He tortured the current director of the Legal Medical Service, Patricio Bustos, and the National Prize winner Gabriel Salazar, among others. The event for Krassnoff remains firm this Monday. Regarding the torture, Salazar noted, “they are extreme memories that have been enriching from every angle.

One gets to know oneself better in extreme situations; one is empowered, and I found that positive. At first, I had aftereffects: they burst my eardrums, they broke my ribs, they left me skin and bones, but everything healed…”

Days before the tribute that Mayor Cristián Labbé (UDI) will pay to Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko, and given all the commotion caused by the exclusive report from Cambio21, it is necessary to recall the criminal record of the torturer who is imprisoned in the Cordillera penal facility serving a 144-year sentence.

He was a DINA agent and the organizer of the Chacarillas act, where a kind of cult to Pinochet was performed by idealistic youths who climbed toward the so-called altar of the fatherland with torches and surrounded by flags, just like those SS acts of Hitler—almost like a movie, but it was the sad reality of Chile in the late 70s and early 80s.

But this tribute, to which the mayor and former member of the dictatorship's secret police, the DINA, invites, is not the first for Miguel Krassnoff. In 1974, he participated directly in the crime where the leader of the MIR, Miguel Enríquez, died in the commune of San Miguel, for which he was given a medal of merit.

Enríquez faced that opportunity, only with his wife (Carmen Castillo and two other people), a true army with helicopters and armored vehicles. He died from a gunshot to the head, which was allegedly fired by none other than Krassnoff.

The Caupolicán Brigade of the DINA

Krassnoff was also the head of the DINA's Caupolicán brigade and the Halcón 1 and 2 groups. These were extermination brigades targeting the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) and the Socialist Party (PS).

The procedure of these DINA subjects was almost always the same: they would arrest a person, torture them in the various facilities of this secret police (such as Calle Londres, José Domingo Cañas, the Cuartel Terranova, to mention a few), and commit the worst physical and psychological aberrations against thousands of Chilean men and women; if anyone remained alive, they were tortured until they died.

For the DINA, to exterminate was the same as to murder.

Declassified information from Germany and the American CIA indicates that Krassnoff Martchenko was always armed with two pistols, "a Browning and a Colt 45, and in his car, he kept an AK machine gun."

The crime of Diana Arón

One of the most horrific crimes for which Krassnoff is being prosecuted is that of Diana Arón. A young journalism student, daughter of right-wing Jews who were against Salvador Allende.

Arón, with leftist ideas, was detained on the street on Avenida Ossa in La Reina in 1974. Her parents wrote to Pinochet himself to find out about her whereabouts, since the network of contacts they had was at the highest level. Despite this, they never received an answer regarding Diana's whereabouts.

Diana Arón was pregnant. She was in the Military Hospital, where she was treating her wounds resulting from gunshots fired by members of the DINA. The then-captain Krassnoff took the young woman out of the hospital to torture her in a special house on Calle José Domingo Cañas in Ñuñoa and later at Villa Grimaldi, in Peñalolén.

Before dying, another torturer, Osvaldo Romo, through judicial and press statements, pointed out that Diana "was finished off by Captain Krassnoff when he could no longer get any statement out of her. We murdered her," he noted.

The statement of the man known as "guatón" Romo continues as follows: "when we were torturing Diana Arón, I was brutally pushed away from my work and shoved violently by my captain Krassnoff, who, completely out of his mind, shouted: 'You are not going to fool me, and even if I have to kill you, you will tell me the truth, you bitch,'" referring to Diana.

"Krassnoff assaulted her with such brutality that it caused a hemorrhage, and the whole floor was left with a pool of blood, which must have been part of the fetus she lost because of the duress. What shocked me most was that Krassnoff came out of the torture room with bloodied hands shouting: 'Besides being a Marxist, the son of a bitch is a Jew; she must be killed,'" these are the verbatim words of Romo.

Those tortured by Krassnoff Martchenko

Dr. Patricio Bustos is currently the director of the Legal Medical Institute and was one of those tortured by Krassnoff. Regarding this, he has declared: "I had the misfortune of being in the hands of Krassnoff, Marcelo Moren, Osvaldo Romo, and other people at Villa Grimaldi when I was detained in 1975.

Of course, it is a painful stage of my life, but I have never regretted having fought against the dictatorship and having paid these consequences as so many Chileans did, and others in a worse way because many of my companions are forcibly disappeared or were murdered in that place."

Bustos also points out that "I have the right to reclaim what our struggle was in that dark stage in the history of Chile. Krassnoff was a captain at that time, and he tortured me. Captain Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko was one of the few who used his real name at Villa Grimaldi, which gave him a cloak of impunity.

He and Osvaldo Romo were the only ones who used their real names when they tortured us, my partner, and all the people who were there."

Regarding the tribute that will be paid to him, he maintains that "obviously I join those outraged by this fact, because a person like that mayor (Labbé) has not been characterized by a soft hand, nor by tolerance, nor by non-discrimination. Let us remember that he has ordered evictions, he has tried to put barbed wire in high schools so that students from other places do not arrive.

Obviously, a person of that type who pays tribute to Krassnoff, I believe, is being absolutely consistent with what his life and his political stance are, to this day," he concluded.

Another of those tortured by Miguel Krassnoff is the historian Gabriel Salazar, who in an interview recalled those painful moments: "I began my political militancy in 1970. I had stopped being Catholic when I was very young, but the sensitivity remained.

It must be remembered that an enormous number of Catholics entered the MIR. The most dedicated were those from the Catholic world. I entered with a foundation, that of the 'Young Church.' I possessed a value-based formation from Catholicism.

What was resized in me was an approach to social problems. My dad was someone who faced them by praying. I was someone who studied the world. I didn't have very social gifts. So my leftism had to do with memories, perceptions.

In the classes at the University of Chile (1969 - 1971), one would be interrupted with: 'Where do you militate?' One felt constantly questioned. That is why I entered the MIR on September 5, 1970, where I began field work. There I was able to resize myself as a man and be consistent in that.

That matures in Villa Grimaldi; that is where the limit is. There I discovered the fundamental dimension of life and politics. I could understand Marx: the class struggle and the conflictive relationship with the enemy.

It was the negation of the negation. While Pinochet tried to destroy his militants, in the cell a militant reconstructed him as a human being; people came to visit from outside, they showed solidarity. Associativity is rediscovered as a fundamental element of History. Finally, I left Villa Grimaldi free in 1976.

By that time, I was thinking of going into exile in England. At the time of the Coup, I was a leader of the MIR. Professors would approach me and tell me they were leaving the MIR. A friend told me, 'My girlfriend went to Moscow, I'm going too.' I told my friend: 'I'm staying.' So my friend stayed.

He told me: 'You are the theorist, I'm staying.' He died later in Villa Grimaldi. That whole experience reinforced the commitment on that side. My intention was to stay, but the family was in England. Upon leaving Chile, I went there; they offered me a scholarship to study."

Salazar noted about the torture: "they are extreme memories that have been enriching from every angle. One gets to know oneself better in extreme situations; one is empowered, and I found that positive. At first, I had aftereffects: they burst my eardrums, they broke my ribs, they left me skin and bones, but everything healed..."

Source: Cambio21, November 20, 2011

The content of Krassnoff's book and its provocative presentation represent a clear attempt by the far-right and Pinochetist militarism at political regrouping, at justifying the cruelest human rights violations during the military regime, at vindicating the DINA agents in charge of the dirty work, and a clear blackmail of the right and the government to reposition their demands.

The fact that Mayor Labbé is the only one of the DINA figures who has achieved electoral reintegration during the years of democracy, and who invites the demonstration of support for Krassnoff, makes it clear that this was planned, that they thought about how to do the most damage by re-proposing the specter of the past.

With Labbé as host of the initiative, they wanted to give it the greatest possible communicative prominence; they sought to open the controversy and involve the government and the right in it. It has transformed the act not only into a cruel provocation to the victims of Krassnoff and the DINA, but into a true challenge to Piñera and the entire right, which is reminded that if Piñera is President and they enjoy the privileges of government positions, it is because Pinochetism also placed its votes to consummate that objective.

They remind Piñera, by vindicating Krassnoff, that said support was agreed upon, that the right-wing candidate met with the "Pinochetist military family," and that there were commitments to review cases, to apply amnesties, and to incorporate military personnel involved in human rights violations into the presidential pardon—something that has not happened and that it is almost impossible for Piñera to want or be able to fulfill, given the repudiation that this would entail in a Chilean society with more capacity for criticism and mobilization.

For this reason, the visible role of the call is played by Mayor Labbé, who has already challenged the government with his repressive measures against the student movement, causing embarrassment and discomfort in La Moneda, in a government and a parliament where men who were in one way or another linked to the dictatorship still subsist.

Precisely, they choose Krassnoff, given that he was the organizer of the emblematic "Chacarillas Act," as a message, so that none of these figures easily forget their old Pinochetist identity.

Almost like a mafia gesture, a warning, they sent an invitation to the President to participate in the book presentation without imagining that the inoperance and carelessness of a civil servant, or her connivance with the ideology of the dictatorship, would directly involve the President in a greeting that he did not know about nor formulate, and where they even go so far as to rescue the figure of Krassnoff as representative of a generation of military men and wish the meeting success.

This unexpected gift constitutes a gigantic victory for the organizers since, in the communicative sphere, the government has been involved, has had to give explanations, and the old confrontational scenario—always favorable to Pinochetism—has been re-proposed, dragging the image of a sector of the right.

With this, the importance of an initiative that, even while being completely isolated in Chilean society, has been highlighted, repositioning the issue of "Pinochet's military men" beyond what they surely expected.

This error by the government, the participation of Labbé as organizer of the event, and the stammering of many exponents of the old right who do not dare or do not want to condemn the crimes and human rights violations have allowed Krassnoff, unexpectedly, to become a further factor of weakness for Piñera and his alliance, pressured by the past, which looms over them like a ghost that is not willing to disappear from the scene.

The act, of course, is inscribed in an effort—to which Pinochetist activism does not renounce, however vain that may seem given that the raw truth of the dictatorship's crimes is already strongly installed in the conscience of Chilean society—to reinterpret history.

For this reason, in these days, we have returned to hearing from figures of the former military dictatorship, brought to TV screens, radio microphones, and newspaper columns, like true specters from beyond the grave, to speak again of the brave soldiers who confronted Marxism and, based on that, justify the crimes committed, presenting the military men involved as "political prisoners," even denying the veracity of the evidence with which the Courts of Justice have condemned Krassnoff and the DINA leadership to hundreds of years in prison.

One of the most despicable figures of the repression is chosen as an emblem, a psychopath directly involved in dozens of crimes and who has always made an apology for them, precisely so that it is clear that their claims reach very high, that it is not just about the demand to free a soldier who received orders or a subordinate who participated, like so many, in the forced disappearance of people or the transport of remains.

No. The ambition is greater. It is about directly vindicating the DINA, about installing the idea that thanks to it and these unjustly condemned and imprisoned men, the war against communism was won and today the country lives in freedom.

They know that they can achieve this only with a right-wing government, and they use pressure, blackmail, and veiled threats to demand that the President fulfill the promise to free the imprisoned men of arms or, failing that, pay a very high political price in image, by reminding many of their old belonging to the dictatorship, or even deepening the loss of support in this sector that is surely today among those who respond against Piñera in the polls.

They do not resort, for this, to a request for forgiveness from society. They do not commit to providing information that would allow for the clarification of the whereabouts of the forcibly disappeared; they do not open the pot of Pinochet's direct responsibility in the crimes executed by the DINA; they do not make any gesture that favors reconciliation or a spiritual reconversion that could lead to forgiveness.

No. They resort to the plea of the legitimacy of the crimes, to arrogance, to the space that they believe the dictatorship should have in the history of this country.

Precisely because of the objectives behind the Pinochetist initiative, it is more repudiable that it is a mayor, elected with popular votes, who organizes this meeting, since deep down Labbé uses this citizen consensus for an ignoble purpose such as promoting the legitimacy of the crimes and the henchmen of the dictatorship.

For this reason, all those who feel part of a vision and adherence to democratic values and respect for human rights must react together in the condemnation of this communicative uprising prepared from Punta Peuco and from the desks of the old exponents of the military regime.

For this reason, also, all democrats should unite in an operation of democratic cleansing to prevent Labbé, a man of Manuel Contreras's DINA, from continuing to be the Mayor of the Providencia commune. It would be a great response to the arrogance of the old dictatorship that looms through Krassnoff and his 144 years of sentencing for the crimes committed against so many Chileans.

Source: La Nación, Monday, November 21, 2011

Miguel Krassnoff, Marcelo Moren Brito, Raúl Iturriaga Neumann are some of those implicated.

The minister on extraordinary visit for human rights violation cases of the Santiago Court of Appeals, Hernán Crisosto, sentenced 77 agents of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) this Monday for their responsibility in the kidnapping of Héctor Garay Hermosilla in 1974.

Garay Hermosilla, a member of the Revolutionary Student Front (FER), was 19 years old when he was detained near his home on July 8, 1974. Days later, his name appeared in the national press on a false list of 119 people killed due to alleged internal disputes within the MIR, in what was called "Operation Colombo." According to what was gathered by the judge, "the publications that declared the victim Garay Hermosilla dead had their origin in disinformation maneuvers carried out by DINA agents abroad."

