I’ve signed a petition that will be handed into the Chilean embassy in London tomorrow 11 September, the 51th anniversary of the military coup that overthrew socialist president Salvador Allende.

Chilean helicopter H-255 in an airsoft park in the UK. Photograph: Dogtag Airsoft

That morning on 11 September 1973, British-made Hawker Hunter jets bombed La Moneda, Chile’s presidential palace, while tanks patrolled the surrounding streets of Santiago. The 17-year dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet is estimated to have murdered, tortured, or arbitrarily imprisoned up to 40,000 people. Like hundreds of thousands of others, my parents were forced to leave Chile after the coup and arrived in the UK as political refugees.

The petition has been started by UK-based Chilean political refugee Carole Concha Bell who describes the petition as follows on the Change.org page it is hosted on:

A plane used during the Pinochet regime to depose of political prisoners during the brutal dictators’ 17-year regime is being used as a prop at a paintball park in Sussex. Dogtag owner told the Guardian he bought the plane part in 2003, unaware of its sinister history. However, the home page of Dogtag Airsoft still features the death flight plane despite requests for its removal.

Death flights are a form of extrajudicial killing in which the victims are dropped to their death from airplanes or helicopters into oceans, large rivers or even mountains. One person's testimony described the procedure: corpses were put in gunny sacks; each sack was attached to a piece of rail using wire, and a second gunny sack put around both. The sacks were carried by pickup truck to helicopters that flew them to the coast of the Valparaíso region, Chile, where the bodies were thrown into the ocean.

The Guardian, CNN, and German news outlet DW News have all recently published articles about the death flight plane’s inappropriate use, and interest is growing in the international media. 

Chile Solidarity Network, a UK- based human rights group said “This plane must be returned to Chile at once. We know of at least three victims associated with this plane. An instrument of death should not be used as a prop in a paintball park. It is an outrage that the Chilean officials have not made moves to return this important piece of evidence to Chile.”

At least three victims have been named directly in connection with this helicopter’s ‘death flights’:  Luis Fernando Norambuena Fernandois, Gustavo Manuel Farías Vargas and Ceferino del Carmen Santis Quijada and whose families are asking for it to be sent back to Chile as a monument.

You can read more about the helicopter in this article. The issue has also been covered by Chilean media (see Spanish-language links here and here).

Click here to sign the petition.

Tomorrow, members of the Chilean exile community and their allies will hold a vigil outside the Chilean embassy in London to remember the victims of the Pinochet dictatorship on the 51th anniversary of coup. They are also supporting the call for Pinochet’s helicopter of death to be returned to Chile. If you are in London please consider joining them.

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