Address: Avda. Balmaceda s/n, Población Nueva Matucana, Quinta Normal Marital Status: Single Occupation: Arc welder Political Affiliation: No known political affiliation Date of Detention: September 17, 1973

Carlos Fonseca Faúndez, single, an arc welder with no known political affiliation, was living as of September 17, 1973, at the Población Nueva Matucana, Quinta Normal, where he lived with his partner, Verónica del Carmen Poblete Sat, with whom he had an 11-month-old son.

On that day, September 17, he arrived home in a state of intoxication and had a heated argument with his partner. At that moment, at one o'clock in the morning, a military patrol arrived at the home and interrogated Carlos Fonseca about what was happening.

Then, the officer in charge violently pulled him up from his chair and stated that he was taking him into custody, assuring them that he would be back home the following day. The captors also raided the house and took the victim's personal documents.

Starting the day after the events, Ms. Verónica Poblete proceeded to search for him at various Carabineros and Investigations police stations, at political prisoner camps such as Cerro Chena, the Estadio Nacional, the Estadio Chile, and even at the Legal Medical Institute, without obtaining positive results.

She still does not know the fate that the father of her son met at the hands of the military personnel who arrested him.

JUDICIAL AND/OR ADMINISTRATIVE ACTIONS

On March 24, 1974, the Committee for Cooperation for Peace in Chile, composed of the Catholic Church, the Evangelical Churches, the Orthodox Church, and the Jewish Community of Chile, filed a writ of amparo (habeas corpus) before the Santiago Court of Appeals on behalf of 131 people who had been detained to date and whose whereabouts were unknown, including Carlos Fonseca Faúndez.

In the petition, filed under case number 289-74, it is stated that the appeal is made to the Honorable Court "for the purpose of safeguarding the physical and moral integrity of so many people who are deprived of liberty and held in places that are kept secret from their relatives and friends, and therefore, to ensure a fair and adequate legal defense.

Thus, there are many homes where members have been missing for months without the families, despite their exhausting and countless efforts, having obtained any information about their whereabouts and their fate."

During the processing of the writ of amparo, information was requested from the authorities, without success in establishing the situation of the vast majority of those protected, including Carlos Fonseca.

On November 28, 1974, the Court of Appeals rejected the writ of amparo, and the resolution was appealed by the petitioner. On January 31, 1975, the Plenary of the Supreme Court confirmed the appealed ruling and agreed to appoint an Extraordinary Visiting Minister to investigate the reported events.

The responsibility fell to Minister Enrique Zurita Camps, who on February 24, 1975, initiated case file No. 106.657 at the First Criminal Court of Santiago.

At the beginning of the process, the relatives of the complainants were summoned to testify, and they ratified the circumstances under which the victims were detained. Likewise, information was requested from the authorities and various welfare organizations, whose responses were all negative.

In addition, the Minister consolidated about 10 reports of alleged disappearance, among which were several missing persons from Isla de Maipo, whose bodies appeared years later in the Lonquén Kilns. On September 25, 1975, without any progress in the investigation that would allow for the discovery of the fate of the disappeared, the summary proceedings were closed, and on September 29, regarding the case of Carlos Fonseca Faúndez and others, the case was temporarily dismissed on the grounds that "the existence of the investigated crime was not justified." On May 10, 1976, the Court of Appeals approved Minister Zurita's resolution. Regarding the other cases investigated, the Minister declared himself incompetent and referred the records to the Military Justice system.

In April 1992, his family filed a complaint for kidnapping before the 24th Criminal Court of Santiago, a case that was entered under file No. 23372-5 and which was in the summary stage at the end of that year.

The anthropometric data of Carlos Fonseca Faúndez were attached to case 4449 AF of the 22nd Criminal Court of Santiago for the crime of illegal burial, in Patio 29 of the General Cemetery, of unidentified persons who died between September and December 1973.

The investigating judge of the case ordered the excavation of 108 graves in September 1991. From there, 125 bodies were exhumed and sent to the Legal Medical Institute. At present (late 1992), the expert identification reports are pending.

Source: Vicariate of Solidarity

A Chilean judge confirmed today the names of four more victims of the dictatorship who had been buried in Patio 29 of the General Cemetery of Santiago and who were misidentified by the Legal Medical Service.

