On Wednesday, September 19, 1973, soldiers belonging to a battalion of the Yungay Regiment of San Felipe raided the Hospital San Juan de Dios in Santiago, Chile, taking several people into custody, among them a worker-priest named Joan Alsina Hurtos.

After being transferred to the Internado Nacional Barros Arana, which was being used at the time as a detention center by the dictatorship, Alsina was severely beaten and tortured by his captors. At 9:00 PM that same day, he was taken to the Bulnes bridge over the Mapocho River in Santiago and executed by a military patrol under the orders of Colonel Donato López Almarza.

"Please do not put the blindfold on me; kill me facing forward because I want to see you to grant you forgiveness."

Nelson Bañados, an 18-year-old recruit performing mandatory military service, was the one who fired seven shots at close range at Father Alsina, as he himself would declare on various occasions before taking his own life due to the guilt he carried from that tragic moment.

Facing his executioner, Father Alsina asked the recruit Bañados not to blindfold him so that he could bless him and grant him forgiveness, according to the recruit's own confession to the Catalan priest Miguel Llodrá, a member of the religious community to which Joan Alsina belonged in the commune of San Bernardo, in the Metropolitan Region, who had taken on the task of searching for his detained brother.

Later, when the trials began, the recruit Bañados would repeat the same testimony before the courts: "Upon arriving at the Bulnes bridge, my captain braked, and I, as I did with each of those I executed, got out, took Juan from the van, and went to blindfold him, but Juan told me: 'Please do not put the blindfold on me; kill me facing forward because I want to see you to grant you forgiveness.' It was very fast.

I remember he raised his eyes to the sky, made a gesture with his hands, placed them over his heart, and moved his lips as if he were praying and said: 'Father, forgive them...' I fired the burst and he fell immediately.

I wanted to shoot him with the pistol, but I did it with the submachine gun so it would be faster. The impact was so strong that it turned his body and he practically fell into the Mapocho on his own; I just had to give him a little push.

Others sometimes fell onto the floor of the bridge and had to be lifted and thrown into the river. It was ten o'clock at night, and I will never, ever forget this execution."

Days later, on September 27, Alsina's body was found downstream in the Mapocho River and transferred to the Legal Medical Service. The military regime's authorities claimed that he was a "terrorist" who had died in a confrontation with a patrol of soldiers. On September 28, his body was buried in the parish cemetery of San Bernardo.

Bañados always ratified his version of the events during the trial for the murder of Joan Alsina, until, overwhelmed by remorse, he committed suicide.

Who was Father Joan

Joan Alsina Hurtos was born in Castelló d’Empúries, in the province of Girona, Catalonia, on April 28, 1942. He was the son of a very Catholic family, which, in addition to Joan, had two other children, Miquel and Maria.

At age 4, he entered the Carmelitas School; three years later, he moved to the National School. At age 11, Joan asked his parents to enter the seminary of Girona, which he later attended, being ordained a priest on September 12, 1965.

Assigned for a time to the town of Malgrat de Mar, Joan decided to move to the Hispanic American Seminary in Madrid to go on missions, which was his desire. His first destination was Chile, where he arrived planning to spend 10 years evangelizing among the working sectors.

Joan arrived in Chile on January 30, 1967, and settled in San Bernardo, south of Santiago, to live in a community of Catalan priests. He exercised his ministry at the San Ignacio Parish in San Bernardo and was working at the Hospital San Juan de Dios in Santiago at the time of the coup d'état on September 11, 1973, where he was also a union leader.

Joan had formed deep friendships in Chile; he had become a worker-priest, like several others who in those years formed the "Christians for Socialism" movement in support of the struggles and social transformations occurring in Chile. It was in this context of the world of labor that he became politically linked to comrades from the MIR.

From the hospital, Joan and his colleagues were able to see the bombing of La Moneda on September 11, 1973, and later receive the wounded who arrived from various places.

On September 16, a military patrol arrived at the Hospital San Juan de Dios in Santiago, raiding its facilities and detaining 7 workers. Joan was free that day, and upon his return to the hospital, his colleagues advised him to take refuge in an embassy.

