Presidential candidate Johannes Kaiser (Liberal Party) announced that if elected president, he would pardon Miguel Krasnov, a former military man convicted of crimes against humanity. He immediately gave his reason for pardoning him: “You can’t have 80-90 year olds rotting in prison and want to mix them with common criminals just because you don’t like them politically.” He immediately announced that he would set the “end point at 73-90,” referring to the period 1973-1990, the years of the military dictatorship.
Miguel Krasnov was sentenced to a thousand years in prison not for political reasons, but for multiple crimes: kidnapping, rape, torture, and disappearance.
During the military dictatorship, thousands of people were subjected to the most horrific types of torture.
Once democracy returned, the National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture, created under the government of Ricardo Lagos, collected the following testimonies from victims, among many others: “They broke the fibers of my anus when they inserted blunt instruments into my body.” “I lost vision in my right eye due to being hit by machine guns.” “They called me ‘the phone,’ and they hit me in unison on both ears, blowing out my right ear.” “My teeth were extracted without anesthesia.” “They hung me by my feet, forced me to eat feces, held my nine-month-old daughter by the neck in front of me, and told me they were going to kill her.” “They crushed my kidneys with blows and the consequences are still affecting me.” “They beat me so much that I lost my memory and my sight.” “They forced us to take off our clothes, passed a penis between our elbows and behind our knees, and it felt like cutting.” “My testicles were torn by the current.” “I have cigarette burn marks all over my body.” “They destroyed my vagina, and I couldn’t defecate without pain for years.” “They left me there and my leg became gangrene.” “They had to remove my uterus and ovaries because of internal bleeding.” “Today I suffer from heart disease as a result of the current they applied to me.” “Then one of them pulled down his pants and took out his penis and forced me to straighten it with my mouth. Then another came and another. In total there were three soldiers that I had to straighten, the last one of them entered my mouth. I don’t know who they were or what they were like because they were masked.” “It left me feeling a terror that never left me, the paranoia, the claustrophobia, the pain.” “I still relive over and over again what I went through in those days.” “I still cry in my sleep.”
If former soldiers like Miguel Krasnov are imprisoned, it is not because they “didn’t like them politically,” as Johannes Kaiser says, but because they tortured and killed men and women because they did not agree with their ideas, they “didn’t like them politically.”
More than a thousand people were killed and disappeared in secret prisons. And still, today, after all this time and staying in prison, these former soldiers whom the Tsar wants to pardon do not agree to locate the remains of the disappeared detainees.
That one of the candidates for the presidency of Chile referred to events that left a deep wound in our country, with such a lack of humanity, is as inexcusable as it is dangerous.
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