If an Italian Researcher Had Been Killed in Chile…

If in Chile, during the Pinochet regime, an Italian researcher had been abducted, disappeared, tortured for days and then killed…

If the Chilean authorities had from the start chosen the strategy of misdirection, boasting a non-existent desire to collaborate and even orchestrating a staged kidnapping that cost the lives of five innocent people belonging to a fictitious gang that kidnapped foreign citizens…

If, according to Chilean and international experts and human rights activists, it was immediately and clearly evident that it was a state crime similar to others preceding it and others that would follow…

If, at the end of the investigations, the Rome prosecutor had reached the conclusion that four Chilean Secret Service Agents were highly suspected of taking part in that state crime…

If, faced with the sentencing of the investigation of the Rome prosecutor, the Chilean authorities had discredited the latter by proposing their “truth” and refused to even indicate an address where to send the judicial documents to the four Chilean officials investigated…

If, after the killing of the Italian researcher the human rights situation in Chile had precipitated further with the arrests and detainment of peaceful dissidents, torture, forced disappearances and death-sentence executions…

If a Chilean student at the University of Bologna who went home to spend time with his family had been arrested at the airport in Santiago and found himself in pre-trial detention for almost a year charged with false accusations of “terrorist propaganda”…

… Would Italy continue to describe Pinochet’s Chile as “our essential partner”, would it have continued to sell them arms and would it have avoided calling back it’s ambassador temporarily?

No? Correct.

Drawing by Gianluca Costantini