The shocking confession of former Major Carlos Herrera Jiménez, who pleaded guilty to the murders of former ANEF president Tucapel Jiménez, under the orders of the DINE, and of the carpenter Juan Alegría Mundaca, in this case for the CNI, stirred up a hornet's nest. Herrera was the first confessed executor and the initial link in a chain that has not yet reached its end.

At least six of the 17 individuals prosecuted in Operation Albania acknowledged their participation in the massacre of twelve FPMR militants in June 1987, stating that they were following orders from the former CNI operations director, Alvaro Corbalán.

The latter, in turn, confessed to Judge Milton Juica that he had given that order under instructions from his superior, pointing to the former CNI director, Hugo Salas Wenzel. Later, lawyer Jorge Mario Saavedra—a plaintiff in the case regarding the murder of the ANEF leader—released a letter allegedly written by the late former CNI director and former member of the Military Junta, Humberto Gordon, in which he assumes responsibility for the actions of his subordinates in the CNI and the Army's National Intelligence Directorate (DINE), to which he never belonged.

Shortly thereafter, Judge Sergio Muñoz delivered his most spectacular blow, to date, in the Tucapel Jiménez case: an arrest and prosecution order against the former army auditor general, Fernando Torres Silva (as a concealer), and active-duty General Hernán Ramírez Hald, head of the Military Industry Command (CIMI) (as an accomplice).

The former, an advisor and trusted man of Augusto Pinochet—until his unfortunate handling of the case before Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón—was a ruthless former military prosecutor during the dictatorship and a protector of torturers and murderers.

For his part, Ramírez Hald, the highest-ranking military officer currently under prosecution, displays a "brilliant" career that includes the directorship of the Army Intelligence Corps (CIE)—the executive body of the DINE—at the time of the ANEF leader's murder.

The weapon used by Carlos Herrera in the crime came from its facilities. More quietly, Judge Juica initiated proceedings against two other active-duty military officers, Colonel Erick Silva and Air Force Captain Hernán Miqueles.

There have also been significant advances in other crimes not covered by the Amnesty Law. Investigating judge Dobra Lusic, who is investigating the murders of José Carrasco, Gastón Vidaurrázaga, Abraham Muskablit, and Felipe Rivera, has had the cooperation of former Captain Arturo Sanhueza and officers Kranz Bauer, Jorge Vargas Bories, Rodrigo Pérez, and former Carabineros commander Iván Quiroz, second-in-command of the CNI.

Their testimonies ratify the indictment orders issued thus far.

The military complicity of silence has collapsed. Faced with justice, stripped of the power conferred upon them by the military dictatorship, and without the protection of their former bosses, the prosecuted murderers and torturers began to falter.

As Herrera Jiménez said a couple of months ago, they felt they were assuming more responsibilities than those that corresponded to them and that the high command of the Armed Forces should answer "for the orders they gave or failed to give." The sentence handed down in early July by Judge Sergio Muñoz in the Juan Alegría case, which was definitively ratified a few days ago by the Supreme Court, was decisive.

This means life imprisonment for Carlos Herrera Jiménez, Alvaro Corbalán, and former Carabineros non-commissioned officer Armando Cabrera Aguilar (perpetrators), in addition to ten years and one day in prison for Osvaldo Pincetti Gac (accomplice).

If that was what was coming their way, many of those who were imprisoned began to consider the possibility of cooperating with the justice system in search of lower sentences. They could no longer count on the skillful maneuvers of Fernando Torres Silva to obstruct the course of justice.

In July of this year, former commander Iván Cifuentes, of the CNI's Cobra Command, requested a "political exit" (a pardon with a sentence of banishment) for former security agents in an interview with "El Mercurio." He said that "deep down, the CNI performed the 'job' that the State entrusted to it" and complained that "from a judicial point of view, the superiors of the CNI remained as concealers or accomplices, but only those of us who were captains are assuming the status of direct and material authors." Cifuentes faces two life sentences for Operation Albania and was also summoned to testify in the cases of Tucapel Jiménez and the murder of Eugenio Berríos in Uruguay.

According to lawyer Jorge Mario Saavedra, in his capacity as a defendant as a perpetrator in the crimes investigated by Judge Dobra Lusic and as an accomplice in the homicide of Tucapel Jiménez, Humberto Gordon was frequently summoned by the courts to be confronted with those who were in Punta Peuco II. "He then began a series of visits to the prison to reach an agreement with the other side—something the uniformed officers have always done—and he encountered a very harsh situation.

The detainees complained that the command had abandoned them," says lawyer Saavedra. The letter, drafted by Gordon along with other people in the prison and some of their lawyers, allegedly emerged from there.

It was sent to Saavedra from Punta Peuco II after Mónica Madariaga delivered it to the president of the Supreme Court. It is known that Alvaro Corbalán, a close friend of Gordon, intervened directly. Lawyer Héctor Salazar states that it was Corbalán who kept the letter in his possession and decided to make it public when the situation became dire.

However, that letter has no procedural value, because Gordon only assumes responsibility in generic terms. "I think what he intended was to look good with his people and, on the other hand, to seek some mitigating factor," comments Saavedra.

His colleague Héctor Salazar asserts that Humberto Gordon was preparing to make those same statements before the courts of justice with the idea of absolving his subordinates of blame, which could have influenced the proceedings.

He was in the middle of this when he passed away on June 15, due to cardiac arrest—as it was stated—while he was under house arrest. "I believe he was murdered and that his family should request an investigation," opines Salazar. "During years of work in the field of human rights, we have seen that every time possibilities of reaching higher levels of command opened up in a process, the key person died unexpectedly and in never-clarified circumstances." Among others, he mentions the cases of Corporal Manuel Leyton and Carabineros Captain Francisco ("Gurka") Zúñiga.

The latter, who allegedly committed suicide in 1991, was being prosecuted as a perpetrator in the homicide of Tucapel Jiménez and Juan Alegría Mundaca.

"Essentially, the late confession of Herrera Jiménez did nothing more than corroborate what we already knew," points out engineer Tucapel Jiménez, son of the murdered union leader. In his statement, the former CNI and DINE agent admitted that he was the one who fired the five fatal shots with a .22 caliber Dan Wesson revolver, obeying the order of the DINE chiefs, then led by former General Arturo Alvarez Scoglia.

In his account of the murder of Alegría Mundaca, Herrera specifies that it was Francisco Zúñiga who cut his wrists, while he held him by the hands and Alvaro Corbalán by the feet. He stated that in this crime he acted on the orders of Corbalán and Humberto Gordon. And he added that, although he did not ask him, he assumed that the latter was, in turn, following orders from Pinochet.

For his part, after Corbalán confessed for the first time before Judge Lusic that the victims of Operation Albania had been previously detained—and, therefore, there was no confrontation—he delivered a statement where he reaffirms his loyalty to the Armed Forces and maintains that he never participated in any operation with Carlos Herrera, as a way to refute the latter's testimony in the Juan Alegría case. "I think (Corbalán) has a few loose wires, that he has lost the direction of things," comments lawyer Saavedra.

Although Herrera and Corbalán met when they were young, the relationship between them has been broken for a long time. Corbalán, who tried to convince the carpenter Alegría's wife of his innocence, blaming Pincetti and Herrera, does not forgive the latter for having involved him in his statements.

For Herrera Jiménez, who considers himself a soldier one hundred percent, his former boss is nothing more than a frivolous mercenary who meddled in politics because he likes to be in the spotlight and, furthermore, an opportunist who pocketed much of the money that passed through the CNI.

Herrera was confronted with Fernando Torres Silva during the three days that the latter remained detained at the Military Hospital before being granted provisional release. Among the charges facing the former army auditor general are concealing and distorting information about the murder of Tucapel Jiménez, and directing the operation to clandestinely take Carlos Herrera to Argentina in 1991, when he had not yet finished serving his sentence as the perpetrator of the murder of the transporter Mario Fernández and was wanted for the case of the former ANEF president.

Former DINE director, General (ret.) Hernán Ramírez Rurange, also participated in this action.

Although Herrera Jiménez's lawyer requested clemency, the Supreme Court confirmed the life sentence for the Alegría crime and agreed to the reopening of the case to investigate former Brigadier Roberto Schmied and Hugo Alarcón Vergara, Corbalán's driver. "In that sense, the confession was of no use," says Jorge Mario Saavedra, "but with this rebellion of the commanders, it became clear that the criminals are not isolated soldiers, but that they acted within the institution.

That forces them to have to pronounce themselves at the highest levels more and more. We are going to go up as far as we can."

Source: Punto Final, November 18, 2000

The Uruguayan journalist Samuel Blixen, who has specialized in the investigation of Operation Condor, testified in January before the Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón. He delivered to the magistrate original documents he found during his research in police archives for his book "El vientre del cóndor.

Del archivo del terror al caso Berríos" ("The Womb of the Condor: From the Archive of Terror to the Berríos Case"). The work of Blixen, an editor for the prestigious Montevideo weekly "Brecha," is the most complete analysis published to date on Operation Condor—the joint organization set up by the secret services of the military dictatorships of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil, and Bolivia, which was responsible for the kidnapping and disappearance of thousands of people.

Samuel Blixen's book was first published in Uruguay (Ediciones de Brecha) and has now been released by Virus Editorial of Barcelona. For the Spanish edition, Blixen wrote a new chapter—"The Ghost"—about the murder in Uruguay of the DINA chemist Eugenio Berríos, which addresses the responsibility in that case of the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and the DINA's links to drug trafficking.

This is a summary of that chapter.

To a certain extent, Eugenio Berríos had better luck than the tens of thousands of victims of the State terrorism that instituted and perfected forced disappearance in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. He, too, was a forcibly disappeared person between November 1992 and April 1995; and like the others (some of whom he helped to "disappear"), he shared the official indifference to his fate, the judicial impotence to achieve justice, and the military stubbornness to hide the truth.

Those who demand truth and justice have the conviction that, even if justice does not finally arrive, the truth will inevitably emerge. In the case of Berríos, it was literally so: his body emerged in some sand dunes (quicksand that expelled its secret instead of swallowing it) on April 13, 1995, on the coast of the Río de la Plata, at the mouth of the Pando stream, 30 kilometers from Montevideo.

Those who buried Eugenio Berríos there did not take into account the constant work of the water and the wind, and perhaps they succumbed to routine, because the entire belt of beaches of the estuary before reaching the oceanic coasts was the recurring burial ground for corpses from score-settling, political, and mafia-related killings.

A long list of victims, from fugitive Nazis to smuggling gunmen, found their final resting place on these beaches.

Also among them were 15 of the four thousand prisoners from the Argentine Navy Mechanics School (ESMA) who were thrown into the sea from aircraft in flight between 1976 and 1979. At the time when those bodies, mutilated by torture and by fish, appeared on the Uruguayan coast, it was possible to evade all responsibility because the official, uniformed version—no matter how ridiculous—relied on the force of the generalized terror that prevented any questioning from the press.

Thus, the appearance of corpses bound with wire, burned, and with bullet holes was explained as the result of mutinies aboard Korean fishing boats. Why Korean? Because the bloating of the flesh, due to the time spent in the water, gave them a slight oriental appearance.

When a woman appeared, the military version followed its own logic: there was a mutiny because there had previously been orgies on board.

The disappeared Berríos had better luck. It was some fishermen who found the remains half-buried in the sand on an unpleasant autumn morning. The bones were partially covered with shreds of clothing; the wrists were bound with cable, and around the rib cage remained the strands of ropes that had immobilized the arms.

The bones exhibited signs of burns, but the irrefutable evidence was two bullet holes in the skull, one in the right occipital and another at the posterior base. The skull, which kept the teeth intact, revealed the outcome: the man, whom an initial forensic examination evaluated as being 1.72 meters tall and approximately 45 years old, had been executed with 9-millimeter caliber shots, weapons classified as war materiel.

FORENSIC INVESTIGATION

The macabre discovery earned a few lines in the newspapers and was soon forgotten. At the Forensic Technical Institute, however, the anthropologist Horacio Solla followed a lead for months based simply on a hunch.

Solla began a patient labor with a relatively novel technique in Uruguay: the computer reconstruction of facial features and head shape from a skull. Once photographed from different angles and the photographs scanned, the computer screen began to reproduce a three-dimensional bone image.

Applying anthropological formulas, the image was slowly covered with cartilage, tendons, muscles, and finally skin; the remains of hair found in the dunes even allowed for the reproduction of the type of beard and slightly graying hair.

In July 1995, the authorities of the Forensic Technical Institute who had supervised the virtual reconstruction process were stunned: the image reproduced by the computer was almost a carbon copy of the photograph published in the newspapers that the Ministers of the Interior, Juan Andrés Ramírez; of Defense, Mariano Brito; and of Foreign Affairs, Sergio Abreu, had presented to Parliament in August 1993 as proof that Eugenio Berríos, kidnapped from the Parque del Plata police station in November 1992, was alive.

Berríos appeared, bearded and smiling, sitting on a sofa next to a copy of the Milan newspaper Il Messaggero, spread out on the adjacent seat with the date of publication clearly visible. That photo, two years later, turned out to be testimony to the contrary: Berríos was dead.

The justice system took several months to confirm the identity. Since the technical procedure of the forensic anthropologists was distrusted, even though the scientific basis of the assumption was admitted, Magistrate González requested, via Interpol, some type of dental record of Eugenio Berríos from the Chilean police.

The Homicide Brigade of the Chilean Metropolitan Police went in search of X-rays and records and, foresightedly, also attached medical records of old fractures suffered by the young Berríos in street fights during the presidency of Salvador Allende.

Berríos's dental records matched the teeth of the corpse from El Pinar, but even so, the magistrate resisted confirming the identity and proposed a DNA test, which forced the biochemist's parents to undergo blood tests.

Finally, in January 1996, the justice system renamed the file of the old 1993 case with the label of homicide, but the investigation did not advance an inch, just as it had not advanced before under the label of kidnapping.

The studies by forensic experts Guido Berro, Beatriz Balbela, and Guillermo Meza were consistent in precisely adjusting the probable date of death, which they placed in the first days of March 1993, exactly in the same period in which the then-commander-in-chief of the Chilean army, General Augusto Pinochet, was making a private visit to Uruguay and requested the Uruguayan command the courtesy of appointing Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Cassella as his aide-de-camp—the man who holds the secret of the "Berríos case."

CHILEAN DETECTIVES ON THE TRAIL

On the eve of General Pinochet's retirement and his automatic incorporation into Parliament as a senator for life, it was necessary to archive the "Berríos case," the police investigation of which had advanced much further than the Uruguayan police and magistrates could have foreseen.

The voluminous 570-page file of the 6th Criminal Court of Santiago stops exactly at the moment when the Metropolitan Homicide Division begins the interrogation of Colonel Carlos Alberto Fernando Herrera Jiménez, finally identified as the "Carlos Ramírez" who, at the end of October 1991, transported Berríos to Montevideo and placed him in the hands of Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Cassella.

The meticulous investigation by the Homicide detectives sheds new light on the life of the biochemist and fills in some vital gaps in the history that was intended to be buried in a sand dune.

Inspector Luis Fuentes Sotomayor, Inspector Nelson Jofré Cabello, and Sub-commissioner Rafael Castillo Bustamante are stubborn police officers. In their service records, a sense of duty that sometimes exceeds the limits of the orders received appears as a defect.

They are part of a team that exhibited inconvenient professional zeal when investigating certain episodes, such as the Chilean background to the assassination of Orlando Letelier in Washington or the attack against Bernardo Leighton in Rome.

In fact, the Tactical Operational Group (GOT) of the Chilean Investigative Police was reprimanded for following leads that had not been expressly authorized. An interrogation of agent Michael Townley in Washington, still under the witness protection system, regarding the Letelier case, drifted almost naturally toward the Chilean connections with the fascist groups Avanguardia Nazionale and Ordine Nuovo.

Townley's elliptical answers to questions about the identity of those who ordered him to "contract" the assassination of Leighton (Mamo Contreras did not resolve these issues on his own initiative, Townley suggested) placed Augusto Pinochet directly at the center of the scene.

The written report that the police provided to the justice system could no longer be ignored, but the authorities of the Ministry of the Interior took disciplinary measures for the "excess of zeal."

Something similar was foreseeable when the Minister of the Interior, Enrique Krauss, filed a complaint with the justice system for the "alleged misfortune of the Chilean citizen Eugenio Berríos." The request for investigation fell to Judge María Isabel Reyes, who decided to open a summary proceeding on June 15, 1993, that is, one week after the scandal of the kidnapping at the Parque del Plata police station became known in Montevideo(*).

The three police officers took the investigation seriously, so that after two years they managed to discover some troublesome extremes.

The detectives began their task with Berríos's wife, the former model Gladys Erika Schmeisser, and narrowed down the timeline: the last time Erika saw her husband in Santiago was at the beginning of October 1991.

The couple lived separately, she in her apartment in Viña del Mar and he at his parents' house, at 59 Bellet Street, in the Providencia neighborhood of Santiago. Eugenio was being harassed by the justice system for issuing checks without funds, so Erika was not surprised when, at the beginning of November, she learned that her husband had left unexpectedly without revealing his destination.

Erika's in-laws assumed that their son had traveled to Libya, Iraq, or Iran, as in his financial straits the biochemist fantasized about the possibility of selling his scientific knowledge, to which he referred vaguely but linked to arms secrets.

But on November 8, Erika received a long-distance call: "Chanchita, don't comment to anyone, don't talk. I'm in Uruguay, go to the PLUNA offices and pick up a ticket I bought in your name," Berríos said.

Erika traveled to Montevideo on November 11 and returned two weeks later. She says she did not try to find out why her husband was hiding in Montevideo. Throughout 1992, she had telephone conversations with Eugenio on several occasions, and in October of that year, she traveled to Montevideo again, this time crossing the Andes mountain range by land to Mendoza first.

The last time she spoke with Eugenio was two days before Christmas 1992. For the investigation, it was relevant to determine that Eugenio Berríos was alive one month after the events at Parque del Plata.

Seventy-two hours after the investigations began, on June 17, 1993, the Chilean police accessed leads that changed the course of the inquiries. That day, the Uruguayan Minister of Foreign Affairs appeared before Parliament to report on two letters and a photo delivered to the Uruguayan consulate in Milan by a young man who spoke perfect English.

The photo, as is already known, intended to document his current status with the copy of Il Messaggero. One of the letters, handwritten, was supposedly sent by Berríos to his parents. It was signed and dated June 9; the other, typed, was addressed to the Uruguayan authorities.

A handwriting expert documented the authenticity of the signature, contrasting it with the one Berríos stamped at the bottom of his complaint in Parque del Plata and with the one that appeared on a photocopy of his identity document. The expert was wrong: Berríos could not have written the letter; he had been murdered three months earlier.

THE DINA AND DRUG TRAFFICKING

One by one, all the characters mentioned in Berríos's alleged letter were interrogated (by the Chilean police); some in Madrid, where they were serving sentences for drug trafficking. The testimonies of Manuel Novoa, Hernán Prieto, Enrique Palavicino, Carlos Board, Rodríguez Núñez, "el Aragonés," Hernán Monje, Hernán López, and the Peruvian Máximo "Bocanegra" Guevara confirmed Eugenio Berríos's link to drug trafficking and provided new elements regarding the biochemist's personality; but, perhaps inadvertently for the author of the letter, they also allowed for the establishment of certain links between the drug trafficking business and former DINA agents, until the lead provided completed a circle and returned to the beginning, enriching the reasons why the Chilean military intelligence apparatus became involved in a covert coordination operation. It was at that moment that the investigation stalled.

The initial list of names provided in the Milan letter increased rapidly. All the characters revolved around a handful of nightclubs (in Santiago): Oliver, Les Assassins, Crazy Horse, frequented by drug traffickers, cocaine users, and many former DINA agents.

The suspects, almost without exception, claimed innocence (regarding drug trafficking). They were explicit, however, about the confidences that, drugged or drunk, Eugenio Berríos distilled about his past as a secret agent.

Thus, Viviana Patricia Egaña, an actress who frequented Les Assassins, who fell madly in love with Berríos and lived with him between 1983 and 1986, tells how the biochemist conducted experiments in the laboratory installed in the garage on Bellet Street, with cats that he suffocated with his own hands.

Berríos used to receive greeting cards from Michael Townley and visits from Captain Armando Fernández Larios. Viviana remembers having spoken briefly with General Contreras's son on one occasion when Berríos took her to the Oliver bar, where "only military men, but in civilian clothes" gathered.

Berríos used to fly into a rage, lose control, and threaten Viviana with death: "On one occasion we fought, he went to a piece of furniture and took out a very small perfume bottle. He told me: 'You know, pellito, if you behave badly, I will kill you with this,' but I never knew what he meant." Viviana never linked the perfume bottle to Sarin gas.

Viviana believed she could handle Berríos's bad mood; instead, she felt a deep fear every time a certain "Arroyo" came to visit the house. In fact, Arroyo, "a terse, serious, very tough guy," followed Berríos everywhere; he was like his shadow. "On another occasion I heard, from both Eugenio and Arroyo, that the latter had killed a certain Carmelo Soria," Viviana declared to the justice system.

Every time Berríos got angry with Viviana, demanding money or checks, "he threatened me by saying that Arroyo had already killed people and that the same thing could happen to me."

It was not fear, but indignation, that caused Viviana's breakup with the biochemist: in 1986, during a weekend at a country house of a friend of Berríos, Viviana went out shopping, "and upon returning I found them both lying in bed, confirming that Eugenio and the other were homosexuals." Nevertheless, Viviana maintained a relationship with Berríos and later with his wife Erika, but decided to hide when the kidnapping and disappearance were publicized, for fear of reprisals from Arroyo.

Other suspects left a record of Berríos's indiscretions. Juan Carlos Cheyre, owner of Les Assassins, confirmed that Berríos used to distribute amphetamines among his friends that he claimed to manufacture; and he recounted his participation in the assassination of the Spanish diplomat Carmelo Soria, among other stories from the time of Townley's barracks in Lo Curro.

Sarin gas always hovers in the statements. David Manuel Morales, a former member of the fascist movement Patria y Libertad, confirmed that in 1979 Berríos had delivered the Sarin formula to the High Command, Lo Aguirre Chemical Complex.

Morales had reasons to know this, because he connected Berríos with his acquaintance, Colonel Víctor Barría, to re-establish contact with General Contreras. From that time dates the constant presence of Arroyo around Berríos.

TRAFFICKERS AND AGENTS

It was Manuel Andrés Novoa who confirmed to the police the mission of the man who caused uncontrollable fear in Viviana Egaña. In his cell at the Alcalá, Madrid 2 prison, where he had been held since October 1991 for illicit cocaine trafficking, Novoa identified Arroyo as a former DINA agent, in charge of guarding Berríos by order of General Contreras.

The police did not take long to establish Arroyo's true identity: José Remigio Ríos San Martín, an army non-commissioned officer who was part of the "informal" structure of the former DINA since its dissolution in the late 70s.

What Novoa was careful to mention was that he, a former law student, merchant, businessman, and finally a cocaine trafficker, like Berríos, had been a civilian agent of the DINA. The initial lead arose from investigating Berríos's bank accounts.

A safe deposit box at the Providencia branch of the Banco de Crédito e Inversiones brought a momentary frustration when it was opened by court order: among Berríos's papers, there was no testimony, as a safe-conduct, that revealed the secret history of the DINA; but documents of some corporations and companies of which the biochemist had been a founding partner were seized.

One of them, Ibercom Chile, turned out to be a front for the DINA's activities in Europe. Berríos's partner in Ibercom was Alberto Comunián Pivari, a member of Avanguardia Nazionale, cited as a witness by the Italian justice system in relation to the attack against Bernardo Leighton.

In Fitoquímica Nacional, an agro-industrial products company that was later proven to be part of a complex for the manufacture and export of cocaine, Berríos's partner was Manuel Andrés Novoa. In most cases, the lawyer for the firms was Enrique Palavicino, also a former civilian agent of the DINA.

The testimony of Juan Enrique Momberg Villarroel, a swindler by profession, deported from Spain (to Chile) after serving a sentence, confirms the link between drug traffickers and elements of the dictatorship's secret police.

His contribution to the knowledge of the criminal structure caused an avalanche of arrests. Novoa and Palavicino operated as the right hand of Rodolfo Robinson Carril, the "second-in-command" in the organization led by a Peruvian with false documents under the name of Jorge Acosta, whose real name is Justo Cornejo Hualpa.

Cornejo Hualpa's business—involved in an operation of 285 kilos of cocaine seized aboard the Eten, a ship of the Peruvian Navy—consisted of buying cocaine in Peru and introducing it into Chile, from where he exported it to Australia, Germany, or Spain.

His main supplier in Peru was the former commander of the National Guard, Percy Lazo, arrested in Spain for illicit drug trafficking. It was Lazo's idea to transport shipments of 25 or 30 kilos in the gas tanks of cars, in trunks, and even in headlights that crossed the border into Chile.

Novoa and Palavicino, who collaborated with Robinson in money laundering operations by manipulating checks, introduced Eugenio Berríos and the journalist Emilio Rojas into Cornejo Hualpa's organization.

Rojas was a regular patron of the bars and restaurants that the biochemist frequented and where he rubbed shoulders with former secret police agents, even though he, Rojas, had been tortured during the dictatorship at the Tejas Verdes military unit (and was later in the Chacabuco prisoner camp).

