The special minister for Human Rights cases, Carlos Aldana Fuentes, reopened the summary proceedings this week regarding the disappearance of 18 peasants from the Mulchén commune, which occurred in 1973.

Six months after having decreed the closure of the summary, the minister decided to reopen it ex officio to investigate the participation of uniformed personnel, particularly from the Los Ángeles Regiment, in "Operation TV Removal" (Operación Retiro de Televisores) carried out at the beginning of 1979.

This operation consisted of performing illegal exhumations of victims who had been executed and clandestinely buried (forcibly disappeared) during the reprisal and punishment actions carried out by uniformed personnel and fascist civilians in dire repressive raids; in the fields of the area, these raids were massive and bloody.

Years later, following the discovery of the bodies of the disappeared from Buin and Paine in the Lonquén ovens, near Santiago, the tyrant ordered the territory to be cleared of clandestine graves and for the remains of the already disappeared victims to be made to disappear.

This perverse operation was headed, organized, and coordinated by the recently deceased (by suicide) former head of the CNI, Odlanier Mena Salinas.

At the time of the summary's closure in April of this year, Minister Aldana had only prosecuted five retired carabineros for the crimes of kidnapping and qualified homicide of the victims, but had not prosecuted anyone for the 1979 operation. In decreeing the reopening, he notes that he has identified the need to order new proceedings to close the case.

Lawyer Patricia Parra, of the Human Rights Program, celebrated the reopening, as she hopes that another five civilians and former uniformed personnel will be prosecuted for the commission of the crime of qualified homicide of the victims.

Furthermore, she points out that there is clear and sufficient evidence regarding those who participated in the illegal exhumations and the incineration of the remains in ovens inside the Los Ángeles regiment. The names of nine former soldiers from the Los Ángeles regiment and intelligence service agents from that unit have emerged in the investigation.

The crimes The murders were committed in punitive operations carried out in October 1973. The peasants were taken prisoner and executed in three different locations in the mountainous area of Mulchén. The executions by firing squad were recorded at the El Morro estate, located 50 kilometers inland from Mulchén; at the El Carmen-Maitenes estate, located 80 kilometers away; and at the Pemehue estate, situated in the high mountains, more than 100 kilometers from the city.

On June 6 and 7, 2009, Minister Aldana carried out intense reconstructions of the scene in order to establish responsibilities for the detentions, executions, illegal burials, and illegal exhumations of the peasants.

The proceedings confirmed the sequence of events and the participation of the perpetrators in the crimes, as well as the subsequent "erasing of tracks" operation they carried out in 1979.

The 18 peasants murdered between October 5 and 7, 1973, were the brothers Alejandro Albornoz González (48), Alberto Albornoz González (41), Felidor Exequiel Albornoz González (33), Guillermo José Albornoz González (32), Daniel Alfonso Albornoz González (28), and a son of Alejandro named Miguel del Carmen Albornoz Acuña (20); Luis Alberto Godoy Sandoval (23); José Fernando Gutiérrez Asencio (25); Juan de Dios Laubra Brevis (26); Juan de Dios Roa Riquelme (35); the brothers José Lorenzo Rubilar Gutiérrez (33), José Liborio Rubilar Gutiérrez (28), Florencio Rubilar Gutiérrez (24); Gerónimo Humberto Sandoval Medina (22); Domingo Sepúlveda Castillo (29); Edmundo José Vidal Aedo (20); Celsio Nicasio Vivanco Carrasco (26) and José Florencio Yáñez Durán (34).

The criminals The repressive units were composed of army personnel from the Los Ángeles regiment, carabineros who operated under an express order from Captain Sergio Neira Tapia of Mulchén, and a horde of fascist civilians commanded by the landowner Romualdo Guzmán Saavedra.

The carabineros were commanded by the then-lieutenant Jorge Maturana Concha, and the carabineros Osvaldo Díaz Díaz and Héctor Armando Guzmán Saldaña; among the civilians, in addition to the fascist Guzmán Saavedra, notable figures included Aquiles Guzmán Fritz, Francisco Urrizola Elías, Ramón Elías Abella, Rofh Düring Pohler, Raúl Tirapeguy, Carlos Lehman, and Samuel Arriagada Domínguez.

The criminal party began acting at the El Morro estate on October 5. There, they detained, tortured, and murdered Juan Laubra Brevis, Domingo Sepúlveda, Edmundo Vidal, Celsio Vivanco, and José Yáñez.

On the 6th, they continued to the El Carmen-Maitenes estate, where they acted in the same manner against Alejandro, Guillermo, Daniel, and Miguel Albornoz, José Liborio, José Lorenzo, and Florencio Rubilar, and Luis Godoy.

On the 7th, they arrived at the Pemehue estate, where they executed Alberto and Felidor Albornoz, Juan Gutiérrez, Juan Roa, and Gerónimo Sandoval.

The murdered peasants were buried or semi-buried in clandestine graves in the same places where they were executed.

Erasing of tracks

Six years after the crimes, the same perpetrators, accompanied by other army personnel and civilian agents, proceeded to exhume the clandestine graves where the victims had been buried. Then, the exhumed remains were taken to the Los Ángeles regiment, where they proceeded to burn them in ovens and drums prepared for incineration.

The crematoria were under the control of Section II (as the intelligence department is called in army units) and were installed next to where this section had its offices.

Minister Aldana focused his proceedings on that same area when he carried out the aforementioned reconstruction in 2009. On that same occasion, he proceeded to interrogate a series of former soldiers and former carabineros linked to the executions, exhumations, and illegal incinerations.

About 14 former soldiers, including officers and enlisted men, were interrogated by Minister Aldana on that occasion. However, he did not prosecute any of them; apparently, new evidence has now emerged that led him to decree the reopening of the summary.

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

Acts like these cannot continue to go unpunished.

Source: resumen.cl, November 2, 2013

Operation TV Removal

"Operation TV Removal" (Operación Retiro de Televisores) was the solution provided by Augusto Pinochet to cover up the massacres that occurred throughout Chile after the coup d'état. This cruel decision was made by him and the Military Junta following the discovery of the bodies of 11 peasants and 4 youths from Isla de Maipo in the Lonquén ovens.

