44 years old, farmer, forcibly disappeared on October 11, 1973, in Lautaro. José Domingo Llabulén Pilquinao, a member of the Communist Party, disappeared that day in Lautaro after being detained by Carabineros officers belonging to the police station of that city.

According to the testimony provided by his son, an eyewitness to the events, José Llabulén was detained by Carabineros while traveling on a bus from the city of Lautaro to his home, located in the Quiñaco-Manzanal indigenous reservation.

The captors, after forcing him off the bus, took him away in an official pickup truck to an unknown destination; to this date, there is no news regarding his whereabouts. His detention was denied at the Lautaro Carabineros station.

The Rettig Report recorded nine cases of people of Mapuche origin who disappeared after being detained in the vicinity of the city of Lautaro by Carabineros officials. All of them were classified as victims of human rights violations.

Considering the evidence gathered and the investigation conducted, the Superior Council of this Corporation reached the conviction that José Domingo Llabulén Pilquinao was detained by State agents and disappeared while being held in that capacity. Consequently, it declared him a victim of human rights violations.

Source: (Corporation Report)

The Supreme Court accepted the appeal in cassation and sentenced a retired Carabineros officer and non-commissioned officer for their responsibility in the crime of qualified kidnapping of the farmer José Domingo Llabulén Pilquinao, an illicit act committed starting on October 11, 1973, in the commune of Lautaro, La Araucanía region.

In a unanimous ruling, the Second Chamber of the highest court—composed of ministers Haroldo Brito, Leopoldo Llanos, Jorge Zepeda, and lawyers (ad hoc) Pía Tavolari and Carolina Coppo—confirmed the first-instance sentence that sentenced the then-major Jorge Enrique Schweizer Gómez and corporal Domingo Antonio Campos Collao to 12 years in prison as perpetrators of the crime, establishing an error of law in the challenged sentence, issued by the Temuco Court of Appeals, which had applied the "half-prescription" (media prescripción) and reduced the first-instance sentence. "Regarding the erroneous application of Article 103 of the Penal Code denounced by the appeal under study, as this Court has repeatedly held, given that both the half-prescription and the cause for the extinction of criminal liability are based on the passage of time as a justifying element for their application, the impropriety of applying total prescription necessarily extends to partial prescription, since both institutions are based on the same element that is rejected by the international humanitarian penal order when dealing with a crime against humanity such as the one in question, so that neither of these institutes is acceptable in the present case," states the Supreme Court ruling. For the Criminal Chamber: "(...) by resolving in the opposite sense, the challenged sentence has incurred in the invoked cause of Article 546 No. 1 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, because, although it qualifies the crime in accordance with the law, it imposes on the defendants a less severe penalty than that designated therein, committing an error of law by agreeing to a reduction that, according to international human rights regulations, is inappropriate, an error that, furthermore, has had a substantial influence on the operative part of the ruling, because it allowed for a two-degree reduction of the penalty that could not have been reached otherwise." "Regarding the mistaken rejection of the aggravating circumstance of Article 12 No. 8 of the Penal Code, which the appellant also reproaches, without prejudice to what will be determined in the replacement sentence, it should be clarified that such an error does not have a substantial influence on the operative part of the challenged ruling, since the two-degree reduction erroneously carried out by it can be based solely on the aforementioned Article 103, without the fact of having declared that the aggravating circumstance of Article 12 No. 8 prejudices the accused having hindered that reduction, even less so if this, in any scenario of penalty determination, must be compensated with the mitigating circumstance of Article 11 No. 6 that favors all of them." Regarding the third person convicted in the case, the Carabineros captain at the time of the events, Marcial Edmundo Vera Ríos, who passed away on September 1, 2019, the Supreme Court excludes him from this resolution, and the first-instance judge must "obtain the respective certificate and issue the resolution that corresponds by law."

Source: vivepais.cl, October 23, 2021

Date: 10-23-2021

José Domingo Llabulén Pilquinao, a member of the PC (Communist Party), was abducted in front of two of his children in Lautaro (La Araucanía Region) one month after the military coup. Jorge Enrique Schweizer Gómez and Domingo Antonio Campos Collao, a retired major and corporal, respectively, were sentenced to 12 years in prison.

During the dictatorship (1973-1990), according to official data, some 2,300 people died at the hands of State agents, of whom 1,192 remain as forcibly disappeared and another 33,000 were tortured and imprisoned for political reasons.

The Supreme Court accepted an appeal in cassation and sentenced two retired Carabineros officials this Friday to 12 years in prison for the qualified kidnapping (forced disappearance) of the farmer José Domingo Llabulén Pilquinao, a member of the Communist Party, committed in the southern commune of Lautaro, La Araucanía Region, on October 11, 1973, one month after the military coup that began the dictatorship.

