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 that 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 the "Operación Retiro de Televisores" (Operation Television Removal) 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 right-wing civilians in grim repressive raids; in the fields of the area, these raids were massive and bloody.

Years later, following the discovery of the bodies of disappeared persons from Buin and Paine in the Lonquén kilns, 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 led, 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 points out that he has noted the need to order new proceedings to close the case.

Lawyer Patricia Parra, of the Human Rights Program, welcomed the reopening, as she hopes that five other 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 kilns inside the Los Ángeles regiment. In the investigation, the names of nine former soldiers from the Los Ángeles regiment and intelligence service agents from that unit have emerged.

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 intensive reconstructions of the scene in order to establish responsibilities in the detentions, executions, illegal burials, and illegal exhumations of the peasants.

The sequence of events and the participation of the perpetrators in the crimes were accredited during the proceedings, as well as the subsequent operation to erase traces that they carried out in 1979.

The 18 peasants murdered between October 5 and 7, 1973, were the brothers Alejandro Albornoz González (48 years old), 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 right-wing 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 right-winger 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 traces Six years after the crimes, the same perpetrators, accompanied by other army personnel and civilian agents, proceeded to exhume the clandestine graves in which the victims had been buried.

Then, the exhumed remains were taken to the Los Ángeles regiment, where they proceeded to burn them in kilns and drums prepared for incineration. The crematoria were under the control of Section II (as the intelligence department in army units is called) and were installed next to where this section had its offices.

Minister Aldana focused his efforts 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 military personnel and former carabineros linked to the executions, exhumations, and illegal incinerations.

About 14 former military personnel, 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.

"Operación Retiro de Televisores" 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 zeal 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

Operación Retiro de Televisores

The "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 kilns.

It was the second-to-last 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 his 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 raw 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 bodies buried clandestinely 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 attack in Washington 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 Central Nacional de Informaciones (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 reticent when they requested him for the position and expressed this to Pinochet. The most forceful argument was that he could not assume it because he was a retired general, and the law created expressly stated that its director should be a general in active service.

Pinochet, demonstrating his power, replied that there were no problems, that he would immediately arrange 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 several documents signed. At the entrance, he came 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 event 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 Admiral Merino, General Leigh, and Pinochet discussing. At that moment, an aide-de-camp let him in. 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 act. 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 regarding 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 "Operación Retiro de Televisores."

In 2004, Judge Guzmán and the Fifth Department of the Investigative Police received the testimony of an intelligence non-commissioned officer who indicated having 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 non-stop account detailed data and situations that spoke of the context of the era and began to give body to a series of gaps 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 regiment commander's office.

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 in the Húsares Regiment, but its commander remembered that the massacre of 18 peasants near the Termas de Pemehue 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 taken 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 Termas de Pemehue area. 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 retained 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 kiln 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 should be prepared to place the bodies and abundant firewood should be lit under it, adding oil permanently. He advised them that they had to burn them until they turned to ashes.

The Mulchén massacre occurred between 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 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 taunts and laughter, Lieutenant Concha Maturana made them play the 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 estate owners, 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 of 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 Commander-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 field, considering that said field was going to transfer part of its land to the Compañía Minera Andina and, for the 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 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 he 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 the conclusiveness of his statement, 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 "Operación Retiro de Televisores" was a decision thought out and decided at the highest levels in order to hide 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 forcibly disappeared persons and human rights organizations refused to participate because they considered this instance to be 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 those who participated in the Table, an absolute rejection of the use of violence as a method of political action was established, and 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 high mountains. Of them, 180 appeared with names, surnames, and the date of their death.

A report containing 45 cases of forcibly disappeared persons whose data contained coordinates and maps of their location was delivered to President Lagos, 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 answers about their loved ones.

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

In this framework, Judge Amanda Valdovinos was designated to investigate the information on the existence of a cavern with 20 skulls of forcibly disappeared persons in 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 research work, together with a team of forensic anthropologists.