According to the reconstruction of the facts carried out by the visiting minister, the DINA agents who captured Garay "put him in the back of a gray Chevrolet C-10 pickup truck and took him to the home of a friend of the victim, who was also forced to enter the aforementioned pickup truck, to be taken in an unknown direction."

"Subsequently, it was possible to establish, through testimonies, the passage of Héctor Marcial Garay Hermosilla through the clandestine detention center called 'Londres 38,' which was guarded by armed guards and to which only DINA agents had access," the ruling continues, establishing that to date there is no further information on Garay's whereabouts.

The convicted In the resolution, the court minister sentenced the following to 13 years in prison: César Manríquez Bravo, Pedro Octavio Espinoza Bravo, Marcelo Luis Moren Brito, Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko, and Raúl Eduardo Iturriaga Neumann, as authors of the illicit act perpetrated in 1974.

Meanwhile, the following former agents must serve 10 years in prison, also in the capacity of authors: Gerardo Ernesto Urrich González, Gerardo Ernesto Godoy García, Ricardo Víctor Lawrence Mires, Ciro Ernesto Torré Sáez, Sergio Hernán Castillo González, Manuel Andrés Carevic Cubillos, José Nelson Fuentealba Saldías, Basclay Humberto Zapata Reyes, José Enrique Fuentes Torres, José Mario Friz Esparza, Julio José Hoyos Zegarra, Nelson Alberto Paz Bustamante, Claudio Orlando Orellana de la Pinta, Enrique Tránsito Gutiérrez Rubilar, Gustavo Galvarino Caruman Soto, Hiro Álvarez Vega, José Alfonso Ojeda Obando, Olegario Enrique González Moreno, Orlando Jesús Torrejón Gatica, Rudeslindo Urrutia Jorquera, Alfredo Orlando Moya Tejeda, Carlos Alfonso Sáez Sanhueza, Fernando Enrique Guerra Guajardo, Hernán Patricio Valenzuela Salas, Hugo Rubén Delgado Carrasco, Juan Alfredo Villanueva Alvear, Juan Evaristo Duarte Gallegos, Lautaro Eugenio Díaz Espinoza, Leónidas Emiliano Méndez Moreno, Pedro Ariel Araneda Araneda, Rafael de Jesús Riveros Frost, Víctor Manuel Molina Astete, Máximo Ramón Aliaga Soto, Manuel Rivas Díaz, Juan Ángel Urbina Cáceres, Risiere del Prado Altez España, Raúl Juan Rodríguez Ponte, Hermon Helec Alfaro Mundaca, and Hugo del Tránsito Hernández Valle.

As accomplices to the crime of qualified kidnapping of Garay Hermosilla, the court minister sentenced the following to 4 years in prison: Luis Eduardo Mora Cerda, José Jaime Mora Diocares, Camilo Torres Negrier, Carlos Justo Bermúdez Méndez, Claudio Enrique Pacheco Fernández, Fernando Adrián Roa Montaña, Gerardo Meza Acuña, Héctor Raúl Valdebenito Araya, Jaime Humberto Paris Ramos, Jorge Laureano Sagardia Monje, José Dorohi Hormazábal Rodríguez, José Manuel Sarmiento Sotelo, José Stalin Muñoz Leal, Juvenal Alfonso Piña Garrido, Luis René Torres Méndez, Manuel Antonio Montre Méndez; Moisés Paulino Campos Figueroa, Nelson Aquiles Ortiz Vignolo, Nelson Eduardo Iturriaga Cortés, Pedro Segundo Bitterlich Jaramillo, Reinaldo Alfonso Concha Orellana, Sergio Hernán Castro Andrade, Víctor Manuel de la Cruz San Martín Jiménez, Gustavo Humberto Apablaza Meneses, Héctor Carlos Díaz Cabezas, Jorge Antonio Lepileo Barrios, Óscar Belarmino la Flor Flores; Rufino Espinoza Espinoza, Héctor Manuel Lira Aravena, Víctor Manuel Álvarez Droguett, Sergio Iván Díaz Lara, Juan Miguel Troncoso Soto, and Roberto Hernán Rodríguez Manquel.

Meanwhile, the following were acquitted due to lack of participation in the events: Rodolfo Valentino Cocha Rodríguez and Armando Segundo Cofre Correa.

Source: t13.cl, August 31, 2015

The DINA agent thus adds a new sentence to the more than one thousand years in prison for human rights violations. Lawyer Carolina Vega maintained that "it marks a key moment in the long struggle to obtain truth, justice, and reparation."

The minister on extraordinary visit of the Santiago Court of Appeals, Paola Plaza González, issued a first-instance sentence in the process investigating the qualified kidnapping and the application of torture against Cristian Mallol Comandari and Héctor González Osorio, both members of the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR), which occurred between December 1974 and September 1975 at the hands of agents of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA).

The magistrate sentenced the Army brigadiers and members of the DINA, Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko and Pedro Espinoza Bravo, to 12 years of major imprisonment in its medium degree as authors of the qualified kidnapping of both victims.

Meanwhile, José Aravena Ruiz, a second sergeant of the Carabineros, was sentenced to seven years as the author of the qualified kidnapping of Cristian Mallol Comandari.

The plaintiff Carolina Vega, of the Caucoto Abogados firm, stated that "more than 50 years have passed and only today are they beginning to punish those responsible for the kidnapping of the victims." "The investigation lasted for approximately seven years and there is still much to advance," she noted.

Vega added that "for us as plaintiffs, the issuance of this ruling is deeply significant. It marks a key moment in the long struggle to obtain truth, justice, and reparation, after decades of impunity."

According to the investigation, both victims were detained in December 1974 and brutally tortured while they were prisoners in the different clandestine centers of the DINA. As detailed in the sentence, both suffered physical and psychological duress of extreme severity.

Mallol was detained for nearly two years and was released in November 1976, while González regained his freedom 9 months after his detention.

The convicted remain currently serving sentences for other various crimes against humanity cases at the Punta Peuco penal facility. Krassnoff adds more than a thousand years in prison for other cases of human rights violations; while Espinoza, who was deputy director of Intelligence of the DINA and supreme chief of "Villa Grimaldi," also has multiple sentences against him for his participation in the disappearances and executions of opponents of the dictatorship.

The facts According to the magistrate's investigation, it has been established that "on December 7, 1974, around 10 to 11 a.m., Cristian Mallol Comandari, a militant of the Revolutionary Left Movement, MIR, who at the time of the events was 26 years old and was already living in clandestinity, was apprehended in the vicinity of the property located at Calle Manuel Salas No. 347, apartment 21, Ñuñoa commune, which corresponded to his former home, which he had abandoned some time before, by a group composed of around four DINA agents."

In the operation, one of the agents in charge of executing it fired against Cristian Mallol, who was injured by a shrapnel in the head; he was then wounded by a bullet in one of his legs, later receiving another impact.

Mallol was taken in those conditions to the Terranova Detention Center of the DINA, known as Villa Grimaldi, where they received him with kicks and punches and he began to be interrogated as soon as he arrived at the place; being in an agonizing and unconscious situation, he was taken out to be driven to a clinic in charge of the aforementioned organization.

However, without receiving medical attention, he was returned to the Terranova barracks where he remained until the month of April 1975, a period in which he received electric shocks in different parts of his body and remained chained by his feet and hands during most of the time of his detention.

After Villa Grimaldi, he was transferred to Cuatro Álamos, to Tres Álamos, and to the Puchuncaví detention camp, where he was for about ten months, until he managed to regain his freedom, leaving the country bound for France in the month of November 1976.

On December 6, 1974, Héctor Hernán González Osorio, a militant of the MIR, was detained by a heavily armed group of DINA agents in downtown Santiago, who put him in a car, blindfolded him, and took him to Villa Grimaldi, a place where, upon arriving, he was beaten repeatedly, being interrogated through the application of electric current in different parts of the body on the so-called "grill," which was a metal cot arranged for that purpose, and subjected to other sessions of mistreatment consisting of constant blows to the ears, to the face, proceeding to submerge his head in a barrel of dirty water, kicks and punches in different parts of the body, a situation that extended to the following days.

In the Villa Grimaldi facility, he was detained for about six months, being a witness to how they took other detainees out of the place whom he never saw again; later he was transferred to the Cuatro Álamos facility, until one day in September 1975, without prior notice, he was taken to his home, announcing that he was regaining his freedom, on the condition of leaving the country as soon as possible, which he finally did at the end of 1975, bound for Spain.

Source: radio.uchile.cl, September 11, 2025

Within the framework of the international FUNA against Operation Condor, Chileans chose a well-known DINA agent to "funa" (publicly denounce) in the heart of the Providencia neighborhood. It is Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko (see box), one of the most remembered repressors in the clear collective memory of the survivors.

KRASSNOFF ACCORDING TO GLADYS DÍAZ

Journalist and former political prisoner Gladys Díaz remembers the "then-Army lieutenant, later captain Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko. He was the intelligence officer in charge of the Halcón Brigade at Villa Grimaldi in charge of the repression of the MIR.

He felt attracted to politics and wanted, together with the 'boss' Manuel Contreras, to consolidate a great social base of support for 'his' General Pinochet. For that task, he felt almost predestined, and in his name, he committed all the excesses that thousands of people attribute to him.

He distrusted everyone, both within his ranks and the prisoners who, after cruel torture, gave him the information he asked for. 'A traitor is always one, on whichever side he is,' he used to tell them.

He had a reputation for being tough. Oscar Angulo, a former political prisoner who lives in Germany, remembers the pale and trembling captain, slowly moving his hand toward his pistol, when they met abruptly at Villa Grimaldi.

The prisoner Angulo had in his hands an AK machine gun, without bullets, that a non-commissioned officer had given him so that he could build a wooden gun rack. He says that he desperately shouted: 'I am unarmed.' He never erased from his mind the altered face of the 'tough' captain. 'Perhaps my colonel will write his memoirs one day,' Krassnoff's aide, Captain Birardi, told the newspaper La Nación a few years ago.

The 'tough guy' of Villa Grimaldi was until some time ago commander of the Tucapel Regiment, in Temuco. At the date of writing this article, he was the second man of his institution in the Fourth Division, based in Valdivia.

He tries to go unnoticed and to meet only with trusted people. He will not make the mistake of calling the press again, as he did a few years ago in Temuco, in order to defend one of his men who had murdered a truck driver because he was blocking his way on the highway. He learned that a cocktail for the press is not enough to erase the past."

MASSIVENESS

The sixth FUNA had one of its highest expressions of massiveness on this occasion, gathering according to some media more than a thousand young people, together with survivors of the torture centers and relatives of the victims, who arrived at the Military Hotel that operates in Providencia near the corner of Manuel Montt to denounce the manager of the company.

Despite a strong police presence, the festive activity took place without problems, and after more than twenty minutes of slogans, songs, dancing, reading of Krassnoff's criminal record, and graffiti on walls, the column began to advance toward the downtown sector of the capital.

At Salvador with Providencia, the young people made a stop to disperse, relating before that part of the actions carried out in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia, Sweden, Switzerland, France, and England to repudiate what was "Operation Condor" and saying goodbye until the next one, because, clearly, as long as there is no justice, the FUNA will continue to exist to denounce the torturers and murderers who continue to live in impunity.

Criminal agent of the DINA General Staff:

Born in Austria on February 15, 1946. Son of Dina Martchenko and Simón Krassnoff. Married to María de los Angeles Bassa, two children. Identity Card 5.477.311-0. Today he works as manager of the Military Hotel, located at Avenida Providencia 1219, corner of Manuel Montt. His phone is 4607800 and his fax is 4607809.

On September 11, 1973, being a lieutenant, he participated in the assault and looting of the Tomás Moro presidential house.

Between January and February 1974, he took the urban counterinsurgency course at the U.S. School of the Americas in Panama. Upon his return, he joined as the third man in the hierarchy of the Metropolitan Intelligence Brigade of the DINA, under the command of Marcelo Morén Brito.

He assumed as head of the torture center that operated at Londres 38 until August 1974, then moving on to command the Halcón Group at Villa Grimaldi and José Domingo Cañas, focusing his repression on the MIR.

During that period, he participated, among many other crimes, in the murders of Miguel Enríquez, Lumi Videla, the priest Antonio Llidó, Carmelo Soria, and Alfonso Chanfreau. In the midst of Operation Condor, he participated in the kidnappings of Edgardo Enríquez, detained in Argentina and transferred to Villa Grimaldi, and Jorge Fuentes Alarcón, brought from Paraguay and tortured to death in "The Tower" of Villa Grimaldi, after having been injected with the rabies virus and kept in a small wooden cage.

He participated in the preparation of the list of the 119 Chileans who were intended to be made to appear as dead in clashes in Argentina, known as Operation Colombo, and whose bodies have still not been found.

THE ACCOUNT OF VÍCTOR TORO

"I was at Villa Grimaldi (...) and together with other prisoners, I was a witness to the most savage and brutal crimes perpetrated by the DINA: the elimination of an entire family through the most barbaric, inhuman methods and insane terror, when the torturers did not even apply the most elementary precautions to hide their identities.

Between November 17 and 18, 1975, the prisoners Alberto Gallardo, Roberto Gallardo Moreno, Catalina Gallardo, and Mónica del Carmen Pacheco arrived at Villa Grimaldi. The torture to which they were subjected was led personally by Colonel MARCELO MOREN BRITO, with the assistance of MIGUEL KRASSNOFF MARTCHENKO and FRANCISCO FERRER LIMA.

