32 years after the homicide of President Allende’s naval aide-de-camp, inconsistencies in the Navy’s judicial investigation and a lead provided a couple of weeks ago by a former civil police officer threaten to dismantle the official version. The civil justice system has reopened the case. Everything points to a high-level plot.

In the early hours of July 27, 1973, seconds after the bursts of gunfire heard on Calle Fidel Oteíza, eight people heard other shots. Three of them, René Claverie Bartet, Guillermo Perry González, and César Palma Ramírez, clearly distinguished that there were two shots.

Elsa Moder Echeverría stated during the proceedings that she heard them "fainter, spaced out." Rafael Mardones Saint-Jean heard them "as if they were of a different caliber, distinct from the bursts." We are at the crime scene of Salvador Allende’s naval aide-de-camp, Commander Arturo Araya Peeters.

That night of July 26, 1973, Commander Araya was accompanying President Allende at a reception at the Cuban embassy. The political situation in the country was extremely tense, and the right and far-right were clamoring for a coup d'état.

A month earlier, army officers had carried out the uprising known as "El Tancazo" in front of La Moneda. In this scenario of conflict, Allende was attempting to gather forces, seeking an agreement with the Christian Democrats to reach a consensus on changes to his government program.

A couple of days before the attack on the aide-de-camp, the leaders of the far-right armed group Patria y Libertad, Roberto Thieme and Miguel Cessa, met in a Vitacura apartment with two Navy officers. One of them was from the corps of admirals.

The officers informed them that on July 25, 1973, a new national strike would begin in the country and that, to increase tension, they required Patria y Libertad to carry out bombing attacks. With this, the coup-plotting faction of the Navy sealed a pact with Patria y Libertad. But it needed something more.

A spark to unleash pandemonium. The assassination of Commander Arturo Araya Peeters could have been that spark, just as the homicide of General Prats could have been three years earlier. At least that is what those who organized the plot to kill him thought.

SOMETHING DOES NOT ADD UP

On the walls of the house at Fidel Oteíza 1953, in the commune of Providencia, where Navy Captain Arturo Araya Peeters lived, five projectile impacts were marked after 01:30 hours on that day, the 27th. With the bullet that killed the aide-de-camp, there were six shots fired in the direction of the second-floor balcony of his house, which faced directly north, toward Avenida Providencia.

But they only found four shell casings. Civil police officers from the Homicide division combed the area and its surroundings that same early morning and returned at daylight. They found nothing more than the four casings from the shots fired from the street toward the balcony where the aide-de-camp was standing, with his 9mm Walter submachine gun in his left hand.

But there were six attack shots. The other two casings never appeared.

René Claverie fired three shots in a burst toward the balcony. He did so with a "Batán-type" Marcatti automatic rifle, from waist level, moving it in a "fan shape." According to expert reports and the reconstruction of the scene carried out on November 7, 1973, Claverie fired while shielded by a pillar of the front garden fence, from bottom to top, since the balcony was 4.5 meters high, and from right to left in relation to the aide-de-camp's position on the balcony.

Another member of the armed group, Carlos Farías Corrales, fired the fourth shot with a .22 caliber Pasper revolver from a position similar to Claverie’s.

Upon realizing the attack, Captain Araya fired a burst with his submachine gun, without wounding any of the members of the commando. The events that followed happened very quickly. "(Araya) fired a burst in a northerly direction," Claverie said in the proceedings. "He fired toward the front," stated Alicia Moder, the commander's wife.

What is clear is that, having them in his sights from above, the aide-de-camp did not aim at the nine young men who were in the street. Despite the police search, none of the seven projectiles fired by the captain were found, except for the corresponding seven casings collected on the balcony.

INITIAL SUSPICIONS

Mardones, one of the attackers, declared that during the shootout he threw himself to the ground and covered his head with both arms. "When I got up, I saw that the gentleman on the second floor was retreating toward the interior." What Mardones said next summarizes the core of that night's mystery.

It is the coded clue to the enigma, still unresolved, of those seconds in which Commander Araya’s life was extinguished.

"When I was lying down and covering my head with my arms, I heard shots of a different caliber, distinct from the first burst." It is the precise instant in which those two shots "as if they were of a different caliber, distinct from the bursts"—the same ones that Claverie, Perry, and Palma Ramírez declared hearing—were fired against the commander.

Perry and Palma were part of the attackers. Elsa Moder and Armando Michell were relatives of the aide-de-camp's wife.

Carlos Farías specified the events that occurred immediately afterward, when the group ran along Fidel Oteíza toward Pedro de Valdivia to the east, a corner located 95 steps from the aide-de-camp's house. "When I and some others reached the corner of Fidel Oteíza and Pedro de Valdivia, shots continued to be heard.

