Héctor Alejandro Barría Bassay, a member of the Socialist Party in Río Bueno, was detained on October 16, 1973, at approximately 12:00 PM, under the circumstances described below, which correspond to the sworn statement presented by Mrs.

Elvecia Bassay Alvear, the victim's mother, before a Notary Public: "The disappearance of my two aforementioned sons (referring to Héctor Alejandro and his brother Guido Ricardo) occurred under the following circumstances: on October 16, 1973, they were working at the aforementioned sawmill (Fundo Los Riscos, a timber operation owned by Julio Escobar), when at approximately 12:00 PM, a group of Carabineros from the Río Negro Police Station burst into the property, commanded by Lieutenant José Hernán Godoy Barrientos, and including, among others, Corporal Pedro Soto, Carabineros Alberto Oyarzún, Sergio Aguilar, René Alvarado, and others whose surnames are Duhalde, Barrientos, Rogel, and Catalán. The Carabineros arrived in a pickup truck owned by brothers René and Raúl Guzmán, merchants from Riachuelo, who remained at a distance. It seems these officials were looking exclusively for my two sons, as they detained them as soon as they arrived, mistreating and torturing them, kicking them, striking them with rifle butts, and hurling insults and profanities at them, before throwing them into the vehicle."

These events, as recounted by the victim's mother, were witnessed—according to her—by all the other workers at the sawmill, among whom were his own father, Mr. Pedro Alejandrino Barría Navarro; Armando Pezoa, Juan Ojeda, Armando Nilián, Alfonso Huenchuán, Alejandrino Barriento, Oscar Vargas, Clemente Chodín, Hayde Hernández, María de Catalán, Mercedes de Schell, and other laborers with the surnames Oyarzún, Angulo, and Soto, who were also witnesses.

The detainee, along with his brother, was taken to the Riachuelo Police Station, where they remained until October 17, being transferred from there to the Río Negro Police Station. The mother went to these locations to seek news of the detainees, but received no answers, only threats of action against her if she continued to ask about her sons.

Nevertheless, in Osorno, she approached various authorities, including the Intendencia, where she interviewed a lieutenant named Retamal, but she obtained no information; she also requested records from the Investigations police, with no results.

In December 1973, at the Carabineros Prosecutor's Office in Osorno, she received an explanation from a lieutenant named Tomás Palmovich that her sons were indeed being prosecuted by that tribunal and had been transferred to the city jail by his order.

At that facility, they assured her that they had not been admitted. She returned to the Prosecutor's Office, where the same lieutenant reaffirmed what he had reported, adding that he "pledged his honor as an officer" to the truth of his statement.

Subsequently, the mother went to the city's Army Unit, speaking there with Lieutenant Cossio and Major Ramírez, who flatly denied that the Barría brothers were being held at that facility.

Later, she went to the city of Valdivia, where the Military Prosecutor's Office informed her that "they could not be dead and must be in a concentration camp or detention center." Despite all this, the family members have had no certain or effective news regarding the fate and whereabouts of both brothers since they were detained at their workplace on October 16, 1973.

Source: Vicariate of Solidarity

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

Elía was the sister of Héctor Alejandro and Guido Ricardo, both of whom were forcibly disappeared in Río Negro (Osorno) in October 1973. In these difficult moments, we ask that you accompany her family and join us for her wake, which will be held at Blanco 236 (Fun.

Villena), and for her funeral on Saturday the 16th, at 3:00 PM, at the Parque del Sendero in our city. We ask that you share this information. Gratefully, The Board of Directors Association of Relatives of the Forcibly Disappeared and Victims of Political Execution, La Araucanía Region

Source: July 15, 2011

Minister Álvaro Mesa conducted proceedings in the cases of Emilio Betanzo and the Barría Bassay brothers in Neltume and Río Negro.