Joan made the decision not only to remain in Chile but also to continue working at the hospital, helping those most in need during especially difficult times.

On the night of September 18, sensing his detention, Joan wrote a document known as "The Testament of Juan Alsina," in which he recorded the reasons for his surrender. Among others, we choose one of the phrases he wrote in his own hand: "if the grain of wheat does not die, it does not bear fruit, but if it dies, it bears much fruit." This is a phrase that more than 10 years later would be taken up by Luisa Toledo, a resident of Villa Francia in Santiago, who was very close to the Catholic base communities, when on March 29, 1984, two of her sons were murdered: Rafael and Eduardo Vergara Toledo.

Joan was one of the priests murdered by the military dictatorship in Chile, like the English worker-priest Miguel Woodward, who was detained and tortured to death on the training ship Esmeralda; the Salesian priest Gerardo Poblete, murdered in a cell at a police station in Iquique in 1974; the Valencian Antonio Llidó Mengual, a worker-priest from Quillota, who was forcibly disappeared from the clandestine detention and torture center of José Domingo Cañas in Santiago in 1974; and the French priest André Jarlan, murdered by a police shot in the La Victoria neighborhood in Santiago while the national day of protests against the dictatorship was being repressed in 1984.

Source: resumen.cl, September 19, 2023

Places of memory are there, some perhaps invisible despite plaques, monuments, and commemorative actions. Sometimes the eyes do not see, and truths are lost in good intentions.

"I remember that I fired seven bullets, aiming at his chest... but as if by a natural instinct... to avoid seeing his gaze." (pp. 76, Nelson Bañados)

Fifty years after the Civil-Military Coup, Felipe Olivares and Claudio Vilches, two young political scientists, began an investigative path toward the heart of one of the many despicable acts perpetrated in the first days of the dictatorship: the execution of the Catalan priest Joan Alsina at the Bulnes Bridge in Santiago.

"Kill me facing forward" accounts for the search for information regarding this emblematic case, which begins with some concrete data that frame it. One of them, the tip of the thread, is that the Instituto Nacional Barros Arana (INBA) served as a cantonment space for the No. 3 Yungay Regiment of San Felipe from September 11, 1973, until October 4 of that year.

It was a place of detention, torture, and the forced disappearance of people. Joan Alsina remained there after being detained with other people at the Hospital San Juan de Dios until the night of his execution, September 19, 1973. Many witnesses agree on this factual data, among them a military chaplain.

The story of Joan Alsina is interwoven with that of others who suffered, died, and were forcibly disappeared at the hands of the soldiers of the Yungay Regiment of San Felipe during the fateful time they were stationed at the INBA and later at the Quinta Normal.

For example, the story of Lucio Bagus, an employee of the Hospital San Juan de Dios, who remains forcibly disappeared to this day. And that of Carlos Fariña, a thirteen-year-old boy detained at his home who was finally found in a grave at Américo Vespucio and San Pablo.

Thus, throughout the book, the reader can understand the plot of the web of death that has been hidden or rendered invisible. Its points join, overlap, and merge, showing us an image of terror that is not literary fiction or political invention.

That happened. Cruelty, perversity, and subsequent impunity were ferocious beasts that moved at their whim in the dictatorial night, from the very first moment of that September 11.

The thread of the story told also picks up the dangling or lost points of the accomplices (passive or active), of the informers. Of those who, for personal reasons, turned in colleagues or neighbors. Of those who remained silent.

Of those who looked the other way when these events were occurring. Of those who contributed to the concealment of the truth. Perhaps out of legitimate fear, perhaps because they really did not care. The "they must have done something" remains throbbing in the darkness that surrounds us today.

Also here are the perpetrators, with their full names and even their photos, verifiable public documents. And the official records of the judicial investigations in which, when the Justice system inquired about one of these responsible parties, there was coincidentally a spelling or typing error in the name, so that the response was that that person did not belong to the Chilean Army.

This was one of the many maneuvers that guaranteed the impunity of the State's assassins.