The information that mentioned the "rincón de los finados" (corner of the deceased) 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 Comando Conjunto Antisubversivo.

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, causing new wounds among the relatives of forcibly disappeared persons.

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 reveal 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 field 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 people detained on 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 "categorically conclude 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, in the framework of "Operación Retiro de Televisores."

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 consequent process of organic decomposition. The bodies were removed manually so that they would not fall apart; despite this, small fragments remained in the earth, as if refusing to disappear completely.

Then they took out the remains and loaded them onto a Unimog truck. In total, there were 12 bags, and all were transported to some parking lots in front of the San Martín highway.

Near 22:00 hours, the Army Aviation Command helicopter arrived, in charge 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 took the Puma helicopter in the Caravan of Death. The aircraft landed near where the bags were; they were quickly loaded, and the helicopter departed.

As in the previous cases, "Operación Retiro de Televisores" had been carried out silently and opportunely. The order of the Commander-in-Chief of the Army was fulfilled.

It was the realization 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 that contained precise orders from the Army Commander-in-Chief 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 transferred to Peldehue to comply with the order.

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

On the 13th, first thing in the morning, a truck parked in front of the barracks where the prisoners were. 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 attentive 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 pit that was next to a building. There, they mounted a machine gun that was operated by Lieutenant Jorge Herrera López and began to take down the detainees, calling them by their names.

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

The process The case has had a long journey in the justice system. Since Judge Amanda Valdovinos began 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, only 11 forcibly disappeared persons have been identified through the work of identifying remains and the genetic analyses carried out by the Laboratory of the University of North Texas, United States, which included expert reports on the victims' bone samples and comparative tests on blood samples donated by the families.

Currently, General (ret.) 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 currently, he is being prosecuted for qualified homicide, and upon changing the legal figure, it is required to request a change of it from the country that grants the extradition.

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 Army Colonel (ret.) Servando Maureira Roa, Army Major (ret.) Jorge Iván Herrera López, Army Brigadier (ret.) Pedro Octavio Espinoza Bravo, and the non-commissioned officers (ret.) d

Army 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. They were joined by an intelligence non-commissioned officer from the III Army Division who had arrived 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 search for a clandestine burial site 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 somewhat, so it was difficult for them to find the exact location. Finally, they found three skulls, concluding that it was the place they were looking for. They unearthed 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 oil in it, then put the five bodies inside, doused them again with oil, 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, Judge Alejandro Solís had initiated investigations in the area of the Polígono General Bari, where, according to information 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 Judge 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 handed down by Judge Solís, acquitting General (ret.) Gabriel del Río Espinoza, who had been convicted for the disappearance of five people, and sentencing Army Colonel (ret.) Juan Hernán Morales Salgado and 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.

Army non-commissioned officer (ret.) Antonio Aguilar Barrientos was sentenced to five years and one day in prison with the benefit of supervised release for four counts of aggravated kidnapping, and Army Colonel (ret.) Antonio Cabezas Salazar for three counts of aggravated kidnapping.

General (ret.) 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 that the worst of the period had passed. The arrests of workers in Neltume and the violence that the Carabineros of Llifén had unleashed among the peasants of Chabranco, Arquilme, and Curriñe had spread like wildfire.

That day, a patrol consisting of 90 well-armed and equipped soldiers in seven vehicles set out for the Andean foothills, where only poor workers of the Empresa Maderera Panguipulli lived. They were from the No. 2 Cazadores Armored Cavalry Regiment of Valdivia, commanded by General (ret.) Santiago Sinclair, who was subsequently 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. Lieutenant Cristián Labbé Galilea was in charge of the special unit.

The patrol toured the towns and hamlets of the area, read lists with 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 yokes of oxen to drag the vehicles that had gotten stuck in the mud.

