Brothers Guido and Héctor Barría Bassay, 19 and 27 years of age respectively, both members of the Socialist Party, were detained on October 16, 1973, at approximately 12:00 PM at the Los Riscos estate, located in the Río Blanco sector, in the commune of Río Negro, Osorno province.

Their father, Pedro Alejandrino Barría Navarro, worked as a tractor driver at the sawmill located on the aforementioned estate. The two brothers had arrived there a few days earlier to get away from Riachuelo, where they resided, as they were known there as political militants and feared possible repression. One of them, Héctor, had been threatened by a Carabineros Lieutenant from Río Negro.

On October 16, a group of approximately 10 Carabineros arrived at the estate under the command of the Lieutenant of the 2nd Carabineros Station of Río Negro, José Hernán Godoy Barrientos. They asked the workers for the location of the sawmill and whether the Barría brothers were there; upon arriving at the site where work was being carried out, they proceeded to detain Guido Ricardo, who was with his father on a tractor.

One of the Carabineros, First Corporal Pedro Segundo Soto Godoy, immediately began beating him with the butt of his service weapon and forced him to undress; he was subsequently taken to one of the vehicles.

Héctor Alejandro was taken from the house of one of the estate's workers, where he had apparently tried to take refuge after seeing the patrol arrive. The Carabineros fired shots into the air before proceeding with the detentions.

Héctor was also tied up and taken along with his brother to one of the vehicles, which subsequently drove away from the site.

There were around fourteen witnesses to these events, including the father of the victims, the estate administrator, several sawmill workers, and some of their wives. Several of them were able to identify the Carabineros who made up the patrol, as they knew them from before.

The witnesses also noted having seen the brothers Raúl Estatiro and Víctor René Guzmán del Río, merchants from Riachuelo, at the scene; they provided their pickup truck to accompany the Carabineros patrol and subsequently transport the victims to the detention facility.

The detainees were reportedly taken to the Riachuelo police station and later transferred to the Río Negro police station. The mother of the detainees, Elvecia Bassay Alvear, went to both facilities, where she was denied any explanation regarding her sons and was even forbidden from returning.

She persisted in her search through various detention centers in Río Negro and Osorno, the Osorno Intendencia, and the Prosecutor's Offices of Valdivia and Osorno. At the Carabineros Prosecutor's Office in Osorno, a Lieutenant informed her that her sons were being prosecuted and were in the city's jail, which was not true.

At the Military Prosecutor's Office in Valdivia, she was told that her sons "must not be dead, but rather detained in some prisoner camp."

To this date, the Barría Bassay brothers remain forcibly disappeared.

JUDICIAL AND/OR ADMINISTRATIVE ACTIONS

On April 16, 1979, case file No. 22.743 and 22.744 was initiated in the First Court of Letters of Osorno regarding the presumed disappearance of Guido and Héctor Barría Bassay, respectively. The complaint for kidnapping, serious injury, and possible homicide filed by the mother of the detainees on May 28 of the same year was subsequently added to these cases.

Regarding the proceedings carried out during the investigation, it should be noted, among other things, that the Osorno Carabineros Prefecture reported having no records of the detention of the Barría brothers on the indicated date, neither at the Riachuelo station nor at the 2nd Carabineros Station of Río Negro, because the Guard and Incident logs sent to the Courts "were incinerated as they have a retention period of 3 and 5 years respectively." The IV Military Court of Valdivia reported that, after reviewing the corresponding documents from the Carabineros and Army Military Prosecutor's Offices, which operated separately until June 1974, the detention of Guido Barría Bassay does not appear registered.

Regarding witness statements, five workers from the estate appeared; three of them stated they saw the Carabineros carry out the detention, and two of them provided the names of some of the apprehenders.

Regarding the seven Carabineros who appeared, five of them claimed not to have participated in operations, as they were performing administrative duties. For his part, Lieutenant Godoy Barrientos stated he did not remember "the names of the people detained during the events of September 1973" and also did not remember having participated in the detention of the Barría Bassay brothers.

Meanwhile, First Corporal Pedro Soto Godoy stated that in October 1973, he was part of a patrol under the command of Lieutenant Godoy (he also provided the names of four other participating Carabineros) and that they detained the Barría Bassay brothers, "members of the Communist Party and known political activists." He added that they later handed them over to a military patrol, but he could not specify if they were taken to Riachuelo or Río Negro.

Regarding the civilians who accompanied the Carabineros, Raúl and Víctor Guzmán del Río, the former acknowledged having provided his pickup truck to the military in September 1973 without knowing the use they would make of it; he added that he knew the Barría brothers as members of the Socialist Party and "political activists who caused problems in Riachuelo."

After several months of investigation, the Judge of the 1st Court of Letters of Osorno, Hugo Sandoval Poblete, issued a temporary dismissal on October 22, 1979, considering that "the perpetration of the crime is not fully justified by the investigated evidence." This resolution was appealed and revoked on December 6 because the investigation appeared incomplete; the case was returned to the summary stage and new proceedings were decreed.

In the same official letter, the Court of Appeals of Valdivia added that there was significant negligence in the processing of the case and that it was handled irregularly, which is why the records were passed to the Full Tribunal.

On December 11, Mrs. Juana González Insunza was appointed as Visiting Minister in the 1st Court of Letters of Osorno and continued to be in charge of the investigation.

During the instruction of the process, several confrontations were carried out, almost all between the father of the forcibly disappeared and each of the Carabineros identified as members of the patrol that carried out the detention.

It should be noted that, in the confrontation with Lieutenant Godoy, the latter stated he did not know Pedro Barría or his sons, nor the estate, and that his appearance was different from what it had been six years prior.

He added: "the ringleader of the activists in Riachuelo was actually surnamed Barría or Bassay, and after 1973, more or less in 1974 or 1975, I learned that the activist was the father of some brothers who were missing, surnamed Barría."

In a confrontation between Lieutenant Godoy and Corporal Soto, the latter completely changed his previous statement, indicating that on that occasion "he had a bad moment and confused the facts."

Of the witnesses questioned, only one provided new information, noting that a year after the military coup, he found a photograph of one of the Barría brothers and a Socialist Party membership card in his business located in Riachuelo, which he delivered to his mother, Elvecia Bassay.

Also examined during this part of the process was case file No. 1.666-73, followed against José Hilario Bassay Alvear and others for violation of Article 8 of Law 17.798 and other crimes, processed in the Army Prosecutor's Office of Osorno.

On December 8, 1973, Guido Ricardo and Héctor Barría Bassay were temporarily dismissed until they were found. Subsequently, on March 6, 1974, it was ordered to suspend the proceedings regarding both accused until they appeared or were found.

After the aforementioned proceedings and others were carried out, the Visiting Minister, on May 8, 1980, declared herself incompetent to continue hearing the case, considering that "members of the Carabineros have had participation in the investigated facts" and therefore its jurisdiction belongs to the Military Prosecutor's Office of Osorno.

The Court of Appeals confirmed this resolution on July 4, 1980.

Source: Vicariate of Solidarity

The Association of Relatives of the Forcibly Disappeared and Political Executions of La Araucanía reports that today in the afternoon, our treasurer and long-time member Elía Barría Bassay passed away tragically in Temuco.

Elía was the sister of Héctor Alejandro and Guido Ricardo, both disappeared in Río Negro (Osorno) in October 1973. In these difficult moments, we ask that you support her family and join us for her wake, which will be held at Blanco 236 (Fun. Villena), and for her funeral on Saturday the 16th, at 3:00 PM, at the Parque del Sendero in our city.

We ask that you share this information. Gratefully, The Board of Directors Association of Relatives of the Forcibly Disappeared and Political Executions, La Araucanía Region “Casa de la Memoria” Pasaje 01620, Población Porvenir, Temuco

Source: July 15, 2011

On October 16, 1973, Guido Barría Bassay disappeared along with his brother Héctor. The police in Riachuelo captured them at a sawmill in southern Chile. They had been sought since the coup d'état, accused of leading a guerrilla group of 500 men in the Huellelhue mountain range.

None of that was true. The young men were alone and frightened. In 2007, the carabineros involved were acquitted due to the statute of limitations. The Barría Bassay family did not hear anything about their relatives until late April 2016, when Ricardo Barría, Guido's son, followed a lead and found a skull: 43 years of searching that seemed to be coming to an end.

Ricardo Barría Ralil seemed to be digging a grave. It was noon on Saturday, April 29, 2016, and he was buried up to his knees. He drove the shovel into the soft earth in a hurry. Sweat ran down him just as it did when he played soccer for the Riachuelo team, the town where he lives.

In that place, 970 kilometers from Santiago, he was searching for his father, Guido Barría Bassay, and his uncle Héctor, who were detained and forcibly disappeared by a police patrol on October 16, 1973.

His effort to move his 93-kilogram body and a cocktail of sudden sensations took his breath away: the nerves, the adrenaline, and the anxiety of someone who has searched for something their whole life and believes they are about to find it.

Ricardo knelt, cupped his hands like a sieve, and moved the sediment until some indecipherable human skeletal remains and a piece of a skull remained in his palms. Then he kissed the remains. “It’s them, it’s them,” he shouted in desperation. *

The day Salvador Allende won the presidential election, Guido Barría did not take his ear away from the radio. It was September 4, 1970, when dozens of socialist militants gathered at his grandfather Luis Bassay Cuevas’s house to hear the results.

