The first prosecutions in the country for the so-called Operation TV Removal—carried out during the dictatorship—were issued by Judge Carlos Aldana against nine retired military officers. The resolutions are part of the case regarding the murder and disappearance of 18 peasants in 1973.

This investigation had been closed last year, with five former Carabineros prosecuted for homicide and illegal burial.

However, after it was reopened, the judge of the Concepción Court of Appeals, Carlos Aldana, ordered a series of proceedings that led him to issue the indictments.

The lawyer for the Human Rights Program, Patricia Parra, explained the resolutions, which she said are the first for the operation led by the Army that consisted of the exhumation of the remains of those executed, in order to make them disappear.

The prosecutions are for illegal exhumation and burial, as well as concealment in the crimes of homicide and aggravated kidnapping, and among the accused is retired Army General Jaime García Zamorano, as well as Julio Reyes Garrido, José Puga Pascua, José Iturriaga Valenzuela, Jaime Muller Áviles, Julio Fuentes Chavarriga, Luis Palacios Torres, Juan Cares Molina, and Juan Carlos Balboa Ortega.

Informed of this resolution, relatives of the victims expressed their hope that the accused will now go to prison, as stated by Marina Rubilar, daughter and niece of three forcibly disappeared persons.

According to Marina Rubilar, the 18 peasants murdered in October 1973—among them Lorenzo, Manuel, and José Rubilar—were buried by Carabineros personnel in a pit, from which they were exhumed six years later by the military officers now being prosecuted.

Judge Aldana granted the former members of the Army release on bail, a measure that must be approved by the Concepción Court of Appeals. Until then, the accused will remain detained at the facilities of the Chacabuco Regiment.

Source: elciudadano.cl, January 29, 2014

Case File No. 226-2011: case of the aggravated homicide of Luis Ricardo Herrera González and Mario Parra Guzmán

Having seen: In these case files No. 226-2011, of the 34th Criminal Court of Santiago, by sentence of January 6, 2015, the defendants indicated below were sentenced to the penalties indicated in each case, for their responsibility as authors of the crimes of aggravated homicide of Luis Ricardo Herrera González and Mario Parra Guzmán, committed on September 27, 1973, in the commune of Santiago:

1.- Pedro Enrique Silva Jiménez and Pedro José Rivera Piña, each, to five years and one day of major imprisonment in its minimum degree;

2.- Jaime Oscar García Zamorano, to seven years of major imprisonment in its minimum degree;

3.- Jorge Muñoz Pontony, ten years and one day of major imprisonment in its medium degree.

Considering

Fourth: That prior to the analysis of the appeals, it is convenient to recall that the court has considered the following facts to be proven: On September 27, 1973, around 17:00 hours, a military patrol went to the company "Chilean Autos S.A." and asked to speak with the person in charge, who was requested to provide two of his workers, both union leaders, Luis Herrera González and Mario Parra Guzmán, who upon arrival were detained by Army officials and taken to the facilities of the War Academy of that military institution, where they were interrogated.

They were kept in the unit until dawn, and subsequently, their execution and the abandonment of their bodies on public roads were decided.

Luis Herrera González lost his life due to multiple thoraco-abdominal gunshot wounds, and Mario Parra Guzmán due to multiple gunshot wounds to the lower extremities and an abdominal and pelvic wound with multiple perforations of the intestine and hemoperitoneum.

These events were considered to constitute aggravated homicide, given the absolute defenselessness of the victims, without any risk to the perpetrators of the crime.

Source: Judiciary, December 29, 2016

Derisory sentences against former Carabineros and military officers for crimes and illegal burials in Mulchén

Indignation has been provoked among the relatives of the victims of the Mulchén case by the ruling issued this Monday the 30th by the visiting judge for human rights violation cases of the Concepción Court of Appeals, Carlos Aldana, who sentenced 11 former members of the Army and Carabineros for their responsibility in the crimes of aggravated kidnapping, aggravated homicide, illegal burial, and illegal exhumation of 18 victims executed in Mulchén in October 1973, whose remains were subsequently illegally exhumed to make them disappear.

