Sandra Contreras, one of the daughters of retired Sergeant Major Manuel Contreras Donaire—who was pardoned in 2005 for the murder of the ANEF leader—described to LND the physical and psychological abuse her family suffered for years, living almost as if they were in a CNI barracks.

After years of estrangement, the former repressor reappeared to file for divorce from his wife, reigniting the anguish of those years. Like Benedetti’s "Capitancito Montes," retired Sergeant Major Manuel Contreras Donaire also struck his children and wife many times, until he was exhausted.

But "it has been so long, and in reality so little, since those outbursts," to quote the Uruguayan writer, that little or nothing must remain in the memory of this former repressor, pardoned in 2005 by then-President Ricardo Lagos after a brief period in prison as a perpetrator of the murder of Tucapel Jiménez, leader of the National Association of Fiscal Employees (ANEF), carried out by the CNI in February 1982.

This is not the case for Sandra Contreras Pizarro, one of the four children from the retired military officer’s first marriage. After a long process of closing wounds, the ghost of that abusive father has returned to haunt her life and that of her family, ever since Contreras Donaire reappeared in April of this year to request a divorce from his wife, Leonor Pizarro, from whom he had been de facto separated since 1988.

The wound began to bleed profusely again, and Sandra could not overcome that horrific past. After nearly 22 years since the last beating, this 37-year-old pharmacy assistant broke her silence to shake off the ordeal of living with a repressor behind closed doors.

Sandra is currently mired in deep depression, on medical leave, undergoing therapy, and a slave to a cocktail of antipsychotics and sleep aids that she neatly keeps in a plastic box labeled with the initials of each day of the week.

At times, her gaze wanders, and then she covers her face to hold back tears, not without difficulty, as she relives the episodes of violence that marked her childhood and that of her siblings. Indelible, she asserts, remain the days of being left bleeding, lying on the floor from the slaps, punches, and kicks that "dad" would dish out for sitting poorly at the table, for following the bad example of "your mother the whore"; for no reason at all, just because.

As if the irony were worth it, after a hard day in the clandestine barracks, he barely had the patience to tolerate "spoiled" children, whimpering or running here and there. "Our house was a regiment. During vacations, we were in bed by eight at night.

For him, at 30 years old, we could only just start thinking about getting married. Forget about parties! We never went on class trips; there was no permission. He hit us for anything and with whatever he had at hand.

If we were sitting poorly at the table, in the street, for whatever reason" (she holds back tears). That was the childhood of Sandra and her siblings. A childhood of early psychiatric treatments based on amphetamines, when she was barely eight years old.

A whole life enduring a monster, terrified to the point of wetting themselves, subjected to a silence that was only broken when the sergeant ordered it. A silence that, despite the beatings, she and her family kept so as not to damage the "dad’s" military career, like that hot February of 1982, when they murdered Tucapel Jiménez, and "they kept us locked in the military villa where we lived.

We had no contact with anyone for about a week." The rigor and extreme discipline of a military father turned Sandra into an oak, as she admits. However, despite being the daughter of a man committed to the dictatorship, she never identified with the regime.

And it cost her dearly: "I never agreed with the military. I went to church, and because of that, he always called me a communist, and I was the one he hit the most." But that oak has collapsed just when she thought the bitter memory was buried and was clinging to the love of her husband and her three daughters in a quiet neighborhood on the west side of Santiago. "We had to run away and hide.

He would hit my mom when she was pregnant. Once, he caught my older sister smoking and beat the hell out of all of us. I can’t tell you he gave us electric shocks, but he tortured us all the same. When he calmed down, he would come and start: never again, forgive me, my ugly black girl, as he used to call me," she says.

Nayareth, the youngest of Sandra’s daughters, follows the story attentively. Her mother’s eyes well up, and with a trace of horror stuck in her chest, she declares: "As a military daughter, I have traits.

I was an oak, but that oak has now fallen because of all the damage he did to me. This has marked me for life," she says, hitting the table. The girl interrupts: "Make that old man pay!" In April of this year, Manuel Contreras Donaire filed for divorce from Leonor Pizarro before the Third Family Court of Santiago.

In the divorce petition, the former DINE agent appeals to Article 62 of the Civil Marriage Law and rejects any type of financial compensation for his wife, as she, he notes, "performed paid labor" during the time the marriage lasted.

After the separation in 1988, Contreras Donaire rebuilt his life with a young woman with whom he was having an extramarital affair at the time. He has three daughters with her today. From that year on, Sandra, her mother, and her siblings left the military villa at the 4th stop of Avenida Pajaritos and lost all contact with the military officer.

Sandra’s siblings later visited him in "prison," where Contreras Donaire served part of the eight years to which he was sentenced for the murder of Tucapel Jiménez. "When we left the military villa, my mother had to iron and wash clothes to pay for our studies; she took it all on.

He rebuilt his life and had three daughters whose university he paid for. Because he was good at his job, he was rewarded with trips to Antarctica and Colombia. Today he has a property in Arica, he retired, and he didn’t give my mother a cent," Sandra asserts.

Overwhelmed, she decided to seek help to confront her father legally and turned to Deputy Tucapel Jiménez, son of the murdered ANEF leader. "Hello, I am the daughter of the man who killed your father," she told him over the phone.

It was not easy. It was not easy for the parliamentarian either. Jiménez did not immediately associate the surname Contreras, until he heard the dramatic story that the daughter of his father’s murderer was recounting with an altered voice on the other end of the line. "She told me her drama, and I didn’t hesitate to help her.

I have always maintained a stance of understanding toward the families of these murderers. These families were also victims, just like us. She can count on me for whatever is necessary. But it was very difficult.

It is a delicate subject. It involves an individual who was pardoned, who also never cooperated or showed any remorse," Jiménez maintained to LND. Sandra and her family lived in a true concentration camp.

Just like that. A reality that, according to her account, was not much different from that of the other families of uniformed personnel who lived in the military villa. In his home, he was the one in charge.

And just like in the Chile of that time, in the Contreras house, not "a leaf moved" without "dad" knowing. As happened when Doña Leonor, now 62, told him about the pregnancy of her eldest daughter, and the CNI dealt out punches and kicks to everyone equally.

Sandra was barely a 14-year-old brat. "That day, my siblings and I were on the second floor waiting for him to arrive, armed with a baseball bat, a tennis racket, and I had a pair of scissors. When mom told him, he stared at her and said: 'Sure, why not, if that’s the example you set, you whore,' and he hit her," she narrates. "I went down and confronted him.

He punched me. My siblings and my mother tried to defend me, and he started hitting them. At dawn, he started crying and asking for me. He had a gun in his hand and was putting on a show that he was going to commit suicide.

That was the first time I let it all out, but I enraged him, and he beat me even worse. They put ice on my eye, and the next day at the Military Hospital, I had to say I had fallen off my bike," she adds.

Sandra barely keeps a couple of the few photographs in which, like a good Intelligence man, Contreras Donaire showed himself. She says she destroyed the rest, like the sad image of that abusive father. "I killed my dad when I was 14.

I made my own life, my family was healing the wounds, but he reappeared and hurt my mom. Because of him, I am losing work, losing my salary. No one gives me this back, nor the health I lost; he is killing us. I am a little girl under the table. That’s how I see myself now, that’s how I was before. But I am going to move forward; I am aware," she says, anguished.

Source: La Nación, October 21, 2007

A high-ranking government official recently found himself face-to-face with a vehicle traveling brazenly against traffic in the La Reina commune. Since he had a driver, the official thought it was an official car and thought about the criticism the incident could unleash.

He noted the license plate and planned to reproach whoever was the unruly driver for their poor behavior. But the car did not belong to La Moneda; it belonged to the Army. According to a journalistic investigation by La Nación, the anonymous passenger was Brigadier (R) Jaime Lepe Orellana, the former Secretary General of the Army and right-hand man to General Pinochet, who has been hired as a civilian by the institution, despite having retired amidst a stormy controversy over his connection to the 1976 murder of the Spaniard Carmelo Soria.

Lepe’s rehiring was confirmed by a high-ranking source in the Ministry of Defense, who requested anonymity. It is not the only case. The source confirmed that Brigadier (R) Miguel Krassnoff Marchenko is in the same situation, having been prosecuted for the disappearance of several political prisoners at Villa Grimaldi.