The Magistrate stated that "what we have been doing since February 2018 are excavations at a site in Neltume, which had been pointed out by witnesses as the place where the body of Emilio Betanzo Ortega could potentially be buried." The Minister on extraordinary visit for human rights violation cases of the Courts of Appeals of Temuco, Valdivia, Puerto Montt, and Coyhaique, Álvaro Mesa Latorre, conducted proceedings in the Valdivia jurisdiction within the framework of the case (1-2014) of Emilio Betanzo, who was last seen in the foothills sector of Neltume, in Panguipulli, and in the case (1-2016) of the qualified homicide of brothers Héctor and Guido Barría Bassay, 19 and 27 years old respectively, who were detained on October 16, 1973, at the Fundo Los Riscos, in the commune of Río Negro, province of Osorno.

Minister Mesa noted that "as we have done since March 2017, we are conducting a monthly tour of the jurisdictions for which I am responsible. On this occasion, we are carrying out proceedings in the case of Emilio Betanzo Ortega, which corresponds to a person who is presumably a forcibly disappeared detainee, who was last seen on October 5, 1973, in the town of Neltume."

The Magistrate added that "what we have been doing since February 2018 are excavations at a site in Neltume, which had been pointed out by witnesses as the place where the body of Emilio Betanzo Ortega could potentially be buried.

In these proceedings, we have interviewed locals from the sector with the purpose of deepening certain data regarding the terrain we are working on, concerning historical data."

To support this work, the Minister on extraordinary visit indicated that "in this work, we are accompanied by a team from the Legal Medical Service (SML), archaeologists, anthropologists, and the Investigations Police (PDI), who support us with proceedings carried out in the field."

Regarding the Barría-Bassay case, Minister Mesa pointed out that "during 2017, we carried out exhumations at a farm in Río Negro. For now, we are carrying out other types of proceedings, such as taking statements from witnesses to deepen the context of the investigation."

Source: diarioconstitucional.cl 9/3/2018

Date: 03-09-2018

Unearthing Guido: the endless search for the Barría Bassay brothers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He looked for work at the post office, where he transported mail between Riachuelo and Río Negro. They were years of intense political work. With his brother Héctor, they participated in land occupations and organized workers into agricultural cooperatives. "We visited people in the countryside a lot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inés Barría Bassay received the call from Ricardo around two in the afternoon, while she was having lunch in Osorno. Her nephew was breathing heavily: "I found a skull," he said bluntly. For the first time, Ricardo was involved in a search.

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

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

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

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

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

He remembered a phrase his wife had said to him on the day of the funeral, which sounded like a prophecy: "Now you are going to have news of them," she had commented as they returned from the cemetery.

In the following days, Ricardo requested medical leave and spoke with some former workers of the farm. One told him about the existence of a plot of land that Pasenau had forbidden them from entering. It was in the northern part of the farm, bordering the Río Blanco, a riverbed that Ricardo crossed with the water up to his waist so as not to enter through the main road.

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

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

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

Sofía Ralil climbed the mountain every day. She left her young daughter in the care of her mother and walked for an hour through the hills with her large pregnant belly and a lunch pail. Guido and Héctor spent the nights among the branches of the mountain, covered under a damp layer of dead ferns.

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

Where are the Barría boys?" recalls Ulloa of what they were asked during interrogations. The military in the area doubled the town's population, but those who most sought the Barría Bassays were the Carabineros from the Riachuelo station.

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

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

The silence of the mountain kept them in constant reflection, interrupted only by military planes. When they heard the engines, they ran to hide in the grass. The days passed slowly and quietly. Sometimes monotonous.

They woke up at dawn with the arrival of the dew, then met with Sofía, and at eight in the evening, everything returned to darkness. They were unarmed and wore the same clothes from the first day. The police had spread a rumor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

During the wait, some former workers of the farm approached him to provide more information. "Keep going that way, you'll do well," one told him. Riachuelo was beginning to recover its memory. Until then, the old people of the town, contemporaries of the Popular Unity and the dictatorship, had shown little empathy in remembering them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elvecia found out about the detention that same afternoon. A neighbor who lived across from the police station warned her as soon as she saw them descend from the vehicle: "They were tied up, naked, and bruised," she said.

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

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

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

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

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

The posthumous son of Guido was baptized with his father's middle name and registered as the offspring of Elvecia and Pedro. Sofía Ralil left him in the care of his grandparents when he was one year old.