To all those prosecuted, Aldana sentences them to derisory penalties given the gravity and magnitude of the criminal offenses investigated and given the fact that these are crimes against humanity; furthermore, the ruling grants seven of the convicted persons the benefit of supervised release, which translates into disguised impunity.

Relatives of the victims and plaintiff lawyers have already expressed their willingness to appeal the ruling, seeking penalties in accordance with the crimes committed and the sense of justice.

In the ruling (case file 30-2007 and accumulated cases), Judge Aldana sentenced former Carabineros: Jacob del Carmen Ortiz Palma, Juan de Dios Higueras Álvarez, Osvaldo Enrique Díaz Díaz, and Héctor Armando Guzmán Saldaña to sentences of 10 years and one day of imprisonment, as co-authors of the crimes of aggravated homicide of Florencio Rubilar Gutiérrez, José Liborio Rubilar Gutiérrez, José Lorenzo Rubilar Gutiérrez, Alejandro Albornoz González, Luis Godoy Sandoval, Miguel Albornoz Acuña, Daniel Albornoz González, Alberto Albornoz González, Felidor Albornoz González, Jerónimo Sandoval Medina, Juan de Dios Roa Riquelme, and José Gutiérrez Ascencio, 12 crimes committed in October 1973, at the Carmen, Maitenes, and Pemehue estates, in the commune of Mulchén. These four convicted individuals are the only ones who, in Aldana's judgment, must serve effective prison time.

Likewise, Ortiz Palma, Higueras Álvarez, Díaz Díaz, and Guzmán Saldaña must serve 5 years and one day of imprisonment for their responsibility in the aggravated kidnappings of 6 other victims: Juan de Dios Laubra Brevis, José Yañez Durán, Celsio Vivanco Carrasco, Edmundo Vidal Aedo, Domingo Sepúlveda Castillo, and Guillermo Albornoz González.

These crimes were committed in October 1973, at the El Morro estate. In addition to 541 days of imprisonment for the illegal burial of the 12 homicide victims.

Meanwhile, the executors of "Operation TV Removal," former Army officer Jaime Oscar García Zamorano, and former non-commissioned officers José María Iturriaga Valenzuela, Jaime Jorge Muller Avilés, Julio Hernán Fuentes Chavarriga, Luis Alberto Palacios Torres, and Juan Carlos Balboa Ortega were sentenced to only 3 years and one day of imprisonment, only as accessories to the crime of simple homicide of 11 victims from the Carmen, Maitenes, and Pemehue estates, plus 541 days of imprisonment for their responsibility in the illegal exhumation of said victims.

In the case of former Army officer Julio Guillermo Humberto Reyes Garrido, also implicated in the operation to disappear the victims, the ruling sentenced him to serve a penalty of 3 years of imprisonment as an accessory to 11 simple homicides, and to the penalty of 300 days of imprisonment for his responsibility in the illegal exhumation of those victims.

In addition, Judge Aldana acquitted former non-commissioned officer José Francisco Puga Pascua, and Juan Luis Cares Molina was acquitted due to death.

"Operation TV Removal" is one of the most bestial actions committed by the military dictatorship, by express order of the tyrant, organized with promptness by the CNI and executed with criminal diligence by the hordes of agents who reveled in the terror they provoked and caused among their victims, the relatives of the victims, and the population in general.

Between the end of 1978 and the beginning of 1979, personnel from the "Húsares" Regiment of Angol, in compliance with a cryptogram from the Army General Command of the time, removed the remains of those who were executed in October 1973 and taken to an unknown destination, carrying out "Operation TV Removal," which was ordered to make the remains of the forcibly disappeared persons who had been murdered disappear.

Acts like these cannot continue to go unpunished.

The convicted Jaime García Zamorano has remained in prison at the Punta Peuco Prison for a couple of years, where he is serving an effective sentence of seven years in prison for two counts of homicide in other human rights cases.

The facts

During the investigation stage, the visiting judge managed to establish that on October 4, 1973, a corporal from the No. 13 Regiment of the Chilean Army based in the city of Los Ángeles, together with 3 conscripts from the same unit, was commissioned to place himself at the disposal of the Carabineros Commissariat of the city.