Lepe Orellana serves as an advisor to the Military Industry Command, while Krassnoff is still the manager of the Military Officers’ Hotel, located at Providencia 1219, although he is currently suspended because he has been detained by judicial order at the Telecommunications Command since November of last year.

When asked about the new roles of Lepe and Krassnoff, the Ministry of Defense revealed last Friday that both provide services on a contract basis and as civilians for the institution. "The Army has been informed of the inappropriateness of this situation continuing," said the source consulted at the Ministry. "The Army expressed understanding of our point of view." Therefore, that department expects "measures to be taken." According to the source consulted, the hiring of both is legal, "but it constitutes an inconsistency with the spirit of collaboration in human rights matters that the Army has demonstrated through the dialogue table." The Army’s Public Relations Department declined to provide information or comment on these facts. The practice of hiring retired uniformed personnel as civilians allows them to improve their pension with a second income. Nothing extraordinary According to a person very close to Miguel Krassnoff—who speaks on condition of anonymity—the retired officer hopes to return to his job at the hotel as soon as he is granted the provisional release he has repeatedly requested from the Fourth Criminal Court of San Miguel, where the disappearance of Manuel Cortés Joo is being investigated. That file has just passed into the hands of the special judge Juan Guzmán. The magistrate also prosecuted Krassnoff for the disappearance of several political prisoners at Villa Grimaldi but granted him the right to provisional release. "Miguel Krassnoff is not the only officer involved in these types of cases who provides services as a civilian in the Army. It is a generalized situation," states the source close to the military officer. It is common for uniformed personnel who retire for service reasons to be rehired as civilians by their institution, and being linked to trials for human rights violations is not an impediment, he reveals. "There is nothing questionable about it. These are not people who are per se sadistic, fascist, cruel, or whatever you want to call them. They are obedient officers who were just over 20 years old when these events occurred. They only followed orders, and, moreover, they developed an impeccable career. It is normal for the Army to want to continue counting on their services," he explains. Lepe, meanwhile, was never prosecuted, as the trial investigating the death of Carmelo Soria was amnestied by the Supreme Court, but President Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle vetoed his promotion to the body of generals in 1997, amidst a bitter public controversy. Thus, the man who kept General Augusto Pinochet’s agenda became a brigadier without a post until September 2000, when he retired. On that occasion, the Minister of the Interior, José Miguel Insulza, praised his departure. Carmen Soria recalled that, as established in judicial investigations and in the testimonies of former agents José Ríos San Martín and Michael Townley, Lepe disguised himself as a Carabineros officer to kidnap her father and then allegedly participated in the torture sessions he was subjected to. "The political exiles, who committed no crime other than thinking differently, could never work in the public administration again," she opines. "And yet, these people who are linked to atrocious crimes continue to enjoy privileges at the expense of all taxpayers. It is a mockery and an atrocity." Not only in the Army Among the background information that emerged in the trial for the murder of Tucapel Jiménez is that two former agents of the Army Intelligence Directorate (DINE), Manuel Contreras Donaire and Miguel Letelier Verdugo, provided services to the Army for fees until, by virtue of the indictment affecting them, they were placed in preventive detention. According to sources close to their defense, their services "were necessary because they are intelligence and secret service personnel. You don’t have to fly very high to assume that there is certain information and contacts that are maintained despite having retired." However, the source denies unofficial information that they would continue to collaborate sporadically from confinement. According to the records, it is not only in the Army that personnel implicated in accusations of human rights violations have been rehired. In the Air Force, former DINA agent Colonel (R) Mario Jahn Barrera has been the director of the Aeronautical and Space Museum, dependent on the Civil Aeronautics Directorate, since he retired in the mid-80s. In the 70s, Jahn Barrera was one of the DINA chiefs who, using the pseudonym Luis Gutiérrez, became the "roving ambassador" between the countries that formed the network of cooperation in repressive tasks known as "Operation Condor," according to the background information that emerged from the so-called "archives of terror" of Alfredo Stroessner’s dictatorship and which are part of the lawsuit filed against him before special judge Juan Guzmán. Barrera, however, does not appear as prosecuted in this case. One of the pilots of the "Caravan of Death," Emilio Robert de la Mahotiere, has worked since 1996 in Operational Security of the Aeronautics Directorate, under a contract that is renewed annually. In his case, although his participation as the military pilot who transported the group commanded by Sergio Arellano is proven in the trial, Judge Juan Guzmán did not consider him deserving of criminal punishment. The Communications Department of the Aeronautics Directorate responded that "we do not provide information about the details of our institution’s staff." Air Force gives explanations for rehiring officers implicated in human rights cases The Chilean Air Force (Fach) responded this morning through various channels that there is no legal impediment, "nor can one discriminate" in the rehiring of retired personnel, in response to allegations that officers implicated in human rights violations during the military regime had returned to that institution. Also on this subject, the Army declined to refer to the jobs given to Brigadiers (R) Miguel Krassnoff and Jaime Lepe. Although the institution declined to provide an official version, a high-ranking source stated that "as long as there is no judicial conviction, one cannot discriminate against a person." At the same time, the Communications Department of the Fach clarified that one of the questioned former officers, Colonel (R) Mario Jahn Barrera, was rehired as director of the Aeronautical Museum and as such does not depend directly on the Institution, but on the National Directorate of Civil Aeronautics. Meanwhile, Fach lawyer Jorge Balmaceda clarified that the DFL1 or Armed Forces Statute allows for the calling to active service and the hiring of former personnel, so there is no legal impediment. "The fact that crimes were committed or not is of a personal nature, so the courts of justice must pronounce themselves through due process of law, not through speculation or simple statements," the professional pointed out. Army The Army will not make any reference to the subject of rehiring retired personnel who participated in the former DINA—cases of Brigadiers Miguel Krassnoff and Jaime Lepe—and who would be involved in human rights violations. It was reported that these are already known matters and that the authorities who can refer to the subject are on a tour with the commander-in-chief of the institution, Lieutenant General Juan Emilio Cheyre.

Source: Primera Línea, Tuesday, April 16, 2002

First-instance ruling issued 20 years after the crime TUCAPEL CASE: Life imprisonment for Herrera; Corbalán, acquitted

For his responsibility in the qualified homicide of Tucapel Jiménez, General (r) Arturo Ramsés Alvarez Sgolia was sentenced to 10 years of major imprisonment in its minimum degree as a perpetrator, without benefits.

After an exhaustive investigation of just over three years, the first-instance ruling of the special visiting judge, Sergio Muñoz, was released in the case of the murder of Tucapel Jiménez on February 25, 1982.

The ruling, delayed during the morning due to computer problems, acquitted Major (r) Alvaro Corbalán Castilla, Brigadier (r) Roberto Urbano Schmied Zanzi, civilian Julio Olivares Silva, and Carabineros Captain Miguel Hernández Oyarzo, who were prosecuted as accomplices.

For his responsibility in the qualified homicide of Tucapel Jiménez, Muñoz sentenced General (r) Arturo Ramsés Alvarez Sgolia to 10 years of major imprisonment in its minimum degree as a perpetrator, without benefits.

As a perpetrator of qualified homicide against the former president of the ANEF and the carpenter Juan Alegría Mundaca, Major (r) Carlos Herrera Jiménez was sentenced to life imprisonment without benefits.

Meanwhile, as perpetrators of qualified homicide, Brigadier (r) Víctor Pinto Pérez and Lieutenant Colonel (r) Maximiliano Ferrer Lima were sentenced to 8 years of major imprisonment in its minimum degree, without benefits.

As perpetrators, Miguel Letelier Verdugo and Sergeant Manuel Contreras Donaire were sentenced to 6 years of major imprisonment in its minimum degree, without benefits. Major Juan Carlos Arriagada Echeverría and Jorge León Alessandrini (civilian) were sentenced by magistrate Sergio Muñoz to 3 years of minor imprisonment in its medium degree, as accomplices (remitted sentence).

General (r) Fernando Torres Silva (former Army auditor), General (r) Hernán Ramírez Hald, and General (r) Hernán Ramírez Rurange were sentenced to 800 days of minor imprisonment in its medium degree (remitted sentence), as accomplices.

