Attorney Roberto Celedón filed two lawsuits today in Talca for the murder of brothers Domingo Antonio and Luis Alberto Urbina Díaz during the dictatorship. In his filing, the professional emphasized that he is suing "those found responsible for the kidnapping, torture, and death of persons opposed to the former military regime" led by Augusto Pinochet from September 11, 1973, to March 11, 1990.

Celedón, who filed the documents before the Talca courts regarding the October 1973 murders of the Urbina Díaz brothers, anticipated that he will file another fifteen lawsuits with Judge Gerardo Bernales, who has exclusive jurisdiction to handle human rights violations.

According to the Rettig Report, the Urbina Díaz brothers were detained along with José Antonio Méndez Valenzuela at the Fundo Venecia by military personnel on October 3, 1973, and taken to the Fundo El Culenar in Talca, a facility belonging to the Army.

At that location, they were executed by their captors and their bodies were buried on the site, without providing the corresponding notice to their families. Their remains were later moved to the local cemetery, and it was not until 1990 that the families were able to identify them.

Source: December 27, 2003, La Nación

Former military intendant of Talca speaks about the disappeared

The retired military officer, who was promoted to commander of the Talca regiment by General (Ret.) Sergio Arellano Stark, recounts the visit of the "Caravan of Death" and some facts regarding the victims.

Retired Lieutenant Colonel Olagier Benavente is 70 years old. He does not claim to suffer from any illness and appears calm. He says that he has not shared this testimony regarding the forcibly disappeared and the Caravan of Death with anyone other than the special judge Juan Guzmán Tapia, who is investigating the lawsuits against General (Ret.) Augusto Pinochet, and that he had some conversations with Patricia Verdugo, the author of the book Los Zarpazos del Puma.

Benavente assumed the Intendancy of Talca and command of the mountain regiment in that city in 1973. He says that he headed the military tribunal there that sentenced the previous intendant, Germán Castro, who was executed by firing squad.

The name of Lieutenant Colonel Olagier Benavente appears in a document provided to the press by the plaintiffs in the Caravan of Death case, signed by General (Ret.) Sergio Arellano Stark, who is currently under indictment.

• Under what conditions did you meet General Arellano?
• I met him on Sunday, September 30, 1973, when he arrived by helicopter at the Talca Regiment with a commission from Santiago. It was not normal for a helicopter to arrive in Talca on that date. The regiment commander, Lieutenant Colonel Efraín Jaña, was not there, so I tried to approach Arellano, but I was blocked by (Marcelo) Morén Brito, Commander (Sergio) Arredondo, and the co-pilot Antonio Palomo, who were wearing field uniforms, grenades, pistols, and submachine guns. Palomo was a second lieutenant in my unit, very proper.

• What did Arellano tell you?
• He asked me how Talca was. I replied: "Perfectly fine, my general, everything is quiet." We didn't have any problems, because a week earlier we had executed the intendant Germán Castro at the regiment, which was the most complicated part. Arellano came with the predisposition that he had to remove Jaña from the regiment because he was a close friend of General Carlos Prats, who had been commander in the area. So he removed Jaña and told me that I was in charge of the regiment and the intendancy.

• Did Arellano have the authority to give those orders?
• He had it, but he didn't show it to me, and I didn't demand it either, because I was a commander and he was a very imposing general.

• Why did Arellano have the authority to review the proceedings and order executions?
• That was a ruse, because there was no lawyer in the entourage. The deaths were illegal, because Pinochet could not delegate the functions of killing people to Arellano. He overstepped his authority.

• On what do you base your assertion?
• I know the Cauquenes case perfectly. Arellano spent the whole afternoon at the military club, and from there the shots could be heard perfectly. Arellano wanted to take a bold step to show that the Army had a command. He grabbed four people he took from a list. When he left Talca, that same Sunday the 30th, he told me he was going to Cauquenes, which he didn't do. I immediately called Commander Castillo and told him: "Hey, Arellano is going there, he left a mess in Talca." So in half an hour, everything was done to wait for Arellano, but he went to the south, and on Thursday, October 4, he arrived in Cauquenes and left a mess.

