As Chile commemorated the 50th anniversary of Augusto Pinochet's coup, President Gabriel Boric's unveiling of the National Search Plan aimed to confront painful historical wounds. The initiative seeks to find the remains of many Chileans who disappeared during the regime, but trust in the state's efforts remains fragile.
For Lazo, it has been a lifetime of fighting. Several weeks after Boric’s announcement, she sat in the dining room of her home in Buin, near Paine, her arms folded across a dark oak table — the same table, she explained, over which her family had enjoyed their final meal together all those years ago. She was 15 years old the night her father and brothers were taken. Now she is 66. Speaking softly, her eyes smoldering, she leaned forward and began to describe those 50 years: armed men with faces painted black, anguished crowds, a skeleton on an aluminum tray, a shattered grave. “A long, long, long, long road,” she said, “in search of the truth.”
In the end, the investigation determined that the Lazo men had never been held in the National Stadium, or any of the countless other detention centers where Flor Lazo and the other women from Paine had searched. Nor had they ever been buried in Patio 29. Just hours after they were taken from their homes, the men were driven to the ravine. There, they were pushed to the bottom, arranged in a line, and executed. From the very beginning, Lazo and the others had been searching for ghosts.