It was the penultimate day of November 1978 when the horror emerged from some abandoned lime kilns in the town of Lonquén, a few kilometers from Santiago. The report had reached the Vicariate of Solidarity from the mouth of a peasant who was digging in the earth looking for a forcibly disappeared son.

At first, it was a secret known only to Cardinal Silva Enríquez, the Vicar of Solidarity Cristián Precht, and a small group of collaborators of the Vicariate of Solidarity; then, it became a stark reality regarding the fate of 15 detained persons who were missing up to that moment.

The news of this discovery unsettled Pinochet; it was not on his agenda. He was clear that the disappeared had not escaped the country, that they were not wandering the world discrediting the military dictatorship.

He knew that behind every forcibly disappeared person was his hand, so he called an emergency meeting of the Military Junta to seek a quick solution and prevent possible accidental discoveries of burials throughout the country.

It was a hot summer for the dictatorship. The discovery of clandestinely buried bodies and their rapid dissemination in the international press was added to the strong pressures from the American government to extradite Manuel Contreras and Pedro Espinoza for the terrorist attack in Washington against Orlando Letelier, further weakening his position on the international stage at a time when he was facing a serious border crisis with Argentina.

That year, the pressures from the White House regarding the Washington attack had forced Pinochet to make the decision to end the DINA, but he could not be left without an intelligence service that responded to his interests.

Thus, on August 12, he promulgated two decree-laws: 1876, which ended the DINA, and 1878, which created the National Intelligence Center (CNI). To ensure everything was in order, he promoted Manuel Contreras to General of the Republic, completing the requirements demanded by the position of director of the nascent CNI.

The American pressures continued, as did the investigations, for which reason Pinochet decided to retire his loyal servant and look for a general who would provide guarantees to him and the Americans. The chosen one was retired General Odlanier Mena.

Odlanier Mena was a man of Military Intelligence who had retired after intense fights with the director of the DINA, Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda.

Pinochet, to reassure him, had given him the position of ambassador to Uruguay, a not insignificant post for a retired general, since it was close to home and there were no conflicts or shocks with the civil-military dictatorship of José María Bordaberry, an ally of the Chilean military dictatorship.

On November 3, 1977, Contreras was called to retirement and replaced by General Odlanier Mena. The change was not easy. Contreras had accumulated much power and influence over his people, who, thanks to the prevailing impunity, had earned a reputation for being unscrupulous among their peers.

Mena was reluctant when they requested him for the position and expressed this to Pinochet. The most compelling argument was that he could not assume it because he was a retired general, and the law created stated expressly that its director had to be a general in active service.

Pinochet, demonstrating his power, replied that there were no problems, that he would immediately order a change stating that the director could be a general in active service or retired.

He was in that situation in December 1978, when he went to Pinochet's office to have him sign several documents. At the entrance, he found himself face to face with General Mendoza, who was leaving the office very disturbed.

They did not have time to greet each other; he only heard, "Odlanier, we are discussing the Lonquén discovery and the enormous public commotion that this fact produced in the country. I have been ordered to present a detailed report because I myself was unaware of this situation."

Surprised, he opened the door slightly and saw that Admiral Merino, General Leigh, and Pinochet were arguing. At that moment, an aide-de-camp had him enter. They greeted him without paying much attention to his presence and continued making comments, analyzing possible scenarios, and looking for ways to cover up the crimes.

Mena listened attentively in a corner of the table. At some point, the idea arose of using the institutions to carry out "the search for clandestine cemeteries throughout the country" in order to erase every trace of the criminal actions. The idea contained a terrifying vision; it was a double crime: after death, disappearance.

The Operation Despite the detailed description that Mena gives of that meeting to the justice system, he replied that he had no further information about the fate of the idea of searching for "clandestine cemeteries." It was Minister Juan Guzmán who managed to clarify the course that meeting took and how the removal of graves had been ordered through "Operation TV Removal."

In 2004, Judge Guzmán and the Fifth Department of the Investigative Police received the testimony of an intelligence non-commissioned officer who stated that he had received an A-1 category cryptogram—a nomenclature that determines the level of urgency and secrecy of the mission—while he was at the Húsares Regiment in Angol in 1979.

The uninterrupted account detailed data and situations that spoke of the context of the era and began to give body to a series of voids that had remained after the opening of graves in Liquiñe and other points in the country.

According to his statement, due to the category of the cryptogram, he had run to the decoding machine to decipher it. When he was able to read it, upon seeing that it came from General Pinochet himself, he took it immediately to the office of the regiment commander.

His impression was so great that he did not forget its text, and as if he were just reading it, he told the Judge that it "ordered the exhumation of all the bodies of political prisoners executed in the regiment's jurisdiction and to make them disappear."

The text of the cryptogram added that if any body were found after that cleanup operation in the area, the officers in charge of the mission would be retired.

Mulchén Massacre

The order began to be executed at the Húsares Regiment, but its commander remembered that the massacre of 18 peasants near the Pemehue Hot Springs was not in his jurisdiction and called the 17th Reinforced Mountain Infantry Regiment of Los Ángeles to communicate the order they had received.

The next day, three non-commissioned officers from the Department II of the III Army Division, based in Concepción, arrived at the 17th Mountain Infantry Regiment. All had gone through courses at the School of the Americas and had specialties in counterinsurgency warfare.

They organized an eight-person team made up of officers and non-commissioned officers who headed to the area of the Pemehue Hot Springs. They went in two vehicles, equipped with pickaxes, shovels, mattocks, and some black bags. Previously, they had established contact with a relative of a soldier to guide them to the place where the bodies were supposed to be.

The task was easy; the damp earth allowed them to reach the bodies, which were only 50 centimeters deep. Some still had the remains of their humble clothes, which were destroyed as they were pulled out, leaving small traces of the crime in the pieces of fabric and buttons that remained in the earth.

