This archive report was first published on 13 December 2019.
Chile's worst crisis in decades erupted in mid-October over metro fare hikes, but quickly escalated into the most severe outbreak of social unrest since the end of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet nearly 30 years ago.
Amid alarming reports of killings and violence, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet sent a team to investigate in October. The investigators, who visited the country from October 30 through November 22, concluded that there were reasonable grounds to believe that a high number of serious human rights violations had been committed.
During their mission, the investigators documented 113 cases of torture and ill-treatment and 24 cases of sexual violence, committed by police and army forces. They also found that the management of assemblies by the police had been carried out in a fundamentally repressive manner.
Chile's public prosecutor's office is investigating 26 deaths in the context of the protests, and the UN team verified information concerning four of the cases. These included four cases of arbitrary deprivation of life and unlawful death involving state agents, which could amount to an extrajudicial execution.
The investigators urged Chile to immediately end the indiscriminate use of anti-riot shotguns to control demonstrations, and to use tear gas only when strictly necessary. They also reported that more than 28,000 people had been detained between October 18 and December 6, many of them arbitrarily, but that the great majority had been released.