According to judicial sources, the visiting minister, Alejandro Solís, completed the identification of these remains exhumed in Patio 29 of the General Cemetery, a process that began last December and was being processed in the 22nd Criminal Court of Santiago.

The examinations were carried out by experts from the Legal Medical Service, Rhonda Roby and Dr. Francisco Echeverría, with 99.99% certainty. The corroborated identities correspond to CARLOS FONSECA FAUNDEZ; Sergio Fernández Pavez, Jorge Manuel Pavez Henríquez, and in the case of Francisco Arnaldo Zúñiga Aguilera, his remains were labeled with the date April 17, 1998, and erroneously identified as belonging to Fernando de la Cruz Olivares Mori.

These individuals, who were murdered in 1973, shortly after the military coup of September 11, and thrown into graves marked as "NN" in Patio 29 of the General Cemetery of Santiago, were exhumed after the restoration of democracy in the country.

When the unmarked graves of Patio 29 were opened in 1991, it was discovered that some contained up to three bodies in a single coffin. When asked about the matter, Augusto Pinochet, who was still head of the Army, commented: "What great economy." In 2006, it was revealed that there were errors in the identification of the remains, and since then, the Legal Medical Service began a series of audits to correctly identify the victims.

In July 2006, Patio 29, where 123 sets of remains were located, was declared a National Monument.

Source: vanguardia.com 2/04/2010

Date: 04-02-2010

Identity of four more Patio 29 victims verified

Visiting Minister Alejandro Solís provided the identification of four more bodies exhumed from Patio 29 of the General Cemetery. With 99.99 percent certainty, the political executions victims of the dictatorship were identified as Carlos Fonseca Faúndez, Sergio Fernández Pávez, Francisco Zúñiga Aguilera, and Jorge Pavez Henríquez.

However, Solís noted that he still has more than one hundred examinations that have not yielded results. The process began in December 2009, after it became known three years earlier that there were errors in the identification of the bodies from Patio 29.

Source: radio.uchile.cl 1/4/2010

Date: 04-01-2010

On the responsibilities of Patio 29

The LMI said that the list that Sergio Diez showed before the UN in 1976 did not come from the service. It was a forgery. Today is the great opportunity for Diez to account for this. Roberto Garretón The debate and accusations against constitutional governments regarding the responsibilities for the probable errors in the identification of people found in Patio 29 of the General Cemetery of Santiago, which even authorized a former minister of the dictatorship to proclaim a grotesque moral tie between Pinochet supporters and democrats, forget two essential facts: first, all the victims were murdered (none fell in combat or due to traffic accidents or natural causes, as has been and is the discourse of Pinochetism from 1973 until today and as it will be tomorrow); and, second, the crimes were covered up by concealment and cover-up campaigns using journalistic and diplomatic means. The two most serious were the setups to deceive the UN and the one known as the case of the 119. I will refer to the first. In his speech before the UN General Assembly in 1976, the dictatorship's ambassador Sergio Diez (current president of RN) stated that on the lists of the disappeared "there are 153 (names), furthermore, that have no existence" and that the Civil Registry "has confirmed that these 153 'alleged' (sic) persons are combinations of assumed names and surnames, which are not in the records and which have no family, and about whom no one in Chile has asked responsibly." He adds that "there are 64 people on the lists of those disappeared who are dead, legally dead, and who died almost entirely in the days following September 11; and also, furthermore, from natural causes or by accident (traffic, etc.). On page 381 of the report (his report) is the list provided by the Legal Medical Institute, with the date and time those people were delivered to the Legal Medical Institute." To hide the crime of the 153 victims of the first group, Diez accompanied certificates from the Civil Registry stating that the people referred to do not actually exist. The detail is that in the certificates, the name of the disappeared person has some slight change, absolutely imperceptible to the delegates of other countries. For example, to prove that the disappeared or murdered Sergio Tormen, a famous Chilean cycling champion whose full identification is Sergio Daniel Tormen Méndez, never existed, Diez accompanied a certificate of the non-existence of Sergio Manuel Tormen Méndez. The latter, of course, does not exist. According to the ambassador, neither did "exist" Sergio Fernando Fernández Pavez, nor Luís Carlos Jiménez Cortéz (Cortés), nor Luis Alejandro Largo (Larco) Vera, nor Ricardo López Elgueda, nor Jorge Manuel Pavez Henríquez (Enrique), nor Simón Eladio (Eludio) Sánchez Pérez, nor Héctor Daniel (David) Urrutia Molina. However, their corpses appeared in Patio 29. Diez "reports" that the corpses of José Ignacio Castro Maldonado, Luís Rodolfo Lazo Maldonado, CARLOS FONSECA FAUNDEZ, and Juan Gallegos Gallegos had entered the LMI with Nos. 3348; 3467; 2923, and 3395, respectively, between September 21 and October 26, 1973. But their bodies were buried as NN and were found years later in Patio 29. But the most serious thing is that the Legal Medical Institute of the time reported that the list that Diez accompanied did not emanate from that service, so it was a forgery. Diez has never accounted for this unqualifiable action. Today, there is the great opportunity for him to finally do so: it would be unacceptable for the newly constituted investigative commission of the Chamber of Deputies on possible technical errors in the identification of the remains of the disappeared and murdered not to avoid the responsibility of those who participated in operations intended to hide these atrocious crimes. To know if Diez acted alone or with others; who the others are (because those others do know where they left the remains of their victims); who forged the documents that the LMI authorities of 1975—yes, Pinochet's!—said did not emanate from that service; how they came into his possession, and so many things that still remain in the dark shadows of a sinister regime, but for which many are "grateful." If he does not do so, the commission will have increased the dramatic abyss that separates the political class from the class of citizens. And the followers of the dictatorship will continue to say that there are no ethical differences between them and us, those who never collaborated.

