The admiral continues to lie. His words are lost among the hills and the wind of Valparaíso. But the memory of the porteños who were victims of the Navy's repression is stubborn and accurate. Nothing and no one will ever be able to erase the horror enthroned on the shores of the Pacific, between the nocturnal mist, the sunset's glow, and the eternal pelicans of the bay.

The fact is that on September 11, 1973, alongside the United States warships participating in the so-called UNITAS exercises, the fleet returned to port to link up with ground units to launch the military coup against the government of Salvador Allende.

The early occupation of the city transformed it into a gigantic concentration camp where fear, torture, and cruelty reigned supreme. The Navy, with unusual rage and profound class-based contempt, repressed the porteños and, to that end, deployed all its personnel, including cadets from the Naval School.

It also enabled several places of detention, such as the Naval War Academy, the Silva Palma barracks, and the ships Maipo, Lebu, and Esmeralda, where thousands of terrified inhabitants of Valparaíso were tortured.

However, Admiral Jorge Arancibia, head of the Navy, continues to maintain that in those detention centers "no one was ever tortured," and that they were merely transit points to house prisoners due to the extraordinary circumstances being experienced.

But the admiral is lying, and he is lying consciously, for it is impossible that he was not aware of what happened in the Navy's facilities. There are thousands of testimonies from victims who experienced firsthand the violence and hatred of the officers and enlisted men of the apparently phlegmatic Chilean Navy.

Such is the case of María Eliana Comené, a Spanish literature student. "They were stuck on all the walls; I counted eight marines, some hooded and others with their faces painted black. They told me to undress.

I started to undress and left my underwear on because I was wearing a sanitary pad for my period. Then, when they forced me to take off even my panties, I said I couldn't because I was unwell. They forced me to do it, and that is when all the feminine rebellion, the rebellion of the fighter, emerged; no matter how much they wanted to make us feel like animals, the moment arrived when the dignity of the human being rebelled against all of that.

And my rage and indignation were such that I took off my panties, took the blood-stained pad, and put it on the face of the lieutenant who was leading the group. After that, still naked, by order of the lieutenant, two marines grabbed my buttocks from behind and bent down to look into my anus." Such was the moral quality of the admiral's sailors, the same ones who did not hesitate to rape women to demonstrate their power and their pathetic manhood, covering their faces with ski masks and hiding their ranks.

On the Esmeralda, María Eliana recalls, "there was violence 24 hours a day; they would take our companions out, beat them, and torture them; they would return purple and vomiting blood. When they transferred me to the Lebu, we were separated from the men, who were in the holds.

We were in the cabins, and there were so many of us that we couldn't breathe; we had to sleep sitting on the floor. They fed us only once a day, at 9 in the morning. It was beans that even had worms in them; once when we complained, they told us mockingly, why were we complaining if they were giving us 'meat'?" But the food was not what worried the political prisoners most, but rather the inhumane and cruel treatment by their captors, most of whom were young sailors.

Although they were also tortured by civilians and, as in the case of María Eliana, by carabineros. She had had the misfortune of being arrested during the retaking of the Universidad Católica in the port in the months prior to the coup. She was assaulted by carabineros under the command of a lieutenant named Pérez; however, she managed to defend herself and strike her aggressors.

Obviously, she never thought that political events would face her once again with the sadistic lieutenant, this time aboard the motor vessel Lebu. But that is how it was; on one occasion—María Eliana recounts—"they took me to a cabin that had been set up as an interrogation room, and there was this lieutenant who started to grope me and shout, saying: 'Defend yourself now, you bitch!' He groped me in a horrifying way; it was more than an hour of just that.

I was blindfolded and humiliated by what they were doing, powerless before what was happening, before the terrifying screams that could be heard." But it was not only on the ship that hundreds of porteños were tortured and degraded.

It also happened in other Navy torture centers. María Eliana also passed through the Naval War Academy, on the Cerro Playa Ancha. "I was there for about four weeks; they took me out every night to interrogate me, they hit my ears with their hands, they applied electricity to my tongue, to my vagina.

They took us out to amuse themselves with us, to sexually abuse us. There were mass rapes. In the end, one disconnects, one tries to sublimate what is happening, but it is impossible to forget; in fact, when I was already in prison, I developed a serious infection, with vomiting and fever.

