Sebastián Piñera, president of Chile on two occasions (2010-2014 and 2018-2022), has been summoned to testify before the High Complexity Prosecutor for a case of crimes against humanity, according to information released this afternoon by the newspaper La Tercera . He will do so as a defendant, along with four other authorities from the Ministry of the Interior of his second term, who were in command of Chile and its police forces when the social outbreak occurred, in October 2019. Within the framework of these riots human rights violations occurred, but until now it has not been proven that it was a State policy.
The Prosecutor’s investigation began after the presentation of nearly 20 complaints sponsored, mainly, by human rights organizations, and in some cases, by Alejandro Navarro, a former senator with a long history on the left who has not belonged to the Upper House since March 2022, at the end of his term. They point to events that occurred between October 2019 and March 2020, the peak months of the riots that put Chilean institutions against the wall and where unprecedented violence in recent decades surpassed the police forces and the Armed Forces.
Navarro’s complaint was filed against Piñera and four other authorities from the Ministry of the Interior in those months: those who were ministers, Andrés Chadwick and Gonzalo Blumel, and the undersecretaries of the same portfolio, Rodrigo Ubilla and Juan Francisco Galli, who must testify before the Chilean Prosecutor’s Office in the same capacity as defendants as Piñera, the only right-wing leader who has come to La Moneda since the restoration of democracy in 1990.
Prosecutor Ximena Chong, of the North Central High Complexity Prosecutor’s Office, has in her hands both this case and the one investigating the responsibility of the command of the Carabineros Generalate for the alleged “omission” in decision-making to avoid injuring the protesters during the social outbreak. Chong will be in charge of interrogating the political authorities, in statements that began this Friday with Chadwick, the former president’s cousin and one of the main faces of the right-wing UDI party. Both Piñera and her collaborators, as defendants, are being investigated as possible perpetrators of a crime. Therefore, they have the same guarantees as any criminal defendant, that is, the right to be assisted by a lawyer, to remain silent, and not to incriminate themselves, among others. The objective is to investigate the consequences that the police action had on the demonstrators injured during the social outbreak, explains La Tercera.
According to the former president’s lawyer, Samuel Donoso, interviewed by the same newspaper, “the facts show that his actions were due to the correct fulfillment of his public duties, seeking at all times to protect human rights, in the difficult times that the president experienced. country”. According to Donoso, they have “the tranquility and conviction that in the actions of the former president he always sought to make the protection of public order and citizen security compatible with respect for the human rights of all.” For Piñera’s defender, “consequently, no crime is configured.”
The debate on the responsibility of the State
Donoso told La Tercera that Piñera “has permanently collaborated with the investigation” and recalled that he already gave a statement in this case, on July 19, 2021, while he was still president, before the prosecutor Claudia Perivancich, who had the case in her hands in A start.
In that statement, the newspaper recalls, Piñera assured: “We always seek that the forces of order and security protect public order as soon as possible to restore constitutional normality with full respect for the rule of law and human rights.”
This case that investigates crimes against humanity happens, above all, because it is proven that the human rights violations committed by the police forces have systematically produced an attack against the civilian population, that is, that the abuses have been a policy of State and its agents, as occurred in the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990). In the three years and five months since October 2019, however, Chile has debated this issue at length.
In the worst weeks of the riots, Sergio Micco, who was the director of the Institute for Human Rights (INDH), an autonomous body, assured that “conceptually, a systematic violation of human rights supposes an agreement between different institutions, where laws or public policies are enacted that directly and intentionally have the objective of violating human rights”. In an interview with television Channel 13 in November 2019, he added: “If you ask me, as director of the Institute, I would say no (there is systematicity) and whoever claims otherwise has to prove it. Systematic violations I would dare to say no ”.
In December 2021, the International Criminal Court dismissed the request against former President Piñera for alleged crimes against humanity and resolved “not to initiate a preliminary examination”, requested by the former Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón.