Leader of the horrific crime of 15 peasants in Lonquén died in Punta Peuco. How the mass murder happened

Retired Carabineros captain Marcelo Castro Mendoza, who was serving a sentence for aggravated kidnapping committed during the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, passed away this Saturday at the Punta Peuco prison.

Castro—who changed his name from "Lautaro" to "Marcelo" a few years ago—was sentenced in 2010 to 10 years and one day of major imprisonment in its medium degree as the perpetrator of the aggravated kidnappings of Juan de Dios Salinas and Guillermo Bustamante Sotelo in September 1973, in the town of Lonquén, Isla de Maipo commune.

According to a report by La Tercera, the former officer's defense confirmed that he was blind, suffered from severe diabetes, was undergoing dialysis, and had previously suffered a fall inside the prison.

In fact, for humanitarian reasons, a pardon from President Michelle Bachelet had been requested in December 2016, which was denied in March of this year, the newspaper notes. The criminal inmate was scheduled to complete his sentence on July 3, 2020.

The deranged head of the Isla de Maipo police station On October 7, 1973, Carabineros from the Isla de Maipo station, led by the criminal Captain Lautaro Eugenio Castro Mendoza, proceeded to the detention, torture, and subsequent murder of 15 people from the rural community of Isla de Maipo.

This crime, which shocked the Chilean and international community, gained prominence in November 1978, when the bodies of the 15 people were found hidden in an abandoned lime mine in the town of Lonquén.

The crime was the first of the murders known to the national and international press. Journalists, figures from the Catholic Church under Cardinal Silva, and human rights lawyers even participated in the location of the peasants' bodies.

Entire families were decimated in this crime: the Maureiras were taken in the early morning by these criminals, and the father and his four sons were murdered. The same happened to the Hernández and Astudillo families.

None of the peasants belonged to political parties. They had only received land through the Agrarian Reform initiated by former President Frei Montalva and were joyfully celebrating that achievement. Several civilians ("snitches" in popular slang) from the area supported the detention of the fifteen peasants.

At the site, 35 minutes from Santiago, there is a monolith that remembers those defenseless peasants murdered by the deranged men led by the now-deceased "old man" Lautaro Castro. The case has been known as the "Lonquén ovens." The victims of this treacherous crime are: Sergio Maureira Lillo and his four sons, Rodolfo Antonio, Sergio Miguel, Segundo Armando, and José Manuel; Oscar Hernández Flores and his brothers Carlos and Nelson; Enrique Astudillo Álvarez and his two sons Omar and Ramón; and the four young men Miguel Brant, Iván Ordóñez, José Herrera, and Manuel Navarro.

The Carabineros who beat and then murdered these people are: Captain Lautaro Eugenio Castro Mendoza, and Carabineros Juan José Villegas Navarro, Félix Sagredo Aravena, Manuel Enrique Muñoz Rencoret, Jacinto R.

Torres González, Eugenio David Coliqueo Fuentealba, José Luis Belmar Sepúlveda, Justo Ignacio Romo Peralta, Héctor Vargas, and Pablo Llancupín. Previously, on September 14, 1973, Carabineros from the same station detained, tortured, and executed two people from the area.

The two victims, Guillermo Bustamante and Juan de Dios Salinas, were executed on September 14, 1973, at the Naltagua Bridge, where these peasants were shot and then thrown into the rushing waters of the Maipo River.

The criminal Carabineros who executed these two people are: Sergeant Emeterio Bravo Moraga, Corporal 1st Class Moisés Aguilera Sandoval, and Carabineros Eugenio David Coliqueo Fuentealba and Justo Ignacio Romo Peralta.

Beaten to death It was believed that the first forcibly disappeared persons found had been riddled with bullets by Carabineros from the Isla de Maipo station before being thrown into the Lonquén ovens.

But international experts confirmed to the families that the cause of death—according to the traces on the remains of the 15 peasants—was due to blunt force trauma. There has been no event in Isla de Maipo as horrendous as the murder of the 15 peasants at the hands of the Carabineros from the station that existed in the commune in 1973.

Today, the pain that has remained with the victims' families for years has become more intense after learning another major detail of the story: they were not murdered with gunshots, but were simply beaten to death before being thrown into the lime ovens in Lonquén.

Only 517 bone fragments of the 15 victims were saved from disappearing forever and were identified after anthropological and dental analyses by a group of international experts. It was the Spanish expert Francisco Echeverría who conducted the detailed follow-up of the entire forensic examination of these remains, as part of an Executive program to correct the identification errors of the remains found in the early nineties in Patio 29 of the General Cemetery of Santiago.

