Occupation: Civil Engineer; Former engineer at CORFO; Former leader of the CORFO Employees Association; Former member of the Board of Directors of Indisa and former administrator of the "Marttonfy" and "Galaz" furniture factories. Political Affiliation: Militant of the Movement of Unitary Popular Action (MAPU). Date of Detention: September 17, 1974

REPRESSIVE SITUATION

Héctor Patricio Vergara Doxrud, married, 3 children, Civil Engineer, a militant of MAPU, was detained by personnel from the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), who did not carry any arrest warrant, on September 17, 1974, around 15:30 hours, at his private office located at San Antonio No. 427, office 311, together with Miguel Baeza Chaud, who, after remaining 8 months detained in the "Tres Alamos" Prisoner Camp, was expelled from the country to France.

Prior to the detention, the office on San Antonio Street had been raided by his captors. On September 21, 1974, around 15:00 hours, the spouse of the affected party, the lawyer Mónica García Vivanco, received a phone call from her husband.

With a broken voice, Patricio Vergara limited himself to telling her that he had had a setback and that she should hand over 500,000 escudos from the family savings to "two gentlemen" who would come to pick them up.

Faced with her husband's requests to explain what was happening and where he was, the affected party gave disjointed answers, which evidenced that he was being guarded and forced to give only the precise information provided.

Half an hour later, two individuals with a thuggish appearance arrived at the Vergara García family home and demanded the delivery of the money. Mónica García repeatedly asked them to identify themselves and leave a receipt, but they stubbornly refused to do so, warning her not to take any action to locate the affected party, as doing so would mean assuming greater risks.

After they seized the money and left the scene, Mrs. García was able to see that the subjects headed toward a yellow Chevrolet pickup truck, a late model, without license plates, which was parked on a cross street.

Subsequently, Mónica García contacted the witness Miguel Baeza Chaud while he was being held in the "Tres Alamos" Prisoner Camp, and in a free conversation, he recounted that he had remained detained, together with Héctor Patricio Vergara, in the incommunicado facility run by the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) known as "Cuatro Alamos." On the other hand, Miguel Pedro Anglés Chateau, detained by DINA agents in civilian clothes on September 16, 1974, at the intersection of Puente and Santo Domingo streets, declared under oath before the Mayor of the Commune of Acheves, France, that he had remained incommunicado in a room in a house (which would later be identified as the secret DINA detention and torture center located at José Domingo Cañas and República de Israel) between September 16 and 19, 1974, with Luis Durán Rivas and Patricio Vergara. On September 19 of that year, the three were transferred to the incommunicado pavilion of the "Tres Alamos" Prisoner Camp, known in that sector as "Cuatro Alamos," and were separated upon arriving at this facility. The witness added in his statement that both Luis Durán and Patricio Vergara had been violently beaten and tortured, and that their situation, from the point of view of their health, worried him enormously. Both detainees (Vergara and Durán), who remain forcibly disappeared to this day, were working at the time of the events described, and had been for some time, on the publication of a clandestine newspaper. Some years later, part of what happened to Héctor Patricio Vergara would be reconstructed. Indeed, on the day of his detention, a group of agents from the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), led by "Captain Max" and accompanied by Miguel Anglés Chateau, who had been detained the day before, went to his office on San Antonio Street. Anglés recognized the affected party, who was put into a white Peugeot vehicle. Inside the vehicle, his eyes were covered with a blindfold and he was taken to a white house with blue shutters, located in the commune of Ñuñoa, at the streets José Domingo Cañas and República de Israel, where he was harshly tortured through the application of electric shocks to his body. Miguel Baeza Chaud, detained together with Vergara in the latter's private office, met the same fate, being transferred to José Domingo Cañas by his captors in a Chevrolet pickup truck, separated from the affected party. Approximately on September 19 or 20, 1974, Héctor Patricio Vergara, together with Miguel Anglés Chateau and the detainee Luis Durán Rivas (apprehended on September 14 of the same year), was taken to Cuatro Alamos, a facility to which Miguel Baeza had already been transferred. On September 21, 1974, Patricio Vergara, Miguel Anglés, Miguel Baeza, and a detainee with the surname Lagos were transferred to the new secret DINA detention and torture facility known as Villa Grimaldi, which had just begun operating. From this facility, the phone call that the affected party had with his wife was made. That same day, the detainees were again taken to Cuatro Alamos, where they were separated. Between September 24 and 26, 1974, Patricio Vergara and Luis Durán were taken from their respective cells in Cuatro Alamos, and all trace of them was lost from that moment on. For his part, Luis Eduardo Durán Rivas was last seen by Miguel Anglés Chateau between October 2 and 4, 1974, when he was being carried by personnel of "Cuatro Alamos" in such a deplorable physical state that he could not stand on his own. The presence of the affected party in the "Cuatro Alamos" Incommunicado Detention Camp was confirmed to his spouse by other means. Indeed, on December 31, 1974, she was called by the lawyer for CORFO and the National Navy, Roberto Cobo de la Maza, who informed her that Héctor Patricio Vergara was, at that date, in the aforementioned facility. Subsequently, in the month of January 1975, Army General (Ret.) Roberto Fuentes Stone informed Patricio Vergara's family that he remained under arrest at "Cuatro Alamos" and that he would soon be expelled from the country to Norway, a country that had granted him the corresponding visa. However, the detention of the affected party was always denied by the competent authority, and to this day, no information has been found to establish his fate and whereabouts.