That commission, accompanied by a Carabineros lieutenant and 4 officials from that unit, left for the mountain sector of the town to search for a list of people opposed to the government of the time.

On October 5, the group arrived at the "El Morro" estate in the foothills of Mulchén and detained, without a legitimate administrative or judicial order, 5 people who were interrogated at a temporary checkpoint and taken to the "La Playita" sector of the Renaico River, where they were executed and their bodies made to disappear.

On October 6, the delegation arrived at the Carmen and Maitenes estates, where 7 people were detained and forced to dig a 6 by 4-meter pit, only to be shot on the spot and illegally buried. Hours later, another prisoner was detained at the site and taken by the group to the main house of the Pemehue estate, where they arrived the following day.

On October 7, 5 people were detained at the Pemehue estate, who were executed on the spot and their bodies left in clandestine graves, where they were found by their relatives.

Meanwhile, between the end of 1978 and the beginning of 1979, a section of the "Húsares" Regiment of Angol, after receiving a cryptogram from the Army General Command of the time, went to the sites of the illegal burials, exhumed the remains, and made them disappear, despite the fact that a visiting judge from the Concepción Court of Appeals was investigating the events.

Source: resumen.cl, October 31, 2017 doval 6 years 12/06/2016 39 Juan Guzmán Valencia 15 years and 1 day 11/11/2016 40 Jorge Eduardo Hernández Espinoza 15 years and 1 day 09/21/2015 41 Hugo del Tránsito Hernández Valle 9 years 10/07/2014 42 Carlos Alberto Herrera Jiménez Life imprisonment 03/31/2004 43 Pedro Alejandro Lorenzo Herrera Mossuto 7 years 03/09/2017 44 Pedro Pablo Hormazábal Fuentes 10 years and 1 day 06/16/2017 45 Raúl Eduardo Iturriaga Neumann 61 years 08/06/2007 46 Patricio Enrique Jeldres Rodríguez 5 years and 1 day 02/17/2014 47 Klaudio Erich Kosiel Hornig 10 years and 1 day 05/13/2014 48 Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko 555 years 09/29/2013 49 Adolfo Nicolás Lapostol Sprovera 6 years 09/25/2015 50 Haroldo Alberto Latorre Sánchez 10 years and 1 day 05/12/2015 51 Fernando Eduardo Lauriani Maturana 90 years 01/05/2015 52 Raúl Diego Lillo Gutiérrez 10 years and 1 day 08/13/2015 53 Carlos José Leonardo López Tapia 72 years 01/21/2015 54 Gonzalo Fernando Maass del Valle 10 years and 1 day 04/26/2017 55 Juan Heraldo Maldonado Sanhueza 10 years and 1 day 02/17/2015 56 César Manríquez Bravo 94 years 09/29/2013 57 Juan de Dios Mansilla Díaz 10 years and 1 day 06/16/2016 58 Orlando José Manzo Durán 77 years 09/27/2012 59 Patricio Orlando Marabolí Orellana 5 years and 1 day 10/03/2016 60 Jorge Segundo Marín Jiménez 10 years and 1 day 03/23/2012 61 Pablo Abelardo Martínez Latorre 5 years 02/10/2016 62 Patricio Gustavo Martínez Moena 20 years 11/24/2014 63 Alejandro Molina Cisternas 5 years 01/27/2017 64 Patricio Montecinos Bustos 10 years and 1 day 08/29/2016 65 Manuel Ángel Morales Acevedo 5 years and 1 day 04/26/2017 66 José Miguel Morales Morales 10 years and 1 day 04/26/2017 67 Juan Hernán Morales Salgado 60 years 07/13/2010 68 Manuel Agustín Muñoz Gamboa 15 years 08/04/2014 69 Osvaldo Muñoz Mondaca 10 years 07/15/2016 70 Jorge Muñoz Pontony 15 years and 1 day 01/27/2017 71 Aquiles Navarrete Izarnotegui 5 years and 1 day 