Amidst blows, screams, threats, and a lot of movement, these prisoners were murdered on the night of November 18. I saw how they hung Alfredo Gallardo from the testicles from a tree in the courtyard. I heard his last moan as he was dying.

MARCELO MOREN personally applied boiling oil and electric current to the naked bodies of Catalina Gallardo and Mónica del Carmen Pacheco while they were hanging by their feet. At one point, the torturers took the electrical installations from Villa Grimaldi and, with high-voltage cables, electrocuted their victims.

That is how they killed these two women. Roberto Gallardo Moreno, who had been subjected to torture since the day before, died on November 18 on the electric grill. Prior to these massacres, the prisoners were with us in the lobby of Villa Grimaldi, and that is how we learned their names."

Source: (Funa No. 7)

Three former DINA agents prosecuted

Those accused by Judge María Inés Collin are Gerardo Urrich and Miguel Krassnoff, who were prosecuted as accomplices, in addition to former agent Miguel Hernández Oyarzo, who appears as the author of the crime of kidnapping of Dagoberto San Martín Vergara.

Those accused by Judge María Inés Collin are Gerardo Urrich and Miguel Krassnoff, who were prosecuted as accomplices, in addition to former agent Miguel Hernández Oyarzo, who appears in the files as the author.

Dagoberto San Martín was detained on December 17, 1974, and disappeared from the DINA torture center known as Venda Sexy.

Source: El Mostrador, March 14, 2002

Army rehires officers implicated in human rights cases

A high-ranking government official encountered, some time ago, a vehicle that was traveling calmly against traffic through the La Reina commune. As he had a driver, the official thought it was an official car and thought about the criticisms that the act could unleash. He noted the license plate and planned to reproach whoever the unruly person was for their bad behavior.

But the car did not belong to La Moneda, but to the Army.

According to a journalistic investigation by La Nación, the anonymous passenger was Brigadier (R) Jaime Lepe Orellana, the former secretary general of the Army and right-hand man of General Pinochet, who has been hired as a civilian by the institution, despite the fact that he retired in a stormy controversy over his link to the homicide of the Spaniard Carmelo Soria, which occurred in 1976.

The rehiring of Lepe was confirmed by a high-ranking source from the Ministry of Defense, who requested that their identity be kept confidential.

It is not the only case. The source ratified that Brigadier (R) Miguel Krassnoff Marchenko is in the same case, prosecuted for the disappearance of several political prisoners at Villa Grimaldi.

Lepe Orellana works as an advisor in the Military Industry Command, while Krassnoff is still the manager of the Military Officers' Hotel, located at Providencia 1219, although he is currently suspended because he is detained by judicial order in the Telecommunications Command since November of last year.

Faced with questions about the new functions of Lepe and Krassnoff, the Ministry of Defense revealed last Friday that both provide services under contract and as civilians for the institution.

"The Army has been informed of the inconvenience of this situation being maintained," said the source consulted at the Ministry. "The Army expressed understanding of our point of view." Therefore, that department expects "measures to be taken."

According to the source consulted, the hiring of both is legal "but constitutes an inconsistency with the spirit of collaboration in human rights matters that the Army has demonstrated through the dialogue table."

The Army's Public Relations Department declined to provide information or comment on these facts. The practice of hiring as civilians the uniformed personnel who retire allows them to improve their pension with a second income.

Nothing extraordinary

According to a person very close to Miguel Krassnoff—who speaks on condition of anonymity—the retired officer hopes to rejoin his work at the hotel as soon as he is granted the provisional release that he has repeatedly requested from the Fourth Criminal Court of San Miguel, where the disappearance of Manuel Cortés Joo is being investigated.

That file has just passed into the hands of the court minister Juan Guzmán. The magistrate also prosecuted Krassnoff for the disappearance of several political prisoners at Villa Grimaldi, but granted him the right to provisional release.

"Miguel Krassnoff is not the only officer involved in this type of case who provides services as a civilian in the Army. It is a generalized situation," affirms the source close to the military man.

It is common for uniformed personnel who retire for service reasons to be rehired as civilians by their institution, and being linked to trials for human rights violations is not an impediment, he reveals.

"There is nothing questionable about it. It is not about people who are per se sadistic, fascist, cruel, or whatever they are called. They are obedient officers who, when these events occurred, were a little over 20 years old. They only followed orders and, for the rest, developed an impeccable career. It is normal that the Army wants to continue counting on their services," he explains.

Lepe, meanwhile, was never prosecuted, since the trial in which the death of Carm

"I share Cheyre's 'never again'" "My experience must be passed on to new generations so that they are never again exposed to living the circumstances that have fallen to me and to many soldiers of our Army." The brigadier (ret.), prosecuted for the disappearances of 44 MIR members and one homicide, defends his mission as an interrogator of the MIR in the DINA barracks.

After 25 years of parading through the courts, he now condemns the torture, but acknowledges that "perhaps at some point it was necessary." He confesses to being the son of a forcibly disappeared person because the remains of his Cossack family, who were hanged in Moscow, were never found.

Every time Brigadier (ret.) Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko is summoned to the courts, he goes prepared for a surprise. It is because at the same time his lawyer informs him that a judge has granted him freedom in one case, another judge prosecutes him in a different one.

In the last 25 years, Krassnoff has testified—according to his own calculations—more than a thousand times in cases regarding the forcibly disappeared, many of whom he interrogated at Villa Grimaldi, where the trail of more than 300 political prisoners was lost.

In various proceedings, witnesses accuse him of ordering torture. Before, he was a lieutenant with a future. On September 11, 1973, he took possession of the Tomás Moro presidential residence. Shortly after, he was in charge of the members of Salvador Allende's cabinet detained at the Military School, and later he organized Augusto Pinochet's security.

But the Commander-in-Chief ordered him in 1974 to join the DINA and, as a result of that, today he lives as a detainee at the Army Telecommunications Command with his former boss, General (ret.) Manuel Contreras.

Although Krassnoff does not say it, they do not get along: Contreras made judicial and press statements that weakened his defense. He remained for 27 months in the DINA (1974-76) and there he was promoted to captain.

Although he assured the courts that he limited himself to working as an analyst and that he did not torture, he became a symbolic figure, infamously known to the world linked to the defense of human rights.

However, he feels the honor of having been the only military officer decorated by the Government Junta. Pinochet himself pinned the medal for military valor on his uniform in 1974 for leading the operation that resulted in the death of the MIR leader, Miguel Enríquez.

At a time when the issue of human rights has been vigorously reinstated on the agenda, he decides to grant his "first and only" interview, after keeping a hermetic silence for 25 years, despite the fact that many articles have been written about him blaming him for illegitimate duress.

In 2001, he sent a note to the Army's Auditor General asking him to file a complaint against media outlets, but he did not obtain support. "Since 1978 I have requested it, because through me the institution and everything I represent were sullied. It was always suggested to me that it was not convenient, for the moment."

• Do you feel abandoned by the Army?
• In no case. The institution has its priorities.
• Why didn't you speak before?
• Because now we are discussing the issue at a national level. I do it as a contribution to make known the situation I am facing. The harassment, humiliations, and suffering to which I have been subjected for 25 years also deserve special attention and reparation for my family and subordinates.
• What do you think of General Cheyre's statement about "never again" regarding human rights abuses?
• I fully share General Cheyre's "never again," especially in its first part, that of the inept politicians and the existence of terrorists.

The enemy of the MIR The Krassnoff of today looks different from the one the public opinion knew when, always wearing his institutional uniform, he appeared upright before the courts of justice. He shaved off his mustache, wears a shirt and tie, and smokes half a pack in two hours.

In addition, he is on semi-rest due to a spinal operation. His current image must also be very different from the one remembered by those who faced him after the military coup.

• Numerous witnesses claim that you interrogated them in the DINA barracks of Villa Grimaldi, Londres 38, and José Domingo Cañas.
• It is totally true—he agrees with a thick voice—. My mission was that of an analyst and I exclusively compiled the background information on MIR communications. Within this work, it was necessary to carry out intelligence work and this meant verifying the information obtained. Going to the neighborhoods and asking about strange movements to determine arms caches and the existence of safe houses. I reported directly to the director, and when I was ordered, I went to the transit sectors for detainees, as I understand they were. I interviewed about 50 MIR detainees.
• Why do you call them "interviews"?
• Because "interrogation" lends itself to speculations like those that have been hung on me in the confrontations: torture, beatings, atrocities, rapes. I saw them all in absolutely normal conditions, neither bleeding nor broken. Since many times for security measures they were blindfolded, I would have them remove the blindfolds and I would identify myself.
• What did you do in those cases?
• Take their fingerprints and check them. The answers were secondary to me, because what interested me most for the analysis was the documentation found in the raids. And that's where the guys were left...

As I got to know this subject, the conversations were longer. And thanks to these, without touching a hair on them and without the need for any physical pressure!, they gave me a lot of information. So much so that according to the internal documentation of the MIR leadership, I was very dangerous because I had the very special ability to obtain information without any type of pressure.

Therefore, I became public enemy number one. Disappearance of those interrogated

• Are you saying that there was no torture at Villa Grimaldi and Londres 38?
• I am not saying that. I am saying that I have no proof of it. I never saw, I never dealt with a person who had evidence. I always saw them very well. I did not torture, nor did my subordinates, for whom I assume responsibility for everything they did, because I have proof of it.
• You testified in court that you had "an excellent informant": Osvaldo Romo, one of the DINA's greatest torturers...
• I always saw Romo as an informant. He was never an agent and, according to my particular point of view, he could not have had access to situations as it has been said they occurred.
• But you assume responsibility for him and that is serious, considering who he is.
• I never saw the informant Romo in any activity related to torture or atrocities. I don't know why, and I said it in court, he suddenly appears admitting that he tortured. He could not have had access to those things. If you refer to all his statements, you will find great contradictions.
• But you cannot deny the torture...
• My lack of knowledge relates to the tremendously rigorous compartmentalization. And, by training, we could not be inserting ourselves into areas outside our competence. I did my job and that's it. Now, in confrontations with certain people, they have tried to insinuate that I ordered torture, which is false. Immediately after, they fall into contradictions.
• Do you condemn those methods even though it was thought they were applied to terrorists?
• Nothing justifies anything, but if a regular war is already terrible, in an internal confrontation this is multiplied many times over. And do not forget that we were involved in a spiral of violence that existed from before.
• Did this justify deaths and torture?
• I insist, nothing justifies anything. But that they may have occurred, of course they did.
• Do you condemn it?
• Ethically and sitting here today after almost 30 years, evidently I condemn it. But I do not rule out that, perhaps, at a given moment, it was necessary to do so.
• What? Disappearances? Torture?
• I am referring to physical pressures. I have heard horrible concepts of torture that are non-existent..., but it is possible. I accept that it could have existed, although I have no proof of it.
• Did you try to clarify where they took the people who died?
• Let's see. I understand the question little. Because I did not see deceased people.
• But you knew about deaths...
• In confrontations. What I have proof of. Let's be clear, evidently today it is recognized that there are people who were made to disappear. In front of me, no one ever died, no one was ever taken away in a strange way as a corpse.
• Didn't you have "interviewees" go missing?
• On more than one occasion I had to clarify aspects about people previously interviewed by me who were no longer in the different transit centers. I assumed that absence meant they had been transferred to permanent centers, or released.
• Did you raise these doubts to Contreras?
• A couple of times I made the pertinent inquiries to whom it corresponded and I was answered according to the above. Therefore, placed in time (1974), I had no real and objective reason to imagine anything else. Do not forget that neither I nor my subordinates had any authority over the detainees. Doubts about those matters should be clarified with the authorities of those years and not with me.

"I followed orders!"

• How did you get along with Contreras?
• Normal relations; let's say of a subordinate with a superior.
• Did you challenge any of his orders?
• ... I would leave that for history.
• History can be you, now.
• It is true, but I would prefer to summarize this point by saying that history will clarify it.
• Did you share his methods?
• Look, I followed orders! I received the orders that corresponded to my analysis work. And within that, I tried to do it as well as possible. What I complied with fit exactly into everything that our current regulations and military codes say. I am not the DINA. I was an Army lieutenant who was in that security service.
• Did your superiors assume responsibility for you?
• That is how it should have been.
• The DINA went down in Chilean history as a criminal organization.
• No. Absolutely not.
• The largest number of disappeared people passed through its facilities.
• That is what is said. But I have absolutely no proof of anything. Not even rumors.
• Do you feel like a victim?
• No... Yes, a person treated in an abnormal way within the concept of the Rule of Law. The charges against me are based on founded presumptions. No specific charge of detentions, torture, or disappearances has been able to be proven against me; I have been subjected to prosecution by the words of people with whom I have been confronted. There has been no concrete evidence. I respect the magistrates, but I do not understand them. It is incomprehensible and unacceptable that extremists who cooperated voluntarily by providing information that served to neutralize them, and who transformed themselves into agents who made a career, are the star witnesses to accuse us of the greatest barbarities and the judges believe them.

I believe in justice as an integral, indivisible concept, equal for all; but there is justice for some and another for others. All those who participated in violent acts, who shot to kill, were quickly amnestied.

That is to say, those directly responsible for this maelstrom of violence have no problem. Those of us who had to face, obligatorily and at the request of all of Chilean society, the aggressors of the nation, have been classified into another group.