JUDICIAL AND/OR ADMINISTRATIVE ACTIONS

On September 23, 1974, a writ of amparo was filed in favor of the affected party before the Santiago Court of Appeals, which was registered under number 1128. On October 11, 1974, the Minister of the Interior at the time, Raúl Benavides Escobar, informed the Court that Patricio Vergara "was not being held by order of any administrative authority, and his current whereabouts are unknown." While the response to the official letters sent to the Ministry of Defense and the National Executive Secretariat for Detainees (SENDET) was pending, the petitioner, Mónica García Vivanco, requested on October 23, 1974, that the aforementioned Secretariat be ordered to bring the witness to the detention and imprisonment of the affected party, Miguel Baeza Chaud, who remained detained in free communication at the "Tres Alamos" Prisoner Camp, before the court. The Court of Appeals did not rule directly on the requested measure, but limited itself to ordering that official letters be sent to the Chief of the State of Siege Zone of Santiago, Sergio Arellano Stark, and to the Commander-in-Chief of the Combat Aviation Command, so that they could report on the detention of the affected party. Both the Chief of the State of Siege Zone and the auditor of the Combat Command for Wartime Aviation Tribunals, Víctor Barahona Bustos, indicated that there were no records regarding the detention or prosecution of Héctor Patricio Vergara. On November 12, 1974, the request to summon the witness Miguel Baeza Chaud to appear before the court was reiterated. This time the Court did not grant the request and ordered that an official letter be sent to the Minister of the Interior, merely noting that the affected party was allegedly being held at the place known as "Tres Alamos," and requesting a report on the matter. On December 26, 1974, it was certified in the case files that "the Minister of the Interior, by Official Letter No. 1003 dated the 12th of the same month and year, indicated that the affected party had no records." Based on the merits of the transcribed reports, and without receiving a response to the official letters sent to the Ministry of Defense and SENDET, nor insisting on obtaining one, the Court rejected the writ of amparo filed and ordered the records to be sent to the 6th Criminal Court of Santiago, in order to initiate a summary investigation into the disappearance of Patricio Vergara. On January 6, 1975, the case for the alleged disappearance of the affected party was initiated by an official letter from the Santiago Court of Appeals before the 6th Criminal Court, which was registered under number 91.059. Once the corresponding investigation order was decreed, it did not provide any information that would allow the whereabouts of the affected party to be established. After having carried out efforts, without positive results, at the National Executive Secretariat for Detainees (SENDET), in healthcare centers, the Morgue, and the Civil Registry, it was returned to the Court, which ordered it to be added to the case files. On February 28, 1975, the Investigating Judge of the case ordered an official letter to be sent to the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) to report whether the affected party was being held in any of the places designated for such purposes. On May 6 of that year, in a response letter containing the phrase "by order of the Director of National Intelligence," it was stated: "I request the 6th Criminal Court to have the kindness to address the Ministry of the Interior (Confidential Department) or the National Executive Secretariat for Detainees, which have the mission of providing this type of information." Just as indicated in the response sent to the Court by the DINA, an official letter was sent to the Ministry of the Interior, which reported on July 2, 1975, that: Héctor Patricio Vergara was not being held by order of that Ministry. Without decreeing the practice of new measures, the summary was declared closed and the case was temporarily dismissed on September 15, 1975, bearing in mind that from the information accumulated in the files, the perpetration of any crime was not completely justified. Upon appeal of this resolution, the Prosecutor of the Santiago Court of Appeals was of the opinion that, since Mrs. Mónica García Vivanco (spouse of