04/24/2017 72 Óscar Hernán Norambuena Retamal 5 years and 1 day 06/29/2017 73 Rodolfo Enrique Olguín Gonzalez 10 years and 1 day 01/09/2017 74 Víctor Manuel Olivos Gallardo 12 years 06/23/2016 75 Héctor Manuel Orozco Sepúlveda 10 years and 1 day 08/21/2017 76 René Ortega Troncoso 30 years 11/16/2016 77 Vittorio Orvieto Tiplitzki 10 years and 1 day 05/13/2014 78 Jorge Aníbal Osses Novoa 5 years and 1 day 05/13/2015 79 Nelson Alberto Paz Bustamante 10 years and 1 day 05/12/2015 80 Rodrigo Pérez Martínez 5 years and 1 day 04/26/2017 81 Manuel Antonio Pérez Santillán 5 years and 1 day 08/14/2015 82 Fernando Guillermo Polanco Gallardo 3 years and 1 day 02/10/2016 83 Hernán Ernesto Portillo Aranda 5 years and 1 day 09/28/2015 84 Hugo Aquiles Prado Contreras 5 years and 1 day 04/24/2017 85 Manuel Jorge Provis Carrasco 25 years 08/14/2015 86 Raúl Pablo Quintana Salazar 10 years and 1 day 05/13/2014 87 José del Carmen Quintanilla Fernández 5 years and 1 day 09/16/2015 88 Iván Raúl Belarmino Quiroz Ruiz 27 years 01/24/2008 89 Hernán Alejandro Ramírez Hald 10 years and 1 day 05/12/2015 90 Moisés Retamal Bustos 6 years 05/18/2015 91 Manuel de la Cruz Rivas Díaz 4 years 01/12/2017 92 Pedro José Rivera Piña 5 years and 1 day 01/31/2017 93 Pablo Marcelo Rodríguez Márquez 10 years and 1 day date 13/08/2015 94 Fernando Rafael Rojas Tapia 15 years 16/10/2013 95 Patricio Sergio Román Herrera 22 years 28/05/2015 96 Nelson Williams Román Vargas 10 years and 1 day 13/08/2015 97 Víctor Eulogio Ruiz Godoy 20 years 09/01/2017 98 Juan Francisco Saavedra Loyola 22 years 04/08/2014 99 Hugo Iván Salas Wenzel Life sentence 29/09/2013 100 Enrique Erasmo Sandoval Arancibia 30 years 21/10/2013 101 Manuel Gustavo Sandoval Cifuentes 10 years and 1 day 30/03/2017 102 Marcelo Ariel Sandoval Durán 10 years and 1 day 14/08/2015 103 Wellington Sarli Pose 5 years and 1 day 13/08/2015 104 Roberto Urbano Schmied Zanzi 10 years and 1 day 12/07/2016 105 Pedro Enrique Silva Jiménez 5 years and 1 day 31/01/2017 106 Arturo Rodrigo Silva Valdés 20 years 04/09/2015 107 Gonzalo Baldemar Soto Sandoval 10 years and 1 day 30/03/2017 108 Gamaliel Soto Segura 10 years and 1 day 21/03/2013 109 Ciro Ernesto Torré Sáez 15 years 05/10/2016 110 Jaime Fernando Torres Gacitúa 15 years 17/08/2015 111 José Andrés Torres Riquelme 5 years and 1 day 16/06/2016 112 Juan Fernando Torres Silva 10 years and 1 day 14/08/2015 113 Lander Mickel Uriarte Burotto 6 years 18/05/2015 114 Gerardo Ernesto Urrich González 25 years 14/03/2014 115 Juan Artemio Valderrama Molina 6 years 16/09/2015 116 Guillermo Antonio Vargas Avendaño 6 years 18/05/2015 117 Hernán Antonio Vásquez Villegas 25 years 15/09/2015 118 Erasmo Francisco Vega Sobarzo 5 years and 1 day 16/09/2015 119 Máximo Arturo Venegas Véjar 5 years and 1 day 23/10/2015 120 Juan Iván Vidal Ogueta 5 years and 1 day 08/09/2015 121 Rolf Gonzalo Wenderoth Pozo 187 years 05/01/2015 122 Christoph Georg Paul Willeke Floel 25 years 10/09/2009 123 Raúl Enrique Zapata 8 years 27/11/2014 124 José Octavio Zara Holger 15 years and 1 day 29/09/2013

Source: cambio21.cl, June 4, 2018

Punta Peuco inmate, Colonel (ret.) Jaime Garcia, dies of COVID-19

According to reports, the former officer, convicted for illegal exhumation and inhumation during the dictatorship, was hospitalized for a week at the Military Hospital. He had requested a pardon due to his state of health, which was rejected by the government.