The II Chamber of the highest court unanimously ratified the sentence issued in the first instance by Judge Álvaro Mesa, which sentenced the then-major Jorge Enrique Schweizer Gómez and corporal Domingo Antonio Campos Collao as perpetrators of the crime.

The magistrates established an "error of law" in a sentence issued by the Temuco Court of Appeals, which had applied the half-prescription and reduced the first-instance sentence. Regarding the third person convicted in the case, the former captain Marcial Edmundo Vera Ríos, who passed away on September 1, 2019, the Supreme Court excluded him from this resolution, and Judge Mesa must "obtain the respective certificate and issue the resolution that corresponds by law."

KIDNAPPED IN FRONT OF HIS CHILDREN

Regarding the case, the first-instance ruling established that the victim, 44, "was traveling on a rural bus route from Lautaro to his home located in the Quiñaco-Manzanal indigenous community, along with two of his children" on October 11, 1973, when "at a certain point on the road the bus was intercepted by a Carabineros patrol from the 1st Lautaro Police Station that was moving in a private pickup truck, ordering the driver of the vehicle to stop." "Immediately afterward, they made all the passengers get off the bus, subsequently taking José Domingo Llabulén Pilquinao into custody, whom they loaded into the pickup truck in which the patrol was moving, apparently without carrying a judicial order that authorized them for such an act," the investigation noted. "The patrol immediately headed to the Lautaro Police Station, followed by the Llabulén Llaulén brothers (the victim's children), who were able to see the moment their father was taken off the vehicle and entered into the unit, this being the last time they had news about their father's whereabouts," it indicated. During the dictatorship (1973-1990), according to official data, some 2,300 people died at the hands of State agents, of whom 1,192 remain as forcibly disappeared and another 33,000 were tortured and imprisoned for political reasons.

Source: cooperativa.cl, October 23, 2021

Date: 10-23-2021

Chile: The Lautaro Patrol, the secret police that made Mapuches disappear during the dictatorship.

Retired Carabinero Domingo Campos Collao is the latest person convicted in La Araucanía to enter the Punta Peuco prison. Last August, he left the Temuco Court of Appeals escorted by prison guards and accompanied by his son to serve a sentence of five years and one day for his responsibility as a perpetrator of the kidnapping of Gervasio Huaiquil Calviqueo, a Mapuche with no political affiliation detained by the Lautaro Patrol.

This group was composed of military personnel and Carabineros who, under a supposed "cleaning of cattle rustlers," detained and made Mapuches disappear in the Cautín province during the dictatorship. Manuela (43) was the one who had the idea in the family to commemorate her father at the end of this month with a mass in the chapel of Lautaro, in La Araucanía.

When the priest asked her for the reason, if it was in memory of a deceased person, the only thing she could answer was: −"It's just that, we don't know, Father. But if that's not the case, I would like to think that by now, he would have remembered the family, but we don't know," she told him.

Gervasio Héctor Huaiquil Calviqueo would be 69 years old today. After the Patrol detained him on October 26, 1975, his mother Mercedes Huaiquilao (75) tried not to alter their routines too much. She would tell his siblings not to be late coming back from school, that their dad would arrive in the afternoon, and for dinner, she would leave a place set for him.

Over time, that wait became unsustainable, and it was better not to talk so much about what had happened to their dad. They had to go on. At that time, Manuela was only six months old, and everything she knows about Gervasio has been through the accounts of others.

Since she came to work in Santiago, she says that she has inevitably kept looking for him. And although she has no photographic references, not even his ID photo, she imagines him as one of her brothers who, according to what Mercedes has told her, looks a lot like him. −"I always look at the faces of the people sleeping in the plazas, in the streets.

Could it be that they beat him so much that he forgot about us? Could it be my old man who is there?" Manuela sometimes thinks. On August 29, retired Carabinero Domingo Campos Collao, one of the members of the Lautaro Patrol, left the Temuco Court of Appeals escorted by prison guards and accompanied by his son, bound for Punta Peuco prison.

The court sentenced him to five years and one day for his responsibility as a perpetrator of the qualified kidnapping of Gervasio Huaiquil, a Mapuche farmer with no political affiliation. Manuela says that after his detention, the Carabineros and military personnel who made up this secret police locked them in and set fire to the ruka of the community in which they lived.

If it hadn't been for the help of the neighbors, she, her mother, and her siblings would have burned to death inside. From that moment, the voice of one of the Carabineros remained etched in the memory of Mercedes, her mother: "Let's set fire to these fucking Indians." That Wednesday in August, the family's lawyer told Manuela to tune in to the regional channel because Collao was appearing live as he left the court.

She was not able to watch it; nor did she want to meet him in person at the trial hearings. She says that what her mother told her about the confrontation they had a few years ago was enough. The rage and the pain are transmitted.

