Chile: One dead and 57 arrested for riots on the Young Combatant’s Day

A deceased woman and 57 detainees is the balance left by the incidents that occurred in Santiago de Chile in the early hours of this Tuesday during the commemoration of the Young Combatant’s Day, official sources informed Efe.

The disturbances took place in various peripheral neighborhoods of Santiago between agents of the Carabineros police force and protesters who protested against the police repression and set up barricades.

During this day, which commemorates the Day of the Young Combatant for the murder at the hands of the Police of two adolescent brothers during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), a 24-year-old woman died after being run over while participating in a barricade in a neighborhood north of Santiago.

According to the authorities, the arrests were carried out for launching incendiary devices, robberies with intimidation of trucks, carrying weapons, erecting barricades or public disorder.

During the first years of this celebration, the day was peaceful and consisted of a liturgical act and a procession led by the parents of the victims. However, in recent years the celebration has turned violent, with looting, fires, assaults and shootings between groups of hooded men.

Rafael and Eduardo Vergara Toledo, two teenagers who were active in the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR), a group that fought with arms against the dictatorship, were assassinated in 1985 in the Villa Francia neighborhood, southwest of the capital.

Both were arrested and taken to a police station where they were shot and their bodies were left on one of the neighborhood streets.

There were also riots and incidents in the early hours of Monday, when groups of protesters gathered in different parts of the capital to demand freedom for those detained in the social outbreak of October 2019.

Several human rights organizations and families of prisoners called protests to request a general pardon for all prisoners from the demonstrations, which lasted for almost a year.

The riots left more than thirty people dead, eye mutilated, thousands injured, and according to data from the Public Ministry, thousands of detainees for various crimes committed in the protests, of which 2,180 went to preventive detention.

The Supreme Court of Justice reported in early January that only 26 protesters remain in preventive detention for more than a year after the start of the crisis.

The Chilean Congress is studying, at the request of a group of opposition parliamentarians, a bill that seeks to grant this pardon and exempt from criminal responsibility those who have been arrested since October 7, 2019 in the context of the social outbreak.