Echeverría met with the families of the 15 victims and, through tears, told them of the discovery that made the Lonquén episode even more dramatic. "I can state with absolute certainty today that the remains we have separated and examined correspond to the 15 victims who were found in 1978, and it was established that the cause of death corresponds to a violent, homicidal death.

There are no bullet impact injuries; these are blunt force traumatic injuries. Death was caused by beatings." According to the expert, the old report from the Legal Medical Service did not establish this fundamental fact.

Until now, the families were convinced that their loved ones, although they had suffered beatings at the Isla de Maipo station, were ultimately riddled with bullets before being thrown into the Lonquén lime ovens.

In these lime ovens, the bodies of Sergio Maureira Lillo and his four sons, Rodolfo Antonio, Sergio Miguel, Segundo Armando, and José Manuel; Óscar Hernández Flores and his brothers Carlos and Nelson; Enrique Astudillo Álvarez and his two sons, Omar and Ramón; and the young men Miguel Brant, Iván Ordóñez, José Herrera, and Manuel Navarro were found.

All were between 17 and 51 years old. The discovery was made through the confession of a peasant to a priest.

Source: Cambio21, December 10, 2017

38 YEARS AFTER THE LONQUÉN PEASANT MASSACRE

LONQUÉN MASSACRE (OCTOBER 7, 1973) – ISLA DE MAIPO

17 MODEST PEASANTS MURDERED BY CARABINEROS. FIRST DISCOVERY OF BODIES OF FORCIBLY DISAPPEARED PERSONS IN THE COUNTRY.

From the very day of the military coup that began the state terrorist dictatorship in 1973, a wave of violence, repression, and death was unleashed upon workers throughout the country. Those affected by the agrarian reform poured all their hatred and resentment onto the peasants, upon realizing the state of defenselessness in which they were left after the fall of the popular and constitutional government of President Salvador Allende.

The right wing, in defense of the interests of the powerful, wanted to teach a lesson so that peasants would never again attempt to take "their" lands from the "gentleman" landowners. The armed forces and Carabineros, instead of fulfilling their role as custodians of public security and defenders of the nation's interests, transformed into criminal repressors of the people and followed the dictates of a foreign doctrine intended to safeguard, through blood and fire, the interests of a foreign power: that of the Empire of large transnational capital.

In this context, just three days after the coup, Carabineros from the Isla de Maipo station, under the command of then-Lieutenant Lautaro Castro Mendoza and accompanied by the owner of the Naguayán estate, José Mario Celsi Perrot, who acted as an informant, detained two social leaders from that rural town on September 14, 1973: Juan de Dios Salinas (29 years old) and Guillermo del Carmen Bustamante Sotelo (39 years old).

Both were savagely tortured at the station and executed the same day at the Naltagua bridge, their bodies thrown into the waters of the Maipo River. The executioners of these murders were Sgt. Emeterio Bravo Moraga, Cpl. 1st Class Moisés Aguilera Sandoval, and Carabineros Eugenio David Coliqueo Fuentealba and Justo Ignacio Romo Peralta.

The henchman and estate administrator Germán Maximiliano Genskowski also had proven participation as an informant. On October 7, 1973, Lautaro Eugenio Castro Mendoza and Carabineros Juan José Villegas Navarro, Félix Héctor Sagredo Aravena, José Belmar Sepúlveda, Jacinto Torres González, Manuel Muñoz Rencoret, Eugenio David Coliqueo Fuentealba, and Justo Romo Peralta detained a group of 11 peasants.

Numerous witnesses saw them being beaten and loaded into a white pickup truck owned by the owner of the Naguayán estate, where the houses of the 3 families to which they belonged were located. They were tied up and laid face down on the floor of the vehicle.