Everyone was carrying red flags. The place also served as the party headquarters. The same one where Allende had rested one afternoon in 1958, when the “Victory Train”—a railway on which he traveled through Chile campaigning from north to south—had taken him there.

All the Bassays were left-wing militants. Grandfather Luis was the origin of that seed. He had arrived in the town in the early 1900s, after being relegated by ship from the saltpeter fields, accused of agitating the workers.

He had settled on the side of the road that connects Riachuelo with Río Negro, municipalities that together totaled fewer than ten thousand inhabitants. There he raised the 7 children he had with Juana Alvear.

Elvecia was one of them, who at 14 years old paired up with Pedro Barría, a young worker from a right-wing family. From the marriage, 8 children were born, among them Guido and Héctor, whom they nicknamed Tito.

For Luis, his grandchildren embodied the principles of socialism better than anyone. Guido was 16 and Héctor 24, and since they were little, they had been militants in the party’s youth wing. Months before the election, both had toured the town’s estates with other friends, explaining Allende’s program to the peasants.

Inés Barría, their 9-year-old sister, was also there on the day of the triumph. For the first time, they were winning something other than soccer. “After listening to the tallies, we marched from my grandfather’s house and people joined in along the way.

We were all shouting with happiness. We arrived at the carabinero station and sang the national anthem,” she recalls. The Germans did not celebrate that night. They had arrived in Riachuelo starting in 1845, after the enactment of the “Selective Immigration Law,” a regulation that facilitated the colonization of southern Chile with more than six thousand families from the German Confederation.

After a century of settlement, their descendants managed vast agricultural territories. They felt threatened by the agrarian reform that Allende had promised to relaunch. During the Unidad Popular government, Guido dropped out of school.

He looked for work at the post office, where he transported correspondence between Riachuelo and Río Negro. Those were years of intense political work. With his brother Héctor, they participated in land seizures and organized workers into agricultural cooperatives. “People in the countryside were visited a lot.

We wanted to ensure the bosses wouldn’t buy their conscience,” recalls Nardo Ulloa, a friend of both brothers. The Barría Bassays became uncomfortable figures for the settlers and the police. They took a dislike to them, especially Guido, who one night encountered Corporal Pedro Soto drunk on the road and wheeled him through town in a wheelbarrow.

Around that time, Guido had fallen in love with Sofía Ralil, a 16-year-old girl, secretary of the party’s youth wing. With her, he had his first daughter in 1972, and shortly after, they were expecting their second.

It was a complicated time. The town was divided, and in the streets, opponents and supporters of Allende clashed. The Barría Bassays were constantly harassed by the police. At the beginning of September 1973, when the coup was underway within the Armed Forces, a message was sent to Guido through an uncle.

It came from Lieutenant José Godoy, the head of the town’s station: “Tell your nephew that we have a bullet reserved for him,” he had warned. Guido was frightened by the threat. He spoke with his family, with Sofía, and went into hiding.

Héctor, who led the Single Union of Education Workers, accompanied him in his flight. They went into the Coastal Range, a jungle of dense forests of alerce, canelo, mañío, ulmo, coigüe, raulí, maitén, radal, apple, plum, and cherry trees, and lost themselves in the thicket.

A few days later, the military seized power. All the police were after them. It was the last time Elvecia Bassay, their mother, would see them alive.

Inés Barría Bassay received the call from Ricardo around two in the afternoon, while she was having lunch in Osorno. Her nephew was breathing heavily: “I found a skull,” he blurted out without preamble.

For the first time, Ricardo was involved in a search. A month earlier, out of nowhere, a lead had reached him. While he was driving the bus that connects Riachuelo with Osorno, passenger Patricia Torres Naguián, a 47-year-old Mapuche woman, approached him to tell him that his father might be buried on the former estate of Germán Pasenau Siebert, a German immigrant who died in 2012.

Patricia had reached that conclusion after an epiphany. The story went back to 1995, when she worked as a domestic employee in Pasenau’s main house. On her first day there, she dreamed of two young men standing underwater asking her for help.

Over time, the scene and the faces had become repetitive and incomprehensible, until in March of last year, on the way to catch the bus in Río Negro, she encountered the faces of Guido and Héctor painted on a mural.

They were the young men from her dream. The Barría Bassay brothers—she believed—must be buried somewhere on the estate. In 43 years, the disappearance of Guido and Héctor had accumulated an indecipherable amount of lies and false leads.

To Ricardo, this time, the story seemed credible. He was trembling behind the wheel after hearing it. He thought of his grandfather Pedro Barría, who had died three weeks earlier without knowing what had happened to his sons.

He remembered a phrase his wife had said to him on the day of the funeral that sounded like a prophecy: “Now you are going to have news of them,” she had commented as they returned from the cemetery. In the following days, Ricardo requested medical leave and spoke with some former workers of the estate.

One told him about the existence of a property that Pasenau had forbidden them from entering. It was in the northern part of the estate, bordering the Río Blanco, a riverbed that Ricardo crossed with the water up to his waist, so as not to enter through the main road.

That was where he dug. That afternoon, Inés waited for her nephew at the entrance of the Investigative Police (PDI) barracks in Osorno. If Ricardo was right, the remains he brought inside a Ziploc bag could finally be those of her brothers.

That same night, the chief prosecutor of the commune, Leyla Chahin, cordoned off the excavation site. Two days later, the whole family arrived at the estate. For the third time, they were witnessing an exhumation.

They found remains of an adult and a child. At the top of some hualles, three pitios watched the scene. The birds, according to southern mythology, announce the return of someone who has spent a long time away. Ricardo thought of his father. The discovery of the remains seemed like a miracle.

Sofía Ralil climbed the mountain every day. She left her young daughter in her mother’s care and walked for an hour through the hill with her huge pregnant belly and the food container. Guido and Héctor spent the night among the branches of the mountain, covered under a damp layer of dead ferns.

Sofía brought them lunch and news. Always bad: “Grandfather Pedro is detained in Los Lagos and Uncle Juan in Osorno,” she told them the first time she saw them. Her friend Nardo Ulloa had suffered the same fate. “The questions were always the same: Where are the weapons?

Where are the Barría boys?” recalls Ulloa, who says they were asked this during interrogations. The military in the area doubled the town’s population, but those who searched most for the Barría Bassays were the carabineros from the Riachuelo station.

Their own neighbors. They knew them well. They had seen how they helped seize the Germans’ land, and Corporal Pedro Soto did not forget his humiliation in the wheelbarrow. The inhabitants were divided between those who misled the police and those who facilitated their search.

In this latter group were some supporters of the National Party, the settlers, and a group of former military personnel called ‘The Hundred Eagles.’ A troop of veterans who, starting on September 11, 1973, returned to wear uniforms to detain left-wing militants.

The silence of the mountain kept them in constant reflection, interrupted only by military planes. When they heard the engines, they ran to hide among the grass. The days passed with slowness and tranquility.

Sometimes monotonous. They woke up at dawn with the arrival of the dew, then they met with Sofía, and at eight in the evening, everything returned to darkness. They were unarmed and were wearing the same clothes from the first day.

The police had started a rumor. They said the Barría Bassays were leading a guerrilla of 500 men in the Cordillera de Huellelhue, a dense coastal jungle with access to the sea. There was talk of the presence of Cubans and Russians.

Héctor became nervous when Sofía told him. Guido just cried. “We were minors. He was 19 years old and was very sad. He told me to go to Uruguay, but I didn’t want to,” she recalls. That was their last conversation.

Sofía never saw him again. The next day, when she arrived with the food, the brothers had walked to the sawmill where their father worked, deeper into the mountain. Pedro Barría got help from his colleagues.

They spent three weeks moving inside a huge estate, mixing with forest workers, until their own family betrayed them. In mid-October, a brother of Pedro, who sympathized with the nationalists, betrayed their location.

On the 16th of that month, the patrol led by Lieutenant José Godoy, Captain José Catalán, and Corporals Pedro Soto, Quintiliano Rogel, and Robert Taylorl—whose name sounded similar to the American actor—arrived at the sawmill.

Major Hans Schemberger, commissioner and governor of the province, had ordered the detention. They were traveling aboard the pickup truck of Raúl Guzmán del Río, a farmer who had provided his vehicle to transport them there. Everyone was carrying rifles. *

Ricardo Barría posed for a photograph. He was sitting on the sofa in his house and holding a banner with an image of his father taken in April 1973, five months before his disappearance. Enlarged to the full length and width, Guido appeared dressed as a soccer player, during a match for Atlético Riachuelo, a club founded in his house in 1963.

He was 1.62 meters tall, weighed 65 kilos, had brown hair, and an angular face. He looked blurry, as photocopies of photocopies usually do. Above him, a question: “Where are they?”. The news of the discovery of the skull was the most important thing that happened in the town during that week.

The photo appeared on the cover of the local newspaper: “I just want to find my father’s remains to bury him and have a place to lay flowers in his memory,” Ricardo said in that interview. Until that moment, he had established a strange relationship with a three-meter-high cross located on a hill at the exit of the town.

He went up almost every month to talk to it as if it were Guido. Sometimes he brought his guitar and sang. He had placed his faith in those timbers, but now the remains occupied his head. If the Carbon-14 tests confirmed that the date of the remains corresponded to the period, the first step before identification, perhaps he would never go there again.

During the wait, some former workers of the estate approached to give him more information. “Keep going that way, you’ll do well,” one told him. Riachuelo was beginning to recover its memory. Until then, the old people of the town, contemporaries of the Unidad Popular and the dictatorship, had shown little empathy for remembering them.