Source: centroschilenos.blogias.com 05/26/2006

Date: 05-26-2006

The enigma of the Patio 29 remains

The identification of all the bodies of forcibly disappeared persons found 15 years ago in Patio 29 of the General Cemetery of Santiago could be erroneous. A week after the Legal Medical Service (SML) and Judge Carlos Gajardo summoned—on April 19—the relatives of the victims to inform them that there was an error in the identification of the remains of 48 of the 90 people found in 1991, today there is not even certainty that the remaining 42 corpses are correctly identified, nor that all 48 have errors.

The SML performed mitochondrial DNA comparisons of 90 remains with DNA from the living relatives of the victims, concluding that in 48 cases there was no correspondence in the Deoxyribonucleic Acid. The chaos arose after Magistrate Gajardo, who is in charge of the Patio 29 case, disqualified on Tuesday the 25th the report issued the previous Wednesday by the forensic service. "I cannot disqualify the first expert report on the basis of what the second tells me.

I have to listen to those who participated in the first and those who participated in the second. [There is] nothing definitive, absolutely nothing definitive," he said. In plain language, it means that some bodies could be "well identified" and others not, but which ones?

President Michelle Bachelet commissioned social worker María Luisa Sepúlveda to clarify the complex situation, and her first words also relativized the report based on mitochondrial DNA, stating that the mitochondrial DNA tests carried out by the Service "is not conclusive." She added that "other background information of the process must be studied so that the court determines if with that single test it is determined that it is not the person who is identified." Now, all the work of more than a decade will have to be done again.