Therefore, I presume that, apart from the two who had already fired (Claverie and himself), there was another person who remained in retreat and who also fired, or rather, could have fired against the aide-de-camp's house."

Farías's conclusion is similar to that of lawyer Raúl Tavolari Oliveros, who at the time assumed the defense of Claverie, accused and convicted by the Naval Court of Valparaíso and the Naval Court-Martial as the person who killed the aide-de-camp with one of the three shots he fired that night.

"To cause his death, Commander Araya was shot from a place different from where Claverie was," Tavolari said when responding to the accusation against his client in the trial. A brief phrase that at the time proved irrelevant to the naval judges.

The naval justice system accepted as proven that President Allende's aide-de-camp died from one of the shots fired by Claverie, and that the attack was "fortuitous," because "it is reliably proven in the proceedings that both the perpetrator and his companions were absolutely unaware of the victim's military status.

The act was directed at killing a stranger and not a military man (...) without any prior preparation," the sentence states.

THE NEW LEAD

However, 32 years later, things are taking a different turn, and a lead provided a couple of weeks ago by a former civil police officer who was part of the group that investigated the crime before the coup d'état threatens to dismantle the official truth that the naval justice system established about the assassination after the military coup.

According to ballistic expert reports, none of the weapons found fired the .22 Long Rifle caliber projectile that killed the aide-de-camp, nor did they fire the four shell casings (three Orbea brand and one Remington brand) of .22 Long Rifle caliber found in the street in front of the aide-de-camp's house.

Another seven casings found at Providencia and Lyon were fired by the same weapon that fired the three Orbea casings in front of the aide-de-camp's house. But the weapon Claverie used, from which the shots that produced the 11 aforementioned Orbea casings presumably came, disappeared. Therefore, it was never scientifically established that it was that automatic rifle that fired them.

Despite this, the naval justice system established that one of the four bullets whose casings were found in the street in front of the house "struck Commander Araya and caused his death," even though none of the ballistic expert reports issued before the military coup established that conclusion.

Except for two issued after September 11, 1973. But even these two reports are ambiguous because, on the other hand, they defend what was established in the autopsy regarding the trajectory of the homicidal bullet.

The information provided by the retired police officer to the aide-de-camp's children, Enrique and Arturo, is consistent with multiple pieces of evidence in the case file, in that the attack on Commander Araya was a well-organized and coordinated plot, in which three concerted groups acted that night. LND studied the 2,000 pages of the 6 volumes of the file.

AUTOPSY AND EXPERT REPORTS

According to the autopsy report on the aide-de-camp, "the intracorporeal trajectory followed by the projectile, with the body in a normal position, is from front to back, from left to right, and slightly from top to bottom. The shot corresponds to those called long-distance in forensic medicine and is of a homicidal type."

Therefore, according to the laws of physics and ballistics, the aide-de-camp could never have died from one of the four shots fired from the street by Claverie or Farías, if the balcony where he was standing was 4.5 meters high from the ground.

Nor could it have happened that way, because Claverie fired, according to the reconstruction of the scene, "from right to left" in relation to the aide-de-camp's location.

And if the shot corresponded to those of "long distance" and "homicidal type," that is to say, fired deliberately with the certain intention of causing someone's death, distinct from the "fan-shaped" burst that Claverie launched, who then fired "slightly from top to bottom" and from "left to right" according to the trajectory of the homicidal bullet examined by the autopsy?

Ballistic expert reports detected five bullet impacts on the walls of the house. "Three adjacent to the bedroom window; one on the upper edge of the shutter on the window (of the bedroom); and one in the vicinity of the place where Commander Araya was wounded." (see infographic).

This description contains another part of the mystery. Because the casings found in front of the house were four, but there were five bullet impacts on the walls. Who fired the fifth projectile and from where, and why was the casing of that fifth shot not found, nor that of the sixth shot that killed the aide-de-camp?

CONTRASTS

"Your father was killed by a sharpshooter who fired at him from the front, from that large house that still exists and that was a school for nuns," the retired investigative officer told the aide-de-camp's children. He affirmed that they reached that conclusion, but that the coup occurred and they did not have time to record it in a written report.

According to the photographs from the scene reconstruction report, the commander faced the attack with his body slightly turned to the right. That is to say, presenting the left part of his thorax more prominently. And the autopsy maintained that the bullet entered and lodged in his thorax "from left to right."

According to all this and the information from the police officer, it can be inferred that it would have been a sharpshooter who, from that location, would have fired the two shots that several people heard seconds after Claverie’s bursts, Farías’s shot, and the aide-de-camp’s bursts.