Dazzled by Berríos with his stories about Sarin gas, Novoa enthused his drug-trafficking partners with an idea that was in principle absurd: a formula to eliminate the odor that gives away cocaine shipments.

Berríos and Emilio Rojas were among the guests who used to get drunk on weekends at Cornejo Hualpa's rural residence, a true fortress that enjoyed the protection of the local police. This drug trafficker—the only one of the suspects who could not be arrested—showed marked interest when the journalist Rojas announced his appointment as press attaché at the Chilean embassy in Uruguay.

Perhaps it was a coincidence, but by then the name of Eugenio Berríos was multiplying in Judge Adolfo Bañados's file on the Letelier case, and his summons to appear before the court was becoming imminent; it was imperative to evacuate him.

Novoa remembers that very shortly before his disappearance, in a meeting attended by the "guardian angel" Arroyo, Berríos said enigmatically: "They won't leave me alone, I'm going to have to leave." Novoa assumed he was referring to his creditors, who were legion, but Berríos clarified that this time he was going to escape "with a badge," that is, with a false document provided by the former DINA chiefs.

DRUGS WITH DIPLOMATIC IMMUNITY

By then, Novoa had traveled to Montevideo three times and had stayed at Rojas's house; he had even visited the embassy. Novoa's negotiations with the press officer culminated in a "summit" meeting in Buenos Aires.

Rojas and Novoa traveled from Montevideo; Cornejo Hualpa and Robinson did so from Santiago, by land. In the Turkish baths of the Hotel Libertad, Cornejo Hualpa proposed to Rojas using his special passport and the diplomatic pouch to introduce cocaine into Montevideo, in transit to Europe and Australia.

The drug trafficker estimated that this route could be very lucrative and safe because, in addition, his organization had another ally in the (Chilean) diplomatic mission in Montevideo, the consul's son (Federico Marull).

According to Novoa, Rojas postponed a decision; but Juan Enrique Momberg confessed that a shipment of nine kilos of cocaine, part of a larger one of 54 kilos, was packed at the premises of the export firm Susset, owned by Cornejo Hualpa, in a suitcase that Emilio Rojas would pick up.

By the end of 1991, according to the testimonies, Rojas was manipulating drug shipments in Montevideo with some frequency. Near the end-of-year holidays, while on vacation in Chile, Rojas was seen once more at the facilities of the Susset firm.

But shortly before returning to Montevideo, he received a visit from Mr. Rodrigo Arteagabeitía, head of public relations for the Investigative Police. It was an informal conversation: perhaps Rojas would be willing, Arteagabeitía proposed, to have an interview with a Mr.

Aránguiz, a detective in the total confidence of Judge Bañados, because the magistrate suspected that Berríos, the witness who had just slipped through his fingers, could be in Uruguay. Rojas agreed and met with the detective the following day at the offices of a radio station.

The meeting was turbulent: the detective insinuated that Berríos could make contact with the press attaché and that perhaps he already had. Rojas was offended: if he had news of Berríos's whereabouts, he would have communicated it immediately; on the other hand, he said, he did not maintain any relationship with Berríos, except for some protocol greeting when they coincided in public places.

For once, Rojas was telling the truth. It was upon his return to Montevideo, in January 1992, that he received a phone call at his home from Eugenio Berríos. It was a local call. Berríos had contacted the embassy, and there they had provided him with the press attaché's private phone number.

Rojas became nervous. He commented on the incident to the military attaché, General Emilio Timmerman. "Berríos is turning out to be very expensive for us," the military man admitted, although it is not understood why he confessed the official knowledge of the operation to a diplomat whom the dictatorship deemed appropriate to torture.

(Further on, Blixen recounts the investigation in Montevideo by Chilean detectives Rafael Castillo Bustamante and Nelson Jofré Cabello in October 1993. They managed to identify the Chilean officer Carlos Herrera Jiménez as the person who rented an apartment in the Uruguayan capital, where Berríos lived.

The guarantee for the rent was provided by Colonel Thomas Cassella of Uruguayan intelligence. Herrera—currently imprisoned in Punta Peuco for the torture and death of a truck driver in La Serena—was in charge of watching Berríos in Montevideo, where he accompanied him, and probably had a role in his death.)

The last relevant police action in the file of the Santiago Criminal Court is the interrogation to which retired officer Carlos Herrera Jiménez was subjected on September 16, 1996, after his extradition from Argentina.

He claimed to have traveled to Montevideo in October 1991 for business matters and to have connected there with Thomas Cassella, an old friend he met in Chile when the Uruguayan military man traveled frequently, during the times of the dictatorships, to carry out "parachuting courses." He flatly denied having clandestinely introduced the biochemist into Uruguay and only admitted to having met him occasionally, one night, at the La Cumparsita tango club.

Herrera was with other Chileans, whom he did not identify, and Berríos approached his table. The conversation continued in his apartment in Pocitos, where Berríos stayed "for a couple of days, because he was in a bad economic situation and had nowhere to sleep." The flagrant contradictions between his version and the results of the police investigations remained unaddressed.

When finally, and after traveling a long stretch sprinkled with cocaine, the investigation promised to advance in a straight line, the case was buried. The file was finally archived in Chile by decision of the higher instances of the justice system.

As a form of compensation, and perhaps as a historical document, the administrative summary of the Chilean Ministry of Foreign Affairs to determine the conduct of the diplomats and officials of the embassy in Uruguay was incorporated into the judicial file.

Almost one hundred pages that reveal unknown details and provide a conviction: almost all the officials of the diplomatic representation had elements of judgment to presume the presence of Eugenio Berríos in Uruguay, long before the episode at the Parque del Plata police station; some even had news a month after the arrival of the former DINA agent.

The conclusion is inevitable: Berríos could still be alive if each of the officials, for different reasons, had not opted for silence. The list excludes General Emilio Timmerman, whose function was, precisely, to coordinate the hiding of Berríos and who, for reasons not explained in the administrative summary, was not interrogated like the rest of the officials, from the administrative staff to the ambassadors.

Timmerman is considered a man of Augusto Pinochet's confidence.

Source: puntofinal.cl, February 19, 1999

« In 2010, Piñera decided not to pardon those convicted of crimes against humanity following a request from the Catholic and Evangelical churches; later, in 2013, he closed the Cordillera Prison and spoke of "passive accomplices." Today, as a result of the commutative pardon project, the possibility of pardoning prisoners for human rights violations is resurfacing.

Commuting the sentences of prisoners who meet the requirements in the midst of COVID-19, a request in the Constitutional Court to declare the law "discriminatory" presented by right-wing senators, and the eventuality that criminals against humanity might move to house arrest arguing "humanitarian reasons," are part of the plot that strained tempers between the government and the ruling party during the past week.

However, for the government, and in particular for Minister Hernán Larraín, the concern today is another: to ensure that the bill advances in order to decongest prisons in the face of the expansion of the coronavirus in Chile.

Although the bill for the commutation of sentences presented by the minister on March 25 was dispatched by Congress, benefiting nearly 1,300 prisoners, including pregnant women or those with children under two years of age, the elderly, and the terminally ill, it left out the provision that established sanctions for those who failed to comply with house arrest.

The regulation was rejected by some deputies of the ruling party itself, who later, led by Senator Francisco Chahuán, presented a request to the Constitutional Court for considering the bill as discriminatory in its article 15, by not incorporating prisoners who today serve their sentences in the Punta Peuco prison.

If the request is declared admissible, "it would mean that not only would people convicted of crimes against humanity benefit from this pardon, but also rapists, sexual abusers, femicides, or parricides would benefit," argued the Minister of Justice. Finally, the Constitutional Court resolved to enter the request for partial processing by declaring it admissible.

This decision by the Constitutional Court opens another front for human rights violators to access prison benefits, which would be added to the announcement made by the Minister of Justice, Hernán Larraín, to place maximum urgency on the "humanitarian law" project for those who are "in imminent danger of death." An opportunity that could mean the commutation of sentences for the prisoners of Punta Peuco.

The onslaught of human rights relatives. This situation generated rejection in various human rights groups that were opposed to these inmates accessing this intra-prison benefit. This time, the president of the group of executed politicians, Alicia Lira, delivered a letter to President Sebastián Piñera, with various signatures, demonstrating the rejection of this eventual scenario.

"These poor little old men tortured pregnant women and made them disappear, they annihilated entire families, that is, we are not talking about a common crime or a crime of passion, but systematic crimes planned to annihilate those who wanted and fought for the freedom of our country," she maintained.

On the other hand, Human Rights Groups also called for not approving the humanitarian bill, which would allow inmates of Punta Peuco to access prison benefits after the health emergency. They categorically reject the humanitarian bill, which seeks for elderly people with terminal illnesses, among them those sentenced for Human Rights cases, to be able to access the benefit of serving total house arrest.

Faced with this, they considered that the humanitarian bill is completely contrary to current national and international legislation. The President of the Chilean Commission for Human Rights, Carlos Margotta, mentioned that the Executive's initiative is unconstitutional.

"The interpellation that we make to parliament especially, where it is intended to approve this legal initiative that is completely incompatible with the legislation currently in force in Chile, is that they do not become accomplices to an initiative that is against human rights and that constitutes, in passing, a new affront to the memory of the victims and their families," he explained.

For her part, the President of the Association of Relatives of the Forcibly Disappeared, Lorena Pizarro, accused that they are taking advantage of the pandemic to try to release inmates from Punta Peuco. "One thing is to have different political positions, but another thing is to relativize state terrorism.

You have to be very indecent to try to make use of such a dramatic moment that Chile and humanity are living to go again after the determination to release human rights violators," said Pizarro.

Meanwhile, the lawyer representing various people convicted of Human Rights cases, Maximiliano Murath, stated that the country has to look after the health of all elderly people who are deprived of liberty, regardless of the crime they have committed.

"We have to look after the protection of all people over 75 years of age who are at risk today serving sentences in prisons, and therefore the standards of International Law have to be applied to all elderly people, regardless of the crime they have committed.

That international standard is required in the Inter-American Convention on the Protection of the Human Rights of Older Persons, which Chile approved and ratified in 2017 and which is fully in force," he defended himself.

"Pardoning a human rights violator will go down in history." Human rights lawyer Nelson Caucoto said that "on the issue of the pardon, two things must be understood: there is a humanitarian law that Sebastián Piñera is sending to Congress and there is another that came out of the joint commission of the senate, where other crimes such as illicit association and domestic violence are incorporated." He added to Cambio21 that "if that is the case, I have no problem, but some senators included that human rights violators from Punta Peuco should not be included, which generated annoyance on the right, saying that it was discriminatory to exclude them." On the other hand, Caucoto added that "on one hand, he is activating the particular pardons, where he does not have to answer to anyone, but if it is a pardon for a human rights violator, it will undoubtedly be written in history that he pardoned such and such a human rights violator." "They want to take advantage of a pandemic to release these human rights violators; they intend to send them to their homes. And the polls themselves are unfavorable for Piñera, and if he releases them, it would be a false step for him," the professional pointed out.

Caucoto added that "all those who are convicted of crimes against humanity, there are no less serious cases or not, they are all the same; just by the fact of being convicted of that crime, one should not distinguish by severity.

The bad thing is the deviation of the objective, what is slipped through a pandemic; besides, in Punta Peuco they have the best isolation situation, they are not going to get infected due to precariousness, they have an exclusive health network for them like the Air Force or the Carabineros." The parliamentarians' veto of the project: "In Punta Peuco there is no risk of coronavirus contagion." Senator Manuel Ossandón expressed himself against including those convicted of Human Rights violations within the commutative pardon law, as parliamentarians from Chile Vamos have proposed. "This project excludes all people who have been convicted of a violent crime, and this got tangled up saying that it was unconstitutional because it left out those of crimes against humanity. And the truth is that, in my opinion, it is not unconstitutional because it left all those of violent crimes out," he said.

Ossandón argued that "there are certain violent crimes that have a greater punishment and, furthermore, in many cases, a person who is over 65 years old and who is pardoned with a project like this and is a drug trafficker, will continue to operate." "The President of the Republic has the power if he wants and deems it appropriate to pardon someone with crimes against humanity, but in a general way, I think that all violent crimes, including those, should not be in a mass pardon," he added.

For his part, the President of the Senate, Jaime Quintana (PPD), expressed his position regarding the commutative pardon project that the Executive is analyzing. "We are going to support the veto on the Covid-19 pardon; it seems to us that it is in line with what the Ministry of Justice proposes, to avoid the spread in penitentiary centers," the parliamentarian maintained.

However, Quintana pointed out that "another different thing is, in the middle of the pandemic, to try to settle campaign debts with genocidaires, knowing that today, in Punta Peuco, there is no risk of contagion because the conditions, as is known, are quite privileged," referring to the position of some senators from Chile Vamos, who resorted to the Constitutional Court (TC) to have the exclusion of the prisoners who are in Punta Peuco from the commutative pardon for low-risk prisoners declared unconstitutional.

For his part, the president of the Chilean Commission for Human Rights, Carlos Margotta, warned that Sebastián Piñera and his sector forget that there are strict international norms that oblige States that have been the object of a Dictatorship to comply with actions of justice and reparation, principles that are contrary to this pardon project.

Lawyer Carlos Margotta recalled that the Rome Statute signed by our country only allows reducing the sentence for human rights violators when they collaborate with justice and manifest effective repentance for their abominable actions, a requirement that those convicted in Punta Peuco do not meet.

Court acquitted authors of crimes. In the meantime, the Eighth Chamber of the Santiago Court of Appeals agreed to acquit the authors of crimes against humanity and human rights violations in the case of 17 victims of very serious human rights violations.

Former uniformed officers Pedro Espinoza, Rolf Wenderoth, Herman Alfaro, Pedro Betterlich, Claudio Pacheco, Orlando Torrejón, Orlando Altamirano, and Eusebio López were acquitted. Furthermore, sentence reductions from 3 years to one year were granted to Ricardo Lawrence, Jorge Andrade, Juan Morales, Ciro Torré, Sergio Escalona, Juvenal Piña, Jorge Díaz, Gustavo Guerrero, and Gladys Calderón.

It was established that they could have the prison benefit of "supervised release." They will be able to serve sentences in their homes. The ruling also speaks of the dismissal of lawsuits in the case of 17 victims of the civil-military dictatorship.

The members of the Chamber that issued the ruling are Juan Cristóbal Mera, Mireya López, and Cristian Lepin. They applied the measure of prescription.

The repressors whom the Chamber of the Court of Appeals acquitted and reduced the sentence for are linked to the murders and disappearance of: Manuel Recabarren González; Manuel Recabarren Rojas; Daniel Palma Robledo; Julio Vega Vega; Carlos Vizcarra Cofré; Víctor Hugo Morales Mazuela; Luis Emilio Recabarren González; Carlos Godoy Lagarrigue; Iván Insunza Bascuñán; Nalvia Mena Alvarado; Clara Canteros Torres; Alejandro Rodríguez Urzúa; José Eduardo Santander Miranda; Mario Juica Vega; Miguel Nazal Quiroz; Juan Aurelio Villarroel Zárate; Eduardo Canteros.

Source: cambio21.cl, April 15, 2020

"If it is of any use, in the most sincere and humble way, I ask for forgiveness from Chilean society and in particular from the people and the families of the people who may have been harmed by my fanatical actions." "I regret having belonged to the CNI, because of the indifference of my brothers-in-arms in active service and in retirement, since they do not even visit me in this prison." "Anyone who knows even a little about the military world will understand how difficult it is for a lieutenant colonel and a major to conspire, without anyone knowing, to kill a diplomat with a bomb in the heart of the civic district of the most important country in the world." Carlos Herrera Jiménez , a former agent of the National Information Center (CNI) and for years the only person prosecuted for the death of Tucapel Jiménez, looks at the history of Chile with pain 25 years after the military coup and after having participated in an event that I viewed, as a young man, as a true war. At 48 years old and imprisoned in Punta Peuco serving a sentence of 10 years and one day—which ends on October 23—for the death of the transporter Mario Fernández, and suffering from cancer, he analyzes his life as a former security service agent and regrets having been one. He acknowledges, for the first time, that "we all went too far" and has the feeling that those who were deprived of their liberty, whether in Punta Peuco or in the High Security Prison—he calls it "both sides"—are the young idealists who believed in "empty words," in orders. He even sees himself perhaps as naive, as gullible. Herrera Jiménez asks for forgiveness. For the first time in democracy, a former CNI agent asks for forgiveness. He claims to be innocent of the crimes he is charged with, such as the qualified homicide of Tucapel Jiménez and the death of Fernández, but he asks for forgiveness anyway from those he may have harmed, at a crucial moment in the history of Chile, when the problems of human rights violations are more pending than ever. He asks for forgiveness when no one expected it. And he does it "in case it is of any use," he says. And he believes that other retired military personnel should also do so, but first to their own peers. -Did you know Tucapel Jiménez? -No. I never heard of him until he was killed. -What were you doing the day he was killed (February 25)? -Like every day, I must have been at my unit, where I was seen by Colonel Ferrer, who was a major at that time; Commander Pinto Pérez, who was the commander of the unit, and all the rest of the officers of the permanent group. I don't remember the date of Tucapel Jiménez's death, but if I had killed him, someone must have missed me in the battalion. However, the Court estimated that not only are there well-founded presumptions that Herrera participated in the event (until now he was prosecuted for robbery with homicide), but since last week it has identified him as the alleged perpetrator of the crime. -With what has happened, do you regret having been part of the CNI? -Yes, for several reasons. The main ones are the indifference of my brothers-in-arms in active service and in retirement, since they do not even visit me in this prison. I feel that with that stance they make me see that they disapprove of my actions in the past and in the present. Maybe they expect a change of attitude from me. A general has never visited me. Only one comrade has done so. When I have been vilified by the press, there is no one who comes to my defense. No one says anything; could it be shame? -What else do you regret? -I also regret the contempt of politicians of all stripes toward the military personnel who are in prison. No one understood us. Perhaps because what we did was wrong or unnecessary. Also, because of the continuous criticisms of the Catholic Church toward the security agencies, to the point that except for the military bishop (Gonzalo Duarte), who visits us four times a year, no other priest has come to this prison to exercise his ministry, at least regarding my person. If I were born again, an idea that is absurd in itself, I would not be a soldier in today's Army. -Why? -In our Army, there is an abysmal distance between what should be and what is. Indeed, it claims to be an institution founded on solid principles of honor, pride, love for the Fatherland, camaraderie, and loyalty. I will not make observations on the first three principles, but regarding loyalty and camaraderie, I have serious reservations. Although it hurts to admit it, this is the only Army in the world that, when it has been appropriate, its generals have not assumed responsibility for the orders they gave. As an example, the Letelier case. Contreras may not be liked, but that does not mean one should fail to recognize that at the time of Mr. Letelier's death, Contreras was a lieutenant colonel and the other (Pedro Espinoza Bravo) was a major, respectively. Anyone who knows even a little about the military world will understand how difficult it is for a lieutenant colonel and a major to conspire, without anyone knowing, to kill a diplomat with a bomb in the heart of the civic district of the most important country in the world. All these events could not have occurred if the order of a general had not intervened. -What don't you understand? -I don't understand how an Army that defines itself as a victor, never defeated, and victor of the heroic feat of September 11, today—because tomorrow I don't know how many there will be—has three generals in prison, two brigadiers, one colonel, three lieutenant colonels, three majors, one captain, one lieutenant, one civilian employee with officer status, and three non-commissioned officers in prison. Of the three generals, there is none other than the meritorious commander-in-chief and two directors of intelligence. -You say you are sorry for having been in the CNI. You also say that in 1973 you were in a real war, but do you believe that in some way you may have gone too far and that so much violence was unnecessary? -With the perspective that the years give, I think we all went too far. On one side and the other. Some time ago there was a general who said that the great judgment of history was missing here. I don't know who he thought was going to be judged. From my perspective, I think that someday history will morally judge the politicians of the right, the left, the center, the businessmen and union and trade leaders, the generals and admirals who led us to the occurrence of September 11. Because they, with their fiery speeches loaded with ideology, incited a series of young idealists to take sides in their positions. More than 20 years later, many of these people, no longer so young, are detained in military units, in Punta Peuco, and why not say it, also in the High Security Prison on the other side. While their leaders and bosses quietly remain in their homes. History will tell, I say. -What feeling do you have about this history? -They led us to a problem on one side and the other and we paid with prison. -Is it unfair because you have had to pay in prison? -It would be fair to the extent that we all paid according to everyone's responsibility, those who gave orders and those who obeyed. And on both sides, but not only those who obeyed. In any case, without the intention of inspiring pity, I must say that I got cancer in prison. I don't know how much life I have left, since I have it conditioned. If I joined the Army and participated in the actions that derived from September 11, it was because I want to see a united, thriving Chile. But it is disunited and polarized. If it is of any use, and with the discernment that the passing of the years gives, in the most sincere and humble way, I ask for forgiveness. In general, to Chilean society and in particular to the people and the families of the people who may have been harmed by my fanatical actions while I was a member of the security services. In the same way, let this be the opportunity to ask for forgiveness from my mother, my wife, and my four children, for all the shocks, anguish, and vicissitudes. And also for having been so naive, gullible perhaps, in having let myself be carried away by so much empty talk, irresponsible orders, slogans, etc., that made me at the time... (put it in quotation marks) "worship idols of clay." -You are asking for forgiveness. You are the first person to ask for forgiveness... -I hope it is of some use. -Do you ask for forgiveness on behalf of the security services? -No, I ask for forgiveness on my own behalf. I do not represent either the Army or the CNI. There are other people who represent them, I do not. -Do you believe that other retired military personnel should have the same gesture as you of asking for forgiveness from society and the families of the victims? -I think there are military personnel who have to ask for forgiveness first from their own peers. There are some apologies to be made first, to their own peers. The indifference of comrades is terrible. I have the feeling that maybe that is what they are waiting for, a change of attitude, right? I think that is what happened. No one understood what we did. Maybe it was unnecessary and it was poorly done. -How was your time at the DINE and the CNI? -It was quite hard for me. I have good memories, although what happened later turns into bad memories. I always had to be in front-line operational units. -And how did you get involved in the crime of Tucapel Jiménez and remain for years as the only one prosecuted? -It is easy to start a rumor and then sustain it, especially when one has the means that the plaintiff's side had, with the support of the Investigations [police] of that time, not the current one. Besides, the Army stepped aside a bit with me. -What do you feel for the Army? -They have stepped aside in many things. -Did they leave you alone? -Not alone, but I feel that they have stepped aside. -Would you have liked the Army to defend you more actively? -Exactly. I have heard Mr. Saavedra say that the defense attorneys are employees of the Army and paid by it. My God, I would have liked that to be true. I have never been paid anything. The people who defend me now do it for free. I have paid 15 percent of what they have charged me. -Are you hurt by the Army? -Not by the Army, by people in the Army, who, having been able to do something, do nothing. It does not seem fair to me that those who were my bosses have stayed in their homes today and have not even been capable of sending me a newspaper. If they were my bosses, they have to know that I am innocent. And if I am, they should have done the impossible to prove it. -Should your bosses have stood up for you? -I think the commander-in-chief of the moment, from General Pinochet on down, should have said openly that I was innocent. -If you say you were not the perpetrator, nor the new ones prosecuted, who killed Tucapel Jiménez? In the process, it is established that they were CNI officials... -What happens is that the Court made a mixture of DINE and CNI. Although both were made up of military personnel, the fields of action were different. The DINE had a field of action of military intelligence. And the CNI had a field of action on national intelligence. Making a mixture of one thing with the other is not right. For someone from the outside it may be the same, but it is not. -Have you ever regretted being in the CNI? -Yes, because I think that if they accuse us of something we didn't do, the defense should be at all levels. I find that by not defending us, the authorities have made a feeling of guilt manifest. By not taking up the defense, the military command leaves the feeling that we are guilty. I think public opinion must think that if such a person is in prison, he must be guilty. I would have preferred a defense that showed its face more. I think fear entered. -Fear of what? -Fear of getting involved in things. That very Chilean attitude of not getting involved in anything. -But you regret having been in the CNI... -Yes. Because of the subsequent performance regarding those of us who are in this situation, because of that lack of commitment from those who were our comrades and bosses. They have left a framework of doubt in public opinion. There has been no clear defense. I have never seen the Circle of Retired Generals nor the admirals complaining for us. -Just as it has been in the case of General (R) Pinochet? -Of course. There has been no foundation moving around us. With the fiery defense of General Pinochet, at least someone is reacting. But as far as I am concerned, I have not seen anyone. The most painful thing is for the family, which suffers. No one has ever gone to my wife's side to tell her 'don't worry, we are with you'. "They haven't shown their faces" -In the processing orders of this case and others, the participation of the CNI in various bloody events is proven. -But one must not forget the presumption of innocence. It is proven when there is a final sentence. I miss the Argentine military, because after the so-called 'dirty war' ended, those who answered were the generals who commanded and not the subordinates. Here in Chile that has not happened. The subordinates have answered and those who commanded have not shown their faces. And the worst thing is that the generals have not come out to defend their subordinates. That is what I miss. It is very difficult for one to defend oneself without means. "I felt I was at war" -Why do you think many darts have fallen on you? -Because it is easy. I don't say it in a pedantic way, but I was always on the front line, close to things and situations. It is not that I was the star assassin. The problem is that here it is said and then it is taken for granted and proven. Things are said with tremendous lightness. It is true that there are events that occurred. It is undeniable that there are forcibly disappeared persons. -What do you think of that part of Chile's history? -Bad. I think that is a problem that has not been faced and should be faced once and for all. This has been done the Chilean way and the problem has been kicked down the road. Neither the Army nor the Church nor anyone has sat down to talk to see how to fix it. All the actors must be summoned. It is not about the leaderships meeting. It must be at all levels. His defense of Valenzuela Patiño -What do you think of Minister Sergio Valenzuela Patiño? The plaintiffs insist that he should be changed... -You must understand that I am detained in this case. It makes no difference to me. I think he has done his job. I don't know if well or badly, I couldn't qualify it, because I am not the one called to do so. I don't know if to call it disloyalty, but at least crookedness, that as long as the minister did actions that suited the plaintiff's side, he was the great minister. When he started to acquit and found that we were innocent, then there he went from nice to ugly. -You were acquitted in November 1998 of the death of the carpenter Alegría Mondaca. -And from there he went from ugly to nice. Now they say the minister is bad. That is such a Chilean attitude. Now they say he had a son in the CNI. He always had a son in the CNI.