A cleaning of cattle rustlers On the same day as the Coup, the military quartered themselves in the La Concepción Regiment, and the Carabineros also remained confined to the first police station of Lautaro.

Some declared that for months they were performing administrative duties; they slept in the Carabineros' archive offices without leaving the barracks. When Colonel Hernán Ramírez Ramírez took power of the governorship that until that September was headed by the communist Fernando Teillier, father of the writer Jorge Teillier, they requisitioned a dark green pickup truck with a white roof.

That vehicle became the hallmark of the Patrol, a group specially formed to detain opponents of the dictatorship in the province of Cautín and its surroundings. Of the members of this secret police, four of them today carry a "Rest in Peace" (Q.E.P.D.) in judicial documents: Lieutenant Orlando Huerta Ávila, the man who gave the orders, Juvenal Sanhueza, Enrique Ferrier, and Mario Ponce Orellana, while Domingo Campos Collao has been in prison for a few months.

The group had an exclusive office assigned inside the barracks where they interrogated the detainees. For the rest of the Carabineros, entry was forbidden, although they knew that decisions about the "cleaning of cattle rustlers" that was being carried out in the area were made there.

In the first few days, the Patrol took nearly forty detainees to the police station, a figure that would increase as the months went by. The Army officers had a disadvantage that they were quickly able to overcome with the help of the Carabineros.

And that was that the military did not know many sectors that became impassable due to the thick vegetation of the forests; something the police managed through their constant rounds in the territory, especially due to detentions for animal theft or cattle rustling.

It was a close collaboration that allowed the procedures to be carried out, led by Carabineros Major Jorge Schweizer and Colonel Ramírez. −"It was toward the countryside where the terrorists had the land seizures," reads the statement made by Schweizer, the boss of the barracks, in the judicial process for the case of the peasant José Domingo Llabulén, who like Gervasio Huaiquil was another victim of the Patrol.

They didn't just talk about the detainees as cattle rustlers, but also about Mapuches with bad records or political indigenous people; the Carabineros' archive unit maintained a list and a detailed sketch of the places where they lived.

These were valuable coordinates for the Army. −"Regarding the other indigenous people I am named, José Domingo Llabulén, Juan Milla Montuy, Julio Paine Lipin, and José Cuevas Cifuentes, for the first one, I showed their address to the officials or the military, that's all (...) For what reason did they ask for those lists?

I imagine it was to eliminate those people. They never appeared again," declared Campos Collao before the justice system. The Llabulén assignment Campos Collao was also convicted for the disappearance of José Domingo Llabulén Pilquinao, a peasant and member of the Communist Party, which occurred on October 11, 1973.

Although in February of this year, Minister Álvaro Mesa Latorre issued a twelve-year sentence for his responsibility as a perpetrator of qualified kidnapping, the Temuco Court of Appeals considered the half-prescription, reducing it to five years, with which Collao could opt for parole.

Bus driver Manuel "Nilo" Cid and bus assistant Benedicto Mardones were witnesses to José's detention. Nilo was driving a 1961 Ford, white and green, that traveled between Lautaro, Chumil, and Temuco. On the morning of October 11, 1973, José took the bus along with two of his children.

He was going to sell an animal in town. The day passed, and both workers of the "Rojas" buses were getting ready to return to the first city on a now-routine trip: the passengers returned loaded with purchases and would stop at different points to head into their rural homes.

Everyone knew the trip started at 17:00 hours. Thirty minutes earlier, a Carabineros Patrol asked Nilo about a certain Llabulén. He said no, that he hadn't taken him that morning. But his words would not prevent them from continuing to patrol the area, a patrol that was already raising suspicions, especially among those who moved frequently through the sector.

Shortly after, José Llabulén appeared on the road again, and the driver, a little alarmed, suggested he go on foot on the other side of the Cautín bridge so they wouldn't see him on the bus. −"No, negro, how could it be that much!" he replied, incredulous, and went to sit in the back of the vehicle.

Before crossing the bridge, the pickup truck overtook the bus, forcing it to stop near a mill. They made all the passengers get off. José moved behind the other people, and before getting off, he exchanged a few words with the driver: he entrusted him with the package he was carrying; it was a canister of kerosene and a package of food.

He knew how necessary it was for his family. Corporal Enrique Ferrier hit him with the butt of his rifle, and together with his peer Domingo Campos Collao, they threw him into the pickup truck. Of the whole group, they only took him.

They accused him of cattle theft. The next day, his wife Francisca Llaulen Antilao went to inquire at all the places where she thought her husband could be: the Lautaro Carabineros, the La Concepción Regiment, the Investigative Police, and the public jail.

Nothing. No one knew of José Llabulén's whereabouts. Two days passed, and the children went to the bus office to look for the package their dad had entrusted, not knowing, until then, that he would become one of the forcibly disappeared of Lautaro.