If what had happened had happened and I had been responsible for all these infamies and atrocities, I would be amnestied just as the law was applied to the other side. Why not us?

• Because you don't acknowledge it...
• If there is nothing to acknowledge! There should be no process, but rather amnesty, statute of limitations, and res judicata.
• Not if the permanent kidnapping persists...
• I don't understand that either. It is absurd. In 30 years we are not going to be walking around with the detainees under the beds. I don't know where they are. If someone knows, let them say so.
• The code of silence is only for you...
• There is no code of silence. I only tell the truth as far as I am concerned.
• Don't tell me you were a "good" DINA agent.
• I was a subordinate Army officer on a service commission in an intelligence body. My experience must be passed on to new generations so that they are never again exposed to living the circumstances and moments that have fallen to me and to many soldiers of our Army. This has been devastating for our family, which knows that I did not commit any type of crime in compliance with the missions that were imposed on me in a moment of extreme violence.

"I would do it again"

• What do you know about the exhumations?
• I do not have any type of information. According to press reports, it seems these began to be carried out starting in 1978, a time when I was at the War Academy, concerned with my own missions in the face of the eventual war with Argentina.
• You were the only active-duty officer who responded to the Rettig Commission.
• Indeed, I sent them a note saying that I had nothing to contribute; that it seemed incongruous to me that I had to go and explain supposed activities to a commission strange to me. And that, according to what I did, if tomorrow it were my turn to carry out missions in that sense, I would do it again. Of course, I was poorly interpreted.
• But, would you do it again?
• I stand by it... But I have lost all my jobs and possibilities. I only live on my modest pension. Every time I have been subjected to prosecution, I am forced into the humiliating situation of being fingerprinted, which is why my personal record is far from serving me to opt for a job of any kind. What is intended today with this officer of the Chilean Army, who 30 years ago cooperated, like the entire military and Order institution, to avoid a civil war? Out of context regarding the moment of the events, with the tranquility that democracy and the rule of law provide, I am judged by people who are what they are thanks to the titanic sacrifice of these anonymous soldiers who swore to give our lives when the nation and its society demanded it. And that is what we did.

Krassnoff Vs. Rettig Report How did Miguel Enríquez die? With his version—never before published—on how the secretary general of the MIR, Miguel Enríquez Espinosa, died, Krassnoff contradicts the information provided by leftist groups and the Rettig Commission.

He relies on the investigation that the Army carried out for two months before deciding to give him—in the person of General Pinochet—the medal for military valor, with which he became the only one to receive it since the War of the Pacific.

The event occurred on October 5, 1974, in a house located in the San Miguel commune. In the place were, in addition to Enríquez, his partner Carmen Castillo and other individuals who managed to flee.

This is Krassnoff's account

"That Saturday, near 2:00 PM, we drove through the streets several times in two vehicles. Two agents go with me, plus a 19-year-old assistant who operated as my secretary. We don't get anything, but when we were leaving, neighbors tell us that vehicles enter and leave a house, they type all night, and there is a man who seems disabled because he enters without getting out." "The information had to be verified by ringing the doorbell and if a lady came out saying nothing is happening, we would leave, as simple as that.

I put the woman in charge of the vehicles, a second man on a corner, and I go with the other member toward the door of the house. When we were crossing in front of the window, the person who was going next to me says 'Careful Miguel!' and pushes me and throws me to the ground.

He had heard the movement of a rifle bolt being loaded. Then a stunning volley of shots passes over us." "We did not have any type of communication and the only way to call the central was by phone. I sent someone to locate one and while I fired my AK rifle, sheltered behind a pole in front of the house.

I heard gunfire elsewhere, but I didn't see any adversary. Suddenly a guy appeared on the roof with a Soviet anti-armor rocket launcher and fires at me. Fortunately, due to the short distance, the projectile does not manage to develop its maximum explosion and blows up a motorcycle and part of the house that was behind it, but nothing happened to me.

At that, I run out of ammunition and I have to withdraw." "When I return, an Investigations team was entering the house. I stopped them because there could be booby traps and explosives, and I enter. I find a pregnant woman bleeding to death, lying on the floor with her rifle.

I thought she was dead, but she was alive. With her clothes, I tried to stop the abundant blood from her shoulder and forearm. And when they warned me that ambulances arrived, I took her under my protection, put her in one of them with an assistant of mine, and they took her urgently to the Military Hospital.

She survived thanks to the timely medical attention. It was Carmen Castillo Echeverría, Miguel Enríquez's partner, niece of Jaime Castillo Velasco, current president of the Human Rights Commission, and daughter of the current mayor of La Reina." "At that, the man I left on the side of the house confronted Enríquez.

He was wounded, tried to climb a wall, and, upon appearing, was ordered to raise his hands and not move. But he continued, he was insisted upon again, and he pulled out a .38 caliber revolver. The agent reacted in self-defense and Enríquez fell dead." "At four or five in the afternoon (more than two hours later) Carabineros and military forces arrived to surround the perimeter.

I was at the hospital verifying Carmen Castillo's condition. When she began to recover, we had very long conversations until she went to England (I myself went to drop her off at the airport) and I never heard from her again.

In 1992 she called me on the phone, but I didn't answer. She sent me a message through an important political figure in the military government. He was impressed by how she referred to an adversary. She wanted to make contact to thank me.

I didn't accept because I did my duty and I didn't have to accept thanks from someone who wanted to assassinate me." A strange relationship The history known until now contradicts Krassnoff's version. According to the Rettig Report, "the house where Miguel Enríquez was hiding was surrounded by a large contingent of security agents, which included a tank and a helicopter, who began to fire (...) Enríquez fell in the confrontation receiving, according to the autopsy protocol, 10 bullet impacts." In the book "El rebelde de la burguesía," by journalists Daniel Avendaño and Mauricio Palma, it is asserted that "there were about 50 men preparing to attack the MIR leader (...) Feeling desperate, he opened fire, being immediately replied to by the military forces (...) DINA agents threw a grenade inside the home. Enríquez was wounded." In her book "Un día de octubre en Santiago," Carmen Castillo, protagonist of the confrontation, describes: "Standing on the adobe wall, one hundred meters from the blue house on Santa Fe, Miguel shouted: 'Stop the fire... There is a pregnant woman, wounded!' The men in ambush stood up and advanced on the humble house. Miguel jumped the wall and pushed the weapon: a burst of machine-gun fire tore the air. Gunshots rang out from everywhere. The woman washing clothes saw him through the crack in the boards. Miguel fired a burst. Miguel collapsed onto the tub, the laundry sink." According to her, they were unaware that a grenade fragment reached him 15 minutes after the confrontation began, "and they will not know that he fought alone, for more than two hours." However, something surprising happens with Castillo, who writes in the third person. She is impressed by Krassnoff. She recognizes in the publication having believed that "he was the good guy in the story." There were many visits she received from Krassnoff at the Military Hospital, where she was recovering from her wounds. "How to talk about Captain Miguel Marchensko (sic)? Even today this is what seems most difficult to me." And Carmen Castillo makes a confession that is at least ambiguous: "She desires his arrival, his questions. She waits for him." Krassnoff's last piece of advice, when, with Manuel Contreras, he went to drop her off at the airport: "Never forget: you were not tortured." Family history Son of a disappeared person Krassnoff's life is a tragic paradox. His grandfather fought against the Bolshevik revolution as commander-in-chief of the Cossacks, and in the Second World War he fought (with the Chilean officer's father and an uncle) against the communists with the support of the German Army in Operation Barbarossa. When the Cossack Army settled in Austria, where his father met his mother, Dhyna (a curious name, which will be related to the officer's destiny) and they married, the British, who controlled the country, captured the Cossacks in 1945 and sent them to Moscow. The three were hanged in 1947 in Red Square and their remains made to disappear. Miguel Krassnoff was born in 1946 in Austria and, through arrangements by the Chilean ambassador, was moved with his mother to Chile. Without knowing this experience (she hid the facts from him to keep him away from the career of arms), he enrolled in the Military School, where he stood out, becoming trapped in his Creole destiny. Of the Krassnoffs, who emerged in Russia in the 9th century, only his small family environment remains and his case is famous in Russia, since it has been widely described in "Izvestia" and Russian Cossack magazines.

• As I am a grandson, son, and nephew of the forcibly disappeared - he states forcefully - I understand this suffering perfectly.
• However, it has been said that this fueled your hatred of communists...
• Never! It is unacceptable. The deranged minds of those who profess philosophies related to Marxism can distort this feeling of being the son of a forcibly disappeared person as a sort of revenge, of vengeance. But I do not feel hatred for any person who has caused me so much harm.

But you are accused of making people disappear.

• By family and professional training, I categorically reject everything that relates to the forced disappearances of people. As I suffered it in my own flesh, I was not going to lend myself to doing the same.

Military career "I had my legitimate aspirations"

• Frustrated by not reaching general?

I had and have my legitimate aspirations and, according to my qualifications of a normal career, these were to access the high command. However, it was frustrated by having belonged to an intelligence service and by all these lies.

This was communicated to me personally by the Commander-in-Chief of the time, my General Izurieta. I thanked him for his deference, because explanations are never given, but I told him that I would have preferred another reason, such as telling me that I did not meet the conditions.

• Why did you testify in uniform?
• Because I have never had anything to hide. That is how I stated it: here I am as a colonel of the Chilean Army; I wear my uniform with great honor, because I have done nothing that could stain it, and much less me, my subordinates, and my dear and respected family. I don't know why they have transformed me into an emblematic figure and have wanted to stigmatize me.

Prosecutions against him His judicial situation Miguel Krassnoff is being prosecuted for 44 cases of MIR members who disappeared after passing through Villa Grimaldi. Military Justice has dismissed several of them, which have been resumed in the civil criminal courts.

At the same time, the Santiago Court of Appeals must resolve the 10-year and one-day sentence for the qualified homicide of the MIR member Humberto Menanteau. The first judicial statement was made 25 years ago, in the middle of the military period before Minister Servando Jordán.

He has remained without freedom for two years in an interrupted manner. He has 14 cases for qualified kidnapping, which five judges are conducting, investigating similar causes. In the courts, there are the statements of Patricio Negrón, former head of national organization of the MIR, who remained in Villa Grimaldi between February and May 1975.

Negrón, who has been confronted with Krassnoff, told Reportajes that "when I was arrested and arrived at Villa Grimaldi, Krassnoff introduced himself to me and gave me his name and his rank: Army captain.

I was blindfolded. He offered that I collaborate and as I did not respond, they began to beat me in front of him and then he ordered that they take me to the grill." The former DINA agent, Nibaldo Jiménez Santibáñez, recounted to the investigating minister Juan Guzmán Tapia, as stated in the process, that "individuals were sent to the sea in a meeting that was held with the heads of the group at that time, the captains Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko, Maximiliano Ferrer Lima, another with the surname Barrieta, who represented the different barracks (...) (Contreras) was the one who reviewed the lists and, ultimately, was the one who decided the fate of the detainees."

Source: El Mercurio, July 6, 2003

Memoriaviva disseminates the response of Carmen Castillo, from Paris:

Regarding an interview with Colonel Miguel Krasnoff Marchenko.

It is three in the afternoon in Paris. My mother calls me from Santiago. She reads me the statements of Miguel Krasnoff Marchensko. The arrogance of the torturer remains in that individual, thirty years later, intact.

Miguel Krasnoff Marchensko, one of the heads of the DINA, responsible for torture, death, and disappearance, head of Halcón 1 and Halcón 2, persists in declaring himself a "non-torturer." From there, from that "statement," the rest of his words are what they are, nothing.

Facing "nothing," one feels neither emotion nor rage. In August 1993, the documentary "La Flaca Alejandra" was filmed in Santiago. During those two weeks, we tried to obtain an interview with Krasnoff Marchensko, to confront him with the memory of his victims and in front of my camera.

He did not respond, but that silence emits noise and a clear meaning. That film, which attempts to dismantle the space of fear, pain, and horror, has been one of my responses to the policy of amnesia and forgetting of the power in Chile.

Why has that documentary, ten years later, still not been broadcast in our country? I do not respond, therefore, today, neither to his statements, nor to those who have always made the dictatorship's version their own.

I address the survivors, my companions, the people of Chile. Our experience of struggle and resistance is found every day alive in me, even if I write to you from afar. I have written three books, two can be read in Chile: "Un día de octubre en Santiago" and "Santiago/París, el vuelo de la memoria," co-written with Mónica Echeverría, my mother.

I have tried in both to transmit the version of the defeated. In those texts, Miguel Krasnoff Marchensko appears as what he is: a torturer, one more screw in the killing machine. The testimonies collected constitute irrefutable evidence that can be consulted by anyone who wishes.

Instead, there is something that is not known and about which we have not spoken enough. If anyone saved my life, it was not any of the pawns of the repressive apparatus. They were human beings who do amaze me, who performed a gratuitous gesture just because, to save the life of someone they did not know.

It was the sum of what is called "a good deed" that managed to extract me from prison and torture: the neighbor Gladys from the house across from ours on Santa Fe Street who, seeing me lying on the sidewalk and bleeding to death, called the Barros Luco Hospital.

The young doctor on duty who was in the ambulance and who confronted the DINA by taking me to the Emergency Room of the Hospital. The old nurse of that same service who asked me "what can I do for you" and who notified my uncle Jaime Castillo that I am wounded but alive.