New forensic anthropological examinations will be carried out, international experts in identification will be brought to Chile, counter-samples with nuclear DNA will be carried out abroad, and the relatives will be supported. "It is my decision to develop a special program in order to know exactly the situation of the people found in Patio 29," said Bachelet. "That is why I have appointed a special representative who is going to answer to me, who will carry out and guarantee both support for the relatives and the strengthening and development of the Legal Medical Service," affirmed the President. Crossed troubles The background of the most serious credibility crisis of the forensic public service is crossed by a series of secondary conflicts: the Service hid from the judges an expert report on a sample of 27 skulls issued in 2002 by the University of Glasgow, while the director of the service, Oscar Vargas, states that the magistrates, who have the final word in an identification for legal reasons, decided on their own "who was who," without scientific support, all this before the condescension of political authorities anxious for a quick solution. There are also rivalries between the current and previous authorities of the SML. The barons of the political class received an unexpected feast for all sorts of questioning and demands for "political responsibility" before the television cameras, while the background is the impotent pain of the relatives who wish there to be administrative and judicial sanctions, but above all that their loved ones whom they lost for the second time be well identified. But the legal consequences are also complex, with legal and economic implications. If there are no corpses, there was no murder, but kidnapping. The culprits who were prosecuted in countless trials could remain in limbo for a long time. The relatives who collected compensation could have problems of another nature, and those who have not yet received reparation from the State will have to continue waiting. And on these aspects, Commissioner Sepúlveda made a cryptic, somewhat strange statement: "We will not be able to resolve that in the particular case until it is established by judicial means that that identity does not correspond. At this minute, that process has not arrived [...] Today [those people] are officially dead, until justice says otherwise." But if those people are not "officially" dead, justice will never achieve the opposite, that is, bringing them back to life. The morgue affair put the last ministers of justice in the pillory: the independent Luis Bates Hidalgo, in the government of Ricardo Lagos; and the radical José Antonio Gómez and the DC Soledad Alvear, in the administration of Eduardo Frei. The procedures of the public forensic medicine system are also questioned. Human rights lawyer Hugo Gutiérrez denounced that "serious irregularities" led to the identification error and demanded the appointment of a visiting [court] minister to investigate the error. The Ministry of Justice appointed a prosecutor who began working. The Chamber of Deputies is preparing to constitute an investigative commission to establish "political responsibilities," a figure that common people little understand what it consists of. The former pathologist of the Legal Medical Service Luis Ravanal said that "there was outright a policy of hiding the truth, of stopping it permanently, [...] not only with the denial of information to the Courts of Justice, but also with the exoneration of officials." The doctor presented to the president of the Supreme Court, Enrique Tapia, background information related to those alleged irregularities, among which is a letter dated November 26, 2001, in which several doctors from the Thanatology Unit warned of deficiencies in the registration of the remains found. "There was no type of control and specific registry for remains, with the exception of the records coming from the Identification Unit starting November 22 of the same year," affirmed Ravanal. He added that there is data related to the absence of necessary and adequate instruments for carrying out examinations on human remains and denounced mismanagement of funds in the SML. "Political responsibilities" It is a mistake to focus on looking for those responsible when it comes to seeking the truth, said Enrique París, son of the doctor of the same name who is among the 48 remains whose identity was questioned. Human rights lawyer Pamela Pereira, who was responsible for opening Patio 29 as a plaintiff lawyer, representing Bishop Sergio Valech and whose father is a forcibly disappeared person, said she alerted President Ricardo Lagos in 2005 about the irregularities in the identifications. She added that the then-president was moved, because among the victims is his friend Enrique París Sr. The lawyer asked for the dismissal of the director of the SML and Minister Bates. She says that Lagos said: "I'll look into it"..., "I have to look into it," but he did nothing. "In the end, presidents are also limited by the realities of power, even in human issues that affect them," assured Pereira in the evening newspaper La Segunda on Tuesday. Former Minister of Justice and current radical senator José Antonio Gómez said he was "open to collaborating and I am not going to evade political responsibilities." And he added: "One must be cautious in the dissemination of versions about the identity of the bodies... mitochondrial DNA is not 100% certain." Retired Minister Juan Guzmán, who gained notoriety for being the first judge to prosecute Augusto Pinochet, caused a stir last year when he said he had been pressured from Gómez's office to soften his judicial treatment of the former dictator. Soledad Alvear, current DC senator and also former minister of the same portfolio, said that "it is delicate that it has been pointed out categorically, before counter-examinations are carried out, that a determined number of bodies does not correspond." She also assured that "we did not hide any information..., I feel calm." Lorena Pizarro, president of the Association of Relatives of Forcibly Disappeared Detainees (AFDD), focused political responsibilities on former Justice ministers Bates and Gómez because "they did not take measures," and also blamed the team that identified and the directors of the SML and other authorities for not listening earlier to these complaints that had been made. Pizarro added that the relatives are aware of the difficulties in identifying remains, but pointed out that the error would still persist if Judge Sergio Muñoz had not requested the exhumation in March 2005. When Muñoz ascended to the Supreme Court, he was replaced in the case by Carlos Gajardo. The leader protested against the erratic conduct of the Lagos government, which tolerated the misidentification and at the same time pardoned the main assassin of union leader Tucapel Jiménez, among other gestures that could have led to an aborted point-final project, very shortly before concluding his mandate. The vice president of the AFDD, Mireya García, said that "there are always political responsibilities when a State institution makes such big mistakes" and recalled that they pointed out to Minister Bates the need for procedures to be regularized and for the appropriate measures to be taken. "However, there was no reaction." List of the 48 victims Among the 48 victims who are allegedly misidentified are doctors Enrique París and Carlos Paredes, collaborators of Salvador Allende captured at La Moneda the same morning of the coup, September 11, 1973. An emblematic case was that of Fernando Olivares Mori, from the documentary "Fernando has returned," by Silvio Caiozzi, a 1998 work that records the return of his supposed remains to the family home and his emotional wake and burial. The 31-minute film exalts the work of the pathologists now questioned. The list also includes journalists Ernesto Traubmann Riegelhaupt, a communist born in Czechoslovakia, captured when he was trying to make a radio system work, and Sergio Contreras Contreras, a socialist journalist, detained at La Moneda. (See their stories in Morir es la Noticia, http://shop.logos.it/users/carmona/html/ii.html). Precisely, on April 20, the Fifth Chamber of the Santiago Court of Appeals overruled Minister Juan Fuentes Belmar by revoking the statute of limitations applied to nine defendants for carrying out illegal exhumations of La Moneda victims secretly buried in the Peldehue Regiment and moved to Patio 29 in 1978. The discovery of Patio 29 occurred in 1991. The court invoked international treaties on crimes against humanity and resolved that "the judge may not issue a definitive dismissal regarding crimes that, in accordance with international treaties ratified by Chile and which are in force, are imprescriptible or cannot be amnestied." Furthermore, it established that the removal of the bodies was the last link in a chain of actions that began with the detention of a group of people at La Moneda. Magistrate Fuentes investigated the detentions carried out on September 11, 1973, at La Moneda in a case about the so-called "Television Removal" operation, which unearthed bodies of forcibly disappeared persons throughout the country. Fuentes considered that exhuming the bodies of the La Moneda prisoners and taking them out of Peldehue to throw them into the sea from helicopters or reburying them in other places could not be considered a crime against humanity but a simple infraction of the Sanitary Code. According to Fuentes' assessment, the exhumations were only "a crime of illegal exhumation typified and sanctioned in the Penal Code with a penalty of minor imprisonment in the minimum degree (61 days to one year) and a fine of ten UTM," equivalent to about 300 dollars. The magistrate had acquitted the former head of the Army Aviation Command, retired General José Darrigrandi, and retired military personnel Fernando Burgos Díaz, Sergio Medina Salazar, and Isidro Durán Muñoz. Chilean courts deal with human rights cases for crimes that occurred more than 30 years ago every day. The 48 victims who are allegedly misidentified, according to the Legal Medical Service's Mitochondrial DNA report, are the following: 1.- Albornoz Prado Hernán 2.- Albornoz Prado Juan 3.- Avilés Jofré Oscar 4.- Carreño Calderón José 5.- Cádiz Molina Luis 6.- Castro Maldonado José 7.- Castro Zamorano Manuel 8.- Cofré Martínez Germán 9.- Contreras Contreras Sergio 10.- Dávila García Luis 11.- Del Canto Rodríguez José 12.- Duque Orellana Patricio 13.- Fernández Pavez Sergio