That was not the case with some young people. In March 2015, a group of schoolchildren from Río Negro, members of the Brotes Collective, drew them on a bus stop. The painting was the same one that Patricia Torres had seen before telling Ricardo about the dream: Guido was wearing a soccer jersey and Héctor a brown overcoat. “Barría Bassay brothers murdered in dictatorship,” the text read.

That afternoon when they were painting, the police arrived to confront them: “Why do you want to stir up the past?” the carabineros asked with indignation. For the Mother’s Day celebration that year, Ricardo asked them to make a mural in Riachuelo.

They drew a loica bird, a tree, their faces, a house, a prison, and wrote a verse by Pablo Neruda: “Even if steps touch this site for a thousand years, they will not erase the blood of those who fell here.” Ricardo handed out keychains to everyone who passed in front of the image.

It was the first tribute in Riachuelo to the disappeared. Their story of political persecution was not even recounted in the only book written about the town. Herta Vásquez, the author, believes that “there are things one cannot talk about.” She also did not include the looting of the Mapuche by the Spanish in the 1600s, nor the brutal treatment of their workers by the German settlers during the 19th century.

Just as it used to do with everything bad, Riachuelo had forgotten the Barría Bassays. The discovery of the skull brought them back.

Guido Barría was half-naked on the ground. His hands were tied with wire, while Corporal Pedro Soto hit him with the butt of his rifle and cursed him: “fucking communist,” he shouted at him. Pedro Barría watched the scene sitting on a tractor, helpless.

He was with his son when they were detained with gunfire. Lieutenant Godoy watched the beating. “This is the famous Guido,” Soto said to his boss, who, as he approached to see his face, killed a dog that tried to bite him with a shot.

A few minutes later, other police officers brought Héctor. They also stripped him. Several workers saw the blows, then how they were loaded into the pickup truck of Raúl Guzmán and disappeared. The operation lasted less than an hour.

Elvecia found out about the detention that same afternoon. A neighbor who lived in front of the station warned her as soon as she saw them descend from the vehicle: “They were tied up, naked, and bruised,” she told her.

The mother ran to the police office, but a carabinero stopped her at the entrance. It was Raúl Pailalef, her neighbor, who pointed his carbine at her chest and then fired at the ground: “Go away, ma’am, they are not here,” he lied to her.

During that week in October, Elvecia toured all the detention centers from Valdivia to the south. They told her they were in the Osorno public jail, but they had not passed through there. The guards explained to her that in the IV Military Court there was a pending case for illegal possession of weapons.

Since they had not appeared, they were declared in rebellion. Neither of the two things was true. That was the first denial of justice. The search mobilized the whole family. They took turns going out to the estates, they divided up the hills, and they combed the banks of the town’s rivers.

In one of them, they found a corpse floating, but it did not match. The bodies crossed the riverbeds and reached the beach without being claimed. “We had to leave it in the current, out of fear,” adds Inés, who was 12 at the time.

The Barría Bassays began to grow impatient. The persecution against them seemed like revenge. By the end of December 1973, the family had two relatives detained and two disappeared. The birth of Ricardo brought some comfort.

Guido’s posthumous son was baptized with his father’s middle name and registered as the offspring of Elvecia and Pedro. Sofía Ralil left him in the care of his grandparents when he was one year old. A long time would pass before knowing the truth. “She said that Guido was not going to appear and asked me to rebuild my life,” explains Sofía.

The following year, the search became sporadic. The leads were increasingly less credible. In January 1978, one of them arrived under the door: “We are alive. Tito has visitors, I don’t,” said a handwritten note supposedly by Guido.

The anonymous note brought hope. The family returned to tour the prisons, but they were nowhere to be found. That bad. Elvecia filed the first complaint at the beginning of 1979. There, the six police officers involved in the detention testified.

Five of them said they did not know the brothers, but Corporal Pedro Soto confessed. He asserted that the operation was under the command of Lieutenant José Godoy: “once detained, we handed the Barría brothers over to a military patrol...

I know for a fact that they were transferred to the Estadio Español and nothing is known about the fate of these people,” he said on May 23, 1979. A year later, in a confrontation with Godoy, he did not ratify that version: “I think I had a bad moment at that time and surely I confused the facts,” he excused himself.

After a few months, the investigation was placed in charge of the IV Military Court. There, they overlooked the contradiction. The disappearance was classified as an alleged misfortune. On March 18, 1981, military prosecutor Roberto Follert closed the case without culprits.

He argued that the evidence to prosecute the police officers was insufficient. If there were any, he added, “the Amnesty Law considers the perpetrators as non-imputable.” It was the second time they were denied justice.

Elvecia told Ricardo the whole truth after the defeat: she told him that she was his grandmother and that his father had disappeared during the dictatorship. It was as if he were born again. In the following years, he dedicated himself to reconstructing Guido’s story, to filling the silences with anecdotes and memories.

He dreamed of finding him. “I cried a lot. I didn’t want to accept it. My only wish was that he would return alive,” he recalls today. *

There is a turning point in the search for Guido and Héctor. In February 1991, when the Rettig Report was published, a compilation of all the cases of forcibly disappeared persons from the dictatorship, the family confirmed their suspicions: both had died after their capture.

The document did not say it explicitly, but it detailed the moment of the detention and the disappearance. “It is the Commission’s conviction that the disappearance of the Barría brothers is the responsibility of State agents who engaged in human rights violations,” the report stated.

Elvecia was approaching the truth for the first time. “After that, we began to search for them as if they were dead, thinking only of finding remains,” explains Ricardo. During the 90s, there were no remains.

Nor justice. With Pinochet as Commander-in-Chief of the Army until 1998, investigations into human rights violations advanced slowly. The situation changed that same year, when Judge Juan Guzmán was assigned to investigate a dozen complaints against him.

All framed in the “Caravan of Death” case, the origin of “permanent kidnapping,” a criminal category that circumvented the Amnesty Law. Without bodies, Guzmán assumed, it was impossible to prescribe the cases, because the crime was still being committed.

The following year, Inés Barría took over the representation of the family. She filed a complaint for the second time, but her brothers were not in the judge’s plans. She began to call him every day with new leads, until the matter became important.

One caught his attention. At the end of 1973, a witness saw a person burying some bodies in the indigenous cemetery of La Capilla, in Río Negro. The grave was marked with a wooden cross without a name.

On January 3, 2001, Guzmán ordered the exhumation. It was the first time the family saw a skull. Ricardo was 27 years old. The experts removed the grave and three bodies appeared from the earth. None matched.

It was another hard blow for the search. The case had no movement until January of the following year, when the judge requested a new exhumation in the same cemetery, but they found nothing there either.

Then, he decided to start from scratch and ordered the police officers to testify again. In charge of the investigation was Sandro Gaete, a detective who had solved several human rights violation cases.

He summoned the carabineros to the PDI barracks in Osorno, but only four of the six involved arrived. All of them had retired as non-commissioned officers. Pedro Soto was the first to speak. Perhaps to ease his conscience.

At that time, he was already a pastor of an evangelical church: “Yes, I participated in the detentions,” he said on April 17, 2002, as soon as he sat in front of the detective. Soto, who in 1979 had said the same thing and then regretted it, had taken almost 30 years to tell the truth.

Had he maintained his version at that time, his testimony could well have changed the course of the search. In all previous statements, a lawyer from the Osorno Prefecture had forced him to lie. For the first time, he provided a chronological account of the capture.

After the sawmill—he confessed—they took them to the Riachuelo station, and then to the Río Negro police station, where they interrogated them. Soto did not remember if there was torture, but Luis Oyarzún, a second sergeant who knew the brothers, did: “Guido told me that they had beaten him very hard, I advised him to tell the whole truth regarding what they asked him, to which he told me that he had already told everything he knew,” Oyarzún told the detective.

In the interrogation, Guido had allegedly said that the weapons were hidden in the Cordillera de Huellelhue. The next day, they prepared an excursion led by Major Hans Schemberger, commissioner and governor of the province.

Six carabineros went. They left at dawn in two vehicles and then followed the route on horseback. Guido walked with his hands tied with wire, to the side of the beasts. They wandered for several hours through the jungle, without finding anything, until Schemberger lost control.

The young man had lied to them just to stop the beating. On the way to the barracks, he deviated from the route until he was in front of the Río Negro. There, “First Corporal Robert Taylorl stepped forward, volunteering to kill him,” Pedro Soto said in his statement.

Robert Taylorl is wearing a navy blue smock, optical glasses, and a measuring tape in his hand. He sits in front of the counter of his flower shop, located in the front part of his house. The place seems abandoned: the windows were boarded up with cardboard and the vegetation around covered a large part of the walls and the roof.

The property has suffered the fury of his fellow citizens: “they have scratched my walls with slogans alluding to the case, they have sent people to beat me, they have tried to kill me,” he lists. Taylorl is 77 years old.

He has lost the vigor and hard character of his youth. The former police officer stayed to live in Río Negro after resigning from the institution. He does not talk about the disappearance of the Barría Bassay brothers: “the truth is in the file,” he says curtly.

In those pages is his statement. On April 18, 2002, he told his version to Sandro Gaete. “We headed to the La Campana estate. In that place, we went into a private road and when we arrived at the bank of the Río Negro, the major ordered to stop the march, and to take the detainee out of the vehicle.” Guido was left standing in front of a small ravine.