Did the projectile that struck under the edge of the balcony correspond to the same type of bullet that killed the aide-de-camp? The commander's children wonder why the Naval Court of Valparaíso did not investigate these questions that now prove vital to clarifying their father's crime.

Captain Aldo Montagna Barghetto acted as prosecutor in the proceedings, and naval officer Jorge Garretón Iturra, former consul general in Caracas, acted as secretary. The naval judge was Rear Admiral Arturo Troncoso Daroch, with Captain Enrique Campusano Palacios serving as the Navy auditor.

A PLOT

In this new light, the analysis of the file confirms that the crime against aide-de-camp Araya was part of a plot, in which three coordinated groups acted that night. Nevertheless, the Naval Court's sentence stated that "the homicide took place without any prior preparation." Hours before the crime, at six in the evening on July 26, 1973, Claverie and Guillermo Bunster spoke with the leaders of Patria y Libertad "Miguel Cessa, a certain Alonso, and others whose names I do not remember," Claverie said.

At 20:30, both went to the house of Jorge Ehlers Ölkers and his son-in-law Alejandro Ellis. They told them, according to Claverie, that they were looking for them to gather their group, because that night they had to create chaos in a sector of Providencia "because the Navy is descending on Santiago tonight." Ehlers obtained the .22 Long Marcatti for them and gave them a box of miguelitos (caltrops).

The group gathered at Bunster's house. Each one left with a weapon. At 23:00 hours, Ehlers and Ellis gave them the go-ahead. That night, aide-de-camp Araya was accompanying President Allende at the reception at the Cuban embassy. The captain arrived at his house at 00:30 hours on the 27th.

The group began to drive around the sector. "We started to get bored," said Alejandro Figari, another member, until "Claverie told us that the signal was a bomb." The first bomb, on Carlos Antúnez, was the indication for Juan Zacconi and Guillermo Necochea to enter through Pedro de Valdivia and go down Fidel Oteíza to the west, to throw the second bomb in front of the aide-de-camp's house in order to make him come out. "We thought there would be no coup d'état that night when we heard the explosion," said Zacconi.

"Upon hearing the explosion near Pedro de Valdivia, the Perrys, Palma, Farías, Claverie, and Bunster arrived," said Andrés Potin, another conspirator. "Claverie told us to enter through Carlos Antúnez and turn onto Fidel Oteíza," stated Figari. Everything was coordinated.

Palma, Figari, and Potin were later agents of the Comando Conjunto.

The assassination of aide-de-camp Araya is being investigated again by the judge of the 17th Criminal Court of Santiago, Patricia González. This week, the magistrate issued an order to investigate to the Special Affairs and Human Rights Brigade of the civil police.

Added to this is another complaint that the aide-de-camp's children filed on Friday against Jorge Ehlers and other civilians who were part of the plot.

by Jorge Escalante

Source: lanacion.cl, March 20, 2005

39 years ago: the assassination of Commander Arturo Araya Peeters

It was a planned assassination intended to establish, within the Navy, the principles that would govern the bloody coup d'état of September 11. The fascist right perpetrated the crime... Washington sheltered and financed it. Our memory remains alive.

At midnight on July 26, 1973, the Naval Aide-de-Camp to President Salvador Allende, Commander Arturo Araya Peeters, was assassinated by a sniper who fired at him point-blank from somewhere in front of his home.

Shortly before, he had arrived at his house after attending—accompanying the socialist president—a reception at the Cuba embassy. One of the criminals who participated in the crime, Guillermo Claverie Bartet, was sentenced to three years in prison.

However, he did not spend a single day in jail serving that sentence. Even while a fugitive, he was pardoned by the dictatorship thanks to a decision by Admiral José Toribio Merino Castro.

It was a planned assassination intended to establish, within the Navy, the principles that would govern the bloody coup d'état of September 11, and at the same time, a reminder that any man in the Navy who did not agree with the fascist-like plans of Admiral Merino Castro would be considered a traitor and punished with death. This is what happened to Araya, an honest man loyal to the Constitution.

On the night of July 26 to 27, 1973, a sniper opened fire on the sailor while mercenaries from Patria y Libertad created an uproar in the street in front of his house, after firing some shots into the air in order to get the presidential aide to come out to the balcony of his home to investigate what was happening. At that moment, a bullet struck Commander Araya Peeters in the chest.

The crime, which at the time the right wing and naval intelligence services tried to blame on ghostly armed leftist groups, was in reality the work of a sordid far-right conspiracy with the support of coup-plotting Navy officers.

