On January 10, 1978, Guido Arturo SAAVEDRA INOSTROZA, a student at the University of Buenos Aires and an employee at Textil Gloria, was detained by Argentine police forces. To this date, he remains forcibly disappeared.

The young university student had left Chile after September 11, 1973, following his detention at the Federico Santa María University in Valparaíso. The information available to the Commission led to the conviction that Guido Saavedra was the victim of a human rights violation committed outside the national territory by agents of the Chilean State or with their participation.

To reach this conclusion, the Commission assessed the high level of communication existing between the Argentine and Chilean security services at the time, which, together with the specific background of this case, provides well-founded grounds to presume such participation.

Source: (Rettig Report)

In 1973, the Navy turned the university into a torture center. The darkest hour of the Santa María.

Marine Infantry troops turned its courtyards and classrooms into places where hundreds of detainees were beaten and tortured. It operated as such at least until October 1973, and it was the first station in the ordeal of the priest Miguel Woodward.

The judicial investigation is in the hands of Judge Eliana Quezada, who has already identified the retired officers who directed the operations. It was dawn on September 12, 1973, when four Navy trucks entered the Federico Santa María Technical University (UTFSM) in Valparaíso with some 80 prisoners tied up.

They entered through the gate on Avenida Los Placeres, in the upper part of the campus. The Marines, who had seized the campus, forced the detainees down with blows and insults and lined them up in a courtyard.

Now began their path to hell: the university cloister was emptied of students and professors to be used, at least until the end of October of that year, as a center for political imprisonment and torture following the military uprising.

Eduardo Catalán Cavieres was a young MAPU militant arrested that dawn in the El Progreso neighborhood of Cerro Los Placeres along with two brothers and his father. From that neighborhood, they were taken to the Villa Berlín of that same hill, from where the trucks departed for the university.

Today he recalls that other detainees were loaded on top of him. In the midst of the violent reception by the Marines in charge of the detention center, Catalán recognized "a Marine Infantry lieutenant with the surname Benavente, who also knew my father, whom he pulled aside." He heard his father say to him: "But there are my three children," which was of no use.

Catalán saw dozens of prisoners mistreated in the courtyard, and he states that "the Marines tortured and beat the detainees there. They kept some prisoners there at night as well." Catalán was taken from the university to the Naval War Academy (AGN) on Cerro Playa Ancha in Valparaíso, which, from an institution for training senior officers in normal times, became the feared four-story gray building whose silhouette, cut against the port city sky between winter clouds and spring sunsets, can be seen from any point.

Catalán left the AGN soon after, but he was arrested again days later and taken back to the UTFSM. Now the matter was more serious: it concerned the priest Miguel Woodward. This second time, he arrived at the detention center installed in the university facilities a few hours after Woodward had been taken from there to the War Academy.

The priest had suffered his first beating. "Miguel had been my confessor and my spiritual guide for a long time," Catalán tells LND. The Marines interrogated him about the priest's movements, whose hours were already numbered by September 20 of that year.

Catalán recognized some officers and non-commissioned officers during his two detentions because he himself had been one of them: after completing his military service, before the coup, he remained employed at the Marine Infantry school.

The investigation into the detentions that took place at the university, and the fate of the detainees, is today in charge of the minister of the Valparaíso Court of Appeals, Eliana Quezada, who is also investigating the crime of Woodward and the events aboard the Esmeralda.

The magistrate has already identified the group of Marine Infantry officers who were in charge of the detention center and the repressive activities that were carried out there, who are not the same ones who tortured Woodward at the AGN and who were involved in his disappearance, whom the judge already indicted at the beginning of this year.

ENGINE ROOM

Aída Rerequeo was then a young communist militant living in the Recreo Alto neighborhood in Viña del Mar. One morning in early October 1973, a van with Marines came to look for her at her house. They took her up with her eyes uncovered, which is why she knows they took her to the UTFSM, and they entered through the same gate on Avenida Placeres.

They put her in a room, "where I saw a lot of machinery and a small office." They isolated her from the rest of the detainees to interrogate her in that place full of metal. "After a few hours, since I wasn't telling them much, others in uniform arrived to pressure me more," she told LND.

From there, she recalls being transferred to the War Academy. The socialist Carlos Guerrero and his son, and the family of Raúl González, also passed through those facilities, according to Eduardo Catalán.

GUIDO SAAVEDRA INOSTROZA was a young university student from the port city who, after the military coup, also joined the ranks of the victims. After remaining detained for a time at this university, Saavedra left for Argentina, where he took refuge.

But he fell from the frying pan into the fire because, after the 1976 military uprising in that country, on January 10, 1978, while he was studying at the University of Buenos Aires and working as an operator in the Textil Gloria industry, he was arrested in the Argentine capital within the framework of Operation Condor.

To this day, he remains forcibly disappeared. Judge Eliana Quezada has an advanced investigation into the events that occurred at the UTFSM, and it is expected that she will soon issue the first resolutions that could lead to the indictment of the group of Marine Infantry officers, now retired, who were in charge of the darkest episode that has occurred in this prestigious center of higher education, whose overseer after the armed uprising was the delegate of the Military Junta, Rear Admiral Juan Naylor Wieber.

THE NEWS, INTERVIEWS, AND NEWS PUBLISHED IN THIS BLOG DO NOT NECESSARILY REPRESENT THE THOUGHTS OF AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL – CHILE.

Source

adhb.wordpress.com 21/09/2008

Source: www.lanacion.cl

Date: 21-09-2008