Chile pardons 1,300 inmates to halt coronavirus spread
Around 1,300 prisoners at high risk of contracting coronavirus will be pardoned in Chile after the Constitutional Court approved a special law sent by the government of conservative President Sebastian Pinera. The law will benefit prisoners over 75 years old, mothers of children under two years old and pregnant women, who will be able to serve the rest of their sentences at home.
Prisoners convicted of crimes against humanity and those guilty of homicide, kidnapping, drug trafficking and domestic violence are excluded.
The pardon is intended to ease pressure on the prisons, which, according to a Supreme Court report, are a “time bomb” with some 42,000 inmates.
Among them are nearly a hundred people convicted of human rights violations during Chile’s military dictatorship from 19731990.
They are serving their sentences — for kidnapping, torture and murder — in the special Punta Peuco prison, a luxury facility on the outskirts of Santiago.
A group of 14 conservative Chilean senators from the ruling Chile Vamos coalition had initially argued before the country’s constitutional court it was “discrimination” to exclude from the law those convicted of crimes against humanity.
The case sparked outrage in Chile, where anger still simmers over dicatorship-era abuses.
More than 3,000 people died or disappeared in political violence during the military regime from 1973 to 1990.
The secret service and the army also tortured and drove into exile thousands of dissidents and leftists. Presidency Minister Felipe Ward said in a televised broadcast that the senators’ dropping of the case had given the law the “green light.”
The commuted sentences are expected to greatly reduce the populations of crowded prisons where coronavirus would likely spread most quickly.
Chile has reported nearly 8,000 cases of coronavirus, among the highest tallies in the region.
Health authorities say approximately 100 prisoners have contracted the virus.
Meanwhile, a Chilean court has ratified a three-year prison sentence handed to Cristian Labbe, a former aide to dictator Augusto Pinochet, for torturing a detainee in 1973.
Labbe, 71, a far-right politician who served as mayor of a Santiago
suburb until 2012, was convicted in September of torturing 26-year-old student Harry Cohen in a town in southern Chile in the early days of military rule.
The Temuco Court of Appeals in the south of the country rejected an appeal by Labbe against his conviction and ordered the state to pay compensation of about $35,000 to the victim.
Labbe was among a number of former members of Pinochet’s notorious DINA secret police who were prosecuted under a drive during the presidency of Michelle Bachelet to bring more of those accused of human rights abuses during the dictatorship to trial.