Joan Alsina was executed at the Bulnes Bridge by the conscript Nelson Bañados and Captain Mario Caraves, who gave the order and was there to verify that his subordinate's hand carried out the action for him.

Out of cowardice or the need to provide himself with accomplices who could not speak later. The words that give the book its title were spoken by Joan Alsina at the moment Nelson Bañados was preparing to execute him. It remained as a lapidary phrase that, nevertheless, did not move the perpetrators and remained an emblem for these fifty years.

The story of Joan Alsina, as well as the phrase, leads us to the issue of forgiveness. For him, as for his parents, forgiveness was crucial. His father, before dying, wrote two letters in which he extended the forgiveness that Joan Alsina granted to his assassins at the Bulnes Bridge.

One letter was for the conscript Nelson Bañados, who accepted it, and the other for Captain Mario Caraves, who rejected it, indignant.

The narrative takes on a chronicle tone at times and at other moments reaches an atmosphere of enveloping intimacy, not without astonishment, when it would seem that nothing can astonish us anymore. The authors, although they try to maintain the distance imposed by the structure of the investigation, cannot avoid shuddering and approach the stories of witnesses and family members emotionally, weaving them together, supported by documents, photos, and easily verifiable data.

This leads the book to be read as an investigation in its own right, but at the same time as a compendium of multiple voices that unfold like a warp that goes far beyond the cases in question: the fabric reaches the entire country when the points are joined with the thread woven from these stories.

Places of memory are there, some perhaps invisible despite plaques, monuments, and commemorative actions. Sometimes the eyes do not see, and truths are lost in good intentions. Books like "Kill me facing forward," based on rigorous investigative work committed to the truth, open the doors to revisit geographical and symbolic spaces, to look while seeing the history of our country, and to bravely walk the paths of the tears of those who gave their lives in our national territory, which still bleeds.

Source: elmostrador.cl, January 3, 2024

In a dramatic testimony before Spanish television, the former Chilean soldier Nelson Bañados confessed to having murdered the Spanish priest Joan Alsina Hourtos by gunfire during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

"I regret it. May they forgive me, I was just following orders," Bañados told the priest's family, interviewed by Catalan television on a program titled "Process to Pinochet," which aired last night in the "Thirty Minutes" slot.

This is the first time that a Chilean soldier who participated in the repression of General Pinochet's dictatorship has admitted to having participated in crimes and publicly asked for forgiveness. The broadcast took place after the lawyers for the plaintiffs in the trial regarding the forcibly disappeared in Chile requested life imprisonment for Pinochet, who had become a senator-for-life on Wednesday, and for 38 high-ranking officials directly responsible for the dictatorship.

Until now, the official version was that the priest Joan Alsina, who was ministering at a hospital, had died by accident in a shootout on a bridge over the Mapocho River.

Bañados admits that it was he who shot him under superior orders. Bañados was 17 years old at the time of the execution.

He said that when the coup d'état led by Pinochet occurred in 1973, he was performing military service and was forced to participate in the executions of people.

The Spanish Justice system is investigating the disappearances of several Spanish citizens, among others, the priest Antonio Llido Mengual. Joan Alsina was a Salesian priest born in the Catalan town of Castelló d'Empúries.

Bañados admitted to having participated in several actions where people were murdered but accused the military chiefs of having forced him. Although Bañados was tried and found guilty, he was covered by the benefits of the amnesty decreed by Pinochet.

The investigation to find those responsible for the death of Joan Alsina was a patient task of his friend, the priest Miguel Jordá. The clergyman had a letter from Alsina's father in which he forgave his son's assassins. Miguel Jordá explains in the report that when he delivered the letter to the soldier Nelson Bañados, he cried like a child and told me: "I killed him! I killed him!"

The relatives of Joan Alsina and the also forcibly disappeared priest Antonio Llido Mengual appeared before the Spanish judge Manuel García Castellón, accusing the former dictator Pinochet and his accomplices of the murder of the two clergymen.

Source: elclarin.cl, March 16, 1998

The murderer of a Spanish priest in Chile dies

Nelson Bañados Pinto, the former Chilean soldier who killed the Spanish priest Joan Alsina after the 1973 coup, committed suicide yesterday at his home in Santiago. Bañados, 44, was being investigated for his responsibility in the disappearance of a four-year-old child.