Source: latercera.cl, January 1999

Sentence for the homicide of Juan Alegría Mundaca

Full text of the ruling of the Santiago Court of Appeals

The following is the textual version of the ruling issued by the Seventh Chamber of the Santiago Court of Appeals, which sentenced Alvaro Corbalán Castilla, Carlos Herrera Jiménez, and Army non-commissioned officer Armando Cabrera Aguilar to life imprisonment as perpetrators of the crime of the carpenter Juan Alegría Mondaca.

As it is an extensive document, to facilitate its reading we have sectioned the ruling into eight parts. In them, the final wording of it is provided, which was in charge of magistrate Gabriela Pérez Paredes.

The text reproduces the sentence of the appellate court with certain modifications formulated by the ministers, both in form and substance. Likewise, the arguments that support the sentence against each of the convicted are exposed in detail.

Mention is even made "of the possible criminal participation that Humberto Alfredo Guillermo Gordon Rubio may have had in these events." Given the recent death of the latter, the ruling points out: "the court of first instance shall issue the resolution that is necessary regarding him." The ruling for the crime of Juan Alegría Mundaca Santiago, July 19, 2000.

Seen: The sentence under appeal is reproduced with the following modifications: A.- Regarding the challenges. In the second foundation, the phrase "and of which he has had or has known any background or information" which is read between the words "them" and "whose" is eliminated, and the sentence "That sum was received, according to him, at the exit of the hearing and was delivered to him by Investigations officials" is added at the end of this motive, following the period (.).

In the fourth consideration, the sentence that begins with the expression "which will be accepted," until its end, is replaced by the following: "which is rejected for considering that the foundations on which it is supported are not proven in the records, the psychiatric report and the statement of the person who issued it being insufficient to invalidate its value to prove the lack of veracity of the witnesses." In the seventh motive, the final phrase, which begins with the word "furthermore," is eliminated until its end.

B.- Regarding the substance: In the tenth consideration, the letters a), b), d), e), i), ñ), o), p), q), r), s), u), v), z), aa), bb), cc), o-1), p-1), q-1), r-1), ii), pp) are eliminated. The word "vascular" is replaced by the locution "vascular" in letter a) of the tenth motive.

In said consideration, letter ff), the phrase "being the last time on Friday" is inserted following the verb "to dine," and the following sentence is added at the end of the paragraph: "He adds that his son worked in 1981 in San Felipe and then in Valparaíso, joining the PAC of the Municipality of Valparaíso in 1983 and that regarding the flashlight he found, it was lead-colored with some vertical red stripes, medium-sized, thick, and was used." In letter hh) of the same, the number "1642" which is read in the final part is eliminated and the following phrase is added following the expression "It is ratified at page 2067.": "but it is specified that the death was suspicious due to the depth of the wounds and the type of cut, clean and deep, pointing out, furthermore, that he ordered an expert to be sought but does not remember if the corpse was present or not when the photographs were taken, recognizing those accompanied to the respective report. He clarifies that in his reports suicide was spoken of due to the telephone background he obtained at the Legal Medical Service regarding the matter." In letter nn), the following is added: "and in the recognition in a lineup of persons at page 670 he recognizes the companion of Alvaro Corbalán, resulting to be Hugo Enrique Alarcón Vergara." In letter rr), following the noun "Then" with which the section ends, the following sentence is added: "In the diligence of recognition in a lineup of prisoners at page 618, he recognizes the individual he alludes to in his statement." In letter ss), at the end of the section, following the word "statements," the phrase is added: "since as he works in the Analysis Department of the Unit that was like the 'brain' of the operations, everything was known there and everything was produced and reported to the higher echelon. Pointing out, furthermore, that Ricardo Muñoz worked directly with Alvaro Corbalán, that is why the information is reliable." In letter vv), the following paragraph is added following the expression "he is shown in the act": "He specifies that he verified the information provided by the report he gave him about Lech Walescka and his aborted trip to Chile, furthermore, he pointed out that he wanted the CNI to intervene to take its "foot" out of what the DINE had done in the assassination of Tucapel Jiménez and that they contacted Alegría, whom an individual with the surname Pincetti had hypnotized and made make a statement by which he attributed the crime of Tucapel Jiménez to himself, he told him that they had Alegría in a room and that Corbalán was at the door and that they reproached him that now it was his turn to "get his... wet" and he entered and had been the one who made the wounds on his wrists." In letter F-1, the following is added following the number 2157: "he points out that he retired in June 1983 from the CNI, going on to provide external services, and specifies at page 871 that in the Metropolitan Division of the CNI there were no groups formed for this or that thing, but that when an order regarding specific search missions emanating from the CNI General Staff was received, a group of available personnel was organized to work on said order. He points out that Alvaro Corbalán or Julio Corbalán was specialized in the anti-subversive part and gave him several missions and was Commander of the Unit for the Search of Information on Subversive Matters in the Metropolitan Region. He indicates that he controlled, supervised, and knew all the actions developed by the members of the Division and when Canales substituted him, he communicated the activities to him. The Brigade that Corbalán commanded depended on the Metropolitan Division. "He specifies that at the time he worked in the Metropolitan Division, the deputy director of the CNI was Mr. Marco Orrego and that the personnel assigned to Alvaro Corbalán was arranged directly by the CNI Personnel Office and the information was obtained from open and closed sources that were informants." Following letter H-1, the following sentence is added: "Carlos Herrera as operational chief had full powers to choose the personnel with whom he was going to act on this or that mission and the team with which he frequently acted was, among others, the "Old Charlie" whose name was Armando Cabrera. He adds that it is unlikely that he would have carried out any mission without it being communicated to him. He expresses that he met Corbalán once in 1982, at the time of the Viña del Mar Festival, he should have appeared, but as he did not, he went to locate him at the Hotel O'Higgins and ask him for background information about the security arranged for the interior of the venue and for TV. He indicated to me that I should dedicate myself to my own business and that if I had problems I should speak with the Director or Vice Director of the CNI. He knew that Corbalán and Herrera were classmates in Artillery." The eleventh and twelfth foundations are eliminated.

Source: El Mostrador, July 19, 2000

Tucapel Case: Judge Muñoz dismissed three former agents

Only 16 accusations were issued by the visiting minister, Sergio Muñoz, in the case for the homicide of union leader Tucapel Jiménez, while three other people involved in the events were dismissed because it was estimated that there was not enough background information to convict them.

This is the former Army intelligence officer, and trusted man of Augusto Pinochet, Arturo Silva Valdés, who helped the material author of the crime, Major (R) Carlos Herrera Jiménez, to leave the country in 1991 under the false identity of Mauricio Gómez, when he was required by justice in the crime of the transporter Mario Fernández.

Arturo Silva also has a rich curriculum of trips abroad as a member of the advance team or "producer" of Pinochet on his trips. Hence, his passport shows repeated destinations such as Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil.

He traveled to those countries to provide money to some military personnel linked today to trials for human rights violations. In fact, Silva Valdés was mentioned in the special program that TVN carried out a few months ago about the disappearance and death of the DINA chemist, Eugenio Berríos, as one of those responsible for his death.

As a result, the head of the Sixth Criminal Court of Santiago will carry out the diligence of observing and transcribing the video to summon him to testify. Before being arrested and prosecuted as a cover-up in the Tucapel case, Silva Valdés worked at a prestigious security company from which he was fired when his status as involved in this process became known.

The other two The second dismissed person is a former Carabineros official, Rolando Pino, who was prosecuted while the process lasted as an accomplice to the crime of Tucapel Jiménez. This is because it would have been he who had Tucapel Jiménez arrested on February 25, 1982, so that Major Carlos Herrera and the non-commissioned officers who accompanied him, Miguel Letelier and Manuel Contreras Donaire, could assassinate him.

Pino was subjected to prosecution by Muñoz because he himself incriminated himself in the event before the family of Tucapel Jiménez, with whom he maintained a close family relationship. However, Minister Muñoz estimated that his statement alone was not enough to issue an accusation against him.

The third dismissed person is the former agent and personnel chief of the disappeared National Information Center (CNI), Humberto Calderón Luna. The decision to release him from responsibility was due to the fact that the background of the process was not configured to issue an accusation against him either.

Muñoz used the same criterion as last year, when he released seven former CNI agents for lack of merit, linked to the Labor Brigade that spied on the union leaders grouped in the National Association of Fiscal Employees, of which Tucapel Jiménez was its president.

The accused Currently, the following are accused as perpetrators of the crime of Tucapel Jiménez: Major (R) Carlos Herrera Jiménez; General (R) and chief of the Army Intelligence Directorate (DINE), Arturo Alvarez Scoglia; DINE brigadier Víctor Pinto Pérez; DINE commander Maximiliano Ferrer Lima; and the non-commissioned officers of the same secret service, Manuel Contreras Donaire and Miguel Letelier.

As accomplices, meanwhile, are CNI brigadier Roberto Schmied, Captain Miguel Hernández, DINE major Juan Carlos Arriagada, dentist Jorge León Alessandrini, and the former ANEF employee and personal friend of Tucapel Jiménez, Julio Olivares, and General (R) Hernán Ramírez Hald.

As cover-ups are the former Army auditor, Fernando Torres Silva, the former lawyer for military justice Enrique Ibarra, the former operational chief of the CNI, Major (R) Alvaro Corbalán Castilla, and the former chief of the DINE, Hernán Ramírez Rurange.

Source: El Mostrador, August 27, 2000

Herrera to Judge Guzmán: 'I executed Márquez with a rifle'

The retired Army Major and former DINA agent Carlos Herrera Jiménez confessed to another homicide before the presiding judge Juan Guzmán Tapia, stating that he killed the Communist leader Nelson José Márquez Agurto with a SIG rifle.

Márquez’s remains were found in 1990 in the Pisagua mass grave. Herrera Jiménez also ratified before the magistrate that the current aide-de-camp to the Chamber of Deputies, Jaime Krauss Rusque, gave him the order for the execution.

Primera Línea gained access to the judicial statement in which Herrera Jiménez reveals the command structure of Pisagua during December 1973 and January 1974. In it, he confesses to leading the firing squad that took the lives of an undetermined number of people, including those found in 1990 and, likely, the group of eight forcibly disappeared persons whose remains were exhumed and destroyed by the passage of trucks, according to the thesis of the plaintiffs, which is supported by documents provided by Senator (PPD) Sergio Bitar that even identify those responsible.

Without hesitation, and following the conduct he adopted when acknowledging the crime against union leader Tucapel Jiménez, the former agent told the magistrate, "I gave the order to fire, which was executed by the squad." He immediately indicated, regarding the specific case of Márquez, that "this man escaped from the Pisagua prison while I was the officer of the guard.

For that purpose, the instructions that existed in this regard were put into execution; that is, the military unit was deployed in search of the prisoner according to a preconceived plan."

He then recounted to the judge that "it happened that I was the one who went with a patrol of soldiers and found Mr. Márquez hiding under the pier at the Pisagua cove; we captured him and took him back to the prison."

In his judicial statement, he adds that "the then-Major Mario Acuña Riquelme—the former prosecutor for the zone who was prosecuted in the case and later dismissed following his death—found out about the event.

He was in Pisagua that day and ordered that women who were in the prison and men who were detained there be taken out and moved to a place on the Pisagua beach. In the presence of military personnel, Acuña ordered Krauss—the current aide-de-camp to the Chamber of Deputies—to have the prisoner executed. He transmitted the order to me, and I executed him with a SIG rifle."

"The foregoing," he explains immediately after, "had no other purpose than to serve as a warning to the prisoners, so they would know what would happen in the event of an escape. That is what Acuña thought, and there were about 30 or 40 people as witnesses to this event."

With this statement, the only valid judicial document that incriminates Herrera Jiménez, the plaintiff lawyer in the case, Adil Brkovic, will request in the coming days the prosecution of the accused for the crimes of kidnapping and homicide against Márquez and the rest of the Pisagua prisoners who perished during that period under the order to shoot issued by the man convicted in the case of the carpenter Juan Alegría Mundaca.

Brkovic recalls that testimonies from other detainees from the same period confirm that Márquez was only meters away from the rest of the prisoners and indicates that the excuse of the "law of flight" was used again to strike at the detainees. Furthermore, the statements of the former agent are fully consistent with the Rettig Report.

Chain of command and other executions

In his interrogation, Herrera was asked about who his hierarchical superior was, and his response to the justice system was categorical: "It was the then-Army Captain Jaime Krauss Rusque, who came from the Rancagua Regiment of Arica and currently holds the rank of retired colonel and is the permanent military aide-de-camp to the Chamber of Deputies."

He also specifies that "Krauss reported to Colonel Ramón Larraín Larraín and Military Prosecutor Mario Acuña Riquelme—both deceased—and to the commander-in-chief of the Sixth Army Division and military judge and commander of the CAJZI (Interior Zone Jurisdictional Air Command), General Carlos Forestier Haensgen, who was the highest military authority in the provinces of Arica and Iquique."

When asked by the tribunal constituted on September 6, 2001, whether he had participated in executions and who ordered him to do so, Herrera Jiménez maintains: "Yes, I effectively received a direct, verbal order from Jaime Krauss Rusque to execute some prisoners; I do not recall that there were more than six of them.

Among them, I remember one with the surname Márquez, who participated in some acts as a clown within the prison camp. I was also at the execution of a prisoner who limped when he walked and another who wore a toupee; they were drug traffickers."

Defense of the accused

In an attempt to justify his actions, Herrera maintains in his judicial statement that in December 1974 he held the rank of Army second lieutenant and was only 22 years old, so his influence on the internal activities of the prison camp was null. "I only limited myself to following the orders that were given to me," he asserted.

Regarding Forestier, he clarifies to the justice system that "I did not see him at any execution. But I have no doubt that, given the verticality of the institutional command, he must have been fully aware of everything that happened or failed to happen in Pisagua.

If it had not been so, he would have gravely failed in his military duties." This is the thesis that, in fact, supported the prosecution currently in effect against Forestier, issued by presiding judge Juan Guzmán Tapia for the crime of kidnapping.

His words are even more precise when specifying to Judge Guzmán that "in the executions in which I participated, either Lieutenant Colonel Ramón Larraín Larraín or the Major at that time, Acuña, were present in their capacity as the most senior officers.

One or the other, bringing their hand to their visor, would indicate to me, the times I commanded the firing squad, the moment to give the order to fire. Now, the person who indicated to me the people I had to take out of the prison to execute was Captain Krauss, who in turn received the order from either Larraín or Acuña."

In that vein, he maintains that "I did not have any dialogue with any of the prisoners I was ordered to execute before carrying out the order. I did not interrogate them, much less torture them; what is more, I did not even want to know their names. I only limited myself to commanding the firing squad."

He explains that this squad was composed of two members of the Navy, two Carabineros, two prison guards, and three military personnel, all with the rank of non-commissioned officers, but he asserts that he does not remember the name of any of them.

Once again, and following the thesis of the existence of other commanders, the man convicted in the Alegría Mundaca case points out that "I never saw prisoners being tortured while I was on guard at the prison. I am unaware of what happened to the prisoners while they were in the hands of the SIM (Military Intelligence Service)."

The career in the repressive services that Herrera pursued includes his participation in 1977 in the CIRE (Regional Intelligence Center) as an operations officer, an organization that in practice, and according to his words, depended on the National Defense General Staff, while the DINA depended on the Military Government Junta and functioned where the DINA had no representation.

Subsequently, he joined the dissolved CNI, an organization under which he participated in the assassination of the former president of the ANEF, Tucapel Jiménez Alfaro, a homicide he acknowledged judicially and for which he even asked for forgiveness from his family in an emotional statement before TVN, in which he maintained: "It is true, Mr.

Jiménez... I killed your father that February 25, 1982. I did it not out of a personal matter or on my own initiative; I was ordered to do it and was told that Mr. Tucapel Jiménez was a traitor to the fatherland and as such caused much harm to Chileans."

Pisagua, Lucía Hiriart Pinochet, and the case of the "cocaleros"

One of the greatest blows to the opponents of the dictatorship was dealt on January 29, 1974, when six people who had been detained in November 1973 in Iquique were transferred to Pisagua. They are Orlando Tomás Cabello Cabello, Nicolás Chanez Chanez, Juan Mamani García, Luis Anibal Manríquez Wilden, Hugo Tomás Martínez Guillen, and Juan Rojas Osega.

According to the information gathered so far, it has been established that this group known as the "cocaleros" never engaged in drug trafficking as they were accused of doing, but rather "the bodies of all of them were found in 1990 in the Pisagua grave, bagged, with their hands tied and their eyes blindfolded." Furthermore, faced with the desperation of the families who were assured that their spouses had fled to another country, they decided to send a letter to the First Lady of the Nation, Lucía Hiriart de Pinochet, who in an unpleasant tone told them that she knew nothing of their husbands, who had obviously abandoned them. The letter is contained in volume ten of the extensive file managed by Judge Guzmán.

However, the constant in Pisagua was the issuance of edicts informing of War Councils. The first, dated October 11, 1973, meant the death of Julio Cabezas Gacitua, José Cordova Croxatto, Humberto Lizardi Flores, Mario Morris Barrios, and Juan Valencia Hinojosa.

The second, dated October 29, 1973, meant the execution of Rodolfo Jacinto Fuenzalida Fernández, Juan Antonio Ruz Díaz, José Demóstenes Rosie Sampson Ocaranza, and Freddy Marcelo Taberna Gallegos. In the third council, dated November 29, 1973, Germán Eladio Palominos Lamas was put to death; his body appeared in the 1990 grave.

Finally, in the fourth council, held on February 10, 1974, two Communist militants were sentenced to death: Alberto Yañez Carvajal and Luis Toro Castillo.

The tone in most of these cases was to inform the families of some of those buried in Pisagua that their loved ones were alive and free on bail and that they had to sign in weekly at the respective police station, "for otherwise they would indeed be in danger of imprisonment; and that the reasons why they did not return home could only be inferred by the family, and were not the concern of the authorities."

The Pisagua mass grave

From the beginning of the military regime, the northern zone of the country had the Pisagua prison camp as the epicenter of repressive action, a place where hundreds of people wandered through the narrow corridors of the prison waiting for their execution to be ordered at any moment.

Although local survivors of the detention center always pointed out that some of the victims of the torture inflicted by Army and CIRE personnel were buried in the vicinity of the camp, it was only in June 1990, when the mass grave adjacent to the cemetery was discovered, that the process took on new momentum.

It was not until 1999 that the prosecutions of General Carlos Forestier, former prosecutor Mario Acuña, and non-commissioned officer (ret.) Miguel Aguirre were finalized.

The 19 bodies found in 1990 shed light on the inhumane treatment they endured during their short stay in Pisagua and alerted the country to the fierce repressive action in the north.

The Rettig Report records that in the case of the mass grave, "the remains were arranged in three levels, corresponding to the dates of death. All the bodies were bagged and had several bullet impacts. Most presented clear and unmistakable vestiges of having had blindfolds on their eyes and their hands tied."

The Legal Medical Service managed to identify Juan Calderón Villalón, Nolberto Jesús Cañas Cañas, Marcelo Omar Guzmán Fuentes, Luis Alberto Lizardi Lizardi, Juan Jiménez Vidal, Michel Selim Nash Saez, Nelson Márquez (January 18, 1974), and Luis Fernando Rojas Valenzuela (December 17, 1973). However, Jorge Marín Rossel, William Millar Sanhueza, and Manuel Heriberto Ayala Zavala remain disappeared.

Meanwhile, on October 20, 1973, Oscar Walter Pedro Ripollcodoceo, Julio Gastón Valenzuela Bastias, and Manuel Francisco Donoso Dañobeitia were executed. The following day, the Salesian priest Gerardo Poblete Fernández met the same fate.

On October 23, the press—a channel used to disseminate deaths in the zone—announced the execution of Luis Pedro Solar Welchs. The same happened on January 11, 1974, when Isaias Higueras Zuñiga, a guard at the Iquique prison, died.

Source: Primera Línea, November 12, 2001

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Corbalán testified again for the carpenter's crime

In the evidentiary stage for the crime of the carpenter Juan Alegría Mundaca—a homicide perpetrated to cover up the assassination of Tucapel Jiménez—the former metropolitan chief of the dissolved National Intelligence Center (CNI), Alvaro Corbalán Castilla, testified today before Judge Sergio Muñoz.

The former officer is sentenced to life imprisonment for this crime, which was carried out a year and a half after the assassination of the union leader—which occurred in February 1982—with the aim of hiding the perpetrators of the homicide.

Others sentenced to life imprisonment in this case are retired Army Major Carlos Herrera Jiménez and retired Carabineros non-commissioned officer Armando Cabrera Aguilar. The civilian attached to the CNI, Osvaldo Pincetti, alias "Doctor Torment," received ten years in prison.

However, the case was reopened to investigate the responsibilities that Brigadier Roberto Schmied and Hugo Alarcón Vergara might have. The former was dismissed, while the latter was indicted as an alleged accomplice in the murder of Alegría.

Until April 23, Judge Muñoz will jointly carry out the evidentiary phases for the crimes against the former president of the ANEF and the carpenter who resided in Valparaíso.

On another level, the Sixth Chamber of the Santiago Court of Appeals will be in charge of settling the procedural conflict that arose between judges Sergio Muñoz and Hugo Dolmestch, which was sparked after the accumulation of the cases involving the CNI in the hands of the former.

These involve the death of 12 FPMR militants in Operation Albania, the assassination of four opponents of the military regime in 1986—following the attack on Pinochet, a process titled under the name of José Carrasco—and the disappearance of five Communist militants in 1987.

The accumulation of the processes, which would form a single case, remained in the hands of Muñoz after he unilaterally decided to assert the principle of accumulation, which prevents two judges from processing a case involving the same defendants.

The chamber has already ruled on this judicial episode, confirming that Muñoz must hear the cases. However, the extraordinary visiting judge Hugo Dolmestch, through a written document, requested that the Supreme Court review the ruling of the appellate court, based on the fact that the jurisdiction over these three processes was delegated to him by the same court.

The unification of the processes was requested by Corbalán's defense because it will allow him to have a single sentence, presumably a life sentence, of 20 or 40 years.

Source: Primera Línea, April 18, 2002

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Those convicted in the Tucapel case to Punta Peuco

After the Second Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court finalized the sentences against those responsible for the death of the former president of the National Association of Fiscal Employees (ANEF), Tucapel Jiménez Alfaro, which occurred on February 25, 1982, judicial sources informed La Nación that they will be transferred today to the Punta Peuco prison, the facility where they will serve their sentences.

With the change of prison, they will leave the Military Police Battalion (BPM) at the Peñalolén Telecommunications Regiment, where the Army built facilities for former uniformed personnel and active military personnel under prosecution to serve preventive detention until a sentence was issued against them.

Thus, they will be held in Punta Peuco, a prison that has mixed custody by the Gendarmerie and the Army: the former director of the Army Intelligence Directorate (DINE), General (ret.) Arturo Alvarez Scoglia; Brigadiers (ret.) Víctor Pinto Pérez and Maximiliano Ferrer Lima; and non-commissioned officers (ret.) Manuel Contreras Donaire and Miguel Letelier Verdugo, all of whom were sentenced to eight years in prison.

The latter two were sentenced as material authors.

Added to them is retired Major Carlos Herrera Jiménez, sentenced to a unified sentence of simple life imprisonment for the death of Jiménez and his participation in the assassination of the carpenter Juan Alegría Mundaca in July 1983.

The same sources indicated that the transfer of the former uniformed personnel was originally scheduled for the weekend; however, it had to be postponed due to a lack of space to receive the new inmates. Added to this is the approval of the security agencies in charge of the operation, who have the authority to stop the procedure until the last moment.

Source: La Nación, March 23, 2004

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Judge prosecutes aide-de-camp to the Chamber of Deputies

The board of directors of the Chamber of Deputies asked for the resignation of the aide-de-camp, Colonel (ret.) Jaime Krauss Rusque, and he accepted. The resignation was demanded just hours after presiding judge Carmen Garay prosecuted him and ordered his arrest as the material author of seven homicides that occurred at the Pisagua prison camp, while Krauss served in 1974 as the captain in charge of the Company of Guards for the detainees.

The information regarding the resignation requested of the aide-de-camp, who is the brother of the current Chilean ambassador in Madrid, Enrique Krauss, was delivered yesterday after 6:30 PM at the Ariztía Palace in Santiago by the president of the Chamber of Deputies, Pablo Lorenzini (DC).

