José Julio Llaulén Antilao, a farmer with no known political affiliation, residing in Reducción Mulato in the commune of Lautaro, was detained on June 11, 1974, around 8:00 a.m. at the home of Carmen Levimilla, just as he was about to leave for his usual agricultural work.

The captors, among whom it was possible to identify two Carabineros officers named Domingo Antonio Campos and Mario Ponce Collao, raided the property and, by force and without providing further explanation, proceeded to take the victim away to an unknown destination.

Through subsequent inquiries made by his relatives to determine his whereabouts, it was learned that he was held at the Carabineros police station in Perquenco along with Samuel Huichallán Llanquilén and 16-year-old Juan Eleuterio Cheuquepán Levimilla, all of whom remain forcibly disappeared to this day.

The Carabineros informed the family of the minor, Cheuquepán, that they were investigating a case of livestock theft.

All of these individuals remain in the status of forcibly disappeared after having been detained by police personnel.

JUDICIAL AND/OR ADMINISTRATIVE ACTIONS

In February 1991, the National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation sent the information in its possession regarding the detention and disappearance of the Yaufulem Mañil brothers, José Julio Llaulén Antilao, Juan Cheuquepán Levimilla, and Samuel Huichallán Llanquilén to the Lautaro Court of Letters. The court initiated proceedings for the case under Case File No. 37.860.

Before the same Court of Letters of Lautaro, on May 5, 1991, Ms. Josefa Llaulén Antilao filed a criminal complaint for the crime of kidnapping her brother.

During those days, the relatives of brothers Ceferino, Miguel, and Oscar Yaufulem Mañil, and of Juan Cheuquepán, also filed complaints. In all three judicial actions, it was requested that they be consolidated into Case File No. 37.860 of the same court regarding the alleged disappearance of these same individuals, a request that was granted.

In Case File No. 37.860, the relatives of the victims testified, including Ms. Carmen Levimilla Carilao, the partner of José Julio Llaulén. She recounted that one day in 1974, the date of which she does not recall, while they were having breakfast, two Carabineros named Domingo Campos and Mario Ponce arrived at their home located in the Reducción Mulato of the commune of Lautaro.

She added that they dragged him away and that other people saw him being loaded into a pickup truck that was waiting some distance from the house. A sister, Ms. Josefa Llaulén Antilao, also testified in court; she remembers that the detention occurred on June 11, 1974, at breakfast time, and that she was notified at the time by José Julio Llaulén's partner.

On April 5, 1991, the Investigative Service returned a report to the court with the results of the investigation requested regarding the alleged disappearance of the aforementioned individuals. The Investigative Service took statements from the relatives of the forcibly disappeared and from some witnesses to the detentions, who concurred in pointing out that the Carabineros captors were Mario Ponce Orellana and Domingo Antonio Campos Collao.

They were also called to testify and acknowledged having been part of the Lautaro police station staff at the time of the detentions. Domingo Campos stated that during the time he worked at the Dollinco police outpost, he knew most of the cattle rustlers in that sector, whom he had several times placed at the disposal of the Lautaro Criminal Court for livestock theft.

Upon arriving to work at the Lautaro police station, he was part of an "operational group" intended to combat the aforementioned crimes.

Regarding the victims, he claimed not to know them and denied having participated in their detentions.

Retired Carabinero Mario Ponce Orellana also testified, denying his participation in the events.

The conclusion of the Investigative Service report was: "the veracity of each complaint and the existence of the corpus delicti were proven." "It was not possible to reliably establish the persons responsible for the crimes under investigation."

In May 1991, Carabineros Ponce and Campos testified in the proceedings, reiterating their denials. In October of that year, the judge ordered a confrontation between the Carabineros captors and the victims' relatives, who ratified their previous statements.

In the case of José Llaulén, the confrontation took place on October 24, 1991, with the participation of Ms. Carmen Levimilla and Carabineros Ponce and Campos.

On November 7, 1991, the Lautaro Judge of Letters declared the summary phase closed and ordered the temporary dismissal of the case. Following a complaint filed by the aggrieved party, the Temuco Court of Appeals issued a ruling on December 13, 1991, that reverted the case to its summary state and ordered the prosecution and pretrial detention of Mario Ponce Orellana, Domingo Antonio Campos Collao, and Eduardo Enrique Salazar Herrera as authors of the crimes contemplated in Article 141, paragraph 1, and Article 142 of the Penal Code for the kidnapping of José Julio Llaulén and the abduction of the minor Juan Eleuterio Cheuquepán Levimilla.

With the investigation reopened in January 1992, the vehicle driver, Eduardo Enrique Salazar Herrera, appeared and denied his participation in the detentions.

The defendants in the case appealed against the indictment; the judge declared the appeal inadmissible, so the defendants filed a complaint with the Temuco Court of Appeals.

In the complaint filed by Eduardo Salazar Herrera, it was argued that the judge was the only one who, according to the law, could issue an indictment and that, furthermore, the Court should only have ruled on the closure of the summary and the dismissal. The Court rejected the appeal on the grounds that the defendants had not presented new evidence.

