Judge Rosa María Pinto prosecuted two former Army and Air Force intelligence non-commissioned officers in Calama today as alleged perpetrators of the crime of illegal exhumation of 26 opponents executed by the "Caravan of Death" in 1973.

The resolution affected Manuel Aguirre Cortés, a former Army intelligence non-commissioned officer, and former Air Force intelligence non-commissioned officer Sergio López Maldonado, according to judicial sources.

The 26 prisoners were executed by order of General Sergio Arellano Stark on October 19, 1973, in an operation by the "Caravan of Death," a military delegation that executed more than 70 political prisoners in different cities across the country, according to the judicial file.

In the case of Calama, 1,564 kilometers north of Santiago, the 26 victims were taken from prison and executed in the Topáter sector, on the outskirts of the city, where they were clandestinely buried. According to testimonies contained in the proceedings, at the end of 1975 or the beginning of 1976, the bodies were exhumed by order of the Army General Command, which issued a coded order via cryptogram.

Aguirre Cortés, along with other military personnel, according to the file, unearthed the corpses and transported them to the Calama airport, where a FACH C-47 aircraft awaited them. They loaded the bodies onto the plane, which were subsequently thrown into the sea wrapped in sacks and tied to rails.

Sergio Maldonado, who was an Air Force mechanic, also participated in the operation. In his statements to the court, Aguirre Cortés accused retired General Miguel Trincado Araneda—who retired last year while serving as commander of the Army's Second Division, based in Santiago—of having directed the exhumation of the remains of the Calama victims.

When consulted by Efe, Judge Rosa María Pinto confirmed the prosecution of the two non-commissioned officers but stated that Trincado is not among those prosecuted. The exhumation of the remains of those forcibly disappeared during the regime of the late dictator Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) was known as "Operation Television Removal" (operación retiro de televisores).

According to judicial sources and human rights activists, the operation, which was repeated in different parts of the country, was ordered by Pinochet to cover up the crimes of his regime, which left more than 3,000 dead and 1,279 forcibly disappeared.

Source: Terra.cl March 27, 2007

Statements implicating Herrera in a human rights case

On January 22, 2007, in a separate volume of the case regarding the removal of the bodies of 26 political executions in Calama, the judge of the Second Court of that city and special visiting minister for the case, Rosa María Pinto, took a statement from Investigations Commissioner Abel Lizama Pinto.

The police officer was part of the Special Affairs and Human Rights Investigative Brigade tasked with investigating "Operation Television Removal," ordered in 1979 by Augusto Pinochet for the purpose of exhuming the bodies of the victims of the Caravan of Death and subsequently throwing them into the sea.

In that four-page judicial statement, Detective Lizama corroborates having received pressure from Claudio Preller, chief of staff to the current director of the Chilean Investigative Police, Arturo Herrera Verdugo, to alter a police report that implicated General Miguel Trincado in "Operation Television Removal." "Indeed, Mr.

Claudio Preller, an official serving as chief of staff to the Director, spoke with me, which occurred in November of that year (2005). He requested that I modify the result of the investigation regarding Lieutenant or General Miguel Trincado, to which I replied that I had become convinced that this officer had participated in the events, in addition to the fact that the report was already at the court, and also because I needed the consent of (Commissioner) Sandro Gaete, who signed report 844 mentioned above with me.

Upon returning to my unit, I verified that Gaete was speaking on the phone with Preller in the same terms, refusing to change the conclusions of the report." Although Commissioner Abel Lizama posits that "I do not believe there was an attempt to obstruct this investigation on the part of the Director of Investigations," in the same statement, he notes that "I must admit that Preller transmitted an order from his superior, and that is how he conveyed it to me." One week after Lizama's statement, the now-retired General Miguel Trincado was confronted with retired non-commissioned officer Manuel Aguirre Cortés, who linked the former to the coordination of the removal of the bodies of political executions in Calama. When Aguirre Cortés pointed out that Trincado had allegedly made arrangements with Arturo Herrera to "nullify a report" that directly implicated him in the "Operation Television Removal" case, Trincado clarified: "What I did was simply make a formal presentation on November 9, 2005, as a private citizen, not as a general, to the Director of Investigations, so that he could confirm or rule out the existence of a report that referred to me and attributed my participation in the aforementioned events (...) I requested an audience with the Director of Investigations; I was informed that he was receiving lumbar treatment at his home, and upon insisting that it was urgent and asking the person I spoke with—without remembering if it was a man or a woman—to get me the audience, they granted it to me. I do not remember if it was for the same day or the next, but I went to the aforementioned Director's home (...) No one was present at the audience with Mr. Herrera, who received me in the living room, and the interview lasted about 15 minutes." According to both judicial statements, it was a few days after Herrera's meeting with Trincado that the chief of staff to the director of Investigations, Claudio Preller, contacted Commissioners Lizama and Gaete to interfere in favor of the retired general. At the end of the aforementioned statement by Commissioner Abel Lizama, he notes that, "as a consequence" of his and Gaete's refusal to alter the police report, "the resources and means to investigate the human rights cases being processed in my unit have been diminished, but without having other problems." The problems would come shortly thereafter. Along with being removed from their usual duties in the Special Affairs and Human Rights Investigative Brigade, last September, Lizama and Gaete filed a criminal complaint with the Second Guarantee Court of Santiago for threats and insults that circulated via email among police officials. In the message, according to the complaint made public by El Mostrador, it read that "the officials of the Investigative Police are watching the traitors Rafael Castillo, Sandro Gaete, Abel Lizama, and Mario Zelada." This aspect of the "Operation Television Removal" case, which involves the figure of obstruction of justice, was mentioned a couple of weeks ago by Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, who accused Arturo Herrera, interim director of INTERPOL, of having been involved in the illegal exhumation of bodies that occurred in 1979 in Calama. Days later, once the government and the opposition in Chile closed ranks in defense of the director of the Investigative Police, the Venezuelan government sent a formal apology, retracting the accusations against Herrera.

Source: Ciperchile.cl May 28, 2008