In the administration office of Curriñe, 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, where 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 rather 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 he did so. At the end of 1978, a military operation returned to Chihuío and unearthed 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, released 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 member of the Socialist Party; and Manuel Jesús Sepúlveda Rebolledo, 28 years old, lumber worker.

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

The identifications were made 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 TV Set Removal."

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

Carabineros officer (ret.) Luis Eduardo Osses Chavarría was sentenced to 3 years and one day in prison for his role 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, Colonel (ret.) Jerónimo Pantoja Henríquez died before the Supreme Court 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 building 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 spoke 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 a smell consistent with the remains. This smell 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 with removing 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.

Some of the bodies were skeletonized, others still retained soft tissue.

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 TV Set Removal 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

First prosecutions for "Operation TV Set Removal" in Mulchén

New prosecutions were issued by the visiting judge for human rights cases of the Concepción Court of Appeals, Carlos Aldana, in the case of the massacre of 18 peasants in Mulchén, which occurred on October 5, 6, and 7, 1973.

The resolution involves 5 former Carabineros and 9 former military personnel and also considers the crimes of illegal burial and illegal exhumation. All this within the framework of the so-called "Operation TV Set Removal."

To the five former Carabineros who were already prosecuted as co-perpetrators for the crimes of kidnapping and kidnapping resulting in death of 13 people, three more crimes were added: aggravated homicide, aggravated kidnapping, and illegal burial.

To them are added nine former military personnel from the No. 17 Reinforced Mountain Infantry Regiment of Los Ángeles, who were prosecuted as perpetrators of the crime of covering up the crimes of aggravated homicide of 11 people and for co-perpetration of the crimes of illegal burial of 11 people.

Judge Carlos Aldana notified seven of the former military personnel involved of the indictment, who were taken to the Courts by PDI personnel from the facilities of the Chacabuco Regiment where they remained detained.

The interesting thing about this ruling is that it also points to the crimes of illegal burial committed within the framework of the so-called "Operation TV Set Removal," ordered by General Pinochet, ordering the exhumation of all the bodies of political executions to make them disappear definitively.

On October 5, 6, and 7, 1973, within the framework of a concerted operation, a Carabineros patrol under the command of Lieutenant Jorge Maturana Concha, and with a list in hand, arrived at the "El Morro," "Carmen y Maitenes," and "Pemehue" estates, arresting a total of 18 peasants, who were riddled with bullets by their captors and their bodies buried clandestinely on the banks of the Renaico River.

The investigation carried out first by visiting judge Carlos Cerda in 1980 and subsequently by Judge Rosa Giacaman and Judge Carlos Gajardo, who investigated the "Operation TV Set Removal," reached the hands of Judge Carlos Aldana in March 2008.

Since then, it has been deepened, also covering the episode of illegal burial.

Making all evidence disappear

Thus, it was possible to establish that "between the end of 1978 and the beginning of 1979, a cryptogram was received in Section 2 of the 'Húsares' Regiment of Angol, by the Intelligence officer in charge, Sergeant 1st Class Juan Carlos Balboa Ortega, from the Army General Command in which all commanders of military units in the country were ordered to carry out the pertinent proceedings to prevent third parties from finding the burials derived from illegal executions carried out in each military jurisdiction.

This document was delivered to the Commander of the aforementioned Regiment, Colonel Patricio Escudero Troncoso, who asked him if there was any case in the jurisdiction, to which Balboa replied no, archiving the background information."

Subsequently, in the summer of 1979, the aforementioned Sergeant 1st Class Balboa Ortega, while on vacation in the Andean foothills sector between Mulchén and Angol, learned in a casual conversation with a son of the victims that his father had been killed by the Carabineros of Mulchén in 1973 and that his body, along with those of other people, had been buried in the sector.

He reported this fact to the Commander of his Regiment, who ordered the unarchiving of the cryptogram and to bring it to the attention, through the same Balboa Ortega, of the Commander of the No. 17 "Los Ángeles" Reinforced Mountain Infantry Regiment, Colonel Jaime García Zamorano, who had jurisdiction over the place where the victims' remains were supposedly located.