Army Colonel (ret.) Jaime García Zamorano (85), convicted for illegal exhumation and inhumation during the dictatorship, died of Covid-19. On Saturday morning, the death of the former officer was confirmed; he became the first inmate to die of coronavirus inside the prison.

As reported, García was hospitalized for a week at the Military Hospital and had requested a pardon due to his state of health, which was rejected by the government. García died at 9:00 PM this Friday due to severe pneumonia resulting from his infection.

Source: lanacion.cl, September 4, 2021

Third Punta Peuco inmate dies as a result of COVID-19

The third inmate to die in the prison in less than 24 hours was the FACh Commander (ret.) Luis Enrique Campos Poblete, 82, who was serving a sentence for crimes against humanity. During the night of last Sunday, the death of the third criminal of the civil-military dictatorship convicted at Punta Peuco due to coronavirus infection was confirmed.

He is the Chilean Air Force (FACh) Commander (ret.) Luis Enrique Campos Poblete, 82, who had underlying health conditions. Campos Poblete was serving a 17-year prison sentence as responsible for the murder of José Francisco Bordas Paz, a leader of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR), in December 1974.

The conviction was in the capacity of perpetrator. This is the third death from the virus inside the prison, where the outbreak began due to a visitor who entered while infected. Campos Poblete thus joins the deaths of Miguel Estay Reyno (68), known as "El Fanta," sentenced to life imprisonment for the 1985 Degollados Case, and Colonel (ret.) Jaime García Zamorano (85), sentenced for illegal exhumation and inhumation during the dictatorship.

Source: lavozdelosquesobran.cl, September 6, 2021

The testimonies of military personnel that brought to light the plan to exhume the victims and throw their bodies into the sea

In the early years of the dictatorship, when the regime still denied the existence of the forcibly disappeared, every kidnapping of political opponents always included the destruction of documentary records that could have elucidated the final fate of the victims.

By late 1978, these attempts to erase evidence reached a level of cruelty that is difficult to fathom: digging up bodies buried in clandestine graves to throw them into the sea from aircraft or burn them in ovens or drums. Under the code name Operation "Retiro de Televisores" (TV Set Removal), the plan condemned the victims' families to a painful search that has lasted for nearly half a century.

Exhorted to tell the truth, retired Air Force Sergeant Major Sergio Orlando López Maldonado decided it was time to break the silence. He did so at 16:05 on August 22, 2005, before two PDI officers. What he said that day in Antofagasta would be the loose thread that would allow for the reconstruction of one of the dictatorship's cruelest plans, which has condemned the families of the forcibly disappeared to live through nearly half a century of painful searching.

That afternoon, he admitted that he was in charge of throwing bodies into the sea from a C-47 aircraft. They were the remains of those executed by the "Caravana de la Muerte" (Caravan of Death) in October 1973. They had been unearthed from a clandestine grave, and those involved in that macabre operation were tasked with making them disappear forever.

They were wrapped in white cloth, López said. He also recalled that members of the Army loaded the bodies onto the aircraft he was piloting. They did so in Calama, back in 1976.

“I don’t remember how many there were, they loaded ten or more bundles,” recounted the FACH sergeant, who later justified his decades of silence by noting that for years he feared reprisals from his superiors (see judicial statement).

López Maldonado was finally sentenced to three years of remitted imprisonment in 2022 (see the sentence).

What happened in Calama in 1976 was the prelude to a large-scale operation that would be carried out two years later to permanently dispose of the bodies of the disappeared. The dictatorship could not allow it to be known that people had been murdered outside of all legality and that their bodies had been hidden.