He was tied by his feet and hands, and his eyes were blindfolded. It was then that Schemberger sentenced him: “Who among you wants to kill him?” he asked. Taylorl stepped forward and pushed him into the water.

The river’s current, increased by the spring thaws, swallowed him in a few seconds. “Guido was screaming when the current carried him away,” he added. About Héctor, he knew nothing. The judge prosecuted all those involved for the crime of qualified kidnapping, and Raúl Guzmán, the civilian who provided the pickup truck to transport them, for his complicity.

In May 2003, everyone was detained. Schemberger and José Godoy, who years later would be promoted to general, blamed each other. “On October 16, 1973, under the direct command of Captain Hans Schemberger Valdivia, approximately 20 carabineros, including the undersigned, gathered to police-detain the Barría brothers,” Godoy wrote to the judge when he had been detained for 41 days.

A couple of weeks after that letter, the police officers were released on bail. The money did not prevent that on May 3, 2004, everyone was sentenced to ten years in prison. Raúl Guzmán, who had been defended by his son, the current head of the Metropolitan South Prosecutor’s Office in Santiago, was the only one who got away.

The Court of Appeals confirmed the sentence, but the Supreme Court, in an unprecedented act, acquitted them. On December 27, 2007, three of the five judges voted in favor of the statute of limitations for the case.

It was the third time that the magistrates benefited the murderers. Elvecia Bassay, the brothers’ mother, had died a year earlier. “She left with the feeling that justice was close, but it wasn’t,” explains her daughter Inés.

Robert Taylorl remembers that period as a difficult time: “It wasn’t such an easy thing. I was signing in every Thursday for about two years. I didn’t even have the right to vote,” he explains. He blames his bosses for Guido’s disappearance. “My conscience is not that affected.

You know that one follows orders from superiors. If I didn’t follow them, they might have killed me myself,” he excuses himself. In recent months, he has followed the details of Ricardo Barría’s discovery, with whom he has often crossed paths on the bus.

When he goes to do paperwork in Osorno, neither of them looks at the other. He is sure that even if they remove all the earth from the former Pasenau estate, they will not find anything. “They haven’t only searched there, they have also taken remains from indigenous cemeteries, and that is desecrating graves.

What I declared, I did before a competent court and it is the truth.” The Barría Bassays do not believe his version. *

Ricardo Barría summoned his entire family for the delivery of the skull’s forensic reports. Once again, the possibility of finding Guido and Héctor brought them together. A routine repeated several times in 43 years of searching, but no less solemn.

They met in the morning at a café in Río Negro. Then they walked to the Prosecutor’s Office, where Leyla Chahin, the investigator of the case, read them the conclusions. The dates had a margin of error of 30 years: “it is possible to associate a date of 120 years before the present for individual number 1 and 170 for number 2.

In this way, individual number 1 was alive in some period between the years 1800 and 1860 A.D., while number 2 was alive between 1750 and 1810.” An uncomfortable silence accompanied the reading. Ricardo took the conclusions with dismay.

The study was unappealable. The Legal Medical Service (SML) had sent two remains of bones to the Beta Analytic laboratory in Miami. After a Carbon-14 test, the experts had ruled out that it was his father.

Although they had warned him of the low probabilities, Ricardo had still been hopeful. Those bones, the cause of so much happiness in him, corresponded to the dead of another war. An adult and a child who died presumably from an epidemic, framed “in a temporality of historical connotation,” without any current legal relevance.

Humans who lived between the end of the Independence and the liberal republican period. Bad news that the SML experts have become accustomed to delivering. The remains that Ricardo found are kept in cardboard boxes.

They are kept in a huge room with “Full Space” shelves full of bones. It shares space with more than 800 containers, each technically called a “protocol.” Hundreds of human remains awaiting an identity.

Marisol Intriago, head of the SML’s Identification Unit, has been studying the bones of the disappeared for more than ten years. In the last two decades, the team she leads has identified 290 victims, out of a universe of 1,465.

Among them, the dead from Patio 29 of the General Cemetery of Santiago, those from the Caravan of Death case, and the 22 peasants murdered in Paine, whose remains appeared in 2007 in a grave located on the road to Rapel, in the VI Region.

The last exhumation that yielded good news. For a decade, none of the approximately 20 annual searches they carry out has allowed for the finding of more bodies. “It is very frustrating that the results are negative,” laments Marisol.

Until now, the process has only served to tear down investigative lines. “Although for the family it may be, success is not necessarily the finding. Excluding the places where there are suspicions serves to rule out a territory,” she explains.

The discussion about who searches for the disappeared of the dictatorship is a pending issue. It does not depend on the SML, nor on the PDI Human Rights Brigade. Only judges can request forensic examinations and exhumations.

Only now has this become an executive concern. The creation of the Undersecretariat of Human Rights, which began operating last February, has a mandate to implement a national search program. The initiative arrives 43 years after the disappearance of the first victims.

In most cases, it has been the family members themselves who have led true expeditions through the Andes Mountains, the Coast, and the Atacama Desert, as happened with those murdered in Calama, whose remains were found in 1995, after a long sweep of the desert.

Ricardo looks at those cases with admiration. The only way to stay connected with Guido—he believes—is through the search. He remains convinced that his father is on that estate. He told the prosecutor after the reading of the document, when she warned him to control his impulses and not keep digging without a court order.

Of the entire report, the phrase he remembers most is where the SML recommends carrying out more studies in the area. “I have the hope that I was wrong. I should have dug on the other side of the trees, not on this side. I have continued gathering information. Now they told me the key was in a cherry tree.”

Five meters from the cherry tree, a backhoe lowers the shovel with surgical precision. Then, an expert from the Legal Medical Service measures the depth. Two others observe the inside of the hole and take notes at the edge of the ground.

The earth is brown, damp, and soft. From the bottom, only roots appear. “Yesterday they made two holes, but they covered them up because they didn’t find anything,” explains Ricardo, sitting on a plastic floor.

It is the third day of the exhumation. An intermittent autumn rain falls. In a few more days, it will be a year since he unearthed the skull on the same estate where he is now. When he was entering for the first time through the main gate, it was inevitable to think of his father: “I started to remember how we had arrived here, the dream that Mrs.

Patricia Torres had, when my father appeared to her so that she would help him,” he recalls. The order to remove the ground was given by Judge Álvaro Meza Latorre, of the Temuco Court of Appeals, who oversees all human rights cases in southern Chile.

It is the fourth time they have gone through a similar process. Around them, 22 people are working, including SML experts, shovelers in charge of making the holes, and PDI officials who only walk around the place.

Ricardo asked for a week off from his work to help. Meters from where the experts are digging, he set up a canopy, a table, and a stove where he heats food. His aunt Inés, who has never stopped searching for her brothers, is also there.

The lunches serve to comment on the progress and encourage each other. During the afternoons, they drink coffee and eat sweets. Although so far they have found four bodies, none of them correspond at first glance to the time of the dictatorship. The same will happen with the other 11 corpses that will appear as the days go by.

After a week of searching, the experts come up with a total number: 15 deceased, all with the same characteristics as that first skull that Ricardo found. There are children, adults, and women. Of them, only three samples were sent to Santiago to study their dating.

Although there is little hope, the forensic examinations will serve to confirm or rule out if the dead are victims of an epidemic that occurred in the 1800s. “Why are we going to lie, I had gotten my hopes up a little, but less than the first time.

So many people arrived that I thought this time we were going to find them, but no,” laments Barría. Ricardo rescues the bond he formed with the officials. The day the exhumation ended, the forensic team wanted to reciprocate the family’s concern with a lamb barbecue.

There, they also sealed a commitment to the case. In two weeks, they will return to remove the ground they missed. Ricardo wants a medium to accompany them for that moment.

He has not lost faith: “I continue to believe that they are on the estate, now I am more sure than ever. Only the exact place is missing.” The search continues.

*Chronicle written for the writing workshop of the 5 Senses program, of the Gabriel García Márquez Foundation for New Ibero-American Journalism.

Source: theclinic.cl, June 26, 2017

Date: 06-26-2017

Unearthing Guido: the endless search for the Barría Basay brothers

On October 16, 1973, Guido Barría Bassay disappeared along with his brother Héctor. The Riachuelo police captured them at a sawmill in southern Chile. They had been searching for them since the coup d'état, accusing them of leading a guerrilla force of 500 men in the Huellelhue mountain range.

None of that was true. The young men were alone and frightened. In 2007, the carabineros involved were acquitted due to the statute of limitations. The Barría Bassay family did not hear anything about their relatives until late April 2016, when Ricardo Barría, Guido’s son, followed a lead and found a skull: 43 years of searching that seemed to be coming to an end.

Ricardo Barría Ralil seemed to be digging a grave. It was noon on Saturday, April 29, 2016, and he was buried up to his knees. He drove the shovel into the soft earth in a hurry. Sweat ran down him just as it did when he played soccer for the Riachuelo team, the town where he lives.

In that place, 970 kilometers from Santiago, he was searching for his father, Guido Barría Bassay, and his uncle Héctor, who were detained and forcibly disappeared by a police patrol on October 16, 1973.

His effort to move his 93-kilogram body and a cocktail of sudden sensations took his breath away: the nerves, the adrenaline, and the anxiety of someone who has searched for something their whole life and believes they are about to find it.

Ricardo knelt, cupped his hands like a sieve, and moved the sediment until some indecipherable human skeletal remains and a piece of a skull remained in his palms. Then he kissed the remains. “It’s them, it’s them,” he shouted in desperation.