The legal classification of the crimes was also challenged in said appeal. In the opinion of the defendants, José Llaulén and Juan Cheuquepán are dead, so the Amnesty Law should be applied rather than defining the crime as kidnapping and thus considering it a permanent crime.

Regarding this argument, the Court stated: "it is precisely important in this investigation to establish whether Llaulén and Cheuquepán died as a result of the crimes of which they were victims, and on what date, in order to study the applicability of the statute of limitations and/or amnesty, but all of that would be the subject of study at a later stage, in the final ruling, and not now."

On May 4, the Court of Appeals rejected the complaint filed by Eduardo Salazar and Carabineros Ponce and Campos.

The three defendants filed a complaint with the Supreme Court, and by the end of 1992, the Court had rejected the complaint in the case of Carabineros Mario Ponce Orellana and Domingo Campos Collao, while the ruling in the case of civilian Eduardo Salazar Herrera remained pending. The case remained in the summary stage.

Although three of the perpetrators of the victim's detention are currently under indictment, the fate of José Julio Llaulén Antilao remains unknown.

For further information, see the file for Juan Eleuterio Cheuquepán Levimilla, detained on June 11, 1974.

Source: Rettig Report

Retired Carabinero Domingo Campos Collao is the last 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 the author of the kidnapping of Gervasio Huaiquil Calviqueo, a Mapuche man with no political affiliation who was detained by the Lautaro Patrol.

This group was composed of military personnel and Carabineros who, under the guise of a "cleanup of cattle rustlers," detained and disappeared Mapuche people in the province of Cautín during the dictatorship.

Manuela (43) was the one who had the idea for 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 for the reason, if it was in memory of a deceased person, the only thing she could answer was: "Well, that, we don't know, Father.

But if that were not the case, I would like to think that by now, he would have remembered his 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 brothers not to be late coming home from school, that their father would arrive in the afternoon, and for tea time, 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 father. They had to go on.

At that time, Manuela was only six months old, and everything she knows about Gervasio has been through the stories of others. Since she arrived in Santiago to work, she says 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 people sleeping in the plazas, on 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 guards and accompanied by his son, bound for the Punta Peuco prison. The court sentenced him to five years and one day for his responsibility as the author of the aggravated 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 where they lived. If it hadn't been for the help of the neighbors, she, her mother, and her brothers 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 damn 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 it was enough with what her mother told her about the confrontation they had a few years ago. The rage and the pain are transmitted.

A cleanup of cattle rustlers

On the very day of the Coup, the military barricaded themselves in the La Concepción Regiment, and the Carabineros also remained confined to the first police station of Lautaro. Some testified 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, which until that month of September had been 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.

The group was assigned an exclusive office inside the barracks where they interrogated the detainees. It was forbidden for the rest of the Carabineros to enter, although they knew that decisions were made there regarding the "cleanup of cattle rustlers" being carried out in the area.

In the first few days, the Patrol brought 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. The military did not know many areas that were 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 livestock 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 head of the barracks, in the judicial process for the case of the peasant José Domingo Llabulen, who, like Gervasio Huaiquil, was another victim of the Patrol.

They did not only speak of the detainees as cattle rustlers, but also of "Mapuche people 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 Llabulen, Juan Milla Montuy, Julio Paine Lipin, and José Cuevas Cifuentes, for the first one, I showed his address to the officials or the military, that's all (...) Why did they ask for those lists? I imagine it was to eliminate those people. They never appeared again," declared Campos Collao to the justice system.

The Llabulen assignment

Campos Collao was also convicted for the disappearance of José Domingo Llabulen Pilquinao, a peasant and member of the Communist Party, which occurred on October 11, 1973. Although in February of this year Judge Álvaro Mesa Latorre handed down a twelve-year sentence for his responsibility as the author of aggravated kidnapping, the Temuco Court of Appeals considered the partial statute of limitations, reducing it to five years, which would allow Collao to 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 preparing 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 5:00 p.m.

Thirty minutes earlier, a Carabineros Patrol asked Nilo about a certain Llabulen. He said no, that he hadn't picked him up 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 traveled frequently through the sector.

Shortly after, José Llabulen appeared on the road again, and the driver, somewhat alarmed, suggested he go on foot on the other side of the Cautín bridge so they wouldn't see him on the bus.

"No, black, 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, a container 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 partner 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 might be: the Lautaro Carabineros, the La Concepción Regiment, the Investigative Police, and the public jail. Nothing. No one knew the whereabouts of José Llabulen.

Two days passed, and the children went to the bus office to look for the package their father had left, not knowing, until then, that he would become one of the forcibly disappeared of Lautaro.

Illicit association

It was said 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, who was doing his military service in '73, saw, 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 were hung, and they were likely subjected to electric shocks. In judicial statements, several Carabineros officers acknowledge that the majority of the detainees were of Mapuche origin.

In the testimonies provided in both the case of José Llabulen and Gervasio Huaiquil, 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 asserted before the justice system that he never received instructions to detain civilians or carry out raids on 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 responded to a hierarchy and was constituted specifically to commit crimes. And the military remains untouchable; only the Carabineros have been prosecuted.

Source: eldesconcierto.cl 22/10/2018 Date: 22-10-2018