It had lied within the country and also before international organizations, claiming that there were no such victims, that they were never detained or executed. But in 1978, the bodies of murdered peasants appeared in Lonquén, exposing the lie.

Then, the dictatorship set in motion one of its darkest plans: it had to repeat what was done in Calama two years earlier, remove the bodies from the clandestine graves, and make them disappear forever.

The judicial documents showing how Operation "Retiro de Televisores" was executed, which were reviewed for this report, are now available in the online search engine “Papeles de la Dictadura” (Dictatorship Papers), an initiative developed by CIPER with the collaboration of the Center for Journalistic Research and Projects (CIP) of the Universidad Diego Portales.

CALAMA, THE LESSON

The victims of Calama were executed by the "Caravana de la Muerte," a delegation that murdered 93 people who were detained throughout Chile under the excuse of accelerating the military trials they were facing. Of those murders, 26 occurred in the city of Calama.

As a delegate of General Augusto Pinochet, the person responsible for the operation was General Sergio Arellano Stark, seconded by Lieutenant Colonel Sergio Arredondo González, then-Major Pedro Espinoza Bravo, Captain Marcelo Moren Brito, and Lieutenant Armando Fernández Larios, among other officers.

In October 1973, the delegation arrived in Calama and took 26 prisoners from the jail. They blindfolded them, tied them up, executed them by firing squad, and buried them clandestinely in the Topater sector.

In a statement before the courts, retired Sergeant Lorenzo Alvear González said that 12 soldiers were chosen to accompany the delegation led by General Arellano in these tasks. “I loaded the bodies onto the truck,” he said, noting that he did so after Dr. Luis Rojas identified them.

After the crime, military chaplain Luis Jorquera informed some of the bereaved that their relatives had died peacefully, as Violeta Berrios, Mario Arguellez’s partner, recalled before the courts.

Governor Eugenio Rivera Desgroux promised the families that in a year he would tell them where the bodies were. Regarding the same matter, the Intendant and Chief of the State of Siege Zone in Antofagasta, Joaquín Lagos, gave a complementary explanation in an interview with the Spanish newspaper El País.

“It shamed me to see them (the bodies). They were in pieces. So I wanted to put them back together, at least leave them in a human form. (...). They were brutal,” he said.

The bodies were never returned, and when the families' search began to approach the truth, the decision was made to exhume them and throw them into the sea—acts for which the Supreme Court imposed sentences of 720 days of imprisonment, with the benefit of conditional remission of the sentence (see an informational note from the Judiciary).

Military officer Emilio Pardo, one of those convicted, admitted that in 1976 they went to the area of the illegal burial on orders from General Carol Urzúa, who wanted to confirm where the remains were. “We proceeded to open and close the grave,” he recalled. They also took photographs as a record.

In the following days, the soldiers returned, exhumed the bodies, and took them to El Loa airport, where the FACH plane was waiting for them, according to the statement of Sergeant Manuel Segundo Aguirre Cortés.

“We had to wait there for the arrival of a plane,” he said (see his statement). That, of course, was the aircraft piloted by Sergeant Major López Maldonado, the man who threw the bodies into the sea.

But these actions were only the beginning. Two years later, new human remains would be found in the ovens of Lonquén, a rural town near Santiago, and the operation spread throughout the country.

1978, THE LONQUÉN CASE

Everything came to a head in November 1978, when a man named Inocencio de Los Ángeles arrived at the Vicaría de la Solidaridad, the institution created in 1976 by Cardinal Raúl Silva Henríquez to lead the defense of human rights during the dictatorship. Under strict anonymity, he provided evidence that human remains existed inside some ovens located in an old lime mine in Lonquén.

On November 30 of that year, following a meeting called by Silva Henríquez, a delegation led by priest Cristián Precht went to the site, confirming the veracity of the report and immediately handing over the information to Judge Juana Godoy, who opened an investigation.

The bodies belonged to 15 peasants from the area, aged between 17 and 51, who had been detained in October 1973 and whose whereabouts had been lost at the Isla de Maipo Carabineros station, where they were initially taken.

