On March 3, 2004, the presiding judge of the San Miguel Court of Appeals, María Stella Elgarrista, indicted a retired Carabineros officer and two civilians for the crimes of kidnapping, qualified homicide, and attempted homicide in the town of Paine between September and October 1973.

The indicted individuals are retired Carabineros Sub-officer Luis Enrique Jara Riquelme, as the perpetrator of the crimes of kidnapping followed by the qualified homicide of José Manuel Díaz Inostroza, Francisco Javier Lizama Irarrázabal, Juan Manuel Ortiz Acevedo, Luis Celerino Ortiz Acevedo, and Jorge Manuel Pavez Henríquez, and as the perpetrator of the crime of aggravated kidnapping of Francisco Baltazar Godoy Román.

The civilians Juan Manuel Balcázar Soto and Claudio Antonio Oregón Tudela were indicted as perpetrators of the crime of qualified homicide of Ricardo Eduardo Carrasco Barrios.

Source: Report of the Vicariate of Solidarity, First semester 2004

Walkiria was detained a few days after the coup d'état at the Maipo Regiment in Valparaíso. After several days of interrogation, she was transferred along with 16 other women to the Villa Grimaldi torture center in Santiago.

The journey between one hell and another was not made in Army trucks. "La Walki"—as her friends call her—recalls that this trip, which could have been the last of her life, was made aboard a closed truck belonging to Pesquera Arauco.

According to her and other former prisoners consulted by The Clinic, this company from the V Region placed all its vehicles at the disposal of the military, which were used for the transport of both prisoners and Navy personnel.

Pesquera Arauco is not the only case of a private company that provided infrastructure that ended up being used to torture and murder Chileans. On the contrary, in the various trials for human rights violations, large and small companies repeatedly emerge that collaborated freely with material and information: a contribution that played a decisive role in the extent of the horror.

Among these companies, Sudamericana de Vapores stands out. From September 11 itself, the company placed two of its ships at the disposal of the Navy. One of them, the Maipo, transported 380 detainees from Valparaíso to Pisagua.

Many of its passengers lost their lives. The other ship provided was the Lebu, which served as a floating prison. More than two thousand people passed through its holds and cabins. María Eliana Comene was one of them.

She recounts that between September 19 and 20, she was taken from the "Esmeralda" training ship and transferred to the Sudamericana ship. "I remember the dock was full, just full of people. People were dumped like bundles on the ground.

On the Lebu, they put the men in the hold and took us women to some cabins. There were so many of us that to sleep we had to sit with our knees pulled up. We could bathe with ice-cold water, but only before six in the morning, because after that the water was cut off." Many of the people who passed through the Lebu are still forcibly disappeared.

Those who survived cannot forget the endless torture they suffered on the ship provided by the shipping company. Some private educational institutions also collaborated with the violation of human rights.

This is the case of the Universidad Federico Santa María, whose facilities were used to interrogate and detain people who came, fundamentally, from the Los Placeres neighborhood of Valparaíso. The university also evicted students from the boarding school so that the military guard could sleep there.

Many detainees were transferred from there to the Naval War Academy, where harsh interrogations were carried out and through which nearly 1,500 people passed. In the provinces, medium and small companies offered enthusiastic collaboration.

In Osorno, the Fábrica Elaboradora de Cecinas (FELCO) provided its warehouses for the detention of political prisoners. Hernán, who prefers to withhold his last name as the years of the dictatorship still weigh on him, was detained there.

He remembers arriving hooded at a place he did not know: a 10-by-10-meter metal shed. But several of the 150 detainees quickly identified the site and communicated it to the rest: they were in the FELCO warehouses.

There was only one bathroom in the place and the overcrowding conditions were terrible. After a couple of days, Hernán was transferred to the city's Estadio Español, another facility provided by private parties.

Human rights lawyer Hiram Villagra states that military repression depended to a large extent on the responsibility of civilians, since "without their complicity, the dictatorship would not have had the cruelty, the intensity, and much less the duration that it had." He adds that "many private individuals ended up providing their services to the dictatorship and applauding the coup, knowing that the end result was repression." One of the most ferocious displays of voluntary services is found in Paine, where 70 peasants from the area were executed in the weeks following the coup d'état.