In total, 12 bodies were exhumed. The bags were loaded into the vehicles, and they headed toward Concepción. The place chosen to put an end to the task was a brick oven of Department II. One by one, they threw the bodies in to be incinerated, just as the Nazis had done during World War II.

Among the accounts is the reference to an officer who commented to them, while they were digging in the earth in search of the bodies, that he had learned to incinerate corpses in a course he had taken in Germany.

He gave them gruesome details, such as that a large grill had to be prepared to place the bodies on and that abundant firewood should be lit under it, adding petroleum permanently. He advised them that they had to be burned until they turned to ashes.

The Mulchén massacre occurred on October 5, 6, and 7, 1973, at the El Morro, Carmen y Maitenes, and Pemehue estates. At dusk on October 5, 1973, the patrol arrived at the Los Morros estate. They brought a list with the names of peasants.

They called them out loud, and they surrendered without making a complaint: Juan de Dios Laubra Brevis, 26 years old; Domingo Antonio Sepúlveda Castillo, 29 years old; José Edmundo Vidal Aedo, 20 years old; Celsio Nicasio Vivanco Carrasco, 26 years old; and José Florencio Yáñez Durán, 34 years old.

All were tied with wire, beaten, tortured, and taken to the banks of the Renaico River to be executed.

The next day, they went up to the Carmen y Maitenes estate looking for 8 peasants: Miguel del Carmen Albornoz Acuña, 20 years old; Daniel Alfonso Albornoz González, 28 years old; Alejandro Albornoz González, 48 years old; José Guillermo Albornoz González, 32 years old; Luis Alberto Godoy Sandoval, 23 years old; Manuel Florencio Rubilar Gutiérrez, 25 years old; José Liborio Rubilar Gutiérrez, 28 years old; and José Lorenzo Rubilar Gutiérrez, 33 years old.

All were taken to the main house. There, they were subjected to violent beatings, until, amidst mockery and laughter, Lieutenant Concha Maturana made them play "Roman circus," where they would beat each other and the losers would fall under the bullets.

Seven were coldly executed, making them dig their own graves and forcing them to lie face down inside them to shoot them in the back. The only one who was not executed that day was José Guillermo Albornoz González, whom they tied to a trailer.

The last stop was at the Pemehue estate. There, they took Felidor Exequiel Albornoz González, 33 years old; Alberto Albornoz González, 41 years old; José Fernando Gutiérrez Ascencio, 25 years old; Jerónimo Humberto Sandoval Medina, 22 years old; and Juan de Dios Roa Riquelme, 35 years old, from their homes. Here, they repeated the same sadism they had displayed at the Carmen y Maitenes estate.

The next morning, Army Sergeant Luis Díaz Quintana realized that José Guillermo Albornoz González was still tied to the trailer. He approached and saw that he was alive, despite the bleeding wounds, a fractured jaw, having not eaten for two days, swollen from the sleet that had fallen, and without water.

Together with carabinero Jacob del Carmen Ortiz Palma, they took him to the banks of the Renaico River and murdered him.

As in all the massacres that occurred in the rural areas, terror took hold of the community; the law of the strongest was imposed, and the victims' families were left exposed to arbitrariness. Some managed to bury their dead; others did not dare to look for the bodies for fear.

Hindered by the fear inspired by the owners of the estates, they did not dare to rescue the bodies, nor did they think that the evil would go as far as the elimination of any vestige of their relatives' lives.

The people responsible for these atrocious crimes are the Mulchén carabinero lieutenant, Jorge Maturana Concha, and the carabineros Osvaldo Díaz Díaz, alias "Alicate," and Héctor Guzmán Saldaña. Along with them, several civilians participated, among whom are Romualdo Guzmán Saavedra, Francisco Urrizola Elías, Ramón Elías Abella, Aquiles Guzmán Fritz, Carlos Lehman, and a sergeant from the 17th Reinforced Mountain Regiment.

Buin Regiment Just as in the Húsares Regiment of Angol, in December 1978, Department II of the Buin Regiment received an encrypted message from the Command-in-Chief. More than 20 years later, Lieutenant Pedro Andrés Rodríguez Bustos declared before Judge Juan Guzmán that the message came signed by Augusto Pinochet and had precise orders "to gather the officers and non-commissioned officers who had been serving in those units between the years 1973 and 1974.

Said meeting should try to obtain from that personnel the information they had regarding the whereabouts of the bodies of persons executed and buried inside military units or, in this specific case, in the Peldehue military camp, considering that that camp was going to transfer part of its land to the Compañía Minera Andina and, for that same reason, it had to be known if there were clandestine burials on said land, since if so, the exactness of the locations was required to proceed with the exhumation and elimination of the corpses."

Later, he would ratify his statements, pointing out that the order came from the Second Army Division, in charge of General Enrique Morel Donoso, and that it was sent to all the garrisons in the country.

He detailed the way in which the information was delivered by those who knew about the burials of political executions and emphasized the secret nature that the entire process had, mentioning two officers who presented themselves to provide information to Commander Mario Navarrete Barriga: Juan Ibáñez and Jorge Aguilar.

Despite how conclusive his statement was, it was dismissed at the time because it was considered that it could be an intelligence operation. Only in 2004 would it be concluded that "Operation TV Removal" was a decision thought out and decided at the highest levels with the aim of hiding the massacres after the 1973 coup d'état.

Fuerte Arteaga In 1999, while Augusto Pinochet was detained in London, the government of Eduardo Frei called on different sectors to participate in a Dialogue Table that would allow for gathering information on the fate of the victims of the military regime who were forcibly disappeared.

Human rights lawyers, representatives of the Armed Forces and Order, representatives of the different religions existing in the country, academics, and government representatives participated in it. The organizations of relatives of the forcibly disappeared and human rights organizations refused to participate, considering that this instance was a lifebuoy for Augusto Pinochet.