The doctor who operated on me at the Military Hospital, who by chance was there and who decided a few weeks later that I could travel. The nurse from the same hospital who whispered some news about my family to me... and yes, the entire solidarity movement in Chile and abroad that demanded my release, horrified by the death in combat of Miguel Enríquez, for which Augusto Pinochet, Manuel Contreras, and Krassnoff Martchenko are responsible.

In that room at the Military Hospital, guarded permanently by three armed men. I was a prisoner. The officers would enter. They came to interrogate. A prisoner is never in a situation of "conversation" with her torturer, even if in the game of "roles," that puppet puts on the mask of the "good guy" of the story.

About this, there is no ambiguity in my texts. In the daily struggle, there are many of us, and although we are not listened to, we exist. We exist, we resist, and we create from our memory, without nostalgia and with an immense desire to live.

It is worth continuing, because Chile cannot afford the luxury of forgetting the courage of those who defended legality and democracy. In the trials that Chile must still carry out against the repressors and torturers of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, my film "La Flaca Alejandra" and my books will have to be included as some of the countless pieces of evidence of the charges against them.

It is the responsibility of El Mercurio to publish the entirety of this response.

Source: Carmen Castillo, Paris, July 10, 2003.

Minister Guzmán prosecuted seven military officers

The investigating minister, Juan Guzmán Tapia, subjected seven military officers (ret.) to prosecution for the crime of qualified kidnapping, for the disappearance of 23 people at the Villa Grimaldi torture facility, during the military government.

The former uniformed officers are the former director of the DINA, Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda; Colonel Marcelo Moren Brito; Brigadier Miguel Krassnoff; Sub-officer Basclay Zapata; agent Osvaldo Romo; the retired Carabineros officer, Conrado Pacheco, and agent Pedro Alfaro.

From a human rights lawyer in Chile, we received more details: Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda for: Jacqueline Drouilly, César Negrete Peña, Marta Neira, Alfredo Rojas Castañeda, Jaime Vásquez Sáenz, Juan Molina Mogollones, Alej.

Avalos Davidson, Sonia Rios Pacheco, Elías Villar Quijón, María Isabel Gutiérrez Martínez, Horacio Carabantes, Fabián Ibarra Córdova, Carlos Rioseco Espinoza, Alfredo García Vega, Abel Vilches Figueroa, René Acuña Reyes, Carrasco Matus, Hugo Rios Videla, Martín Elgueta Pinto, Agustín Martínez Meza, Juan MacLeod, Julieta Ramírez Castro, and Luis Palominos Rojas.

Marcelo Moren Brito for all of the above except Elgueta, Negrete, and Neira. Miguel Krassnoff for Negrete, Neira, Drouilly, Rojas, Vásquez, Molina, Avalos, Acuña, Carrasco, Ríos, Elgueta, Martínez, and Palominos.

Pedro René Alfaro Fernández for: Ríos, Villar, Gutiérrez, Carabantes, Ibarra, Rioseco, García, and Vilches. Basclay Zapata for: Rojas, Vásquez, Molina, Acuña, Carrasco, Ríos, Elgueta, and Palominos. Conrado Pacheco Cárdenas for: MacLeod and Ramírez.

Source: La Tercera, Monday, July 22

Chilean justice prosecutes for the first time in the Llidó Case

For the first time, Chilean justice issued indictments against people who participated in the qualified kidnapping of the Spanish priest Antonio Llidó. The priest's case was one of those that determined the detention in England of General (ret.) Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, following the investigation carried out by the Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón.

This morning, nine former members of the DINA, including its top leadership, were subjected to prosecution as authors of the qualified kidnapping. The accused are Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda, Marcelo Moren Brito, Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko, Osvaldo Romo Mena, Maximiliano Ferrer Lima, Fernando Lauriani Maturana, Orlando Manzo Durán, Ciro Torré Sáez, and Bazclay Zapata Reyes.

Priest Llidó was illegally detained in October 1974 and last seen at the clandestine detention center of Cuatro Álamos. DINA agents tortured him for helping and providing protection to MIR militants.

Source: El Mostrador, May 15, 2003

Wave of prosecutions in human rights cases

A total of nine more prosecutions were issued for human rights violations, in a context where expectations are growing to know how the right, independently of improving compensation for the victims' families, will address a legislative proposal that would attempt to put an end to the trials against military officers 30 years after the military coup occurred.

In a resolution issued by Minister Juan Guzmán Tapia, the former members of the DINA, Colonel (ret.) Carlos López Tapia, Brigadier (ret.) Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko, Colonel (ret.) Germán Barriga Muñoz, Carabineros Colonel (ret.) Ricardo Lawrence Mires, and the doctor Osvaldo Pincetti were prosecuted yesterday as authors of the crime of kidnapping in 1976 of nine communist militants.

The indictments were issued for the disappearance of former deputy Bernardo Araya and his wife, María Olga Flores, and the members of the clandestine leadership of the PC, all disappeared to date, Mario Zamorano, Jorge Muñoz (husband of the current president of the PC, Gladys Marín), Elisa Escobar, Uldarico Donaire, Jaime Donato, Lenín Díaz, and Víctor Díaz.

The latter was the father of the former president of the AFDD, Viviana Díaz. The disappearance of the first clandestine leadership of the PC is known as the Calle Conferencia case, because in a house on this street, in Santiago West, the DINA set up a trap to capture the leadership of the PC.

These victims are included in the first complaint against Augusto Pinochet and other military officers (ret.), which Gladys Marín filed on January 12, 1998. The plaintiff lawyer, Eduardo Contreras, highlighted that "this shows that truth and justice can continue to be made, unlike what the UDI wants." Contreras also underlined "the courage and ethical condition of Judge Guzmán, who, without disqualifying himself from the case, prosecuted a relative of his so directly." Indeed, Carlos López Tapia, Judge Guzmán's cousin, was the head of the clandestine center Villa Grimaldi in 1976, the place where the PC detainees were taken and disappeared. López also integrated the Caravan of Death on its first tour through the south and, according to his own statements in the process, attended on the night of October 3, 1973, in Valdivia, the extrajudicial execution of the MIR leader in the foothills area of what is now the Tenth Region, José Liendo Vera, better known as "Commander Pepe." Yesterday Guzmán admitted that the measure "was difficult, because judges are human beings." Four Others Meanwhile, Judge Jorge Zepeda subjected to prosecution the Army officer (ret.) Claudio Lecaros Canales, the sub-officer (ret.) José Muñoz Pozo, and the Carabineros sub-officer (ret.) Omar Mella Lillo. The indictment was issued as authors of the homicide of Rubén Acevedo Gutiérrez and the kidnapping of Vidal Riquelme Ibáñez and Cesáreo Soto. The three victims presented themselves on September 15, 1973, at the El Melosal police station in San Javier, in what is now the Seventh Region, from where they were removed by military personnel from the Linares Artillery School, taken to the Loncomilla bridge, and executed. Only Acevedo's body appeared. In turn, Minister Daniel Calvo prosecuted the FACH Colonel (ret.) Guillermo Gómez Aguilar, as the author of the kidnapping of Gabriel Marfull González. He was detained on September 13, 1973, and taken to the El Bosque Air Base. There he was executed and his body moved to Cuesta Barriga, where it was abandoned. In both cases, the lawyer for Fasic, Nelson Caucoto, acts as a plaintiff representing the families, and he valued yesterday the investigation instructed until now by the two magistrates.

THE FALL OF THE PC

On Calle Conferencia, located in the western zone of the Santiago commune, the DINA set up a "trap" in May 1976: agents of the repressive organization waited for several days for the arrival of the PC leadership that was working on the rearticulation of the party and captured them to then make them disappear.

In December of the same year, the DINA struck again and this time its agents detained members of a new PC leadership, in what is known as the "case of the thirteen." In this second repressive wave fell Waldo Pizarro, husband of Sola Sierra and father of

The presiding judge Alejandro Solís issued a new sentence of up to fifteen years and one day against the leadership of the dissolved National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) for their responsibility in the aggravated kidnapping of Herbit Guillermo Ríos Soto, which occurred on January 3, 1975.

The maximum sentences handed down by the magistrate were against retired General Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda, former director of the repressive agency, and retired Brigadier Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko.

Meanwhile, Brigadier (R) Pedro Espinoza Bravo, Lieutenant (R) Fernando Lauriani Maturana, Colonel (R) Marcelo Morén Brito, Major (R) Rolf Wenderoth Pozo, Sub-officer (R) Basclay Zapata Reyes, and civilian agent Osvaldo Romo Mena were sentenced to ten years and one day in prison.

Solís also sentenced retired Lieutenant Colonel Francisco Maximiliano Ferrer Lima to five years in prison and acquitted retired Carabineros officer Orlando Manzo Durán. Ríos Soto, a history pedagogy student and member of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR), was detained on January 3, 1975, at the home of a comrade, after which he was taken to the Villa Grimaldi detention center.

Source: El Mostrador, March 30, 2007

Supreme Court issues new sentence against DINA agents

In a new ruling that dismisses the Amnesty Law and the statute of limitations, the Criminal Chamber sentenced four members of the DINA's Caupolicán Brigade for the kidnapping of four members of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) in August 1974, who were taken from an apartment in downtown Santiago.

The Supreme Court ratified a sentence of 10 years and one day in prison for members of the Caupolicán Brigade of the dissolved National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) for the disappearance of four militants of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) that occurred in August 1974.

In a unanimous ruling, the Criminal Chamber confirmed the sentence handed down against Colonel (R) Marcelo Moren Brito, Brigadier (R) Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko, Sub-officer (R) Basclay Zapata, and civilian agent Osvaldo Romo Mena for the aggravated kidnappings of Ricardo Aurelio Troncoso Muñoz, Hernán Galo González Inostroza, María Elena González Inostroza, and Elsa Victoria Leuthner Muñoz, who were taken on August 15, 1974, from different parts of the capital.

The ruling ratified the decision of presiding judge Joaquín Billard Acuña issued in April 2004, which had not been modified by the Santiago Court of Appeals, applying once again the country's highest court's criterion of accepting the Geneva Conventions for cases of human rights violations committed during the dictatorship, thereby dismissing the concepts of amnesty and the statute of limitations. “It is not acceptable that the same people who took refuge in the advantages granted to them by the aforementioned declaration of a state of war, established by the only legislative instrument available after the breakdown of the constitutional institutional order in force until then, now pretend to ignore its value in order to disregard the sanctions for transgressions of the laws of such a state and the limits that the Geneva Conventions and other international instruments already in force at the time impose on self-exoneration regarding them,” states the ruling drafted by Justice Jaime Rodríguez Espoz, which spans more than 70 pages and 90 considerations. It adds that “if, by making use of the superiority of force, a state of war was established to facilitate the fight against those who opposed the military government, one must also accept the consequences that follow from having violated the regulations governing armed conflicts in relation to the treatment of combatants, who could no longer be considered common criminals and, much less, be made victims of brutal repression such as that accounted for by the background of this case.” Of those sentenced, only Sub-officer Zapata, known as "El Troglo," is not currently serving time for a previous conviction for human rights violations, so once the files are sent to the court of first instance, he must enter one of the two special penal facilities for military personnel located in the Metropolitan Region. Ricardo Aurelio Troncoso Muñoz, Hernán Galo González Inostroza, María Elena González Inostroza, and Elsa Victoria Leuthner Muñoz were detained on August 15, 1974, in a raid carried out by DINA agents at the apartment located at Calle Bueras 172, Apartment D, in Santiago, and taken to the detention centers of Londres 38 and Tres y Cuatro Álamos, from where they disappeared. The case of Troncoso Muñoz is particular. Before his detention, he had remained in asylum at the Mexican Embassy in Santiago from October 10, 1973, until March 1, 1974, the date on which he left the asylum, desperate due to the delay in being granted a safe-conduct. Fifteen days later, he was detained by DINA agents.

Source: El Mostrador, May 12, 2007

Four DINA members sentenced for disappearance of carpenter

Ofelio Lazo was detained in July 1974 by troops commanded by agent Osvaldo Romo, one of the members of the organization affected by the ruling of Judge Juan Eduardo Fuentes. A new sentence against agents of the dissolved National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) was issued by Judge Juan Eduardo Fuentes Belmar for the kidnapping of Ofelio de la Cruz Lazo Lazo.

The magistrate sentenced the former director of the organization, Manuel Contreras, and civilian agent Osvaldo Romo to five years in prison, while collaborators Miguel Krassnoff and Marcelo Moren received three years and one day of imprisonment.

This is the 15th conviction affecting Contreras, who already totals 159 years of imprisonment for various cases of abuse during the military dictatorship. Lazo Lazo, a carpenter and member of the Socialist Party (PS), was detained on July 30, 1974, by troops commanded by Romo, who arrived at his home in the Pudahuel commune around 1:00 AM.

Subsequently, it was established that that same night, Ofelio Lazo was taken from his home by the group of DINA agents to the home of his friend and former co-worker Eduardo Alarcón Jara, whom they detained at 2:30 AM.

That same night, the agents detained Gumercindo Machuca Morales at his home in the town of Peñaflor; the captors arrived there with Ramón Núñez Espinoza, whom they had detained on July 25, 1974, and with Lazo, recalls Memoria Viva.