The day Salvador Allende won the presidential election, Guido Barría did not take his ear off the radio. It was September 4, 1970, when dozens of socialist militants gathered at his grandfather Luis Bassay Cuevas’s house to hear the results.

Everyone carried red flags. The place also served as the party headquarters. The same place where Allende had rested one afternoon in 1958, when the “Victory Train”—a railway on which he toured Chile campaigning from north to south—had taken him there.

All the Bassays were left-wing militants. Grandfather Luis was the origin of that seed. He had arrived in the town in the early 1900s, after being exiled by boat from the saltpeter fields, accused of agitating the workers.

He had settled on the side of the road that connects Riachuelo with Río Negro, municipalities that together totaled fewer than ten thousand inhabitants. There he raised the 7 children he had with Juana Alvear.

Elvecia was one of them, who at 14 years old paired up with Pedro Barría, a young worker from a right-wing family. From the marriage, 8 children were born, among them Guido and Héctor, whom they nicknamed Tito.

For Luis, his grandchildren embodied the principles of socialism better than anyone. Guido was 16 and Héctor 24, and they had been militants in the party’s youth wing since they were small. Months before the election, both had toured the town’s estates with other friends, explaining Allende’s program to the peasants.

Inés Barría, their 9-year-old sister, was also there on the day of the triumph. For the first time, they were winning something other than soccer. “After hearing the results, we marched from my grandfather’s house and people joined us on the road. We were all shouting with happiness. We arrived at the carabinero station and sang the national anthem,” she recalls.

The Germans did not celebrate that night. They had arrived in Riachuelo starting in 1845, after the enactment of the “Selective Immigration Law,” a regulation that facilitated the colonization of southern Chile with more than six thousand families from the Germanic Confederation.

After a century of settlement, their descendants managed vast agricultural territories. They felt threatened by the agrarian reform that Allende had promised to relaunch.

During the Unidad Popular government, Guido dropped out of school. He looked for work at the post office, where he transported correspondence between Riachuelo and Río Negro. Those were years of intense political work.

With his brother Héctor, they participated in land occupations and organized workers into agricultural cooperatives. “We visited people in the countryside a lot. We wanted to ensure the bosses didn’t buy their conscience,” recalls Nardo Ulloa, a friend of both brothers.

The Barría Bassays became uncomfortable figures for the settlers and the police. They took a dislike to them, especially Guido, who one night encountered Corporal Pedro Soto drunk on the road and paraded him through town in a wheelbarrow.

Around that time, Guido had fallen in love with Sofía Ralil, a 16-year-old girl, secretary of the party’s youth wing. With her, he had his first daughter in 1972, and shortly after, they were expecting their second.

It was a complicated time. The town was divided, and in the streets, opponents and supporters of Allende clashed. The Barría Bassays were constantly harassed by the police. In early September 1973, when the coup was underway within the Armed Forces, a message was sent to Guido through an uncle.

It came from Lieutenant José Godoy, the head of the town’s police station: “Tell your nephew that we have a bullet reserved for him,” he had warned.

Guido was frightened by the threat. He spoke with his family, with Sofía, and went into hiding. Héctor, who led the Single Union of Education Workers, accompanied him in his flight. They went deep into the Coastal Range, a jungle of dense forests of alerce, canelo, mañío, ulmo, coigüe, raulí, maitén, radal, apple, plum, and cherry trees, and lost themselves in the thicket.

A few days later, the military seized power. All the police were after them. It was the last time Elvecia Bassay, their mother, would see them alive.

Inés Barría Bassay received the call from Ricardo around two in the afternoon, while she was having lunch in Osorno. Her nephew was breathing heavily: “I found a skull,” he blurted out without preamble.

For the first time, Ricardo was involved in a search. A month earlier, out of nowhere, a lead had reached him. While he was driving the bus that connects Riachuelo with Osorno, a passenger, Patricia Torres Naguián, a 47-year-old Mapuche woman, approached him to tell him that his father might be buried on the former estate of Germán Pasenau Siebert, a German immigrant who died in 2012.

Patricia had reached that conclusion after an epiphany. The story went back to 1995, when she worked as a domestic servant in Pasenau’s main house. On her first day there, she dreamed of two young men standing underwater asking her for help.

Over time, the scene and the faces had become repetitive and incomprehensible, until March of last year, on the way to catch the bus in Río Negro, she encountered the faces of Guido and Héctor painted on a mural. They were the young men from her dream. The Barría Bassay brothers—she believed—must be buried somewhere on the estate.

In 43 years, the disappearance of Guido and Héctor had accumulated an indecipherable amount of lies and false leads. To Ricardo, this time, the story seemed credible. He was trembling at the steering wheel after hearing it.

He thought of his grandfather Pedro Barría, who had died three weeks earlier without knowing what had happened to his sons. He remembered a phrase his wife had said to him on the day of the funeral that sounded like a prophecy: “Now you are going to have news of them,” she had commented while they were returning from the cemetery.

In the days that followed, Ricardo requested medical leave and spoke with some former workers of the estate. One told him about the existence of a plot of land that Pasenau had forbidden them from entering.

It was located in the northern part of the estate, adjacent to the Río Blanco, a riverbed that Ricardo crossed with the water up to his waist so as not to enter through the main road. That was where he dug.

That afternoon, Inés waited for her nephew at the entrance of the Investigative Police (PDI) barracks in Osorno. If Ricardo was right, the remains he carried inside a Ziploc bag could finally be those of her brothers.

That same night, the chief prosecutor of the commune, Leyla Chahin, cordoned off the excavation site. Two days later, the whole family arrived at the estate. For the third time, they were witnessing an exhumation.

They found remains of an adult and a child. Above the canopy of some hualles, three pitios watched the scene. The birds, according to southern mythology, announce the return of someone who has spent a long time away. Ricardo thought of his father.

Sofía Ralil climbed the mountain every day. She left her young daughter in the care of her mother and walked for an hour through the hill with her huge pregnant belly and the food container. Guido and Héctor spent the night among the branches of the mountain, covered under a damp layer of dead ferns.

Sofía brought them lunch and the news. Always bad: “Grandfather Pedro is detained in Los Lagos and Uncle Juan in Osorno,” she told them the first time she saw them. Her friend Nardo Ulloa had met the same fate. “The questions were always the same: Where are the weapons? Where are the Barría boys?” Ulloa recalls them being asked during the interrogations.

The military in the area doubled the town’s population, but those who most sought the Barría Bassays were the carabineros from the Riachuelo station. Their own neighbors. They knew them well. They had seen how they helped occupy the Germans’ lands, and Corporal Pedro Soto had not forgotten his humiliation in the wheelbarrow.

The inhabitants were divided between those who misled the police and those who facilitated their search. In the latter camp were some sympathizers of the National Party, the settlers, and a group of former military personnel called ‘The Hundred Eagles.’ A troop of veterans who, starting on September 11, 1973, returned to wear the uniform to detain left-wing militants.

The silence of the mountain kept them in constant reflection, interrupted only by military planes. When they heard the engines, they ran to hide among the grass. The days passed with slowness and tranquility.

Sometimes monotonous. They woke up at dawn with the arrival of the dew, then met with Sofía, and at eight in the evening, everything returned to darkness. They were unarmed and wore the same clothes from the first day.

The police had started a rumor. They said the Barría Bassays were leading a guerrilla force of 500 men in the Huellelhue mountain range, a dense coastal jungle with access to the sea. There was talk of the presence of Cubans and Russians.

Héctor became nervous when Sofía told him. Guido only cried. “We were minors. He was 19 years old and was very sad. He told me to go to Uruguay, but I didn’t want to,” she remembers.

That was their last conversation. Sofía never saw him again. The next day, when she arrived with the food, the brothers had walked to the sawmill where their father worked, deeper into the mountain. Pedro Barría obtained help from his colleagues.

They spent three weeks moving inside a huge estate, mixing with forestry workers, until their own family betrayed them. In mid-October, a brother of Pedro, who sympathized with the nationalists, betrayed their location.

On the 16th of that month, the patrol led by Lieutenant José Godoy, Captain José Catalán, and Corporals Pedro Soto, Quintiliano Rogel, and Robert Taylorl—whose name sounded similar to the American actor—arrived at the sawmill.

Major Hans Schemberger, commissioner and governor of the province, had ordered the detention. They moved aboard the pickup truck of Raúl Guzmán del Río, a farmer who had provided his vehicle to transport them there. Everyone carried rifles.

Ricardo Barría posed for a photograph. He was sitting on the sofa in his house and holding a banner with an image of his father taken in April 1973, five months before his disappearance. Enlarged to its full length and width, Guido appeared dressed as a soccer player, during a match for Atlético Riachuelo, a club founded in his house in 1963.

He was 1.62 meters tall, weighed 65 kilos, had brown hair, and an angular face. He looked blurry, as photocopies of photocopies usually do. Above him, a question: “Where are they?”

The news of the discovery of the skull was the most important thing that happened in the town during that week. The photo appeared on the cover of the local newspaper: “I only want to find my father’s remains to bury him and have a place to leave flowers in his memory,” Ricardo said in that interview.

Until that moment, he had established a strange relationship with a three-meter-high cross located on a hill at the exit of the town. He went up almost every month to talk to it as if it were Guido. Sometimes he brought his guitar and sang.