DISAPPEARED

• Who did you know among the members of the Caravan of Death, since you said the co-pilot Palomo was a second lieutenant in your unit...
• Palomo arrived as Arellano's co-pilot; he was in the Army's air command, but he only went to the south. He didn't continue to the north because General Pinochet normally used him; he was his pilot. He was a second lieutenant in my unit, very proper. He told me about all the misdeeds. Many of the bodies were taken to the Tobalaba air command, and from there they gave Palomo the mission to make them disappear. But he didn't tell me the details.

• Where were they thrown? Into the sea, for example?
• Of course. All the officers and commanders knew about this. For example, while in Talca, I received two GAP (Group of Friends of President Salvador Allende) members, and we had orders to send one of those guys to the Tacna Regiment. So I knew that once he arrived at the Tacna, he was screwed; they were going to execute him. So I sent him to Santiago with the Investigations police, and a few days later the relatives arrived, and I told them to go to the Ministry of Defense, just to tell a white lie.

• Were those the bodies that arrived at Tobalaba?
• Yes, and Palomo had the mission to make them disappear in a helicopter. Some of those bodies were thrown into the sea and others were dumped on the high peaks of the Andes. Palomo must have all of this perfectly clear.

• When you were in charge of the Pisagua regiment, were you ever told where there might be bodies?
• Once, a gravedigger mentioned to me that bodies had been buried in the cemetery, near the main gate.

• Today, do you agree that the whereabouts of the disappeared should be revealed?
• Of course, but the military will never say.

• Why?
• There is no oath regarding that... But it turns out that they weren't all killed together, nor at the same time; they are very scattered. There are places where it has become known, but the Army does not authorize entry.

• In Talca, there were also forcibly disappeared persons, and the DINA acted...
• ... Until the year I was there - in 1975 - there was nothing. The DINA we had was very incipient.

• Why was it necessary to execute the prisoners?
• No... no... we only executed that kid Castro; he was the only one. We executed him at the regiment at twelve at night. Then we took him to the cemetery morgue, and the next day we buried him.

• Who gave the order to execute him?
• I was appointed president of the War Council, so there, with four other officers, the penalty that corresponded to him was decided.

• How do you handle, over time, having given a death order?
• It's difficult... but at that moment it was very messed up. September 11, 1973, happened, and the intendant of Talca arrived at the regiment and left with a truck full of explosives toward the mountains to break the dam, which was impossible, but with all the commotion, one saw it as possible.

Source: La Tercera, June 25, 1999

Freedom granted to three military officers indicted in Talca

The Talca Court of Appeals granted freedom, upon payment of a 200,000 peso bail, to three former military officers who are indicted for the execution of three peasants, which occurred in October 1973. The judicial determination, which modified the first-instance decision of special judge Alejandro Bernales, benefits the former military prosecutor of Talca, Lieutenant Colonel (Ret.) Olagier Benavente; the former commander of the Talca Regiment and former provincial governor, Héctor Véjar; and former conscript Luis Pizarro.

The former uniformed officers are accused of the murder of José Méndez and the brothers Luis and Domingo Urbina Díaz, who were executed by firing squad at the El Culenar training camp, on the outskirts of that city in the Sixth Region. The indicted individuals had been held in different military facilities in the Seventh Region since March 24, when Judge Bernales issued the indictment.

Source: El Mostrador, March 30, 2004

STATE TERRORISM: THE FATE OF THE CHILEAN DISAPPEARED

Pinochet's pilot threw bodies into the sea It was Captain Antonio Palomo

• He threw the disappeared into the water and also into the Andes
• Revealed by a colonel who was in the dictatorship

In a spectacular development in the slow uncovering of crimes committed during the Chilean dictatorship, a retired Army lieutenant colonel revealed that General Augusto Pinochet's personal pilot transported political prisoners in a helicopter to throw them into the sea or the Andes.

The crimes were committed in the first years of the dictatorship that began in 1973, said retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Olagier Benavente Bustos, 70, who was governor of the Talca region and commander of the regiment in that city during the military regime.