the affected party) had indicated that her husband was detained together with Miguel Baeza Chaud, who was allegedly being held in the "Tres Alamos" Prisoner Camp, it was therefore necessary to hear this person. Consequently, he requested that the case be returned to the summary stage, summoning the aforementioned witness to appear before the court, and sending an official letter to that effect to the National Executive Secretariat for Detainees. All this on September 26, 1975. On October 13, 1975, the Santiago Court of Appeals took charge of the Prosecutor's report and ordered the continuation of the case proceedings, ordering the practice of the previously indicated measures. Thus, when Colonel Jorge Espinoza Ulloa, National Executive Secretary for Detainees, was requested, he informed the 6th Criminal Court on November 10, 1975, that Miguel Baeza Chaud had an "exempt arrest decree No. 452 of September 30, 1974, from the Ministry of the Interior; and decree No. 528 of the Ministry of Defense of April 16, 1975, the latter ordering his forced departure from the country, for which he traveled to France on June 26, 1975." Based solely on the merits of the preceding report, the summary was again declared closed, and for the same reasons previously stated, the case was temporarily dismissed on November 24, 1975. Reporting again, the Prosecutor of the Santiago Court of Appeals, in the appeal filed to obtain the revocation of the resolution that decreed the temporary dismissal of the case, stated on December 3, 1975, that he was of the opinion to approve the aforementioned resolution, but expressed the following: "It was, without a doubt, very regrettable that Your Honor did not accede to the measure requested on November 12, 1974, in order to summon the arrestee Miguel Baeza Chaud to testify, who according to the petitioner 'knows of the detention of the protected party carried out by DINA personnel.' Once the indicated measure was requested by the Prosecutor, it was proven to be impracticable, since Miguel Baeza Chaud, arrested in accordance with the decree of September 30, 1974, had a decree issued on April 16, 1975, ordering his forced departure from the country, and he traveled to France on June 26, 1975. The investigation decreed to find out the disappearance of Héctor Patricio Vergara meets the same fate as the amparo. There is, in truth, no answer. The protected party is not under arrest. Nothing can be learned about the protected party." On January 13, 1978, a writ of amparo was filed before the Santiago Court of Appeals, registered under No. 60-61, in favor of the affected party, which was sent by letter from abroad by the National Union of Education Workers, based in Mexico. This appeal was not definitively processed, as the Court, on February 8, 1978, decreed that it must first be proven that it had been filed by persons capable of appearing in court; which was not verified. Faced with the results of the judicial investigations, the family of Héctor Patricio Vergara Doxrud sought other paths to obtain some answer to their many questions. Fifteen or twenty days after the detention of the affected party, his brother met with the then-President of the Supreme Court, Mr. José María Eyzaguirre, who called the Director of the DINA, Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda, by phone in his presence. Contreras stated that he recognized the name Héctor Patricio Vergara, as he was a very dangerous person and that he was surely in Argentina. On September 25, 1974, the spouse of the affected party filed an amparo before the Honorable General Council of the Association of Engineers. On November 25 of that year, the case of Patricio Vergara was presented to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States (OAS). On June 25, 1975, a letter was written to the President of the Association of Engineers, and on October 13 of the same year, the father of the affected party wrote a letter to Colonel Jorge Espinoza Ulloa, National Executive Secretary for Detainees, asking for information about his son. Likewise, help was requested from the International Red Cross and the Norwegian Embassy. However, all efforts aimed at establishing the fate and whereabouts of Héctor Patricio Vergara proved fruitless. Since that day when he was detained in his office on San Antonio Street, he remains disappeared.

