Every time Deputy Carlos Bombal (UDI) faces an election or a controversy, his adversaries make sure to air the following accusation: that he provided two agents of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) with the information they needed to locate university professor Alejandro Avalos Davidson.

The data allegedly enabled Avalos to be arrested on November 20, 1975, and forcibly disappeared until 1990, when his remains were found in Colina, along with those of two other former prisoners.

The issue resurfaced again due to the debate sparked by Bombal's potential promotion to the vice-presidency of the Chamber of Deputies. On Tuesday the 14th, Deputy Tomás Jocelyn-Holt (PDC), supported by 14 colleagues, questioned Bombal's ethical standing due to his involvement in this case.

For Bombal, the attack is a smear campaign in response to his criticisms of the government following the Guzmán (UDI) case. In any event, government sources admit that—beyond Bombal's link to the case—the goal is to hinder the arrival of one of the UDI's best candidates to a privileged platform.

According to the case file on Avalos, on November 3, 1975, two agents appeared before the rector of the Universidad Católica, Jorge Swett, to obtain information. Swett referred them to Bombal, then his chief of staff, who proceeded to call the director of the academic unit where Avalos worked.

The agents suggested he not cause alarm, because they had orders to arrest him "without witnesses." Bombal accepted the suggestion and also provided them with the curricular, academic, and contractual data they required.

The deputy states that in 1975 he did not know that people were being forcibly disappeared. Furthermore, he points out that it is one thing to have provided information, and another to have responsibility for a crime of that nature, although his adversaries deliberately mix both things.

As the deputy declared before Raquel Camposano, the judge who investigated the case, he preferred "not to hinder the functions of that security agency." Furthermore, when consulted by Qué Pasa, he indicated that he limited himself to obeying Swett's orders.

Since the agents' intention seemed strange to him, he asserts that he left a record with the secretary general, Francisco Bulnes Ripamonti, "of what could happen to this professor," who allegedly proceeded to notify the corresponding Academic Unit.

However, according to the professor's sister, Beatrice Avalos, Bulnes—who has since passed away—only found out when the family requested information from the university about the disappeared person. In the proceedings, Bulnes declared that only at that moment did Bombal mention to him that he had received news of Avalos's arrest from a DINA agent.

In the same case, Bombal points out that it was Rector Swett whom he informed of the fact. The latter states in the proceedings: "I did not know anything more about these two people (the agents), nor did my secretary inform me of anything else regarding them, or if he informed me of anything more concrete, I do not remember." Regarding the criticisms against Bombal for having received the DINA officials who requested information in a normal manner, the deputy pointed out that the rest of his encounters with intelligence agents were aimed at safeguarding the security of the university campus.

There is one point in Bombal's actions that everyone admits can in no way be presented as a form of tolerance for DINA's crimes. Both Avalos's relatives and their lawyer, Nelson Caucoto, acknowledge that Bombal's statements helped establish that the professor had been arrested by the DINA, a fact that was systematically denied by the military government.

In fact, according to Caucoto, Bombal's assertion that DINA agents had arrested Avalos contributed—along with the statements of witnesses who saw the professor at Villa Grimaldi—to the unprecedented summoning of the security agency's top leadership to testify.

Soon, Bombal is expected to be called to clarify his previous statements, but this time for the illegal burial case, in the 19th Criminal Court.

Source: Revista Que Pasa 1347 - January 31, 1997

Through a resolution that was as impressive as it was expected, the visiting judge, Alejandro Madrid, changed the classification of the death of former President Eduardo Frei Montalva to that of qualified homicide, and indicted six members of the criminal network responsible for the assassination, including four doctors, one of whom, Patricio Silva Garín, was a man of his absolute trust, to the point that he had occupied the Undersecretariat of Health during his term.

The extensive 55-page resolution by Judge Madrid contains shocking evidence. For starters, it refers to the historical context that Frei led the opposition to the 1980 plebiscite fraud, and later, the process of political-union convergence that ended with the assassination of Tucapel Jiménez, less than a month after Frei's death.

Under those circumstances, the former President decided to undergo surgery for a gastroesophageal hernia at the Clínica Santa María on November 18, 1981.