Benavente Bustos, in statements published yesterday by the newspapers La Nación and La Tercera, said that Pinochet's personal pilot, then-Captain Antonio Palomo Contreras, told him personally about those missions in 1976 with the confidence that he had been his captain. "He told me about all the misdeeds... many of the bodies were taken to the Army air command in Tobalaba, and there they gave Palomo the mission that they had to disappear... but he didn't tell me the places." - "Did he tell you that those bodies were thrown into the sea?" the journalist asked. "Of course," replied Benavente Bustos. He added that those bodies came from the Tacna Regiment and from there they disappeared... they liquidated them. "There was a Colonel Fernández there." This would be General Julio Fernández Atienza. Palomo, who was later a military attaché in France, participated in a phase of the so-called Caravan of Death that summarily executed more than 70 political prisoners in various cities of the country, four of them in Talca. Four of the members of that group, which was allegedly headed by General Sergio Arellano Stark, were indicted two weeks ago. In those cases, they were political opponents executed illegally, who had been sentenced to prison terms by war councils. Benavente Bustos gave testimony to Judge Juan Guzmán, who is investigating more than twenty criminal complaints against Pinochet, currently detained in London awaiting his extradition to Spain to be tried for torture. In the opinion of the retired colonel, Pinochet should be prosecuted and convicted because, knowing what was happening with Arellano, he allowed him to continue acting, he maintained. According to the military officer, the orders for the murders were issued by a General Staff command that decided the fate of the prisoners. A week ago, parliamentarians from the government coalition released an investigation titled The Industry of Death and Disappearance, in which they maintained that there were two secret codes that determined the fate of the disappeared. One was "Puerto Montt," which implied that the bodies had to be disappeared on land. The other was "La Moneda," which ordered them to be thrown into the water, either a river or the sea. The retired military officer said that Palomo told him he had the mission to make the prisoners disappear by putting them on a helicopter. There were several helicopters. He stated that the officer was General Pinochet's favorite pilot, and as such, he entrusted him with missions outside the country that only Pinochet and Palomo knew about. He added that the pilot never told him where the bodies were thrown. "But I am going to be a little indiscreet to say that some of those bodies were also thrown in the Andes... on the high peaks... surely alive, no more, well." - "Did Palomo know if they were thrown alive or dead?" the journalist asked him. The military officer replied that he must have it perfectly clear. "He didn't give me names, he only told me that he had the mission to throw them into the sea, I don't know if tied up or what..." - "Did he tell you if they threw them with a weight around their necks or if they opened their chests so they would sink?" was the next question. "I suppose they threw them with some stone," he stated. Benavente Bustos said in the interview that he decided to make this revelation because "I have nothing to hide and I am willing to confront Palomo about everything I tell." He then maintained that he does not believe there are bodies of the disappeared inside the regiments. "Yes, in other places," he specified. "On Army land for their work, which are not barracks... land that remains military." He stated that it is necessary to say where the disappeared are, although they are very scattered. There are places where the Army does not authorize entry, and the officers who were in the Army air command must know where there are bodies. Benavente Bustos said that the military refuses to talk about the subject for fear of getting into trouble. "Those who know will die with the secret." In Chile, during the military dictatorship, 1,185 people disappeared. Benavente Bustos's commitment to the dictatorship was very high. When he assumed the governorship of Talca and the command of the mountain regiment in that city in 1973, the same day as the military coup against Allende, he headed the military tribunal that sentenced the local intendant Germán Castro to death. "We executed him at the regiment at twelve at night. Then we took him to the cemetery morgue and the next day we buried him."

Source: El Clarín, June 26, 1999

An exhaustive and long investigation by Judge Juan Guzmán and his team of detectives from Department V manages to unveil the best-kept secret of the [DINA]

The systematic operation was carried out by the pilots and mechanics of the Puma helicopters of the Army Aviation Command between 1974 and 1978. Calves and feet protruded from the potato sacks. On the women, one could see shoes with high or low heels.

Sometimes the hem of a skirt would peek out. On the men, one could see shoes and the ends of their trousers. Each sack contained a body tied with wire to a piece of rail. Some bodies still showed fresh blood.

Others gave off the smell of early decomposition. Other sacks were impregnated with human oil, a sign that the corpses had remained buried for some time. Some of the bundles, the fewest, did not have the shape of a body but were of a smaller size, only part of the remains.

