Case File No. 12.293.2005: Miguel Angel Becerra Hidalgo Case

Considering

First: That in relation to the crime of qualified homicide of Miguel Angel Becerra Hidalgo, the following evidentiary elements have been gathered in the case files: a) Death certificate of Miguel Ángel Becerra Hidalgo, on page 3, which indicates that this person died on July 30, 1974, in Longaví, and the cause of his death was asphyxia, carbon monoxide poisoning, homicide; b) Criminal complaint on page 4, filed by Ms.

Elena Rosa Becerra Hidalgo, for the crimes of aggravated kidnapping and qualified homicide of her brother, Miguel Ángel Becerra Hidalgo. In said complaint, Ms. Becerra Hidalgo states that her brother, Miguel Ángel Becerra Hidalgo , a contractor, a militant of the movement known as Patria y Libertad and, subsequently, a collaborating member of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) , stated in the month of January 1974 that he would travel to the city of Concepción, and invited his eldest son, José Miguel, 13 years old, to spend a season in that city, to which the boy agreed; that some time later, Miguel Ángel Becerra Hidalgo informed his spouse that the son they had in common, with whom he had traveled, would stay to live with him in that city; however, they later learned that in reality their nephew José Miguel never traveled with his father to Concepción but to Colonia Dignidad , a place where he settled to live together with him. That, on July 25, 1974, her brother Miguel Ángel visited his other brother, Arístides, at the latter's home, that occasion being the last time Miguel Ángel was seen alive. On that occasion, both brothers spoke about the plans Miguel Ángel had, with the latter indicating that he had the intention of leaving his job at the DINA and leaving Colonia Dignidad; however, "the Germans" would not agree with his decision, because he handled a lot of information about the activities of the Colony and it was not desirable for them that this be known; Miguel Ángel added to his brother that, in any case, he had definitively decided to abandon the activities, regardless of what "the Germans" might decide. Subsequently, the complainant indicates, on Thursday, July 29 of that year, her brother Arístides was informed at the Diego Portales Building, the place where he was on duty in his capacity as a member of the Carabineros de Chile, that his brother Miguel Ángel had suffered an accident, moving immediately to his sister-in-law's house in Linares, where he was informed that his brother Miguel had passed away. It is explained in the same complaint that Arístides investigated in detail the circumstances surrounding the death of his brother Miguel Ángel; thus, he interviewed two subjects, who apparently were members of the National Intelligence Directorate, DINA, who told him that the death had been very strange and that they thought this was the work of the communists, as retaliation for Miguel Ángel's activities for the DINA; furthermore, he found out that although the official cause of death, recorded in the autopsy report, was asphyxia by inhalation of carbon monoxide, supposedly because his brother had fallen asleep inside his pickup truck, where he was found, the doctor who performed the autopsy indicated to him that he was not in a position to diagnose the death with 100% certainty and that is why the cause was marked with question marks. He was also able to find out, from the statements of a peasant in the area, that he had given notice of the discovery to the military, and that he had also heard the noise of the engine of more than one vehicle, which happened in the early hours of Tuesday of that week, specifically in the place where his brother's pickup truck was later found with his body. 1.- That the accused Paúl Schäfer Schneider , already identified, is sentenced to seven years of major imprisonment in its minimum degree, to the accessory penalty of absolute perpetual disqualification for public offices and positions and political rights, and that of absolute disqualification for professional titles for the duration of the sentence, and to the payment of court costs, as the perpetrator of the crime of qualified homicide against the person of Miguel Angel Becerra Hidalgo, an act committed in the so-called "Ex Colonia Dignidad," Parral, between July 26 and 29, 1974. 2.- That the accused Kurt Schnellenkamp Nelaimischkies , already identified, is sentenced to five hundred and forty-one days of minor imprisonment in its medium degree, to the accessory penalty of suspension from public office or position during the time of the sentence, and to the payment of court costs, as an accessory after the fact to the crime of qualified homicide against the person of Miguel Ángel Becerra Hidalgo, which occurred in the Ex Colonia Dignidad, Parral, between July 26 and 29, 1974. 3.- That the accused Rudolf Hans Cöllen Franzkowsky , already identified, is sentenced to five hundred and forty-one days of minor imprisonment in its medium degree, to the accessory penalty of suspension from public office or position during the time of the sentence, and to the payment of court costs, as an accessory after the fact to the crime of qualified homicide against the person of Miguel Ángel Becerra Hidalgo.

Source: Judiciary, November 27, 2008

The Santiago Court of Appeals confirmed today a ruling sentencing Paul Schaefer, former leader of Colonia Dignidad, to seven years in prison for the 1974 homicide of Miguel Ángel Becerra Hidalgo, an agent of the DINA, the secret police of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship.