Source: Vicariate of Solidarity

47 years after the 1973 coup d'état, ANECOR remembers and pays tribute to the 23 CORFO officials who were forcibly disappeared and victims of political executions during the Military Dictatorship, which occurred between the years 1973 and 1989.

It is to be hoped that this dark political period in our country, in which barbarism and disgrace reigned, will never be repeated, and that in the present, solidarity and understanding will flourish among all.

Source: anecor.cl 9/11/2020

Date: 09-11-2020

Catholic University awarded posthumous degrees to students who were victims of the Military Government

The educational establishment recognized students, teachers, and professionals who were victims of the dictatorship. The Pontifical Catholic University of Chile paid tribute to 28 members of the university, students and professors, who were victims of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

At the event held in the Aula Magna of the San Joaquín Campus, attended by nearly 200 people, posthumous degrees were awarded to the families and friends of 10 executed students, and teachers and professionals who were victims of human rights violations were also remembered.

Rector Ignacio Sánchez stated that they collaborated and worked together with the Student Federation to carry out a "symbolic act of reparation and reconciliation" where they commemorated and awarded posthumous degrees.

The ceremony was preceded by a mass officiated by the Vice-Grand Chancellor of the University, Father Cristián Roncagliolo, which was concelebrated by several priests who played a prominent role in the defense of human rights during the dictatorship. The 28 people who received the posthumous degree were:

• Diana Frida Aaron Svigilsky.
• Alejandro Juan Ávalos Davidson.
• Jenny del Camen Barra Rosales.
• Loepoldo Raúl Benitez Herrera.
• Patricio Biedma Schadewaldt.
• Alan Roberto Bruce Catalán.
• Carmen Cecilia Bueno Cifuentes.
• Mauricio Jean Carrasco Valdivia.
• Ignacio Orlando González Espinoza.
• Luis Enrique González González.
• José Eduardo Jara Aravena
• Juan Alberto Leiva Vargas.
• José Patricio del Carmen León Gálvez.
• Enrique López Olmedo.
• Víctor Eduardo Oliva Troncoso.
• Jaime Ignacio Ossa Galdames.
• Alicia Viviana Ríos Crocco
• Juan Carlos Rodríguez Ayraya.
• Eugenio Ruiz- Tagle Orrego.
• Enrique Antonio Saavedra González.
• Jilberto Patricio Urbina Chamorro.
• Omar Roberto Venturelli Leonelli.
• Héctor Patricio Vergara Doxrud.
• Ismael Darío Chávez Lobos.
• María Teresa Eltit Contreras.
• Ángel Gabriel Guerrero Carrillo.
• Samuel del Tránsito Lazo Maldonado.
• Ernesto Igor Ríos Céspedes.

Source: 24horas.cl 12/31/2019

Date: 12-31-2019

ANEF inaugurates memorial for victims of the dictatorship with the presence of President Bachelet

In a solemn ceremony outside the headquarters of the ANEF, this Monday, September 8, a memorial was inaugurated in honor of public employees who were victims of the civic-military dictatorship. The event was attended by the President of the Republic, Michelle Bachelet; representatives of the Association of Relatives of Forcibly Disappeared Detainees (AFDD), Lorena Pizarro, and of Political Executions (AFEP), Alicia Lira; along with the Minister of Labor, Javiera Blanco; the Minister of Mining, Aurora Williams; the president of the CUT, Bárbara Figueroa; the Undersecretary of Labor, Francisco Díaz; Joan Jara, widow of Víctor Jara; parliamentarians Tucapel Jiménez, Maya Fernández, Lautaro Carmona, Hugo Gutiérrez, and Claudio Arriagada; as well as social and union leaders.