A long time would pass before she knew the truth. "She said Guido was not going to appear and asked me to rebuild my life," explains Sofía. The following year, the search became sporadic. The leads were increasingly less credible.

In January 1978, one of them arrived under the door: "We are alive. Tito has visitors, I don't," said a handwritten note supposedly by Guido. The anonymous note brought hope. The family returned to tour the prisons, but they were nowhere to be found.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All framed in the "Caravan of Death" case, the origin of "permanent kidnapping," a criminal category that circumvented the Amnesty Law. Without bodies, Guzmán assumed, it was impossible to apply the statute of limitations to the cases, because the crime continued to be committed.

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

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

It was the first time the family saw a skull. Ricardo was 27 years old. The experts removed the grave, and three bodies appeared from the earth. None matched. It was another hard blow to the search. The case had no movement until January of the following year, when the judge requested a new exhumation in the same cemetery, but they found nothing either.

Then, he decided to start from scratch and ordered the police to testify again. In charge of the investigation was Sandro Gaete, a detective who had solved several human rights violation cases. He summoned the Carabineros to the PDI barracks in Osorno, but only four of the six involved arrived.

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

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

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

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

“I told everything I knew,” Oyarzún told the detective. During the interrogation, Guido allegedly said that the weapons were hidden in the Cordillera de Huellelhue. The next day, they prepared an excursion led by Major Hans Schemberger, commissioner and governor of the province.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He knew nothing about Héctor. The judge prosecuted all those involved for the crime of qualified kidnapping, and Raúl Guzmán, the civilian who provided the pickup truck to transport them, for his complicity. In May 2003, everyone was arrested.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: theclinic.cl, June 26, 2017

Date: 06-26-2017

Investigation into remains found in Los Lagos that could be those of the Forcibly Disappeared

The Río Negro Prosecutor's Office is investigating the possibility that they are the brothers Héctor and Guido Barría Basay, who disappeared in October 1973. The Río Negro Prosecutor's Office, in the Los Lagos region, is investigating the remains found on an agricultural property in the commune of Purranque that could be those of the Forcibly Disappeared.

Specifically, it is investigating the possibility that it concerns Héctor and Guido Barría Basay, who have been missing since October 16, 1973. The discovery was made thanks to information provided to Ricardo, Guido's son.

The only thing known about their whereabouts is that they were detained by at least ten carabineros in the same area where the remains were found. Now the investigation is in the hands of the Prosecutor's Office, the PDI, and the Legal Medical Service.

Source: 24horas.cl, 5/2/2016

Date: 05-02-2016

The discovery that could reopen the case of the disappeared Barría Basay brothers

“Don Mario,” the former worker of the estate who alerted the Barría Basay family that if they dug at the foot of a Pellín tree in the sector known as the “cemetery,” they would find the skeletal remains of their brothers Héctor and Guido, who disappeared during the dictatorship after being detained by at least 10 carabineros, arrived at the Río Blanco estate on the border between Río Negro and Purranque.

It was past 3:00 p.m. when, riding his Enduro motorcycle, the adult arrived without issuing any statement before making official contact with the investigative bodies. Likewise, and in complete silence, the direct relatives of the Barría Basay brothers also arrived, traveling in a vehicle that had the phrase “Where Are They?” written on one of its windshields.

Meanwhile, little by little, the press began to gather outside the forestry company, located approximately 42 km from the city of Osorno. Cristian Parra, administrator of the property, said that in 2014, Inversiones Ltda.

Jelaila bought the 280-hectare land adjacent to the river of the same name, and in which they never heard stories that would make them presume that a case like the one being seen was real. Regarding the excavation carried out by the brother of the forcibly disappeared, which was without the owner's permission, Parra said that after the discovery became known, the man apologized, explaining that the desire to find his brothers' remains led him to act without authorization, a situation that is completely understandable, said the administrator.

