Interviews with Álvaro Varela Walker

We were always hopeful, all Chileans, that this very dark period in life of Chile, the dictatorship, was not going to last long. We always had hope that at any minute there would be some response but it took much longer than we ever imagined.

Therefore, it was much more painful. But at the same time, without a doubt, it meant that as the end of the dictatorship neared, it stirred enormous hope.

The night of the referendum, the night in which “no” triumphed in spite of the difficult circumstances, because it was very hard for people in fear to vote “no” … but victory was achieved.

[The “No” campaign was a Chilean campaign to pursued citizens to vote “No” in the 1988 nation-wide plebiscite that would have prolonged the rule of the Pinochet regime.]

I remember the first thing I did after learning the results: I went home, it was very late at night, my three children slept, they were very young, and I went home to give each one a kiss as a sign that they were going to live in a different country.

I think that that essentially speaks to what one could feel at that moment.

Álvaro Varela Walker is a Chilean attorney and human rights activist. He was born in 1951.
Varela studied law at the University of Chile. He became student body president and was active in politics. He supported Salvador Allende, a leftist who was elected president of Chile in 1970. In 1973, Allende’s government was overthrown by a military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet. As the universities in Chile came under control of Pinochet’s military regime, he was expelled.

In 1974, he began working as an attorney for the Committee for Cooperation for Peace, an ecumenical initiative of the Catholic Church to catalog and defend against human rights abuses committed by the dictatorship. In 1976, Pope Paul VI established the Vicariate of Solidarity (La Vicaría de la Solidaridad) under the leadership of the Archdiocese of Santiago, where Varela continued his human rights work. In addition to publicly denouncing the human rights abuses of the regime, the Vicariate provided legal assistance to 250,000 Chileans and became a target of the military government.

After the restoration of democracy in 1989, Varela served as a member of the Valech Commission (the National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture Report) chaired by Catholic Bishop Sergio Valech, which investigated the human rights record of the Pinochet regime. The Commission found that there were more than 38,000 people detained by the regime. The Valech Commission built on the work of an earlier Rettig Report, which had determined that more than 2,200 people were executed by the Pinochet regime. The Valech Commission provided an accounting of the abuses of the military regime, as well as determining reparations to its victims.