On December 4, he was transferred to the same clinic and underwent a new surgical intervention by a new medical team. On the 8th of the same month, he suffered septic shock, which led to his transfer to the clinic's Intensive Care Unit.

Nurse Olga Ortiz declares having seen a private nurse on December 6, around 10:45 a.m., moving the former President to the X-ray department and, along the way, switching him to a different stretcher. Nurse María Elena Zamorano declares that on that same day, at 12:00 p.m., when she arrived to begin her shift, which was being handed over by Olga Ortiz, the former President was without the external nurse and was "sweaty, decompensated, his blood pressure was low, the IV was out of the vein, and his bed was soaked with blood; he had lost a lot of blood." The resolution adds: "during that period, a warning was received from those close to the patient's family that he might be being poisoned; however, despite the seriousness of the communication, only measures were taken to prevent strangers from accessing the areas where he was, without any type of examination being performed that could determine the effectiveness of what was indicated above." Despite the treatments, it was not possible to stabilize Frei, since every time some progress was made, a decline ensued due to his deficient immunological state, which the investigation attributes to the administration of a product called "Transfer Factor."

On December 22, 2004, the court ordered an anatomopathological examination, which determined the administration of thallium and mustard gas in the last three months prior to his death, in low doses, intravenously.

Dr. Carmen Cerda states in her report that the presence of these combined toxic substances does not correspond to either the food or the medications that Frei received during his hospitalization. Furthermore, she established that they were administered to him on at least three different occasions, and that due to the sequential and simultaneous type of supply, the effect of the products was potentiated, causing the final effect to be equally lethal with smaller doses: "all of the above allows us to rule out a form of accidental ingestion and concludes that, in sum, the health conditions in which Mr. Frei Montalva found himself, as well as the method of administration and the unusual nature of the combination of toxic substances found, allow us to rule out a medico-legal form of death classifiable as suicide. Consequently, it is possible to affirm with reasonable certainty that this is a medico-legal form of death classifiable as homicide."

The resolution adds: "that what was stated above, added to the analysis of the medical records seized at the Clínica Santa María, demonstrates that the aforementioned patient was inoculated with toxic substances that affect human health, which, when applied in small doses and spaced out over time, depress the immune system and favor the appearance of so-called opportunistic bacteria that caused the former president's death."

The judge estimated that for the commission of this act, "its participants were favored by a series of circumstances intentionally provoked prior to the perpetration of the crime, such as the lack of protection for the former president's security by the government and police authorities, the wiretapping and surveillance to which he was permanently subjected, the harassment carried out against both his person and his family at his private residence, and, above all, the infiltration into his closest circle of people who obeyed the aforementioned security agencies of the military regime and others who were active members of the Chilean Army and who naturally, given the structure of that institution, could not help but be subordinate to orders coming from their superior commands, which explains that despite the discrepancies of the regime of the time with the political party to which the former President belonged and his exclusion from national political life, members of the aforementioned armed institution had a primary role in the care of this patient, which obviously could not have been carried out if the corresponding institutional authorization had not been obtained."

Frei died on January 22, 1982, and the judge's resolution draws attention to the fact that "despite the abnormal circumstances that occurred during his stay at the Clinic, and notwithstanding the doubts evidenced regarding the precise and necessary causes that led to his death, no medico-legal autopsy was ordered to determine the latter, nor was the fact reported to the ordinary justice system; on the contrary, without the family's authorization and without them even being duly informed, a procedure was carried out by a medical team from the Faculty of Medicine of the Universidad Católica that involved the extraction of organs from the deceased's body for the purpose of subjecting them to pathological examinations, giving as justification for this the possibility that a TB infection suffered by the former president during his youth might have had some impact on the outcome of his illness, which, based on the merits of the investigation, has turned out not to be true."

Regarding the accused, the judge's resolution points out that Luis Becerra Arancibia, Frei's former driver, "worked as an agent of the National Intelligence Center (CNI), keeping this service informed of all activities carried out by the former president"; Raúl Lillo Gutiérrez "was part of a brigade in charge of the surveillance, control, and analysis of opposition activities carried out by the Christian Democratic Party and other political groups"; Patricio Silva Garín was Undersecretary of Health in President Frei's cabinet, "without it being possible to determine with exactitude the reasons that justified the aforementioned appointment, since this physician entered the Army's health service on February 24, 1955, carrying out an uninterrupted career until November 30, 1985, the date on which he retired with the rank of Colonel of the Health Service"; Pedro Valdivia, who from November 1976 until 1990 provided services at the DINA medical center and subsequently at the CNI, "states that he entered the room where the former President was without there being any reason to justify it and without proceeding to leave a record of it in the respective file."

