This Thursday, procedures were carried out regarding the historic case of the death and disappearance of 19 people detained on September 11, 1973, in Laja and San Rosendo. The Carabineros involved in the incident, who are currently in custody, have already been interrogated, and the reconstruction of the scene of the crime was carried out today.

The case involves 19 people who were detained in Laja and San Rosendo on the day of the Military Coup and whose whereabouts became unknown on September 17, 1973. Subsequently, in 1979, visiting judge José Martínez Gaensli was appointed to investigate the case, which concluded that the detainees had been murdered and buried in an illegal mass grave in the Yumbel parish cemetery.

The bodies were exhumed that same year and those responsible for the deaths were identified; however, in 1981, the Amnesty Law was applied to them, and they were released. This year, relatives of the victims filed an appeal against those responsible, and the case was taken up by Judge Carlos Aldana, who specializes in human rights violation cases.

This morning, the 13 Carabineros accused of murder were interrogated; they arrived at the Concepción Court of Appeals under PDI escort while in custody. The session lasted from 8:30 to 11:00 this morning.

Afterward, Judge Aldana and the detainees traveled to Laja and San Rosendo, the communes where the historic reconstruction of the events that occurred on September 11, 1973, will take place. Finally, Aldana confirmed that there are 14 Carabineros involved in the events, while 10 of them have acknowledged their participation, confirming the crime of qualified homicide.

He also noted that the proceedings are being carried out in accordance with the old legislation.

Source: Radio Bio Bio, August 18, 2011

38 years after the crimes, the Carabineros speak and are set free

Unprecedented confessions link CMPC to the massacre of 19 workers in Laja.

It was a hunt. In September 1973, Carabineros from the Laja station arrested 14 workers from the Paper Mill and the Railways, two high school students, and two teachers, whom they took to the Fundo San Juan, where they executed and clandestinely buried them.

All the police officers had been drinking heavily of pisco sent to them by the CMPC, which also provided vehicles for the "caravan of death" led by farmer Peter Wilkens. Despite the desperate search by their relatives, the pact of silence regarding what happened that night remained in place until August of last year.

"Since it was sand, it wasn't hard to dig. We made a trench 2 to 3 meters long by 1.5 meters deep. Then we took the 19 detainees out of the vehicles. We made some kneel in front of the trench; we left the others standing.

They were in front of us, with their backs to us. I remember very well when Carabinero Gabriel González argued heatedly with Nelson Casanova, because the latter did not want to shoot. It was so intense that I stepped in and told González that if he did anything to Casanova, I would shoot him with the Sig rifle I had in my hand.

The tension was so high. We were all very agitated, but even so, when the officer gave the order, we proceeded to shoot. We all shot, and when I say all, I include Lieutenant Alberto Fernández Michell.

We shot them in the back. Some fell directly into the pit. Others, already dead, we had to push so they would fall, or we grabbed them and threw them into the pit. They were left one on top of the other.

Then we covered them with the same sand and some branches and headed back to Laja. When we arrived at the station, we kept drinking the pisco and the drinks the lieutenant had brought from the CMPC paper mill casino. Only then did those who remained on guard duty know what had happened. Fernández gave the order to remain silent. After that, everything continued as if nothing had happened."

Corporal 1st Class (ret.) Samuel Vidal Riquelme was the first to break the pact. For 38 years, he kept the secret of what happened in the early hours of September 18, 1973, to the 19 workers whom he and his colleagues from the Laja station had apprehended in that town and San Rosendo over the previous five days, only to put them in a small cell, torture them, and then, that night, clandestinely execute them in a forest near the Perales Bridge, at the Fundo San Juan.

The first time Vidal spoke about what happened that night was in 1979, when the Archbishopric of Concepción filed a complaint against the Carabineros of the station, and the then-visiting judge of the Concepción Court of Appeals, José Martínez Gaensly, interviewed him.

But that time, he said the same thing as his 15 colleagues from the Laja station: that the prisoners had been taken to the Los Ángeles Regiment. Martínez asked the military officers of that regiment about the 19 workers, but they claimed they had never entered there.

Then he spoke to the Carabineros again. Although they changed their version, they all said the same thing: that they had put them on a bus provided by the Compañía Manufacturera de Papeles y Cartones (CMPC) and that on the way to Los Ángeles, they had handed them over to a "ghost patrol" of military personnel.

That they had lost track of them since then. Martínez's inquiries were useful for something: it became known that the bodies were in a mass grave in the Yumbel Parish Cemetery. That they had been taken there in October 1973, without anyone knowing, when they were removed from the hole where they had been buried after a farmer reported to the Yumbel Carabineros that his dogs were gnawing on human remains.