They were the agricultural workers: 01 Sergio Adrián Maureira Lillo (46, and his 4 sons) 02 Sergio Miguel Maureira Muñoz (27) 03 José Manuel Maureira Muñoz (26) 04 Segundo Armando Maureira Muñoz (24) 05 Rodolfo Antonio Maureira Muñoz (22) 06 Carlos Segundo Hernández Flores (39, and his 2 brothers) 07 Nelson Hernández Flores (32) 08 Oscar Nibaldo Hernández Flores (30) 09 Enrique René Astudillo Álvarez (51, and his 2 sons) 10 Ramón Osvaldo Astudillo Rojas (27) 11 Omar Enrique Astudillo Rojas (19) The same day, in the town square, 4 young men were detained: 12 Miguel Ángel Brant Bustamante (20) 13 Manuel Jesús Navarro Salinas (20) 14 Iván Gerardo Ordóñez Lama (17) 15 José Manuel Herrera Villegas (17) Their families searched for them desperately. The dictatorship's information deceptively indicated that they had been taken to the National Stadium for interrogation. This was also claimed by Lautaro Castro Mendoza and his subordinates. The 17 peasants became part of the long list of forcibly disappeared persons. Only 5 years later would the horrendous truth of their fate be known. In 1978, an elderly man who had long been seeking information about a detained relative about whom he had been unable to learn anything, approached the Vicariate of Solidarity to declare that he had found numerous human remains in the lime ovens in Lonquén. That was the first step for priest Cristián Precht to lead a commission that ended up verifying that they were the 15 peasants who had been detained by the Carabineros of the Isla de Maipo station in 1973. The Cardinal Archbishop of Santiago, Raúl Silva Henríquez, agreed to form a Commission to investigate the report. On November 30, 1978, a meeting was held at the Vicariate of Solidarity in which Auxiliary Bishop Enrique Alvear, priest Cristián Precht, and other members of the Vicariate participated, along with three guests: lawyer Máximo Pacheco, Jaime Martínez, director of Qué Pasa, and Abraham Santibáñez, deputy director of Hoy. Cristián Precht and Javier Egaña, Executive Secretary of the Vicariate, reported the information and asked the three guests to accompany them to verify it. The ovens were two old 9-meter-high chimneys, once used for lime production, located inside the "El Triunfador" agricultural cooperative, about 14 km from the city of Talagante. After much coming and going by family members who never received answers about the fate of their loved ones, the Commission found the first evidence of this treacherous crime in the Lonquén ovens. On December 1, 1978, the Vicariate of Solidarity filed a complaint with the Supreme Court regarding the discovery of human remains inside two mineral treatment mines located on the slopes of the Lonquén hills. The case files were transferred to the Talagante Court of Letters, which, through a summary proceeding, confirmed the existence of human remains inside the ovens. Subsequently, the case passed into the hands of Minister Adolfo Bañados Cuadra, who concluded that the bodies found in Lonquén belonged to the 15 peasants who had been victims of the crime committed by the group of Carabineros from Isla de Maipo after being detained on October 7, 1973, and that none of the analyzed remains showed signs of having received bullet impacts. The 1978 discovery of the bodies buried in Lonquén was the first finding of bodies of forcibly disappeared persons in the country and strengthened the resolve to fight for the defense of human rights. It exposed the state policy promoted by the dictatorship to hide the bodies of its victims. Pinochet and the security agencies of the terrorist regime knew that the discovery of the Lonquén ovens would expose the existence of forcibly disappeared persons, which had been denied so many times both nationally and before the UN, where its ambassador, Sergio Diez, cynically went so far as to claim that the "allegedly" disappeared persons had left the country of their own free will. In order to make the compromising evidence disappear, the dictator ordered, via an encrypted message decrypted in each regiment, the so-called "Operation TV Removal." Using this code, all military units were to proceed to locate and remove the clandestine graves where they had dumped the bodies of hundreds of murdered people. The remains, as is now known, were burned or thrown into the sea. In various trials, statements from retired non-commissioned officers were recorded, acknowledging having held in their hands the cryptogram sent from the Army General Command ordering them to report the clandestine graves to "clean them up." This operation remained in effect from late 1978 until late 1986. On April 4, 1979, visiting minister Adolfo Bañados Cuadra declared himself incompetent, and the process for this case passed to military justice. On July 2 of that year, military prosecutor Gonzalo Salazar issued an indictment against Capt. Lautaro Castro Mendoza and the involved Carabineros as "perpetrators of the crime of unnecessary violence, causing death" to the 15 victims. However, on August 16, 1979, the Amnesty Law was applied to them, leaving them free and the case dismissed. This resolution was confirmed by the Martial Court on October 22, 1979. On September 14, 1979, the families were waiting for the delivery of their loved ones' bodies to hold a wake and give them a Christian burial, but CNI agents kidnapped the bodies from the SML and threw them into a mass grave in the Isla de Maipo cemetery. In 1980, a new owner, who acquired the Lonquén estate and was a supporter of the dictatorship, had the ovens dynamited to prevent the place from continuing to be a site of pilgrimage for relatives and friends of the 15 murdered peasants. Until 2006, the process for the Lonquén deaths remained closed due to the application of the Amnesty Law. However, the case for the death of the two peasants at the Naltahua bridge was reopened. At the request of lawyer Nelson Caucoto, the reopening of the case of the 15 Lonquén peasants was obtained, finally managing to reverse the definitive dismissal that weighed on the case and to advance in the certain identification of the remains. All the Carabineros who participated in the detentions were again prosecuted. The then-retired Carabineros Major Lautaro Castro Mendoza appeared to testify, but when he was again required for interrogation and to proceed with his prosecution, he disappeared without a trace. On June 28, 2007, the fugitive Lautaro Castro Mendoza was captured by the Special Affairs and Human Rights Brigade (BAE) of the PDI, on Cerro Las Mercedes, in Valparaíso, where he was hiding under another identity and physical appearance. On August 21, 2008, the minister of the San Miguel Court of Appeals, Marta Hantke, sentenced Lautaro Castro Mendoza to 10 years in prison as the perpetrator of the kidnapping and disappearance of Juan de Dios Salinas Salinas and Guillermo Bustamante Sotelo, the two social leaders from Isla de Maipo detained in September 1973. The judge did not sentence the material authors of the double crime in exchange for the collaboration they provided in the investigation. Only 517 bone fragments belonging to the 15 murdered peasants could be recovered, which enabled the subsequent identification of the victims. The definitive identifications were obtained with the help of anthropological and dental analyses by a group of international experts and samples sent for DNA testing to a specialized genetic laboratory in Texas. These analyses allowed it to be established that they corresponded to the 15 victims found in 1978 and confirmed that they did not die from bullet impacts but were brutally beaten to death before being thrown into the lime ovens. After the definitive confirmation of the identities on March 26, 2010, the remains could be delivered to their families by the Director of the Legal Medical Service (SML). On March 28, 2010, they were buried in a solemn ceremony at the Isla de Maipo cemetery, in the Mausoleum that had been built for that purpose and inaugurated in October 2008. There they rest in 17 tombs alongside the remains of the two social leaders killed at the Naltahua bridge. Fortunately, and after 32 years, the application of the Amnesty Law dated August 16, 1979, and confirmed by the Martial Court on October 12 of that year in favor of the prisoner Lautaro Castro Mendoza and the Carabineros involved in these 15 murders, was reconsidered on August 19, 2011, by the Second Chamber of the San Miguel Court of Appeals, which reopened the case and revoked the statute of limitations ruling, ordering visiting minister Héctor Solís to prosecute the murderers. On August 31, Lautaro Eugenio Castro Mendoza, Juan José Villegas Navarro, Félix Héctor Sagredo Aravena, Jacinto Torres González, Eugenio David Coliqueo Fuentealba, and Justo Ignacio Romo Peralta were prosecuted again as perpetrators of the aggravated homicide of the 15 agricultural workers, which opens the possibility of finally applying justice to these criminals. On the other hand, it would be the central government's moral obligation to take charge and take all measures conducive to rebuilding the ovens that were dynamited, as well as building a road for free and public access, which should be declared a National Heritage site and a monument to Historical Memory. Failure to do so would make it appear to public opinion as a participant in the cover-up that this action intended to provide for this abominable crime. As someone pointed out, the unwavering struggle of the victims' families for the clarification of the truth, for achieving justice, and for the punishment of those responsible, overcoming so many obstacles, with the support from the beginning of this tragedy from the Pro-Peace Committee, the Vicariate of Solidarity, the Association of Relatives of Forcibly Disappeared Persons (AFDD), the Association of Relatives of Political Executions (AFEP), and Human Rights lawyers, constitutes an example and a magnificent legacy of persistence, solidarity, and appreciation for the defense of Human Rights for new generations. "They have the force, they may subjugate us, but social processes are not stopped by crime or force" Salvador Allende Gossens, President of Chile (September 11, 1973)