As a cover-up, Colonel (r) Enrique Ibarra was sentenced to 541 days of minor imprisonment in its medium degree. Finally, the weapon used in the crime was confiscated, a Smith & Wesson .22 caliber revolver, serial number 22547, which is registered in the name of the General Directorate of National Mobilization.

Judicial process In three years of investigation, Judge Sergio Muñoz shook the Army. In 1999, he prosecuted the former director of the CNI, the now-deceased Humberto Gordon, and in June of that year, he got ahead of Juan Guzmán by sending a letter rogatory to Pinochet during his detention in London.

However, his most daring step was to prosecute Hernán Ramírez Hald, the first general in active service to be charged in a human rights case. Ramírez Hald was charged on November 22, but a day earlier, President Ricardo Lagos received him in his office for an hour to support the general’s gesture of retiring from the Army and facing the process as a civilian.

The former uniformed officer remained detained at the Telecommunications Command until he was released on bail in mid-2000. It should be remembered that Judge Muñoz took over the investigation in April 1999, after 17 years of fruitless work by Judge Sergio Valenzuela Patiño, who was removed from the case by the Supreme Court.

Source: La Tercera, August 5, 2002

Supreme Court reviews appeals in Tucapel case

The Second Chamber of the Supreme Court began reviewing today the appeals to the sentences issued in the second instance in the case of Tucapel Jiménez, murdered by the CNI in February 1982. On September 24, the country’s highest court declared admissible most of the cassation (annulment) appeals presented by those implicated in the case, with the exception of the appeal presented in favor of retired Major Carlos Herrera Jiménez, whose life sentence for the crime of the union leader and the carpenter Juan Alegría Mundaca was confirmed.

Mentioned in the case are the former head of the Army Intelligence Directorate (DINE), General (r) Ramsés Alvarez, and former agents Manuel Contreras Donaire and Miguel Letelier Verdugo, among others, who were also sentenced by the instructing judge Sergio Muñoz.

Source: La Nación, October 23, 2003

Those convicted in Tucapel case to Punta Peuco

After the Second Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court finalized the sentences against those responsible for the death of the former president of the National Association of Fiscal Employees (ANEF), Tucapel Jiménez Alfaro, which occurred on February 25, 1982, judicial sources informed La Nación that they will be transferred today to the Punta Peuco prison, the facility where they will serve their sentences.

With the change of prison, they will leave the Military Police Battalion (BPM), Peñalolén Telecommunications Regiment, where the Army built facilities for former uniformed personnel and active military personnel under prosecution to serve preventive detention until a sentence was issued against them.

Thus, they will be confined in Punta Peuco, a prison that has mixed custody by the Gendarmerie and the Army, including the former director of the Army Intelligence Directorate (DINE), General (R) Arturo Alvarez Scoglia, Brigadiers (R) Víctor Pinto Pérez and Maximiliano Ferrer Lima, as well as Sergeants (R) Manuel Contreras Donaire and Miguel Letelier Verdugo, all of whom were sentenced to eight years in prison.

The latter two as material perpetrators. Added to them is Major (R) Carlos Herrera Jiménez, sentenced to a unified sentence of simple life imprisonment: for the death of Jiménez and his participation in the murder of the carpenter Juan Alegría Mundaca in July 1983.

The same sources indicated that the transfer of the former uniformed personnel was originally scheduled for the weekend; however, it had to be postponed due to a lack of space to receive the new inmates. Added to this is the approval of the security agencies in charge of the operation, who have the authority to stop the procedure until the last moment.

Source: La Nación, March 23, 2004

Sentence commuted for one of Tucapel Jiménez’s murderers

The Government confirmed yesterday that it granted a pardon to Miguel Contreras Donaire, a retired Army sergeant, convicted as one of the perpetrators of the homicide of union leader Tucapel Jiménez, which occurred in February 1982.

The former uniformed officer was granted a "Commutation of Sentence Pardon." Luis Bates, Minister of Justice, clarified yesterday that the benefit was granted because Contreras Donaire meets all the requirements to opt for it and that, according to the rules, a particular pardon can be materialized as remission, commutation, or reduction of the sentence.

The Secretary of State pointed out that after having served "five years and seven months effectively deprived of liberty, he will serve the balance of 2 years and 4 months (out of a total of eight years) under the supervision of the Local Patronage of Inmates.

Consequently, Mr. Contreras Donaire will continue serving his sentence under the indicated modality." The family of the murdered ANEF president harshly questioned the measure, describing it as a "slap in the face." Tucapel Jiménez Fuentes, son of the former leader, said it is "a slap in the face not only to the family but to the workers of Chile, especially public employees.

We as a family oppose all types of pardon. It does not do democracy any good for the Executive Branch to interfere in a decision already made by the Judicial Branch." As established judicially, Manuel Contreras Donaire was one of those who, on February 25, 1982, intercepted the ANEF president while he was driving his taxi.

Along with him, Miguel Letelier Verdugo (retired sergeant) and Carlos Herrera Jiménez, all former members of the DINE, got into the vehicle. Finally, after driving the vehicle to the El Noviciado road, Herrera Jiménez shot Jiménez in the head and slit his throat.

Source: La Nación, August 18, 2005

Tucapel Case: President Lagos pardoned retired Army sergeant

The beneficiary, Manuel Contreras Donaire, was serving an eight-year prison sentence in Punta Peuco as a material perpetrator of the homicide of the former president of the ANEF. The retired sergeant and former agent of the Army Intelligence Directorate (DINE), Manuel Contreras Donaire, was pardoned by order of the President of the Republic, Ricardo Lagos, as stated in a decree from the Ministry of Justice.

Contreras Donaire had been confined since April 2004 in the Punta Peuco prison for his participation, as a material perpetrator, in the murder of the former president of the National Association of Fiscal Employees (ANEF), Tucapel Jiménez, which occurred on February 25, 1981.

The document, which allows Contreras Donaire to leave the prison facility, bears the signature of the Minister of Justice, Luis Bates, as is the case in all presidential pardons. For the Tucapel case, Judge Sergio Muñoz also sentenced retired Army Major Carlos Herrera Jiménez, who is also serving a sentence for the crime of the carpenter Juan Alegría Mondaca, who was killed in February 1982 in Valparaíso with the intention of covering up the homicide of the union leader.

Likewise, General (r) Ramsés Alvarez Scoglia, who was head of the DINE at the time of the crime; Brigadiers (r) Víctor Pinto Pérez and Maximiliano Ferrer Lima; and retired Sergeant Miguel Letelier Verdugo are serving sentences.

Letelier Verdugo, Contreras Donaire, and Major (r) Herrera were charged as material perpetrators of the crime, while the rest of the involved parties received sentences as accomplices and cover-ups. Tucapel Jiménez was murdered on February 25, 1982, while he held the presidency of the ANEF.

The crime was investigated for 17 years by Sergio Valenzuela Patiño, who did not reach any conclusion, which changed in 1999 when, with the support of the State Defense Council, Jiménez’s family managed to have the Judiciary replace him with Judge Muñoz.

The new magistrate managed in a few months to establish the correlation of the facts linked to the crime, something Valenzuela did not achieve in almost two decades of work, and concluded with the conviction of those responsible.

For the Tucapel case, there is still a judicial aspect, which pits the State against the family of the murdered union leader, since the 13th Civil Court of Santiago determined, in the first instance, that the Treasury must pay an indemnity of 1 billion pesos to the next of kin.

The civil lawsuit was processed in parallel to the criminal process that Judge Muñoz substantiated, and it must now be defined by higher courts, since the State Defense Council (CDE) appealed the ruling.