This was how García ordered an operation to be carried out with military personnel from that Regiment in charge of the Chief of Section II, Lieutenant Julio Reyes Garrido, composed of non-commissioned officers José Puga Pascua, José Iturriaga Valenzuela, Jaime Muller Áviles, Julio Fuentes Chavarriga, Luis Palacios Torres, and Juan Cares Molina, and from Department II of the 3rd Army Division of Concepción, in charge of Sergeant Major Eduardo Paredes Bustamante (currently deceased), who in 1973 had served in section II of the Los Ángeles Regiment.

All of them headed towards the place of the burials. They started along the south bank of the Renaico River via Collipulli and from there they went into the road to Curaco, arriving at the "El Amargo" sector.

They crossed to the north bank of the river, where, after making inquiries with locals, they arrived at the Carmen y Maitenes sector, specifically to a site where there was a cross. There they excavated with shovels and pickaxes, taking out human remains, as well as clothing and identity cards, which they introduced into potato sacks, differentiating the human remains from the other items taken out.

Once the excavation was concluded, in which Puga Pascua, Iturriaga Valenzuela, Muller Áviles, Fuentes Chavarriga, Palacios Torres, Cares Molina, and Paredes Bustamante intervened, they crossed the river and put the potato sacks in the back of the pickup truck in which they were traveling.

Balboa Ortega was waiting for them there, who, according to his testimony and seeing that Müller dropped the sack he was carrying into the river, entered the water and rescued it since he knew its contents. To finish the operation, they covered the grave from which they extracted the bones or other items, simulating that nothing had happened in the sector.

Subsequently, they moved to the Termas de Pemehue site, inside the Cordillera, also under the jurisdiction of the Los Ángeles Regiment, where they again excavated and unearthed four other bodies, which were buried on the north bank of the Renaico River, under some stones. They covered the graves to hide the exhumation and then loaded the remains into the pickup truck in which they were traveling.

The members of the patrol that exhumed the aforementioned bodies had information that they corresponded to locals who, in October 1973, had been executed by personnel of the Carabineros of Mulchén.

The exhumed skeletal remains, clothing, and identity documents were taken to the No. 17 Reinforced Mountain Infantry Regiment of Los Ángeles, where Lieutenant Reyes, in charge of the operation, reported to Commander García, who ordered them to be disposed of, for which their incineration was arranged in a brick oven that was located adjacent to Section 2 inside the Regiment.

"The facts described above constitute the last link in the episode that began on October 6, 1973, already referred to in the first consideration, regarding the victims of Carmen y Maitenes and Pemehue, intended to achieve the elimination of the victims' remains in order to hide or render useless the body of the crimes to prevent their discovery," reads the resolution of Judge Aldana.

The prosecuted

With the facts clear, three crimes were configured: aggravated kidnapping, aggravated homicide, and illegal burial.

Thus, Jorge Maturana Concha, Jacob del Carmen Ortiz Palma, Juan de Dios Higueras Álvarez, Osvaldo Enrique Díaz Díaz, and Héctor Armando Guzmán Saldaña are prosecuted as co-perpetrators of the following crimes:

