by Roberta Bacic and Elizabeth Stanley

Until the establishment of the Comisión Nacional Sobre Prisión Polí­tica y Tortura (National Commission for Political Imprisonment and Torture, hereafter the Comisión), the issues of political imprisonment and torture had been neglected in Chile. This is not to say that there has been no movement at all on the issue. In 1991, the Rettig Report acknowledged torture as a recurrent and institutionalised event, and torture was shown to have preceded most of the executions and ‘disappearances’ of victims. Further, in the transition from dictatorship, some torture survivors have been able to receive personal medical assistance from the Government, others were able to regain their civil rights by challenging official documentation that presented them as criminals, while some have been accepted as viable witnesses in human rights court cases. However, these rights were hard to attain and, at an official level, those who survived imprisonment and torture were not generally acknowledged. […]