Mara Penaloza had learned to live with her partner's disappearance under Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship, but the release of his abductor by Chile's latest right-wing government has reopened the wound.
President Jose Antonio Kast has professed admiration for Pinochet, who oversaw the killing or disappearance of more than 3,200 people while tens of thousands more were tortured or imprisoned.
In recent weeks, Kast has proposed slashing the budget allocated to the search for victims of the dictatorship that ran from 1973 to 1990.
He has also floated blocking Chile's human rights institute from filing complaints on behalf of citizens over alleged state abuses.
The government has meanwhile reduced the sentences of three agents of the dictatorship who had been convicted of crimes against humanity.
All three now walk free. One of them participated in the 1987 kidnapping of Penaloza's partner, leftist activist Jose Julian Pena.
"It reopened all the wounds again: the pain, the anguish, having to think once more about how he died," the 68-year-old retiree told AFP, a photograph of Pena swinging around her neck.
Penaloza, who never found out what happened to her loved one, assumes he was thrown into the ocean after being tortured.
"With a crime like that, it's impossible for someone to be released with such impunity," she said.
The government did not respond to AFP requests for comment.
- 'One after another' -
Justice Minister Fernando Rabat, whose appointment drew criticism for his links to Pinochet, signed off on the reduced sentences.
During his career as a lawyer, Rabat defended the dictator in a case of alleged embezzlement of public funds, which was thrown out when he died.
The administration he is part of wants to institute a 27-percent cut to the National Plan for the Search for the Disappeared, a 2024 program launched by Kast's leftist predecessor Gabriel Boric.
Resources "were already very limited given the magnitude of the task that had to be carried out," former search coordinator Magdalena Garces told AFP.
A slimmer budget might stall the large-scale digitization of information, which is key to reconstructing what happened in cases like Pena's.
Activist Alvaro Gonzalez warns of "a dismantling of human rights issues."
Gonzalez, whose uncle Jorge Ortiz went missing in 1975, sits in the Association of Relatives of the Detained and Disappeared, surrounded by photographs of victims of the dictatorship.
He said he is "starting to get a bit anxious" as Kast's threats to human rights appear to come "one after another."
The president also wants to cut the budget for dictatorship-related memorial sites by 60 percent.
Chile's human rights undersecretary told Radio Biobio that cuts don't aim to end these programs, only to "better plan" resources.
- 'Risk of regression' -
Another bill aims to prevent the National Institute of Human Rights (INDH), a state agency created in 2009, from legally defending civilians who accuse officials of crimes.
Social unrest in 2019 created a larger-than-usual workload for the institution, when thousands of people spent months protesting for improved social benefits.
The INDH filed 3,247 lawsuits against state agents for alleged abuses, one of them in support of political scientist Carlos Astudillo, 31, who was injured by a soldier while demonstrating.
Astudillo was shot in the right leg, which caused hemorrhaging and an open fracture.
"I have limited mobility, I have to get around with a cane. I can't run; I can't jump," he told AFP.
His assailant received a seven-year prison sentence.
INDH director Yerko Ljubetic views stripping the institution of its powers as a "neutralization of an autonomous body that acts as a counterweight and a limit on the exercise of power."
"This bill contains a serious and very significant risk of regression," Ljubetic said.