During the ceremony, a choir of former political prisoners dedicated several songs to the fallen of the ANEF. Afterward, Lorena Pizarro and Alicia Lira gave speeches, celebrating this act of memory and calling on the authorities to seek truth and justice in the cases of the forcibly disappeared and political executions that remain pending.

“With this memorial, we settle a debt of the ANEF to the State workers who were executed and disappeared during the dictatorship, while remembering that ours was one of the sectors most heavily struck during this dark period,” stated the president of the ANEF, Raúl de la Puente, in his speech.

De la Puente also recalled the resistance and struggle of some of those honored, such as Jorge Peña Hen, Reinalda Pereira, Carlos Prats, and the President’s father, Alberto Bachelet. The memorial features the names of 380 forcibly disappeared and political execution victims inscribed on elegant bronze plaques; they were public employees from diverse sectors who, according to information from the Ministry of the Interior, were victims of the tyranny.

“One cannot build a solid community without taking responsibility for the violence that fractured our society and ended the lives of wonderful people, like those who receive our tribute today,” President Bachelet noted in her speech.

“We need that justice to come soon, and for that to be possible, we need those who have relevant information, whether civilians or military, to provide it,” stated the President, who urged the justice system to work toward uncovering the truth.

Following the ceremony, the plaques that make up the memorial at the entrance of the ANEF were shown to the attendees, where the priest Mariano Puga, a recognized collaborator of the workers, blessed the memorial.

Finally, it is worth noting the excellent organization of the event by the Secretary of Culture, Recreation, and Sports, Nayadé Zúñiga.

Source: anef.cl 9/09/2014

Date: 09-09-2014

Now totaling 268 years in prison: ‘Mamo’ Contreras receives his 33rd conviction

The Supreme Court issued a final ruling in the case of Héctor Vergara Doxrud and determined the sentences for the former director of the DINA and other agents.

In a split decision, the ministers of the Second Chamber, Milton Juica, Juan Araya, Carlos Künsemüller, Haroldo Brito, and the acting attorney Emilio Pfeffer, rejected the appeal filed against the sentence of the Santiago Court of Appeals regarding the kidnapping of Héctor Patricio Vergara Doxrud (forcibly disappeared), which occurred on September 17, 1974, in the Metropolitan Region.

The final ruling of the Supreme Court, as detailed by La Nación, determined the following sentences for the agents of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA): Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda (former director of the repressive organization), 5 years and 1 day of imprisonment for his responsibility as the perpetrator of aggravated kidnapping; César Manríquez Bravo, 5 years and 1 day of imprisonment for his responsibility as the perpetrator of aggravated kidnapping; Marcelo Moren Brito, 5 years and 1 day of imprisonment for his responsibility as the perpetrator of aggravated kidnapping; Orlando Manzo Durán, 5 years and 1 day of imprisonment for his responsibility as the perpetrator of aggravated kidnapping; and Ciro Torré Sáez, acquitted due to lack of participation.

Civil engineer Héctor Vergara Doxrud was married with 3 children, a militant of the MAPU, and during the Allende government, he worked at Corfo, Indisa, and was an overseer for 2 companies. He was 32 years old when he was detained by DINA agents and, as established, was subjected to torture at Villa Grimaldi, from where he disappeared, with nothing known about him to this date.

The Supreme Court ruling indicates that “given the nature of the investigated act and in accordance with the evidence gathered during the inquiry, it is appropriate to infer that we are in the presence of what the universal legal conscience has come to call a crime against humanity,” adding that according to International Law, this type of crime does not expire.

With this new record and according to figures from the Human Rights Observatory of the Universidad Diego Portales and the Judiciary, General (R) Juan Manuel Guillermo Contreras Sepúlveda (83 years old) has 33 final sentences (ratified by the Supreme Court), totaling 268 years in prison, the last of which was made known this Tuesday.