a) Aggravated homicide of the following 12 people: From the Carmen y Maitenes estate: José Florencio, José Liborio, and José Lorenzo, all with the surname Rubilar Gutiérrez, Alejandro Albornoz Acuña, Luis Alberto Godoy Sandoval, Miguel del Carmen Albornoz Acuña, Daniel Alfonso Albornoz González; and from the Pemehue estate: Alberto Albornoz González, Felidor Exequiel Albornoz González, Jerónimo Humberto Sandoval Medina, Juan de Dios Roa Riquelme, and José Fernando Gutiérrez Ascencio; b) Aggravated kidnapping of the following 6 people: From the El Morro estate: Juan de Dios Laubra Brevis, José Florencio Yáñez Durán, Celsio Nicasio Vivanco Carrasco, Edmundo José Vidal Aedo, Domingo Sepúlveda Castillo, and Guillermo José Albornoz González, at the Carmen y Maitenes estate; c) Illegal burial of 12 corpses corresponding to José Florencio, José Liborio, and José Lorenzo, all with the surname Rubilar Gutiérrez, in addition to Alejandro Albornoz Acuña, Luis Alberto Godoy Sandoval, Miguel del Carmen Albornoz Acuña, Daniel Alfonso Albornoz González (From the Carmen y Maitenes estate) and Alberto Albornoz González, Felidor Exequiel Albornoz González, Jerónimo Humberto Sandoval Medina, Juan de Dios Roa Riquelme, and José Fernando Gutiérrez Ascencio (from the Pemehue estate).

Likewise, Julio Reyes Garrido, José Puga Pascua, José Iturriaga Valenzuela, Jaime Muller Áviles, Julio Fuentes Chavarriga, Luis Palacios Torres, Juan Cares Molina, Juan Carlos Balboa Ortega, and Jaime García Zamorano are prosecuted as:

a. Cover-ups, in the terms of article 17 no. 2 of the Penal Code, regarding the crimes of aggravated homicide of the following 11 people: José Florencio, José Liborio, and José Lorenzo, all with the surname Rubilar Gutiérrez, in addition to Alejandro Albornoz Acuña, Luis Alberto Godoy Sandoval, Miguel del Carmen Albornoz Acuña, Daniel Alfonso Albornoz González (From the Carmen y Maitenes estate) and Alberto Albornoz González, Felidor Exequiel Albornoz González, Jerónimo Humberto Sandoval Medina, and José Fernando Gutiérrez Ascencio (from the Pemehue estate).

b. Co-perpetration, in the terms of article 15 no. 1 of the Penal Code, of the crimes of illegal exhumation of the remains of the following 11 people: José Florencio, José Liborio, and José Lorenzo, all with the surname Rubilar Gutiérrez, in addition to Alejandro Albornoz Acuña, Luis Alberto Godoy Sandoval, Miguel del Carmen Albornoz Acuña, Daniel Alfonso Albornoz González (From the Carmen y Maitenes estate) and Alberto Albornoz González, Felidor Exequiel Albornoz González, Jerónimo Humberto Sandoval Medina, and José Fernando Gutiérrez Ascencio (from the Pemehue estate).

Because the prosecuted Jorge Maturana Concha, Jacob del Carmen Ortiz Palma, Juan de Dios Higueras Álvarez, Osvaldo Enrique Díaz Díaz, and Héctor Armando Guzmán Saldaña are on provisional release, they were summoned for January 29 in order to notify them of the resolution.

Regarding the prosecuted Julio Reyes Garrido, José Puga Pascua, José Iturriaga Valenzuela, Jaime Muller Áviles, Julio Fuentes Chavarriga, Luis Palacios Torres, Juan Cares Molina, Juan Carlos Balboa Ortega, and Jaime García Zamorano, given the penalty assigned to the crimes for which they are being prosecuted and the degree of participation, an arrest warrant was dispatched against them by the Homicide Brigade of Concepción of the Investigative Police of Chile.

They remained detained in the Chacabuco Regiment of Concepción to be notified.

Source: Resumen, January 30, 2014

Indictment issued against military personnel and Carabineros for crimes against 18 peasants from Mulchén

The visiting judge for human rights violations cases of the Concepción Court of Appeals, Carlos Aldana, issued an indictment against former members of the Carabineros and the army for their responsibility in the crimes of aggravated kidnapping, aggravated homicide, illegal burial, and illegal exhumation of 18 workers from the El Morro, El Carmen-Maitenes, and Pemehue estates, located in the Andean foothills sector of the town of Mulchén.