The work ended on June 13, 2000, with the delivery of the document of the agreements reached to President Ricardo Lagos. In it, the human rights violations that occurred during the military dictatorship were recognized by all who participated in the Table; an absolute rejection of the use of violence as a method of political action was established, as well as a commitment as a society to generate the conditions that would lead to reconciliation, thereby facilitating the delivery of information on the fate of the forcibly disappeared.

In January 2001, the Armed Forces delivered a report that provided data on the fate of 200 forcibly disappeared persons supposedly thrown into the sea, rivers, or the high mountains. Of them, 180 appeared with names, surnames, and the date of their death.

President Lagos was given a report that contained 45 cases of forcibly disappeared persons whose data contained coordinates and maps of their location, which made it presumed that those remains would be found quickly.

This complex situation caused public commotion, since it was the recognition of the existence of information on the fate of the forcibly disappeared within the Armed Forces; to that was added the anxiety of many relatives who hoped to have an answer about their loved ones.

Faced with this situation, the president of the Supreme Court, Hernán Álvarez, decided to appoint visiting ministers to clarify the fate of the forcibly disappeared.

Within this framework, Judge Amanda Valdovinos was designated to investigate the information on the existence of a cavern with 20 skulls of forcibly disappeared persons at Fuerte Arteaga and areas adjacent to the property that surrounds this military facility.

The accounts that emerged spoke of exhumations and transfers of remains to the slopes of the El Talhuenal mountain range. There, the minister focused her investigative work, together with a team of forensic anthropologists.

The information that mentioned the "corner of the deceased" (rincón de los finados) recurrently to refer to a certain area of the military facility, where remains taken from other places had been buried, led her to determine that not all the exhumed remains had been thrown into the sea, and she reported this to the Supreme Court.

In March of that same year, the investigations on the grounds of Fuerte Arteaga in Peldehue yielded results. In the Quebrada de los Ratones, the remains of Luis Rivera Matus were found, a communist union leader detained at the exit of the Chilectra building on November 6, 1975, by men in civilian clothes who belonged to the Antisubversive Joint Command.

His name appeared in the Armed Forces report as having been thrown into the sea off the coast of the central zone.

This meant a new discredit for the Armed Forces; they were pointed out for delivering a list loaded with inaccuracies, provoking new wounds among the relatives of the forcibly disappeared.

The minister's findings gave rise to more information that ended with the prosecutions of Air Force generals (ret.) Freddy Ruiz Bunger and Carlos Madrid Hayden, Army major (ret.) Álvaro Corbalán Castilla, and DINE (Army Intelligence Directorate) officer (ret.) Sergio López Díaz.

In 2004, the Minister of the Court of Appeals with special dedication for human rights cases, Joaquín Billard, sentenced General (ret.) Freddy Ruiz Bunger and Carlos Madrid Hayden to 600 days in prison as accessories to qualified kidnapping in the person of Luis Rivera Matus.

He sentenced Army major (ret.) Álvaro Corbalán Castilla and Army Intelligence officer (ret.) Sergio López Díaz to 10 years in prison as perpetrators of the qualified kidnapping of Luis Rivera Matus. Three years later, the Supreme Court reduced the sentences, leaving only Álvaro Corbalán Castilla with effective prison time.

La Moneda Four months after the search began at Fuerte Arteaga, the investigations began to make evident what had happened more than twenty-five years earlier with those detained on September 11, 1973, at La Moneda.

A large pit was excavated in the northern area of the campaign zone, and more than 500 bone pieces were recovered, which corresponded to fragments of limbs, teeth, pieces of skull, and other parts of human bodies, in addition to war material and pieces of clothing. In these remains was the last piece of history of 12 of the 20 detainees from September 11, 1973, at La Moneda.

Judge Valdovinos issued a conclusive report to the Supreme Court. In it, she spoke of the violence and irrationality that had dominated these deaths. She indicated that, upon observing the remains found in the pit area, one could "conclude categorically the use of explosives of the grenade type to destroy the bodies," due to the encrustations of bone remains that had remained on the walls of the pit.

She also referred to the tracks of heavy machinery in the exhumation of bodies.

In June 2002, the Supreme Court decided to restructure the investigations of cases of human rights violations and appointed Judge Juan Carlos Urrutia, of the Fifth Criminal Court, to be in charge of the Fuerte Arteaga case. Based on the bone fragments, the investigation for illegal exhumation began.

One of the fundamental witnesses in this investigation was non-commissioned officer Eliseo Cornejo Escobar, who participated in the executions of the La Moneda detainees and, five years later, guided the search in the excavations to exhume the remains, within the framework of "Operation TV Removal."

That December 23, 1978, the supervision of the work was in charge of the commander of the Tacna Regiment, Hernán Canales Varas. According to the accounts, it was near 10:00 hours when Eliseo Cornejo marked the exact place where those detained on September 13, 1973, had been buried.

A mechanical shovel began to dig the dry pit until reaching six meters deep; there, an iron bar appeared, which Cornejo immediately identified. The shovel began to work slowly until the first body appeared.

The bodies were almost intact, thanks to the clay soil that prevented the penetration of oxygen and the subsequent process of organic decomposition. The bodies were removed manually so that they would not fall apart; despite this, small fragments...

they remained in the earth, as if refusing to disappear entirely. Later, they removed the remains and loaded them onto a Unimog truck. In total, there were 12 sacks, and all were transported to some parking lots in front of the San Martín highway.

Around 22:00 hours, the Army Aviation Command helicopter arrived, under the command of the then-colonel Fernando Darrigrandi. It was piloted by Emilio de la Mahotiere González, Luis Felipe Polanco, and Antonio Palomo Contreras, the same trio that flew the Puma helicopter during the Caravan of Death.

The aircraft landed near where the sacks were; they were quickly loaded, and the helicopter took off.

As in previous cases, "Operation Retiro de Televisores" (Operation TV Set Removal) had been carried out silently and opportunely. The order from the Commander-in-Chief of the Army was being fulfilled.

