Interviews with Álvaro Varela Walker

As we worked during the dictatorship, every day we received cases of kidnapped and missing persons, of people imprisoned in concentration camps, of people subjected to military trials – military! – Meaning they were subjected to courts martial – and countless other situations.

That involved an enormous amount of work, because we filed lawsuits, we intervened in each one of those cases.

At the time, that meant that we did not have enough time to dedicate ourselves to pursue the human rights violations consisting of torture.

Those that had been released, had gone to a concentration camp or a prison, had been expelled from the country or had been obligated to live in a distant region of the country, described to us that they had been tortured… the truth is that we did not have the capacity to accept and pursue lawsuits about the torture.
Lastly, these cases were about people [who had been released] who were now relatively [well], alive, whole, and relatively assured of a future, in the sense that they were now in a public space, now known.

Meanwhile, we had so many people that were going missing, many people in other circumstances. So torture was rather a widely denounced topic but it was not like other human rights violations, an object of criminal charges.

After some time, during the third post-dictatorship democratic government, specifically that of Ricardo Lagos, a special commission on political imprisonment and torture was created with the aim of collecting testimonies throughout the country of those who had been tortured and to consider compensation for them.

[Ricardo Lagos Escobar (1938 – ) is a lawyer, economist and social democrat politician, who served as president of Chile from 2000 to 2006.]

It became known as the Valech Commission, since it was presided over by Bishop Sergio Valech who had been the last Vicar of Solidarity, a bishop of the Catholic Church, a renowned figure in the country known by everyone.

[Bishop Sergio Valech (1927 – 2010) was the Roman Catholic Auxiliary Bishop Emeritus of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Santiago de Chile. He was the head of the eight-member National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture panel in Chile.] [The Valech Report (officially The National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture Report) was a record of abuses committed in Chile between 1973 and 1990 by agents of Augusto Pinochet´s military regime.] [The Vicariate of Solidarity, an agency of the Chilean Catholic Church, was a human rights organization in Chile during the military regime of Augusto Pinochet.]

A commission was named and I was selected as one of the nine members. Two of us had been tortured, one was José Antonio Gómez, [formerly] Minister of Defense, and I was the other.

[José Antonio Gómez (1953 – ) is a Chilean lawyer, Social Democrat Radical Party politician, and a former senator, and president of his party.]

This team became organized to collect testimonies throughout the nation. Though I had lived it, I had defended people; I had listened to the testimonies at the time… I must confess that the work affected me, it moved me. I was strongly affected by everything I heard.

There were many who never spoke of their torture. For example, I never discussed it, except perhaps during the last two years. Never before did I speak about my own torture — that is why I understand.

I had the opportunity to see cases of people throughout Chile that on first impression, appear to be strong and active, but when they describe the torture, a strong and powerful breakdown occurs.

We confirmed that a large percentage had never told their family and that their family was hearing about it for the first time.

That commission was very important. It definitively established a total of thirty-three thousand persons as tortured and from that emerged reparation measures for those people and their family members.

I think that is an extraordinarily relevant and exemplary step taken by Chile and [an example] for all societies.

Álvaro Varela Walker is a Chilean attorney and human rights activist. He was born in 1951.
Varela studied law at the University of Chile. He became student body president and was active in politics. He supported Salvador Allende, a leftist who was elected president of Chile in 1970. In 1973, Allende’s government was overthrown by a military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet. As the universities in Chile came under control of Pinochet’s military regime, he was expelled.

In 1974, he began working as an attorney for the Committee for Cooperation for Peace, an ecumenical initiative of the Catholic Church to catalog and defend against human rights abuses committed by the dictatorship. In 1976, Pope Paul VI established the Vicariate of Solidarity (La Vicaría de la Solidaridad) under the leadership of the Archdiocese of Santiago, where Varela continued his human rights work. In addition to publicly denouncing the human rights abuses of the regime, the Vicariate provided legal assistance to 250,000 Chileans and became a target of the military government.

After the restoration of democracy in 1989, Varela served as a member of the Valech Commission (the National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture Report) chaired by Catholic Bishop Sergio Valech, which investigated the human rights record of the Pinochet regime. The Commission found that there were more than 38,000 people detained by the regime. The Valech Commission built on the work of an earlier Rettig Report, which had determined that more than 2,200 people were executed by the Pinochet regime. The Valech Commission provided an accounting of the abuses of the military regime, as well as determining reparations to its victims.