14.- CARLOS FONSECA FAUNDEZ

15.- Freire Medina José 16.- Gallegos Gallegos Juan 17.- Gutiérrez Ayala Daniel 18.- Gutiérrez Rivas Luis 19.- Guzmán Altamirano Carlos 20.- Jiménez Cortés Luis 21.- Largo Vera Luis 22.- Lazo Maldonado Luis 23.- Marambio Araya Oscar 24.- Maturana Valderrama Samuel 25.- Montero Montero Enrique 26.- Muñoz Bizama José 27.- Muñoz Contreras José 28.- Muñoz Muñoz Raúl 29.- Muñoz Peñaloza Mario 30.- Olivares Mori Fernando 31.- Paredes Barrientos Eduardo 32.- París Roa Enrique 33.- Pavez Henríquez Jorge 34.- Pérez Godoy Pedro 35.- Pincheira Núñez Héctor 36.- Ramírez Ramírez José 37.- Reyes Avila Carlos 38.- Rodríguez Lazo Daniel 39.- Rodríguez Riquelme Luis 40.- Serrano Galaz Roberto 41.- Sobarzo Sepúlveda José 42.- Sotelo Ojeda Jaime 43.- Toledo Garay Enrique 44.- Traubmann Riegelhaupt Ernesto 45.- Utreras Beltrán Juan 46.- Vargas Barrientos Pedro 47.- Zárate Alarcón Pedro 48.- Zúñiga Aguilera Francisco

Source: rebelion.org 05/01/2006

Date: 05-01-2006