He stated that the Chamber's board agreed to ask for his resignation because, having been prosecuted, he fell into the "supervening disability" indicated by the institution's personnel statute in its Article No. 23, letter c), which establishes that "the person who performs functional duties may not be prosecuted or convicted."

The aide-de-camp had declared himself "innocent" in his statements in the Pisagua process, and he also expressed this to La Nación Domingo, which in its edition last Sunday published the chronicle "The Ghost of the Aide-de-Camp."

The indictment of Colonel (ret.) Krauss was requested by the plaintiff lawyer in the Pisagua case, Adil Brkovic. He said yesterday that "we are very satisfied with this resolution because the truth is that there is sufficient evidence in the process to prove Mr. Krauss's participation in the homicides of seven prisoners."

The lawyer said that although Krauss "is not accused of shooting the prisoners himself, there are those who point to him as the one who issued the orders as the second-in-command of the Pisagua prison camp. This investigation has already taken six years, and the facts are fully accredited," said Brkovic.

The facts

The now-former aide-de-camp to the Chamber will be notified today first thing in the morning at the Palace of Tribunals in Santiago, and then he will be transferred as a detainee to the Military Police Battalion located inside the Army Telecommunications Command in the commune of Peñalolén.

Judge Garay maintained in her resolution that the seven homicides that occurred between January 18, 1974, and January 30 of that year took place in Pisagua while "Captain Jaime Krauss Rusque was in charge of the military personnel whose mission was to guard the political prisoners of the Pisagua Camp, a military unit that ultimately depended on the commander-in-chief of the VI Army Division (in Iquique), General Carlos Forestier Haensgen."

Colonel (ret.) Krauss acknowledged in the process that these seven homicides indeed occurred while he served in Pisagua between January 14, 1974, and at least, according to him, January 30 of that month. But he denied that he ordered the executions and also denied that his function was that of commander of the Company of Guards for the prisoners.

He said his task was "administrative," inventorying and storing "saws, hammers, shovels, heaters, cheese, ham, and sugar" coming from Red Cross aid for the prisoners.

However, according to lawyer Brkovic, the judge "did not believe" that argument, since it "does not fit" with what really happened.

In Pisagua, between September 1973 and July 1974, a rotating calendar of officers who made up the Company of Guards for prisoners operated like clockwork, each time under the command of an officer with the rank of captain.

In turn, he had four or five lieutenants and second lieutenants under his command. The company was responsible for what happened to the prisoners, and it was its members who always participated in the extrajudicial executions, as established in the investigation.

For these same functions, other retired officers who, at the date of their duties in Pisagua, according to the shift calendar, also held the ranks of captain, lieutenant, or second lieutenant, have been indicted for other homicides.

The first to state that Krauss ordered the execution of prisoners in Pisagua was retired Major Carlos Herrera Jiménez, who is serving a life sentence in the Punta Peuco prison. Herrera admitted that Krauss ordered him to kill the prisoner Nelson Márquez Agurto, one of the seven victims of the indictment, because he had tried to escape to avoid further torture.

Krauss denies it, but when confronted, Herrera maintained his statements.

Colonel (ret.) Krauss was also indicted for the homicides of Luis Manríquez, Nicolás Chánez, Tomás Cabello, Juan Rojas, Hugo Martínez, and Juan Mamani. All of them were declared "released" by General Forestier; however, their corpses appeared, along with Márquez's, in the clandestine grave discovered in Pisagua in June 1990 containing 19 bodies.

The other prosecuted individuals

Also prosecuted for the seven homicides were General (ret.) Carlos Forestier, as the intellectual author; retired Major Carlos Herrera Jiménez, as the material author; Colonel (ret.) Bernardo Martínez Téllez, as an accessory; and retired Carabineros non-commissioned officer Manuel Vega Collao, also as a material author.

Vega was part of the firing squad for the six prisoners executed at the end of January 1974.

Against Colonel (ret.) Krauss's arguments of innocence regarding the fact that he only performed administrative duties are the statements of some former prisoners, who affirm, coincidentally, that the then-Captain Krauss entered the prison on the night of Márquez's escape attempt, threatening that if he did not appear in half an hour, prisoners would be killed.

One of them, Luis González Vivas, said that "when they killed Márquez, Major Krauss was there, for whom I had made a piece of furniture. And he warned that if Márquez did not appear by four in the morning, they were going to take prisoners out of the cells to be executed." Freddy Alonso stated the same. Both versions contradict the "administrative" tasks of the then-Captain Krauss.

Source: La Nación, July 3, 2004

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Executions in Pisagua: Herrera Jiménez reiterates that former aide-de-camp to the Chamber participated in crimes

In a document presented to Judge Billard, the confessed murderer of Tucapel Jiménez assumed his responsibility for executions in the north but insisted that the order came from the then-Captain Jaime Krauss, who was acquitted in the case.

Plaintiff lawyer Adil Brkovic announced that he will insist on having his indictment reinstated and criticized the possible political reasons for the CDE (State Defense Council) to desist from appealing.

Retired Major Carlos Herrera Jiménez, who faces a life sentence for the assassination of union leader Tucapel Jiménez and is being prosecuted for the qualified homicide of at least seven people in the town of Pisagua that occurred in January 1974, reiterated that the order to execute the prisoners of the aforementioned detention camp came from the then-Captain Jaime Krauss Rusque.

In an extensive document presented to the minister instructing the judicial process, Joaquín Billard, the former DINE agent urged the justice system to establish the truth in these cases of human rights violations, asserting that the decision to acquit the former aide-de-camp to the Chamber of Deputies and brother of the former Minister of the Interior and current ambassador to Ecuador, Enrique Krauss, only obeyed political reasons.

Herrera Jiménez has confessed to said murders, as well as the homicide of the former president of the ANEF. However, he asserts that the orders for the firing squads to execute the Pisagua prisoners came from Krauss, whose prosecution was revoked by Billard on September 6, 2005.

"There were executions ordered by the commander of the Prisoner of War camp, Army Colonel Ramón Larraín Larraín and/or by the war prosecutor, Colonel Mario Acuña Riquelme. Those orders were transmitted to me for execution by my direct superior, the then-Army Captain Jaime Krauss Rusque," states the document to which El Mostrador.cl had access.

Criticisms of the Rettig Report

On the other hand, the former member of the CNI accused that a sort of "black hand" had acted in the preparation of the Rettig Report to alter the dates of the executions in Pisagua, with the object of disassociating Jaime Krauss from those events.

"Many years later, and examining the Rettig Report, I verified that in the month of December 1973, in Pisagua, it does not record any dead people, and those whom I remember being executed in that month appear in the month of January 1974, a day on which I was without any doubt in Iquique, executing the duties of a second lieutenant in my regiment," the document states.

In that sense, Herrera Jiménez adds, "Was the idea that in the period in which Captain Jaime Krauss Rusque was also on a service commission in Pisagua, no dead people should appear? Then, there were 'Moorish hands' that altered the dates of the executions for that purpose."

"I will insist, until I am exhausted, that the deaths that give rise to my indictment occurred in December 1973 (sic) and, at most, the first week of January 1974 (...) Someone with certain power and influence in the highest spheres of government manipulated the dates in the Rettig Report. Nothing more and nothing less than the revealed truth of human rights in Chile," he added in the document.

"My statements are true. I call God as my witness to this, and my peace of conscience regarding the facts. The indictment that affects me in this case is the product of a dirty political machination that does not have justice itself as its ultimate and superior end, but a bastard and no less immoral objective: the concealment of facts that could damage political images, no matter at what price," maintained the former DINE agent.

Participation in the events

Regarding the homicides of prisoners in Pisagua, Herrera Jiménez asserts that he does not remember the number of people he executed. "It never occurred to me to write down their names or to have made marks on my pistol."

However, he acknowledges his participation in at least three deaths. "I was the one who commanded the firing squad that killed, by order of Captain Krauss, a person who limped; in time I learned his name was Nicolás Chanez Chanez and, another gentleman, who at the moment of the shots, had his toupee jump macabrely into the air, without us knowing that he wore such an accessory."

Likewise, he detailed the execution of Nelson Márquez Agurto, a young man who, after an intense torture session, tried to escape the camp in a state of mental alienation and was recaptured by Herrera Jiménez along with two conscript soldiers, under a pier on the beach.

"Once out from under the pier, Prosecutor Acuña and Captain Krauss were waiting for me, among other people, to whom I handed over the prisoner; they ordered me to change into dry clothes. Upon my return, on the beach near the prison, in front of witnesses—political prisoners—Lieutenant Acuña, after a harangue, ordered Krauss to have him executed, as this was a punishment that corresponded to a prisoner of war who tried to escape from prison; my captain passed me his SIG rifle that he was carrying and ordered me to shoot Mr.

Márquez. I followed the order because I considered it appropriate," Herrera Jiménez pointed out.

In the final considerations of his document, the former uniformed officer concluded with the phrase: "May God grant that never again in our country will we live through traumatic situations that forever truncate the existence of people who are compelled to carry out certain activities that are at odds with morality."

No place

Although at the date of this document, mid-last July, the retired Major requested a personal hearing with Judge Billard to present these objections in the case, the judge responded to his defense with a "no place, as it is improper."

On the other hand, Herrera Jiménez's lawyer requested that Captain Eugenio Pertier Garfias, who would have been Jaime Krauss's predecessor in Pisagua, be questioned. However, the request was also dismissed by the magistrate.

Regarding the possibility of conducting a new confrontation between Krauss and Herrera Jiménez, Billard responded with "abide by the merits of the case files." In this regard, it should be noted that before the acting judge Carmen Garay prosecuted the former aide-de-camp, she faced both military men against each other, and they maintained their statements.

Krauss's defense is mainly based on the fact that although the former uniformed officer was stationed in Pisagua during the date of the executions, his function was to be in charge of a warehouse of tools and medicines that were intended for the prisoners.

They will insist on prosecution

Consulted on the subject, plaintiff lawyer Adil Brkovic totally questioned Krauss's version, pointing out that it is not credible that an officer of that rank, commander of the prison camp, would not have had intervention in the executions.

"I have the absolute conviction that Jaime Krauss, as captain of the Pisagua prison camp, was responsible for participating in the executions; that is why he was prosecuted, and that resolution was confirmed by the Santiago Court of Appeals."

Likewise, he opined that Billard's decision was due to the statements of other former prisoners who reported that the former aide-de-camp had humane treatment toward them during that period, but that those antecedents do not free him from his responsibility.

Along with this, Brkovic questioned the decision adopted by the State Defense Council (CDE) to appeal this acquittal and then desist from the appeal, which, in his opinion, was due to extrajudicial considerations, pointing to possible political influences for it.

The professional recalled that not only Herrera Jiménez's statements supported the indictment of Krauss, but also a reconstruction of the scene that the former judge Juan Guzmán carried out at the time.

In that proceeding, the former uniformed officer acknowledged having been present at the execution of Márquez Agurto, stating that he had refused to give the order and that, nevertheless, Herrera Jiménez carried out the task.

For Brkovic, that version is not credible due to the context that was being lived, in which no military man could refuse the orders of a superior. On the other hand, he maintained that two former prisoners who testified that when Márquez hid to try to escape, crazed by the torture, it was Captain Krauss who appeared in the prison cells threatening that if Márquez did not appear in 30 minutes, prisoners were going to be killed.

Furthermore, there is testimony from the executioners themselves that account for Krauss's presence at the executions. For that reason, the lawyer said he will insist that the magistrate reinstate the indictment against the former uniformed officer. "It is not a closed issue," he noted.

However, the pro bono lawyer who represents the victims' families clarified that he did not share Herrera Jiménez's statements that the executions were in December 1973, since the date of the deaths (January 19, 1974) is a fact that is accredited in the case.

This media outlet attempted to obtain the version of the CDE and the Human Rights Program of the Ministry of the Interior regarding why the decision to acquit Krauss was not appealed. In the first institution, it was answered unofficially that it was considered that the decision was well adopted, while in the second organization, it was said that it was a decision taken by the highest representatives of that department.

Jaime Krauss was prosecuted by Judge Garay on July 27, 2004, as the author of seven qualified homicides. After being acquitted by Billard, the former uniformed officer filed a lawsuit against the Chamber of Deputies for the damages of his dismissal, after being indicted by the justice system.

Source: El Mostrador, August 25, 2006

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Retired Major Herrera Jiménez incriminated himself in Pisagua executions

The former agent of the Army Intelligence Directorate (DINE) and the defunct National Intelligence Center (CNI), retired Major Carlos Herrera Jiménez, acknowledged—personally and through a letter—to the visiting judge for Human Rights cases, Joaquín Billard, that he was the direct person responsible for the executions of opponents of the dictatorship at the Pisagua concentration camp, in the First Region, in 1974.

The retired officer, who is being held in the Punta Peuco Prison serving a sentence for the homicide of the former leader of the ANEF, Tucapel Jiménez, assured the magistrate that his actions were due to the orders he received from the former aide-de-camp to the Chamber of Deputies, retired Colonel Jaime Krauss Rusque.

The account delivered to Judge Billard sought to have the investigation of this case reopened, after it had been dismissed last year, in which the accused in the process were acquitted.

According to the version provided by court sources, Herrera Jiménez, also known by the alias "Bocaccio," first sent a letter, only to later, upon seeing the magistrate's refusal, request a personal hearing in an attempt to tell his truth.

Both in the document and in the visit to the Palace of Tribunals, the retired major tried to exculpate himself from responsibility in the mass executions of political prisoners that occurred in January 1974.

Herrera maintained that Krauss Rusque was the Army commander who issued the instructions to end the lives of seven dissidents to the regime of Augusto Pinochet: Nelson Márquez Aburto, Luis Manríquez Wilden, Juan Rojas Osega, Hugo Martínez Guillén, Tomás Cabello Cabello, Juan Mamani García, and Nicolás Chanes Chanes.

The sources consulted assure that "Bocaccio" is trying to make a turn in this case that is preparing to begin its plenary period, on the verge of the sentences that will be handed down for this case.

The charges formulated against Krauss caused him to abandon his position as aide-de-camp to the Lower House in 2004, due to the indictments decreed against him by the then-judge of the case, Carmen Garay.

Carlos Herrera Jiménez was sentenced to life imprisonment as the author of the death of Tucapel Jiménez. He has already served ten years in prison since he was initially incarcerated for having tortured the transporter Mario Fernández (DC) to death.

He is also sentenced to life imprisonment as the author of the homicide of the carpenter Juan Alegría Mundaca, to cover up his responsibility in the homicide of Tucapel Jiménez.

Judge Garay prosecuted Jaime Krauss as the material author of seven murders of Pisagua prisoners. Along with him, retired Major Carlos Herrera Jiménez and former Carabinero Manuel Vega Collao were indicted, as well as retired General Carlos Forestier, who died in 2005.

Source: Terra.cl, August 25, 2006

*

The latest revelation of the murderer of Tucapel Jiménez, former DINA agent, Carlos Herrera Jiménez

The initiative of the Head of State to gather more information about the forcibly disappeared was well received by human rights organizations, although this time there was greater skepticism.

In a confidential 34-page document written in June 2006, to which El Mercurio had access after the presidential decision to reactivate the Rettig and Valech commissions, the former member of the CNI harshly questions the scarce progress of judicial investigations since the return to democracy, and that more punishment has been meted out to those who executed the orders to torture and kill than to those who gave them.

The former officer, who has been the only one to ask for forgiveness for his acts, explains in detail how the repressive organizations of the military regime operated to make the bodies disappear and why they will never be found.

The detailed description of how the detainees were eliminated: "The forcibly disappeared will never be found, because the system unfortunately worked very well"

The former military man harshly criticizes the slow pace that the investigations to find the whereabouts of the forcibly disappeared have had, pointing out that "the knowledge of historical truth is not as successful as it is intended to be believed."

To demonstrate his statements, he makes the following calculations, after 16 years of Concertación governments: "There are no more than eight finished and clarified cases!, out of an approximate estimate of more than 480 processes in development throughout the country.

At the same time, out of a total of 1,464 forcibly disappeared, 162 corpses have been identified and handed over to their families, including the 96 now in doubt from Patio 29 in the General Cemetery. It is only 12 percent!"

Making a projection, he maintains that

He is recognized as an icon of human rights violations, but today he asserts that even if a hundred false cases were to appear, it is not possible to cast doubt on what happened during the dictatorship.

The former CNI agent describes the failed accusation by Karla Rubilar as a “moral and ethical” problem and reveals that, in 1982, the president of the ANEF was only the fourth name on a list of union leaders that the dictatorship intended to assassinate, headed by Rodolfo Seguel, Manuel Bustos, and Hernol Flores.

The name of Carlos Herrera Jiménez entered the history of the dictatorship forever. Although he killed in Pisagua months after the military coup, he was not an operative soldier in the arrests, the torture, and the method of the rail piece to throw bodies into the sea, but rather in the political, selective, and planned crime of the final years of the tyranny.

He never hesitated to kill when it was his turn to obey. Without a word. Proud to fulfill his mission for the fatherland and with blind faith in his superiors. He obtained his "star medal" when, in 1982, he eliminated union leader Tucapel Jiménez with three shots.

It was the crime that catapulted him to fame. Today he reveals, for the first time, that Tucapel was barely the fourth and final name on a death list headed at that time by copper unionist Rodolfo Seguel and, after him, leaders Manuel Bustos and Hernol Flores.

He was part of the Army Intelligence Battalion and later, in 1983, took charge of the CNI in the Valparaíso Region. It was in that assignment that, together with Álvaro Corbalán, he formed the quartet that killed the carpenter Juan Alegría Mundaca.

After 20 years of imprisonment, Carlos Herrera, at 57 years old and with gray hair, wears a ponytail that, inside the Punta Peuco prison, differentiates him from others, such as Raúl Iturriaga Neumann or the former head of the CNI himself, General Hugo Salas. They still maintain martial formality. His view of life today distances him from that obedient soldier.

-What is your opinion on the recent actions of RN deputy Karla Rubilar, who provided erroneous information regarding alleged false forcibly disappeared persons?

-What Karla Rubilar did is monstrous. Beyond her ignorance, she has a moral and ethical problem. Finding four or five people who were being clever does not change the substance at all, which is that there are disappeared persons in Chile. Even if ten or a hundred appeared, that only changes the magnitude. Even if there were only one forcibly disappeared person, the problem remains the same.

-Do you believe that today the forcibly disappeared and those subject to political executions are a reality in Chile?

-Yes, effectively, that cannot be denied. I believe that is the axis of the conflict regarding human rights violations. It seems inconceivable to me that there are forcibly disappeared persons.

-What effect do you think this conflict had on the dictatorship?

-The existence of the forcibly disappeared delegitimized all the good work we did in the security services and that the military regime carried out.

-After the suffering of so many years and adding the recent events, what would you say today to the victims' families?

-That is a difficult question. It seems to me that, with everything that has been known until now, asking for forgiveness is something overtaken by events. Forgiveness is a process that rests with those affected. And I personally did not make anyone disappear, therefore I cannot ask for forgiveness for something I did not do.

-But then, do you feel any kind of empathy for the families of those murdered or subject to political executions?

-Yes. A son of mine died in 1978. I suffered quite a bit, but I believe that in some way the wound has already closed, although the scar remains. He is buried and I know where he is. I did not live through the disappearance of a loved one.

-And the families of those subject to political executions, would you ask them for forgiveness?

-I already asked for forgiveness from the families of my victims, among them Tucapel Jiménez.

-Were you the first to ask for forgiveness from your victims?

-Yes, I believe I was the first.

-You knew Manuel Contreras well; what is your opinion of him?

-I lived with him for three years and nine months in Punta Peuco. I think he is someone very intelligent. Unfortunately, it seems to me that he remained stuck in the past. He is still in the fight of 1973; he has not evolved. And that harms those who were his subordinates.

-In what sense does it harm them?

-Today Contreras is the one who heads the human rights problem. But his dimension is not the same as that of a non-commissioned officer like, for example, Basclay Zapata. But society as a whole, and the press in particular, puts both in the same dimension, when there is a tremendous difference.

And Manuel Contreras has done nothing to make that distinction. Why does he allow his subordinates to continue being placed at his same level?

-Contreras even continues to deny the existence of forcibly disappeared persons.

-That is why I say he is stuck in the past.

-When and why did you decide to confess to the crimes in which you participated during the dictatorship?

-It was precisely during the time living with Contreras. Especially because he did nothing to put things at their fair level. I think it would be very manly and honorable if he took responsibility for the orders he gave.

-Do you believe Contreras has been a coward?

-I think Chilean society as a whole is a bit cowardly. We are in a country of "it wasn't me."

-Were there other reasons for you to confess your crimes?

-I have four children, including one who is twenty-two years old, which is the age I was when I had to live through all these things. I truly would not want them to live through what I lived, nor for them to be victims like other young people were during the dictatorship.

My youngest son hides what happened to his father, and that is hard. When I was arrested, he was a baby in arms, so he has practically lived his whole life without a father. He does not know me in any other way than as a prisoner.

-Are you referring to the fact that there is a family cost?

-Yes. In addition to four children, I have four grandchildren, and they humanize more than the children themselves.

The Lost Pride

-You said that when you killed Tucapel Jiménez you felt pride because you believed fervently in what you were doing. What were your ideals?

-It was painted for me that Jiménez was betraying the fatherland. That was enough for me to think that his death, being illegitimate from the origin by the act of killing, was legitimized on its own by the final objective, even if it sounds Machiavellian.

-But what was the pride you felt when killing him based on?

-In the young people of that time, and particularly in me, there was a jingoism that fell into chauvinism. Everything done for the benefit of the fatherland was legitimized by itself. Jiménez was part of that jingoism.

But I will tell you that he was originally the fourth on a list of probable people to be assassinated. The first was Rodolfo Seguel (as of 2002, an important copper union leader and deputy 2002-2006), the second was Manuel Bustos (at the time president of the National Union Coordinator), and the third, Hernol Flores (leader of Correos de Chile).

Killing any of them was evaluated as a serious political problem. Tucapel was chosen by elimination. Because those who directed this "got scared." It shocked me a lot to know this later.

-What justified for you the crime of the carpenter Alegría, carried out to frame him for having killed Tucapel Jiménez?

-It was a consequence of the first crime. As the years go by, you realize that if it was already clumsy to kill Jiménez, eliminating Alegría was much more so.

-Do you believe that when someone kills, they are doing something wrong?

-I believe that is the case, and whoever says otherwise is lying. In the family, from a young age, one is taught that killing is wrong. I think one can analyze the motivations, but whoever killed knows what they did.

-At any moment did you feel that we were at war?

-Honestly, yes. Later it shocked me very strongly to realize that it was not so.

-What are the ideals or paradigms that you had then and that you no longer have today?

-I left the Military School in 1970. And, although there were things about the Allende Government that I found remarkable, like the half-liter of milk for children, I did not agree with the substance of his project.

But in some way, we were a much more ideologized youth than the current one. At 13 or 14 years old, you were already participating in something, on one of the two sides, something quite Manichean that did not consider nuances.

Trial of the Dictatorship

-When and why did the image of Augusto Pinochet begin to break for you?

-Pinochet disillusioned me when in a speech he said "this is not a fascist government." Then I said, how are we not fascists if we are surrounded by militants of Patria y Libertad? And, furthermore, we were very good friends with them.

That caused me many problems. I always noticed that Pinochet was inconsistent. First, he said we were anti-Marxists and we didn't know what Marxism was; then nationalists without ever reading Primo de Rivera.

I thought that nationalism was dancing the cueca, listening to Los Huasos Quincheros, eating empanadas, and watching the Military Parade. In a zigzagging path, later he told us we were gremialistas.

-Do you rescue anything from the military regime?

-Yes, I separate Pinochet from the regime. The reorganization of public administration, the development of non-traditional exports, the reactivation of the Tarapacá Region, and the creation of the Free Trade Zone are works that have endured. I also believe that the leap in the economy was a work of the military regime that is unfortunately tarnished by the violation of human rights.

-And what do you think of the neoliberal system and the market economy?

-There I enter a problem, and let me go back a little to the past. When Allende took office, he promised equality, and the same happened with Pinochet, where we were all going to have access to education.

But in the end, years later, it turned out that this new society built by the military left out the very people who made it. For example, with four children, I could not pay for universities. Today there is no equality of opportunity for everyone, and I embarked on this project to achieve that equality.

-Do you believe that the system made Chile a more classist country?

-Yes, and an example of that is the reaction to the death of the students from the Colegio Cumbres, which is regrettable in itself. Shortly after, the President made the presidential plane available to the parents, but how many accidents are there every day of Chileans who are less equal than others to whom no one provides a plane?

-Do you believe that everything good that existed in the military regime would have been possible under a democratic government?

-Yes, but with a much slower process. In a dictatorship, everything is faster, although the cost is high.

-So, do you recognize that we lived through a dictatorship?

-It was a dictatorship. As an old man, I have learned to speak without euphemisms. If a ruler is not elected by popular vote, he is a dictator. When they ask if it was a pronouncement or a military coup, it is obvious that it was a coup; the rest is decoration.

Abandonment

-To what extent did you feel used by the system? When and how did you start to realize it?

-When I got old. At the time, I felt I was doing it very well. The aphorism "tell the fool he is good with an axe, and the fool will chop down the forest" suits me very well. In 1991, I disassociated myself from the institution by requesting my discharge.