The report with the complaint reached the local Court of Greater Quantities, but Judge Corina Mera ordered it to be kept in the safe. It was never investigated. Without knowing how the bodies had reached the cemetery or who had executed them, the remains were identified and handed over to their relatives, who had searched for them tirelessly for six years.

In March 1980, Martínez declared himself incompetent and referred the case to the Ad Hoc Military Prosecutor's Office of Concepción. In three months, the case was dismissed, and at the end of 1981, the Supreme Court ratified the dismissal.

That was the extent of the justice served. 27 years later, the Association of Relatives of Political Executions (AFEP) and the Law 19.123 Continuation Program of the Ministry of the Interior requested the reopening of the case from the Concepción Court of Appeals.

After reviewing the records, Judge Carlos Aldana set aside the resolution that definitively dismissed the accused Carabineros and the ratification of that ruling by the Supreme Court. Thus, the summary and investigation were reopened under case file 27-2010.

CIPER had access to the statements and documents of that investigation. Among them is the confession of Corporal Samuel Vidal on June 14, 2011, before the Investigative Police (PDI). Since then, details began to emerge one by one about the fate of the 19 workers whom he and his colleagues murdered in the back in the early hours of September 18, 1973.

Thus, the capture operations, the execution in an open field, and the support and financing provided for their extermination by an important local businessman and especially the local CMPC, a company chaired at that time by former President Jorge Alessandri and whose main shareholder was businessman Eliodoro Matte Ossa, became known.

The oath that the Carabineros of the Laja station made in November 1973 at the Perales Bridge, when their officer in charge, Lieutenant Alberto Fernández Michell, was being transferred to Antofagasta, had been broken: "That if anyone opened their mouth, they had to be 'taken out' by the colleagues themselves."

Source: ciperchile, January 13, 2012

New president of the Electoral Qualification Tribunal hid information about the Laja Massacre

In 1978, the now-Supreme Court Justice, Rosa Egnem, admitted that she hid key information about the Laja massacre: the execution of 19 people, perpetrated by civilians and Carabineros. At the time, she worked in a Yumbel court, and despite this episode, she continued to rise until reaching the highest court.

Now, she will add a new distinction: on January 31, she will assume the presidency of the Electoral Qualification Tribunal. In that position, she will have to oversee the constitutional plebiscite. On January 7, a conviction was handed down for the Laja crimes, 46 years later.

Only Carabineros were sentenced, and nothing was said about the role of the executives of the CMPC Laja Plant, an emblematic company of the Matte Group.

One week after the Coup d'État, in the early hours of September 18, 1973, 19 men—workers of the Compañía Manufacturera de Papeles y Cartones (CMPC), railway workers, teachers, and two students—were murdered and surreptitiously buried in a private field in Laja, in the Biobío Region.

For more than 40 years, there was impunity for their perpetrators and whispers about what happened to the victims. A silence that reveals the collusion that existed to hide crimes against humanity between private enterprise, politicians, police, and, of course, different levels of the Chilean justice system.

The protection for the murderers and their accomplices had a milestone just one month after what became known as the Laja and San Rosendo Massacre. In October 1973, a local farmer found mutilated bodies of some of the victims and reported it to the justice system.

But his complaint was hidden in a safe and under lock and key by lawyer Rosa Egnem, then secretary to Judge Corina Mera of the Yumbel Court of Greater Quantities.

Rosa Egnem is now a Supreme Court Justice. Her act of omission and manipulation of judicial records meant that the widows and children of all those murdered continued for six years searching for their loved ones. In contrast, Egnem, who confessed to her crime in 1978 without receiving any sanction from the Concepción Court of Appeals, became a judge and continued to rise in her judicial career.

Despite her history, on January 31, Justice Rosa Egnem will assume the presidency of the Electoral Qualification Tribunal, which will have to oversee the decisive plebiscite on a new Constitution on April 26.

The conviction for the Laja and San Rosendo crimes was just handed down this January 7 by the Concepción Court of Appeals judge, Carlos Aldana. Only Carabineros were convicted. Not a word about the leading role that the executives of the Laja Plant of the Compañía Manufacturera de Papeles y Cartones (CMPC), owned by the Matte Group, had in the qualified homicides.

As in the recent multi-million dollar toilet paper collusion fraud organized by CMPC, its owners will not pay with jail time. The only one who was questioned by the justice system was businessman Roberto Izquierdo Menéndez, who in September 1973 was the manager of CMPC, owner of Forestal Mininco, which in turn owned the Fundo San Juan where the bodies of the 19 executed prisoners were illegally buried.