Source: cooperativa.cl, August 18, 2005

Tucapel Jiménez family outraged by pardon for convict: "It’s a slap in the face"

Tucapel Jiménez, son of the namesake union leader, described the commutation of sentence granted by the government to retired Sergeant Manuel Contreras Donaire, one of those convicted for the homicide of the union leader, as a "slap in the face." Speaking at the headquarters of the National Association of Fiscal Employees (ANEF), Tucapel Jiménez Fuentes, accompanied by the head of that organization, Raúl de la Puente, harshly criticized the measure confirmed during the day from La Moneda. "We found out through the news, seeing the Minister of the Interior Francisco Vidal explaining the inexplicable," said the eldest son of the murdered union leader, lamenting how the information was channeled. Tucapel Jiménez Fuentes remarked that the news is "a slap in the face not only to the family but to the workers of Chile, especially public employees. We as a family oppose all types of pardon. It does not do democracy any good for a branch of the State, in this case the Executive, to interfere in a decision already made by another branch of the State, such as the Judicial Branch." Contreras Donaire will be released, but not through a presidential pardon, as Minister of the Interior Francisco Vidal first communicated, but through the granting of a penitentiary benefit, as the Palace spokesperson, Osvaldo Puccio, later clarified. The beneficiary was sentenced to eight years in prison for the crime of Tucapel Jiménez, a sentence he has served for the most part. The retired sergeant was one of the people who intercepted the ANEF president and killed him on February 25, 1982. Along with him, Miguel Letelier Verdugo and Carlos Herrera Jiménez, all former members of the DINE, participated in the homicide. Minister Puccio explained that he was not granted "a presidential pardon, since it is a decision at the level of the Ministry of Justice in which inmates who meet certain requirements for serving their sentence have the balance of their sentence commuted, and that balance remains under the supervision of the Gendarmerie." He added that it is in line with humanitarian benefits, since "it is a decision for an inmate who met the requirements to access this type of benefit," and clarified that the document does not bear the signature of President Ricardo Lagos. Previously, Puccio had been asked about the reaction the Tucapel Jiménez family might have, and he stated in this regard that "we live in this country in a traumatic situation, where many of us were victims of that situation, and I believe that the country has been moving toward a different climate. Those of us who fought for human rights, for a different democratic system, fought at the same time for the law to be applied fully and for everyone to have access to the benefits that the law grants." They fear it may be a precedent Jorge Mario Saavedra, the lawyer for the Tucapel Jiménez family, warned that the commutation of Contreras Donaire’s sentence could set a precedent for other military personnel linked to human rights abuses during the dictatorship. The jurist explained that the benefit to the convicted sergeant is contemplated in the law, and that Contreras Donaire requested the Executive’s pronouncement considering that he had already served six of the eight years of his sentence. The sentences On March 9 of last year, the Supreme Court confirmed the conviction against Manuel Contreras Donaire, Miguel Letelier Verdugo, General (r) Ramses Arturo Alvarez Sgoglia, and Brigadiers (r) Víctor Pinto Pérez and Maximiliano Ferrer Lima to eight years in prison. Along with this, it sentenced General (r) and Army Auditor General Fernando Torres to 800 days of remitted sentence as a cover-up for the crime, and Generals (r) Hernán Ramírez Rurange, former head of the Army Intelligence Directorate (DINE), and Hernán Ramírez Hald, director of the Army Intelligence Corps (CIE), to 800 days of remitted imprisonment as cover-ups. The Court estimated that in the case of Herrera Jiménez, the sentence would be life imprisonment, and on that occasion, Colonel Enrique Ibarra Chamorro and civilian agent Jorge León Alessandrini were also released from responsibility. According to the background information provided by Judge Sergio Muñoz’s investigation, Tucapel Jiménez was intercepted by two subjects who, pretending to be passengers, boarded his taxi and asked him to take them to the Renca-Lampa road. They were retired Major Carlos Herrera Jiménez and Sergeant Miguel Letelier Verdugo. Meanwhile, Sergeant Manuel Contreras Donaire followed them in a Peugeot car. In Pudahuel, Herrera ordered him to stop the vehicle and shot him, also inflicting cuts with a bladed weapon; the three fled in the Peugeot.

Source: La Nación, August 18, 2005

The steps of Manuel Contreras Donaire. The Pardoned

One autumn day in 2007, Deputy Tucapel Jiménez received a phone call.

"I am the daughter of your father's killer," the parliamentarian heard. Then, a long silence. It was Sandra Contreras. Almost two years had passed since then-President Lagos decided to pardon Manuel Contreras Donaire, and the deputy found it hard to believe that on the other end of the line, the daughter of one of the three material authors of his father's death—which occurred in February 1982—was asking him for help.

Desperate, Sandra begged him to advise her on the lawsuit her father had filed around that time against her mother, Leonor, to obtain a divorce. The parliamentarian helped her with lawyers, but the Third Family Court granted the retired officer's request.

It was not that Sandra wanted her father back. She only sought to ensure her mother would not lose the few benefits she still received as a dependent of the former military man. Today, Sandra's rage against her father surfaces easily, almost spontaneously.

With eyes full of tears, she remembers what the discipline lessons were like in the small apartment 302 of the Villa Militar in Estación Central. "My dad was terrible. Once he caught one of my sisters smoking and he beat all four of us, all equally, so that we would all learn that no one could disobey him.

It wasn't just a slap and that's it. It was kicks and punches. It was brutal," says Sandra, unable to hide her pain. Her memories continue, filled with shouting and aggression, and she offers a confession: "It is not fair that they pardoned my dad.

He did terrible things." She falls silent and nervously adds: "He ruined our lives." He also, to a large extent, did the same to the children of union leader Tucapel Jiménez. His son, Tucapel, was 19 years old when his father was assassinated.

Today, he still does not approve of or understand why Contreras Donaire was pardoned. "They definitely misinformed former President Lagos. He pardoned my father's killer, even though Contreras never repented for what he did," he says today.

In the trial for the case, it became clear that of the three material authors, Carlos Herrera Jiménez was the only one who provided information about his accomplices. In fact, the retired major, who always took care not to mention people, provided the names of two military men during a plenary session of the case: Miguel Letelier Verdugo and Contreras Donaire.

The latter never cooperated and even, as one of his lawyers, Mauricio Unda, stated at the time, always denied having participated in the crime. He claimed he was not in the taxi where they fired the five shots and slit the throat of the former union leader, and he also said he never worked with Herrera Jiménez.

Even so, Judge Sergio Muñoz verified his participation and in 2002 sentenced him to eight years in prison. But on August 13, 2005, Manuel Segundo Contreras Donaire left the Punta Peuco prison, becoming, to this day, the only military officer convicted of human rights crimes to be pardoned under democracy.

Life in the alley

For this 65-year-old counter-espionage expert, it has been easy to maintain anonymity since he left behind bars. His neighbors in La Florida know almost nothing about the sentence he served, and even less about what motivated it.

Only one neighbor says she once spoke about the subject with his second wife, María Luisa Ruiz Maureira, who allegedly assured her that her husband was innocent and that "that is why they pardoned him." The former military man practically does not leave his house during the day and almost never talks to his neighbors.

He also refused to speak with "Sábado" on repeated occasions. The person in charge of social relations is María Luisa, whom he was able to marry on October 30, 2008, once the retired non-commissioned officer stopped signing in at the parole office.

Only in recent days has Contreras been seen more in the narrow Quiringe alley of the Villa El Sol. The repairs and the expansion of his house have forced him to move wood and rubble. Dressed in a full tracksuit and with completely white hair, he looks more robust than he did five years ago.

At least at first glance, he manages to hide the physical effects of the prostate cancer he suffers from, which was one of the arguments used to grant him his freedom. It is not only Contreras who has changed during this time.

The house now has two floors, new doors, windows, and a gate, and the interior has been completely redecorated. In general, he only goes out in the family car, a metallic green 2009 Dodge Journey that replaced the old brown Ford Aerostar.

The vehicle barely fits in the front yard and, according to neighbors, Contreras washes it with almost a sense of fascination. "It looks like they won the Kino," jokes a neighbor about the new status of the Contreras Ruiz family.

It is assumed that Contreras does not work and that his only income is the approximately 250,000 pesos he receives as a pension for having worn the uniform. His wife is not known to have a job either. In fact, she spends most of the day with him at home.

According to neighbors, she has commented that she has land in Curicó and a property in Puente Alto. According to a relative, one of those plots was allegedly sold to pay off some debts with two retail companies, arrears that even caused Contreras to be sued in the middle of last year and at the beginning of this one, as recorded in the Judicial Branch records—problems that he has already solved.

With the divorce, the retired non-commissioned officer's financial obligations to his former family were extinguished. His daughter Sandra says that only because of a commitment to one of her brothers does Contreras deposit 100,000 pesos to her mother on the 21st of each month.

Military career

Contreras's career as an Army non-commissioned officer began in his native San Felipe, at the Guardia Vieja regiment in Los Andes. He stood out quickly, was always among the top in seniority, and won several awards for his skiing ability.