A total of 32 members of Patria y Libertad, whose founder was Pablo Rodríguez Grez, were arrested and prosecuted by the Naval Prosecutor's Office, but all were set free after a few "slaps on the wrist." Only one of them, Guillermo Claverie, after having been a fugitive for a time, was sentenced to three years and one day in prison as the material author of the crime, a sentence he did not serve either, since, in the end, all the conspirators were pardoned in 1981 by the murderer and thief surnamed Pinochet Ugarte, "for services rendered to the Fatherland."

In an interview published by the newspaper La Nación, Claverie swore he was innocent and asserted that he was forced to confess after suffering multiple tortures carried out by officers of the Navy and the Air Force, and that he was apparently chosen as a scapegoat by his bosses in Patria y Libertad, among them Pablo Rodríguez.

Although he admitted to having been at the scene of the events, he said that he always remained in the street and that the trajectory of the bullet that killed the aide, who was on a balcony, was from top to bottom.

He also claimed to have fired his pistol after he saw the man fall from the balcony and that at that moment he did not know who it was. Claverie's statements were part of the argument in the Court of Appeals by Arturo Araya, the victim's son and a plaintiff lawyer in the trial.

The planned crime committed against the Navy Commander and aide to President Allende, which occurred on Fidel Oteíza street—between Marchant Pereira and Carlos Antúnez—in the commune of Providencia, was ultimately and clearly a well-mounted terrorist operation of intelligence and political destabilization, structured by the extreme right together with fascist and ultra-nationalist groups embedded in the armed forces, who counted on the support and financing of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), just as the North American government acknowledged many years later when it declassified its confidential documents.

The coup plotters of the SIN (Naval Intelligence Service) had already been executing dozens of attacks and self-inflicted bombings, some previously "negotiated," such as the one carried out at the house of the coup-plotting Admiral Ismael Huerta in mid-July 1973 in Viña del Mar, with the objective of building an environment favorable to the upcoming coup d'état.

The "Bataan" machine gun with which the militant of the Comando Rolando Matus and SIN agent infiltrated in the state company Ecom, Guillermo Claverie Bartet, shot Commander Araya after detonating a decoy bomb and shooting at the front of the house to make him come out to the balcony, was supplied by the SIN through Jorge Ehlers Trostel, a character who later—in the midst of the dictatorship—would occupy a high position in the sports area (Digeder).

Claverie Bartet had already been detected firing against troops loyal to the Constitution on the day of the tanquetazo (June 1973) from a terrace of Ecom (the guy believed that day the Navy was starting a coup; this was published shortly before the coup by the biweekly directed by Marta Harnecker, Chile Hoy). He was fired from Ecom, but not handed over to the Police... incredibly!!

THE MURDERERS FABRICATE AN OUTRAGEOUS ALIBI

The then-lieutenant of the SIN, Daniel Guimpert Corvalán, together with the Carabineros Intelligence captain Germán Esquivel Caballero, who would later participate in multiple "disappearances" committed by the Comando Conjunto and the Sicar, was responsible for carrying out one of the dirtiest and most cowardly aspects of the destabilizing plot.

The day after the assassination of President Allende's naval aide—a Saturday—Esquivel and Guimpert scoured various police stations looking for a "scapegoat" to pin the crime on. The one chosen was a prisoner arrested for drunkenness who worked at a Corfo company (Seam) and carried a membership card for a Unidad Popular party (the Radical Party).

Since that was not very convincing nor enough to complete their plans, they fabricated a Socialist Party membership card and interrogated the official "privately," who, subjected to savage torture, incriminated himself for having participated in the assassination "together with a PS–Elenos commando" and some Cubans.

The Seam Corfo mechanic ended up charged and prosecuted by the Naval Justice under the direction of prosecutor Aldo Montagna.

The name of the electrical mechanic from Seam Corfo tortured by Guimpert and Esquivel was José Luis Riquelme Bascuñán, and he was interrogated and charged by the conspiring minister of the Court of Appeals (Abraham Meerson) and by the military prosecutor Joaquín Erlbaum.

The unfortunate mechanic was so well tortured that he blamed himself for having participated in the crime with a group of GAPs and Cubans led by Bruno (Domingo Blanco), one of the leaders of the GAP.

The following day, opposition media and various politicians—among whom stood out the right-wing senators Víctor García Garzena and Fernando Ochagavía, along with the Christian Democrat deputy Claudio Orrego Vicuña and the director of the Christian Democrat newspaper La Prensa, Jorge Navarrete—began a campaign of insults and accusations against the UP government and the Cuban representation in Chile.

The problem for the conspirators of various stripes and affiliations who concerted themselves around the false discovery of Commander Araya's murderers was that, a few days later, the Investigative Police arrested almost all the members of the gang formed by elements of the Comando Rolando Matus (CRM), National Party (PN), Radical Democracy (DR), and Patria y Libertad, who had participated directly in the assassination of the aide.