There were at least 40 trips. On each one, they loaded eight to fifteen bundles aboard the Puma helicopters. Of the 12 Army mechanics who finally ended up acknowledging the operations, each one made at least one trip.

In some cases, it was two, three, and even more. There are other mechanics who also participated in these operations but who still deny it. For almost thirty years, the secret was kept among pilots and mechanics at the Army Aviation Command (CAE), the entity responsible for the operation.

At the beginning, everyone denied it, several times. The pilots deny it to this day. But the mechanics broke the oath sealed with the blood of others. Judge Guzmán and the detectives assisting him took this thread and investigated it silently and patiently for more than a year, within the framework of the trial for the disappeared Communist leadership of Calle Conferencia.

Learning the details of the death flights is harrowing. There, at last, is the answer, detailed, and this time told from the inside, of the fate of the DINA prisoners in Santiago. Between 400 and 500 bodies were thrown into the sea in these operations carried out mainly between 1974 and 1978, although they may have also occurred in the last weeks of 1973.

The report of the Armed Forces that emerged from the Human Rights Dialogue Table in January 2001 with information on the fate of 200 forcibly disappeared persons (49 on land and 151 at sea) barely records 29 cases attributed to the DINA.

Of these, only 23 appeared as having been thrown into the sea. At the dialogue table, the Army of then-General Ricardo Izurieta stated that it did not have more information. Giving the benefit of the doubt, the Army did not manage to break the secret of the sworn members that time.

But it has not done so to this day either. The official figures of the Rettig Report and the successor entities indicate that the DINA disappeared in the Metropolitan Region between 1973 and 1978 totaled 590.

THE REASON OF THE "MAMO"

In the end, the truth was confirmed. It was confirmed by the executors themselves, or part of them. As has been happening with other chilling cases, such as those executed at La Moneda in Peldehue, those who spoke were those at the bottom, not the high-ranking officers.

The mechanics are all non-commissioned officers, now retired. It must be admitted that the former head of the DINA, Manuel Contreras, was right for once. "There are no DINA forcibly disappeared persons, they are all dead," he recently told a documentarian for the French TV channel Canal+.

What Contreras has never acknowledged is that the macabre and systematic operation of throwing bodies into the sea existed. And that it could never have been planned only by the man who was the head of the Army Aviation Command between January 1974 and December 1977, Colonel Carlos Mardones Díaz.

He, along with four other former CAE pilots, was indicted on Friday, November 14, 2003, by Judge Guzmán as an accomplice and accessory in the summary for the death of Marta Ugarte. The body of this communist leader was the only one of the victims thrown into the sea that surfaced from the depths of the Ocean and which, in September 1976, washed up on La Ballena beach, near the Los Molles cove in the V Region.

It was the only failure of the extermination system, the clue that now allows the guilty to be convicted. No other body thrown into the sea appeared. The culprit for the defective tying of the weight that allowed Ugarte's corpse to rise to the surface and become fundamental evidence is identified and has confessed to his criminal error.

But Guzmán also indicted Contreras for this case as an author of kidnapping and homicide, as well as his own cousin, Brigadier (Ret.) Carlos López Tapia, who in 1976 was the head of the DINA's Metropolitan Intelligence Brigade and at the same time head of Villa Grimaldi.

This was the main clandestine detention and torture center in the country, and from there, the largest number of corpses that went to the sea were taken. The judge was backed on Friday, November 21, 2003, by the Fifth Chamber of the Santiago Court of Appeals, which confirmed the indictments.

Although it revoked that of pilot Emilio de la Mahotiere because he was in France when Marta Ugarte disappeared.

TOBALABA-PELDEHUE

Operation Puerto Montt (the code with which those who were to be executed and thrown into the sea were marked in the DINA prisoner registry in the clandestine centers) had an operating protocol that was repeated.

Before each flight, the mechanics received the order to remove the Puma's seats (18 to 20) and the additional fuel tank. The flight range of this helicopter without the second tank is two and a half hours.