Source: eldinamo.cl 19/6/2012

Date: 19-06-2012

Remembering 28 victims from a Chilean university murdered or disappeared by the military dictatorship

The memory of 28 students and academics of the Pontificia Universidad Católica who were murdered or forcibly disappeared by the 17-year military dictatorship will be honored. This dictatorship was established by the same economic and political civil groups that are governing Chile again, and initially even by the now-opposition Christian Democratic Party, PDC.

After more than three decades of indifference from that university regarding the fate of these members of the university community, the victims will be remembered for the second time on a Catholic university campus on Thursday, November 17, at 6:30 PM, at the San Joaquín Campus, Vicuña Mackenna 4860, in a ceremony organized by the PUC Memory Collective, composed of alumni from the 60s/70s, and the Catholic University Student Federation, FEUC.

Different political winds are now blowing at the PUC, as demonstrated by the active participation of its Student Federation in the student conflict that has been ongoing for more than 6 months, under the leadership of Giorgio Jackson, who did not run for reelection, and whose runoff election is being held today, Tuesday.

Noam Titelman, of the Nueva Acción Universitaria (NAU), the same group as Jackson, is competing against the pro-government right-winger Juan José Silva, of the Gremialist Movement (MG), encouraged by the Independent Democratic Union (UDI), which turned the PUC into the “think tank” of the dictatorship.

The PUC was historically the cradle that formed the political class of the two factions of the conservative right that govern Chile today with Sebastián Piñera: the UDI and National Renewal (RN) alliance.

Almost all the ministers and high-ranking officials of the current government were formed in the classrooms of the PUC and later pursued classic postgraduate degrees at emblematic universities of American capitalism: Harvard, Yale, Chicago, and others.

As early as 1956, the PUC School of Economics signed an agreement with its counterpart at the University of Chicago, which, under the dictatorship, forcibly introduced into Chile the neoliberal model that is currently causing problems for Piñera and his followers across the globe.

The disappearance and/or death of these 28 people was a taboo never recognized by the Catholic authorities.

An informal memorial plaque located in the sociology school cafeteria even disappeared mysteriously, but apparently, the engraving was bothersome because no one knew when, why, or who removed it.

In 2007, there was a mass, and that was all... But a little over a year ago, on October 6, 2010, this same PUC Memory Collective, together with academic Gabriel Salazar, National History Prize winner and former professor of that institution, presented the book “A Light Over the Shadow: Forcibly Disappeared and Murdered of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile,” which in 180 pages reflects an investigation by the editorial team and journalist/writer Nancy Guzmán, with a prologue by historian Salazar and graphic design and cover by José Bórquez.

The presentation of that book was the first activity in memory of these 28 victims held officially on a PUC campus, thanks to the interest of the Student Federation of that university, then presided over by Joaquín Walker.

Who were “the 28”?

Among the victims are talented young people, such as journalists Diana Arón and Eduardo Jara, the budding filmmaker Carmen Bueno and her partner, the documentarian Jorge Hernán Müller Silva—cameraman for the trilogy “The Battle of Chile,” by Patricio Guzmán—engineering student Allan Bruce, English teacher Alejandro Ávalos, the educator and former priest Omar Venturelli, and other lives cut short.

Former army prosecutor Alfonso Podlech, an anti-communist lawyer and landowner who sent Venturelli and dozens of people to their deaths in Araucanía-Temuco, was imprisoned in Italy from 2006, tried by a court investigating the murder of him and other citizens of Italian origin killed in Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay, but was “acquitted” in July 2011, even though the Italian Prosecutor’s Office had requested life imprisonment.

Five victims—Ismael Chávez, María Teresa Eltit, Ángel Guerrero, Samuel Lazo, and Ernesto Ríos—were studying at the Worker-Peasant University Department (DUOC), which was born in 1968 with the University Reform and the first lay rector of the PUC, Castillo Velasco, to provide free education to the children of workers and peasants, just like other programs at the University of Chile, the State Technical University, and Federico Santa María aimed at workers and poor students who received training in high-level technical careers.

