Chile skips an official 11 September rite for the first time since the dictatorship ended

For the first time since Chile returned to elected government in 1990, La Moneda will hold no official act on 11 September, the anniversary of the 1973 coup. President José Antonio Kast is spending Friday on a working trip in the Los Ríos Region. There will be no presidential address and no ecumenical ceremony of the kind Sebastián Piñera once attended.

Kast said in late August that he would work that day as on any other. “I value that the dates are not forgotten because they are part of our history,” he told Radio Cooperativa. He added that if someone asked for the usual Friday mass inside the palace to be dedicated to the date, that would be fine, and that there would be no government act of any kind. La Moneda later said the choice was to look forward.

The 1973 coup overthrew Salvador Allende, whose government was elected in 1970. Aircraft struck the presidential palace. Augusto Pinochet headed the junta that followed. The dictatorship lasted until 1990. Official reports qualify 40,175 victims, a figure that includes people executed for political reasons, the detained and disappeared, and those held and tortured.

A president who never condemned the old regime

Isabel Allende Bussi, the former president’s daughter and a former senator, called Kast a recognised Pinochet supporter. On the podcast Reseteo she said this is the first 11 September under a democratically elected president who has not condemned the human rights crimes and who has publicly defended Miguel Krassnoff, an officer serving sentences that add up to more than 600 years. She said Kast ducked the subject in the campaign and has not denied the affiliation.

Kast took office about six months ago. His government has faced criticism over cuts to the programme that searches for people still listed as disappeared. Opposition parties told him to govern for the whole country. Human rights groups used the week to march rather than wait for a palace invitation that was not coming.

On Sunday, 6 September, thousands walked the traditional four-kilometre romería from central Santiago to the General Cemetery in Recoleta. The march has run since the 1980s. This year it was also a protest against the decision to skip an official act. The slogan “¿Dónde están?” followed the column to Patio 29, the cemetery block where the dictatorship buried people without names. Relatives said the walk honoured the dead and the present demand on rights policy.

What staying away from La Moneda does

Every elected government since 1990 found some official form for 11 September: a minute of silence, a mass, a speech, a wreath. Kast broke that line. He treated 4 September, Allende’s 1970 victory day, the same way, and pointed to 5 October, the date some Chileans mark the 1988 plebiscite that ended Pinochet’s bid to stay, as another contested memory. His argument is that the state should not pick a liturgical side. His record is that he has never accepted the official victim count as a verdict on the regime he grew up defending.

Infobae and other wires noted that Kast is the first president since the return of democracy to treat Pinochet’s rule as a political inheritance rather than a closed criminal file. That is why the empty diary at the palace is being read as policy, not as a scheduling quirk. A regional tour in Los Ríos on the anniversary is a choice to be elsewhere when cameras would otherwise stand in Plaza de la Constitución.

The search for the disappeared is the practical fight underneath the ceremony fight. Families have spent five decades asking the state to finish identification work. A budget cut to that work, in the same season as the cancelled act, tells those families that memory is being moved off the government calendar and off the government ledger.

Friday in Los Ríos will look like a regional tour. Friday at the cemetery and in opposition halls will look like the old 11 September. The new fact is the empty programme at the palace that was bombed 53 years ago. That absence is the policy. Other dates on the Chilean calendar will now be read against it: if 11 September gets no wreath, every later human-rights anniversary becomes a test of whether the state still shows up at all.