One of the details that draws attention in this case is that the former worker provided precise information, that is to say, that “it was only necessary to dig into the earth for a few centimeters at the foot of the tree—in fact, at about 50 cm the first vestiges appeared—and the remains could be found.” Another piece of information that makes one pay special attention is that the remains were found in the area commonly known as the cemetery.

The administrator explained that this name was due to the fact that there was previously a dairy in that place, so they worked with many animals, which were buried in that sector. Asked if they were surprised to have found presumably human remains, Cristian Parra said that it should not be ignored that around 1900 it was common for families to bury their relatives on the same land, so from that point of view, it did not cause surprise.

What did cause attention is that it could be a case of the forcibly disappeared. Among the data gathered, it has also transpired that, like the former worker, it was a former employee of the estate who provided information on the matter, data that will be cross-checked with the first proceedings being carried out by the specialized bodies, initially under the direction of the local prosecutor's office of Río Negro.

Prosecutor Leyla Chahín, meanwhile, said that only tonight could the action plan be designed, since the experts had to see the first findings and the terrain in general to determine the steps to follow.

In fact, it was confirmed that the radius of action was expanded by at least 30 meters in the direction of the Río Blanco, which will remain isolated and under surveillance until this Tuesday, when the SML experts will move again to begin the excavations.

Source: biobio.cl, 5/2/2016

Date: 05-02-2016

Osorno human rights groups object to the possible appointment of Raúl Guzmán as National Prosecutor

Relatives of the Forcibly Disappeared sent a letter to President Michelle Bachelet, where they express their “concern.” A letter addressed to President Michelle Bachelet was released by groups of Relatives of the Forcibly Disappeared of Osorno.

In the letter, they express their “concern” regarding the “possible” appointment of Raúl Guzmán as national prosecutor. The groups state that the prosecutor is the son of Raúl Guzmán del Río and nephew of René Guzmán del Río, who—they assert—“provided their vehicles and served as guides to capture the brothers Guido Ricardo and Héctor Alejandro Barría Bassay in the town of Riachuelo, commune of Río Negro, province of Osorno.” Along with this, they state that the current chief prosecutor of the Metropolitan South zone “defended his father in said investigation in case No. 2.182-98, called ‘Río Negro Episode,’ which was also prescribed with the majority vote of Mr. Rubén Ballesteros.” “With the absolute conviction that what is demanded is just, we want to point out that we will not accept again that in the name of a healthy national coexistence, the obligation that authorities have to generate all the political actions that allow for definitive progress in ending impunity is renounced,” they state. The groups point out that “when civilians with notable participation in the dictatorship and their relatives are not prevented from holding public office, it is because there is truly no political will to fill the ‘never again’ with content.” “For all the above, we want to demand that the Executive Branch, and especially you in your capacity as President of the Republic, take our concern into consideration,” they conclude. It is expected that this Wednesday, in accordance with the ten days available for these purposes, President Michelle Bachelet will choose her candidate to head the Public Prosecutor's Office.

Source: t13.cl, October 9, 2015

Date: 10-09-2015

Ruling recommends investigating Pinochet's involvement

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

The victims are Héctor and Guido Barría Basay, 27 and 19 years old, respectively, who were detained on October 16, 1976, and whose case was substantiated in the first instance by Minister Alejandro Solís.

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

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

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

Source: El Mostrador, July 7, 2005

Date: 07-07-2005

Six former carabineros convicted in the case of the disappeared

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

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

The resolution also highlights the charges against José Hernán Godoy, as he is the brother of the current deputy director of Carabineros, Nelson Godoy Barrientos. The former uniformed officers were accused of the qualified kidnapping of the brothers Guido and Héctor Barría Basay, both socialist militants.

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

Source: La Nacion, May 3, 2004

Date: 05-03-2004

Judge Guzmán detains retired Carabineros colonel

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

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

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

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

Source: La Tercera, May 3, 2002

Date: 05-03-2002

Police general (ret.) detained for kidnapping

SOLEDAD NEIRA Prosecuted by Minister Alejandro Solís for the qualified kidnapping of brothers Héctor Alejandro (19) and Guido Ricardo (27) Barría Bassay, in Río Negro, General (ret.) José Hernán Godoy Barrientos, former head of the X Police Zone, Los Lagos Region, remains detained at Carabineros facilities in Santiago.