He had placed his faith in those timbers, but now the skeletal remains occupied his head. If the Carbon-14 tests confirmed that the date of the remains corresponded to the period, the first step before identification, perhaps he would never go there again.

During the wait, some former workers of the estate approached to give him more information. “Keep going that way, you’ll do well,” one told him. Riachuelo was beginning to recover its memory. Until then, the old people of the town, contemporaries of the Unidad Popular and the dictatorship, had shown little empathy for remembering them.

It was not the same with some young people. In March 2015, a group of schoolchildren from Río Negro, members of the Brotes Collective, drew them on a bus stop. The painting was the same one Patricia Torres had seen before telling Ricardo about the dream: Guido wore a soccer jersey and Héctor a brown overcoat. “Barría Bassay brothers murdered in dictatorship,” the caption read.

That afternoon when they were painting, the police arrived to confront them: “Why do you want to stir up the past?” the carabineros asked with indignation.

For the Mother’s Day celebration that year, Ricardo asked them to make a mural in Riachuelo. They drew a loica bird, a tree, their faces, a house, a prison, and wrote a verse by Pablo Neruda: “Although steps may touch this site for a thousand years, they will not erase the blood of those who fell here.” Ricardo handed out keychains to everyone who passed in front of the image.

It was Riachuelo’s first tribute to the disappeared. Their story of political persecution was not even recounted in the only book written about the town. Herta Vásquez, the author, believes that “there are things that cannot be spoken about.” She also did not include the looting of the Mapuche by the Spanish in the 1600s, nor the brutal treatment of their workers by German settlers during the 19th century.

Just as it usually did with everything bad, Riachuelo had forgotten the Barría Bassays. The discovery of the skull brought them back.

Guido Barría was half-naked on the ground. His hands were tied with wire, while Corporal Pedro Soto hit him with the butt of his rifle and cursed at him: “fucking communist,” he shouted. Pedro Barría watched the scene sitting on a tractor, helpless.

He was with his son when they were detained with gunfire. Lieutenant Godoy watched the beating. “This is the famous Guido,” Soto said to his boss, who, as he approached to see his face, shot and killed a dog that tried to bite him.

A few minutes later, other police officers brought Héctor. They also stripped him. Several workers saw the blows, then how they were loaded into the pickup truck of Raúl Guzmán and disappeared. The operation lasted less than an hour.

Elvecia found out about the detention that same afternoon. A neighbor who lived in front of the station warned her as soon as she saw them descend from the vehicle: “They were tied up, naked, and beaten,” she said.

The mother ran to the police office, but a carabinero stopped her at the entrance. It was Raúl Pailalef, her neighbor, who pointed his carbine at her chest and then fired at the ground: “Go away, ma’am, they are not here,” he lied to her.

During that week in October, Elvecia toured all the detention centers from Valdivia to the south. They told her they were in the Osorno public jail, but they had not passed through there. The gendarmes explained to her that in the IV Military Court there was a pending case for illegal possession of weapons.

Since they had not appeared, they were declared in rebellion. Neither of the two things was true.

That was the first denial of justice. The search mobilized the whole family. They took turns going out to the estates, they divided up the hills, and they combed the banks of the town’s rivers. In one of them, they found a corpse floating, but it did not correspond.

The bodies crossed the riverbeds and reached the beach without being claimed. “We had to leave it in the current, out of fear,” adds Inés, who was 12 at the time.

The Barría Bassays began to lose patience. The persecution against them seemed like revenge. By the end of December 1973, the family had two relatives detained and two disappeared. The birth of Ricardo brought some comfort.

Guido’s posthumous son was baptized with his father’s middle name and registered as the offspring of Elvecia and Pedro. Sofía Ralil left him in the care of his grandparents when he was one year old. A long time would pass before he knew the truth. “She said that Guido was not going to appear and asked me to rebuild my life,” explains Sofía.

The following year, the search became sporadic. The leads were increasingly less credible. In January 1978, one of them arrived under the door: “We are alive. Tito has visitors, I don’t,” said a handwritten paper supposedly by Guido. The anonymous note brought hope. The family returned to tour the prisons, but they were nowhere to be found. That bad.

Elvecia filed the first complaint in early 1979. There, the six police officers involved in the detention testified. Five of them said they did not know the brothers, but Corporal Pedro Soto confessed.

He asserted that the operation was under the command of Lieutenant José Godoy: “Once detained, we handed the Barría brothers over to a military patrol... I know for a fact that they were transferred to the Estadio Español and nothing is known about the fate of these people,” he said on May 23, 1979.

A year later, in a confrontation with Godoy, he did not ratify that version: “I think I had a bad moment at that time and surely I confused the facts,” he excused himself.

After a few months, the investigation was placed in charge of the IV Military Court. There, they overlooked the contradiction. The disappearance was classified as an alleged misfortune. On March 18, 1981, military prosecutor Roberto Follert closed the case without culprits.

He argued that the evidence to prosecute the police was insufficient. If there were any, he added, “the Amnesty Law considers the perpetrators as immune from prosecution.” It was the second time they were denied justice.

Elvecia told Ricardo the whole truth after the defeat: she told him she was his grandmother and that his father had disappeared during the dictatorship. It was as if he were born again. In the following years, he dedicated himself to reconstructing Guido’s story, to filling the silences with anecdotes and memories.

He dreamed of finding him. “I cried a lot. I didn’t want to accept it. My only wish was for him to return alive,” he remembers today.

There is a turning point in the search for Guido and Héctor. In February 1991, when the Rettig Report was published, a compilation of all the cases of forcibly disappeared persons from the dictatorship, the family confirmed their suspicions: both had died after their capture.

The document did not say it explicitly, but it detailed the moment of the detention and the disappearance. “It is the conviction of the Commission that the disappearance of the Barría brothers is the responsibility of State agents who committed human rights violations,” the report stated.

Elvecia was approaching the truth for the first time. “After that, we began to search for them as if they were dead, thinking only of finding skeletal remains,” explains Ricardo. During the 90s, there were no remains.

Nor justice. With Pinochet as Commander-in-Chief of the Army until 1998, investigations into human rights violations progressed slowly. The situation changed that same year, when Judge Juan Guzmán was assigned to investigate a dozen complaints against him.

All framed in the “Caravan of Death” case, the origin of “permanent kidnapping,” a legal figure that bypassed the Amnesty Law. Without bodies, Guzmán assumed, it was impossible to apply the statute of limitations to the cases, because the crime was still being committed.

The following year, Inés Barría took over the representation of the family. She filed a complaint for the second time, but her brothers were not in the judge’s plans. She began to call him every day with new leads, until the matter became important.

One caught his attention. In late 1973, a witness saw a person burying some bodies in the indigenous cemetery of La Capilla, in Río Negro. The grave was marked with an unnamed wooden cross. On January 3, 2001, Guzmán ordered the exhumation.

It was the first time the family saw a skull. Ricardo was 27 years old. The experts removed the grave and three bodies appeared from the earth. None corresponded. It was another hard blow to the search.

The case had no movement until January of the following year, when the judge requested a new exhumation in the same cemetery, but they found nothing either. Then, he decided to start from scratch and ordered the police to testify again.

In charge of the investigation was Sandro Gaete, a detective who had solved several human rights violation cases. He summoned the carabineros to the PDI barracks in Osorno, but only four of the six involved arrived.

All had retired as non-commissioned officers. Pedro Soto was the first to speak. Perhaps to ease his conscience. At that time, he was already a pastor of an evangelical church: “Yes, I participated in the detentions,” he said on April 17, 2002, as soon as he sat in front of the detective.

Soto, who in 1979 had said the same thing and then regretted it, had taken almost 30 years to tell the truth. Had he maintained his version at that time, his testimony could well have changed the course of the search.

In all previous statements, a lawyer from the Osorno Prefecture had forced him to lie. For the first time, he provided a chronological account of the capture. After the sawmill—he confessed—they took them to the Riachuelo station, and then to the Río Negro police station, where they interrogated them.

Soto did not remember if there was torture, but Luis Oyarzún, a second sergeant who knew the brothers, did: “Guido told me that they had beaten him very hard, I advised him to tell the whole truth regarding what they asked him, to which he told me that he had already told everything he knew,” Oyarzún told the detective.

In the interrogation, Guido allegedly said that the weapons were hidden in the Huellelhue mountain range. The next day, they prepared an excursion led by Major Hans Schemberger, commissioner and governor of the province.

Six carabineros went. They left at dawn in two vehicles and then followed the route on horseback. Guido walked with his hands tied with wire, beside the beasts. They wandered for several hours through the jungle, without finding anything, until Schemberger lost control.

The young man had lied to them just to stop the beating. On the way to the barracks, he deviated from the route until he was in front of the Río Negro. There, “First Corporal Robert Taylorl took a step forward, volunteering to kill him,” said P

Pedro Soto in his statement.

Robert Taylorl wears a navy blue work jacket, optical glasses, and a measuring tape in his hand. He sits in front of the counter of his flower shop, located in the front part of his house. The place looks abandoned: the windows were boarded up with cardboard, and the vegetation around it has covered a large part of the walls and the roof.

The property has suffered the fury of his fellow citizens: "they have spray-painted my walls with slogans alluding to the case, they have ordered people to beat me, they have tried to kill me," he lists.

Taylorl is 77 years old. He has lost the vigor and the hard character of his youth. The former police officer stayed to live in Río Negro after resigning from the institution. He does not speak about the disappearance of the Barría Bassay brothers: "the truth is in the file," he says curtly.