For years, human rights organizations accused several small agricultural entrepreneurs of having provided vehicles and having participated directly in the deaths. At the beginning of March, Judge María Estela Elgarrista proved them right and indicted a Carabineros officer and two civilians for the crime of kidnapping and qualified homicide.

The civilians, Claudio Oregón Tudela and Juan Balcázar Soto, are small entrepreneurs in the area. The Lists A considerable percentage of former political prisoners and the forcibly disappeared were detained in their own workplaces.

This occurred because another great service provided by companies to the nascent dictatorship was the creation of blacklists, which in the long run ended up being, for many, death lists. Juan Báez worked at the Portuaria de Valparaíso company as a storekeeper and was detained on September 30 by a naval patrol when he arrived for work.

Several workers at the company met the same fate, and today Báez is convinced that the list was drawn up within the company. Something similar occurred at ENAMI, where 276 of its workers were listed as "traitors" or "dangerous people to the company's operations." A large part of them were executed.

The same happened at the Industria Textil Viña and the Unión Lechera de Aconcagua. Many workers detained as a result of these blacklists did not even have clear political preferences and were exposed to violence due to personal vendettas.

As a result of the torture, many were left with sequelae that prevented them from returning to work, radically affecting the quality of life of their families. Juan Báez, for example, was left with severe spinal problems and partial blindness after spending 17 hellish days in a detention center in Papudo.

To this day, he cannot perform any type of heavy physical activity, such as the work he did when he was an employee of the Portuaria de Valparaíso. However, Báez did not fare as badly as a group of workers from the Elecmetal company, owned by Ricardo Claro.

According to Mario Fernández, a former worker at that company, he himself witnessed how his two brothers and several members of the union were summoned to the management office by the military interventor Patricio Altamirano, the manager Gustavo Ross, and the director, Fernán Gazmuri.

The workers left there handcuffed and in the custody of the Carabineros. They were never seen alive again. "Months before the coup came, the manager, Gustavo Ross, summoned my brother Juan to talk. He told him that if he did not leave the company, they would suffer the consequences," recounts Mario Fernández.

For him, it is clear that Elecmetal handed him over to be murdered. Lawyer Juan Agustín Figueroa, who was part of the company's board of directors when the murders occurred, denies Fernández's statements. "It didn't cross anyone's mind that the detainees were going to end up with a military patrol and that they were going to appear shot," says the criminal lawyer.

Despite this, Fernández maintains that although the company was intervened by the military, it was Ricardo Claro who gave the orders there, via telephone. "He never lost power. And everyone knew what was going to happen.

They knew the conditions in which they were killing the workers," he claims. Certificates The Universidad Católica de Valparaíso did not escape this wave of snitching. After the coup, the UCV was left in the hands of a naval officer who counted on much voluntary and spontaneous collaboration from professors and students to draw up lists of undesirable students.

When classes resumed, students had to report to a shed at the School of Engineering where they were informed if they were "without problems," "conditional," or "expelled." The latter received a certificate accusing them of "being a danger to the academic activity of the university, due to their status as a violent extremist." That was the case of Enrique Núñez, who was studying agronomy at the time.

He was not only expelled but erased from the university's records. At least three UCV students included on that fateful list suffered a worse fate. María Isabel Gutiérrez and Alfredo García were taken to the Maipo Regiment where their trail was lost; meanwhile, Silvio Pardo, a law student, disappeared at the Silva Palma barracks.

Núñez believes that the UCV is in debt to those people and that a way to make amends for its collaborationism "would be for the university, in a dignified gesture, to give a posthumous degree to all those who were victims of the repression.

That doesn't cost them a peso. But the political will to face one's own guilt is lacking." South African Model The support of private companies for governments based on repression and torture is not an issue only in Chile.

In South Africa, during Apartheid, there were many companies that encouraged human rights abuses and maintained business with a State that, despite international condemnation, fostered murders, torture, rape, arbitrary detentions, and inhumane treatment of thousands of people.

Unlike our country, the victims of Apartheid, organized through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Khulumani movement, filed two lawsuits against nearly 30 companies that contributed to the Apartheid government.