The detention of both socialist militants took place on October 16, 1973, inside the Los Riscos estate, Río Negro commune, Osorno province. Carabineros Patrol According to the background information contained in the complaint filed by their relatives, the two were captured by a Carabineros patrol under the command of Colonel (ret.) Hans Schemberger Valdivia, then a captain; non-commissioned officers (ret.) Robert Taylor, Quintiliano Rogel, Pedro Segundo Soto, and José Catalán, and then-lieutenant José Godoy.

Source: El Mercurio, 07/19/03

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

I didn't actually live with my brothers; I lived in Valdivia. I was married, I had my oldest daughter who at that time was two years and four months old, and I was four months pregnant with my second child, and it was terrible, it was super distressing for me, because the first thing I did was listen to the news, and I started to hear what was happening in Santiago.

The radios in all the cities were also being silenced; there was very little information, meaning that after hours passed, you no longer had a way to inform yourself; they had already silenced all the radios.

The last one heard in Valdivia was "Camilo Henríquez." My husband worked near the school where we lived; imagine the desperation. I had another brother studying at the Technical University; he was from the Communist Youth, so it was such a great desperation that no one was arriving, my brother wasn't arriving home, my husband wasn't arriving.

In the end, when they finally arrived, my husband arrived at one in the afternoon, it was three, and my brother didn't arrive. I ran to the University; the University was already surrounded by soldiers, and I don't know, by those things of life, my brother was saved and we locked ourselves in the house.

But I lived in a university sector and there were university boarding houses; all night long the soldiers were taking students out of the houses naked, dragging them by their hair, on a cobblestone street on top of that, and throwing them into vehicles and taking them away, and we were looking from behind the curtains there, with tremendous desperation and anguish, and without knowing anything about my house, what was happening in my house, because there were no telephones.

And there my brother, the one who was at the university, decided, on the second day, to go to his house, and he went with a white handkerchief so they wouldn't take him at night, to show that he was going to the train, we without knowing if he had arrived or not.

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

It was all a tragedy at that moment, but terrible. Fredy, my husband, was carrying some photos of Allende and he ate them. And we continued with the anguish of not having a way to know about my house. An aunt traveled to Osorno and there she brought information that my brothers were being searched for, that my brothers were in hiding.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Never again, that was the story of their detention, and from there it has been an ordeal. After that, my mom filed complaints, when Pinochet was imprisoned in London, after that my mom gave power of attorney to my sister so that she could start the procedures, a complaint was made in Santiago for my brothers and there Judge Juan Guzmán started the investigation, because there were some testimonies, some people who said that my brothers had been buried in the indigenous cemetery of Riachuelo and in all those parts excavations were made, without any result.

And one of the "cops" who murdered my brothers with the last name Oyarzún said: "I didn't know that mass was held for the living," because my mom held mass for them. And later they took all the implicated carabineros prisoner and the judge gave some 10 years and a day, others 3 years and a day, and when they appealed to the Court of Appeals, the court ratified the sentences of ten years and a day for everyone.

They appealed to the Supreme Court and there in the Supreme Court the case of my brothers has been sleeping for more than two years, without being able to do anything. The lawyers who are handling the case are there "nagging," but nothing happens.

They recognized that they killed my brothers, even that my older brother cried, cried for them not to kill him because he had a 4-year-old daughter, Cristina, and he cried desperately for them not to kill him and they killed him anyway.

That was what they declared, nothing more is known, because they took the case away from Minister Guzmán and now Minister Solís has it. And there they are in the Supreme Court, they remain free on bail, in different parts.

Here in Temuco we went to do a "funa" (protest) to Pedro Soto, in Villa Galicia, who pretends to be sick but he is not sick, and so some are in Punta Arenas, others in Viña del Mar, in Río Negro, Osorno has Alberto Oyarzún, that's how they are, scattered in different parts.

And there my mom died waiting to know about her children, she never knew about them again, that is the story and we continue waiting.

Source: Elia Barría Bassay