It was also in San Felipe that he met his first wife, Leonor Pizarro, sister of the popular singer Palmenia Pizarro. One of the last times he was seen in the small city in the Valparaíso Region was in 2002 for the funeral of his mother, Raquel Donaire, at the San Felipe cemetery.

Contreras arrived there in handcuffs and under heavy guard. He was no longer the proud officer who loved fine dining and the music of Olga Guillot and Charles Aznavour that his family knew. His career in the Army, in the mid-70s, had always been on the rise.

His good performance as a soldier led, at the end of that decade, to a posting in Bogotá, at the Chilean embassy in Colombia. There, he worked in security and was allowed to have his family with him for a few months.

At the diplomatic residence, every September 11, Contreras was one of the most enthusiastic participants in the "Thanksgiving" ceremony held to commemorate the military coup, during which the flag was raised—a custom the former soldier maintains to this day.

Also, his daughter Sandra remembers that he acquired his taste for Caribbean music from that trip. Then, everything changed. Upon returning to Santiago, now as a member of the Army Intelligence Corps, under the Army Intelligence Directorate (DINE), his path began to cross with that of Tucapel Jiménez.

At the beginning of 1982, retired General Arturo Álvarez Sgolia, former head of the DINE, ordered the assassination of the union leader, and Contreras was part of the squad in charge of executing the order.

As established in the trial, on February 25 of that year, Jiménez left his house and got into the taxi he worked in. A few blocks away, on Calle Balmaceda, two passengers got in. One sat next to him and the other in the back.

One of the two vehicles following him overtook him and, by stopping, marked the place where Jiménez's car should stop. The passenger who was in the front seat got out, and the one in the back shot Jiménez in the head.

Then, they slit his throat. Judge Muñoz was never able to determine exactly which of those actions Contreras carried out. "Contreras Donaire never collaborated in anything; he was characterized by a constant refusal, he always showed a terrifying coldness, and no repentance," says the lawyer for the Tucapel Jiménez family, Jorge Saavedra, today.

The deputy and son of the former ANEF leader adds: "I am totally against pardons, but at least, if President Lagos wanted to analyze case by case and make a gesture, he would have had more standing if he had pardoned Herrera Jiménez.

He did cooperate with the case, he did show repentance, and he did have cancer." Carlos Herrera Jiménez remains imprisoned in Punta Peuco and several of his pardon requests have been rejected. He is serving a life sentence.

"He was supposed to be sick" Last Monday, during his visit to the DC anniversary event, Ricardo Lagos was surrounded by the press. They wanted to ask him about President Piñera's decision to rule out pardons for human rights violators.

In his response, Lagos explained that he pardoned Contreras because he collaborated to clarify the assassination of Tucapel Jiménez. "Thanks to him, to a large extent, the crime could be clarified." In 2005, after he announced his decision to pardon him, he said in La Segunda that "he is a person sentenced to eight years who had the right to get out after four years.

He had served five years and seven months. Second, he was a non-commissioned officer who followed orders; it was others who said what had to be done. And third, he had a complex health situation." Sandra also casts doubt on that today: "He was supposed to be sick, that he was going to get out and die," she says in reference to her father's cancer.

She, like Tucapel Jiménez Jr., cannot forgive him either. She accuses him of the abandonment that she, her siblings, and her mother suffered when the former military man rebuilt his romantic and family life.

Today, Contreras Donaire dedicates a good part of the day to the three daughters from his new marriage. He spends part of his time watching sports channels, especially soccer, and occasionally goes to see Universidad Católica play.

One of the last times he attended the stadium was at the Bicentenario de La Florida, for a match between the local Audax Italiano and UC. "In that, I take after him. I am also a UC fan," says Sandra. Crafts are another of his hobbies.

He learned the trade while he was in prison, and several of the flowerpots in his house were made by him. One of his close associates even says that after being pardoned, Contreras tried without success to create a small business to sell his creations.

But his greatest hobby is skiing, a sport he learned during his training as a non-commissioned officer. In fact, a few weeks ago, he was seen very early with his family loading the truck. When they returned at night, they commented that they had spent the day in the snow.

Hero son Before his imprisonment, in 2000, Manuel Contreras lived with his second wife in Arica, in an Army apartment on Pasaje Los Copihues. Although he left it more than 10 years ago, that is the last address where he appears registered.

In the building, no one remembers the Contreras Ruiz family, and the only Manuel Contreras they know is the son of the retired non-commissioned officer, a former commissioner of the Investigative Police who became relatively well-known in the city in August 2008, when—while still in service—he was one of the first to arrive at kilometer 135 of Route 11 CH in Putre, where nine students from the Colegio Cumbres died.

He ran and helped several of the wounded. He helped some of them get out of the vehicle and transported two of them in his truck to the hospital. Fate would have it that 26 years after the assassination of Tucapel Jiménez, this time, a Manuel Contreras saved lives. "It is not fair that they pardoned my dad.

He did terrible things," says Sandra Contreras. "Contreras always showed a terrifying coldness," says the lawyer for the Tucapel Jiménez family. "If Lagos wanted to analyze case by case and make a gesture, he would have had more standing if he had pardoned Herrera Jiménez. He did cooperate," says Tucapel Jiménez Jr. In the photo, at a tribute to his father.

Source: piensachile.com, February 2010

Punta Peuco IV: The untold stories of family members and prisoners

Punta Peuco does not appear on maps, despite being 50 kilometers and only 30 minutes away from Santiago. However, it does have a tradition as a prison site: an abandoned plot of land among the few houses in the town was the last vestige of an old colony for low-risk prisoners that once operated there.

The land remained the property of the Gendarmerie, and in January 1995, in light of the imminent first conviction of General (ret.) Manuel Contreras for the crime of Orlando Letelier (perpetrated in Washington in September 1976), it was chosen as the site to build the new special prison for the former DINA chief and the uniformed officers convicted of human rights crimes.

After overcoming a political crisis caused by the refusal of Ricardo Lagos, the Minister of Public Works at the time, to sign the decree that would initiate its construction, and then a brief attempt at rebellion by the former DINA chief, Contreras finally entered Punta Peuco as a prisoner in October 1995.

For months, both the convicted military officer and the new prison captured the attention of the Army, government intelligence, the police, and the media.

Fifteen years later, when former Carabineros non-commissioned officer Francisco Toledo entered Punta Peuco for a crime he committed in 1985, everything was different. Manuel Contreras was no longer held there, but at the Cordillera Prison, a more exclusive and intimate military facility.

There were no longer members of the Army in custody, only gendarmes; and the prisoners watched their days pass, submerged in oblivion. Many of their children, however, were living a different story on the outside: they constantly felt the fear of social rejection, sometimes triggered simply by hearing their surname in public.

That is exactly what happened to the only daughter of the Carabineros officer Francisco Toledo: she lost a scholarship at the university where she was studying. According to her mother, her grades dropped because she was terrified that a classmate would confront her: “Your dad killed the Vergara brothers!”. Her nightmare was that they would face her during a presentation.

Francisco Toledo was sentenced to seven years as one of the perpetrators of the homicide of Rafael Vergara Toledo, an 18-year-old boy who, on March 29, 1985, received 8 bullets (including one in the nape of the neck and another in the lumbar region) during a day of protest, and whose body was found on the public road next to his brother, Eduardo (23 years old), who was also murdered.

It took justice twenty-five years to reach its verdict.

The Vergara Toledo brothers lived in Villa Francia, a neighborhood in Santiago that was the epicenter of massive protests against the dictatorship in those years. Both were members of the MIR, and their deaths became a symbol for the young people who fought against the military regime.

Over the years, that symbol shifted to represent social discontent with democracy and continued to mutate until reaching the present day, transformed into an amalgam of protests and criminal outbreaks. The truth is that since that first March 29, 1985, when the Vergara brothers were victims of political violence, no anniversary has ceased to be violent.

Elisa, the wife of former Carabineros non-commissioned officer Francisco Toledo, explained to her daughter that “dad was following orders and was working that day.” Like most wives of uniformed officers imprisoned for crimes committed during the dictatorship, Elisa believes in her husband’s innocence and disagrees with how the trials were conducted.

Elisa and Francisco met when she was 14. Together they built a family that Elisa describes as “exemplary”: her husband was always a concerned father, “who took our daughter to the university every day. The girl was his favorite.” Elisa feels pain and rage over this separation.