Illicit association It was rumored that Corporal Enrique Ferrier had marks on the handle of his revolver to keep count of the people detained or murdered. According to what soldier Paicaví Painemal saw, who was doing his military service in '73, the detainees arrived at the regiment at night, after passing through the dungeons and stables of the first Lautaro police station.

He also remembers that the torture sessions of those detained for "political issues" were in the gym, in the stables, and in the riding arena; punches and kicks to different parts of the body, they would hang them, and they probably applied electricity.

In judicial statements, several Carabineros officials acknowledge that the majority of the detainees were of Mapuche origin. In the testimonies provided in both the José Llabulén and Gervasio Huaiquil cases, it is read that some Carabineros and officers thought it was all a bad joke because they saw that everything was functioning regularly.

Retired Army Colonel Jorge Nibaldo del Río has assured the justice system that he never received instructions to detain civilians or carry out raids in their communities. −"Perhaps I should have investigated more thoroughly," said Lieutenant Marcial Vera Ríos when the lawyers reviewed these events before the courts, and added in his January 1996 statement: "The serious problem was that the command of the police station did not know how or could not put a stop in time to the detentions or the activities of the Carabineros with the military." Until now, in none of the judicial cases in which members of the Patrol have been prosecuted has the crime of illicit association been considered, despite the fact that this was an organization that answered to a hierarchy and was constituted especially to commit crimes. And the military remain untouchable; only the Carabineros have been prosecuted.

Source: cctt.cl, November 27, 2018

Date: 11-27-2018

Minister Álvaro Mesa sentences 3 retired Carabineros for the qualified kidnapping of José Domingo Llabulén Pilquinao in Lautaro.

The visiting Minister sentenced retired Carabineros Jorge Enrique Schweizer Gómez, Marcial Edmundo Vera Ríos, and Domingo Antonio Campos Collao. The visiting Minister for human rights violation cases of the Temuco Court of Appeals, Álvaro Mesa Latorre, sentenced retired Carabineros Jorge Enrique Schweizer Gómez, Marcial Edmundo Vera Ríos, and Domingo Antonio Campos Collao to 12 years in prison for their responsibility as perpetrators of the crime of qualified kidnapping of José Domingo Llabulén Pilquinao, an illicit act perpetrated on October 11, 1973, in the commune of Lautaro.

During the investigation, the extraordinary visiting minister was able to establish the following facts: A.- That starting on September 11, 1973, at the 1st Carabineros Police Station of Lautaro, the command in charge of the unit, including Major Jorge Enrique Schweizer Gómez and Captain Marcial Edmundo Vera Ríos, organized and coordinated a special group of Carabineros, among whom were Juvenal Santiago Sanhueza Sanhueza (R.I.P.), Enrique Ferrier Valeze (R.I.P.), Mario Ponce Orellana (R.I.P.), and Corporal Domingo Antonio Campos Collao, among others, who under the orders of Lieutenant José Orlando Huerta Ávila (R.I.P.) collaborated with Army personnel from the La Concepción Regiment of Lautaro, carrying out joint patrols through the rural area dependent on the aforementioned police unit, while proceeding to indicate the names and addresses of people who were subsequently detained and taken to the Police Station to be interrogated in different areas of that unit; or who were removed by this special group of Carabineros and military personnel to be taken to places unknown to this date. B.- That on October 11, 1973, in the afternoon, José Domingo Llabulén Pilquinao, 44 years old, a farmer and member of the Communist Party, was traveling on a rural bus route from Lautaro to his home located in the Quiñaco-Manzanal indigenous community, along with two of his children. At a certain point on the road, the bus was intercepted by a Carabineros patrol from the 1st Lautaro Police Station that was moving in a private pickup truck, ordering the driver of the vehicle to stop. Immediately afterward, they made all the passengers get off the bus, subsequently taking José Domingo Llabulén Pilquinao into custody, whom they loaded into the pickup truck in which the patrol was moving, apparently without carrying a judicial order that authorized them for such an act. C.- Witnesses to the detention were the two children of the victim who were accompanying him at that moment, that is, Juan Alfonso Llabulén Llaulén (now deceased) and José Domingo Llabulén Llaulén, who identified as members of the group of captors Sergeant Ferrier (R.I.P.), Mario Ponce Orellana (R.I.P.), and Corporal Domingo Antonio Campos Collao, all from Lautaro. The patrol immediately headed to the Lautaro Police Station, followed by the Llabulén Llaulén brothers, who were able to see the moment their father was taken off the vehicle and entered into the unit, this being the last time they had news about their father's whereabouts. In the civil aspect, the ruling ordered the treasury to pay a total compensation of $55,000,000 for the moral damages to the victim's son.

Source: diarioconstitucional.cl, February 23, 2018

Date: 02-23-2018