They sent me to the Naval Hospital, and there they said it was just a gallbladder attack and sent me back to prison. However, it was something much more serious. It was gonorrhea, and it was impossible to know how and where I had contracted it—on the Esmeralda, on the Lebu, at the Academy? The only thing clear is that my endometrium was left totally and absolutely destroyed."

NAVAL WAR ACADEMY: HOUSE OF HORROR

And thousands of lives were destroyed physically and psychologically in the Navy's houses of horror in Valparaíso, El Belloto, Colliguay, Puchuncaví, and Talcahuano. Humberto Arancibia, president of the union of workers of Enadi, formerly the Valparaíso Gas Company, passed through such centers of detention and torture.

He was arrested in Villa Alemana on the night of October 3, 1973. He was taken by the marines who arrested him to the Silva Palma barracks in the port. "We arrived," Humberto recalls, "at a large room full of people, men and women lying on the floor, many with their hair cut off by bayonets.

A marine asked me why I was there. I replied that I didn't know, that I was simply a union leader. 'Exactly,' he told me, 'to ask you about other leaders, to see if they had stolen anything or not.'" The sailors, the military, knew perfectly well that no one had stolen anything, just as they knew that no one was going to attack the physical integrity of the members of the Armed Forces and their families, as they tried to make people believe through the dissemination of an absurd "Plan Zeta." They were simply trying to justify the unjustifiable: the repression, the massacres, the torture, the rapes.

For this reason, "about an hour after having arrived," Humberto continues, "they blindfolded me, put a black hood over my head, tied my hands behind my back, and took me out of the room. 'So you are Carlos Nicolás!' (administrator of the Gas Company), they said to me while hitting me in the pit of my stomach.

I lost my breath; they hit me with sticks on my back, on my ribs, all this on the way to the interrogation. I feel that we arrived at a room; I catch my breath: 'No, my name is Humberto Arancibia,' I manage to say. 'Why didn't you say that before, you son of a bitch!' they shouted at me.

That's when I realized what awaited me, how the treatment was going to be. In the torture room, they hit me with open hands on my ears ('the telephone'), punched me in the stomach, hit me with sticks on my ribs.

All the time my hands and feet were tied with wire. At one point I thought they were going to hang me, but in reality, what they did was apply electricity to me. This was repeated many times in the midst of all kinds of insults."

After an endless night of torments, Arancibia was transferred to the ship Lebu. "It looked like a pirate ship," Humberto points out, "with men crowded into the ship's holds. They were bearded, some with their hair cut with knives, wearing coats, blankets, dirty and hungry.

Sometimes they would throw us pieces of bread, and we would share it among everyone. We did the same when, by a miracle, an orange appeared. We would eat it among six; we would even eat the peel. Later on, they gave us noodles, or rather, masses of noodles.

Also beans full of weevils. Each meal was guarded by armed sailors. Not everyone ate, though; there was a companion named Villarroel whom they kept in a cage, naked, and they never gave him anything to eat.

The sailors forced us to get up at six or seven in the morning. We would go up to the ship's deck, and they would hose us down while we were naked in the cold of the morning. It is clear that we had nowhere to relieve ourselves, and at some point, they put out halves of oil drums—which they called 'chutes'—where we began to urinate and defecate."

On the Lebu, people were denigrated; they tried to dehumanize the supposed enemy, men and women, regardless of age. They were also interrogated and tortured. The selective and most brutal interrogations were carried out at the Naval War Academy.

Humberto was taken there again. "They told me that I had laughed at them the first time; they put a cloth in my mouth and threw me against the wall and began to beat me. I lost all sense of time and space; I thought they were going to kill me.

Being there, even if they weren't torturing you, was the same, because you could hear screams, blows, and the heartbreaking laments of people who were dying. You were always in a tense emotional state; you knew that later it would be your turn, you were going to go through the same process.

You had no hope; you didn't know if you were going to come out alive. There were several who had tried to commit suicide by throwing themselves out of one of the windows on the fourth floor of the Academy or by hitting themselves against some pillars that were in the large room."

The panic, the desperation, and the violence against defenseless people reached such a point that there were not a few who preferred to die rather than continue enduring the horror of torture. However, Admiral Arancibia insists that no one was ever tortured in naval facilities.

Even in those places where they were not interrogated, a regime of permanent repression and humiliating punishments for political prisoners prevailed. Such is the case of the Isla Riesco or Melinka concentration camp, located in Colligüay in the interior of Valparaíso.

There, every time a new group arrived, a staging of intimidation was organized at night, when the prisoners were locked in their cabins. Bursts of machine-gun and automatic rifle fire were heard, mines were detonated in the area surrounding the camp, along with shouting and running.