It was the execution of one crime to hide another, which had begun on September 12, 1973, with the arrival of Pedro Espinoza at the Tacna Regiment. The Intelligence officer carried an envelope containing precise orders from the Army General Command to the commander of the Tacna Regiment, Luis Ramírez Pineda.

In them, the people detained at La Moneda were sentenced to death, and it was ordered that they be transported to Peldehue to carry out the order.

Ramírez Pineda had given orders to apply maximum brutality against the detainees who arrived that afternoon of September 11. In those bound and exhausted men, he deposited all his hatred against the Marxists. There were 49 detainees; the following day, it was ordered to release 17 Investigative Police officials, and others were separated, reducing the La Moneda group to 21 people.

On the 13th, at first light, a truck was parked in front of the barracks where the prisoners were held. List in hand, they were taken out of the stables, tied with wire, and violently thrown into the truck.

Among the 21 were Jaime Barrios Meza, Sergio Contreras, Daniel Escobar Cruz, Enrique Huerta Corvalán, Claudio Jimeno Grendi, Jorge Klein Pipper, Oscar Lagos Ríos, Juan Montiglio Murúa, Enrique Paris Roa, Eduardo Paredes Barrientos, Julio Moreno Pulgar, Héctor Pincheira Núñez, Arsenio Poupin Oissel, Julio Tapia Martínez, Héctor Urrutia Molina, Oscar Valladares Caroca, Juan Vargas Contreras, Luis Rodríguez Riquelme, José Freire Medina, and Luis Avilés Jofré, who had arrived at the La Moneda Palace to support the government.

The truck headed north, guarded by military vehicles and followed by the watchful gaze of the then-colonel Pedro Espinoza Bravo, who was traveling in one of the column's vehicles. Espinoza was a high-ranking Army Intelligence officer whose role in the post-coup repression was decisive.

He was in charge of supervising the main extermination operations committed throughout the country, by order of the Intelligence General Staff.

Upon arrival, they went immediately to a dry well next to a building. There, they set up a machine gun operated by Lieutenant Jorge Herrera López and began to bring the detainees down, calling them by their names.

Without complaint and looking straight ahead, the 21 men faced death standing at the edge of the well. They faced the muffled sounds of the bullets that echoed in the solitude of the hills alone. When the last detainee fell, the order was given to throw grenades so that the walls of the well would collapse, thus covering up the crime.

The Process The case has had a long journey through the justice system. From the time Judge Amanda Valdovinos initiated the investigation into illegal burials until the present, the investigation has been in the hands of the judge of the Fifth Criminal Court, Juan Carlos Urrutia; the Minister of the Court of Appeals Alejandro Madrid Crohare; the Special Minister for human rights cases Juan Fuentes Belmar; and it is currently in the hands of the Minister of the Court of Appeals Miguel Vásquez Plaza.

Of the 21 victims, it has only been possible to identify 11 forcibly disappeared persons through the work of identifying remains and genetic analyses carried out by the University of North Texas Laboratory, United States, which included forensic examinations of the victims' bone samples and comparative tests on blood samples donated by the families.

Currently, retired General Luis Ramírez Pineda is being prosecuted as the perpetrator of the qualified homicide of 11 people detained at La Moneda on September 11, 1973, and transferred to the Tacna Regiment, where he was commander.

The expansion of the extradition is also being processed in the Argentine justice system, because it was initially requested for the charges of qualified kidnapping of 11 people, and he is currently being prosecuted for qualified homicide; when the legal classification changes, it is required to request a change of extradition from the country that granted it.

The resolution affected eight other retired members of the Army who confessed to having participated in the kidnappings of Jaime Barrios Meza, Daniel Escobar Cruz, Enrique Huerta Corvalán, Claudio Jimeno Grendi, Oscar Lagos Ríos, Juan Montiglio Murúa, Julio Moreno Pulgar, Arsenio Poupin Oissel, Julio Tapia Martínez, Oscar Valladares Caroca, and Juan Vargas Contreras.

The eight prosecuted as perpetrators of the crime of qualified kidnapping were retired Army Colonel Servando Maureira Roa, retired Army Major Jorge Iván Herrera López, retired Army Brigadier Pedro Octavio Espinoza Bravo, and retired Army non-commissioned officers Eliseo Antonio Cornejo Escobedo, Jorge Ismael Gamboa Álvarez, Teobaldo Segundo Mendoza Vicencio, Juan de la Cruz Riquelme Silva, and Bernardo Eusebio Soto Segura.

Linares Artillery School

The same secret document that circulated through the barracks at the beginning of 1979 reached the Linares Artillery School. Without hesitation, the director of the Linares Artillery School, Lieutenant Colonel Patricio Gualda Tiffani, ordered the formation of a special team to exhume the bodies and placed Captain Mario Gianotti Hidalgo in charge of this mission.

He chose two officers, among whom was Lieutenant Hernán Véjar Sinning, and two non-commissioned officers to carry out the mission. To them was added an Intelligence non-commissioned officer from the III Army Division who had arrived along with two other members of that department to supervise the fulfillment of the order.

Equipped with shovels and pickaxes, they dug in different places inside the Regiment, finally finding two bodies that were without clothing. After putting them in bags, they kept them safe inside the Regiment and left for the city of Constitución to look for a clandestine burial that was located in a cave at the mouth of the Maule River.

The constant rising of the river and the tides had changed the appearance of the terrain slightly, so it was difficult for them to find the exact place. Finally, they found three skulls, concluding that it was the place they were looking for. They exhumed them, put them in bags, and returned to the Artillery School.

With the first stage of the mission accomplished, they went to look for a metal drum, put kerosene in it, then put the five bodies inside, doused them with kerosene again, and set them on fire. The remains of five forcibly disappeared persons were turned into ashes, and the double crime was finalized.

In April 2003, Minister Alejandro Solís had initiated investigations in the General Bari Polygon area, where, according to data provided by a former conscript, there had been a mass grave with the bodies of the forcibly disappeared persons from the area. The proceedings did not yield results, and only some traces of possible burials were found at the site.

