.
Lagos said that political prisons and use of torture were a brutal violation of people's rights that had "affected all facets of their lives, as well as those of their family members."
The military coup mounted by Pinochet to save Chile from "the threat of communism" resulted in the death of the country's elected president, Salvador Allende.
As many as 3,000 opponents of the military regime perished in the wake of the military take-over, including 1,198 people who disappeared without a trace, according to human rights advocates.
The president said the report shows that torture was elevated to the level of "state-sanctioned institutional practice" under the Pinochet regime.
"This runs counter to Chile's historical tradition and is absolutely unacceptable," Lagos said.
He said he was moved by the contents of the report and expressed confidence Chileans will feel the same when the document is made public.
He added he had seized the magnitude of people's suffering as well as the extent "of extreme cruelty that had no justification."
Earlier this month, Chile's Supreme Court ruled that cases of abduction linked to political disappearances are not covered by a 1978 amnesty issued by Pinochet to his collaborators.
The ruling was likely to re-open hundreds of cases of crimes that occurred under the military dictatorship.
It addressed the case of retired general Manuel Contreras, former head of Pinochet's secret police, and four agents charged with kidnapping Miguel Angel Sandoval, a member of the Revolutionary Leftist Movement.
Sandoval vanished after he was arrested by secret police agents on January 7, 1975.
The amnesty was issued in April 1978 and covers soldiers, police and regime collaborators charged with violating human rights during the first five years of military rule.