Some of these complications may also affect reparations efforts that come about through discrete legislative or executive initiatives, but they need not. However, designing a reparations programme as a systematically interlinked set of measures covering a large number of the relevant violations has advantages over a gradualist, incremental approach. It is more likely that different categories of victims will be treated fairly when a comprehensive programme is designed than when their fate is left to the vagaries of the myriad factors, including political clout, that can determine the outcome of separate legislative fights over a long period of time.23 The fact that there are entire categories of victims that will have to keep up the struggle to receive what is owed to them as a matter of right, while others receive their benefits, is not only unfair to the former, it also detracts from the reparations effort’s legitimacy, erodes the contribution to political stability and civic trust that reparations overall may make, and simply guarantees that the issue will remain on the political agenda for a very long time. 23 One of Chile’s first reparations laws restored pension benefits to those who had been fired from government positions under Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. This became one of the most expensive parts of Chile’s reparations efforts, as well as one of the most difficult to administer. The benefits for those who were excluded from land reform programmes—largely a traditionally disempowered peasant constituency—were unusually low, on the other hand. For a thorough overview of Chile’s different reparations initiatives, see Elizabeth Lira, “The reparations policy for human rights violations in Chile,” in The Handbook of Reparations, Pablo de Greiff, ed. (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006), and Elizabeth Lira and Brian Loveman, Políticas de Reparación. Chile 1990-2004 (Santiago, LOM Ediciones, 2005). 13