The justice system, assisted by the Legal Medical Service, only concluded the identification work of those remains on February 19, 2010, 32 years after the discovery, in a task that took four years from the time it was requested by Judge Alejandro Solís (see ruling).

Contrary to that procedural slowness, in 1978 the speed of events and the decisions to hide other bodies was much greater.

The appearance of the remains in Lonquén was the first material proof of the existence of the forcibly disappeared in Latin America. The discovery caused concern within the dictatorship and for General Pinochet himself.

That unease was publicly acknowledged in the year 2000 by retired General Odlanier Mena, who in 1978 was the director of the Central Nacional de Informaciones (CNI), the body that replaced the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA), the regime's first repressive agency.

“The discovery of bodies in Lonquén produced a serious internal social commotion. The country was in the preliminaries of a near-war with Argentina. It could be inferred that if new ‘Lonquenes’ appeared, the internal front would be damaged,” Mena told the evening newspaper La Segunda.

General Mena, who committed suicide in 2013 to avoid his transfer to the Punta Peuco prison, was from then on in charge of Operation "Retiro de Televisores," which consisted of digging up all the bodies of the forcibly disappeared buried in clandestine graves—a fact for which he was never convicted.

Most of the exhumed corpses were thrown into the sea, as had happened in Calama. Others were burned in ovens or metal drums, as occurred in the south of the country.

A CRYPTOGRAM FROM SANTIAGO

In the Los Ángeles Regiment, the order arrived between late 1978 and early 1979 via a cryptogram sent by the Army General Command, as established by a criminal investigation conducted by Judge Carlos Aldana.

According to the judicial inquiry, that encrypted document was received in that unit by Sergeant Juan Carlos Balboa Ortega, who passed it on to his superior, Commander Patricio Escudero Troncoso, who was unaware of the existence and location of these types of graves.

“It was a secret A-1 cryptogram from the commander-in-chief and addressed to all military units in the country (...). It ordered all measures to be taken to prevent third parties from finding the burial sites in each military jurisdiction,” acknowledged Balboa (see his statement).

This sergeant, according to his own judicial account, found out days later about the existence of an irregular burial in the area, information he communicated to his superior, who in turn informed the regiment commander, Colonel Jaime García Zamorano.

The latter, after a coordination meeting with regional intelligence, ordered an immediate military operation to carry out the instructions from Santiago.

Lieutenant Julio Reyes Garrido was placed in charge of the mission, in which he was seconded by sergeants José Puga Pascua, José Iturriaga Valenzuela, Jaime Muller Avilés, Julio Fuentes Chavarriga, Luis Palacios Torres, and Juan Cares Molina, in addition to the late Sergeant Major Eduardo Paredes Bustamante.

The uniformed men, winding along the banks of the Renaico River, advanced to the two points where the bodies of the forcibly disappeared were illegally buried. In both places, they removed the corpses, put them in sacks, and took them to the regiment, where Sergeant Juan Cares proceeded to incinerate them in a brick oven (see his statement).

Lieutenant Colonel Julio Reyes described that operation step by step in his statement. “The transport to the area was carried out in a short truck (...). In this way, three occupants boarded the vehicle in the front, while the remaining three officials traveled in the back,” he began his account.

“The personnel from Concepción knew the exact location of the burial, so we went directly to this site. My job, along with the personnel of the section I was in charge of, consisted of providing security and surveillance for the III Division team that carried out the excavation.

For this reason, I remained about thirty or forty meters away, so I could not see the number of bodies that were exhumed. These remains were kept in black plastic bags and loaded into the vehicle, to be subsequently transported to Concepción. I remember that this work was organized because the locals already knew about this burial site,” detailed Reyes (see statement).

Once at the regiment, and after the incineration of the bodies, the closing of the mission was left in the hands of conscript Julio Fuentes. “I had to send a cryptogram saying that the TV sets had been removed,” he said before the courts.

Later, Fuentes maintained that over the years he continued to inquire about what happened and discovered that among the exhumed bodies were peasants he had known since childhood, from his summers at the school camps organized at the Termas de Pemuhue (see his statement).