The next day, the prisoners were informed that a group of "extremists" had tried to rescue them during the night and that they had been eliminated by the camp guard. If it happened again—they warned—the first thing to be eliminated would be the internal danger, that is, the prisoners.

TORTURE OF DEMOCRATIC SAILORS

Furthermore, many were punished by being submerged in pits of excrement and urine, by being struck with rifle butts, by being plunged into trash, or by being forced to run while being whipped. It was the marines who tortured in this way.

And they had experience, as they were the ones who initiated the massive and systematic practice of torture in August 1973 by arresting and flogging a group of constitutionalist sailors who denounced the Navy's coup-plotting attempts.

Antonio Ruiz, a second corporal, an electronic mechanic with a specialization in fire control, was one of them. Antonio Ruiz vividly remembers the day he was arrested: "It was August 7, 1973, in Talcahuano.

Intelligence officers took me out of the unit to transfer me to Fuerte Borgoño. There was a squadron of at least twelve marines waiting for us. They forced me to take off my clothes, and the beatings began; the war treatment began.

We became the enemy. For the marines, it was live practice; we were their guinea pigs. The officer who interrogated us, so that the blows wouldn't show, wore wet gloves. They put us in drums of excrement and urine; two marines would hold us by the legs and submerge us in the drums until we couldn't breathe.

The desperation in the face of the torture and the threats was such that in the end, one would rebel and confront the officer, shouting at him: 'Kill me, you son of a bitch!' They didn't care what one said or felt; on the contrary, they perfected the torture techniques day by day.

After a short time, they no longer held you by the legs, but had installed a pulley from which they would drop you into the drum of excrement. They kept us tied hand and foot, they threatened us with death, and there were many mock executions.

There were about 50 of us arrested, but in the end, less than half of us remained. There were people with blue affiliation (Asmar) and white affiliation, both from the School staff and the Fleet. Subsequently, we were sent to the Talcahuano jail in transit and, finally, to the Concepción jail.

The coup caught us there; we woke up to the sound of gunfire, we sensed death; the Carabineros took charge of the prison and threatened us that we would have to pay. A mock execution was carried out, and my whole life passed before me, very quickly.

I waited for death with my eyes closed. Fortunately, nothing happened, and eventually, we were transferred to Valparaíso, passing through the Isla Riesco or Melinka concentration camp, the Silva Palma barracks, and the port's public jail. Other democratic sailors were arrested and tortured at the Fuerte Miller of the Marine Corps in Las Salinas, and at the Engineering School in Viña del Mar."

26 years after the coup d'état that began in Valparaíso, Admiral Jorge Arancibia continues to deny that the Navy massively violated human rights. So why should one believe in his supposed good intentions in promoting, together with the government, a "dialogue table" intended—also supposedly—to put an end to the human rights problem?

No apparent conciliatory gesture can hide the irrefutable fact that the worker-priest Michael Woodward was murdered on the Esmeralda, his Esmeralda, Mr. Admiral.