Roberto Izquierdo Menéndez had to acknowledge that he did have knowledge of the Laja and San Rosendo massacre, although today he remembers nothing. He is currently a councilor of Sofofa and one of the most powerful businessmen in the country.

And his power makes him feel it. From the presidency of Alimar, and despite having been investigated for the illegal payments to politics that he made through the southern fishing association (ASIPES), to which he belongs, and after it was confirmed in courts and in CIPER that the Fisheries Law voted on by Congress was tailored to the fishing companies and their illegal payments, in January of last year he launched a tirade against the government.

Facing the new Fisheries Law that must replace the one obtained with bribes, Izquierdo Menéndez accused "expropriation" and reiterated: "Obviously yes. If the authority changes the conditions, they have to compensate us because they are acquired rights."

Izquierdo Menéndez knows about impunity. Two of his brothers, Diego and Julio Izquierdo Menéndez, participated in the assassination of General René Schneider in October 1970, executed by an extreme right-wing group to prevent Salvador Allende from assuming the presidency.

They were never prosecuted: despite all the judicial evidence demonstrating their participation, they enjoyed the impunity provided by the military regime.

Source: interferencia.cl, January 17, 2020

Relatives of San Rosendo massacre victims value Supreme Court ruling confirming convictions of responsible Carabineros

"It is said and sometimes repeated that delayed justice is not justice, but we, always looking toward the future, sincere and without a desire for revenge, can say that 'justice, even if late, is also justice when it arrives,'" stated the families of the 19 people executed at the hands of Carabineros de Chile officials one week after the 1973 coup d'état in a statement.

On March 1, 2024, the Supreme Court released the final ruling regarding the cassation appeals filed by both the plaintiffs and the defendants against the August 2021 ruling of the Concepción Court of Appeals.

In summary, the Supreme Court maintained almost entirely what was resolved at the time by the Concepción Court, upholding the convictions of the direct material executors of the 19 homicides of Laja and San Rosendo residents that occurred in the early hours of September 18, 1973, and whose perpetrators were former uniformed officers of the Laja Carabineros station at that time.

Indeed, it was resolved to maintain: the life imprisonment sentence for former Carabinero Lieutenant Alberto Juan Fernández Michell; the sentence of 15 years and one day of major imprisonment in its maximum degree for former Carabineros Gerson Nilo Saavedra Reinike, Pedro del Carmen Parra Utreras, Víctor Manuel Campos Dávila, Nelson Casanova Salgado, José Jacinto Otárola Sanhueza, Mario Sebastián Montoya Burgos, and Manuel Enrique Cerda Robledo, all named as authors of the 19 qualified homicides.

Finally, the sentence of 5 years of major imprisonment in its minimum degree for former Carabinero Anselmo del Carmen San Martín Navarrete was maintained.

It should also be considered that, regarding four other former Carabineros—Luis León Godoy, Lisandro Martínez García, Gabriel González Salazar, and Samuel Vidal Riquelme—who had been temporarily dismissed by the investigating judge of the case, Carlos Aldana Fuentes, due to alleged insanity, the resolution of the Concepción Court in its August 2021 ruling is maintained, stating that it was not appropriate to favor them with that procedural decision and, instead, it was ordered to continue the trial against them by a non-disqualified judge, anticipating convictions for each with penalties similar to those mentioned above.

In turn, the Supreme Court ruling ended up acquitting Pedro Jarpa Foester of criminal responsibility regarding the homicides, considering that the mentioned crimes were not attributable to him due to the lack of intent or eventual intent in his actions.

However, the same Court addresses the criminal reproach deserved by the conduct displayed by him regarding the detentions and kidnappings of former CMPC Laja Plant workers, mainly his actions consisting of the direct identification of the people who were being detained and kidnapped by Carabineros at the exit of CMPC shifts.

Finally, regarding the CMPC company and its relationship and link to the investigated criminal acts, the relatives pointed out that "our conviction is reinforced that said paper company and its agents effectively allowed, encouraged, and facilitated the consummation of the criminal design, as irrefutably stated in the investigation of Judge Carlos Aldana, in the considerations taken into account by the Concepción Court, and in the reflections and considerations adopted in the Supreme Court ruling—supply of vehicles, lime to cover the victims' bodies, ownership or possession of the property where the victims were sacrificed, provision of drivers from the company itself, etc."

Source: interferencia.cl, March 4, 2024