Among them stood out: the alleged author of the shots (Guillermo Claverie), a leader of the National Party Youth and the CRM—Uca Eileen Lozano—, the "Patria y Libertad" son of the well-known bakery businessman Castaño, Odilio Castaño Jiménez; the Patria y Libertad militant, Luis "Fifo" Palma Ramírez, who two years later would have a prominent participation in the Sifa and in the disappearances of the Comando Conjunto, a CRM nephew of the DINA psychiatrist, Laihlacar, with the surname Potin Laihlacar, the DR leader, Guillermo Schilling, and a CRM militant, Miguel Sepúlveda Campos, son of a well-known retired admiral. ()

Those who were not arrested hid on a farm in the Valparaíso Region and turned themselves in to a Navy commando the day after the coup. Those who were detained and prosecuted in the prisons of Valparaíso and Santiago were taken out of prison on September 12 by SIN commandos and integrated into repressive activities. The crime of Commander Araya remained unpunished and with the file disappeared.

EVERYTHING CHANGES

Lieutenant Guimpert Corvalán left the Navy in the late 70s and dedicated himself to running an arms sales business in the vicinity of the Armed Forces Building in Plaza Bulnes. He enjoyed release on bail until he was arrested again, accused in more than a dozen cases of forcibly disappeared persons, in some of which he was even pardoned in the early 90s.

His accomplice in the attempt to falsify the assassination of Commander Araya—Guillermo Esquivel—reached the rank of colonel of Carabineros in the Dicomcar and was arrested—for bounced checks—in 1991. He died in strange and never-clarified circumstances in 1993, while he was being denounced in various trials for disappearances and murders.

35 years after the assassination of President Allende's courageous aide, the official version provided by the dictatorship began to crumble in the courts and the truth emerged: It was a crime planned by the right wing against Commander Araya.

The measure, which the officer's family had requested for the first time in August 2003, was approved following the appearance of new evidence provided by Guillermo Claverie.

On April 28, 2008, the Santiago Court of Appeals ordered the reopening of the investigation into the assassination. Unanimously, the Eighth Chamber of the appellate court determined that the court in charge of the case should proceed with the reopening of the investigation, take testimony from Guillermo Claverie Bartet (today 63 years old), and carry out other proceedings derived from it.

The account that Claverie gave to the journalists of La Nación Domingo a few years ago raises doubts. He asserted that he still felt fear of what the old (and new) members of the coup-plotting brotherhoods could do to him.

"I could never read my statements that they made me sign at the Naval Prosecutor's Office. And one day that I started to read one of them, after an interrogation, the secretary of the naval prosecutor Aldo Montagna, the officer Jorge Garretón Iturra, put his hand into the jacket of his uniform and pulled out a pistol.

And he said to me: 'Hey, you idiot, you're reading a lot, be grateful that you're still alive and sign there!' And of course, that's how I always signed everything."

His confessions confirm what the aide's children have been discovering in recent years, digging into the file of the trial initiated by the naval justice system and which culminated in 1980 with a three-year sentence for Claverie, as the sole material author, and with lesser sentences for minor crimes for other members of the group that acted that night: "It's just that that investigation is riddled with vices," maintains Arturo, the eldest son of the aide, who is a lawyer.

With these confessions from Claverie, the aide's children managed to get the Santiago Court of Appeals to order the reopening of the new process initiated from the complaint they filed in 2003, but which at the time was dismissed and archived by the 18th Criminal Court of Santiago.

THE BURNING QUESTIONS

To make Commander Araya come out to the balcony, Juan Zacconi and Guillermo Necochea (members of 'Patria y Libertad') threw a bomb in front of his house. The aide's arrival at his home was announced to them by another bomb that exploded nearby, thrown by another group.

The second bombing, that of Zacconi and Necochea, was the signal for the third group, which was to enter through Fidel Oteíza street, to commit the assassination.

Ballistic experts detected five impacts on the walls of the Navy captain's house. But the shell casings found in front of the house were only four. With the projectile that mortally wounded the aide, and which entered directly without first bouncing off anywhere, the shots total six.

But the other two shell casings were never found. And the ballistic examinations established that the shell casings found in the street, corresponding to the shots fired by Claverie, did not belong to the projectile that pierced the aide's body.

That would mean that the commander was assassinated with a different weapon, and they shot him from another place—presumably from the front of his house—slightly from top to bottom. Despite all this evidence, the naval investigation concluded that Allende's aide died from one of Claverie's shots. But he insists on making explicit many questions, all of them without official answers.