In 2008, the Minister of the Santiago Court of Appeals, Alejandro Solís, issued a sentence and set sentences of 15 years and one day for five defendants, and 10 years and one day for a sixth defendant for the disappearances of María Isabel Beltrán Sánchez, José Gabriel Campos Morales, Anselmo Cancino Aravena, Héctor Hernán Contreras Cabrera, Alejandro Róbinson Mella Flores, Arturo Enrique Riveros Blanco, Jaime Bernardo Torres Salazar, José Alfonso Saavedra Betancourt, and Jorge Bernabé Yáñez Olave, detained between September 1973 and February 1974.

On April 27, 2011, the Supreme Court reduced the sentences issued by Minister Solís, acquitting retired General Gabriel del Río Espinoza, who had been convicted for the disappearance of five people, and sentencing retired Army Colonel Juan Hernán Morales Salgado and retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Claudio Abdón Lecaros Carrasco to five years and one day in prison with the benefit of supervised release for the disappearance of María Isabel Beltrán, José Gabriel Campos, Anselmo Antonio Cancino, and Alejandro Róbinson Mella.

Retired Army non-commissioned officer Antonio Aguilar Barrientos was sentenced to five years and one day in prison with the benefit of supervised release for four qualified kidnappings, and retired Army Colonel Antonio Cabezas Salazar for three qualified kidnappings.

Retired General Humberto Lautaro Julio Reyes, who was Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs during the military dictatorship, was sentenced to three years in prison with the benefit of conditional remission, remaining on supervised release.

This was one of the most conclusive pieces of evidence available to demonstrate that Pinochet knew about the atrocities that occurred during his mandate. No one creates such a perverse mechanism to hide crimes if they are not directly involved.

Chihuío On October 9, 1973, the locals of Chihuío thought the worst of the period had passed. The arrests of workers in Neltume and the violence that the Llifén Carabineros had unleashed among the peasants of Chabranco, Arquilme, and Curriñe had spread like wildfire.

That day, a patrol set out in seven vehicles, consisting of 90 well-armed and equipped soldiers, to the foothills area, where only poor workers of the Panguipulli Lumber Company lived. They were from the No. 2 Armored Cavalry Regiment "Cazadores" of Valdivia, commanded by retired General Santiago Sinclair, who was later a member of the Military Junta and a designated senator at the beginning of the transition to democracy.

In charge was squadron commander Luis Osorio Gardasanich, and officers Patricio Keller, Lautaro Ortega, Marcos Rodríguez Olivares, and Luis Rodríguez Rogorrichi. In charge of the special unit was Lieutenant Cristián Labbé Galilea.

The patrol toured the towns and hamlets of the area, read lists of names, and proceeded to arrest them. The owner of the Chihuío estate, Américo González Torres, participated actively and enthusiastically in this journey of death.

Without any shame, they asked the locals for wire and ox teams to drag the vehicles that had gotten stuck in the mud.

In the Curriñe administration office of the Panguipulli Lumber Complex, they tortured some detainees, while a patrol went up to arrest workers at the Folilco sawmill. Their last stop was in Chabranco; there, they arrested the last workers.

With their cargo, they left for the main house of the Chihuío estate, where they brutalized the workers. According to testimony received by the Rettig Report, at first glance, there were no bullet impacts, but signs of cuts, throat-slitting, dismemberment of limbs, and other traces of torment impossible to describe.

The next morning, a local saw that there were some bodies covered with branches and logs, recognizing some of the victims as workers from the area. The corpses remained in the open for about 15 days and were then buried.

There were 17 workers from the area: Carlos Maximiliano Acuña Inostroza, José Orlando Barriga Soto, José Rosamel Cortés Díaz, Rubén Neftalí Durán Zúñiga, Luis Arnaldo Ferrada Sandoval, Eliecer Sigisfredo Freire Caamaño, Narciso Segundo García Cancino, Juan Walter González Delgado, Daniel Méndez Méndez, Sebastián Mora Osses, Pedro Segundo Pedreros Ferreira, Rosendo Rebolledo Méndez, Ricardo Segundo Ruiz Rodríguez, Carlos Vicente Salinas Flores, Manuel Jesús Sepúlveda Rebolledo, Rubén Vargas Quezada, and the minor Fernando Adrián Mora Gutiérrez, who, upon helping to pull a military vehicle out of the mud, saw that his father was among the detainees and asked the soldiers where they were taking him. They replied that if he wanted to go with his father, he should get into the vehicle, and so he did. At the end of 1978, a military operation returned to Chihuío and exhumed the bodies of the 17 peasants to throw them into the sea. The grave with the skeletal remains from the exhumation was found on June 17, 1990, by a group of relatives and friends of forcibly disappeared persons.

In the first days of July 2011, the director of the Legal Medical Institute, Patricio Bustos, announced the names of the first five people identified: Carlos Maximiliano Acuña Inostroza, 46 years old at the time of his death, agricultural worker; Luis Arnaldo Ferrada Sandoval, 42 years old at the time of his death, agricultural worker; Daniel Méndez Méndez, 42 years old, agricultural worker and peasant leader; Ricardo Segundo Ruiz Rodríguez, 24 years old, factory manager and militant of the Socialist Party; and Manuel Jesús Sepúlveda Rebolledo, 28 years old, lumber worker.

On July 15, the director of the Valdivia Legal Medical Service, Patricia Benhe, handed over the few bone remains to the families so they could bury them.

The identifications were carried out with the fragments found in the clandestine grave, where the bodies were thrown and later removed to be thrown into the sea, within the framework of the so-called "Operation Retiro de Televisores."

In January 2011, the Supreme Court sentenced retired Army Colonel Luis Osorio Gardasanich to 10 years and one day as the perpetrator of the crime of qualified homicide of 17 people, including a minor.

Retired Carabineros officer Luis Eduardo Osses Chavarría was sentenced to 3 years and one day in prison for his status as an accomplice to 4 kidnappings. The civilian Bruno Esteban Obando Cárdenas was acquitted for having no participation in the events.