One year after its founding, the DUOC had 475 students and continued to grow, but today education must be paid for.

Among the victims are also Eugenio Ruiz Tagle-Orrego, a civil engineer and Mapu militant, a relative of former president and current Christian Democratic senator Eduardo Frei R-T, who lost the elections to Sebastián Piñera.

Their political ideas led all the victims of the Catholic University to join or sympathize with the different parties and movements that characterized the political diversity of the era that marked the presidency of Salvador Allende (1970-1973) and the rise of social struggles in Chile in the 60s.

According to the alphabetical order of their surnames, the victims whose memory is honored at the PUC are Diana Frida Arón Svigilsky, Alejandro Ávalos Davidson, Jenny del Carmen Barra Rosales, Leopoldo Raúl Benítez Herrera, Patricio Biedma Schadewaldet, Alan Roberto Bruce Catalán, Carmen Cecilia Bueno Cifuentes, Mauricio Jean Carrasco Valdivia, María Teresa Eltit Contreras, Ismael Darío Chávez Lobos, Ángel Gabriel Guerrero Carrillo, Ignacio Orlando González Espinoza, Luis Enrique González González, José Eduardo Jara Aravena, Juan Alberto Leiva Vargas, José Patricio del Carmen León Gálvez, Samuel del Tránsito Lazo Maldonado, Enrique López Olmedo, Víctor Eduardo Oliva Troncoso, Jaime Ignacio Ossa Galdámez, Ernesto Igor Ríos Céspedes, Alicia Viviana Ríos Crocco, Juan Carlos Rodríguez Araya, Eugenio Ruiz Tagle Orrego, Enrique Antonio Saavedra González, Jilberto Patricio Urbina Chamorro, Omar Roberto Venturelli Leonelli, and HECTOR PATRICIO VERGARA DOXRUD.

Of the victims, 5 belonged to the Mapu, 2 to the PC, 1 to the Socialist Party, 18 to the MIR, and the rest do not record specific militancy, such as Ernesto Ríos, 18 years old, who died in 1986 from a bullet to the skull fired from a helicopter while he was witnessing a popular protest in his neighborhood.

There are also three foreigners, such as sociologist Enrique López Olmedo, born in Spain, and architect Patricio Biedma, a native of Buenos Aires, who finished his studies at the Catholic University and stayed to live and work in Chile after fleeing the Argentine dictatorship of Juan Carlos Onganía.

His secret murder, like the disappearance of 118 other people, was masked by Operation Colombo of Plan Cóndor, with the journalistic staging of a false confrontation “in the Argentine pampas” in which 119 alleged leftist refugees from Chile died.

This colossal lie, fabricated by the newspapers of the El Mercurio and La Tercera chains and other major media outlets, with the complicity of certain journalists of the time, is also known as the case of “The 119.”

Another terrifying episode cut short the life of the young Bolivian Enrique Saavedra, 18, who never showed any interest in politics.

He only traveled to Chile to train as a commercial engineer at the PUC, which had already become famous for its adherence to the neoliberal theories taught by the University of Chicago’s school of economics.

He managed to pass his first semester in 1973 and, with his cousin Ramiro Carlos González, was facing the adventure of living alone in a downtown hotel in the Chilean capital.

Four days after the coup of September 11, 1973, they went out to walk the streets, to look around and buy food, after the prolonged curfew imposed by the new government. He never returned to his hotel, nor did his cousin. Nothing was ever heard of them again.

No body ever appeared, nor was there any judicial case. They faded into oblivion as if they had never existed.

The only explanation for this disappearance is the racist phobia against foreigners, standardized by the military as an ideological pillar of the coup against Allende “to defend the fatherland threatened by international communism.”

The military fantasies proclaimed the myth of a secret army of 10,000 Czechoslovaks, Hungarians, Cubans, etc., and all kinds of “communists” determined to dominate the country.