Every Sunday, both visit Francisco Toledo in Punta Peuco, where he is held in “Module 2,” sharing space with other former uniformed officers whom Elisa did not know, with the exception of Sub-lieutenant (ret.) Alex Ambler, her husband’s former boss, who is also sentenced to seven years for the death of the Vergara Toledo brothers.

Elisa finds all of them to be “excellent people and good prison companions.”

“I can evaluate these people by how they are now; I don’t know the cases they were involved in,” Elisa explains.

It is not strange that Elisa does not know the crimes for which her husband’s module companions are imprisoned. As in all prisons in the world, the reasons for incarceration are a taboo subject among the inmates.

That defense mechanism does not work the same way for all the prisoners’ relatives. Among the children, the question lingers. One day, her daughter told Elisa that there was a page on the Internet where, just by using a person’s surname, it was possible to know what crime they were convicted of.

The young woman told her that this way they could find out the accusations against her father’s cellmates.

Elisa stopped her immediately

“Why are you going to do that?” I told her. “Why don’t you get to know the person as they are now and pay attention to how they greeted you? Respect the rest. If one day he wants to tell you, ‘I am involved in this or I was prosecuted for this,’ you listen to him. But for now, it is not appropriate.”

Elisa presented the secret to her as a form of respect, which implies assuming that the truth is an offense. Francisco Toledo’s daughter agreed: “Mom, you are absolutely right,” she replied.

For this report, about twenty relatives of imprisoned military personnel (including wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters) were contacted, but the majority refused to speak. Some wives, showing much accumulated rage in their words and tone of voice, took the opportunity to repeat over and over: “History is distorted.”

Sandra Contreras (42 years old) does not agree.

IN NO MAN’S LAND

Sandra Contreras does believe in the facts that were proven in court and that sentenced her father, former Army non-commissioned officer Manuel Contreras Donaire, to 8 years in prison for having slit the throat of the union leader and president of the National Association of Fiscal Employees (ANEF), Tucapel Jiménez, in February 1982.

Manuel Contreras Donaire used to beat Sandra, her three siblings, and her mother when he was free. He did it if they contradicted him or if they laughed when he wanted to rest. Once, he punched his daughter Sandra and threw her down the stairs. “At the Military Hospital, I had to say that I fell off a bicycle,” the woman recalls.

They never reported him. Her mother and all her siblings endured it in silence. That is why, when Sandra found out that her father was going to prison in Punta Peuco, she was glad:

“I told myself that in some way this asshole is going to have to pay,” she recalls.

Sandra stopped seeing her father in the late ’80s, when Manuel Contreras Donaire separated from her mother. Her siblings, however, maintained contact. Sandra was the only one who not only felt rage toward him for how violent he had been with them, but for having murdered Tucapel Jiménez.

During the dictatorship, Sandra participated in a church pastoral group in Renca and got to know the neighborhoods:

“I saw hunger, injustice, I saw the soldiers there. I was the black sheep of my family.”

In July 2005, former President Ricardo Lagos granted Contreras Donaire a presidential pardon with the benefit of conditional remission of the sentence. The president argued that the pardon was due to the help he provided in solving the case. “Thanks to him, to a large extent, the crime could be clarified,” said Lagos.

The union leader’s son replied to the President: “I would ask the President and the Minister of Justice to read the ruling before taking such a measure, because the person pardoned is one of the material authors. Carlos Herrera Jiménez was the one who fired the shots at my father, and this murderer (Contreras Donaire) was the one who slit his throat.”

By the date of the pardon, July 2005, Contreras Donaire had been in prison for six years. He had two years left to serve his sentence. According to the judicial file, the non-commissioned officer never acknowledged his participation in the events, even though Minister Sergio Muñoz proved that it was he who slit Tucapel Jiménez’s throat.

Two years after regaining his freedom, the former non-commissioned officer legally divorced Sandra’s mother and left them with nothing. Since the daughter wanted her mother to receive a decent pension, she decided to call Tucapel Jiménez Jr., who was already a PPD deputy.

She felt that her family and his had been victims of the same plague: bad men. As if people’s belonging were not a matter of blood, race, or homeland, but of human quality.

Sandra called him without thinking much: “Hello, I am the daughter of the man who killed your father.” Tucapel listened to her hell and helped her get lawyers.

Every so often, that whole history returns, just as the crime of the Toledos returns every violent March 29, the Day of the Young Combatant.

Last year, for example, Sandra did not miss a single episode of the series “Los archivos del cardenal” (TVN) and “Los 80” (Canal 13), two productions with which Chilean television tried to settle part of its debt of silence regarding what was experienced by thousands of compatriots in the ’70s and ’80s.

Fiction allowed them to show that world from a perspective that is very difficult for journalism: through the daily life of the torturer, the incredible duplicity of the human soul capable of electrocuting a man in the morning and, in the afternoon, leaving in a good mood to choose Christmas presents for the children.

Showing violence as a work activity with a “terrifying normality,” as the philosopher Hannah Arendt speaks of when she describes the Nazi criminal Otto Adolf Eichmann.

For Sandra, the daughter of Manuel Contreras Donaire, watching those characters was seeing herself. Sometimes she was not able to finish the episodes:

“I would watch ‘Los 80’ and say: my dad was like that, he worked in that. Watching the program caused me so much anguish… there are no words… I imagine him electrocuting people, forcing them with beatings… and I couldn’t stop thinking that when I was a girl, I lived well thanks to all the aberrations he committed, thanks to all the families he destroyed,” says Sandra.

“MY GUILTS OR WHATEVER IT’S CALLED”

Fernando Valdés Cid, Lieutenant (ret.) of Carabineros, was imprisoned for three years in “Module 2” of Punta Peuco.

Valdés was a street police officer. He joined the institution in 1977, three years after the Coup. He practiced karate, judo, and his hobby was going hunting. In 1982, while a sub-lieutenant, Valdés was charged by the Military Prosecutor’s Office of Valparaíso as the author of the crime of unnecessary violence causing minor injuries to Oscar Uribe.

He was subsequently acquitted. In 1984, he was accused of killing the POJH worker Nelson Carrasco, who was detained in San Bernardo on March 27 of that year by a picket of 19 Carabineros led by Valdés. The worker’s mother reported her son’s disappearance, and the body was found on the bank of the “El Espejino” canal on April 11.

The Second Military Court of Santiago determined that Carrasco was brutally beaten in the police van and then thrown into the canal along with other detainees, where he drowned.

Valdés was sentenced to six years in prison for “unnecessary violence resulting in death.” In 1988, he entered the Carabineros School to serve preventive detention for about three years, time that was credited to him when he arrived at Punta Peuco to serve his sentence in ’96.

The crime committed by Valdés is probably the most current of all those reviewed in this series. The crime has persisted over time, in dictatorship and in democracy: the unchecked use of the State’s police force is what the inhabitants of Aysén demanded this summer, what the Mapuche have been demanding for decades, and what the students proved in last year’s demonstrations.

Regarding his responsibility in the death of the worker Nelson Carrasco, Fernando Valdés says:

“I have always remembered it as a great sorrow… For a family, losing a son is not easy, right? I lost my mother just a few days ago; I know what it is, I can feel what it is. But before, I always felt sorrow anyway.

I carry it in my heart, it is a thing… having been there or not, having done or not, having helped or not, having cooperated or not, or having avoided or not, all those things I ask myself…”

Valdés speaks of Carrasco, and finally, when he can no longer avoid the key point of his death, it seems that he prefers not to answer what he asks himself for some reason:

“I didn’t kill him. They talk about how, upon throwing him into the water, this kid later drowned. In other words, that I hit him alone, I hit the other four or five who were there, I did all this alone. That is what I think. Ask yourself what happened. I am not going to ask myself anymore what happened. For myself, I have my own responsibilities, guilts, or whatever it’s called…”

When Fernando Valdés entered Punta Peuco, his eldest son knew where he was: a military prison. But he told the 6-year-old that dad worked in the countryside and that Punta Peuco was the place where he slept when the night became dangerous. That is how Valdés explained the presence of the bars and the armed gendarmes to the child the three times he went to see him. The bad guys were outside.

Now that that son has grown up, he has never asked him again. Valdés is of the idea of forgetting. “What happened is in the past; I have already paid,” he says.