Source: El Mostrador, June 19, 2007

Supreme Court issues new sentence applying the concept of permanent kidnapping

The Criminal Chamber of the highest court once again issued a sentence against five former agents of the dissolved DINA for a case of a forcibly disappeared person. Of the former military personnel sentenced to effective prison time, the only one who is currently free is retired Colonel Rolf Wenderoth Pozo, who in the coming days must enter the Cordillera Prison.

The Supreme Court issued a new sentence against five former agents of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), applying the concept of aggravated kidnapping of a forcibly disappeared person. A decision that comes amid criticism from retired military personnel and UDI parliamentarians regarding the logic of the courts in human rights violation cases, following the escape of retired General Raúl Iturriaga Neumann.

The Criminal Chamber of the highest court sentenced civilian agent Osvaldo Romo Mena to 10 years and one day of imprisonment for the case of the forcibly disappeared Manuel Cortez Joo, and reduced to five years and one day of imprisonment the sentences for Miguel Krassnoff, Marcelo Moren Brito, and Rolf Wenderoth, who had been sentenced to the same penalty as Romo Mena.

Considering the collaboration he provided in the process, the sentence for retired Sub-officer Basclay Zapata Reyes, known as “El Troglo,” was also reduced from five years and one day to three years and one day of suspended prison time.

The ruling by Justices Alberto Chaigneau, Nibaldo Segura, Jaime Rodríguez Espoz, and the participating lawyers José Fernández and Fernando Castro does not enter into a deep analysis of the concept of aggravated kidnapping and is limited only to reducing the sentences, considering that Krassnoff, Moren Brito, and Wenderoth are favored by the mitigating factor of an irreproachable previous conduct.

In the civil aspect, the ruling makes a deep analysis, as it rejects the lawsuit that the relatives had presented for moral damages, and the issue must be analyzed by the civil justice system and not alongside the criminal sentence, rejecting the payment that had been ordered jointly to the Treasury and the 5 sentenced individuals to pay $20 million pesos to the victim's relatives.

Source: El Mostrador, June 28, 2007

Manuel Contreras sentenced to 25 years in prison

The DINA leadership was sentenced for the crime of Lumi Videla in a first-instance ruling that involves, in addition to Contreras, Miguel Krassnoff, Cristoph Willike, Marcelo Moren Brito, among others.

Two magistrates issued separate sentences in well-known human rights cases, sentences that once again complicate the DINA leadership and with special force the leader of the repressive organization, General (R) Manuel Contreras.

On one hand, Judge Alejandro Solís issued a sentence in the case of the homicide of Lumi Videla Moya and the aggravated kidnapping of her husband Sergio Pérez Molina, events that occurred on November 3, 1974, and September 22, 1974, respectively.

In the ruling, he sentences General (R) Manuel Contreras to ten years and one day of major imprisonment in its medium degree as the author of the crime of aggravated kidnapping of Sergio Pérez. He also sanctions Miguel Krassnoff for the same offense, but in this case, the penalty is five years and one day of major imprisonment in its minimum degree, a case that is repeated for Ciro Ernesto Torré Sáez.

In the crime of Lumi Videla, the sanction for "Mamo" Contreras reaches fifteen years and one day of major imprisonment in its maximum degree. For Krassnoff Martchenko, ten years and one day of major imprisonment in its maximum degree, and the same sanction will be served by Cristoph Georg Paul Willeke Floel, Francisco Maximiliano Ferrer Lima, and Marcelo Luis Moren Brito.

Meanwhile, Basclay Humberto Zapata Reyes receives a sanction of five years and one day of major imprisonment in its maximum degree. And after the conviction yesterday of the former Army auditor, General (R) Fernando Torres Silva, and Colonel (J) Enrique Ibarra as authors of illicit association in the death of the DINA chemist, Eugenio Berrios, today Judge Alejandro Madrid expanded the convictions for another offense.

The judge's ruling refers to the kidnapping and homicide of Army Corporal and DINA agent Manuel Leyton Robles, murdered with toxic gas in 1977. This case is of special importance because it would be a related crime to the death of former President Eduardo Frei, due to the fact that the officer died at the London clinic where the DINA operated.

For the crime of illicit association, he sentenced Hernán Taricco Lavin, Pedro Valdivia Soto, Osvaldo Leyton Bahamondes, Carlota Bolumburu Tabeada, Ricardo Lawrence Mires, Vianel Valdivieso Cervantes, Hernán Sovino Maturana, Santiago Matteo Galleguillos, Juan Morales Salgado, Lorenzo Toro Olivares, Vittorio Orvietto Teplisky, Federico Chaigneau Sepúlveda, and Gladys Calderón Carreño.

For the crime of kidnapping, the sanction involves Hernán Taricco Lavin, Osvaldo Leyton Bahamondes, Carlota Bolumburu Tabeada, Vianel Valdivieso Cervantes, Hernán Sovino Maturana, Juan Morales Salgado, Lorenzo Toro Olivares, and Ricardo Lawrence Mires.

And furthermore, for the concept of homicide that affected Manuel Leyton himself, Judge Madrid sentenced Hernán Taricco Lavin, Ricardo Lawrence Mires, and Juan Morales Salgado. As accomplices, he sanctioned Hernán Sovino Maturana and Lorenzo Toro Olivares; and as cover-ups, he sentenced Osvaldo Leyton Bahamondes, Carlota Bolumburu Tabeada, Pedro Valdivia Soto, Santiago Matteo Galleguillos, Federico Chaigneau Sepúlveda, and Gladys Calderón Carreño.

Finally, for the crime of co-authors in the falsification of a public document, he sanctioned Osvaldo Leyton Bahamondes and Carlota Bolumburu Tabeada.

Source: La Nación, July 24, 2007

New conviction for crime during Pinochet dictatorship

Visiting Judge Alejandro Solís issued a new conviction against former members of the dissolved National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) for their involvement in the aggravated kidnapping of Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) militant María Teresa Bustillos Cereceda, in events that took place in December 1974.

The magistrate sentenced the former head of the defunct DINA, General (R) Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda, to 15 years in prison; and retired Brigadiers Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko, Marcelo Moren Brito, and Pedro Espinoza Bravo to 10 years and one day of imprisonment.

This is the 17th conviction issued by Judge Solís since he was appointed in October 2002 to take charge of investigations into human rights violations committed between 1973 and 1990. The victim was a militant of the MIR and a social worker at the University of Chile; she was 24 years old and was detained in her apartment on Calle San Antonio, in the Santiago commune.

Source: La Nación, September 28, 2007

Contreras sentenced to 15 years in prison for kidnapping of MIR militant

The court also sentenced retired Colonels Marcelo Moren Brito, Rolf Wenderoth, and Francisco Ferrer Lima, former Army Brigadiers Miguel Krassnoff and Pedro Espinoza, and Sub-officer Basclay Zapata to ten years and one day.

The Santiago Court of Appeals sentenced retired General Manuel Contreras, former head of the DINA, the secret police of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship, to fifteen years and one day in prison this Friday for the disappearance of a MIR militant in 1975.

The court also sentenced retired Colonels Marcelo Moren Brito, Rolf Wenderoth, and Francisco Ferrer Lima, former Army Brigadiers Miguel Krassnoff and Pedro Espinoza, and Sub-officer Basclay Zapata to ten years and one day.

The ruling, agreed upon unanimously by the Ninth Chamber of the Court of Appeals, ratified the first-instance resolution issued by Judge Alejandro Solís on January 18 of this year. The court, however, rejected the civil lawsuit filed by the victim's relatives against the Chilean State, who were requesting monetary compensation.

The case refers to the kidnapping of Julio Flores, 22, who was a student at the State Technical University and a militant in the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR). The young man was detained by DINA agents on January 10, 1975, at his home in Santiago and was last seen at the Villa Grimaldi torture center, from where he disappeared, as stated in the Rettig Report.

With this Friday's sentence, Contreras accumulates fifteen convictions against him, totaling more than 200 years in prison, although at least half are still pending a review by the Supreme Court. With these sentences, the Court of Appeals completes 21 rulings in human rights violation cases so far this year.

According to the Rettig Report, during the Pinochet dictatorship, more than 3,200 people died at the hands of State agents, of whom 1,192 are listed as forcibly disappeared.

Source: El Mostrador, December 28, 2007

France to try thirteen Chilean repressors in absentia

After almost ten years since the French justice system decided to try a group of Chilean and one Argentine repressor for the kidnapping and disappearance of five Franco-Chilean citizens, the Grand Criminal Court of Paris set the date for the trial between May 19 and 23.

The 13 Chileans and the Argentine will be tried in absentia (according to the French legal concept) because neither Chile nor Argentina accepted the extradition requests made at the time by France. Among the Chileans are the former head of the DINA, Manuel Contreras, and the leader of the German sect Colonia Dignidad, Paul Schafer.

Four of the initially requested Chileans are already dead: the dictator Augusto Pinochet, General Javier Palacios who commanded the ground assault on La Moneda on September 11, 1973, Aviation Colonel Andrés Pacheco Cárdenas, commander of the Temuco air base, and former civilian agent Osvaldo “Guatón” Romo.

The Chilean officers (all retired) who will be put on trial are, in addition to Contreras and Schafer: Emilio Sandoval Poo, a southern businessman; Joaquín Ramírez Pineda, former commander of the Tacna regiment; Rafael Ahumada Valderrama; Carabineros Lieutenant Colonel Gerardo Godoy García (“El Cachete Chico”); Basclay Zapata Reyes (“El Troglo”), DINA Army sub-officer; Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko, DINA Brigadier and former head of the Águila brigade; Marcelo Moren Brito, DINA Colonel and former head of Villa Grimaldi; Pedro Espinoza Bravo, Brigadier and former second-in-command of DINA; Raúl Eduardo Iturriaga Neumann, DINA General and former head of its foreign department; José Zara Holger, DINA Brigadier and former head of its foreign department; and former DINA civilian agent Enrique Arancibia Clavel, who last year finished serving a prison sentence in Buenos Aires for the 1974 assassination of General Carlos Prats and his wife Sofía Cuthbert. Also to be tried is the former head of Argentine Army intelligence (SIDE) in Mendoza and Bahía Blanca during the last dictatorship, José Osvaldo Riveiro, alias “Balita.” The fourteen criminals, most with long records for crimes against humanity, will be tried for the kidnapping and disappearance of Alfonso Chanfreau Oyarce, Jean Ives Claudet Fernández, René Marcel Amiel Baquet, George Klein Pipper, and Etienne Pesle de Menil. The five victims: Chanfreau was detained in July 1974 in Santiago and his name appears on the list of the 119 disappeared of Operation Colombo - a preamble to Operation Condor - through which the Chilean dictatorship tried to make it appear that they had fled to Argentina. Claudet was detained in Buenos Aires in November 1975 as part of Operation Condor, in which the intelligence services of Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Uruguay also participated. In this case, Arancibia Clavel, or “Luis Felipe Alemparte,” sent from Buenos Aires (November 1975) a memorandum addressed to “Luis Gutiérrez” - the alias for the position of DINA foreign chief, at that time Iturriaga Neumann - which said: “Claudet was subjected to interrogation... He no longer exists, he is RIP (Réquiem in pace).” The memo, along with others similar to it, was investigated in Buenos Aires by Judge María Servini and was part of the file opened there for the Prats-Cuthbert crime. Amiel was arrested in Mendoza by Chilean and Argentine agents in 1977. Klein was an advisor to Allende and was detained at La Moneda on the day of the military coup. Pesle was a priest kidnapped in Temuco in September 1973.

Source: La Nación, February 12, 2008

Disappearance of four French citizens: Lawyers for former DINA agents downplay trial in France

"It has no validity in Chile," said lawyer Jorge Balmaceda yesterday, who represents two of the former DINA members who will be tried next May by a French court for their responsibility in the kidnappings and illegitimate coercion suffered in Chile by four citizens of that country during the military regime.

Yesterday it was reported in France that between May 19 and 23, the trial against 17 former members of the intelligence organization headed by then-Colonel Manuel Contreras will take place in a Paris criminal court, who are held responsible for the disappearances of Alfonso Chanfreau Oyarce, Etienne Pesle, Georges Klein, and Jean-Yves Claudet Fernández.

It is expected that several of those who will be tried in absentia could be sentenced to life imprisonment if the application of torture is proven. For Balmaceda, who defends Brigadier (R) Pedro Espinoza and General (R) Raúl Iturriaga - both on the list of 17 - the French courts "have no competence or jurisdiction in Chile," and the Chilean justice system is the only one that can rule on the events that occurred in the country. "Furthermore, they have no way to investigate the facts; the trial is conducted only based on assumptions," he added.

Lawyer Enrique Ibarra, who represents Basclay Zapata, emphasized that whatever the French justice system decides has no value. "It is a symbolic issue," he asserted, because it has no practical effects.

Furthermore, he recalled that the cases for which they are going to be tried are being investigated by the Chilean justice system, and in some, there have been resolutions. Lawyer José Luis Sotomayor, who represents Brigadier (R) José Zara and the former leader of Colonia Dignidad, Paul Schaeffer, emphasized that "no rational rule of law can judge anyone in absentia." Meanwhile, Alfonso Chanfreau's widow, Erika Hennings, celebrated the news. "I think it is spectacular, considering that in Chile there has been no progress," she asserted, referring to the process being instructed by Judge Carlos Gajardo. The woman, who was also detained, did not rule out traveling to France.