Finally, the justice system established the veracity of these accounts and set the sanctions, which in the case of the exhumations were three years or less.

“The facts described above,” wrote Minister Aldana in his first-instance ruling, “constitute the last link in the episode that began on October 6, 1973, already referred to in the first consideration, regarding the victims of (the farm) Carmen and Maitenes and of Pemehue, intended to achieve the elimination of the victims' remains in order to hide or render useless the body of the crimes to prevent their discovery.”

In 2020, the Concepción Court of Appeals ratified that judicial truth and increased the sentences imposed by the magistrate in relation to the murder and subsequent disappearance and incineration of 18 peasants murdered in Mulchén.

SECRETS IN A RESERVED NOTEBOOK

Another account that shows in a special way the persistent effort of Operation "Retiro de Televisores" is safeguarded in a reserved notebook of the Judiciary to which CIPER had access.

In this file, officer Mario Gianotti, who in 1978 was a captain at the Artillery School in Linares, recounted step by step his work in the mission of searching, clandestine exhumation, and incineration of bodies that took place in the south of the country. “I was ordered to carry out a search on the grounds of the military property, with the purpose of locating the places where the bodies of people who had been executed after September 11, 1973, were buried,” the officer maintained.

Gianotti also recalled that he organized a work team with two officers and two sergeants, noting that of them he only remembered the name of then-Lieutenant Hernán Vejar, who would later qualify as a lawyer, swearing before the Supreme Court. “We did not receive precise information on where the bodies were located, and we began the search according to the known information, but not only at the Artillery School in Linares, but throughout the city,” he specified.

That work, which was concentrated at the General Bari shooting range, lasted for 20 days without results, until they finally found one body, which was handed over to another team of four soldiers from Concepción, who proceeded to incinerate it “inside a metal drum with oil.”

Gianotti and his men then continued their exhumation work in Constitución, in a coastal cave near the mouth of the Maule River, where they met Carabineros who were performing the same functions. “They had found three bodies, one on top of the other, not at a great depth,” he recalled (see the statement).

Officer Hernán Vejar, who retired in 1996 as a member of the Army Intelligence Directorate (DINE), confirmed Gianotti’s confessions before the courts, specifying that he never had to account to his superiors for these events and that he was unaware of further details of what happened (see statement).

THE LAST STEP, DESTROYING DOCUMENTS

Certainly, in the final years of the dictatorship, the destruction of evidence ceased to focus on clandestinely buried bodies and shifted to the incineration of documentation, as shown by various archives from that era reviewed by CIPER.

For example, in secret official letter 03146 of 1988, then-Foreign Minister Ricardo García sent the CNI a “Destruction Act” for documents in the possession of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, signed by official James Sinclair.

Certainly, that elimination of classified information was ordered for all ministries.

However, some one hundred thousand pages of secret documents remained forgotten on the 27 kilometers of shelves of the National Administration Archive (ARNAD), material reviewed by CIPER to produce this series of reports on the 50th anniversary of the coup d'état.

Judicial investigations also established that the DINA and CNI archives were transferred to the Army Intelligence Directorate (DINE) with the advent of democracy. Before the courts, Sergeant Raúl Luis Otárola López, a former member of DINA and later the CNI, said that during his time at DINE he witnessed that those materials were kept at least until 2005.

“(That year) I went down to the basement (of DINE) to leave microfilmed documents, where there are metal shelves where the celluloid rolls supported by cartridges are kept, organized by codes and numbers,” recounted Otárola, as recorded in a PDI report.

However, the documents were finally incinerated, as later established by Judge Alejandro Madrid (see CIPER report: Testimonies prove the Army kept secret dictatorship files). In 2020, Judge Mario Carroza prosecuted retired General Eduardo Jara Hallad, former director of the Army Intelligence Directorate (DINE); the former head of archives in the Department II of counterintelligence, dependent on DINE, retired Lieutenant Colonel Mercedes del Carmen Rojas Kuschevich; and the former Chief of the Army General Staff, retired General Carlos Chacón Guerrero.

Source: ciper.cl, September 7, 2023