2024-09-17 07:28:26
The Minister of the Interior remembered her father, José Tohá, and two other former ministers of Salvador Allende who were murdered, detailing the close relationship that the three families had: “One by one they were killed…”
This Wednesday, September 11, a commemoration ceremony was held for the 51 years since the coup d’état at La Moneda, whose activity included a tribute to former ministers who were victims of the military dictatorship.
Under this context, Interior Minister Carolina Tohá He gave an emotional speech after the inauguration of the Hall of Ministers, where he remembered his father, Jose Toha, who was Minister of the Interior of the Popular Unity.
“We have just inaugurated what will be called the Ministers’ Room in the Cabinet of the Ministry of the Interior. This room will be dedicated to the memory of Orlando Letelier, by Carlos Prats and my father José Tohá. All three were interior ministers of President Salvador Allende and all three were eliminated by the dictatorship,” he began by saying.
To which he added: “One of the things we did in the Government It is that each ministry reconstructed the list of victims who were workers, workers or authorities of their portfolio and we all held a tribute ceremony in which that list was read before the current officials, name by name.”
“We looked at each other as we read the names and imagined that if we were in that time, 50 years ago, “We would take their place. Reconstructing that information was not easy because the victims had never been classified from their workplace,” he explained.
The three ministers of the Interior of Salvador Allende who were murdered during the dictatorship
Later, Minister Carolina Tohá remembered the three ministers of State who were murdered during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.In the case of the Ministry of the Interior, when we compiled the list, we realized for the first time that there were three ministers on it: Orlando Letelier, Carlos Prats and José Tohá.“It took 50 years for us to make that discovery,” he said.
Along those lines, he said: “Not only were there three former interior ministersbut three political figures who had had close ties to the Armed Forces. Because so much Orlando Letelier, like my father, later became Ministers of Defense. and in the case of Carlos Prats was a General of the Army“.
After that, the Secretary of State recounted how September 11, 1973 impacted her, considering the closeness that the families of the aforementioned political figures had.
“These three men not only shared the fact of having been Minister of the Interior and having been victims of the hatred with which the dictatorship persecuted and murdered them. In their death, their lives are also intertwined, because deep ties were forged between them and their families,” he said.
“A relationship of mutual appreciation, collaboration and deep affection was forged between them, which also extended to our families from that time onwards and has been consolidated over time. by the hand of those tremendous, fighting women, who are the widow of Orlando Letelier, and my father, Isabel Margarita Moy, and who are the three Prats sisters, Sofía, Angélica and Cecilia,” he explained.
To close her speech at the commemorative event for September 11, Carolina Tohá recounted how the deaths of her father and the other former ministers occurred, who were assassinated about a year apart.
“One by one they were killed, in other cases they made them disappear, but what they really sought was to kill a group, to destroy a group, they were categories of human beings, it was an idea, an energy of social change that existed in Chile at that time,” concluded Minister Tohá.