If his memory has blocked the exact date he left Punta Peuco, the images of what happened that day are very vivid: his wife and his brother went to pick him up and handed him a bottle of whiskey, which he drank little by little as he walked the streets freely again.

The following Monday, he returned to work at the same company where he had worked after his retirement from the Carabineros in ’87. No one gave him problems because of his criminal record, as happens to everyone who leaves prison.

Thus, the Carabineros officer—short, stocky, bald, with hairy arms, who was called “El Mono” (The Monkey)—returned to walk through the fields of the Sixth Region as if the three years in prison had never existed. Except for the pistol.

“I took precautions. I got a weapon because I was afraid that I would face some retaliation out here. And although as an ex-prisoner I did not have permission to carry weapons, I walked around with one illegally for a year.”

CONTRERAS’ PARTIES

It is very likely that the reprisals Fernando Valdés Cid feared when he was released were not only from Pinochet’s opponents. And this is because, at the end of 1995, when the first convicts of the “Caso Degollados” (Slit Throats Case) began to arrive at Punta Peuco, this Carabineros officer became the first prisoner of that peculiar prison to denounce—to the magazine Qué Pasa—the privileges for New Year’s Day that the former DINA chief and his second-in-command in the repression organization, Pedro Espinoza, had.

“The parties of ‘Mamo’ Contreras and Espinoza’s birthdays were true carnivals. Because the Gendarmerie did not enter that sector; it was exclusive to the Army,” says Valdés today, who also remembers that he was annoyed because the military had telephones in their rooms and visits outside of hours:

“But for us, the Carabineros, there was none of that. So, what I said was that if we are all in the same boat, let’s all bear the burden in equal conditions,” asserts the retired officer.

That was not the opinion of all his module companions. For some of the Carabineros from the “Caso Degollados,” Valdés’s denunciations were disloyalty toward Manuel Contreras, since it was thanks to him that they were in that prison and not in one with all the common prisoners. But Valdés does not regret it:

“I have been much more loyal than many of them. There you have ‘Mamo’ Contreras screaming like a convict, involving more people. Why doesn’t he stay quiet? That is not appropriate. Is he going to be released with that? Let him die quiet, like a good soldier, that’s all,” he tells CIPER.

THE ORIGINS

While he was imprisoned there, Manuel Contreras always asserted that it was thanks to him that this special prison existed, guarded by members of the Army who stood at attention before them and treated them as their superiors.

“I went to a prison that they had to build especially for me. If not, I’m not going to prison,” Contreras said in an interview with Chilevisión two years ago.

And this time, Contreras is telling the truth. Because it was the announced first conviction of the former DINA chief that triggered the decision in January 1995 to build a special prison for the general. The socialist architect Claudio Martínez, then director of the Gendarmerie, proposed to the Army the land that the institution had in Punta Peuco.

The Army, which was pushing for that special prison, accepted. Not so the Minister of Public Works, Ricardo Lagos, who rejected President Eduardo Frei’s order to sign the emergency decree to begin construction.

He was not willing to be seen as the author of a special prison for military personnel. Frei had no other choice but to send a bill to Congress. In February 1995, construction began. Four months later, on June 14, 1995, the government of Eduardo Frei issued Decree 580, which created the “Punta Peuco Special Preventive Detention and Penitentiary Compliance Center.”

Claudio Martínez remembers that in all the conversations he had about the new prison, Army officers were always present:

“They were behind this, and it could not have been any other way. Building a special prison at that time was not to give privileges to the military; it was for the safety of the citizenry. Pinochet, the former dictator, was still the commander-in-chief of the Army. What would have happened if the head of the dictatorship’s secret police had been killed inside a common prison?” he explains.

Contreras was sentenced by Minister Adolfo Bañados on May 30, 1995, to 7 years in prison as one of the authors of the assassination of Allende’s former foreign minister, Orlando Letelier. But he did not inaugurate the new prison.

He argued that he was ill. The first to arrive at Punta Peuco was the active-duty Brigadier Pedro Espinoza Bravo, the second operational man of the DINA, who was also convicted for the Letelier crime. And he did so on June 19, the same day the Army called him to retirement, stripping him of his protective shield.

Espinoza told the press: “The Army is handing me over.” The transfer took place in the early morning. Claudio Martínez, director of the Gendarmerie and the one who received him at Punta Peuco, remembers that Pedro Espinoza arrived accompanied by a retinue of relatives, friends, and military personnel:

“There were about 50 people, and the scene was quite harsh, because Espinoza arrives at a gate and I am inside waiting for him. In two seconds, I had to think: do I let him in, or do I let them all in? And I let them all in. And when they entered, they started taking pictures of the prison!”

Once Espinoza was left alone inside, Martínez says that “the atmosphere was like that of a wake.” And it remained that way for four months with the brigadier as the only prisoner in the new jail. On July 22 of that year, about 300 people, including military and civilians, demonstrated at Punta Peuco to support him: they sang the national anthem and had a picnic in the surroundings.

The tension was growing. And it reached its peak when the brigadier’s two sons—both active military—flew over the prison in a helicopter. “It was a provocation, if you will,” says Martínez. A provocation that Espinoza replicated by announcing a hunger strike against the Army in October. But he desisted. Just in time to receive the new VIP inhabitant of Punta Peuco: General (ret.) Manuel Contreras.

After trying to resist imprisonment and maintain the impunity he had enjoyed for two decades, entrenching himself in the Sangra Regiment in Osorno and the Naval Hospital of Talcahuano, Manuel Contreras arrived at Punta Peuco in October 1995. His only module companion, Pedro Espinoza, considered him a traitor.

“Since the relationship between the two was tense, they installed a traffic light system in the common areas so they wouldn’t run into each other,” recalls Martínez.

To guard two prisoners, the Army designated five officers and 66 non-commissioned officers and enlisted men, the institution informed CIPER. They formed an internal security ring, while the Gendarmerie was in charge of external custody. “What I perceived is that the Army was very afraid that Espinoza or Contreras, as a result of the confinement, would provide some type of information,” says Martínez.

A viable thesis in light of the latest crime that the Chilean justice system has just attributed to Espinoza in November 2011: he was prosecuted by the Santiago Court of Appeals Minister Jorge Zepeda as the material author of the homicide of the American citizen Charles Horman (whose story gave rise to the film Missing), a death that the military regime always denied.

What no one denies today are the privileges that Manuel Contreras enjoyed while he was in Punta Peuco and which Carabineros officer Fernando Valdés Cid denounced. To begin with, he was never treated as a prisoner by the military custodial staff, but as their subordinates.

“‘Mamo’ treated the Army officers who guarded him like lackeys. He always made requests through them and pressured the Gendarmerie. Because of him, an infirmary with a doctor had to be set up, and they even brought in a waiter who prepared his meals,” a former gendarme who worked at Punta Peuco in those years told CIPER.

In 2001, Manuel Contreras completed his first sentence and left Punta Peuco for his home, with house arrest for the multiple ongoing trials. As proof of his importance, almost two years later, in 2003, the Army’s custody ended.

Just at the moment when Ricardo Lagos created the Valech Commission, which investigated the cases of political imprisonment and torture. More than 35,000 people gave testimony while Punta Peuco received new inhabitants of the special prison: Álvaro Corbalán and Hugo Salas Wenzel, both from the CNI, among them.

It was also the moment when the prisoners of Punta Peuco began a battle to obtain prison benefits. They had to attract new partners to support their petition.

REASONS OF STATE

In 2003, the priest Alfonso Baeza, vicar of the Social Pastoral, visited the Carabineros of the “Caso Degollados” at Punta Peuco. It was the prisoners themselves who asked Marcelo Mancilla, the Gendarmerie priest who assisted them spiritually and with whom Baeza has a very good relationship, to bring him.

They wanted Baeza to intercede for them before the authorities of the time, just as he was doing for the members of the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front (FPMR); the armed wing of the Communist Party that, during the dictatorship, prepared, among other actions, the failed attack of September 1986, where they planned to kill Augusto Pinochet on the route back from his house in El Melocotón.

In democracy, not only did the dictator’s men fall into prison, but also those who opposed him.

Confined in the High Security Prison (CAS), the Front members began periodic hunger strikes to negotiate a presidential pardon. Due to his pastoral work and his active work during the dictatorship, Baeza mediated with the government.