General Santiago Sinclair, who gave the orders, was acquitted. Meanwhile, retired Colonel Jerónimo Pantoja Henríquez died before the Supreme Court's sentence.

The 17 workers belonged to the Esperanza del Obrero Peasant Union of the Panguipulli Lumber Complex. Most were evangelical believers who had organized to participate in the construction of a more just life.

Cuesta Barriga Enrique Erasmo Sandoval Arancibia was an Army lieutenant when he was called to the DINA in 1976. Although he does not say much about his role in the repressive organization that year, he hints at his time at the Intelligence School in Rinconada de Maipú, which served to instruct Argentine, Uruguayan, and Chilean agents.

He also claims to have been part of the security for the VI OAS Assembly held in Santiago, which Henry Kissinger attended. Disjointedly, he says that at the end of 1976, he became part of the Caupolicán Brigade, which was under the command of Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko, assigned to the Cóndor group.

He claims not to remember names, nor the activity he carried out; he only remembers that he talked a lot with the former MIR member who collaborated with the DINA, named "Joel," Emilio Iribarren.

But "Pete el Negro," as he was known in the DINA, had a whole criminal history behind his apparent innocence before the courts. After the coup d'état and the indiscriminate repression, this man murdered the boy Carlos Fariña with a shot in the back and burned the corpse. In the 80s, he participated in the murder of Lisandro Sandoval.

In 1978, he joined the Red Brigade of the National Intelligence Center (CNI), in charge of the repression of the MIR. During his stay, he reported directly to Álvaro Corbalán.

He remembers that at the beginning of 1979, Jerónimo Pantoja, deputy director of the CNI, received information that a rabbit hunter had discovered an abandoned mine with bodies in Cuesta Barriga, and the information had been delivered to the Vicariate of Solidarity.

Faced with the alarm, Pantoja sent him to check the place, "which was a mine shaft, and I verified that it was true. It was full of rodents, bats, putrid remains, and there was an odor consistent with the remains. This odor would have alerted and disturbed the hunter's dogs, and that is how he would have arrived at the place."

With a photograph in hand, Lieutenant Sandoval arrived before Pantoja, who ordered him not to dynamite the mine and ordered him to use acid. Given the difficulty he had due to not knowing how to use chemicals, he called General Odlanier Mena at his vacation home in Mehuín to inform him of the situation.

The delicate information caused Mena to suspend his vacation, return to Santiago, and take charge of the removal of the bodies. For that, he entrusted Sandoval to remove the bodies with a trusted team. "My team was made up of 9 people, and we went to the mine for three days." He claims to have no idea how many bodies there were, but calculates that there were about 20, which were put into 50 potato sacks.

Part of the bodies were skeletonized; others still retained soft tissues.

When they finished removing the bodies, they took some dogs, killed them, and threw them inside to justify the presence of bones. Then they loaded the sacks onto a truck and took them to the Malloco plot that had belonged to the Political Commission of the MIR. Finally, the remains were transported to Peldehue and possibly thrown into the sea.

Operation Retiro de Televisores covered the entire national territory and is the clearest example of the policy of concealment of human rights violations that prevailed during the military dictatorship.

Source: elmostrador.cl, September 2013

50 years after the Coup: these are the CONAF workers murdered during the dictatorship

The National Forestry Corporation (CONAF) is an entity dependent on the Ministry of Agriculture, which was born from the former Reforestation Corporation through a decree signed by the government of Salvador Allende on April 19, 1973, and published in the Official Gazette on May 10 of the same year.

The origin of the institution has historical roots in the beginning of the 20th century and has as its first important milestone the creation of the Malleco Forest Reserve in 1907, located in the commune of Collipulli.

CONAF had only been created for months by the time of the coup d'état of September 11, 1973; however, it was one of the institutions most affected after the overthrow of the popular government; 19 of its workers were murdered by the coup plotters in the weeks following the bombing of La Moneda.

The dictator himself appointed his own son-in-law, Julio Ponce Lerou, as executive director of this Corporation. Until then, Ponce was a former employee of the Matte family at the Biobio Paper Mill in Concepción. The Matte family would also place one of their former employees, Fernando Léniz Cerda, as Minister of Economy of the Military Junta.

CONAF workers murdered in Mulchén

It was very close to the Malleco Forest Reserve where the greatest crime against CONAF workers was committed after the coup d'état. Between October 5 and 7, 1973, in the mountain estates of the Mulchén commune—called El Morro, Carmen, Maitenes, and Pemehue—18 people from the sector were killed: 13 of them were workers of the National Forestry Corporation (CONAF).

A patrol of approximately thirty people, composed of Carabineros from Mulchén, soldiers from the No. 17 Mountain Infantry Regiment of Los Ángeles, and a group of civilians among whom the courts managed to identify the farmer Romualdo "Mayo" Guzmán Saavedra, the industrialist and owner of a lumber yard Francisco Urrizola Elías, the lumber industrialist Ramón Elías Abella, the farmer Aquiles Guzmán Fritz, and the estate administrator Carlos Lehman.

This "patrol" toured the estates and properties of the mountain area of Mulchén, carrying a previously prepared list of the people who were to be detained and who were subsequently murdered.

The "patrol" began its tour at the El Morro estate on the afternoon of October 5. They proceeded to arrest five peasants in their homes, who were transported to the banks of the Renaico River: Juan de Dios Laubra Brevis (26 years old), Domingo Sepulveda Castillo (29 years old), Edmundo José Vidal Aedo (20 years old), Celsio Nicasio Vivanco Carrasco (26 years old), and José Florencio Yañez Duran (34 years old).

Neighbors in the riverbank sector heard gunshots; a few months later, during the search for their own, neighbors and relatives of the victims found the bodies of the murdered workers in the La Playita sector with bullet impacts and their hands tied behind their backs with wire.

