Chile 2025: Human Rights on Paper, Misery in Real Life

By Rodolfo Varela 

On July 31, 2025, Chile closes yet another Virtual Public Consultation on Human Rights. This initiative aims to gather citizen input for drafting the Third National Human Rights Plan and the Third National Action Plan on Business and Human Rights. It all sounds democratic and participatory.

¿Solución al problema de las pensiones en Chile?

But here’s the real question: What good are all these consultations if the victims of the dictatorship still live in poverty, with miserable pensions, institutional neglect, and broken promises?

More than three decades have passed since Chile's return to democracy, under both right-wing and left-wing governments. Despite all the grand speeches, true and full reparation for those who were persecuted, tortured, exiled, or exonerated has never been delivered. Many survivors are still struggling to survive, receiving shamefully low pensions, facing abusive deductions from the public health system (Fonasa), and lacking access to proper medical and psychological care.

To this, we must add another unpunished crime: the dictatorship stole pension contributions from thousands of workers—disappeared from records or funneled away. These were never returned, and the pension system still fails to acknowledge those lost years, pushing survivors into extreme poverty.

The government has also announced the expropriation of Colonia Dignidad, the infamous German enclave that operated as a torture and extermination center for years. This is a long-overdue and necessary measure. But expropriation alone is not enough. Justice demands that this place become a true memorial site—not a sanitized tourist attraction funded by foreign aid or a soulless cultural façade.

There are also calls for new cultural and memory project grants. But who decides which organizations receive funding? Why do politically connected foundations get privileged access, while many real victims’ associations lack even a place to meet?

Another issue that must be central to any serious human rights agenda: the Chilean State is still trying to recover $16 million USD stolen by Augusto Pinochet, currently held by his heirs. How can there be justice while the dictatorship’s stolen wealth remains in private hands, and the survivors live on crumbs from the state?

And let us not forget one of the most painful and unresolved crimes: the abduction and trafficking of children during the dictatorship, handed over—often illegally—to foreign families under threats or deception. Many of these now-adult victims live abroad, searching for their true identities, without sufficient help from the Chilean government, without access to case files, without truth, justice, or reparations.

      imagen más dolorosa: Todos los jubilados haciendo fila para cobrar

It’s not just Pinochet’s heirs who must be held accountable. Judges who validated fabricated cases, politicians who built careers on silence, religious figures who blessed state terror, business elites who profited from fear, and artists who cheered on the regime while others were being executed—they too must face the weight of memory and justice.

This administration, like the ones before it, has become a master of simulation. They simulate listening. They simulate repairing. They simulate legislating. But they do not change the lived reality of those who still suffer the consequences of the horror between 1973 and 1990.

Chile needs more than national plans and online consultations. It needs political will to deliver justice. It needs real financial reparation, guaranteed access to mental health care, restoration of stolen pension contributions, public recognition, truth for stolen children, education to prevent repetition, and above all, a deep reform of the pension system, so that no survivor is ever forced to beg for what is rightfully theirs.

And above all, it needs the return of everything that was stolen from the people—in money, in memory, and in dignity.
Human rights are not to be consulted. They must be guaranteed.