In those pages is his statement. On April 18, 2002, he told his version to Sandro Gaete. "We headed to the La Campana estate. In that place, we went in along a private road, and when we arrived at the bank of the Río Negro, the major ordered us to stop the march and take the detainee off the vehicle." Guido remained standing in front of a small ravine.

He was tied by his hands and feet and was blindfolded. It was then that Schemberger sentenced him: "Who among you wants to kill him?" he asked. Taylorl stepped forward and pushed him into the water. The river's current, increased by the spring thaws, swallowed him within a few seconds. "Guido was screaming as the current carried him away," he added.

Regarding Héctor, he knew nothing. The judge prosecuted all those involved for the crime of qualified kidnapping, and Raúl Guzmán, the civilian who provided the pickup truck to transport them, for his complicity.

In May 2003, everyone was detained. Schemberger and José Godoy, who years later would be promoted to general, blamed each other. "On October 16, 1973, under the direct command of Captain Hans Schemberger Valdivia, approximately 20 carabineros, including the undersigned, went to police-detain the Barría brothers," Godoy wrote to the judge when he had been detained for 41 days.

A couple of weeks after that letter, the police officers were released on bail. The money did not prevent them from all being sentenced to ten years in prison on May 3, 2004. Raúl Guzmán, who had been defended by his son, the current head of the Metropolitan South Prosecutor's Office of Santiago, was the only one who got off.

The Court of Appeals confirmed the sentence, but the Supreme Court, in an unprecedented act, acquitted them. On December 27, 2007, three of the five judges voted in favor of the statute of limitations for the case.

It was the third time that the magistrates had benefited the murderers. Elvecia Bassay, the brothers' mother, had died a year earlier. "She left with the feeling that justice was close, but it wasn't," explains her daughter Inés.

Robert Taylorl remembers that period as a difficult time: "Things weren't that easy. I was signing in every Thursday for about two years. I didn't even have the right to vote," he explains. He blames his bosses for Guido's disappearance. "My conscience is not that affected.

You know that one follows orders from superiors. If I hadn't followed them, they might have killed me myself," he excuses himself. In recent months, he has followed the details of the discovery of Ricardo Barría, whom he has often crossed paths with on the bus.

When he goes to do paperwork in Osorno, neither of them looks at the other. He is sure that even if they remove all the earth from the former Pasenau estate, they will not find anything. "They haven't only searched there; they have also taken bones from indigenous cemeteries, and that is desecrating graves. What I declared, I did before a competent tribunal, and it is the truth."

The Barría Bassay family does not believe his version.

Ricardo Barría summoned his entire family for the delivery of the skull forensic reports. Once again, the possibility of finding Guido and Héctor brought them together. A routine repeated several times in 43 years of searching, but no less solemn.

They met in the morning at a café in Río Negro. Then they walked to the Prosecutor's Office, where Leyla Chahin, the investigator of the case, read them the conclusions. The dates had a margin of error of 30 years: "it is possible to associate a date of 120 years before the present for individual number 1 and 170 for number 2.

Thus, individual number 1 was alive at some period between the years 1800 and 1860 A.D., while number 2 was alive between 1750 and 1810."

An uncomfortable silence accompanied the reading. Ricardo took the conclusions with dismay. The study was unappealable. The Legal Medical Service (SML) had sent two bone remains to the Beta Analytic laboratory in Miami. After a Carbon-14 test, the experts had ruled out that it was his father. Although he had been warned of the low probabilities, Ricardo had still been hopeful.

Those bones, the cause of so much happiness for him, corresponded to the dead of another war. An adult and a child who died presumably from an epidemic, framed "in a temporality of historical connotation," without any current legal relevance. Humans who lived between the end of the Independence and the liberal republican period. Bad news that the SML experts have become accustomed to delivering.

The bones that Ricardo found are kept in cardboard boxes. They are kept in a huge room with "Full Space" shelves full of bones. It shares space with more than 800 containers, each technically called a "protocol." Hundreds of human remains waiting for an identity.

Marisol Intriago, head of the SML Identification Unit, has spent more than ten years studying the bones of the forcibly disappeared. In the last two decades, the team she leads has identified 290 victims out of a universe of 1,465.

Among them, the dead from Patio 29 of the General Cemetery of Santiago, those from the Caravan of Death case, and the 22 peasants murdered in Paine, whose remains appeared in 2007 in a grave located on the road to Rapel, in the VI Region. The last exhumation that yielded good news.

For a decade, none of the approximately 20 annual searches they carry out have allowed for the finding of more bodies. "It is very frustrating that the results are negative," laments Marisol. Until now, the process has only served to tear down investigative lines. "Although it may be for the family, success is not necessarily the finding.

Excluding the places where there are suspicions serves to rule out a territory," she explains.

The discussion about who searches for the disappeared of the dictatorship is a pending issue. It does not depend on the SML, nor on the Human Rights Brigade of the PDI. Only judges can request forensic examinations and exhumations.

Only now has this become an executive concern. The creation of the Undersecretariat of Human Rights, which began operating last February, has a mandate to implement a national search program. The initiative comes 43 years after the disappearance of the first victims.

In most cases, it has been the family members themselves who have led true expeditions through the Andes Mountains, the Coast, and the Atacama Desert, as happened with those murdered in Calama, whose bones were found in 1995 after a long sweep of the desert.

Ricardo looks at those cases with admiration. The only way to stay connected with Guido—he believes—is through the search. He remains convinced that his father is on that estate. He told the prosecutor after the reading of the document, when she warned him to control his impulses and not continue digging without a court order.

Of the entire report, the phrase he remembers most is where the SML recommends carrying out more studies in the area. "I have the hope that I was wrong. I should have dug on the other side of the trees, not on this side. I have continued gathering information. Now they told me the key was in a cherry tree."

Five meters from the cherry tree, a backhoe lowers its shovel with surgical precision. Then, an expert from the Legal Medical Service measures the depth. Two others observe the inside of the hole and take notes at the edge of the ground.

The earth is brown, damp, and soft. From the bottom, only roots appear. "Yesterday they made two holes, but they covered them up because they didn't find anything," explains Ricardo, sitting on a plastic floor.

It is the third day of the exhumation. An intermittent autumn rain falls. In a few more days, it will be a year since he unearthed the skull on the same estate where he is now. When he was entering for the first time through the main gate, it was inevitable to think of his father: "I started to remember how we had arrived here, of the dream that Mrs.

Patricia Torres had, when my dad appeared to her so that she would help him," he remembers. The order to remove the ground was given by Judge Álvaro Meza Latorre, of the Court of Appeals of Temuco, who oversees all human rights cases in southern Chile.

It is the fourth time they have gone through a similar process. Around them are 22 people working, including SML experts, laborers in charge of digging the holes, and PDI officials who only walk around the place.

Ricardo asked for a week off from his work to help. Meters from where the experts are digging, he set up a tent, a table, and a stove on which he heats food. His aunt Inés, who has never stopped looking for her brothers, is also there.

The lunches serve to comment on the progress and give each other encouragement. During the afternoons, they drink coffee and eat sweets. Although they have found four bodies so far, none of them correspond at first glance to the time of the dictatorship. The same will happen with the other 11 corpses that will appear as the days go by.

After a week of searching, the experts arrive at a total number: 15 deceased, all with the same characteristics as that first skull that Ricardo found. There are children, adults, and women. Of them, only three samples were sent to Santiago to study their dating.

Although there is little hope, the forensic examinations will serve to confirm or rule out if the dead are victims of an epidemic that occurred in the 1800s. "Why are we going to lie, I had gotten my hopes up a little, but less than the first time. So many people arrived that I thought this time we were going to find them, but no," laments Barría.

Ricardo rescues the bond he formed with the officials. The day the exhumation ended, the forensic team wanted to repay the family for their concern with a lamb barbecue. There, they also sealed a commitment to the case.

In two weeks, they will return to remove the ground they missed. Ricardo wants a medium to accompany them for that moment. He has not lost faith: "I still believe they are on the estate, now I am more sure than ever. Only the exact place is missing."

The search continues.

*Chronicle written for the writing workshop of the 5 Senses program, of the Gabriel García Márquez Foundation for the New Ibero-American Journalism.

Source: theclinic.cl 06/26/2017

Date: 06-26-2017

Possible remains of forcibly disappeared persons discovered on an Osorno estate

The SML Human Rights Group will begin the forensic examinations on Monday.

The Prosecutor's Office, the Legal Medical Service, and the PDI are working hard to clarify whether the bodies they found on an estate in the Osorno town of Riachuelo belong to the remains of the forcibly disappeared.

This, after a person warned the family of the brothers Guido and Héctor Barría Bassay, socialist militants detained in 1973, that they could find information on the whereabouts of their loved ones on the property.

Ricardo Barría, son of Guido Barría Bassay, indicated to Cooperativa that a lady led them to that sector. "We found some bones, part of a skull, some teeth, some little bones that we don't know what part of the body they are from," indicated Ricardo.

"They are bone fragments. The rest of the excavation requires the work of specialized personnel coming from Santiago, it is a Human Rights group from the Legal Medical Service," the chief prosecutor of Río Negro, Leyla Chahin, indicated to SoyOsorno.

The place where the remains were found is under the protection of carabineros from the Riachuelo station.