Regarding doctors Herman Rosemberg and Sergio González Bombardiere, the judge accuses them of having taken part in the false autopsy of the former President and of having hidden the evidence. The investigation by Judge Alejandro Madrid will continue to provide high-caliber impacts as it approaches the material authorship and, particularly, those who gave the orders.

THE RIGHT WING AND THE CRIME

Although the assassination of former President Eduardo Frei Montalva is part of the same criminal policy that determined homicides or attacks, such as those of Generals René Schneider, Carlos Prats, Oscar Bonilla, and Augusto Lutz; former ministers José Tohá, Bernardo Leighton, and Orlando Letelier; union leader Tucapel Jiménez; Corporal Manuel Leyton; real estate broker Renato León Zenteno; and chemist Eugenio Berríos; and although the truth has taken 27 years to begin to emerge, and the judicial investigation is already entering its seventh year, the right wing—the same political sector that fostered those crimes, represented for this purpose by its candidate, Sebastián Piñera, and the newspaper El Mercurio—does not seem to care about anything other than the fact that Judge Madrid released his resolution... six days before the presidential election. A typical case of a guilty conscience.

The truth is that the right wing has ample reason to blush, since many of its main figures were part of the dictatorship's cabinet or held positions by direct appointment from Pinochet as of January 1982, the date of the assassination by poisoning.

For starters, former senator and founder of the UDI, Sergio Fernández Fernández, was serving as Minister of the Interior.

The current President of the Senate and also founder of the UDI, Jovino Novoa Vásquez, occupied the General Undersecretariat of Government, a position from which he announced three days of official mourning once Frei's death occurred, an occasion on which he issued the following statement: "The figure of a President of the Republic is above the ideologies that might exist."

The General Secretariat of Guilds depended on the General Undersecretariat of Government, in which figures such as Misael Galleguillos and Valericio Orrego worked. In this regard, it is useful to reproduce the following paragraph from the sentence of the Visiting Judge, Sergio Muñoz, against those guilty of the assassination of Tucapel Jiménez, which, as we reported in our edition No. 1456, was part of the same operation that ended Frei's life: "Because of the fact that it was considered important by the National Intelligence Center, the agents of that agency Jorge Ramírez Romero and Raúl Lillo Gutiérrez contacted Valericio Orrego Salas, a union leader of the Ministry of Public Works, through the National Secretariat of Guilds, with the object of proceeding to record the meeting that the organization called the 'Group of Ten' would hold, for which the agents gave Orrego a recorder, with which Orrego went to the place where the meeting of the unionists would take place; however, this device produced a noise that made his intentions clear, and he had to leave the place."

Regarding Lillo Gutiérrez, the indictment against him issued by Judge Madrid for the assassination of Frei states the following:

"Regarding Raúl Lillo Gutiérrez, he served for a long time as an agent of the military regime's security services, and specifically, he was part of a brigade in charge of the surveillance, control, and analysis of opposition activities carried out by the Christian Democratic Party and other political groups."

However, Fernández Fernández and Novoa Vásquez are not the only right-wing politicians who were part of the dictatorship's apparatus on the date of Frei's assassination.

José Piñera Echenique, brother of the current presidential candidate of the right, had just said goodbye to the cabinet, but not before leaving as a legacy the Labor Plan, the privatization of the pension system, and the second denationalization of copper.

His brother Sebastián, after his disastrous stint at the Banco de Talca, was serving as general manager of Citicorp. Without explaining the origin of the funds, in 1982 he invested one and a half million dollars in real estate operations in Huechuraba.

In the month of August of that year, he was charged by Visiting Judge Luis Correa Bulo for the crime of defrauding the Banco de Talca. The current candidate of the right was a fugitive from justice for 17 days, until the Supreme Court, by way of an amparo (habeas corpus) appeal, reversed the indictment.