Source: elpais.es, June 1, 1999

Military officer sentenced for the death of a Spanish priest in Chile

Five years in prison for Major Donato López for the murder of Joan Alsina in 1973.

A Chilean judge sentenced retired Major Donato López on Tuesday to five years in prison without benefits; he is the only one still alive from the Army patrol that murdered the Spanish priest Joan Alsina next to a bridge over the Mapocho River on September 19, 1973, eight days after Augusto Pinochet's military coup.

Magistrate Jorge Zepeda considered the case a crime against humanity in order to apply the sentence 32 years after the homicide.

Alsina, one of the three Spaniards murdered by the Pinochet dictatorship (two of them priests), born in Castelló d'Empúries (Girona), was 31 years old at the time of the coup and had arrived in Chile in 1968 to dedicate himself to evangelizing in working-class neighborhoods.

After the coup, he asked his friends in the Catholic Church that, if he were detained, they should do nothing for him because he wanted to "share the fate of the workers," and he showed up for his job as head of personnel at the Hospital San Juan de Dios, where he was detained by a patrol from the Yungay regiment during the third raid on the site.

The soldiers beat Alsina, a parish priest in the southern part of the capital, until he was unconscious. Together with seven other hospital workers, two of whom remain forcibly disappeared, they transported him to execute him at night next to the bridge.

The soldier Nelson Bañados recounted in the trial that Alsina asked him not to blindfold him: "Please, do not put the blindfold on me; kill me facing forward because I want to see you to grant you forgiveness." The execution was very fast, Bañados recounted: "I remember he raised his eyes to the sky, made a gesture with his hands, placed them over his heart, moved his lips as if he were praying and said 'Father, forgive them.' I fired the burst and he fell immediately." The impact threw the Catalan Alsina next to the Mapocho River, which in those days was a frequent site for military executions. When his body was found, it had seven high-caliber bullet impacts. The other two members of the military patrol, including Bañados, died before the sentence was handed down. A plaque commemorates the crime at the site.

On the other hand, Judge Sergio Muñoz has agreed to a request from the plaintiffs in the case being pursued against Pinochet and has asked the Supreme Court for a new stripping of the former dictator's immunity due to the well-founded suspicion that he committed embezzlement of public funds, which explains the origin of part of his fortune, estimated at some 28 million dollars.

It was his last action in the case, the investigation of which he abandoned yesterday upon being sworn in as a member of the Supreme Court, amidst applause from court officials, who consider that Muñoz has contributed to giving prestige to the Chilean justice system.

The plaintiffs also asked to strip the former dictator of his immunity for other crimes, but Muñoz did not manage to resolve the cases and left them in the hands of his successor. The Supreme Court has a pending resolution that will be analyzed today regarding the appeal by Pinochet's defense against the stripping of immunity granted by the Santiago Court of Appeals for four other crimes: tax fraud, forgery of public documents and passports, violating an embargo on funds ordered by the Spanish justice system when the general was detained in London, and for adulterating his declaration of assets upon leaving power.

Muñoz indicated yesterday that it is most likely that in the summary for the former dictator's corruption, he will be replaced by Judge Jorge Zepeda, who handed down the first sentence for the Alsina crime.

Meanwhile, Pinochet (89 years old) spent about three hours yesterday undergoing medical tests at the Clinical Hospital of the Catholic University by order of Judge Víctor Montiglio. In September, the Supreme Court stripped the former dictator of his immunity and ordered him to undergo psychiatric examinations for 15 of the 119 crimes of Operation Colombo, the mass murder of political prisoners committed by the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA, Pinochet's political police), pretending that they were killing each other due to internal quarrels.

Montiglio, who has always voted in favor of Pinochet, went further than the Court's instruction and ordered neurological and psychiatric examinations to be performed on the former dictator. The doctors took X-rays and urine and blood samples from the general yesterday, and next week they will perform the neurological and psychiatric examinations.

Source: elpais.es, October 18, 2005