I started to know another life and other people. In the Army, one lives as if in a ghetto, just like the people from the UDI or the DC who marry among themselves. We also married the daughters of other military men.

When I studied in the Army, the grades were oriented toward how good a follower of orders you were. As I was always well-rated, I felt like a good soldier, without thinking about the consequences that it was going to bring me.

-How do you understand the two stages in which prisoners were made to disappear: that of the DINA and the subsequent one of the CNI called "Operation Television Removal"?

-Many like me were told that we were at war, and we believed it. From the logic of the war of those first years, with some effort, I could understand those deaths. But when in 1978 and 1979 the exhumation of bodies was carried out under the command of the CNI director, General Odlanier Mena, that is something I do not share.

There, the manifest intention to hide a crime, conscious of having committed it, already exists. And I believe that General Mena must answer for that.

-What did you feel when you knew that the dictatorship had been defeated at the polls?

-Several things. From the judicial point of view, it was clear what was going to come, although I never imagined it would be so hard. But more than that, I thought that the commanders, who had been quite severe and autocratic, among them Sergio Arellano Stark, Humberto Gordon, Carlos Forestier, and Pinochet himself, were going to take responsibility for the orders they gave.

Something that never happened. But I had been disillusioned with Pinochet for a long time. Although I emphasize again that, for me, he is not the military government.

-Did you imagine that the superior commanders were not going to assume their responsibility?

-Never. It was a very big disappointment, and I still have it. It hurt me a lot. It is very hard for me today to look them in the face and address them by their rank and as "my general."

-What effect did it have that the commanders did not assume the orders they gave?

-That the justice system initially started to dig from the bottom. So we subordinates fell into prison first.

-Did you vote Yes or No in 1988?

-With my soul in the No, I voted Yes.

-Why?

-Because I was a disciplined soldier.

False Reconciliation

-Looking at yourself in time, do you believe it is valid to kill for the fatherland?

-As I already said, initially I felt a lot of pride. But later the weight of conscience attacked me, the children when they grew up, and meeting my grandchildren. Now I believe all of that was monstrous.

-What do you think of some of the gestures of reconciliation that have occurred?

-A few years ago, the then commander-in-chief Juan Emilio Cheyre held a reparatory mass in memory of General Carlos Prats, which I found fantastic. But I found it in very poor taste to see, in the front row and on the verge of tears, the same generals who told us that Prats was a traitor.

-Like whom?

-For example, General César Benavides. Attitudes of that type are what provoke my bewilderment. For years I thought Prats was a traitor. Likewise, it seemed indecent to me to see in the social pages of "El Mercurio," at a university world cocktail party, General Guillermo Garín and MIR leader Pascal Allende together. That seems very indecent to me. Neither of the two should have been there.

-Does that not have to do with an eventual reconciliation?

-Are the leaderships going to reconcile? And what happens to those below whom they themselves sent to their deaths? There must be respect for the fallen on one side and the other. Now, putting myself in the place of the MIR, their dead that day would be rolling in their graves. If that is reconciliation, I don't understand anything.

The Slow Road to Heaven

-Apart from the judicial cost and public scorn, is there a family cost?

-The family one was the highest cost, because I not only lied judicially but also to my family. I never told them that I had committed such and such a homicide. But my children were growing up, and at one point, in 2000, I had to tell them.

And telling my wife, I think, was more difficult than when I spoke with Minister Sergio Muñoz (who investigated the Tucapel Jiménez crime). I didn't know where to start and how to justify the unjustifiable. I think the most difficult thing was with my youngest son, since the others suspected what I worked in. He questions my actions of the past, and that evidently produces pain.

-What do you regret?

-Leaving aside the human rights violations for which I already repented and asked for forgiveness, I regret not having studied Law. While in the CNI, I was accepted as a student at the Catholic University of Valparaíso, but General Gordon said to me, "Are you crazy?" Here in prison, I would have liked to study Philosophy, but I haven't been able to either.

When one is old and makes the list, there are more regrets than successes.

-What do you not regret?

-My family. And having been present at the most important events of the 20th century, even though many of them were despicable. From the historical point of view, I can say "I was there." It is a contradiction; I could have had a simpler life and known more things, but also, how beautiful it is to have the guilt of what has happened!

This serves to know what is true and what is false. What is all this for? I have no idea.

-Are you religious?

-On the religious level, I am Catholic, and I had to go through a long journey before returning to receive communion. It was not easy, because it is illogical that a practicing and observant Catholic, as is my case, would have done what I did. I still question it from the spiritual point of view, since I know quite a bit about the Bible. I knew that my religion forbids doing what I did.

-Do you pray?

-Yes.

-Do you believe you will go to heaven?

-Yes, yes. How long it will take me to get there is something I don't know. Although I think it will take me quite a while.

-Why?

-Because of purgatory, of course.

Pisagua

-You were in Pisagua at the end of 1973. Did you kill the prisoner Nelson Márquez?

-Yes, I killed him.

-Who gave you the order?

-Captain Jaime Krauss Rusque gave it to me, and I carried it out. He was later an aide-de-camp to the Chamber of Deputies.

-But you are in prison and Krauss is free.

-Because the Chilean justice system accepted as valid that he was engaged in administrative tasks counting medicines in a pharmacy. Although the pharmacy was very small, it took him a month to count the medicines.

The Longed-for Freedom

-When should you be released?

-I have a unified life sentence for the deaths of the carpenter Alegría and Tucapel Jiménez, which total 20 years of imprisonment. That time was completed on June 21, 2008. I was imprisoned in 1992, but I had three years and seven months accumulated from a previous sentence for the case of the transporter from La Serena, Mario Fernández.

So, what I maintain is that, if criminal legislation allows for the accumulation of sentences, I have already served mine. If the State, with all justice, was so agile to judge and condemn me, today with that same agility it must set me free. One must also respect the human rights of those of us who violated them. Otherwise, it turns into revenge.

-The justice system recently denied you an appeal for protection, due to a formal error...

-Exactly. Unlike medicine, where the urgency to save a patient prevails regardless of any formality, in the justice system it does not happen. What would have happened if the appeals for protection in Chile had been properly accepted? Many lives would have been saved.

-If you already asked for a pardon from former President Ricardo Lagos and it was denied, why don't you request it from President Michelle Bachelet?

-No, and it is not out of arrogance, but because I have already served my sentence.

-What do you want to do if one day you are released?

-What a paradox, I got used to being locked up and I want to go lock myself in my house. I have no desire to reintegrate into social-type activities. I don't even want to go to the stadium, which I used to like.

-Which team are you a fan of?

-San Luis de Quillota, man! But what I am really interested in today is living with my wife on a plot of land I have. To restart our courtship. Unfortunately, my children will no longer be with me in the house, which will be very hard for me to overcome. A couple of years ago I had the empty nest syndrome, which normally happens to mothers.

-Would you like to isolate yourself from the world?

-Not entirely, I want to make a community radio, because I consider Chile to be a very unjust country. I am a radio amateur and I have the necessary equipment. Among other things, I would like to make a program dedicated to prisoners. But I am going to do this from my house.

Reflections

At the end of the interview, Carlos Herrera pulled out a folder and said he wanted to raise some points.

“There is an inequity in the sentences when the same penalties are applied to high officers like Manuel Contreras and other generals, and to non-commissioned officers like Basclay Zapata and others.”

“The law is not rigid; the law has always been interpreted. The first conviction for qualified homicide was exemplary, and I took it: life imprisonment. Today, the same type of crime is condemned with a remitted sentence (serving it in freedom). I am clear that I was harmed by the historical moment in which I committed the crime.”

“There are cases of officers and non-commissioned officers who have done a lot of damage, have not confessed anything, and are serving a sentence. On the contrary, there are others who confessed all the little they did, and they have the same sentence.”

La Nación April 3, 2009 Supreme Court orders annulment of indictment in Pisagua case The magistrates, acting ex officio, stated that Minister Billard had violated the Montevideo Convention on the extradition of Carlos Herrera Jiménez, so it is not appropriate to maintain the indictment against the former uniformed officer.

The Supreme Court determined to annul the indictment issued by Minister Joaquín Billard against Major (ret.) Carlos Herrera Jiménez in the human rights investigation known as the Pisagua case.

In a split decision, ministers Nibaldo Segura, Jaime Rodríguez, Rubén Ballesteros, Hugo Dolmestch, and Carlos Künsemüller rejected the appeal for protection presented by the defense of the accused.

However, acting ex officio, the country's highest court ordered the annulment of the indictment issued on July 22, 2004, as it considers that it violates the precepts of the Montevideo Convention through which Argentina granted the extradition of Herrera Jiménez to Chile.

“That in accordance with the provisions analyzed above and appearing from the background of the case taken into view that the indictment order dated July 22, 2004, regarding Herrera Jiménez, has been issued in violation of the provisions of letter a) of article 17 of the Montevideo Convention, this Court proceeding ex officio, in accordance with its conservative powers, orders it to be left without effect, the judge of the case having to follow the corresponding procedures in order to obtain the extension of the extradition, on the merits of the elements that appear in the case and that motivated the issuance of the resolution that by this ruling has been left without effect,” says the ruling.

The decision to reject the appeal for protection was agreed upon with the dissenting vote of Minister Segura, who was in favor of accepting the presentation of Herrera Jiménez's defense.

Source: La Nación January 18, 2009

Piñera also Deceived Us

Álvaro Corbalán, José Zara, Eduardo Iturriaga, and Carlos Herrera, all former members of Pinochet’s secret police forces, are claiming rights to prison benefits and asserting that “we were the armed wing of the right, and now they despise us.” Zara, known for his phrase about “hardened cutlasses” (corvos acerados), requested a pardon. Piñera denied it.

“We human rights violators have become the lepers of the new Chilean society, whom few want to acknowledge or help.” This is how Carlos Herrera Jiménez, a retired Army major who has been detained for 23 years in various prisons, refers to his current situation.

He is currently held at Punta Peuco prison, a facility built specifically to house military personnel convicted of crimes against human rights. He was declared guilty, among other cases, of the 1982 death of Tucapel Jiménez, a labor leader opposed to Pinochet.

This and other strong statements made by him and by fellow convicted military officers Jorge Iturriaga Neumann, Álvaro Corbalán Castilla (convicted for the Corpus Christi crimes and other murders), and José Zara Holger (the one with the famous phrase about “hardened cutlasses,” convicted for the murder of General Carlos Prats) can be read exclusively in the third edition of the weekly Cambio21, which went on sale at newsstands across the country.

Our director was exclusively at the prison built specifically for human rights violators in the commune of Til Til, and they told him that the President of the Republic deceived them with his campaign promises, where he offered special laws and "final point" laws to the so-called "military family."

Retired General Eduardo Iturriaga, accused of participating in the murder of the Army Commander-in-Chief Carlos Prats and his wife, says that "with our votes, Piñera was elected president." He added that in the next election, they will call for people not to vote for "this government as long as our problems are not solved." He indicated that they do not rule out starting a hunger strike.

Herrera Jiménez says that "we were the armed wing of the right to reach power" and "now they despise us," and they are announcing actions to claim what they consider their rights.

Other reports that can be read in the new issue of Cambio21 include, among others, the "Karadimazo" of the Ursuline nuns, with the dismissal and transfer to Germany—for reasons not entirely clear—of their eternal superior; an interview with Senator Isabel Allende, where she speaks of her profound pain over the death of her son and the national situation; and the fights between the titans of politics with an eye toward the 2013 senatorial elections.

We also learned about the Chilean "discolandia" national team, the rebel politicians, and what they are playing at...

We also tried to elucidate who will control the nuclear energy business in Chile, and we undertook the desperate search for what was the think tank of Piñera’s campaign, which no one knows where it is. Because, does anyone know what happened to the Tantaucos?

The confessed author of the murder of Tucapel Jiménez and the carpenter Juan Alegría, Major (R) Carlos Herrera Jiménez, requested a pardon from Piñera. He has not yet received a response. José Zara also requested one. He has already been told no.

Read the text of the pardon petition

In the main: I request a Particular Pardon; First subsidy: Reduction of sentence; Second subsidy: Commutation of sentence; Third subsidy: Relegation.

First Otrosí: I request a Particular Pardon for a Non-Commissioned Officer.

Second otrosí: Power of Attorney.

Most Excellent Mr. President of the Republic, Mr. Sebastián Piñera Echeñique:

Carlos Alberto Fernando Herrera Jiménez, RUN No. 6.119.621-8, retired Army major, fifty-nine years of age, native of Quillota, married; currently in Punta Peuco prison, Til-Til commune, serving a sentence of Life Imprisonment for my responsibility in the events investigated in the accumulated cases Roll No. 1.643 and 1.643 bis, respectfully, to the Most Excellent Mr.

President, I state: I was convicted by a sentence dated March 9, 2004, Roll No. 3231-03 of the Most Excellent Supreme Court, to suffer the unified penalty of life imprisonment for the crimes of qualified homicide, in the persons of Tucapel Jiménez Alfaro and Juan Alberto Alegría Mundaca, with the sentence becoming final as of Wednesday, March 31, 2004.

Based on records that can be obtained from the Courts of Justice, the Army, the Investigative Police, and the Gendarmerie, it is evident that since Sunday, January 19, 1992, I have been imprisoned without interruption, after being arrested in the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina.

I have never obtained provisional release, conditional release, or intra-prison benefits. Prior to that date, I spent three years and seven months in preventive detention in units of the former CNI. In total, then, I have remained a little more than twenty-two years in prison, in Argentine prisons, Chilean prisons, and military units.

Furthermore, I am responsible for the acts of human rights transgressions for which I have been charged, with the exception of the "La Serena Transporter" case, in which, together with the retired Carabineros non-commissioned officer Mr.

Armando Cabrera Aguilar, we complied with the order of the Director of the former CNI, General (R.I.P.) Mr. Humberto Gordon Rubio, to self-incriminate, because as he said, "later he would get us out of the problem." That never happened. He could not, or perhaps, he did not want to.

Emphatically and without hesitation, I acknowledge my criminal responsibility in those unfortunate injustices. Certainly, I did not join the Army to be a murderer or executioner of my fellow citizens. Of course not.

I joined the Army in 1965, at fourteen years of age, convinced that this institution served the country effectively, as it is directed and formed by brave people of honor, clothed in dignity, whom, for that same reason, it was necessary to obey without hesitation, just as the military ordinance still in force provides.

But I was wrong. After distancing myself from the events, due to the time elapsed and the vicissitudes experienced regarding the problems derived from human rights, it became clear that my services rendered to the country were not precisely the best.

I acknowledge that what is stated in the preceding paragraph is of a supreme naivety bordering on simplicity. But it cannot be ignored that I am part of the youth of the sixties and early seventies, with ideologization and Manichaeism being our main characteristic. The young people of that time only had two positions to take; one way or another, we wanted to radically change the world.

Both contenders, it seems to me, were completely wrong regarding our leaders and the way of carrying out the paradigms. Suddenly, those who were not with one side were enemies of the other. Young people, spurred on by slogans and by older people, just as irresponsible or more so, in schools, universities, factories, in the countryside, in the city, and in military barracks, faced each other—some with words, others with verbal violence, others with weapons—and in this way, we were led to the social disaster that a good part of Chilean society laments today.

I think that in those years, the world, and Chile in particular, lived in a state of generalized madness; I did not exempt myself from it. Due to the nature of the functions I performed in the security services of the military government, regrettably, and as I have publicly acknowledged, the barrier between moral, immoral, and amoral became blurred for me; I agreed that to serve the interests of the fatherland, not focusing on the means was legitimate if it served to achieve the final purpose.

I was one of those who thought about the need for deep changes, with weapons, if the case arose. Furthermore, I was mistakenly convinced that the national intellectual elite was in the Chilean Armed Forces, as they were the last moral reserve of the fatherland and their commanders were people of the highest intellectual, moral, and ethical level.

What else was I to think if the only information I received was imparted through the regular military channel?

At the end of the day, Mr. President, what is now an institution in our country prevailed: no one took charge of anything. The leaders of one side and the other did not assume, for a change, the responsibilities inherent to their positions.

It seems to be a noted thing: in Chile, there is no will or courage to investigate first and, if necessary, condemn later the leaderships, whatever they may be.

Indeed, just as in the past the General Secretariats of subversive terrorist movements, such as the MIR and the F.P.M.R., were not subjected to trial and much less convicted; today, with few exceptions, those who judicially answer for what happened regarding human rights during the military government are sailors, aviators, and police officers who at that time held subordinate ranks.

Generals and admirals of the era, in most cases, with qualified and prestigious teams of lawyers from the plaza in Santiago, have managed to evade the action of justice regarding the criminal responsibility that fell to them, for having been the ones who planned, created, and maintained a psychological climate within the institutions to exacerbate hatred against the "enemy" and issued the orders for the commission of the illicit acts that today have their subordinates in prison.

Definitively, no general or admiral from the time of the coup or military pronouncement answered for anything. None of the generals now imprisoned in the Punta Peuco and Cordillera prisons had reached that rank by September 11, 1973. The most notorious of all, General Manuel Contreras, was only a lieutenant colonel. Curious.

The climate of hatred before and after September 11, 1973, made me lose my way in matters of human rights, despite knowing from the womb that killing is wrong, as we are born with that norm incorporated into our being.

Inexplicably, at that time, young military men like me carried out orders that were illegal in origin, but converted into legal ones through a sustained and effective psychological action in which we were made to see that the "enemy" was every day stronger, more dangerous, more bloodthirsty, more treacherous, more dangerous for families and for our country.

The passage of time, the maturity acquired, and the weight of conscience made me understand that what was done previously by that path was a profound and misguided error.

The illicit will always be illicit, the immoral will also always be so, whatever the circumstances, and never, ever, will the end justify the means.

My catharsis on the matter is captured in:

a) Some of my reflections on the problem of human rights were added to the books, "El bisel del espejo: mi ventana" and "Culpabilidades y sanciones en crímenes contra los derechos humanos, otra clase de delitos," written by the well-known lawyer, Ms. Clara Szczaranski Cerda.

b) My essay, written during the year 2006, titled: "Derechos Humanos, Verdad Inconclusa. ¿Deuda Social?", which, among other places, is found in the Illustrious Court of Appeals of Santiago, marked as book AD Roll No. 1114-2007.

For this same document, I gave talks in this prison to the fourth and fifth-year law students of the University of Chile. It was also requested by the same chair, but at the Pontifical Catholic University, as a research text. Both facts had wide press coverage at the time.

On Tuesday, December 26, 2006, the social worker, Ms. Claudia Reyes Guzmán, a Chilean and American citizen, doctor in Political Science at the University of Michigan, United States, visiting Chile and aware of the existence of the work, visited me in this prison and requested a copy of it.

Shortly after, I received a thoughtful letter from the chair of the doctorate in Political Science at that university, thanking me for the work and informing me that it is reference material there.

The morning newspaper "El Mercurio," of Sunday, August 26, 2007, section "D," page 4, transcribed a passage of my work, and on pages 6 and 7, interviewed on the matter, former President Mr. Patricio Aylwin Azócar. He expressed agreement with my approaches.

In August 2003, the President of the Republic at the time, Mr. Ricardo Lagos Escobar, gave his speech regarding human rights matters via national broadcast, titled "No hay mañana sin ayer." It states in chapter IV, numeral 3: "(...) At the same time, it will examine other situations of prisoners convicted of crimes of similar gravity in previous periods, who request a presidential pardon, provided that they have genuinely manifested their repentance, have already been in prison for a long time, and have acknowledged their crimes, cooperating with the truth and the Courts of Justice (...)".

Unfortunately, it was never carried out.

Mr. President, regarding the criminological variables (repentance, awareness of the crime, and the harm caused) that the authority weighs when studying the background of a prisoner who applies for benefits, I will transcribe the statements given on Saturday, July 31 of this year, to the morning newspaper "El Mercurio," El Sábado magazine, pages 16, 17, and 18, by Deputy Mr.

Tucapel Jiménez Fuentes, about me: "(...) President Lagos would have had more support if he had pardoned Herrera Jiménez. He did cooperate with the case, he did show repentance, and he did have cancer (...)".

It happens that the honorable congressman referred in this way, nothing more and nothing less, to the person who murdered his father. That moving statement is, without a doubt, an authentic and genuine gesture of reconciliation, which, for the good of our country, cannot and must not fall into a vacuum.

I have served a little more than twenty-two years in prison; I acknowledged my guilt in national and foreign publications; I provided all possible collaboration to the courts, with a record of this in the respective files; I requested to be forgiven, publicly and privately, by the relatives of my victims; a good part of the period in which I have been imprisoned has been in national and Argentine prisons.

Positive justice has done its part.

I meet the requirements demanded in Law No. 18.050, which Sets Standards for the Granting of Particular Pardons. I ask for equality before the law for myself, just as in the governments of Mr. Patricio Aylwin Azócar and Mr.

Ricardo Lagos Escobar, who, in legitimate use of their presidential powers, pardoned two hundred and eighty-two people imprisoned for politically motivated crimes. For a better resolution by Your Excellency, I inform you that Eliseo Aballai González and Luis Enrique Quilodrán Muñoz, who benefited during the year 1994, are the ones from that group who remained in prison the longest: sixteen years and seven months each.

I have surpassed them by more than six years.

It is not my intention to make this request a Venezuelan soap opera. But, much to my regret, I have cancer. For this reason, I have been operated on more than four occasions, hospitalized as many times, with the obligation to periodically attend treatment and oncological control at the Military Hospital.

For the moment—God willing—the disease is controlled, and, truly, I would not want to end my days in prison.

Finally, because of my age, my illness, my wife, my four children, my four grandchildren, because of all the time lost not being with my family, because of all the important family events I could not attend—graduations of my children, marriage proposals, their weddings, births of my grandchildren, operations of my wife and my mother who is still alive, funerals of relatives, etc.—Your Excellency can have the absolute certainty that in the event of granting me the grace of a particular pardon, I will only dedicate myself to taking care of the trees on my five-thousand-square-meter plot located in the commune of greater Santiago, to developing my hobby of amateur radio, and to spoiling my four grandchildren.

Therefore: In accordance with Law No. 18.050, which Sets Standards for the Granting of Particular Pardons, I ask the Most Excellent Mr. President of the Republic, Mr. Sebastián Piñera Echeñique, to be so kind as to grant me the grace of a particular pardon, keeping in mind the long time served in prison; the criminological variables that could influence my person are, with facts and not words, totally and absolutely overcome; the serious or terminal illness that afflicts me, and the good disposition in this regard manifested by the next of kin of Mr.

Tucapel Jiménez Alfaro.

In second subsidy, the commutation of the sentence for the remainder of it under the supervision of the Local Patronage of Prisoners. In third subsidy, to be relegated to the Metropolitan Region, Melipilla province, for a determined number of years.

I ask Your Excellency to take note of what has been stated and to grant what has been requested.

First Otrosí: In advance, I offer apologies to the President for the license I will allow myself. But, out of a duty of conscience and minimal loyalty that my superiors never had with me, I would like to advocate and ask for your clemency for the retired Carabineros non-commissioned officer Mr.

Armando Edmundo Cabrera Aguilar, also imprisoned in this prison and serving a sentence in case Roll No. 1.643 bis, regarding the Homicide of Mr. Juan Alegría Mundaca. Retired non-commissioned officer Cabrera was a loyal subordinate of mine; he is a man of very little education—sixth grade of primary school—seventy-two years of age.

He also suffers from terminal stomach cancer and is asthmatic. The life expectations of this person are not promising. Despite this, he has the commendable merit of having kept his family united, together with him, in all these fateful years.

Likewise, he has served more than eighteen years in prison, always for crimes related to human rights violations.

Therefore: I ask the Most Excellent Mr. President of the Republic, Mr. Sebastián Piñera Echeñique, to be so kind as to grant the grace of a particular pardon to Mr. Armando Edmundo Cabrera Aguilar, keeping in mind the long time served in prison; the criminological variables that could influence his person are totally and absolutely overcome; and the terminal illness that afflicts him.

If the granting of such grace is not possible, I ask in first subsidy for a reduction of his sentence, fixing as a single and maximum penalty the amount of eighteen effective years of prison. In second subsidy, the commutation of the sentence for the remainder of it under the supervision of the Local Patronage of Prisoners.

In third subsidy, to be relegated to the Valparaíso Region, Viña del Mar province, for a determined number of years.

I pray Your Excellency to grant the Particular Pardon to the retired Carabineros non-commissioned officer Cabrera.

Third Otrosí: For the purposes of the processing of these particular pardons, I grant POWER OF ATTORNEY, as broad as is required by Law, to the lawyer Mr. Luis Hernán Núñez Muñoz.

I ask Your Excellency to take note of this.

Source: Cambio 21, March 22, 2011

Statements by Tucapel Jiménez’s murderer generated all kinds of reactions at the national and international level. Herrera confronted Krassnoff: “The military...”

Carlos Herrera Jiménez declared that the torturer Krassnoff Martchenko is guilty of all the crimes for which he is charged, stating, “it is not credible, and even less logical, that the judiciary has been wrong on more than twenty occasions in issuing a conviction against the brigadier.” Almost all the media in Chile and all international news agencies highlight the information published by our weekly.

The exclusive from Cambio21, where retired military officer Carlos Herrera Jiménez, imprisoned in Punta Peuco, stated that "we imprisoned military personnel are here for having killed people," has generated great media and political impact.