Any Latin American suspected of being “tropical,” or who spoke differently from a Chilean, became a dangerous “Cuban communist,” even if they were Brazilian or Central American, and if they were Black, it was worse.

Furthermore, since the territorial expansion of Chile conquered in the so-called War of the Pacific of 1879, Bolivians have always suffered in Chile from the racist xenophobia underlying the propaganda of a bicentennial landowning class.

PUC-Dictatorship Empathy

The PUC, which is called Pontifical because it belongs to the Vatican, was an important ideological and theoretical support for the military.

The university never showed interest in rescuing the memory of these 28 members of the institution, in contradiction to the undeniable 17-year effort of the Catholic hierarchy to “give a voice to those who have none” by defending the human rights of the victims of the dictatorship (1973-1990) through the Vicariate of Solidarity.

The PUC faculty of economics motorized the political-economic theories coined by Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago, which moved from academic debate to being forcibly implanted in Chile over a working class incapable of defending itself from the fierce military repression, in the first neoliberal experiment in contemporary history worldwide.

Many academics from the PUC faculty of economics became millionaires, ministers, and high-ranking cadres of the state’s economic-financial apparatus, which under the military dictatorship privatized all public companies, including the airline LAN, which years later ended up in the hands of Sebastián Piñera.

The greatest theoretical contribution of those commercial engineers was a heavy fundamentalist text of neoliberal economic theory nicknamed “El Ladrillo” (The Brick), which became the catechism of the dictatorship.

In the legal field, the right-wing academic Jaime Guzmán, ideologue of the military regime, very close to Pinochet and a law professor at the Catholic University, founder of the far-right movement that calls itself “gremialismo,” was one of the forgers of the constitution imposed by the dictatorship in 1980, after governing for 7 years without any fundamental charter.

This constitution remains in force in Chile thanks to the makeup of successive modifications that rather legitimized an obsolete charter that only reflects the interests of the political class. Some professors, such as the lawyer and former UDI senator Carlos Bombal, even helped the DINA capture and torture their colleagues and students of leftist ideology.

“The cases of the lawyer Carlos Bombal, who helped the DINA in the detention of Alejandro Ávalos Davidson, [of] Andrés Terrisse, who allegedly participated in interrogations of detainees from the Catholic University, and that of the nurse who graduated from this institution, María Eliana Bolumburú Taboada, who was known in the DINA as the ‘Queen of Pentothal’ for being the one who injected it into detainees before they were loaded onto the helicopter that threw them into the sea, are well known,” cites a paragraph of the book (p. 24) “A Light Over the Shadow…”

Source: carlosgaton.blospot.com 2/11/2011

Date: 02-11-2011

New conviction for Contreras in Chile

The new judicial decision is in addition to the two life sentences that the former head of the DINA during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet is already serving.

Judge Fuentes, who convicted Contreras, has carried out more than seventy proceedings for human rights violations during the Pinochet dictatorship.

The former head of Chile’s National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, which lasted from 1973 to 1990, General Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda, was sentenced to another five years in prison for the disappearance of an opposition politician. The decision of the Chilean trial judge, Juan Fuentes Belmar, was made known by the Chilean justice system itself.

According to information revealed by Chilean judicial sources to the local press, Contreras was convicted along with two other agents of the secret service for the kidnapping, which occurred on September 17, 1974, of Héctor Vergara Doxrud, who was an engineer, 32 years old, married with three children, and a militant of the Unitary Popular Action Movement (MAPU), a leftist group, when he was detained by the Chilean secret service.

The other convicted individuals are the former head of the DINA’s metropolitan brigade, César Manríquez, and another former high-ranking DINA official, Marcelo Morén, sentenced to 800 days in prison.

Judge Fuentes has carried out more than seventy proceedings for human rights violations during the Pinochet dictatorship.

The new conviction against Contreras, who directed the now-defunct DINA, is in addition to two other life sentences he is currently serving in prison.

Source: 14 de Abril 2010 News.com

Date: 14-04-2010