Who fired the two shots that several witnesses, according to their declarations in the Naval Court process, heard immediately before the aide fired his burst toward the front and minutes before Claverie fired his four shots?

Did the former naval cadet Jorge Ehlers Trostel hire a sniper to assassinate Commander Araya Peeters, taking advantage of the chaos that Ehlers himself ordered the far-right group to create that night in the vicinity of the aide's house?

Why did Ehlers literally flee to Germany days after the aide's children filed the complaint in September 2003, taking refuge in that country until today?

Why did no one take into account the statement of two prostitutes that appears in the naval justice file, who claimed that, standing that night on the corner of Pedro de Valdivia and Providencia and seconds after hearing shots, they saw two men running out of a place, one of them with a rifle in his hand, and that they got into a pickup truck that had a disc that seemed to them to be a government vehicle?

TORTURE, PRESSURE, AND THREATS

Detained preventively in the Santiago Public Jail, one morning—still in the midst of the dictatorship—the guards took Claverie out and led him to the office of the Naval Prosecutor. In that place, Claverie himself told the newspaper La Nación, he was received by the naval officer Germán Arestizábal, who served as a clerk. "He made me get into an Austin Mini, where I recognized the Air Force officer with the surname Schindler, a schoolmate." They blindfolded him and took him to the Air War Academy, in Las Condes.

"There they tied me to a cot and started hitting me on the soles of my feet with a stick or an iron. Later they injected into my vein what I believe was pentothal, because they still hadn't gotten my own confession of the aide's crime, as they wanted. I never knew what I answered, but I couldn't have said something that was false," he expresses.

Days later, upon leaving an office where he had started working, a car approached him from which an individual he knew got out, who forced him to get into the vehicle.

"It was 'Fifo' Palma (Luis Palma Ramírez, who later joined the Comando Conjunto) and in the car I saw about five machine guns. Fifo said to me: 'Do you know that now we can kill you for talking, you idiot? You know that people who are now very important are involved in this. Don't you forget it.'"

That last phrase of the so-called 'Fifo' Palma—assuming Claverie is telling the truth—is what the court in charge of the reopening of the case will have to elucidate, as it is vital to establish the identity of those "people who are now very important." How 'important' are those people today?

Parliamentarians? Businessmen? Chilean diplomats abroad? Retired officers of the Armed Forces? Still-active officers? Political leaders? Leaders of employer associations? Sooner or later the country will know their names, which will be added to that of Guillermo Claverie, who was indeed in one of the seditious and criminal groups that fateful night.

() THE LIST OF MEMBERS OF THE ASSASSIN COMMAND (published by Cauce Magazine No. 15, 07/09/1984).

René Guillermo Claverie Bartet Mario Eduardo Rojas Zegers Guillermo Francisco Necochea Aspillaga Miguel Víctor Sepúlveda Campos (son of a retired Admiral) Uca Eileen Lozano Jeffs (CRM-JN) Guillermo Adolfo Schilling Rojas (cousin of 'Mamo' Schilling, leader of the Socialist Party) José Eduardo Iturriaga Aránguiz Luis Guillermo Perry González Luis César "Fifo" Palma Jiménez (later, he was a member of the Comando Conjunto) Ricardo Vélez Gómez Rafael Mardones Saint Jean (first cousin of José Luis Mardones Santander, President of BancoEstado) Adolfo Palma Ramírez (brother of Fifo Palma) Enrique Quiroz Ruiz Wilfredo Humberto Perry González Odilio Castaño Jiménez (current co-owner of the 'Castaño' bakery chain) Carlos Fernando Farías Corrales Juan Zacconi Quiroz Andrés Pablo Potin Lailhacar Tito Alejandro Figari Verdugo

========================================== By Wari

Source: elciudadano.cl, February 7, 2012

Guillermo Claverie, convicted as the author of the crime of Allende's aide: “I did not kill Commander Araya”

His story is like a novel. He maintains that he was tortured and drugged to extract a confession, and that at the Naval Prosecutor's Office he signed his statements at gunpoint. The aide's children, who no longer believe he was their father's murderer, are today his only light of hope.

For the first time, he tells his drama. He opens the door of his house with a smile, although he says that for him his existence is shattered. Cigarette in hand, shawl around his neck, and well-groomed, his friendly greeting fails to hide a grimace of suffering.

But a light, which seems to come from a good movie script, now turns on at the end of the dark tunnel that he has been crossing for 35 years.

"I did not kill your father, I did not assassinate aide Araya, believe me please!" cries Guillermo Claverie Bartet (62 years old) with a voice worn down by time that has treated him with rigor. Haunted by ghosts that have never given up on continuing to remind him of the hours and the shots of that night of July 26, 1973, on Fidel Oteiza street, in Providencia.