The lawsuits were filed in the U.S. in 2002 on behalf of the victims of Apartheid and demanded both individual compensation and more general contributions for social development. Some of the companies sued are: Citigroup, Exxon Mobil, Caltex Petroleum, Ford, General Motors, IBM, Fluor Corporation, Commerzbank, and Credit Suisse, among others. _

Source: March 19, 2004

In the town, nearly 70 people were murdered after the 1973 coup d'état, in particular thanks to the collaboration of local residents who denounced the victims. Judge María Estela Elgarrista has indicted two civilians for having collaborated in 1973 in the execution of opponents of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship in Paine, judicial sources reported.

Retired Carabineros officer Luis Jara Riquelme was also indicted in the case. The civilians are Claudio Oregón Tudela and Juan Balcázar Soto, accused of crimes of kidnapping and qualified homicide in Paine.

In that town, around 70 people, mostly agricultural workers, were executed without trial in the weeks following the military coup of September 11, 1973. According to judicial records, the indicted civilians pointed out to the military the identities, addresses, and other data that allowed for the detention and execution of their own neighbors in the town.

Among those executed at that time is the merchant Andrés Pereira Salsberg, father of human rights lawyer and Socialist Party leader Pamela Pereira. The investigation by Judge Elgarrista, in which nearly a thousand people have testified, was able to advance significantly due to the testimony of Alejandro Bustos, a peasant from the area who was taken to be shot and miraculously survived the gunfire.

Bustos, who lived in hiding and in fear for many years, valued the investigation and the resolutions issued by the judge, more than 30 years after the events occurred.

Source: Cooperativa.cl, March 8, 2004

Human Rights: Judge indicts two civilians

Claudio Oregón Tudela and Juan Balcázar Soto were indicted for crimes of kidnapping and qualified homicide against opponents of the military regime in Paine. Judge María Estela Elgarrista, who is investigating various human rights cases, indicted two civilians for having collaborated in 1973 in the execution of opponents of Augusto Pinochet's regime in Paine, 40 kilometers south of Santiago.

They are Claudio Oregón Tudela and Juan Balcázar Soto, who were indicted for crimes of kidnapping and qualified homicide. In Paine, around 70 people, mostly agricultural workers, were executed without trial in the weeks following September 11, 1973.

Along with Oregón and Balcázar, former Carabineros officer Luis Jara Riquelme was also indicted for the same crimes. According to judicial records, the indicted civilians pointed out to the military the identities, addresses, and other data that allowed for the detention and execution of their own neighbors in the town.

Among those executed at that time is the merchant Andrés Pereira Salsberg, father of human rights lawyer and Socialist Party leader Pamela Pereira.

Source: Emol.com, Monday, March 8, 2004

Two civilians indicted for executions in Paine

The presiding judge of the San Miguel Court of Appeals, María Estela Elgarrista, has for the first time indicted two civilians who collaborated in the identification, provision of means, and collaboration for the execution of dissidents of the military regime in Paine, in the days following the overthrow of Salvador Allende.

They are Claudio Oregón Tudela and Juan Balcázar Soto, as well as retired Carabineros officer Luis Jara Riquelme, who were indicted for the crimes of kidnapping and qualified homicide. The relevance of this resolution is that the civilians appear in the capacity of collaborators for the acts carried out by members of the uniformed police, specifically the Paine police station.

The events recorded at the end of September and the beginning of October 1973 affected about 70 people, among whom is the father of the Socialist Party human rights lawyer, Pamela Pereira, Andrés Pereira Salsberg.

The repressive wave was also the responsibility of troops from the San Bernardo Infantry Regiment. When Elgarrista took charge of the investigation, she received all the proceedings from both the San Bernardo judge who was in charge of this investigation and those of presiding judge Juan Guzmán Tapia.

On that occasion, the judge archived both cases and began a completely new one, in which more than a thousand people have already testified, and she notified the new defendants in her office this morning, according to judicial sources.

This media outlet interviewed the peasant Alejandro Bustos, nicknamed "El Colorín," who was also a victim of the indicted men and was taken to be shot without success. "The judge told me that she had the resolve and that she was going to do justice in this case, and she delivered," he assured.

Bustos valued the investigation that the judge has carried out and the resolutions issued a little over 30 years after the events occurred. "It's good that these people are finally going to jail, because those of us who remained alive have suffered more than the dead," he concluded.

It should be remembered that in October of last year, the construction of the "Paine, a Place for Memory" memorial began in the aforementioned town, located south of the capital, in memory of the peasants who were forcibly disappeared or executed after the 1973 coup d'état.

Source: March 8, 2004, El Mostrador