Regarding the controversial tribute to Miguel Krassnoff by Mayor Cristián Labbé (UDI), Herrera pointed out that he is "guilty of all the crimes for which he is charged," noting that "it is not credible, and even less logical, that the judiciary has been wrong on more than twenty occasions in issuing a conviction against the brigadier."

For this reason, the reactions were immediate, and media such as Radio Cooperativa, The Clinic, El Mostrador, La Segunda, CNN, El Dinamo, and other media outlets, in addition to all international agencies, cited this medium to make known Jiménez’s opinions regarding Krassnoff.

Such was the case of the Spanish agency EFE, which referred to Carlos Herrera Jiménez as follows:

A former agent of the political police of the Chilean military dictatorship (1973-1990) asserted today that "the military forgot that they are in prison for having killed people," and harshly criticized a tribute offered to a former brigadier sentenced to more than one hundred years for human rights violations.

Carlos Herrera, of the National Intelligence Center (CNI), who is serving a life sentence in Punta Peuco prison for the murder of labor leader Tucapel Jiménez and the carpenter Juan Alegría Mundaca, referred in this way to the tribute offered on November 21 to Miguel Krassnoff, who is serving more than 140 years in prison for crimes against humanity.

In statements to the weekly Cambio21, Herrera asserted in harsh terms that Krassnoff is guilty of all the crimes for which he is charged, although he anticipated that in prisons currently "there are more non-commissioned officers than officers imprisoned" for human rights violations.

"It is not credible that the judiciary has been wrong on more than 20 occasions in issuing a conviction against the brigadier," Herrera stated in response to those who defend Krassnoff, among them the mayor of the Providencia municipality, Cristian Labbé, a former bodyguard of Augusto Pinochet, who organized the tribute to the convicted military officer.

In Herrera’s opinion, Krassnoff’s honorees were wrong to insist on his judicial innocence, "but Krassnoff was more wrong to insist stubbornly on his innocence."

In the account to Cambio21, the weekly that discovered the tribute to Krassnoff and the dismissal of the press officer of La Moneda, Andrea Ojeda Miranda, who excused President Sebastián Piñera for not attending the event and even added laudatory terms for the military officer, Herrera highlights that the officers ultimately did not assume their responsibility for the crimes committed.

As we pointed out, Krassnoff is incarcerated and sentenced to 147 years in prison in a special jail for human rights violators in the foothills of the Andes in the Peñalolén commune. Meanwhile, Herrera Jiménez is imprisoned in Punta Peuco, another special jail for military and Carabineros who violated human rights, which is located in the vicinity of Til Til, about 45 kilometers north of Santiago.

Source: Cambio 21, December 7, 2011

The secret project of former agent Carlos Herrera Jiménez, “Bocaccio”

It was in 1996 when former CNI agent Carlos Herrera Jiménez, known in Pinochet’s intelligence barracks as Bocaccio, recorded his first audiobook in prison. His martial and thick voice is kept on dozens of cassettes that he has sent to the Central Library for the Blind in the Providencia commune directly from Punta Peuco, where he is a neighbor of Alvaro Corbalán, alias El Faraón.

Herrera Jiménez, who is currently serving a life sentence for the crimes of former ANEF president Tucapel Jiménez and carpenter Juan Alegría Mundaca, which occurred in 1982 and 1983, respectively, works every day on his computer, where he has special software installed for recording. According to someone close to him, in his cell, Bocaccio has a simple desk where he kills the hours reading aloud.

Today, in addition to the tough fights he has had with the Gendarmerie to obtain—without luck—prison benefits, Herrera is obsessed with an ambitious personal project: creating the largest archive of audiobooks for the blind in the country. And all with the Punta Peuco trademark.

Those who visit him regularly say that recording these books is part of his hobby for communications. In fact, in 1991, and before falling into prison for the first time accused of the death of the transporter Mario Fernández—murdered in 1984 at the hands of the CNI in La Serena—one of his favorite activities was amateur radio.

Herrera has even confessed to his friends that, in addition to his desire to study philosophy and create the audiobook archive, if he is released, he is determined to be a broadcaster on a community radio station whose listeners are prisoners.

The agent and the recording

At first, when a Gendarmerie social worker notified the library that Herrera was interested in recording books, it at least caught their attention. Although he is the only military officer who has asked for forgiveness for the crimes of the dictatorship, he was also the one who carried out the cold-blooded murder of the labor leader and the carpenter Juan Alegría, who was made drunk in his shack in Valparaíso and forced to write a letter blaming himself for the crime of Jiménez, in circumstances where the CNI cut the veins of both his wrists to simulate a suicide.

The cuts were so deep that they severed his tendons, debunking the official hypothesis.

Be that as it may, in the library, users never ask who the voice behind the works is; they only enjoy their reading, and the work helps to expand the collection, which today has more than 2,000 titles.

Bocaccio recorded the first texts between 1996 and 1998. Back then, he would ask his relatives to bring him the books to his small cell, and once he recorded them, he would return them: in prison, he has no space to have his own library and can barely store his clothes. He pays for the cassettes—and later CDs—out of his own pocket to this day.

However, it was in 2008 when he took his hobby seriously, and in parallel to sending his discs to the Central Library for the Blind on his own initiative, he began to record huge texts daily: currently, he is focused on a history book of Chile in which, it is calculated, he will fill 50 CDs of 72 minutes each.

But history is not his only interest.

“The Manipulator”

In the mid-90s, Herrera sent the library a list of books that he was determined to record. In the list, as in his own history, the noir novel predominated. Thus, one of his first deliveries was “The Manipulator,” by Frederick Forsyth, a story about the British intelligence services written by the same author of “The Jackal,” the text that gave rise to the film “The Day of the Jackal.”

Coincidentally, Herrera Jiménez was also part of the dictatorship’s intelligence agencies, specifically the National Intelligence Center (CNI) and the Army Intelligence Directorate (DINE).

In the case of “The Manipulator,” he recorded the text on 14 Philips-brand cassettes of one hour each. In total, it was 840 minutes in front of a recorder.

Then would come the delivery of “Theory of the Constitution,” by Francisco Cumplido, former Minister of Justice under Patricio Aylwin; “The Eagle Has Landed” by Jack Higgins; “Doña Bárbara” by Rómulo Gallegos; “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” by William Shakespeare; and “How to Overcome Pain” by Father Marino Purroy.

In his personal collection, there are also audio recordings of “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel García Márquez and several codes for blind law students. In addition, he was about to record “The Puma’s Claws” (Los Zarpazos del Puma), the book by the late journalist Patricia Verdugo in which, for the first time, the human rights violations committed after the military coup by the Caravan of Death, led by General (R) Sergio Arellano Stark, were denounced.

But finally, he recorded a much longer one: The Divine Comedy, which condemned him to read for 4 months until filling 14 discs in which the former agent recreates Dante’s walk through hell, purgatory, and paradise.

Abandon all hope

Dante’s book remained spinning in his head. So much so that two years ago, in an interview with the newspaper La Nación and faced with the question of whether he believed he would go to heaven, he replied: “Yes, yes. How long it will take me to get there is something I don’t know. Although I think it will take me quite a while.” The reason? “Because of purgatory, of course,” he replied with irony.

It is at least curious to hear a man with a violent past recite with a nasal voice, in a candid and slow tone, with all the time in the world: “Do not hope ever to behold the sky / I come to lead you to the other shore / the eternal darkness / to the ice, to the fire.” In some passages, his military education seems to betray him, and the verses sound coarse, like an execution order.

It is not the only curiosity of the former agent. Unlike other audiobook readers, at the end of The Divine Comedy, he did not want to record biographical information about the author, as is the custom of other volunteers.

Herrera, instead, surprised his listeners by including “Aguas Turbulentas,” a song by Camilo Sesto: “If life treats you badly / and you lose strength and morale / do not be cowardly / You will always have / a hand to hold.”

In the library, Herrera still has pending work. He has not delivered other books he promised: “The Justice of the Innocent” by Elizabeth George, “Practice of the Love of Christ” by Saint Alphonsus Liguori, and texts by the former head of the State Defense Council, Clara Szczaranski, which he himself suggested: she was one of the few authorities who in the last decade supported his idea of “justice with clemency,” which consisted of collaborating before judges in exchange for a reduction or commutation of the sentence.

A thesis that remained in fiction and never became a reality.

Training and complaints

In recent times, Herrera Jiménez has filed protection appeals and has even accused the Gendarmerie of acting arbitrarily in his case. In fact, he won an appeal against the National Director, Luis Masferrer, in the Council for Transparency, where he requested to know the minutes of the Technical Council, the instance that decides the viability of the requests that prisoners make in these matters.

According to Herrera, he had requested access to the coveted Sunday leave after estimating that the outing he was appealing for would not cause major conflicts. But, according to him, the prison warden denied it.

In addition to his audiobooks, he has held mosaic and tennis workshops. But in other proposed activities, he has fared very poorly, such as the course on renewable energy that he could not finish because the teacher got tired of the paperwork and the control he had to comply with to enter the prison.

He also accuses that he has been denied taking a Basic Electronics course at an Inacap center; a commercial voice-over and film dubbing course at the Provoz Academy; and an online English course from the state program “Chile speaks English.” All distance learning and which would be paid out of his own pocket.

For some time, Herrera Jiménez wanted to train dogs to help the disabled and young people from the Sename. One of them was sponsored by the well-known dog food brand Purina Dog Chow. But his venture was not successful.

And although he did not manage to do it for those purposes, and despite the fact that he has not received a professional trainer course, he did try a few years ago with Manuel Contreras’s dog, Kazán. But it also went poorly, because, as they say, El Mamo liked dogs, but from the fence outward.

That is, he did not want to have contact with his pet, which hindered the trainer-dog-master relationship.

Source: The Clinic, September 4, 2013

Judge clarifies that Herrera Jiménez shot a PC militant in Concepción

At the end of the reconstruction of the crime scene committed in 1983, the visiting minister Carlos Aldana affirmed that the murderer of Tucapel Jiménez is also the material author of the death of Víctor Huerta Beiza.

Judge Carlos Aldana reported this Wednesday that the former agent of the National Intelligence Center (CNI), Carlos Herrera Jiménez, fired the shot that ended the life of the Communist Party militant, Víctor Hugo Huerta Beiza (52), on November 3, 1983, in Concepción.

Aldana, the visiting minister for the case, spoke after more than two hours of the reconstruction of the crime scene that was carried out in the Pedro de Valdivia sector of the capital of the Biobío Region, and in which Herrera and former agents Álvaro Corbalán Castilla and Armando Cabrera Aguilar participated.

After the procedure, Judge Aldana maintained that "at the scene of the event, the participants recreated their statements and confirmed what was already in the background of the file (...) the people who fired are confirmed, in what conditions they did so, and that is essential to establish responsibilities."

"The one who fired was the captain at that time, Herrera Jiménez, and they belonged to CNI groups that were operating in Concepción on that occasion," said the minister specializing in human rights cases.

A group of relatives and groups of political execution victims arrived at the reconstruction. Hugo Huerta, the victim’s son, maintained that "he was detained, he was tortured, and he was murdered with a bullet in the forehead, with a weapon (...) on November 3, 1983, at 22:30."

Both Herrera Jiménez and Corbalán and Cabrera are incarcerated in Punta Peuco prison, serving various sentences for human rights violations.

In the case of Herrera Jiménez, a retired Army major, he is sentenced to 10 years for the homicide of Tucapel Jiménez and to life imprisonment for the murder of the carpenter Juan Alegría Mundaca. With this last crime, it was intended to hide the murder of the president of the ANEF.

Source: La Nación, June 20, 2012

Former CNI: “The executions during the dictatorship were miserable homicides ordered by clumsy military chiefs”

The execution orders were given "to young officers who only wanted to fulfill our mission in the best way," maintained Carlos Herrera Jiménez, confessed author of the murder of Tucapel Jiménez.

Carlos Herrera Jiménez, the former member of the National Intelligence Center (CNI) convicted, among other crimes, for the homicide of the union leader Tucapel Jiménez in 1982, told EFE today that the executions of opponents during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet were “miserable homicides.”

“They were miserable homicides ordered by clumsy military chiefs who, given their intellectual limitation to neutralize opponents with better ideas, ordered their elimination,” Herrera specifies in the prison for human rights violators in Punta Peuco, about 35 kilometers north of Santiago.

The execution orders were given “to young officers who only wanted to fulfill our mission in the best way,” he adds.

“I confused the border between good and evil, between the moral and the immoral, and I placed myself on the opposite side of the ethical,” admits the former agent, convicted for the murders, in 1982, of the union leader Tucapel Jiménez Alfaro and, the following year, of Juan Alegría Mundaca.

Jiménez was leading an incipient reorganization of the labor movement, and Alegría, an alcoholic and apolitical carpenter, was murdered to create a smokescreen over the first crime.

Herrera Jiménez, the first agent of the Chilean dictatorship to admit his crimes, has poured into a document, which he entrusts to EFE, his critical reflections on his repressive role, with criticism toward the commanders “who gave the orders and to this day hide their faces.”

“I do not intend to justify acts for which I already assumed my criminal and military responsibility before the courts long ago,” he says, and reveals that for this reason “they have considered me a traitor.”

“I understood that the people killed were never traitors to the fatherland, but only thought differently. I reconsidered that I did not join the Military School to become a murderer of my fellow citizens, but to serve my country,” Herrera expresses in the text.

“With shame, I observe how my military chiefs and the institutional commanders of the time deny today the facts that they themselves ordered to subordinates who today are imprisoned for committing human rights violations,” he adds.

Herrera, who also served a 10-year sentence for the murder of a transporter, Mario Fernández, in northern Chile, has requested a pardon several times, which has been denied by different governments.

Afflicted by a cancer against which he stopped fighting—“I got tired of the treatments, one day I said enough and I didn't go to the hospital anymore,” he asserts—he dreams, however, of being free one day, “to found a rural radio station and help people.”

“I believe that my transformations and meditations on life have healed me of cancer,” muses, convinced, the man who was one of the most feared agents of the dictatorship, who now accepts “that the crimes committed by agents of the State are more serious than those committed by private individuals.”

“We existed to protect people, and we swore so (...), agents have privileged information and State resources, in addition to impunity during the commission of the crime, which facilitates its execution,” he adds.

“We have been left alone, we were abandoned by our chiefs and the high command,” he remarks, after a long silence.

In his document, Herrera accuses that “no general or admiral, who exercised total command, has assumed any degree of

In December 1981, Army Captain Carlos Herrera Jiménez, attached to the CNI, received orders to transfer to the Army Intelligence Directorate (DINE), commanded by General Álvarez Scoglia.

Herrera, whom his classmates at the Military School had nicknamed “Boccacio” due to his prominent lips, joined the Army Intelligence Corps (CIE), the executive group of that Directorate, under the command of Major Víctor Pinto Pérez, to carry out a “special operation.”

All the data gathered by the CNI regarding Tucapel Jiménez filled a folder that, in early 1982, reached the hands of Captain Carlos Herrera, along with the order to kidnap and eliminate the union leader.

“Boccacio” set himself up in the Counter-Espionage Unit, dependent on the CIE’s Counter-Intelligence section, located at Avenida Echenique 5995, in the commune of La Reina, known to the military as “Cuartel Coihueco,” at that time under the command of Hernán Ramírez Hald. He also sporadically occupied offices at the DINE headquarters on Calle García Reyes, very close to the Brasil neighborhood.

In mid-February, the final decisions were made. Three men would act directly: “Boccacio” and Army non-commissioned officers Manuel Contreras Donaire (“Felipe”) and Miguel Letelier Verdugo (“Marcos”).

The operation would be carried out in two vehicles painted as official taxis, and they would also have the support of several agents and collaborators. Another team, known as the Special Support Unit, commanded by officer Juan Carlos Arriagada Echeverría, was in charge of obtaining the weapons, which arrived on February 24, one day before the date chosen to carry out the task.

On the morning of Thursday, February 25, 1982, the CIE’s special task force followed Tucapel Jiménez when he left his house in his taxi heading toward the Panamericana Norte. Surprisingly, at a street corner, Luis Rolando Pino, a Carabineros sergeant and nephew of the union leader, signaled for him to stop.

Captain Herrera and one of the non-commissioned officers took advantage of this moment to board the vehicle and force the president of the ANEF to take the road leading from Renca to Lampa, in the northwestern area of Santiago.

Shortly before reaching the junction to Noviciado, they ordered him to stop.

Carlos Herrera then fired the .22 caliber Dan Wesson revolver that had been given to him the day before. Five bullets struck the right side of Tucapel Jiménez’s head. Seeing that the victim was still alive, “Bocaccio” held him with one hand and with the other inflicted three stab wounds to his neck.

They immediately proceeded to clean the car and stole various items and documents belonging to the victim, including the taximeter, a flashlight, a wristwatch, a comb, his identity card, and his driver’s license.

The special mission was accomplished.

The two non-commissioned officers were reassigned to other military units in remote regions of the country, and Captain Carlos Herrera remained at the DINE.

On March 1, 1982, the Santiago Court of Appeals appointed Judge Sergio Valenzuela Patiño as a visiting minister to investigate the assassination of Tucapel Jiménez.

At the end of that year, the Army high command ordered the transfer of Captain Herrera Jiménez to Coihaique, a measure that “Bocaccio” resisted. He went to ask for help from his old friend Álvaro Corbalán and recounted in detail the behind-the-scenes of the ANEF president’s murder.

Corbalán took Herrera before General Humberto Gordon, who already knew the details of the operation and reassured “Bocaccio” by offering him a return to the CNI, but in an operational position in Viña del Mar.

Minutes after Captain Herrera left, Gordon ordered Corbalán to accompany him to La Moneda to meet alone with Pinochet. Upon leaving that meeting, the CNI chief commented to Corbalán, who was waiting in a hallway: “Tell Herrera that the president sends his recognition, that he congratulates him, and that he will keep him in mind for the future.”

In May 1983, with Carlos Herrera Jiménez already serving as the CNI’s operational chief in the Fifth Region, based in Viña del Mar, General Gordon informed his direct superior, Corvette Captain Sergio Echeverría Villarroel, that Herrera would be dedicated for one week to a special operation in Valparaíso, under the command of Álvaro Corbalán.

Two months later, in July 1983, an unemployed and alcoholic carpenter, identified as Juan Alegría Mundaca, was found dead in his humble home located on a hill in Valparaíso.

Alegría Mundaca had deep cuts on his wrists that had caused him to bleed to death. Next to him was found a letter in which he confessed to the homicide of Jiménez, stating that he had only wanted to assault and rob him.

The autopsy, however, revealed that it was impossible for the carpenter to have committed suicide in that manner. The deep incisions made on his forearms had severed the tendons. The forensic doctor was categorical: Alegría Mundaca could have cut one wrist, but never both.

Several years after the homicides of Jiménez and Alegría, Héctor Alarcón Nohra, former head of the CNI’s Regional Division, apparently repentant, gave priest Miguel Ortega an anonymous note with the names of the five men from a security service who had participated in the murder of Alegría Mundaca.

Officers from the Homicide Brigade managed to establish that on the night of July 20, 1983, one of Álvaro Corbalán’s trusted men in the CNI, Captain (ret.) Francisco Zúñiga, toured the police stations of Viña del Mar in search of a suitable victim—a man no one would care about, poor, without personality or character, who would be easily influenced and who lived alone.

Thus, in the middle of the street, he found Juan Alegría Mundaca, an alcoholic who had just been released from prison. Zúñiga asked for his name and address. He then put him in a car and took him to a remote house in the upper sector of what is today the commune of Concón.

There, Zúñiga and other conspirators held him for two days, trying to convince him first and then force him to confess as the murderer of Tucapel Jiménez. The carpenter repeatedly refused to cooperate, and the CNI men had to resort to Osvaldo Pincetti, nicknamed “Doctor Tormenta” or simply “Doc,” to obtain a false written confession.

Pincetti, a strange mix of charlatan and hypnotist, tried to put the carpenter into a trance, but he continued to resist.

Finally, they opted to give him large quantities of liquor, presumably pisco, until they managed to break him when he was in an advanced state of intoxication.

Alegría Mundaca then wrote in his own hand an undated letter in which he confessed to the crime of Tucapel Jiménez and announced that he was committing suicide out of repentance.

On the morning of Saturday, July 21, Álvaro Corbalán, Carlos Herrera, Armando Cabrera Aguilar, and another agent, nicknamed “Zanahoria” (Carrot) for his red hair, went to check Alegría’s home. They verified that no one was living there and prepared the scene to carry out the final act of the macabre plan.

The confident CNI agents did not realize that in the hills of Valparaíso, many eyes watch strangers, especially if they have an appearance like theirs, which made the neighbors’ skin crawl—the same neighbors who, almost ten years later, would not hesitate to identify them in the presence of Judge Sergio Valenzuela Patiño.

On Sunday, July 22, it was raining torrentially. Completely drunk, the carpenter Alegría Mundaca was left on his bed. Next to him were the five CNI men. Herrera placed the date on the letter: July 22, 1983.

Francisco Zúñiga then approached and, with a sharp pocketknife, cut the unfortunate alcoholic’s wrists almost to the bone. The deep incisions destroyed the tendons that allow for finger mobility and the ability to grasp objects. That excess was one of the pieces of evidence that later allowed detectives from the Homicide Brigade to establish that the carpenter’s death was not a suicide.

At the crime scene, other clues were also found that helped the police become convinced of the homicide. The carpenter’s bed was positioned in a way that the victim, according to his relatives, would never have placed it; and the pencil found next to the letter left by Alegría was of a different ink color than that used to write the note.

Judge Valenzuela Patiño investigated the murders of Tucapel Jiménez and Juan Alegría for 17 years. However, despite the enormous progress made, out of fear or apathy, he never dared to advance resolutely in the case; it seemed more like the only thing he wanted was to close it and relegate it to the judicial archives.

On April 12, 1999, the Supreme Court finally decided to remove him from the case and appointed Judge Sergio Muñoz Gajardo in his place. The new magistrate personally assumed the conduct of the investigations and, in a task that will remain in the annals of Chilean justice, just three years later, on August 5, 2002, after accumulating 24 volumes, seven reserved notebooks, and 60 supplementary notebooks, he issued his first sentence for the crime of Tucapel Jiménez:

• Carlos Alberto Fernando Herrera Jiménez, Major (ret.) assigned in 1982 to the CIE Counter-Espionage Unit, as perpetrator, to the penalty of life imprisonment.
• Ramsés Arturo Álvarez Sgolia, General (ret.), former director of the DINE, as perpetrator, to the penalty of ten years of major imprisonment in its minimum degree.
• Víctor Raúl Pinto Pérez, Colonel (ret.), former commander of the CIE Counter-Espionage Unit, as perpetrator, to the penalty of eight years of major imprisonment in its minimum degree.
• Francisco Maximiliano Ferrer Lima, Lieutenant Colonel (ret.), former commander of the CIE Counter-Espionage Unit, as perpetrator, to the penalty of eight years of major imprisonment in its minimum degree.
• Miguel Segundo Letelier Verdugo, former CIE non-commissioned officer, as perpetrator, to the penalty of six years of major imprisonment in its minimum degree.
• Juan Carlos Arriagada Echeverría, Captain (ret.), former head of the CIE Special Support Unit, as accomplice, to the penalty of three years of minor imprisonment in its medium degree.
• Jorge Luis León Alessandrini, former dentist of the CIE Dental Health Department, as accomplice, to the penalty of three years of minor imprisonment in its medium degree.
• Hernán Ramírez Hald, Brigadier General (ret.), former head of CIE Counter-Intelligence, as accessory after the fact, to the penalty of 800 days of minor imprisonment in its medium degree.
• Hernán Ramírez Rurange, Brigadier General (ret.), former director of the DINE, as accessory after the fact, to the penalty of 800 days of minor imprisonment in its medium degree.
• Juan Fernando Alfredo Torres Silva, General (ret.), former Army Auditor General, as accessory after the fact, to the penalty of 800 days of minor imprisonment in its medium degree.
• Enrique Gabriel Ibarra Chamorro, Colonel (ret.), former head of Department IV of the Army General Audit, as accessory after the fact, to the penalty of 541 days of minor imprisonment in its medium degree.

Almost two years earlier, on July 19, 2002, the Third Chamber of the Santiago Court of Appeals had annulled a sentence by Judge Valenzuela Patiño and, in the second instance, had sentenced defendants Carlos Herrera Jiménez, Álvaro Corbalán Castilla, and Armando Cabrera Aguilar to life imprisonment for the murder of the carpenter Juan Alegría Mundaca.

It also applied a ten-year prison sentence to Osvaldo Pincetti Gac.

Source: interferencia.cl, May 7, 2020

Supreme Court requests Argentina to expand extradition of Carlos Herrera Jiménez

The Supreme Court requested the Argentine justice system this Thursday to expand the extradition of retired Major Carlos Herrera Jiménez, who is serving a sentence in Chile for the homicides of carpenter Juan Alegría Mundaca and ANEF leader Tucapel Jiménez Alfaro.

In a unanimous ruling, the country’s highest court ratified the request of visiting minister Joaquín Billard to extend the request against the former officer so that he can be tried for seven crimes committed in Pisagua after the military coup.

The request is important for Herrera Jiménez because when he was extradited in 1994, it was only to be tried for the homicide of Ovalle transporter Mario Fernández, and according to the Montevideo Convention, “an extradited person cannot be prosecuted or punished for crimes other than those for which the extradition was granted.”