Sources

"Chile: The Sinister History of Carabineros de Chile - Lonquén" - Iván Ljubetic Vargas (Historian) "Historical Memory. Forcibly Disappeared Persons. Mass Exhumation" - Raúl Auth Caviedes "Returning to Memory" Chapter II: Furrows in Memory - Raquel Olea and Olga Grau (Compilers) Note: In the history of our country, strange paradoxes often occur.

Between 1978 and 1980, Hernán Cubillos Sallato was the Foreign Minister of the dictatorship. In 1978, the dictatorship was striving to hide its crimes and repeatedly denied to national and international public opinion the existence of forcibly disappeared persons.

That year, the first bodies were discovered, as a result of which it launched the sadistically named "Operation TV Removal," attempting to destroy all evidence. 37 years later, for the identification of the victims of that horrendous crime, it was necessary to resort to advanced DNA recognition techniques on the scarce bone remains that were recovered.

Thirty-three years after this discovery, 21 people perished in a very unfortunate plane crash. Among them was businessman Felipe Cubillos Segall, son of Hernán Cubillos Sallato, and for the recognition of his remains, it was also necessary to resort to the same identification technique used in the case of the ill-fated bodies of the victims murdered in Lonquén. Camilo Muñoz

Source: http://www.g80.cl/, September 13, 2011