Responsible for Navy Tortures

Vice Admiral Adolfo Walbaum Wieber, Commander, 1st Naval Zone Vice Admiral Pablo Weber Munnich, Commander-in-Chief of the Fleet Rear Admiral Hugo Cabezas Videla, Chief of the Navy General Staff Captain (CN) Sergio Huidobro Justiniano, Commander, Marine Corps CN Guillermo Aldoney Hansen, Chief of Staff, 1st Naval Zone CN Marcos Ortiz Guttmann, Deputy Chief, Navy General Staff CN Carlos Borrowman Sanhueza, Director, Arturo Prat Naval School CN Raúl López Silva, Director, Naval War Academy CN Homero Salinas Núñez, Director, Naval Engineering School CN Arnt Arentsen Pettersen, Director, Marine Corps School CN Jorge Sabugo Silva, Commander, Training Ship Esmeralda CN Hernán Sepúlveda Gore, Commander, "Miller" Marine Corps Detachment of Viña del Mar CN Cristián Sloraker Pozo, Chief of Staff of the Fleet CN Oscar Horlscher, Director, Almirante Nef Naval Hospital Commander (CF) Jorge Davanzo Cintolesi, Director, Armaments School CF Víctor Valverde Steinlen, Director, Naval Operations School CF Hernán Soto-Aguilar Cornejo, Deputy Director, Marine Corps School CF Jorge Valdés Romo, Deputy Director, Arturo Prat Naval School CF Patricio Villalobos, Commander, El Belloto Naval Air Base CF Ernesto Huber Von Appen, Commander, Naval Aviation CF Julio Vergara, Chief, Naval Intelligence Service, 1st Naval Zone Commander Santa Cruz, Marine Corps, Silva Palma Barracks, Valparaíso Captain Bunster, Marine Corps, Fuerte Borgoño, Talcahuano Naval Base Captain Jaeger, Marine Corps, Fuerte Borgoño, Talcahuano Naval Base Captain Koeller, Marine Corps, Fuerte Borgoño, Talcahuano Naval Base Captain Acuña, Marine Corps, Fuerte Borgoño, Talcahuano Naval Base Lieutenant Federico Stigman, Naval Intelligence Service Lieutenant Luna, Marine Corps, Fuerte Borgoño, Talcahuano Naval Base Lieutenant Tapia, Marine Corps, Fuerte Borgoño, Talcahuano Naval Base Lieutenant Maldonado, Marine Corps, Fuerte Borgoño, Talcahuano Naval Base Lieutenant Alarcón, Marine Corps, Fuerte Borgoño, Talcahuano Naval Base Lieutenant Letelier, Marine Corps, Fuerte Borgoño, Talcahuano Naval Base Lieutenant Boetsch, Marine Corps, Fuerte Borgoño, Talcahuano Naval Base Lieutenant Schuster, Marine Corps, Fuerte Borgoño, Talcahuano Naval Base Lieutenant Luis Rebolledo, Marine Corps, Motor Vessel Lebu Lieutenant Guillermo Morera, Marine Corps (ret.), Motor Vessel Lebu Lieutenant Rafael Yussef (ret.), Motor Vessel Lebu Lieutenant Rodriguez, Marine Corps, Training Ship Esmeralda Lieutenant Juan Gonzalez, Marine Corps, Isla Riesco Concentration Camp Petty Officer Aguayo, Marine Corps, Isla Riesco Concentration Camp Corporal Soto, Marine Corps, Isla Riesco Concentration Camp Corporal Bustos, Marine Corps, Isla Riesco Concentration Camp

Source: Punto Final, October 29, 1999

About one hundred people linked to human rights organizations and the Comisión Funa demonstrated today against the training ship La Esmeralda, which arrived today at the port of Valparaíso after concluding a tour of the Americas.

Along with the ships Lebu and Maipo, La Esmeralda was used as a place of detention and torture for political prisoners after the 1973 military coup, as has been recorded in the Rettig Report and other reports by the Organization of American States (OAS), Amnesty International, and the United States Senate.

The Comisión Funa identified the following officers as responsible for the torture in Valparaíso after the military coup:

• Vice Admiral Adolfo Walbaum Wieber, Commander, 1st Naval Zone
• Vice Admiral Pablo Weber Munnich, Commander-in-Chief of the Fleet
• Rear Admiral Hugo Cabezas Videla, Chief of the Navy General Staff
• Captain (CN) Sergio Huidobro Justiniano
• Captain (CN) Guillermo Aldoney Hansen, Chief of Staff, 1st Naval Zone
• Captain (CN) Carlos Borrowman Sanhueza, Director of the Naval School
• Captain (CN) Raúl López Silva, Director of the Naval War Academy
• Captain (CN) Homero Salinas Núñez, Director of the Naval Engineering School
• Captain (CN) Arnt Arentsen Pettersen, Director of the Marine Corps School
• Captain (CN) Jorge Sabugo Silva, Commander of the Training Ship Esmeralda
• Captain (CN) Hernán Sepúlveda Gore, Commander of the Marine Corps
• Commander (CF) Jorge Davanzo Cintolesi, Director of the Armaments School
• Commander (CF) Hernán Soto-Aguilar, Deputy Director of the Marine Corps School
• Commander (CF) Julio Vergara, Chief of the Naval Intelligence Service, 1st Zone
• Commander Santa Cruz, Marine Corps, Silva Palma Barracks, Valparaíso
• Lieutenant Luis Rebolledo, Marine Corps, Motor Vessel Lebu
• Lieutenant Guillermo Morera, Marine Corps, Motor Vessel Lebu
• Lieutenant Rafael Yussef, Motor Vessel Lebu
• Lieutenant Rodríguez, Marine Corps, Training Ship Esmeralda

Source: El Mostrador, November 5, 2000