Source: puranoticiachile.cl, May 1, 2016

Date: 05-01-2016

Ruling recommends investigating Pinochet's involvement

The Seventh Chamber of the Santiago Court of Appeals confirmed the sentences of 10 years and one day against 5 retired carabineros who participated in the detention and subsequent disappearance of 2 militants of the Socialist Party (PS) in the town of Río Negro, in the Los Lagos Region.

The victims are Héctor and Guido Barría Basay, 27 and 19 years old, respectively, who were detained on October 16, 1973, and whose case was substantiated in the first instance by Minister Alejandro Solís.

The magistrate sentenced General (ret.) José Hernán Godoy, Colonel (ret.) Hans Schemberger, and non-commissioned officers Robert Teylor, Pedro Soto, and Quintiliano Rogel Alvarado to suffer the penalties of 10 years and one day of qualified imprisonment.

However, the Seventh Chamber of the appellate court increased the sanction imposed on non-commissioned officer José Catalán Oyarzún, who had previously been sentenced to 3 years and one day in prison, but who will now have to serve 10 years of effective incarceration.

A curious detail in the sentence signed by ministers Carlos Cerda, Jorge Dahm, and Joaquín Billard was the recommendation made to the investigating judge of the process regarding investigating the eventual participation that General (ret.) Augusto Pinochet Ugarte had in these events, given that "there are no records in these files that prove that –the uniformed officer– is deprived of reason." This is stated in resolution Roll 5765-2004.

Source: El Mostrador, July 7, 2005

Date: 07-07-2005

Six former carabineros convicted in case of the disappeared

The special judge Alejandro Solís sentences six former carabineros to terms ranging from ten to three years in prison for their responsibility in the crimes of Río Negro, a case that occurred in October 1973.

The resolution establishes that Hans Fchernberger, José Hernán Godoy Barrientos, Roberto Teilort, Quintiliano Rogel Alvarado, and Pedro Segundo Soto Godoy must serve ten-year sentences, while José Rómulo Catalán faces a sentence of three years and one day in prison, since the mitigating factor of mental illness was considered in this case.

The resolution also highlights the charges against José Hernán Godoy, as he is the brother of the current deputy director of the Carabineros, Nelson Godoy Barrientos.

The former uniformed officers were accused of the qualified kidnapping of the brothers Guido and Héctor Barría Basay, both socialist militants.

The plaintiff lawyer in the case, Hugo Gutiérrez, expressed that the sentence demonstrates that there was an irregular arrest by officials of the uniformed police and that it even led to the disappearance of these brothers.

Source: La Nacion, May 3, 2004

Date: 05-03-2004

Judge Guzmán ordered the detention of a retired Carabineros colonel

Minister Juan Guzmán Tapia decided to order the detention of Colonel (ret.) Hans Eduart Schernberger Valdivia, within the framework of the investigation into the death of the Barría Basay brothers, which occurred between 1973 and 1976 in the Río Negro area, Tenth Region.

The magistrate made the decision after subjecting the former uniformed officer to a long interrogation, who was subsequently transferred to the First Police Station of Viña del Mar, where he remains incommunicado.

According to the newspaper El Mercurio de Valparaíso, Hans Eduart Schernberger allegedly denied any relationship with the case, asserting that during the period in which the events occurred, he held an administrative position in the Río Negro governorship.

Likewise, the colonel (ret.) allegedly indicated that he only learned of the case when the judge of the sector summoned him to testify regarding whether he had any information about the Barría Basay brothers.

Source: La Tercera, May 3, 2002

Date: 05-03-2002

Forcibly Disappeared: Inés Barría Bassay speaks after the discovery of bones

On Saturday afternoon, relatives of the brothers Guido and Héctor Barría-Bassay, disappeared since 1973 in the Riachuelo sector, Río Negro commune, went to the facilities of the Investigative Police of Osorno to report the discovery of bone remains that could belong to the young socialists.

Inés Barría Basay, secretary of the Association of Relatives of Forcibly Disappeared and Politically Executed Persons of the Osorno Province, sister of Guido and Héctor, spoke with Wilson Gonzalez of Radio Voz de la Costa via telephone, who provides more details of the discovery.

Source: paislobo.cl, 2016-05-02

Testimony of Elia Barría Bassay, sister of Guido Ricardo and Héctor Alejandro Barría Bassay

I didn't actually live with my brothers; I lived in Valdivia, I was married, I had my oldest daughter who at that time was two years and four months old, and I was 4 months pregnant with my second child, and it was terrible, it was super distressing for me, because the first thing I did was listen to the news, and I began to hear what was happening in Santiago, the radios in all the cities were also being silenced, there was very little information, meaning that after the hours passed, you no longer had a way to inform yourself, they had already silenced all the radios, the last one heard in Valdivia was "Camilo Henríquez."

My husband worked near the school where we lived, imagine the desperation. I had another brother studying at the Technical University, he was from the Communist Youth, so, it was such a great desperation, that no one arrived, my brother didn't arrive home, my husband didn't arrive, in the end, when they arrived, my husband arrived at one in the afternoon, it was three, and my brother didn't arrive, I ran to the University, the University was already surrounded by soldiers, and I don't know, by those things of life, my brother was saved and we locked ourselves in the house.

But I lived in a university sector and there were university boarding houses, all night long they took the students out of the houses naked, dragging them by their hair, the soldiers, through a cobblestone street on top of that, and they threw them into the vehicles and took them away, and we looked from behind the curtains, there, with a tremendous desperation and anguish, and without knowing anything about my house, what was happening in my house, because there were no telephones, and there my brother, the one who was at the university, decided, on the second day, to go to his house, and he went with a white handkerchief so they wouldn't take him at night, to show that he was going to the train, we without knowing if he had arrived or not.

Well, later we learned that my grandfather was a prisoner in Osorno, my mother's brother, another brother of my mother who they took with a cerebral hemorrhage, he was a communist councilman of Los Lagos, because the carabineros had given him a beating, and there, trying to go from one hospital to another so the soldiers wouldn't take him out and kill him.

It was all a tragedy at that moment, but terrible, Fredy, my husband, was carrying some photos of Allende and he ate them.

And we continued with the anguish of not having a way to know about my house, an aunt traveled to Osorno and there she brought information that my brothers were being searched for, that my brothers were hiding.

On October 16 (1973) they were taken into custody, furthermore, they were in the mountains with other groups of comrades, but they came down from the mountains because it occurred to some that there were no cigarettes, that there were no pots to cook with, so, they came down, and that was their worst destiny, because the others were saved.

And I there, when I knew that my brothers were hiding, I traveled to Riachuelo with my little daughter. I left my husband working and I left, my whole family was under house arrest, no one could leave, and I was also a prisoner with my daughter without being able to leave, for a month, because until we said where my brothers were, and there in those days, they were taken into custody.

They were from the Socialist Youth, my older brother worked in "School Aid and Scholarships," he worked there and was a leader, and my other brother studied and at the same time was an assistant at the Riachuelo post office.

The same day in '73, they began to be called by the military decrees to present themselves, and how were they going to present themselves, and they ran away, like any number of people, and later when my brothers returned, my dad told them to hide in such a place.

He went to see them, my mother told them to go to a family, very good people who had a dairy, about 3 km away in the countryside, they made them like a room under the stable and they had them there with some wood and straw in case the soldiers came, that's how they were for fifteen days.

They only went out to give them food, the people, the peasants, and one day that my dad went to see them, to bring them clean clothes and food, because it had to be in secret, because my house was watched day and night, they were under house arrest and my mom and dad were the only ones who had authorization to leave, because their brother and dad were prisoners in the Osorno jail, so, there my brothers went to a place where they went to detain them.

Because a gringo called the carabineros of Río Negro and Riachuelo and in a private pickup truck from there in Riachuelo, with the surname Del Río, they went to look for my brothers, so, from there we never knew about our brothers again.

Never again, that was the story of their detention, and from there it has been an ordeal, after that, my mom filed lawsuits, when Pinochet was arrested in London, after that my mom gave a power of attorney to my sister so that she could start the procedures, a lawsuit was filed in Santiago for my brothers and there Judge Juan Guzmán began the investigation, because there were some testimonies, some people who said that my brothers had been buried in the indigenous cemetery of Riachuelo and in all those parts excavations were made, without any result, and one of the "cops" who murdered my brothers with the surname Oyarzún, said: "I didn't know that mass was held for the living," because my mom held mass for them, and later they took all the implicated carabineros prisoner and the judge gave some 10 years and one day, others 3 years and one day, and when they appealed to the Court of Appeals, the court ratified the sentences of ten years and one day for everyone. They appealed to the Supreme Court and there in the Supreme Court my brothers' case is sleeping, for more than two years, without being able to do anything, the lawyers who are handling the case are there "nagging" but nothing happens.

They recognized that they killed my brothers, even that my older brother cried, cried for them not to kill him because he had a 4-year-old daughter, Cristina, and he cried desperately for them not to kill him and they killed him anyway. That was what they declared, nothing more is known, because they took the case away from Minister Guzmán and now Minister Solís has it.

And there they are in the Supreme Court, they remain free on bail, in different parts, here in Temuco we went to hold a "funa" (protest) against Pedro Soto, in Villa Galicia, who acts sick but is not sick, and like that, some are in Punta Arenas, others in Viña del Mar, in Río Negro, Osorno, Alberto Oyarzún is there, that's how they are, scattered in different parts, and there my mom died waiting to know about her children, she never knew about them again, that is the story and we continue waiting.

Source: Elia Barría Bassay