Source: El Mercurio, February 12, 2008

Judge issues 100th conviction against DINA leadership

The usual sentenced individuals: Brigadier (R) Pedro Espinoza, General (R) César Manríquez Bravo, Lieutenant Colonel (R) Francisco Ferrer Lima, and Colonel (R) Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko. The 100th conviction against the leaders of the former National Intelligence Directorate, DINA, was issued yesterday by the presiding judge of the Santiago Court of Appeals, Alejandro Solís.

This time it was for the aggravated kidnapping of MIR militant Marcelo Salinas Eytel, who disappeared in 1974. The former director of the DINA, General (R) Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda, was sentenced to 15 years in prison, which were added to the 57 he is already serving for other cases.

However, Contreras awaits final sentences in another 15 cases that would raise his imprisonment to 197 years. Another of those sentenced by Judge Solís is Army Brigadier (R) Pedro Espinoza Bravo, second in the DINA hierarchy, sentenced to 10 years and one day in prison.

The same sentence was received by Army General (R) César Manríquez Bravo, former head of the DINA's metropolitan brigade; Lieutenant Colonel (R) Francisco Ferrer Lima, the "intellectual" of the repressive organization, because he asked for more "intelligence and less blood"; and Colonel (R) Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko, alias "El Ruso," head of the MIR extermination brigade at Villa Grimaldi.

José Manzo Durán, former head of the Cuatro Álamos detention center, was acquitted. The ruling by Judge Solís is part of a process that began in January 1998, parallel to the trials against former dictator Augusto Pinochet that remained in the hands of Judge Juan Guzmán Tapia.

That year, relatives of forcibly disappeared persons filed complaints against Pinochet and other former officers of the Armed Forces and Carabineros, but Judge Guzmán decided to open another process for the aggravated kidnappings that originated at Villa Grimaldi.

On October 14, 2002, the Santiago Court of Appeals decided to reorganize Judge Guzmán's investigations due to the large volume of this process. Four judges were appointed, including Alejandro Solís, who has issued 20 of the 100 convictions affecting the DINA leadership.

Marcelo Salinas Eytel, a radio and television technician, was 31 years old at the time of his detention on October 31, 1974, in front of his home on Calle Alberto Decombe, in Providencia. He was a member of the MIR.

Days earlier, his wife Jacqueline Drouilly Yurich, a Social Work student and also a forcibly disappeared person to this day, had been kidnapped by the DINA to keep her as a hostage while Salinas Eytel appeared.

A "mousetrap" was set up at their home, and the agents forced Salinas Eytel's sister to tell him that everything was fine and that he could arrive at the house without problems. The technician arrived in a taxi, but upon seeing something suspicious, he told the driver to continue, at which point the agents shot at the vehicle's tires.

Beaten, Salinas Eytel was taken first to Cuatro Álamos and then to Villa Grimaldi, from where he disappeared. According to witnesses, both Salinas Eytel and his wife were brutally tortured by Osvaldo Romo Mena.

Source: Lanacion.cl, April 18, 2008

Former head of the dissolved DINA adds new conviction

The magistrate issued the following sentences against former agents of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA): Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda, 15 years as the author of aggravated kidnapping. Visiting Judge Alejandro Solís issued a new conviction this Monday against the former head of the defunct National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), General (R) Manuel Contreras, for his involvement in the aggravated kidnapping of Anselmo Radrigán Plaza, which occurred starting December 12, 1974.

The magistrate issued the following sentences against former agents of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA): Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda, 15 years as the author of aggravated kidnapping; Marcelo Moren Brito, 10 years and one day as the author of aggravated kidnapping; Pedro Espinoza Bravo, 10 years and one day as the author of aggravated kidnapping; Rolf Wenderoth Pozo, 10 years and one day as the author of aggravated kidnapping; Miguel Krassnoff Martchentko, 10 years and one day as the author of aggravated kidnapping; and Basclay Zapata Reyes, 10 years and one day as the author of aggravated kidnapping. Likewise, the judge issued a series of indictments for four cases of aggravated kidnapping. Among those charged are Pedro Espinoza Bravo, Basclay Zapata Reyes, and Palmira Almuna Guzmán, linked to the disappearance of Claudio Silva Peralta, which occurred starting November 26, 1974. For the kidnapping of Mireya Pérez Vargas, kidnapped starting February 24, 1976, Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda, Miguel Krassnoff Martchentko, Carlos López Tapia, Basclay Zapata Reyes, and José Fuentes Torres were indicted. For Jaime Robotham Bravo, kidnapped starting December 31, 1974, Solís filed charges against Contreras Sepúlveda, Pedro Espinoza Bravo, Rolf Wenderoth Pozo, Miguel Krassnoff Martchentko, Fernando Lauriani Maturana, and Daniel Cancino Varas. In the case of Claudio Thauby Pacheco, kidnapped starting December 31, 1974, Pedro Espinoza Bravo, Rolf Wenderoth Pozo, Fernando Lauriani Maturana, and Daniel Cancino Varas were indicted.

Source: UPI, May 20, 2008

Judge Montiglio indicts 98 former agents for victims of Operation Colombo - The biggest blow to repression

Among those indicted, all retired, are eight colonels and 23 Army sub-officers, 40 Carabineros officers and sub-officers, two former FACH agents, one former Navy agent, and seven former Investigative Police agents.

The biggest blow to the repression of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship was dealt yesterday by Judge Víctor Montiglio, by indicting 98 former agents from different branches of the Armed Forces, Carabineros, and Investigations for 42 victims of Operation Colombo.

This is the most numerous resolution issued among the nearly 400 cases of human rights violations being investigated in the country. It even surpassed the 67 former agents indicted by the same Judge Montiglio in 2007 for the crimes of the Lautaro Brigade and its Delfín Group at the Simón Bolívar barracks.

Among those indicted for Colombo are eight Army Colonels (R), six of whom had not been indicted before in any case. Also declared defendants were 23 Army sub-officers (R), of whom at least 50 percent appear for the first time in this type of case.

Among these sub-officers is Juvenal Piña, alias "El Elefante," a former agent of the Lautaro Brigade, who was the one who suffocated the clandestine communist leader (1976) Víctor Díaz with a plastic bag over his head, before injecting him with cyanide.

In addition, the magistrate indicted 40 former Carabineros officer and sub-officer agents, among whom are Ricardo Lawrence, Heriberto Acevedo, Claudio Pacheco, and José Mora, all former members of the same Brigade.

Among those indicted are also former agents who belonged to the Investigative Police. The only civilian (Army) is Juan Suárez. Of the total list, at least thirteen are already serving sentences for other cases (see list).

Until the closing of this edition, those indicted continued to be detained to be interned in different places, such as the Peñalolén Military Police Battalion. Among the 42 victims for whom the judge issued his resolution are María Angélica Andreolli, Miguel Acuña Castillo, Juan Carlos Perelmann Ide, Juan Chacón Olivares, Jorge Müller Silva, Luis Guendelmann Wisniak, Mario Calderón Tapia, and Carmen Bueno Cifuentes.

Operation Colombo and the media The list of the 119 was published in the magazine Lea (Buenos Aires) and the newspaper O Dia (Brazil) in 1975, information that was also false. Both publications were created by DINA agents.

Operation Colombo was part of Operation Condor and consisted of a setup by the dictatorship to make the population believe that 119 detainees who were disappeared had clandestinely left for Argentina and died there in clashes with police and Army forces during the phase prior to the 1976 military coup in Argentina.

Some of those names appeared as militants "murdered" in Buenos Aires and its surroundings, with signs on their bodies saying that they had been executed by their own comrades due to internal disputes. However, this also turned out to be a setup.

The list of the 119 was published in the magazine Lea (Buenos Aires) and the newspaper O Dia (Brazil) in 1975, information that was also false. Both publications were created by DINA agents abroad and had only one edition.

In Chile, the pro-dictatorship press such as the newspapers El Mercurio, La Tercera, Las Últimas Noticias, and La Segunda reproduced the intelligence services' setup. The headline of the evening paper that reported "Exterminated like rats: 59 Chilean MIR militants fall in military operation in Argentina" remains in memory.

They were part of the list of the 119 disappeared of Colombo. The former fugitive Raúl Iturriaga, who was one of those in charge of the DINA's foreign department, was the one who first gave clues in Buenos Aires about this operation.

According to former civilian agent Enrique Arancibia Clavel, convicted in Buenos Aires for the crime of General Carlos Prats and his wife, it was Iturriaga who met with him at the beginning of 1975 to ask him to prepare what was necessary because "we have to make some dead people from Operation Colombo appear." It was about preparing the appearance of the supposed bodies of Jaime Robotham and Luis Guendelmann as part of the setup.

List of indicted individuals

Army (all retired)

Víctor Molina Astete (Colonel); Sergio Castillo González (Col.); Eduardo Guerra Guajardo (Col.); Víctor San Martín Jiménez (Col.); José Fuentes Torres (Col.); Manuel Carevic Cubillos (Col.); Jaime Paris Ramos (Col.); César Manríquez Bravo (Col.); Raúl Toro Montes (Sub-officer); Eduardo Reyes Lagos (Sub.); Orlando Torrejón Gatica (Sub.); Osvaldo Tapia Alvarez (Sub.

Committed suicide); Juvenal Piña Garrido (Sub. “El Elefante”); Juan Suárez Delgado (Civilian); Nelson Paz Bustamante (Sub.); José Aravena Ruiz (Sub.); Luis Torres Méndez (Sub.); Raúl Soto Pérez (Sub.); Jorge Andrade Gómez (Sub.); Juan Escobar Valenzuela (Sub.); Rolando Concha Rodríguez (Sub.); Gustavo Apablaza Meneses (Sub.); Hiro Alvarez Vega (Sub.); Víctor Alvarez Droguett (Sub.); Jorge Venegas Silva (Sub.); Carlos Rinaldi Suazo (Sub.); Carlos Letelier Verdugo (Sub.); Reinaldo Concha Orellana (Sub.); Máximo Aliaga Soto (Sub.); Hugo Clavería Leiva (Sub.); Samuel Fuenzalida Devia (Sub.); Investigations Juan Urbina Cáceres; Hugo Hernández; Manuel Rivas Díaz; Herman Alfaro; Eugenio Fieldhouse; Osvaldo Castillo; Carabineros (officers and sub-officers all retired) Gerardo Godoy García; Ciro Torres Sáez, Alejandro Molina Cisternas; Camilo Torres Negrier; Héctor Lira Aravena; José Fritz Esparza; Claudio Pacheco Fernández; Jorge Sagardia Monge; Sergio Castro Andrade; Luis Villarroel Gutiérrez; Armando Cofré Gómez; Fernando Roa Montaña; Gerardo Meza Acuña; Enrique Gutiérrez Rubilar; Luis Mora Cerda; José Muñoz Leal; Juan Duarte Gallegos; Carlos Miranda Meza; Rufino Jaime Astorga; Luis Urrutia Acuña; Luis Zúñiga Ovalle; Pedro Alfaro Hernández; Orlando Inostroza Lagos; Rosa Ramos Hernández; Gustavo Caruvan Soto; Héctor Valdebenito Araya; Manuel Avendaño González; José Mora Diocares; Guido Jara Brevis; Nelson Ortiz Vignolo; Ruderlindo Urrutia Jorquera; Héctor Flores Vergara; Jerónimo Neira Méndez; Manuel Montré Méndez; Heriberto del Carmen Acevedo; Claudio Orerllana de la Pinta; Nelson Iturriaga Cortés; Luis Gutiérrez Uribe; José Ojeda Obando; Air Force Delia Gajardo Cortés; Hernán Avalos Muñoz Navy Teresa Navarro Osorio; Indicted individuals already serving sentences Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda; Pedro Espinoza Bravo; Raúl Iturriaga Neumann; Marcelo Moren Brito; Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko; Ricardo Lawrence Mires; Basclay Zapata Reyes; Conrado Pacheco; Francisco Ferrer Lima; Gerardo Urrich; Orlando Manzo Durán; Rizier Altez España; Fernando Lauriani Maturana

Source: La Nación, May 27, 2008

Manuel Contreras adds new conviction for disappearance of MIR militant

Judge Juan Eduardo Fuentes sentenced Contreras to 5 years and one day in prison for the aggravated kidnapping of Álvaro Barrios Duque on August 14, 1974, judicial sources reported. In his resolution, the magistrate also sentenced retired Brigadier General Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko and retired Colonel Marcelo Moren Brito to 3 years in prison for the same case, who also accumulate several processes for other cases of human rights violations.

In addition, he sentenced retired Army sub-officers Basclay Zapata Reyes and Nelson Paz Bustamante to 800 days in prison. In the cases of Contreras, Krassnoff, Moren, and Zapata, the penalty must be served effectively, while Paz Bustamante was granted the benefit of conditional remission of the sentence, the judge's resolution specified.

Likewise, the magistrate determined that all those convicted, except Zapata Reyes, must pay joint compensation of 35,000,000 pesos (about 64,220 dollars) to Gabriela Zúñiga Figueroa, the victim's spouse.

Álvaro Barrios Duque was a militant of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR), was 26 years old, and was studying English pedagogy when he was detained at his home in Santiago by members of the DINA. Subsequently, the young opponent of the military dictatorship (1973-1990) was seen at the "Londres 38" torture and detention center, from where his trail was lost.

Source: El Mostrador, October 2, 2008

Supreme Court ratified new sentences for "Operation Colombo"

The conviction refers to the case of the disappeared carpenter Ofelio Lazo.