The next day, October 6, the "patrol" arrived at the Carmen and Maitenes estates, detaining 8 CONAF workers: Miguel del Carmen Albornoz Acuña (20 years old), Daniel Alfonso Albornoz Gonzalez (28 years old), Alejandro Albornoz Gonzalez (48 years old), Luis Alberto Godoy Sandoval (23 years old), Florencio Rubilar Gutierrez (25 years old), José Liborio Rubilar Gutierrez (28 years old), and José Lorenzo Rubilar Gutierrez (33 years old), who were taken to the main house.

Around 23:00 hours, peasant witnesses heard bursts of machine-gun fire. The next day, the members of the "patrol" buried seven bodies in a grave dug in a field near the house sector, covering them with grass.

That same day, October 7, the "patrol" moved to the Pemehue estate, to the very office of CONAF in the Malleco Forest Reserve, taking Guillermo José Albornoz González (32 years old) into custody, who was brutally beaten and, in very poor physical condition, taken to the Renaico River, where his body appeared floating.

At the Pemehue estate, the criminal "patrol" proceeded to detain and execute 5 other CONAF workers: Alberto Albornoz González (41 years old), Felidor Exequiel Albornoz González (33 years old), José Fernando Gutiérrez Ascencio (25 years old), Gerónimo Humberto Sandoval Medina (22 years old), and Juan de Dios Roa Riquelme (35 years old).

At night, repeated bursts of rifle fire were heard. All of them were buried in the same places where they were murdered. Relatives later found their bodies with their hands tied, their faces destroyed, and numerous bullet impacts.

For these criminal acts, a judicial case was initiated in the courts of justice, specifically before the Concepción Court of Appeals. In October 2017, Minister Carlos Aldana issued a first-instance sentence in which he only convicted the former Carabineros: Jacob del Carmen Ortiz Palma, Juan de Dios Higueras Álvarez, Osvaldo Enrique Díaz Díaz, and Héctor Armando Guzmán Saldaña to sentences of 10 years and one day in prison, as co-perpetrators of the crimes of qualified homicide of the victims Florencio Rubilar Gutiérrez, José Liborio Rubilar Gutiérrez, José Lorenzo Rubilar Gutiérrez, Alejandro Albornoz González, Luis Godoy Sandoval, Miguel Albornoz Acuña, Daniel Albornoz González, Alberto Albornoz González, Felidor Albornoz González, Jerónimo Sandoval Medina, Juan de Dios Roa Riquelme, and José Gutiérrez Ascencio.

The same four former Carabineros must serve 5 years and one day in prison for their responsibility in the qualified kidnappings of 6 other victims: Juan de Dios Laubra Brevis, José Yáñez Durán, Celsio Vivanco Carrasco, Edmundo Vidal Aedo, Domingo Sepúlveda Castillo, and Guillermo Albornoz González.

The judicial case continues with pending appeal procedures before the Court of Concepción, so none of these criminals is serving a prison sentence for these crimes.

At the end of 1978, Pinochet's tyranny organized and executed the so-called "Operation Retiro de Televisores," one of the most bestial actions of the military dictatorship, which sought to erase the traces of the murders committed up to that point by the uniformed and civilian hordes.

The operation consisted of exhuming the bodies of those murdered and illegally buried throughout the country and making those remains disappear so as not to leave any indication of the crimes. It was, in short, to make the remains of the forcibly disappeared persons disappear.

The disastrous action was organized promptly by the CNI and executed with criminal diligence by the military troops and civilian agents who reveled in the terror they provoked among their victims, the victims' families, and the population in general.

In the case of the Mulchén victims, probably in March 1979, personnel from the "Húsares" Regiment of Angol, in compliance with a cryptogram from the Army General Command of the time, illegally exhumed the clandestine graves, removed the remains of those who were executed in October 1973, and took them to an unknown destination, consummating the purposes of the operation.

CONAF worker shot in La Serena

In the same days that the crimes of Mulchén were being committed in the south, in the north, the forestry technician and CONAF worker Oscar Gastón Aedo Herrera (23 years old) was detained by Carabineros in Salamanca, Choapa Province, Coquimbo Region.

He was held incommunicado at the local police station and then taken on October 12 to the Illapel Prison, to later be transferred to the "Arica" Regiment of La Serena, where he was executed in the early hours of October 16, 1973, along with 14 other political prisoners murdered during the passage of the Caravan of Death through that region.

In the judicial sphere, in October 2022, the Sixth Chamber of the Santiago Court of Appeals sentenced eight former officers and two former non-commissioned officers of the Army for their responsibility in the crimes of qualified homicide of the 15 victims of the "Caravan of Death" in the city of La Serena.

The group of criminals is composed of a former General and Commander-in-Chief of that institution, two former brigadiers, five former lieutenant colonels, and two non-commissioned officers.

CONAF workers murdered in Truful Truful Melipeuco

On October 14, 1973, CONAF workers José Alejandro Ramos Jaramillo (46 years old), Gerardo Alejandro Ramos Huina (21 years old), and José Moisés Ramos Huina (22 years old)—father and sons, respectively—were detained in the Truful Truful sector, Melipeuco commune.

The following day, Mario Rubén Morales Bañares (23 years old), a tractor driver and CONAF worker, was detained at his home in Melipeuco. Witnesses report having seen their corpses, bound together, next to the Allipen River.

However, they were not the first CONAF workers murdered in the Melipeuco commune, since on the very day of the military coup, the tractor driver Luis Alberto Soto Chandía (25 years old) was detained, becoming the first CONAF worker murdered just hours after the overthrow of Salvador Allende.

Judicially, only in the case of the victim Luis Alberto Soto Chandía is a procedural case known, with only one former Carabinero being prosecuted for this act.

Forcibly disappeared CONAF worker

On January 29, 1975, the forestry technician Juan René Molina Mogollones (29 years old), a former CONAF official in the Curicó province and former union leader of the corporation's workers, was detained in Santiago by DINA agents.

Immediately after the military coup, he began to be pursued and sought by uniformed troops, so he continued living in hiding and moved to Santiago. Some time later, he was detained and kidnapped to the clandestine detention and torture center Villa Grimaldi, and from that facility, he was made to disappear.

Source: resumen.cl, April 28, 2023