And 30 years after the Coup, the prisoners of Punta Peuco considered that the visit of a priest who got along with the left was a good way to raise the flag of the other “political prisoners.”

Baeza remembers the visit: “They wanted to tell me that an injustice was being committed against them because they were also political prisoners and did not have access to parole or any prison benefits.”

At first glance, the prisoners of Punta Peuco’s demand for parity seemed like basic justice. But in essence, for Baeza, there were profound differences with the political prisoners of the CAS. The first and most important was that the Front members had committed to never again use violent means:

“But the prisoners of Punta Peuco hadn’t even made clear to the courts what they had done or who gave them the orders. At Punta Peuco, I realized that one could not argue with them, that there was no conversion there. Honestly, it seems to me that there are some like Manuel Contreras, the head of the DINA, and others, who would do the same thing again,” Baeza told CIPER.

The lobbying by the Punta Peuco prisoners continued. Through their relatives’ visits to Congress and the letters they sent from prison to different politicians, they achieved a certain reception and even an echo of their situation.

Thus, in September 2005, months after then-President Lagos granted the presidential pardon to Manuel Contreras Donaire, senators Hernán Larraín (UDI), Admiral (ret.) Jorge Arancibia (UDI), Baldo Prokurica (RN), and Enrique Silva Cimma and Edgardo Boeninger, both appointed senators of the Concertación, presented a bill that favored the convicted uniformed officers with two types of benefits.

The first set a single sentence of 10 years in prison for all crimes committed, remaining subject to travel restrictions and the supervised release regime for the rest of the original sentence; and the right to conditional remission of the sentence for those sentenced who reached 70 years of age during the serving of the sentence.

Two years later, in November 2007, the Senate rejected it. The controversy caused by Lagos’s pardon of one of Tucapel Jiménez’s murderers left no room for new benefits.

The former President’s reasons for granting the pardon to Manuel Contreras Donaire were ultimately reasons of State. Something that Lagos explains today as an opportune gesture. During his government, he had pardoned several Front members. It was time to do so with “the others”:

“One had to say, well, 15 years have passed since the recovery of democracy and now we are in charge. Because when I arrived at La Moneda and went abroad, they would ask me: ‘Are you effectively the President, or is Pinochet still in charge?’ I had already appointed a socialist woman who had been tortured by the military to the Ministry of Defense, and the constitutional reforms that allowed the dismissal of high commands had been enacted.

Why didn’t Frei do something of that type? Because they would have believed that the military was still in charge. But this decision was mine, and it was mine because the country had changed.”

Social changes are subtle, complex to pinpoint. And what Lagos describes as “changing the country,” Judge Joaquín Billard sees much more restrictively. In all these years investigating the crimes of the dictatorship, the only military officer Judge Billard has seen change is Carlos Herrera Jiménez, an Army officer, former member of the Army Intelligence Directorate (DINE) and the CNI, who has publicly asked for forgiveness from the family of Tucapel Jiménez, whom he murdered along with Manuel Contreras Donaire:

“Herrera Jiménez feels that the commanders of the time deceived him, that they convinced him that what he was doing was for the good of the Fatherland. And he now, sitting and looking at the ceiling, realizes that all that was stupidity,” asserts Judge Billard.

But at the beginning, Judge Billard says that the accused military officers arrived at court haughty because they did not believe they were going to be judged: “They thought they were never going to be prosecuted! How could they have thought that?! How could they believe: ‘I kill this guy and no one is going to do anything to me’? What a way to be deified!”

Mario Carroza, another of the ministers who has investigated human rights violations over the years, agrees with Billard on the sense of impunity with which the agents lived: “They were people who liked to have power, to feel that the rest depended on them. Others liked to play spy,” he says.

But the structure linked to the system that protected them and provided them with impunity, and which was also settled in the Judiciary, no longer exists. Judge Carroza works from that line in the interrogations: making them see that now they are ordinary people:

“I try to make them understand that they did things beyond the ordinary, and when that happens, people enter the criminal stage. If they ever thought they were in a war, I am not the one to say that is not so.

But after 1975, there was no war. There, I tell them that they must know why they acted that way. Weigh whether they acted wrongly and answer for that. When I interrogate them, I try to point out to them that there is a moment where they made a decision and that theirs was wrong,” says the judge.

For those mistakes, as of September 2011, according to the database of the Human Rights Program of the Ministry of the Interior, there were 249 uniformed officers convicted in the final instance. A quantity that in all analyses, both in Chile and abroad, is placed next to the 3,186 compatriots disappeared and executed during the military regime. Two dramatically disparate situations.

TURNING THE PAGE

Tucapel Jiménez’s son never thought that, in addition to everything he had experienced, he would have to deal with the repentance of one of his father’s murderers. With that forgiveness that Carlos Herrera Jiménez has publicly asked him for through the media, to which is added his repeated request to meet with him at Punta Peuco.

The deputy has considered that possibility. But it is difficult for him:

“I don’t see myself sitting in front of my father’s murderer. As a deputy, one would like to say ‘I’ll do it in exchange for information, so that other families have that spiritual peace,’ but the truth is that I haven’t reached that degree of conviction that it is going to serve me or serve other people. But if it were of any use, I would make the sacrifice,” says Tucapel Jiménez’s son.

Tucapel’s father had become, at the beginning of the ’80s, one of the most important voices against the regime, to the point of initiating the preparation of the first national workers’ strike in 1981.

His high turnout and his alliance with former President Eduardo Frei Montalva, also murdered a month before the union leader, set off all the alarms in Pinochet’s circle. Hence, the PPD deputy wants to honor his figure by facing his murderer on behalf of others, but it is the son who cannot today. Now Tucapel has his own children who would never accept something like that.

“Many people think that it is part of Carlos Herrera’s strategy to meet with me to receive the pardon. I am against pardons, but I think he should have prison benefits. Herrera collaborated with justice, and if his requests for forgiveness were a strategy and a lie, it doesn’t matter as long as he collaborated,” says Deputy Jiménez, who assumes that it is impossible to turn the page.

“I am going to die remembering him. Even in small, everyday things, like when Colo-Colo plays, the soccer team he liked, I can’t stop remembering my dad,” says Tucapel Jiménez.

The words of Tucapel Jiménez’s son illustrate how difficult it is for the relatives of the Punta Peuco prisoners to try to deal with rejection on the outside. More difficult if, far from showing repentance, some try to use old extortion strategies to obtain benefits. As Álvaro Corbalán did, involving other prisoners in the process.

After reading the first report in this series, Senator Francisco Chahuán and the priest Cristián Precht, to whom Corbalán’s mother asked for shelter for her son, told CIPER that they will no longer go to Punta Peuco. For both, their refusal to be involved in any action associated with an intelligence operation is what motivates their decision.

by Verónica Torres

Source: ciper.cl, May 2, 2012

Cheyre and Contreras Donaire, convicted of human rights violations, appear eligible to vote in the Plebiscite

The Servel explained that “no communication appears for the persons indicated and consulted” regarding them being disqualified from participating in the constituent process.

The Electoral Service (Servel) has already published the final Electoral Roll for the constitutional Plebiscite of October 25, establishing who are the people who will be able to vote in said process and who are not.

In this sense, the Servel defines certain criteria to establish the people eligible to vote, excluding those who have been sentenced to afflictive penalties that entail a prison sentence of three years and one day.

However, according to information revealed by BioBioChile, two former members of the Army who have been convicted of human rights violations are eligible to vote. They are former General Juan Emilio Cheyre and former Army Sergeant Major Manuel Contreras Donaire.

The aforementioned media outlet details that Cheyre was sentenced to three years and one day of supervised release for the “Caravana de la Muerte” (Caravan of Death) case, where he covered up 15 homicides committed in La Serena in October 1973.

Meanwhile, Contreras was sentenced to eight years in prison after being declared guilty as a material author of the homicide of Tucapel Jiménez, a crime committed in February 1982.

Likewise, it is explained that the currently valid Constitution details that a person who lost their citizenship status after being sentenced to an afflictive penalty as described above may recover said status once their “criminal responsibility” ends.

Regarding this situation, the Servel indicated that “in the digitized criminal sentence records that the Electoral Service has had since automatic registration onwards (year 2012), no communication appears for the persons indicated and consulted.”

Source: theclinic.cl, September 9, 2020