Jaime Guzmán, the assassinated senator and former founder of the UDI, was a member of the dictatorship's Constitutional Commission.

Another of the founders of the UDI, Miguel Kast, father of the current deputy José Antonio Kast, held the position of Minister of Labor.

Founder of the UDI and former President of that party, the current senator Pablo Longueira was at that time the appointed president of the Federation of Student Centers of the Universidad de Chile (FECECh), while General Alejandro Medina Lois served as Rector.

Just in the month of January 1982, the former Minister of Finance of the dictatorship and former member of the UDI Political Commission in the 1992-94 period, Hernán Büchi Buc, was moved by Pinochet from the Undersecretariat of Health to the presidency of ENDESA. It was the first move of a policy that would end up privatizing the electricity sector, and not only that.

Serving as mayors appointed by Pinochet were former UDI senator and former vice-president of that party, Carlos Bombal Oteagui, in the Municipality of Santiago, and Herman Chadwick, in the Municipality of Providencia.

Although the former President's family made it known through private channels, and also through the press, that General Pinochet's presence was not welcome at the funeral ceremonies, he still managed to attend the Metropolitan Cathedral, where he was received with prolonged booing.

With refined hypocrisy, he delivered a note of condolence to the widow, in which he expressed his "special concern" for the death of the former president and told her: "I know how deeply painful it will be for you to resign yourself to the absence of your life partner, but with Christian faith and prayer, I am certain you will be able to accept the Lord's will and bear this irreplaceable loss."

For its part, in an editorial note, the newspaper El Mercurio joined in the condolences, although not even on such an occasion did it depart from the sibylline stamp that is its own: "Certainly, the country owes much to President Frei in terms of the modernization of structures and general progress, but it is impossible not to remember the cost of his reform program.

This, by weakening the right to property, caused consequences that were felt in the events following his administration."

Source: El Siglo, December 15, 2009

The President and her family were filed by the German leaders. The same goes for DC politicians, socialists, and right-wingers, such as Jaime Guzmán, Hernán Larraín, Andrés Chadwick, and Mónica Madariaga. There is also material on foreign ambassadors. But the papers seized in 2005 are still a state secret and their content is forbidden to Chileans. What is being hidden?

The humidity and spores that rose in the place became embedded in the nostrils of the police officers who, that night of June 14, 2005, were checking the four wooden drawers full of yellowish and foul-smelling papers. They were the files that Colonia Dignidad hid for more than 35 years and whose content remains a state secret today.

Since the hardest blow was dealt to the German enclave with the capture of Paul Schäfer, neither the weapons discovered nor the money hidden in tax havens are considered a danger to national security. The 36,000 files that were jealously hidden are.

Judge Jorge Zepeda, who is investigating the human rights violations committed inside the German compound, imposed the National Intelligence Law on them, so their content cannot be revealed or made public.

But how relevant to the country's integrity can the moldy papers that were rescued almost as if in a spy operation be? The old procedural system allowed the judge to keep information confidential during a trial, even from the lawyers litigating there. And if the zeal was even greater, it was possible to accumulate all sensitive information in a "secret notebook."

Judge Zepeda did all that, but added the most severe shielding granted by Chilean legislation, and it has not moved from there until now, and nothing seems to change the judge's criteria. Added to this is that once the investigation is closed in the near future, if the judge deems it so, he could keep the information classified, despite the fact that after a summary is finished, all documentation is public.

Truths and myths are hidden there. Deviant sexual behaviors, vices, debts, lovers, friendships, part of the public and private life of current authorities of the country, both in the Government and in Congress or the Judiciary, from the right or the left. They say no one is saved.

LND tried to gain access to the files currently at the Investigative Police Intelligence Headquarters. To do so, access to the material was formally requested in writing on Wednesday the 5th of this month. The document also asked the magistrate that if he denied access, he explain the reasons. But the judge remained silent without responding.

The only ones who have had access to said classified information, including the Intelligence Law, is the State Defense Council (CDE). The organization, which is a plaintiff in this process and has had an active participation in requesting proceedings, indictments, and opposing the release of the leaders who were in preventive detention, was able to read the documentation.