Each trip was ordered by the head of the CAE to the head of the Aeromobile Company of that helicopter command. All flights were recorded. The machines departed each time from the Tobalaba airfield in the La Reina commune, where the Army Aviation Command operated during those years.

The crew consisted of a pilot, a co-pilot, and a mechanic. The flight began with a destination of Peldehue, in Colina. There, on military land, they would descend and were usually awaited by two or three Chevrolet C-10 pickup trucks, almost always white, whose rear section was covered by a canvas.

In charge of these vehicles were two or three agents in civilian clothes. The civilians would pull back the canvas that hid the piled-up corpses and unload them to put them inside the helicopter. Next, the Puma would rise again with the civilian agents on board.

It would normally head toward the coast of the Fifth Region, and at the height of Quintero, the machine would take a direction out to sea. Less often, the flights went out to sea at the height of San Antonio or Santo Domingo.

Once an adequate distance was reached, the pilot would give the order to begin unloading the bodies. The launch was carried out through the hatch of more or less one square meter located in the middle of the helicopter, where the cargo hook is located, which lowers inside at the height of the main rotor.

But the unloading was also sometimes done from a stern hatch, 1.80 meters high by almost a meter wide. The launch was carried out by the civilian agents, who were responsible not only for taking the bodies to Peldehue and putting them inside the ship, but for supervising that the bundles reached the bottom of the sea.

The identities of the bodies thrown into the ocean in this operation are not established, since the witnesses say they never knew them, except for Marta Ugarte. Those who do know them, such as former DINA head Manuel Contreras, deny that this operation existed.

THEY SHINED

The rails, freshly cut, which made them shine on the cut sides as the Investigations commissioner and DINA agent Nibaldo Jiménez Santibáñez saw them prepared, provided, in principle, the security that the proof of the crime would go with the piece of metal to the bottom of the ocean.

Jiménez says in one of his procedural statements that when he asked one day what those rails cut into pieces were for, he received the answer: "Those are for the packages." When he asked "What packages?", he maintains that they replied: "The ones that go cut every day from here, a large batch to the sea, they wrap them in a sack well tied with wire, throw the body and the rail, and with the weight of the rail they go to the bottom." They were no longer former prisoners talking about the rails, nor just the scuba diving champion Raúl Choque, who once in the 80s declared to the press that he saw bones on the seabed off Pisagua, stuck to pieces of rails. Now the fragments of truth were a reality seen by one of the agents themselves who was telling it to a judge. Nor had retired Colonel Olagier Benavente Bustos gone crazy when, on June 24, 1999, he declared in an interview with La Nación that Pinochet's pilot, his "favorite," Antonio Palomo, told him one summer day a couple of years after 1973 in Pelluhue, where both had vacation homes, that he had had to make trips piloting a Puma to throw bodies into the sea. "They departed from Tobalaba," said Colonel (Ret.) Benavente that Palomo had told him. It was the first time that a high-ranking retired officer revealed part of the secret. But that time everything stayed there, only in the statements. All the background information discovered now did not exist. Of course, Palomo denied Benavente's statements when Judge Guzmán interrogated him.

THE CLEANUP

Once each flight mission was completed, the helicopters returned to the place in Peldehue where the C-10 trucks had been parked. There, the civilian agents would descend, get into the trucks, and leave.

The helicopter would rise again and head to its CAE base in Tobalaba. Once the machine was cleared of its crew, the mechanics would perform the cleaning operation of the floor, which most of the time was left with impregnated blood and a penetrating smell of decomposed flesh.

They would hose down the floor and the interior and let the machine ventilate. When the smell and the blood disappeared, the mechanics would reinstall the seats and the additional fuel tank, unless it was already known that the next day that same helicopter had to fulfill a similar task.

Normally, this cleaning was not performed by the same mechanics who had participated in the flight. Among the cleaners was more than once E.A.O., the very personal mechanic of Puma No. 256 of the Army Commander-in-Chief, General Augusto Pinochet.

Although he maintains in the trial that he never had to perform any of these flights to the high seas. His boss for many years was the now Brigadier (Ret.) Antonio Palomo. "When we talked among the mechanics, I could see that several of them had made these types of trips," declared in the trial another mechanic who participated in the flights and whom we will name Rotor 1.