The night of the crime of the naval aide to President Salvador Allende, Arturo Araya Peeters.

"They beat me, they tortured me, they threatened me with death, and I lost my family and the will to live, but they never managed to get me to confess to the crime I did not commit, even though the naval justice system convicted me as the material author," he states, looking into one's eyes.

His name was etched in the collective memory as the official murderer of Allende's aide, after the plot that the instigators of the conspiracy to hasten the coup d'état—a far-right group and some high-ranking active-duty Navy officers of 1973—had planned to blame the crime on a leftist group, including some members of Allende's personal guard, fell apart.

Listening to Claverie's account is harrowing. It is the first time he has told his story, and it is not easy to convince him to speak with LND, because he still feels fear.

"I could never read my statements that they made me sign at the Naval Prosecutor's Office. And one day that I started to read one of them, after an interrogation, the secretary of the naval prosecutor Aldo Montagna, the officer Jorge Garretón Iturra, put his hand into the jacket of his uniform and pulled out a pistol.

And he said to me: 'Hey, you idiot, you're reading a lot, be grateful that you're still alive and sign there!' And of course, that's how I always signed everything."

His confessions confirm what the aide's children have been discovering in recent years, digging into the file of the trial initiated by the naval justice system and which culminated in 1980 with a three-year sentence for Claverie, as the sole material author, and with lesser sentences for minor crimes for other members of the group that acted that night: "It's just that that investigation is riddled with vices," maintains Arturo, the eldest son of the aide, who is a lawyer.

For almost five years, the children have been seeking for a new trial to establish the truth of their father's crime and for the true author(s), material and intellectual, to be known. But they have encountered "strange situations" that make them suspect that there are still hands that want to cover up more than a few things.

With these confessions from Claverie, the aide's children intend for the Santiago Court of Appeals to order the reopening of the new process initiated from the complaint they filed in 2003, but which a few months ago was dismissed and archived by the 18th Criminal Court of Santiago.

That night Guillermo Claverie's memory of what happened that night is still clear. When they entered Fidel Oteíza street, where the aide lived, it was near midnight.

"I saw a gentleman who leaned out onto a balcony and we shouted at him to go inside. Shortly before, we had been creating chaos in the surroundings, as we were ordered. Suddenly I heard some isolated shots and shortly after a burst of machine-gun fire that came from the balcony.

Then I saw the gentleman who with his left hand was holding a machine gun, and he was pointing toward the front and not downward, where we were passing."

Immediately afterward, says Claverie, he saw when the person on the balcony leaned downward as if doubling over. "I still hadn't fired," he clarifies.

He states that the artificial light of the street allowed him to glimpse that the man on the balcony was wearing a robe "sort of green-colored, like with some drawings on the chest that seemed to me to be stains. Today I think they were bloodstains, because it could be seen that the person was wounded."

Claverie still hadn't fired, but he did so moments after hearing the burst that the aide fired toward the front. "I did it when I no longer had him in sight, because when I heard the burst I ducked and sought to take refuge under the balcony, sticking myself to the wall; I stopped seeing him and then I just fired a few shots.

It is impossible that my shots even wounded the person on the balcony who was 4.5 meters above the street level, because I no longer saw him at all."

The impossibilities

All these details, which Claverie has been providing to the aide's children and which he now agreed to tell LND, fully coincide with the ballistic examinations carried out by the Investigative Police for the process initiated in 1973 by the naval justice system.

And they ratify the result of the autopsy performed on aide Araya at the Military Hospital by Dr. Tomás Tobar Pinochet, considered an eminence by his peers and the same one who performed the autopsy on President Allende.

Regarding the bullet that killed the aide by striking him in the chest, the forensic report of Dr. Tobar establishes: "The intracorporeal trajectory followed by the projectile while the body was in a normal position [standing], is from front to back, from left to right, and slightly from top to bottom.

The shot corresponds to those called long-distance in forensic medicine and is of the homicidal type."

The precise scientific description destroys any possibility that Claverie's shots, as he also asserts, could kill or wound the aide. Unless the laws of physics and ballistics are profaned, or one intentionally wants to alter the circumstances of the crime.

Dr. Tobar's definition that the shot that caused the death of Commander Araya corresponded "to those called long-distance in forensic medicine" coincides with Claverie's version regarding his location that night: almost stuck to the wall of the house and 4.5 meters below the balcony where the commander was.

Just as it is registered in the naval court file. That is to say, he was almost next to the victim.

