A unanimous ruling by the highest court favored Germán Borneck Matamala, Nelson Cayupi Contreras, and José Henríquez Salamanca, who were implicated in the death of Bernardo Solorza González. The ruling concludes that there was no institutional policy of torture by the State's security agencies, even though the victim was recognized as such by the Rettig Report.

In the first ruling on human rights violation cases occurring during the military dictatorship issued so far this year, the Supreme Court refused to consider torture as a crime against humanity and acquitted three former detectives implicated in the death of a peasant detained between April 18 and 21 at a police barracks in the city of Talca.

In a unanimous ruling, justices Alberto Chaigneau, Jaime Rodríguez Espoz, Hugo Dolmestch, and acting lawyers Fernando Castro and Juan Carlos Cárcamo ratified the acquittal issued on May 31, 2005, in the case of the detainee Bernardo Solorza González.

The resolution favored former detectives Germán Borneck Matamala, Nelson Cayupi Contreras, and José Henríquez Salamanca, who had initially been sentenced on November 12, 2004, by judge Gerardo Bernales to 541 days in prison for the crime of unlawful coercion.

The Talca Court of Appeals had considered the criminal liability of the former detectives to be extinguished and estimated that the police officers acted in accordance with a legal order, despite the fact that Solorza González was considered a victim of repression by the Rettig Report.

The Supreme Court ratified this criterion and asserted that this was a common crime, which cannot be considered part of a policy of human rights violations by the State of Chile.

"It is necessary to take into account that the facts that motivated the formation of the case originate from the detention of the victim, which was not questioned as illegal (...) which took place in the context of a common crime in which participation was attributed along with other subjects, a scenario in which the agents, acting outside of all norms and with abuse of power, caused him injuries, without any purpose for them having been established beyond the aggression and bodily harm, nor that they were framed within an institutional or State policy, as a generally accepted procedure, in the context of a specific ideology or with genocidal purposes, for which such circumstances alone are not suitable to qualify such conduct as attacks against human rights," states the ruling written by Justice Rodríguez Espoz.

The victim

Bernardo Solorza González died on April 21, 1980, in a police barracks in Talca, and initially, it was spoken of as a case of suicide; however, the Rettig Report considered him in 1991 to be a victim of the military dictatorship.

The Rettig Report states verbatim regarding his case: "On April 21, 1980, Bernardo Enrique SOLORZA GONZALEZ died. He was detained by Investigaciones personnel in Talca, accused of committing common crimes.

It was officially reported that the victim committed suicide by hanging himself, a cause that was recorded on the death certificate. However, information and testimonies received by this Commission indicate that the victim died as a result of the mistreatment and torture inflicted upon him during his detention.

The Commission acquired the conviction that Bernardo SOLORZA died as a consequence of torture by state agents, who thus violated his human rights (Source: www.memoriaviva.com)." His death was judicially investigated as a homicide until April 30, 1981, when a definitive dismissal was issued, but on June 18 of the same year, the Talca Court of Appeals ordered the reopening of the process to investigate a possible crime of injury by the police officers of the barracks, an investigation that was archived on April 27, 1981.

A complaint filed on July 11, 2003, by the victim's family allowed the investigation to be reopened on March 4, 2004, an investigation in which judge Gerardo Bernales issued a sentence in November of that same year.

Precedent in the same vein

This is the second time that the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of State agents in a case involving human rights violations during the dictatorship; previously, in 2005, it had favored General (ret.) Joaquín León Rivera, who in the first instance had been sentenced to 10 years in prison for the case of the forcibly disappeared Luis Cotal Rivera and Ricardo Rioseco Montoya.

In the ruling, however, it was admitted "that, in circumstances where Ricardo Rioseco Montoya and Luis Cotal Alvarez were detained in the warehouse identified in paragraph A of the third motivation of the appealed sentence, unarmed and held at gunpoint by a group of conscripts, Mr.

Joaquín León Rivera González, 2nd Commander of the Regiment, made his appearance, who took out his pistol and pointed it at one of them, but the bullet did not fire, with the conscripts then firing, with Ricardo Rioseco Montoya and Luis Cotal Alvarez dying on the spot, without their bodies having been found to date."

And it was added later: "that the elements of conviction analyzed in the second motive of the appealed sentence constitute a set of judicial presumptions that, by meeting the requirements established in article 488 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, allow this Court to acquire the conviction that Ricardo Rioseco Montoya and Luis Cotal Alvarez were killed.

Indeed, the witness Duberli Héctor Rodríguez Silva (fs. 19 and 148), owner of the warehouse where the events occurred, claims to have witnessed the execution of the victims, specifying that the bodies 'were cut in half,' that they demanded he bring four sacks, that they threw them (the bodies) into the jeep and told him that they were going to dump them in the river and that they themselves (referring to the conscripts) cleaned the place with water so as not to leave traces."

Source: elmostrador.cl, January 12, 2007