In a unanimous ruling, the magistrates of the VIII Chamber of the appellate court also sentenced Kurt Schnellenkamp Nelaimischkies and Rudolf Cöllen Frankowsky, collaborators of Schaefer, to 541 days in prison as accessories after the fact to the crime, although both were granted the benefit of supervised release, judicial sources reported.

In 2005, after almost eight years as a fugitive from justice, Schaefer was captured in Argentina and expelled to Chile. Additionally, the court determined that the three convicted individuals must jointly pay total compensation of 170 million pesos (about 310,000 dollars) to nine plaintiffs in the case, all relatives of the victim.

Schaefer, 87, is currently serving a sentence of three years and 300 days in prison for the storage of war weapons, another of three years and one day for torturing German members of Colonia Dignidad, and a third of 20 years as the perpetrator of five rapes and 21 sexual abuses against children residing in the enclave.

The former non-commissioned officer of the Nazi Army has been hospitalized in a prison hospital for more than two weeks in serious condition due to progressive heart problems, according to doctors, who have stated that his prognosis is uncertain.

Schaefer founded Colonia Dignidad in 1961 in the vicinity of the town of Parral, some 3,600 kilometers south of Santiago, which over time became "a State within another State," as defined by former Chilean President Patricio Aylwin.

The fortified property, of some 16,000 hectares, was used as a concentration and torture camp by the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), according to testimonies from survivors. Miguel Ángel Becerra Hidalgo was a former member of the far-right group "Patria y Libertad," which used terrorism against the government of Salvador Allende, and who became a DINA agent after the 1973 military coup.

According to the case file, he was 33 years old when he was poisoned between July 26 and 29, 1974, inside Colonia Dignidad, where he lived, and his corpse appeared days later in a nearby area, to which it was taken by Schnellenkamp and Cöllen, who tried to simulate that the man had been run over by a vehicle.

The motive for the crime was that Becerra had expressed dissatisfaction with the torture and mistreatment applied to political prisoners. In 2005, after almost eight years as a fugitive from justice, Schaefer was captured in Argentina and expelled to Chile.

Source: ultimahora.com, July 13, 2009

The Mysterious Lost Files of Manuel Contreras

Declassified documents, press reports, and statements indicate that Contreras's archive is somewhere, perhaps in the south of Chile. With his death, Manuel Contreras took with him the key to a series of enigmas that still surround the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) and that, in one way or another, could have served to solve pending human rights violation cases.

Perhaps the main one of those enigmas is the location of the DINA files. In addition to the safe with documentation that Contreras managed in his office at the Belgrano barracks of the DINA, the former PS militant and later agent of Pinochet's secret police, Luz Arce, recounts in her book El Infierno that there existed an archive called "LIDES," an acronym that is actually very simple: "LIsta de DESaparecidos" (List of the Disappeared).

Certainly, some years ago, at the time of the Valech Report, Contreras handed over a list with nearly 500 names and the supposed locations of the bodies, but, as was proven, many of the details were false.

The true "LIDES" is not known to be anywhere, but its destination is quite logical: "I believe that Manuel Contreras took that information with him when he handed over command of the CNI," opined Luz Arce in her biography, in which she would add a key piece of data: the person who managed "LIDES" for Contreras was a non-commissioned officer of his absolute trust, Manuel Lucero Lobos.

However, it is impossible to know anything more about it, because in a statement given in 2004 before the visiting judge Jorge Zepeda, Arce recounts that Lucero "died mysteriously," the same thing that happened to several members of the DINA, such as the agent Miguel Ángel Becerra, who tried to desert from Colonia Dignidad, where he was being held, and like the DINA corporal Manuel Leyton, both murdered with sarin gas.

The Bundles In 1978, when the dictatorship was under strong pressure from the United States to extradite those involved in the crime of Orlando Letelier in Washington (starting with Contreras), a curious note appeared in the evening newspaper La Segunda, directed at that time by Hermógenes Pérez de Arce.

As a declassified cable from the United States Department of State (DE) recalls, said newspaper reported that in April of that year, Contreras had sent 12 containers "of documents" by ship from Punta Arenas.

In a subsequent note, on November 10, La Segunda reported on three other packages that had been sent by Contreras to Europe between May 22 and 25. According to what the newspaper related, the CIA had allegedly found out about it and had passed the tip to the FBI, which supposedly intercepted the packages in New York, making copies of some of the documents.

After the publication, the North American cable continues, Manuel Contreras's lawyer, Sergio Miranda Carrington, came out to deny La Segunda, asserting that although the former head of the DINA had been in Punta Arenas in April 1978, he had only done so to greet his old friend Pedro Espinoza, who at that time resided there and whose head was also being demanded by the White House.

Despite the denial, the newspaper persisted in its version, stating that its sources had even specified that the documents sent in May referred to the Letelier case. According to this version, the packages had been shipped on a Braniff flight, bound for Germany with a stopover in New York.