The identities of the mechanics who finally told the judge the dark stories that allowed these facts to be known are kept confidential by LND. The son of one of them was kidnapped for a few hours the Friday before last, the same day that Judge Guzmán issued the first indictments for the Marta Ugarte case against five former Puma pilots, in addition to Contreras and López Tapia.

Two individuals forced him into a car, tied him up, put a hood over his head, beat him, and told him to tell his father to "shut his snout." Then they dumped him on a street in Santiago. Another of the mechanics, Rotor 2, related in the investigation that as soon as these flights began, the CAE commander Carlos Mardones gathered the pilots and mechanics and ordered them that "these are secret missions that you must not comment on with anyone who does not participate in them.

You must not even talk about it with your families."

THE TRIBUNAL

Commissioner (Ret.) Nibaldo Jiménez, a former DINA agent with duties at Villa Grimaldi and at the José Domingo Cañas facility, maintains that those who sent the individuals to the sea were a meeting that was held with the group leaders of that time, the captains Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko, Maximiliano Ferrer Lima, and others, because there were several barracks.

They met in something like a tribunal, where they decided which detainee was saved and who went to the sea with the code "Puerto Montt" noted. Those others to whom Jiménez refers were the usual ones, Marcelo Moren Brito and Pedro Espinoza Bravo, both rotating heads of several of the DINA's clandestine centers.

The result of each of those meetings, Jiménez continues, was sent to General Contreras, the supreme head of the DINA (...) "General Contreras was the one who reviewed the lists and, in the end, was the one who decided the fate of the detainees." Another of the DINA's victims was the journalist Máximo Gedda Ortiz, brother of the Gedda brothers who produce the television program Al sur del mundo.

Detained in July 1974, he disappeared at the Londres 38 facility. Jiménez tells of the state in which he saw his body before, presumably, it joined the list of those thrown into the sea. "A subject with the surname Gedda was detained.

They had removed the flesh from his leg with a knife, and the bone could be seen. He was hanging, they had him hanging. They had flogged him." Jiménez describes another figure of horror and brutality against another of the DINA's disappeared.

It is the photographer Teobaldo Tello Garrido, who had been an Investigations official during the government of Salvador Allende. He was detained in August 1974 and remains disappeared. "I went to see him in a room crowded with detainees; upon opening his mouth, I saw that it was bloodied. His teeth had been removed with pliers by Mr. Marcelo Moren (...) Colonel Moren was quite brutal."

PILOTS OF THE CARAVAN

Among the five former Puma helicopter pilots that Judge Juan Guzmán indicted for the kidnapping and homicide of Marta Ugarte are those who were the pilots of the Caravan of Death. Antonio Palomo was the pilot during the southern leg of this operation, acting as his co-pilot Emilio de la Mahotiere González.

For the northern leg of the caravan, the pilot was the same De la Mahotiere and the co-pilot, Luis Felipe Polanco Gallardo. The fifth pilot declared a prisoner is Colonel (Ret.) Oscar Vicuña Hesse. A second phase of this method of disappearing detainees by throwing their bodies into the sea began after 1978 and lasted at least until 1981-82, once the corpses of 15 peasants were discovered in an oven in Lonquén at the end of 1978, and the Army and Pinochet became alarmed.

This second phase, known as the "clandestine removals," was admitted even by the former director of the National Intelligence Center, General Odlanier Mena, and some former agents who participated in the operation have also provided statements about it.

To this operation belong, among others, the prisoners of Chihuo in the X Region; those executed at La Moneda exhumed from Peldehue; and the 26 victims of the Caravan of Death buried clandestinely in the Calama desert.

These were not DINA victims. Probably, given the experience acquired, this second phase was carried out by the same pilots and mechanics of the Army Aviation Command. This episode is not totally clarified judicially.

In any case, the CAE commanders after Carlos Mardones were: Colonel Hernán Podesta Gómez, between January and December 1978; Colonel Fernando Darrigrandi Márquez, between January 1979 and July 1981; and Colonel Raúl Dinator Moreno, between August 1981 and February 1982.

Source: La Nación, Nov 23, 2003