Address: Pje. Chocalán, Manzana 32, site 13, Población Pablo de Rokha, Santiago Marital Status: Married, 4 children Occupation: Construction worker Political Affiliation: No information Date of Detention: Late September 1973

REPRESSIVE SITUATION

José Santos Ramírez Ramírez, married, father of 4, a construction worker with no known political affiliation, was detained in late September 1973 during a military operation carried out in the Población Pablo de Rokha in Santiago.

The uniformed personnel arrived at the location around two in the morning and proceeded to violently enter the homes, subsequently removing the male residents and transporting them to the soccer field located in the Población.

Several of the detainees were taken to different detention centers, but the exact location to which José Santos Ramírez Ramírez was taken remains unknown. His family conducted a fruitless search through various penitentiary facilities and other locations such as the Estadio Nacional and the Estadio Chile, but obtained no news regarding the fate of the victim.

The uncertainty regarding the situation of José Santos Ramírez Ramírez ended on March 18, 1991, the date on which his family learned through the press that, in the investigation being conducted regarding a complaint of illegal burial in Patio 29 of the General Cemetery, several bodies had been identified, among them that of José Santos Ramírez Ramírez, buried in grave 2717 of said Patio.

However, in the Civil Registry and Identification Service, he does not appear as identified among those deceased during that period. Nor did he appear identified among the remains exhumed in the preliminary reports of the experts. To date, José Santos Ramírez Ramírez remains a forcibly disappeared person.

JUDICIAL AND/OR ADMINISTRATIVE ACTIONS

On November 15, 1991, his spouse, Mrs. Ana Luisa Valdenegro, filed a complaint for illegal burial before the Twelfth Criminal Court of Santiago, in which, along with exposing the circumstances of the arrest and subsequent disappearance of José Santos Ramírez Ramírez, she points out that if the information regarding the positive identification of the body found in Patio 29, grave 2717, is accurate, it must be concluded that at some moment—the date of which is unknown—her spouse was murdered and his illegal burial was carried out in the indicated location.

At the end of 1992, experts from the Legal Medical Institute of Santiago were still working on the identification of the remains exhumed from Patio 29 of the General Cemetery of Santiago. In case file No. 4449-AF, which is being processed in the 22nd Criminal Court of Santiago regarding the illegal burial of 125 bodies interred as N.N. (John/Jane Doe) between September and December 1973, no progress had been made in confirming that one of the remains corresponded to that of José Santos Ramírez Ramírez.

Judge Alejandro Solís informed family members about 14 new cases of erroneous identifications in the Patio 29 case. He asked the affected parties for forgiveness "on behalf of the State" for this "dramatic" event.

The director of the Legal Medical Service, Patricio Bustos, said that this agency will be forced to exhume the bodies of the parents of dictatorship victims to cross-reference genetic information and thus avoid new cases of erroneous identifications like those that had to be acknowledged in 2006 and yesterday.

In a meeting with family members of the forcibly disappeared whose bodies were found in 1991 in Patio 29 of the General Cemetery and identified in subsequent years, the judge investigating the case, Alejandro Solís, admitted to 14 cases of remains identified erroneously. "We told 24 families: 'Indeed, the remains you have are the correct ones,' but to the rest, we had to say: 'Unfortunately, there were errors in the identification, and at this moment, I am standing for the State to ask for your forgiveness for what was done; a mistake was committed, and we are working to repair it,'" explained Solís. "Unfortunately, we have had to reach the extreme of summoning them to tell them: 'We have bad news for you; that person who was delivered to you as your relative is not (the correct one), so we ask for your forgiveness, but you must return the remains...'; it will be understood that it is very dramatic, but it is the reality. There are 14 cases in which there were mistakes," said the magistrate. In this regard, Dr. Patricio Bustos said that currently at the service "we have some close identifications that we are not going to certify in order not to make mistakes, and for that, we need, in some cases, to exhume the skeletal remains of the father or mother of the dictatorship victims, in such a way as to achieve accurate identifications." "As we obtain them, we deliver them to the minister, and the minister summons the families immediately so as not to increase this anguish, which has already lasted almost 40 years," noted Bustos.

Reaction of the family members

One of the families informed yesterday of the erroneous identification of their relative was that of José Santos Ramírez, a 50-year-old construction worker detained on September 13, 1973, from his home in the Población Pablo de Rokha.

In 2002, "they handed us the body of another person," reflected his granddaughter, Gisella González Ramírez, surprised after the meeting with Judge Solís. González explained how "there is no counter-sample," they do not know how "to manage to know whose body it really is," while her grandfather returns to the status of a forcibly disappeared person. "The samples that exist at this moment cannot conclude that they really identify my grandfather; the identification is complicated, so they need in this case the most direct consanguinity, which is with his parents," who are already deceased. "We are going to pursue civil and compensatory actions, because what else can be done... the pain is already there, the sorrow is there, we have searched for a long time, years. I grew up under this," explained Gisella González.

Source: cooperativa.cl 30/8/2012 Date: 30-08-2012