Without referring to the content of the process, through the CDE communications office, the president of the entity, Carlos Mackenney, indicated to LND that "as stated in the case file, Judge Jorge Zepeda, through a resolution issued last year, brought to his attention the documentation found inside Colonia Dignidad, so he has direct knowledge of it."

Perhaps that explains why the CDE has not requested that the prohibition be lifted so that it can be known by all parties to the process, including the lawyers, the Human Rights Program of the Ministry of the Interior (also a plaintiff), or Hernán Fernández, the plaintiff lawyer for the sexual crimes committed against children by Paul Schäfer.

Anyone who reveals information that is covered by the Intelligence Law can receive sentences of up to five years in prison. That is why the silence surrounding the material is not surprising.

Sui Generis

In 1968, Schäfer saw a threat to the continuity of his sect and, up to that moment, his secret perversions with German and Chilean children repeatedly abused by him. Since that year, there has been data on the creation of files on people who could be a threat or useful to the enclave.

According to the statements of the top leaders detained and indicted before and after Schäfer's capture in Argentina, the person registration system was in charge of the colonist Gerd Sewald Lefevre (85 years old), a German who worked at the University of Hamburg, in northern Germany.

"From 1974, I classified the information, a job that Paul Schäfer entrusted to me. It may be that before that, information was handled that was later stamped on the cards; before, they were not classified," the German assures.

The elderly man says that he obtained the information from open sources (media, telephone directories) and from informants who provided information regarding neighbors they considered important who could affect the colony.

In the statement he gave in August 2005, Sewald maintained that there was special interest in "left-wing people." Likewise, he acknowledges that after the 1973 coup d'état, ties with representatives of the Armed Forces increased, especially with the Army and Carabineros.

That is why he did not delay in describing the link that was created from that moment with the DINA, with visits from the head of the agency, Manuel Contreras. In this regard, he points out that data on political prisoners were delivered to him both by the military institution and, subsequently, by the DINA itself through its agent in Parral, Fernando Gómez Segovia.

By the 1980s, with the dictatorship consolidated and arms deals flowing, Sewald said that "there was interest in knowing more about the people who visited us. This did not obey a planned action, as happened later with the creation of files. If the person acquired relevance subsequently, the notes were included in the classified files."

In this category, the number of files that were created regarding President Michelle Bachelet is surprising. When she was still a student and was detained by the dictatorship, she was immediately filed by the colony.

Her card had its origin in the relevance that her father, the FACh general, Alberto Bachelet, had in those days, who was detained within the group of officers of the institution who decided to resign in the face of the violation of the constitution.

As if an exhaustive analysis of the press had given them an indication of what would happen in 2006, 15 years earlier, files on her mother Ángela Jeria and her brother Alberto were already accumulating in the drawers, with data about their studies, militancy, places of detention, DINA agents who detained them, countries of exile, and activities abroad.

The files were created from a yellow cardboard card. At the top, the person's name was indicated, an acronym that indicated the origin of the information, and, in the case of people who were members of an institution, it was colored to identify it (black, Army; blue, Navy; red, FACh; green, Carabineros; lilac, priests).

It was complemented with personal data, family, addresses, telephones, studies, and jobs. Further down, a section was noted where comments were added.

As information such as statements or press clippings was attached, these were attached on legal-sized sheets and stapled (see copy).

As the years passed, the documents accumulated in Kardex-type boxes, of which only four were recovered, inside which were the 36,000 files. But witnesses assure that the files were several thousand more and that most were destroyed by fire.

The material was found during the same operations in which Dignidad's weapons were located. One of the underground bunkers where the war material was stored had the drawers where the files were in its corners.

The official version indicates that once unearthed, everything was transferred to the Los Ángeles Regiment and from there to Santiago, supervised by the court and detectives of the Special Police Investigation Brigade (BIPE): the weapons to the War Arsenals and the files to the Police Intelligence Headquarters (Jipol).

But there is another version. After it was assumed that everything had been transferred to Los Ángeles, detectives from the PDI Human Rights Brigade noticed that the drawers with the files had been left at the storage site (an old hangar).

To rectify the oversight, a record was made for the administrator of the compound, Hernán Briones, and it was transferred to Santiago in a pickup truck to the Human Rights Headquarters at the PDI Independencia barracks, where they remained until the next day.