The ruling of the highest court establishes that “consequently, as expressed in the preceding motives, the requirements are met in this case to carry out the expansion of the original request ordered regarding the aforementioned defendant.

And in accordance, furthermore, with the provisions of articles 637, 638, and 639 of the Code of Criminal Procedure; and as reported by the Substitute Prosecutor of this Supreme Court, who deems the request for expansion in question to be appropriate, it is declared that it is appropriate to request the Government of the Republic of Argentina to expand the extradition already granted of the Chilean citizen Carlos Alberto Fernando Herrera Jiménez, retired Army Officer, regarding the crimes of qualified homicide of Orlando Cabello Cabello, Nicolás Chanez Chanez, Juan Mamani García, Luis Manríquez Wilden, Hugo Martínez Guillen, Juan Rojas Osega, and Nelson Márquez Agurto,” the document states.

Herrera Jiménez, a former agent of the dissolved CNI, is imprisoned in the Punta Peuco prison and is suffering from kidney cancer.

Source: elmostrador.cl, August 5, 2010

The 15 convicted of human rights violations who are requesting parole

Among the names are former CNI operational chief Álvaro Corbalán and Carlos Herrera Jiménez, perpetrator of the assassination of Tucapel Jiménez.

After a former military officer filed a complaint with the Constitutional Court (TC) for not being included in the list of applicants for parole, the Gendarmerie released the names of the 15 individuals convicted of human rights violations who are requesting this measure, as revealed by Radio Bío Bío.

Among them, the figure of Álvaro Corbalán stands out, former operational chief of the CNI, perpetrator of the homicide of Juan Alegría Mundaca, a crime for which he is serving a life sentence.

Carlos Herrera Jiménez, material perpetrator of the assassination of union leader Tucapel Jiménez in 1982, is also seeking access to this benefit.

Another person on this list is “El Fanta,” Miguel Estay Reyno, involved in the death of four teachers in the so-called “Degollados case.”

Check the list here

Applicants for parole Carlos Enrique Blanco Plummer Ramón Pedro Cáceres Jorquera Álvaro Julio Federico Corbalán Castilla Hernán Alejandro de la Fuente Irribarra Miguel Arturo Estay Reyno Carlos Alberto Fernando Herrera Jiménez Adolfo Nicolás Lapostol Sprovera Jorge Segundo Marín Jiménez Pablo Abelardo Martínez Latorre Jorge Anibal Osses Novoa Rodrigo Pérez Martínez José Andrés Torres Riquelme Juan Artemio Valderrama Molina Erasmo Francisco Vega Sobarzo Juan Iván Vidal Ogueta

Source: t13.cl, October 10, 2019

Dictatorship murderers and torturers want a pardon

The country has been exposed to a dramatic situation because there are those who are asking for freedom or a pardon for those who violated human rights during the dictatorship and even afterward. Opinions are divided.

While it is understandable on a human and Christian level, we would have to demand the same of them regarding their victims whom they tortured, murdered, and forcibly disappeared. Many of them already have the benefits granted to prisoners, such as weekend leave, daily leave, and also parole, as several of those involved—for example—in the Degollados case were favored.

It must also be remembered that crimes against humanity are not subject to statutes of limitations, pardons, or amnesties, nor are benefits granted. Most of the sick elderly have died in the Military Hospital, surrounded by their families and very well cared for.

In fact, most of them receive pensions of over two million pesos. Justice is for everyone and must be fulfilled as such. Human life cannot be recovered, and these individuals—now elderly—when they were not, murdered hundreds of Chileans without mercy just for thinking differently. Here we remind you of some of the worst.

By María Cristina Prudant

Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko

Army Brigadier and DINA agent. Aliases: “Captain Miguel”; “Crazy Horse.” Considered one of the most bloodthirsty executioners of the concentration camps during the dictatorship. “The Cossack” Krassnoff, as he likes to be known, came from a military career.

As an Army lieutenant, he participated in the assault on the Tomás Moro presidential house. He was assigned to the DINA, where he directed the torture and extermination center of Londres 38. Starting in September 1974, he headed the Caupolicán Brigade, known for its cruelty, and also directed the Halcón 1 and 2 groups, associated with Villa Grimaldi and the José Domingo Cañas extermination camp, from which no one could leave alive.

He tortured and raped Lumi Videla, who was murdered and thrown inside the Italian Embassy. He participated in the crimes of Alfonso Chanfreau, the pregnant journalist Diana Arón, the priest Antonio Llidó, the Spaniard Carmelo Soria, and he is even identified as one of the murderers of singer-songwriter Víctor Jara.

He was decorated for the assassination of MIR leader Miguel Enríquez. He also participated in the preparation of lists for Operation Condor, which ended in the kidnapping and murder of 119 Chileans abroad.

Krassnoff is held responsible for the homicide of Jorge Fuentes Alarcón, kidnapped in Paraguay and taken to Villa Grimaldi, where he was tortured to death in “The Tower,” with Krassnoff’s direct participation.

He was injected with the rabies virus and kept locked in a small wooden cage. The military man’s criminal actions were not limited to the DINA: he was also part of the CNI, where he performed repressive duties.

His name is associated with 113 human rights cases in which hundreds of people were kidnapped, tortured, raped, and murdered. Another crime he is charged with is the near-dismemberment of teacher Marta Ugarte, whose body was returned by the waves after being thrown into the sea.

The testimonies of those who were in Villa Grimaldi, where he exterminated entire families like the Gallardo Pachecos, portray him as a being without God or Law. He has requested a pardon from the authorities.

He has accumulated 500 years of prison sentences. In 2011, the then-mayor of Providencia, Cristián Labbé, sparked a harsh controversy by organizing a tribute for the man who was part of the fearsome DINA.

Álvaro Corbalán Castilla

Corbalán, who used the alias Álvaro Valenzuela while he was part of the CNI, is in Punta Peuco serving a life sentence for a series of crimes committed during the dictatorship. Army Lieutenant Colonel, Head of the CNI Anti-Subversive Division, aliases: “Don Juan”; “Pharaoh.” Former operational chief of the CNI and top boss of the feared Borgoño Barracks, he has a modus operandi: staged events.

Cases like Operation Albania, the murder of carpenter Juan Alegría Mundaca, and journalist José “Pepe” Carrasco are part of his curriculum. In his judicial statement regarding Operation Albania, he recounted that days after the massacre, they met and celebrated with a barbecue, where they drank whiskey, hosted by General Hugo Salas Wenzel.

He took a course at the School of the Americas in January 1971. A member of the DINE, he participated in the actions of the Joint Command. Convicted of various human rights crimes. Accused of organizing the assassination of union leader Tucapel Jiménez and implicated in Operation Albania (the Corpus Christi Massacre, in which 12 members of the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front (FPMR) were murdered in June 1987).

Carlos Herrera Jiménez

Carlos Alberto Fernando Herrera Jiménez is currently in the Punta Peuco prison, in the commune of Til-Til, serving a life sentence for his responsibility in the death of union leader Tucapel Jiménez. Herrera Jiménez, a CNI agent, took a course at the School of the Americas in January 1971.

He participated in the torture sessions that caused the death of transporter Mario Fernández López, who was detained by 4 CNI agents at his home in the city of Ovalle. He was subsequently taken to that organization’s barracks in La Serena, “Casa de Piedra.” On February 25, 1982, he participated in the homicide of the president of the National Association of Fiscal Employees (ANEF), Tucapel Jiménez.

In 1991, he fled to Argentina thanks to the complicity of Prosecutor Fernando Torres Silva. Currently, the retired Army major is serving a life sentence in Punta Peuco. He was the first military man of that era who decided to ask for forgiveness for the crimes he committed, and he has also reiterated his request for a pardon, which, until now, has been rejected.

Miguel Estay Reyno, “El Fanta”

A leftist militant before the military coup, Miguel Estay Reyno later became a nightmare for his former comrades, whom he betrayed. He is sentenced to life imprisonment for the “Degollados” (Throat-Slitting) Case, in which Manuel Guerrero, whom he personally knew, was executed.

He was also amnestied in the execution and disappearance of Reinalda Pereira, who was three months pregnant. At first, it was the thesis of “my comrades or me,” to end up enjoying what he was doing. He ended up sentencing dozens of his former comrades from the Communist Party to death, many of whom he tortured personally. He was granted a pension as a victim of torture during the Pinochet regime.

José Octavio Zara Holger

Army Brigadier, born February 6, 1943, in Chillán. He belonged to the DINA’s Foreign Department and was a student at the School of the Americas, like many other Latin American military officers implicated in human rights violation trials.

Zara Holger participated in Operation Condor and in the assassination of General Carlos Prats and his wife Sofía Cuthbert in Buenos Aires on September 30, 1974. He was known for threatening the country with his “steel daggers.”

In July 2010, Zara was sentenced for these homicides to 15 years and one day along with Raúl Eduardo Iturriaga Neumann, Willike Floel, and Juan Morales Salgado, while Manuel Contreras and Pedro Espinoza were sentenced to 17 years in prison. Zara Holger was also sentenced to 100 days in jail for the illicit association organized by the DINA to commit the double crime.

Raúl Iturriaga Neumann

The start date for his sentence is August 2, 2007, and the end date is June 6, 2031. He is accused as the perpetrator of 2 qualified kidnappings of Mario Fernando Peña Solari and Nilda Patricia Peña Solari, December 1974, Santiago.

Accused as co-perpetrator of the qualified kidnapping of Jorge Arturo Grez Aburto, Operation Colombo, July 1974. He was prosecuted as co-perpetrator of 38 qualified kidnappings in 25 notebooks. (Prosecuted as co-perpetrator of the qualified kidnappings of Jaime Buzio, Mario Calderón, Cecilia Castro, Rodolfo Espejo, Albano Fioraso, Gregorio Gaete, Mauricio Jorquera, Isidro Pizarro, Marcos Quiñones, and Jilberto Urbina, Operation Colombo, between June 1974 and February 1975, Santiago).

He is definitively convicted as the perpetrator of the qualified homicides of Carlos Prats and Mrs. Sofía Cuthbert Chiarleoni, to the penalty of 15 years and 1 day of major imprisonment in its maximum degree, and as perpetrator of illicit association to the penalty of 100 days of minor imprisonment in its minimum degree; to 5 years and 1 day as perpetrator of the qualified kidnapping of Luis Dagoberto San Martín Vergara in 1974; to 5 years and 1 day as co-perpetrator of the qualified kidnappings of Mario Edrulfo Carrasco Díaz and Víctor Fernando Olea Alegría; to 3 years of minor imprisonment in its medium degree, with the benefit of conditional remission of the sentence, as perpetrator of the qualified kidnapping of Félix De la Jara Goyeneche; as co-perpetrator of 3 qualified kidnappings of Luis Genaro González Mella, Luis Omar Mahuida Esquivel, and Antonio Patricio Soto Cerna, November 1974, Santiago.

In 1976, he attended the School of the Americas in Panama again; this time it was a special course that included interrogation and torture techniques. In 1977, Iturriaga Neumann served as deputy director of intelligence at the DINA headquarters at Calle Belgrado No. 1.

In December 1975, he was appointed head of the Purén Brigade, which made dozens of prisoners disappear. This brigade originally operated out of Villa Grimaldi and subsequently at “La Venda Sexy” or the “discotheque,” which was the clandestine center at Irán 3937 in the commune of Macul.

The Purén Brigade was characterized by the sexual aberrations committed by its members, including its chief, against the female detainees. He fled in 2007 when he was supposed to turn himself in to Judge Solís to begin his five-year and one-day sentence handed down against him for the qualified kidnapping of Luis Dagoberto San Martín Vergara in 1974.

He remained a fugitive from justice for 52 days.

Sergio Carlos Arredondo González

Right-hand man of General Sergio Arellano Stark (Caravan of Death) and one of the main instigators of the coup d’état within the Army ranks from the War Academy, with privileged contacts with United States intelligence services.

Described by US intelligence reports of the time as “one of the hardline anti-communists and anti-Marxists” and a lover of good whiskey. The Cavalry officer always knew how to maintain quotas of power without occupying the leading role: his pleasure was directing the pieces from the back of the stage.

The beginning of the dictatorship bears his mark. On September 11, 1973, he was appointed Chief of Staff to General Sergio Arellano Stark, in charge of operations in Santiago, and was later his right-hand man in the fateful Caravan of Death.

Arredondo is directly involved in the crimes of nine political prisoners in Quillota in January 1974. In September 1973, he was director of the Army War Academy. And precisely in those facilities, Manuel Contreras would have the first secret DINA barracks.

Among its first operational agents were names like Pedro Espinoza, Marcelo Moren Brito, Fernández Larios, and a group of officers recruited by Arredondo to serve as riflemen in the Caravan of Death.

Hugo Salas Wenzel

Retired Army General, he was head of the CNI between October 1986 and November 1988, a period during which he led Operation Albania. This emblematic massacre of twelve people who belonged to the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front occurred between June 15 and 16, 1987, during the Corpus Christi holiday.

The official version was that they died in “clashes with security forces.” Responsible for the death of Recaredo Ignacio Valenzuela Pohorecky; Patricio Ricardo Acosta Castro; Juan Waldemar Henríquez Araya; Wilson Daniel Henríquez Gallego; and Julio Arturo Guerra Olivares.

Pedro Octavio Espinoza Bravo

Retired Army Brigadier, DINA agent, his name is inextricably linked to the so-called “Caravan of Death,” which began its tragic trajectory on October 4 in Cauquenes and ended on the 19th of the same month in Antofagasta, leaving 68 executions in its wake.

But not only executions, also massacres with daggers and bladed weapons. Extraditable. Pedro Espinoza held one of the leadership positions of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) at the beginning of the dictatorship and was one of Arellano Stark’s men.

In the Army, he has the classic image of the professional soldier, which is why he served in the DINA as head of operations and as head of the Villa Grimaldi torture center. Those close to him describe him as a reserved and at times taciturn person.

Prisoners at Villa Grimaldi agree with that perception, although they add an attachment to formalities and an admiration for values and order. He was second in command after Manuel Contreras. He was head of operations for the repressive agency and boss of Villa Grimaldi.

He is convicted of the Letelier crime and for his participation in the crime of the young American journalist Charles Horman Lazar. In 1995, he decided to voluntarily retire from the Army—after belonging to it for 46 years—due to the sentence handed down by the Supreme Court, which ratified the first-instance resolution of investigating minister Adolfo Bañados.

Espinoza was the second man in the political police, after General Manuel Contreras. Currently, he is serving a sentence for murder and kidnapping in Punta Peuco, including the qualified homicide, in Washington D.C., of former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier.

Fernando Torres Silva

He was Prosecutor and Army Auditor General, one of the strongmen of the military government, and one of the Army Justice officers appointed to participate in the War Councils established immediately after the Coup d’État.

Once that function ended, he was hired as a presidential advisor and head of the Diego Portales Legislative Secretariat. As Prosecutor and Army Auditor General, he was in charge of the main cases related to leftist groups that operated against the military regime.

In October 1997, one year before the arrest of Augusto Pinochet, he traveled to Spain to provide exculpatory evidence to Judge Manuel García Castellón, who was handling the case against the senator-for-life.

On that occasion, he reportedly presented himself as Pinochet’s lawyer, and in Spain, Torres Silva’s trip was considered the first Chilean recognition of the trial against the former Commander-in-Chief of the Army by an active-duty general.

The general, now retired, was the architect of the defense of the military officers most loyal to the dictatorship. The criminal military officers owe him a lot; thanks to his management, many trials and investigations that involved them were cut short.

He played a decisive role in the repression of the eighties in his capacity as prosecutor, and in the systematic cover-up of human rights violators. He was characterized by his abuses in the application of laws against detainees; he determined prolonged and arbitrary incommunicado detention beyond what was permitted by law, and allowed CNI agents to beat and mistreat detainees in “his” Prosecutor’s Office when they refused to cooperate.

In 2000, the Third Chamber of the Court of Appeals confirmed the prosecution of former Prosecutor Torres as an accessory after the fact to the homicide of Tucapel Jiménez, an event that occurred on February 25, 1982.

Héctor Orozco Sepúlveda

One of the last to enter Punta Peuco. Former DINE chief General (ret.) Héctor Orozco, brother of the well-known former president of “U” (Universidad de Chile), René Orozco. In September 2008, a sentence was issued against him for the qualified kidnapping of a former Army non-commissioned officer, Guillermo Jorquera.

He also has other pending cases. On January 23, 1978, non-commissioned officer Guillermo Jorquera attempted to seek asylum at the Venezuelan Embassy, being surprised by Carabineros who handed him over to the DINE.

From that moment on, there has been no knowledge of his whereabouts. In 1976, the non-commissioned officer was assigned by the DINE to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to operate in intelligence and control tasks for the Chancellery staff.

There, Jorquera handled a large amount of information, among other issues, regarding the false documentation (passport case) that the ministry gave to DINA agents who traveled to Washington to assassinate Allende’s former minister, Orlando Letelier.

At the end of 1977, the process for Jorquera’s discharge began due to events that occurred in the Chancellery related to intelligence tasks. On that date, the director of the Consular Department of that ministry, Carlos Osorio, who participated in granting false passports to agents Armando Fernández Larios and Michael Townley, with which they traveled to Paraguay to prepare the attack on Letelier, appeared “suicided.” The day he tried to seek asylum, Jorquera visited the Joint Command agent, Otto Trujillo, and told him of his decision to seek diplomatic protection because “I am sure they are going to kill me just like Osorio,” according to what Trujillo declared in the process. After that day, nothing more was ever known of Guillermo Jorquera.

FERNANDO LAURIANI MATURANA

Alias “Lieutenant Pablito.” He belonged to the DINA. In Londres 38, he was: Head of the “Vampire” group in the “Caupolicán” brigade. Head of the “Eagle” group (“The chubby ones”). He was characterized by his cruelty toward political prisoners.

Lauriani directed operations to transfer political prisoners to Colonia Dignidad, where many of them were made to disappear. Accused of the kidnapping and disappearance of the Antequera brothers. In ’91, he was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel, Chief of Staff of the 3rd Army Division.

Descendant of General Marcos Maturana del Campo (who participated in the War of the Pacific). Almost permanent interrogator of political prisoners. Most of them disappeared.

Source: cambio21.cl, January 8, 2018

by Julio Oliva García If Aylwin decreed that his term would be one of "justice to the extent possible," Lagos has definitively established "negotiated justice," of which the madness of Pinochet and the meager ruling for the assassination of Tucapel Jiménez Alfaro are clear examples.

Fifteen days ago, the family members, union leaders, and plaintiff lawyers in the Tucapel Jiménez case were overflowing with optimism. They were certain that the sentences against those involved in this horrible crime would be exemplary, especially as the investigation advanced toward the direct culpability of the Army as an institution.

However, on Monday the 5th, outside the 18th Criminal Court, their faces could not hide their surprise and disappointment: Judge Muñoz had failed them. After nearly 18 years of useless work by Minister Sergio Valenzuela Patiño, Magistrate Sergio Muñoz had advanced rapidly in the investigation of the facts, re-indicted many of those whom Valenzuela had released, and aimed his sights at the heart of the Army and its intelligence branch, the DINE.

The first-instance convictions Ramsés Arturo Alvarez Sgolia, Director of DINE, sentenced to ten years of major imprisonment in its minimum degree for his responsibility as the perpetrator of the homicide.

He is imposed the accessory penalty of absolute perpetual disqualification for public offices and political rights, absolute disqualification for titular professions for the duration of the sentence, and payment of the court costs.

Carlos Alberto Fernando Herrera Jiménez, sentenced to a single penalty of life imprisonment for his responsibility as the perpetrator of the qualified homicide of Tucapel Jiménez and Juan Alegría Mundaca.

He is imposed the accessory penalty of absolute perpetual disqualification for public offices and political rights, absolute disqualification for titular professions for the duration of the sentence, and payment of the court costs.

Víctor Raúl Pinto Pérez and Francisco Maximiliano Ferrer Lima, sentenced to eight years of major imprisonment in its minimum degree as perpetrators of the crime of qualified homicide. They are imposed the accessory penalty of absolute perpetual disqualification for public offices and political rights, absolute disqualification for titular professions for the duration of the sentence, and payment of the court costs.

Manuel Segundo Contreras Donaire and Miguel Segundo Letelier Verdugo, sentenced to six years of major imprisonment in its minimum degree as perpetrators of the crime of qualified homicide. They are imposed the accessory penalty of absolute perpetual disqualification for public offices and political rights, absolute disqualification for titular professions for the duration of the sentence, and payment of the court costs.

Juan Carlos Arriagada Echeverría and Jorge Luis León Alessandrini, sentenced to three years of minor imprisonment in its medium degree as accomplices to the crime of qualified homicide. The sentenced individuals are imposed the accessory penalty of suspension from public office during the term of the sentence and payment of court costs.

They are granted the alternative benefit of conditional remission of the sentence (signing in once a month). Hernán Ramírez Hald, Hernán Ramírez Rurange, and Juan Fernando Alfredo Torres Silva, sentenced to eight hundred days of minor imprisonment in its medium degree as accessories after the fact to the qualified homicide.

They are imposed the accessory penalty of suspension from public office during the term of the sentence and payment of court costs. They are granted the alternative benefit of conditional remission of the sentence (signing in once a month).

Enrique Gabriel Ibarra Chamorro, sentenced to five hundred and forty-one days of minor imprisonment in its medium degree as an accessory after the fact to the qualified homicide. The sentenced individual is imposed the accessory penalty of suspension from public office during the term of the sentence and payment of court costs.

He is granted the alternative benefit of conditional remission of the sentence (signing in once a month). Acquitted Roberto Urbano Schmied Zanzi, Chief of the Metropolitan Intelligence Brigade, accused as an accomplice.

Miguel Eugenio Hernández Oyarzo, Chief of the Political-Union Unit of the CNI, accused as an accomplice. Julio Olivares Silva, junior clerk at ANEF and agent of the Political-Union Unit of the CNI, accused as an accomplice.

Alvaro Corbalán Castilla, Chief of the CNI Operational Unit, accused as an accomplice. Sentenced to life imprisonment for the assassination of Juan Alegría Mundaca. The reduction of sentences Despite the large accumulation of evidence implicating CNI and DINE agents and high-ranking Army commanders, Magistrate Muñoz narrowed his focus to only a few of them, eliminating from the prosecution figures who also played a role in the crime (see box) and the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, the self-styled President of the Republic who did not let a leaf move without his consent.

Little by little, he set aside data confirming that the CNI, under Gordon's command, at least performed surveillance, phone tapping, meeting recording, and agent recruitment tasks regarding Tucapel Jiménez, such as the case of the ANEF junior clerk Julio Olivares Silva.

He also disregarded his own ruling of November 15, 2000, in which he had sentenced CNI members Alvaro Corbalán, Armando Cabrera Aguilar, and Carlos Herrera Jiménez to life imprisonment for the assassination of the carpenter Juan Alegría Mundaca, and Osvaldo Pincetti to ten years in prison.

This crime was proven to have been carried out with the sole intention of covering up the crime against the ANEF leader. On the other hand, avoiding the interpretations regarding crimes against humanity recently applied by the Supreme Court, he opted to apply mitigating measures to a large part of those convicted in the process and to dictate low sentences, based on the principle of "gradual prescription," justified by the inoperability of Valenzuela Patiño.

With that reasoning, the ruling states that "the crime remained uninterrupted until the temporary dismissal dictated in the records on April 26, 1986, became final. Then, the processing remained paralyzed for more than three years, a circumstance that determined that the prescription period for the criminal action continued to run, as if it had never been suspended, until the process was restored to summary proceedings on July 30, 1990.