Still based on the same source, La Segunda stated that the packages were in some place in Europe. The cable was signed by George Landau, the then-U.S. ambassador to Chile. He commented at the end that he had no background information on the veracity of this information and even asked if the United States Department of Justice could shed any light on the matter.

To finish, he said that the friendship between Manuel Contreras and Hermógenes Pérez de Arce was well known (which the latter has denied in recent days) and for that same reason he speculated that "it may be that Contreras is spreading these stories to disconcert Pinochet and other government leaders." In this regard, the journalist Manuel Salazar specifies in his book Contreras, historia de un intocable that on April 20, 1978, the German ship Badenstein had set sail from Punta Arenas, carrying on board 23 suitcases with DINA documents, shipped by General Manuel Contreras, all of which were destined for the port of Hamburg. According to Salazar, this occurred only 12 days after Michael Townley was abruptly extradited to the U.S. for the Letelier crime. He specifies in the same book that "other mysterious bundles were sent through Lufthansa bound for New York-Frankfurt," adding that "subsequent versions indicated that the cargo that went on Lufthansa was transferred to Braniff and intercepted in New York by the FBI. Regarding its content, nothing has been known." It has often been speculated that the final destination of the files was Siegburg, the small city where the headquarters of Colonia Dignidad operated in Germany, a country that Contreras had already visited between 1975 and 1976 together with the arms dealer Gerhard Mertins, a former SS officer, intimate friend of Paul Schäfer and creator of the "circles of friends of Colonia Dignidad," the neo-Nazi enclave that Contreras used as one of his axes in the commission of human rights violations. Contreras's Tentacles For the North Americans, the matter of Contreras's secret files was something much more concrete than a supposed disinformation maneuver, as Landau speculated, since a secret document from that country indicates that the bundles existed and that there were two copies of them, in addition to the original. It is a cable belonging to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the intelligence organ of the Department of Defense, which generally possessed very accurate information, given the sources of information it maintained within various armies, including the Chilean one. The text, titled "Contreras's Tentacles," apparently consisted of six pages, but after being declassified, only three remained (two and a half, in reality, since the first page of the document is almost entirely redacted). The date of the text would be January 1, 1989. The report indicates that "the retired Chilean General Manuel Contreras, former director of the DINA and a key figure in the Letelier-Moffitt assassination, has taken extreme precautions to protect President Pinochet from direct involvement in the decision-realization/authorization process of that assassination. (Redacted). All government files relating to the Letelier-Moffitt assassination in Washington, in 1976, as well as those of the homicide of Pinochet's predecessor as Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Carlos Prats and his wife, in Buenos Aires; and the attack against the life of the regime opponent Bernardo Leighton, in Rome, in 1975, were removed by Contreras from the DINA files." Likewise, the CIA report states that "in addition to internal DINA documents, the files include all files/meetings at the ministerial and National Security Council level regarding the three incidents." According to the author of the report, "Contreras made two copies of each document, sending one to Germany and another to Paraguay, to keep them in safes, while the remaining material he retains stored under his control, in the south of Chile." The Germans Did they refer to Colonia Dignidad with that? It is the most likely, given the closeness of Contreras to Paul Schäfer and the gigantic extension of the main estate of the colony in Parral (17,000 hectares), in which the remains of the nearly 30 political prisoners that various colonists acknowledge were murdered there have still not been found (which were allegedly cremated and thrown into the Perquilauquén River in the 80s), nor other evidence, because as the ruling for illicit association handed down last year against Manuel Contreras and the Dignity hierarchs pointed out, inside that enclosure and "in order to hide the criminal activities, the superior of the villa and his closest collaborators proceeded to hide all traces of the victims on the property, hide the weapons, and bury several vehicles that disappeared along with them." It is worth remembering that in 2005, when Schäfer's arsenal was found, both in Parral and in the facility they possess in Bulnes, the boxes containing the 45,000 files that Judge Jorge Zepeda declassified last year were also found. Along with those documents, which were prepared by Gerd Seewald, head of intelligence of the colony, and shared with the head of the Southern Regional Brigade of the DINA, Fernando Gómez Segovia, hundreds of empty folders and envelopes were found, with references to other files that have never been found. Several of them, according to various testimonies, such as that of the former colonist Franz Bäar, were burned in the brick factory around 1997, but it is difficult that they eliminated them all and, especially, that they got rid of the most sensitive information. In this regard, the lawyer Hernán Fernández, who began to legally pursue Schäfer in 1996, points out that it is very likely that Contreras left all or part of his files in the hands of Dignidad, because "what has been found so far is an infinitesimal and very partial part of the information that Colonia Dignidad stored for decades and in the midst of an era in which there was an extremely close association between Contreras and Schäfer."

Source: elmostrador.cl, August 9, 2015