The fact was reported to Judge Jorge Zepeda, who flew into a rage and ordered the detective in charge of the transfer to be detained until the circumstances were clarified.

Finally, after six months of work, Jipol delivered a report with the summary of the content of the files, which has served as a guide to extract information with which it has been possible to prove, fundamentally, the passage of political prisoners through that place before they disappeared.

Moreover, thanks to the files, it was possible to establish that the double agent Marcia Merino, known as "Flaca Alejandra," had lied regarding the fate of some of her MIR comrades once she betrayed them to the DINA.

Cards

Once the files were found in June 2005, a special Jipol team focused on the task of recovering the material. The cards and papers were damp, with mold. Through a drying process, it was possible to rescue the material and classify it. It took this team six months to prepare the report for Judge Zepeda.

The document records the quantity, nature, and list of people who appear there, with data regarding the most relevant dates.

That was how it was discovered that there were files on both political prisoners and figures of the dictatorship, businessmen, and parliamentarians.

In this sense, various sources consulted in both the police and judicial spheres point out that there would be files on friends and visitors to the enclave. Among them would be senators Hernán Larraín and Andrés Chadwick, in addition to the assassinated Jaime Guzmán.

The former UDI senator Carlos Bombal also appears. Regarding all of them, their respective cards and press clippings and comments written by Gerd Sewald for Schäfer appear.

Of the political authorities of the dictatorship, the former Minister of the Interior, Sergio Onofre Jarpa, stands out, who was also noted for his status as a landowner of extensive estates in the Maule Region, and the former Minister of Justice, Mónica Madariaga.

From the Concertación, the presence of extensive information on DC senators Andrés Zaldívar and Hosaín Sabag (legislator for the area) and former foreign minister Gabriel Valdés stands out.

A special chapter deserved the Catholic Church. There are dozens of files on religious figures such as Bishop Carlos Camus.

Classified Names

Some of the reasons why it is believed it was determined to give "classified" status to the material was because of very specific people who appear there and the positions they hold today. However, everything indicates that the content of said files does not reveal information related to compromising aspects of people. "Paul Schäfer made blackmail one of the defense mechanisms they had to remain unpunished, but that material was not left in those files, but rather on magnetic tapes and videos that were taken out of the colony," a former colonist who knew said material told LND from Germany.

In fact, many of the colonists who fled Dignidad agree that the one who keeps that compromising material in his possession is Erwin Fage, the compound's head of security, who also fled and was not captured.

A Chilean who had access to the Dignidad files said that "in these, there is no mention of personal or intimate issues of people, except for some relationships that are made between people of various kinds."

The delicate nature of the information that appears in those files, several sources agree, is that there are many people who had files and who maintained business or, more importantly, were informants for Colonia Dignidad.

Said people, whose names are handled only by the judge, detectives, and eventually the CDE, today appear in public positions. As far as LND could find out, this category of people would be working in the Government, in parliament, and in the diplomatic service.

The difficulties that exist today are that Judge Zepeda is in charge of investigations for specific crimes such as kidnapping and forced disappearance of people, in addition to crimes for violation of the Arms and Explosives Control Law.

Regarding the money that has its origin in illicit business, several years ago the judge sent letters rogatory to Germany requesting information regarding accounts; however, they have not received any kind of response.

Without going any further, the Government of Germany has not yet officially notified the magistrate of the death of the leader and number two of the Colony, Albert Schreiber, who fled Chile evading an international arrest warrant. The German justice system denied his extradition from that country. According to rumors, he died between July and August.

Despite the difficulties the judge has encountered and the excessive workload of the cases that originated the investigation against Dignidad, the information regarding people who would have the status of "double agents" is in the hands of the National Intelligence Agency.

However, it is unknown if this organization has carried out inquiries, contemplated in the law, with the corresponding judicial authorization.

This would be one of the already known reasons that would explain the failure of the raids recorded in the 1990s or the difficulties that existed in locating Schäfer abroad.

The relevance regarding the content of the files and the names is also determined by the concern that the files also reveal more information about the people with whom the colony carried out arms deals for 25 years.

It transpired that Judge Jorge Zepeda is currently pursuing leads related to the existence of a new arsenal outside of Villa Baviera.

by Luis Narvaez

Source: lanacion.cl, November 9, 2008