Thus, between February 25, 1982, and July 30, 1990, eight years, five months, and five days elapsed, a factual antecedent that implies the passage of more than half the time established for the prescription of the criminal action to operate in this case and, therefore, leads to accepting the approach formulated by the defenses of the accused Arturo Ramses Alvarez, Víctor Pinto Pérez, Francisco Ferrer Lima, Manuel Contreras Donaire, Miguel Letelier, Hernán Ramírez Hald, Juan Carlos Arriagada, Jorge Luis León Alessandrini, Hernán Ramírez Rurange, Fernando Torres Silva, and Enrique Ibarra." Muñoz also rewarded Herrera Jiménez, unifying the sentence with the life sentence for the homicide of Alegría Mundaca, meaning that in practice he will only have to serve 20 years of effective imprisonment and opening the possibility for him to request a presidential pardon. He incorporates other benefits, citing the irreproachable prior conduct of some defendants such as Arriagada Echeverría, León Alessandrini, Ramírez Rurange, Ibarra Chamorro, Torres Silva, and Ramírez Hald, who were granted the remission of the custodial sentence, having to sign in only once a month. Despite having no prior convictions, Torres Silva has been accused of the torture that affected numerous political prisoners, and Ramírez Hald is implicated in the disappearance of the young student from the Liceo Industrial de Maipú, José Flores. In this way, the final sentences bear no relation to the horror of the crime nor to the aggravating factors of premeditation, treachery, cruelty, and assassination in an unpopulated area in which it was committed. Nor to the fact that the perpetrators had the absolute protection of the State, that the negligence of a recognized Pinochet-supporting judge deliberately lengthened the process, and that the Army itself persistently denied its collaboration. Those who escaped unscathed It is strange in the resolution that many of those involved were not part of the conviction; beyond the inexplicable acquittal of Alvaro Corbalán, Miguel Hernández Oyarzo, Julio Olivares Silva, and Roberto Schmied Zanzi, there are other figures who had a clear participation in the crime and were not even considered in the resolution. These are, for example, the members of the National Secretariat of Guilds and the National Syndicalist Revolutionary Movement, headed by Misael Galleguillos Vásquez, Valericio Orrego Salas, and Raúl Manolo Lillo Gutierrez, who spied on the actions of this "traitor to the fatherland," providing information to their superiors in the Directorate of Civil Organizations and the General Undersecretariat of Government, under the command of today's UDI Senator Jovino Novoa Vásquez. It is not unknown that from this department there were reserved expenses to finance allied paramilitary groups. Even among the proceedings requested by the plaintiffs was the confrontation of Novoa with Sergio Fernández and Enrique Montero Marx, who held the position of Minister of the Interior near the date of the assassination. Galleguillos is linked to the planning of the crime, while Valericio Orrego contacted CNI agents for the surveillance of Tucapel Jiménez and the "Group of 10," and an Opala car used in the crime was allegedly his property. Lillo Gutiérrez also acted as a spy for opposition union groups. Among the accomplices to the crime, as the investigation merited, also appeared the agents assigned to the espionage of union leaders: Nelson Hernández Franco, alias "Marcos de la Fuente"; Héctor Lira Aravena; Luis Pino Moreno; and José Ramírez Romero, alias "Carlos Santander." Patricio Pezoa Araya, an employee of a DC union leader, allegedly spied on the "Group of 10" and made contact with the three CNI agents who were following Tucapel Jiménez. Army Captain Raúl Descalzi Sporke, who was always considered among the perpetrators, is also not on the final list. It also does not name the Carabineros sub-officer (ret.) Luis Pinto Moreno, initially indicted as an accomplice, and the Army captain (ret.) and member of the DINE, Arturo Silva Valdés, who had been prosecuted as an accessory after the fact for his participation in the escape of Herrera Jiménez to Argentina. Last year, Judge Muñoz had considered Army sub-officer Humberto Calderón Luna, chief of personnel of the CNI in 1982, among the perpetrators; he does not appear among the convicted despite being the one who allegedly recruited Galvarino Ancavil to obtain the weapons used in the crime. Ancavil Hernández, who was always linked to the process, is allegedly in France and never appeared before the judge. This should not be an obstacle to convicting him in absentia for having provided the weapons—a .22 caliber Pasper and a .32 caliber—used in the assassination. Finally, Humberto Gordón Rubio, Director of the CNI at the time, was acquitted due to his death. Pinochet's orders Although for Magistrate Muñoz there was not enough evidence to consider the dictator in the process, Augusto Pinochet Ugarte played a central role in the decision to eliminate Jiménez and in the subsequent cover-up maneuvers. Alerted by Jovino Novoa and his union leaders from the National Secretariat of Guilds, Pinochet learned of the "betrayal" that the former ally Tucapel Jiménez was preparing. The same man who defended the military junta abroad after the first months of the coup d'état was, at the beginning of the 80s, part of the opposition group that was politically linked to the former Commander-in-Chief of the FACH, Gustavo Leigh Guzmán. In the summer of 1982, Jiménez Alfaro was making a broad call for worker unity against the regime, meeting with Manuel Bustos and other union leaders for that purpose. The meetings at Leigh's house were becoming more frequent. The figure of the ANEF leader was becoming dangerous. On February 21, 1982, at a title deed delivery ceremony in Calbuco, Augusto Pinochet stated: "Logically, when there are these small negative momentary actions, the usual ones appear. The usual negative ones appear, and to them I send this message today: the government tolerates many things, but it will never tolerate going back. It will never tolerate that some entrenched ones are acting in a negative way and trying to sow discord in the minds of the workers. Therefore, I dare to say to those who are currently carrying out actions contrary to the Government: be very careful, gentlemen, because you too can end up outside the country." He then added: "And those who have signed letters, telegrams, or cables to communist entities abroad are as communist as those, because, gentlemen, tell me who you walk with and I will tell you who you are. If they cling to a communist action, they are as communist as those who are acting." The expressions, widely reproduced by the media, signed Jiménez's death warrant. Only four days later it would be made effective. The cover-up Carlos Herrera Jiménez has maintained repeatedly, since he acknowledged his participation in the events, that at the moment he was exposed to the planning for the physical elimination of Tucapel Jiménez, it was indicated to him that Arturo Alvarez Sgolia, Director of Army Intelligence, was aware of it, who also, once the events were executed, held a meeting with those who took part in those actions or had knowledge of them, in which he forbade them from referring to the subject in their conversations. He states that Alvarez directly congratulated him for the action carried out, telling him to be calm, that nothing would happen to him, and that he had "done a great favor to the fatherland." Herrera recognizes that the order was arranged by his direct boss, Francisco Ferrer Lima, which was reiterated to him by the superior, commander of the Army Intelligence Corps Víctor Pinto Pérez, expressing to him that it had been ordered or was known by the Director of Army Intelligence, Arturo Alvarez Sgolia, and, furthermore, that it had been arranged or was known by "the Command," which he understood to refer to the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, to which it was added that Tucapel Jiménez was a traitor to the fatherland, that he was causing much damage to the country, and that his elimination was necessary. Francisco Ferrer Lima, a participant in a meeting after the crime, declared that Alvarez requested all officials of the Army Intelligence Corps who took part in the events not to say anymore that such events had been arranged by General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, that he assumed all responsibility. Pinochet himself, in his book Camino recorrido, tried to leave the responsibility on Alvarez by saying that the death of Jiménez Alfaro could have been arranged by "a hothead without remedy." The Chief of the General Staff of the Army at the time, Enrique Morel Donoso, declared in the process that: "if the event is linked to the Army Intelligence Directorate, it would be the product of the personal initiative of its Director, Arturo Alvarez Sgolia, whom I consider a very intelligent person, but in a certain way lacking in judgment." On January 17, 1992, faced with some advances in the investigations into human rights violations, Pinochet Ugarte gave a command order to the Army Auditor General Fernando Torres Silva: he had to create the Department of Study and Planning. The functions of this new body were aimed at refining the defense strategies of the uniformed personnel, which included the possibility of taking some out of the country, covered in a language that defined: "analyzing the procedural situations that the institution could face, from political, communicational, and intelligence points of view." The unit was created between the end of 1992 and the beginning of 1993, assigning to it the CNI lawyers who had been assigned to the General Audit. Under Torres Silva's command was Enrique Ibarra, in his capacity as Chief of Department IV of the Audit. Among the favors granted are the hiding of Osvaldo Romo Mena in Brazil, of Miguel Fanta Estay Reino in that country and Paraguay, and the departure of Herrera Jiménez to Argentina. At the end of 1982, Carlos Herrera Jiménez allegedly met with Alvaro Corbalán to request his reincorporation into the CNI, telling him about the crime against Tucapel. After that, they talked with Gordon, who took Herrera to La Moneda, he interviewed Augusto Pinochet, and, upon leaving, he told him that the President sent him his recognition, that he congratulated him, and that he would keep him in mind in the future. Uniformed pressures Just as in the case of Pinochet's dismissal, before this ruling was known, the visits of government officials and uniformed personnel to the Courts were reactivated. Already in January of this year, the defense lawyers for the criminals requested Muñoz to declare himself incompetent to give way to Military Justice. Jorge Balmaceda Morales, Juan Carlos Manns, and José Luis Sotomayor framed their request in the so-called "exceptions of prior and special pronouncement," which the Code of Criminal Procedure contemplates, and which refer to the declination of jurisdiction and the prescription of the criminal action due to the time elapsed since the crime occurred, which are in the stage of issuing charges, a phase prior to the first-instance convictions that would be dictated by the magistrate. They also tried to have Muñoz declare the crime prescribed and stop the investigation so that the military courts could take charge of the case. In the final stage of the investigation, the Army began to operate desperately; the liaison officers who supposedly cared about the well-being of the defendants were dedicated to bringing information to the DINE and Torres Silva to redesign the defense planning, and they threatened the detainees who were providing collaboration. Ricardo Opazo Wildner, Herrera Jiménez's liaison, threatened him directly, pointing out that his attitude would have negative consequences for his personal safety and that of his family. The decision for Herrera Jiménez to leave Chile was taken by Torres Silva and Ibarra, who thus fulfilled Pinochet's mandate to help the defendants, included in his command order to create the Department of Study and Planning of the Army General Audit. Although Juan Emilio Cheyre says he abides by the resolutions of Justice, his private visits to the Palace of Courts are known, as is his refusal to help in this case, in which the judge had to resort to other means to know the list of DINE members in 1982, and in the process for the executed and disappeared of Cerro Chena, where Judge Cecilia Flores has been systematically denied all collaboration. In the case of Judge Mario Carroza, in charge among others of the process for the disappearance of Domingo Blanco Tarres, his requests have not been accepted or he has been sent irrelevant documents that delay the investigative stage. These are just some of the cases in which the words of the Commander-in-Chief contrast brutally with reality. Fifteen days before the ruling was known, when the family members, union leaders, and plaintiff lawyers were still overflowing with optimism, a strange incident caused the delivery of the sentences to be delayed: the judge's computer had suffered a failure. Everything indicates that, between that failure and Monday, August 5, something happened on the magistrate's computer that ended the optimism reigning in the circle close to Tucapel Jiménez Alfaro.

Source: rebelion.org, August 10, 2002

Major (ret.) Carlos Herrera asked Pinochet to acknowledge his errors

According to the former agent of the National Information Center (CNI), the former dictator must "take a step of honesty, of military honor." Retired Army Major Carlos Herrera Jiménez, sentenced to life imprisonment in the Tucapel Jiménez case, asked that Augusto Pinochet, "sick, healthy, or imprisoned," admit his errors in human rights matters for his "soldier's honor." Herrera Jiménez made these statements to Televisión Nacional on Thursday night, on the occasion of having begun to serve the life sentence imposed on him as the material perpetrator of the assassination of the union leader and the carpenter Juan Alegría. In his opinion, the "mea culpa" of the former Chilean dictator (1973-1990), dismissed in several cases regarding human rights violations because according to the Supreme Court he suffers from "irreversible vascular dementia," would be the first step toward national reconciliation. "He who was commander-in-chief of the Army at that time, General Augusto Pinochet, sick or not sick, healthy or not healthy, imprisoned or not imprisoned, as a soldier should have taken a step of honesty, of military honor," said the retired major. Carlos Herrera Jiménez, who was an agent of the National Information Center (CNI), has cancer and confessed before the justice system his authorship of the crimes for which he was sentenced to life imprisonment, which he began serving on the night of March 31 at the special prison of Punta Peuco, 30 kilometers north of Santiago. "So that the successes that the military government had are recognized, we must also, of course, take charge of the errors of one and another," stressed the former agent. Herrera Jiménez also reiterated his repentance for his participation in the crimes and repeated that he obeyed the orders of his superiors who convinced him that he was eliminating enemies of the fatherland. During the process, the former agent accused on several occasions the Army commands of the time and the Intelligence Directorate (DINE) of having abandoned their subordinates in these processes. Tucapel Jiménez was kidnapped and assassinated in February 1982, when he was working to reorganize the Chilean union movement and in particular the civil resistance against the dictatorship. Herrera Jiménez was also convicted for the homicide, on September 12, 1983, of the carpenter Juan Alegría Mundaca, whom CNI and DINE agents killed to try to cover up the assassination of the union leader. The carpenter was found dead in his house with his wrists slit and next to him a letter in which the man explained that he was committing suicide because of the remorse he felt for having killed the unionist. The setup was discovered almost immediately. For these crimes, in addition to Herrera Jiménez, the former head of the DINE Arturo Alvarez Sgolia and four other military personnel were sentenced to eight years in prison.

Source: cooperativa.cl, April 2, 2004

Supreme Court asked Argentina to expand extradition for former CNI agent

The Supreme Court requested Argentina to expand the extradition of former National Information Center (CNI) agent Carlos Herrera Jiménez, who is serving a sentence for the assassination of Tucapel Jiménez Alfaro and Juan Alegría Mundaca.

Unanimously, the ministers of the Second Chamber of the highest court agreed to the request of the minister visiting for human rights cases of the Court of Appeals of Valparaíso, Julio Miranda Lillo, to expand the charges against Herrera Jiménez and thus be able to prosecute him for his responsibility in the homicides of Luis Tamayo Lazcano, David Miño Logan, Marcelo Miño Logan, and José Medel Rivas.

All the assassinations were perpetrated between 1983 and 1985, in the Valparaíso Region. The ruling accounts for "the existence of sufficient means of conviction that satisfy the requirements established in article 274 of the cited legal text and that would allow his submission to process.

Also fulfilled, as the pieces of the compiled processes confirm, are all the requirements contemplated in the second paragraph of the First consideration of this resolution." Luis Tamayo Lazcano was executed on August 12, 1984, at Cerro Los Placeres in Valparaíso.

The brothers David and Marcelo Miño Logan were executed on January 19, 1985, at the intersection of Avenida Valparaíso and Yungay, in the commune of Quillota. José Daniel Medel Rivas was killed on January 28, 1983, on the highway between La Calera and Quillota. "The request proceeds" "The authorization of the requested person is not a requirement of the request for expansion of extradition, but it is when the requesting country decides to prosecute and punish the individual for a common crime committed prior to the extradition request and which has not been included in it, as peremptorily provided by section a) of article XVII of the Convention," the magistrates indicated. They added that "the lack of a prior indictment against the requested person and the issuance of arrest warrants in the cases instructed against him do not hinder what was decided and obey the fact that the procedure or diligence being carried out is a request for expansion of an extradition already granted and with full compliance with the provisions of section b) of article XVII of the Convention. That, as the Judicial Public Ministry also expresses, under these conditions the extradition request under study proceeds, as all the requirements contemplated in national legislation and in the cited Convention are met." The request was ruled on by magistrates Milton Juica, Lamberto Cisternas, and Juan Escobar (substitute), in addition to the participating lawyers Luis Bates and Jorge Lagos.

Source: cooperativa.cl, December 20, 2013

Sentence dictated for eleven crimes of kidnapping and homicide in Pisagua prisoner camp

The minister on extraordinary visit for human rights violation cases of the Santiago Court of Appeals, Mario Carroza, dictated a sentence in the investigation he is substantiating for the crime of kidnapping and qualified homicide of eleven prisoners, illicit acts perpetrated in October 1973 and January 1974, respectively, in the town of Pisagua.

In the ruling (case roll 2182-98), dictated this Wednesday the 23rd, the presiding minister sentenced former Army major Carlos Alberto Fernando Herrera Jiménez to a single penalty of 12 years of imprisonment for his responsibility in the qualified homicides of Orlando Tomás Cabello Cabello, Nicolás Chanez Chanez, Juan Apolinario Mamani García, Luis Aníbal Manríquez Wilden, Hugo Tomás Martínez Guillén, and Juan Rojas Osega, perpetrated on January 29, 1974; and of Nelson José Márquez Agusto, executed on January 18, 1974.

Meanwhile, former Army sub-officer Miguel Chile Aguirre Álvarez must serve 10 years and one day for the repeated crimes of aggravated kidnapping of Rodolfo Jacinto Fuenzalida Fernández, Juan Antonio Ruz Díaz, José Demóstenes Rosier Sampson Ocaranza, and Freddy Marcelo Taberna Gallegos, perpetrated on October 29, 1973.

Likewise, Minister Carroza decreed the acquittal of former Carabineros major Manuel Rogelio del Carmen Vega Collao for not proving his participation in these crimes. Herrera Jiménez is the same one who, with the cover name of "Marcos Belmar" and the alias of "Bocaccio," later continued his criminal actions in the DINA, the CNI, and the DINE, and currently remains serving a sentence in Punta Peuco for other crimes.

The facts In the investigation stage, Minister Carroza managed to establish the following sequence of events: «a.- That the illicit acts that occurred after September 11, 1973, in the city of Iquique, began at the General Headquarters of the Sixth Division of the Army, at that time commanded by General Ernesto Carlos Joaquín Forestier Haensgen, who, once the Military Coup occurred, created a repressive body of militants or sympathizers of left-wing parties and/or opponents of the Military Government, and included in that group people whom the Military Prosecutor and former Criminal Judge of Iquique, Mario Acuña Riquelme, for personal reasons, decided to hold responsible for alleged illicit acts committed in the area prior to the establishment of the Military Government. In the fulfillment of this work of mutilating individual guarantees, this Army officer and the Military Prosecutor of the time created the Regional Intelligence Body, CIRE, with personnel from the Intelligence Department of the Sixth Division of the Army and the Civil Commission of the First Police Station of Iquique; b.- That all operations carried out by CIRE agents in the city of Iquique, arbitrary and restrictive of rights, were with evident transgression of fundamental rights and were not limited to raids and arrests of civilians and military personnel, but also intimidated numerous people in the area to present themselves at the General Headquarters of the Sixth Division, under threat of shooting them if they did not present themselves and were found on public roads; for this, military decrees that were publicized through the media were used; c.- That, as a consequence of these actions, an indeterminate number of people were deprived of liberty, transferred to the Telecommunications Regiment of the city of Iquique, subjected to intense interrogations under torture, and some of them, as happened with the victims of this process, were sent to the Prisoner of War Camp that was located in the town of Pisagua, transformed at that time into a military unit under the command of Army Officer Major Ramón Ibarra Ibarra, which also received nearly 270 detainees transferred by sea by the Chilean Navy on the Merchant Ship Maipo; d.- That in the Pisagua Prisoner Camp, the detainees were locked in shared cells and every so often, taken out of their place of confinement to be interrogated and/or on occasions to be given "softening" beatings, thus forcing them to sign blank documents, the same ones that subsequently constituted a confession of crimes of treason to the fatherland, with which the Military Prosecutor Acuña justified fallacious accusations before spurious War Councils, which were no obstacle for this Military Prosecutor to request on occasions the death penalty for the prisoners, whose only crime was their ideology, and which once imposed was executed within twenty-four hours with firing squads in the northern area of the town of Pisagua. These rulings were ratified by Regional Commander Forestier and executed by personnel of the Army and other institutions; e.- That these procedures, essentially arbitrary and unjust, which included kidnappings, confinement, interrogations, torture, and on occasions summary executions, were directed by the Military Prosecutor and Former Criminal Judge Mario Acuña Riquelme, by virtue of crimes admitted under torture; despite this, they constituted the basis for figurative War Councils and endorsed the despotic defenselessness to which the prisoners were subjected by the military hierarchy, in a framework lacking impartiality and with absolute contempt for the norms of due process. The above is evidenced because in the records there is no record or antecedent that proves that the victims were allowed a timely and effective defense, much less when in those cases in which the death penalty was applied, it was not even applied with strict adherence to the law of the time, but on the contrary, it was with open violation of the requirements that the law demanded for these cases, as in the one that concerns us today, where the capital penalty is applied without the unanimity of its members, but that for others was not even taken into consideration, but arbitrarily it was decided that they should be executed without a War Council, only supported by considerations that only their captors knew or in the so-called "Law of Flight"; By virtue of what was expressed above, it is possible to infer three illicit facts; I.-) That Orlando Tomás Cabello Cabello, Nicolás Chanez Chanez, Juan Apolinario Mamani García, Luis Aníbal Manríquez Wilden, Hugo Tomás Martínez Guillén, and Juan Rojas Osega were arrested in the city of Iquique in the month of November 1973 and taken to the Telecommunications Regiment of the same city, then after a time transferred to the Pisagua Political Prisoner Camp, both units dependent on the General Command of the VI Division of the Army, under the command of Army General don Carlos Forestier Haensgen, currently deceased. The detainees had no political militancy nor did they carry out any type of subversive activity, but they were branded by the military authorities as being authors of crimes of merchandise smuggling and/or drug trafficking, without any basis that had proven it. One day in the month of January 1974, it was informed to the citizenry and their families, by a military decree, that the aforementioned prisoners had been released at the intersection of the Pisagua Road and the Pan-American highway. However, on the occasion of the discovery and exhumation of human remains found in a clandestine grave found on the side of the Pisagua cemetery in the year 1990, their bodies were found in a grave, all with their hands tied, their eyes blindfolded, and a red circle adhered to their clothes at the height of the heart; each one of them was wrapped in burlap sacks and they were buried with other prisoners who received the same punitive sanction. The forensic medical examinations that were carried out on these human remains determined that the cause of their deaths was multiple gunshot wounds, the product of an execution, prior to their bodies being bagged and buried in the grave; II.-) That Nelson José Márquez Agusto, a militant of the Communist Party, was arrested in Iquique after September 11, 1973, and transferred to the Pisagua Prisoner of War Camp, where he was kept for about four months with repeated physical punishments, which increased with the visit of General Oscar Bonilla, a military authority before whom he denounced mistreatment by the military who guarded him. In view of this violence to his person, Márquez's mental state deteriorated, so his captors decided to leave him without custody in a field located in front of the Public Jail, a matter that allowed him to make an attempt to go down to the pier to flee, but he was discovered and despite orders he did not stop, so a search was initiated under the "law of flight" and he was managed to be arrested; subsequently, he was given a "lesson" beating and transferred again to the Jail; later they went to look for him and on the beach adjacent to the Pisagua theater it was decided to execute him as a lesson and example for the other prisoners, without there being any motive that made it necessary, only to prevent other detainees from deciding to follow his example and attempt to escape; III.-) That on October 29, 1973, in the town of Pisagua, Tarapacá Region, a War Council was held and it was resolved to condemn to death Freddy Marcelo Taberna Gallegos, José Demóstenes Rosiel Sampson Ocaranza, Juan Antonio Ruz Díaz, and Rodolfo Jacinto Fuenzalida Fernández, who at the time were deprived of liberty in the prisoner camp existing in that town; as a consequence of this, they were executed on the north side of the Cemetery of that place, without the whereabouts of their remains being known to date, so it has not been possible to verify their deaths, a situation that persists to this day». As is known, this ruling is of the first instance, which implies that the sentence could be appealed to higher instances before being executed.

Source: resumen.cl, November 25, 2016

Six former CNI agents prosecuted for illegal detention, kidnapping, and torture during the Dictatorship

In the resolution, Minister Jaime Arancibia identified as authors of the crimes Carlos Herrera Jiménez, Máximo Lara Lara, Manuel Sergio Aliro Álvarez Lucero, Osvaldo Emilio Fredes Fredes, Manuel José Pastén Vera, and Leoncio Velásquez Guala, for their responsibility in the consummated crimes of illegal detention, kidnapping, and application of torture to Pablo Emilio Hernández Dubo that occurred in 1983.

The minister on extraordinary visit for human rights violation cases of the Court of Appeals of Valparaíso, Jaime Arancibia Pinto, dictated an indictment against six former State agents for their responsibility in the consummated crimes of illegal detention, kidnapping, and application of torture to Pablo Emilio Hernández Dubo, illicit acts perpetrated in October 1983, in Quillota and Viña del Mar.

In said resolution, Minister Arancibia identified as authors of the crimes Carlos Herrera Jiménez, Máximo Lara Lara, Manuel Sergio Aliro Álvarez Lucero, Osvaldo Emilio Fredes Fredes, Manuel José Pastén Vera, and Leoncio Velásquez Guala.

With the antecedents collected during the investigation stage of the case, the visiting minister managed to establish that «on October 13, 1983, the victim, Pablo Emilio Hernández Dubo, was arrested by State Agents at his home in Quillota».

The document details that the victim «is transferred in a car with his eyes blindfolded to the CNI barracks that was located on Agua Santa or Habana street in the city of Viña del Mar. On the way, he is interrogated by his captors, who gave him punches to his head.

When they arrive at their destination, he is led to a basement, the interrogations continue, they performed the "submarine" on him, consisting of them taking him by his feet, submerging him in a drum with liquid, taking him out, repeating this operation until achieving some confession, also applying the "telephone," which was blows with open hands to both ears; he was treated throughout the night with violent punches to different parts of his body.

The dawn of the following day, they again take him to a room, he was with his eyes blindfolded, they lay him on a metal bed, called a "grill," they undressed him, tied him up, applying electric current». «He remained in this place for seven days.

The victim recognizes those who assaulted him in the barracks as the same subjects who carried out his arrest. As a consequence of the mistreatment, the victim resulted with strong spinal pains, has damaged vertebrae, and acute disabilities related to open-palm blows to the ears, and with greater psychological damage, he feels persecuted, could not sleep, thus configuring the crimes of Illegal Detention, Kidnapping with grave damage, and Application of Torture,» he adds.

In the resolution, finally, Minister Arancibia adds that «Bearing in mind the health situation of the country on the occasion of COVID-19 and being the majority of those prosecuted elderly people, keep these detainees in their respective homes, under the custody of Carabineros of their sector, with the exception of the prosecuted Carlos Herrera Jiménez, who is serving a sentence in the Punta Peuco Prison, while the resolution that will grant them provisional release is approved and which will be dictated next in a consultation procedure before the Court of Appeals of Valparaíso».

Source: eldesconcierto.cl, June 26, 2020

Convictions confirmed against three former uniformed personnel for homicides and kidnappings committed in Pisagua during the dictatorship

The Supreme Court sentenced three former uniformed personnel for their responsibility in the consummated and repeated crimes of qualified homicide and aggravated kidnapping, perpetrated in the town of Pisagua, between October 1973 and January 1974. In a unanimous