The traces of the truth

Ballistic examinations detected five bullet impacts on the walls of the Navy captain's house. "Three adjacent to the bedroom window, one on the upper edge of the window shutter [of the bedroom], and one in the vicinity of the place where Commander Araya was wounded [immediately below the edge of the balcony]."

But the shell casings found in front of the house were only four. With the projectile that mortally wounded the aide, and which entered directly without first bouncing off anywhere, the shots total six.

But the other two shell casings were never found. And the ballistic examinations established that none of the shell casings found in the street, corresponding to the shots fired by Claverie, belong to the projectile found in the aide's body.

That means that the aide was assassinated with a different weapon, and they shot him from another place—presumably from the front of his house—slightly from top to bottom.

Despite all this evidence, the naval investigation concluded that Allende's aide died from one of Claverie's shots. Who fired the two shots that several witnesses, according to their declarations in the Naval Court process, heard immediately before the aide fired his burst toward the front and minutes before Claverie fired his four shots?

This evidence squares with the six shots fired that night toward the aide's balcony: four shell casings found and two never found.

Did the former naval cadet Jorge Ehlers Trostel hire a sniper to assassinate Commander Araya, taking advantage of the chaos that Ehlers himself ordered the far-right group to create that night in the vicinity of the aide's house?

Why did Ehlers literally flee to Germany days after the aide's children filed the complaint in September 2003, taking refuge in that country until today?

Why did no one take into account the statement of two prostitutes that appears in the naval justice file (whose names LND reserves), affirming that, standing that night on the corner of Pedro de Valdivia and Providencia and seconds after hearing shots, they saw two men running out of a place, one of them with a rifle in his hand, and that they got into a pickup truck that had a disc that seemed to them to be a government vehicle?

Upon studying the six thousand pages of the Naval Court file, as LND did, and analyzing the declarations of the young far-rightists (some from Patria y Libertad) who acted that night, it is established that three coordinated groups acted waiting for the aide to arrive at his house from the Cuban Embassy, where he had accompanied President Allende to a reception for the anniversary of the triumph of the Cuban Revolution.

To make Commander Araya come out to the balcony, Juan Zacconi and Guillermo Necochea threw a bomb in front of his house. The aide's arrival at his house was announced to them by another bomb that exploded nearby, thrown by another group. The second bombing, that of Zacconi and Necochea, was the signal for the third group, which was to enter through Fidel Oteíza street, to do so.

Torture at the AGA

While Claverie was detained in the Santiago Public Jail, one morning the guards took him out and led him to the office of the Naval Prosecutor. There, he says, he was received by the naval officer Germán Arestizábal, who acted as a clerk. "He took me out and made me get into an Austin Mini, where I recognized the Air Force officer with the surname Schindler, a schoolmate." They blindfolded him and took him to the Air War Academy, in Las Condes.

"There they tied me to a cot and started hitting me on the soles of my feet with a stick or an iron. Later they injected into my vein what I believe was pentothal, because they still hadn't gotten my own confession of the aide's crime, as they wanted. I never knew what I answered, but I couldn't have said something that was false," he expresses.

When they released him from jail, a year and a half later, he says that at his house in Santiago a small party was held for him by the group with whom he acted the night of the crime. But during the gathering, he received more than one surprise.

"That afternoon, the secretary of the Naval Prosecutor's Office, Garretón Iturra, Arestizábal, and another officer whom I did not know, who said he came representing the Navy, also arrived. Jorge Ehlers also arrived, who strangely gave me a whole cheese, which in the language of intelligence means that you are giving a gift to a traitor."

Days later, upon leaving an office where he had started working, a car approached him on the street from which they forced him to get in.

"It was Fifo Palma [César Palma Ramírez who later joined the Comando Conjunto] and in the car I saw about five machine guns. Fifo said to me: 'Do you know that now we can kill you for talking, you idiot?' I asked him if it was because I said I wasn't the murderer of Commander Araya, and he answered: 'Ah, it seems you're getting wise, you idiot!

You know that people who are now very important are involved in this. Don't you forget it.'"

An epilogue of emotion

Claverie remains silent for a long time. Then he looks at Enrique, one of the aide's children present in the conversation, and says in a calm tone: "Having met you and talking with you has meant for me, after 35 years, the disappearance of that guilt that I never had, but that in the end they etched into my mind with beatings and threats.

Now I feel that with them, the children of Commander Araya, I share a pain and I have grown so fond of them that when I don't hear from them on the phone I miss them."

The pardon that Augusto Pinochet granted him and the whole group on July 22, 1981, "for services rendered to the fatherland," did not manage to heal his wounds. "I have never seen so many cowards together!" he expresses, as if putting a seal on everything he had to live through after the crime.

Source: La Nación, April 20, 2008