In the resolution (case file 30.2007), Judge Aldana indicted the former members of the Carabineros: Jacob del Carmen Ortiz Palma, Juan de Dios Higueras Álvarez, Osvaldo Enrique Díaz Díaz, and Héctor Armando Guzmán Saldaña, as perpetrators of the aggravated homicides of José Florencio Rubilar Gutiérrez, José Liborio Rubilar Gutiérrez, José Lorenzo Rubilar Gutiérrez, Alejandro Albornoz Acuña, Luis Alberto Godoy Sandoval, Miguel del Carmen Albornoz Acuña, Daniel Alfonso Albornoz González, Alberto Albornoz González, Felidor Exequiel Albornoz González, Jerónimo Humberto Sandoval Medina, Juan de Dios Roa Riquelme, and José Fernando Gutiérrez Ascencio, crimes perpetrated on October 6 and 7, 1973.

Former Carabineros who were also indicted as perpetrators of the crimes of aggravated kidnapping of: Juan de Dios Laura Brevis, José Florencio Yáñez Durán, Celsio Nicasio Vivanco Carrasco, Edmundo José Vidal Aedo, Domingo Sepúlveda Castillo, and Guillermo José Albornoz González, perpetrated starting October 5, 1973.

State agents who were also indicted as perpetrators of the crime of illegal burial of the 12 victims of the homicide crime.

Meanwhile, former army officers Jaime García Zamorano and Julio Reyes Garrido, and former non-commissioned officers José Puga Pascua, José Iturriaga Valenzuela, Jaime Muller Avilés, Julio Fuentes Chavarriga, Luis Palacios Torres, Juan Cares Molina, and Juan Carlos Balboa Ortega, were indicted as cover-ups for 11 crimes of homicide -except for that of Juan de Dios Roa Riquelme- and for the crime of illegal exhumation of said victims.

In the investigation stage, the visiting judge managed to determine that the 18 victims were detained by army personnel from the No. 13 Regiment of Los Ángeles and the Carabineros Police Station of Mulchén between October 5 and 7, 1973, at the El Morro, El Carmen-Maitenes, and Pemehue estates in the area, executed and buried in those places, others in the Mulchén Cemetery or on the banks of the Renaico River, places where the remains remained for more than 5 years.

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

"Operation TV Set 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" CNI chief, Odlanier Mena, and executed with criminal solicitation by the hordes of agents who reveled in the terror they provoked and caused among their victims, the victims' relatives, and the population in general.

Facts like these cannot continue to go unpunished. It only remains to hope that Aldana and the courts take care of applying justice.

Source: resumen.cl, July 15, 2016

Ridiculous sentences against former Carabineros and military personnel for crimes and illegal burials in Mulchén

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

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

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

In the ruling (case file 30-2007 and accumulated), Judge Aldana sentenced 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 aggravated homicide of Florencio Rubilar Gutiérrez, José Liborio Rubilar Gutiérrez, José Lorenzo Rubilar Gutiérrez, Alejandro Albornoz González, Luis Godoy Sandoval, Miguel Albornoz Acuña, Daniel Albornoz González, Alberto Albornoz González, Felidor Albornoz González, Jerónimo Sandoval Medina, Juan de Dios Roa Riquelme, and José Gutiérrez Ascencio, 12 crimes committed in October 1973, at the Carmen, Maitenes, and Pemehue estates, in the commune of Mulchén. These four convicted are the only ones who, in Aldana's judgment, must serve an effective prison sentence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Facts like these cannot continue to go unpunished.

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

The facts

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

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

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

On October 6, the delegation arrived at the Carmen and Maitenes estates, where 7 people were arrested and forced to dig a 6 by 4 meter grave to then be executed on the spot and illegally buried. Hours later, another prisoner was arrested in the place and was taken by the group to the main house of the Pemehue estate, where they arrived the next day.

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

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

Source: resumen.cl, October 31, 2017