SANTIAGO, June 2, 2025 (BSS/AFP) - Chilean President Gabriel Boric announced Sunday that a prison housing inmates convicted of human rights abuses during the 1973-1990 military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet will be converted to a common penitentiary.

The Punta Peuco facility north of capital Santiago holds about 100 former military dictatorship personnel who committed crimes against humanity and other rights violations, but live out their days in better conditions than those endured by the rest of Chile's prison population.

"From my point of view, there is no justification for this privilege," Boric said during his latest report to Congress in the port city of Valparaiso.

The leftist president ordered the Ministry of Justice to transform Punta Peuco "into a common prison that allows segregating people according to the requirements of the gendarmerie" -- the national prison service military.

Justice Minister Jaime Gajardo said the decision on who stays and who is transferred elsewhere would be a "technical decision by the Chilean Gendarmerie."

Human rights groups for years have called for Punta Peuco to be closed and its inmates integrated into other correctional facilities.

On her final day in office, in 2018, president Michelle Bachelet ordered the shutdown of Punta Peuco. But her justice minister refused to comply, claiming the decree was legally flawed.

Boric on Sunday also announced that the expropriation order for the former Colonia Dignidad, a German-themed settlement in southern Chile where a brutal cult carried out the torture and killing of dissidents under the Pinochet dictatorship, will be carried out in June.

Last year he ordered the requisition of 116 hectares of the 4,800-hectare site to make way for a center of remembrance.

Some 3,200 people died under the dictatorship and over 38,000 cases of torture were recorded.