Manuel Contreras was sentenced to five years in prison. The Supreme Court ratified prison sentences for retired General Manuel Contreras, former head of Augusto Pinochet's secret police, and two other former officers as authors of the aggravated kidnapping of an opponent of the military regime, judicial sources reported.

The final ruling of the Second Criminal Chamber of the highest court sentenced Contreras, former head of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), to five years in prison, while former Colonel Marcelo Moren Brito and former Brigadier Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko were sentenced to remain three years in prison.

The case refers to carpenter Ofelio de la Cruz Lazo Lazo, 43, a militant of the Socialist Party and linked to the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR), detained at his home in Santiago by DINA agents on July 30, 1974.

The same group of agents, commanded by civilian Osvaldo Romo, one of the worst torturers, detained several acquaintances and co-workers of Lazo Lazo that day, who have been disappeared since then, just like him. Their names, however

The Santiago Court of Appeals issued a ruling in the kidnapping case of priest Antonio Llidó Mengual, which occurred starting in late September or early October 1973 in Santiago. The Third Chamber of the appellate court, composed of ministers Lamberto Cisternas, Gloria Ana Chevesich, and lawyer member Claudia Chaimovich, ratified the first-instance ruling by minister Jorge Zepeda Arancibia, which established the following sentences: Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda: 7 years in prison for his responsibility as a perpetrator.

Marcelo Moren Brito: 7 years in prison for his responsibility as a perpetrator. Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko: 7 years in prison for his responsibility as a perpetrator. Basclay Zapata Reyes: 7 years in prison for his responsibility as a perpetrator.

Francisco Ferrer Lima: Acquitted. Fernando Lauriani Maturana: Acquitted. Orlando Manzo Durán: Acquitted. In the case of Manzo Durán, the decision was adopted with the dissenting vote of lawyer member Chaimovich, who was in favor of convicting this officer.

In the civil aspect of the case, the conviction of the State to pay an indemnity of 100 million pesos to the priest's sister, Josefina Llidó Mengual, was ratified.

Source: La Nación, October 15, 2009

Londres 38: Judge indicts DINA leadership for the disappearance of the PC political secretary

Investigating judge Alejandro Solís issued an indictment yesterday in the investigation into the aggravated kidnapping of Sergio Riveros Villavicencio, which occurred starting on August 15, 1974, in the commune of Santiago.

At that time, the victim held the position of political secretary of the Communist Party (PC) in the commune of Conchalí and, according to the case file, was detained by the DINA and then taken to the Londres 38 detention center, from where his trail was lost, adding him from that date to the list of those forcibly disappeared by intelligence agencies commanded by Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda, who was indicted as the perpetrator of this crime.

Likewise, Judge Solís issued the indictment of Marcelo Moren Brito, Miguel Krassnoff Martchentko, and Nelson Paz Bustamante. The first three were notified of this resolution at their detention facilities, while Bustamante, who was the only one at liberty, was detained at the Peñalolén Military Police Battalion.

Source: La Nación, October 27, 2009

Contreras receives another 5-year sentence

For his responsibility in the aggravated kidnapping of Sergio Alejandro Riffo Ramos, which occurred starting on November 27, 1974, the director of the defunct DINA, Manuel Contreras, was sentenced, as was the rest of the leadership of the dictatorship's repressive organization. In a second-instance ruling, the Santiago Court of Appeals unanimously set the following sentences:

• Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda: 5 years and one day in prison. Without benefits.
• Pedro Espinoza Bravo: 5 years and one day in prison. Without benefits.
• Marcelo Moren Brito: 5 years and one day in prison. Without benefits.
• Miguel Krassnoff Martchentko: 5 years and one day in prison. Without benefits.
• Fernando Lauriani Maturana: Acquitted due to lack of participation.

In the civil aspect of the proceedings, judges Cornelio Villarroel Ramírez, Mauricio Silva Cancino, and lawyer member Bernardo Lara Berríos were in favor of maintaining the previous ruling and ordering the payment of a joint indemnity of 20 million pesos by Contreras and Moren to Blanca Ramos Aranda, the victim's spouse.

Source: La Nacion.cl, November 25, 2009

Santiago and Concepción Courts of Appeals issue resolutions in Human Rights cases

Two visiting ministers investigating cases of human rights violations issued resolutions in the cases they are instructing within the jurisdictions of the Concepción and Santiago Courts of Appeals, respectively.

First, minister Carlos Aldana, of the Concepción appellate court, issued a first-instance conviction in the investigation into the aggravated kidnapping of Adán Valdebenito Olavarría, which occurred starting on September 24, 1974, in the city of Lota.

The magistrate sentenced Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda to a penalty of 541 days and Orlando Manzo Durán to a penalty of 61 days of suspended prison for their responsibility as perpetrator and accomplice, respectively, in the crime of aggravated kidnapping.

In the case of Contreras Sepúlveda, the sentence was considered served due to the time he has spent in pretrial detention. Meanwhile, minister Alejandro Solís, of the Santiago Court of Appeals, issued an indictment in the investigation into the aggravated homicide of Ramón Martínez González, which occurred on January 13, 1975, in Santiago.

The magistrate indicted Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda, Mario Jahn Barrera, Marcelo Moren Brito, Fernando Lauriani Maturana, and Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko for their responsibility as perpetrators of the aforementioned crime.

Regarding the indicted Contreras Sepúlveda, Moren Brito, and Krassnoff Martchenko, pretrial detention was ordered, to be served in addition to the sentences they are currently fulfilling. Regarding the indicted Lauriani Maturana, the benefit of provisional release is maintained, and regarding the indicted Jahn Barrera, his entry into pretrial detention was ordered as he is considered a danger to society.

Source: Radio Bio Bio, June 18, 2010

Scandalous reduction of sentences for the authors of the kidnapping and disappearance of Father Llidó

The authors of the aggravated kidnapping, homicide, and disappearance of the remains of the Spanish priest Antonio Llidó, who carried out a fruitful pastoral, social, and political mission in Quillota, will serve their sentences in freedom.

The Valencian priest, loved and remembered in this city, was detained and forcibly disappeared by agents of the dictatorship in late September 1974 in the Metropolitan Region, where he had taken refuge after the military coup.

There are multiple testimonies that he was kept detained in clandestine detention centers, where he was cruelly tortured until his death, after which the repressors made his body disappear. In September 2008, visiting minister Jorge Zepeda determined sentences of 7 years in prison, without benefits, for the authors of the crime: Manuel Contreras, Marcelo Moren, Miguel Krassnoff, and Basclay Zapata.

But now, in a split decision, the Second Chamber of the Supreme Court has issued a final ruling. Ministers Nibaldo Segura, Jaime Rodríguez, Rubén Ballesteros, Hugo Dolmestch, and Carlos Künsemüller sentenced the former members of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) Contreras Sepúlveda, Moren Brito, Krassnoff Martchentko, and Zapata Reyes to five years in prison, reducing their sentences to five years but granting them the benefit of supervised release; that is, they may stay in their homes or walk free through the streets, even though all are incarcerated (in VIP prisons, of course) for other crimes against humanity. In their resolution, the ministers also acquitted former agents Maximiliano Ferrer Lima, Fernando Lauriani Maturana, and Orlando Manzo Durán due to lack of participation. Likewise, and demonstrating absolute contempt for the suffering that the family has endured for 36 years, the Supreme Court rejected the lawsuit for damages against the State of Chile filed by the victim's sister, Josefa "Pepa" Llidó, who had previously been granted an indemnity. The highest court accepted the exception of absolute incompetence of the first-instance court and rendered it void. In its ruling, the Supreme Court applied the mitigating factor of "half-prescription" or "incomplete prescription"—which other ministers have rejected—with the favorable votes of ministers Segura, Ballesteros, and Dolmestch, and with the contrary opinion of magistrates Rodríguez and Künsemüller. Scandalous decision The final ruling of the Second Chamber of the Supreme Court is perceived by the family and friends of Father Llidó as a truly scandalous determination, as it highlights the indifference of the Chilean justice system toward a case as cruel as it is emblematic of human rights violations. It is established in the case file that during the decades of investigation, none of the intellectual or material authors of the kidnapping, torture, homicide, and disappearance of the remains of "Cura Toño"—as we knew him in Quillota—collaborated with the inquiries. For decades, they not only denied their participation but also deceived the judges with false data, distorted the facts, hid information, and acted before the courts with repugnant cynicism. The partial clarification of what happened to Father Llidó was only possible thanks to the tenacity and professionalism of magistrates like minister Zepeda, who did not give up until he got close to the truth... ...Only close, because they continue to hide the total truth. The confessions were only achieved because they kept falling into absurd contradictions. But they have never wanted to reveal why they kidnapped and tortured him with such cruelty, who killed him, what they did with his remains, or where they hid them until now. Scant local repercussions The scandalous reduction of sentences and the refusal to indemnify the still-grieving family has had little repercussion in the national media. Only the newspaper La Tercera provided relatively extensive information, of 278 words. Stations such as Cooperativa, Bio Bio, and Universidad de Chile also dedicated some space to it, without major significance. "El Observador" of Quillota—which before 1973 was a great critic of the activities of "Cura Toño"—published a chronicle of 291 words. Upon closing this note (Wednesday night, the 22nd), we discovered a note published by El Mercurio, of 261 words, reporting on the event. In contrast, at the international level, the shameful ruling had great repercussions. The Google search engine shows publications in written media such as El País, El Periódico, El Diario de Levante, and El Diario Vasco in Spain, La Jornada in Mexico, and the Ansa Latina, China.Org.cn, and Xinhua agencies in China, among many others. The lawyer The Llidó family's lawyer in Chile, Héctor Salazar, criticized the highest court's resolution, considering that it is "too soft a hand for a crime of this nature, in a case where even all those who appear involved and convicted never provided information, not even to know where Father Llidó's remains ended up." In addition, lawyer Salazar lamented the rejection of the indemnity initially set for the relatives of the Spanish citizen, because "it leaves the Chilean State, from the point of view of its international commitments, in a bad position," as it did not resolve the "reparation that is involved in this kind of crime."

Source: ZonaImpacto.cl, September 27, 2010

France convicts Chilean dictatorship military officers in absentia

The French justice system convicted a dozen Chilean military officers and one civilian, as well as an Argentine military officer, in absentia on Friday, with sentences ranging from 15 years in prison to life imprisonment for the disappearance of four French citizens during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-90).

Retired General Manuel Contreras, founder of the fearsome National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), the regime's political police, currently incarcerated in Chile, was sentenced to life imprisonment by decision of the Paris Criminal Court presided over by judge Hervé Stephan.

His number two in the DINA hierarchy, retired General Pedro Octavio Espinoza Bravo, was sentenced to the same maximum penalty, the magistrate maintained while reading the sentence that puts an end to the trial in absentia for the disappearance of four French citizens during the Pinochet dictatorship.

George Klein, Etienne Pesle, and Alphonse Chanfreau disappeared in Chile, and Jean Yves Claudet disappeared in Argentina, all of them between 1973 and 1975. Retired General Herman Julio Brady was sentenced to 30 years in prison, as were retired colonels Marcelo Luis Moren Brito and Miguel Krasnoff Martchenko.

The French magistrate reaffirmed the validity of the arrest warrant issued by the French justice system in May 2005 against the convicted military officers. From the initial list, José Octavio Zara Holger was acquitted due to his death.

In the presence of a hundred relatives, mainly the children of the four disappeared, former colleagues, and legal experts who arrived from Chile, Spain, and France, a trial in absentia that began on December 8 concluded, 12 years after this case began in France in October 1998, just when Pinochet was arrested in London.

Source: AFP, December 17, 2010

Relatives of French citizens disappeared during the dictatorship value convictions of former Pinochet agents

Exemplary convictions that will be difficult to match in Chile were received by the former agents of the military dictatorship, including General Augusto Pinochet, in the trial that took place in Paris.

In total, there were 14 accused from the Chilean regime, who received minimum sentences of 15 years in prison. Manuel Contreras, former head of the National Intelligence Directorate, the fearsome DINA, was sentenced to life imprisonment, the same penalty given to former brigadier Pedro Espinoza. 35 years after the disappearances of 4 French citizens murdered during the dictatorship, a form of symbolic justice arrives for their relatives, as celebrated by Bernard Chanfreau, brother of Alphonse, a MIR militant who disappeared in 1974. "I am very moved because a very hard era is ending for us, both for our family and for my brother's wife, his daughter, and the two sisters of Janet Claude. It is a very important total satisfaction. No conviction of those culprits will return our brother and our family to us," Chanfreau pointed out. The relatives of the disappeared valued that in these cases the action of the justice system was achieved, unlike what happens in our country, where, as they accuse, the system remains under the yoke of the dictatorship. Lawyer Benjamín Serfati, representative of the Corporation for the Defense and Promotion of the People's Rights (Codepu), highlighted that from this historic trial, extradition orders will emanate from France that our country will have to resolve. "An extradition order will be issued by France directed at the Chilean authorities, and we will see how the Chilean authorities will react regarding the convicted individuals who are currently imprisoned in Chile. Regarding the cases of the Chileans who are free, it will be very interesting to follow the choice of the authorities in the sense of accepting or not the requests," indicated the jurist. The relatives and their representatives assured that beyond the fact that this trial may seem symbolic, legal arguments valid throughout the world were used, which will prevent the convicted former agents from leaving the country, for example, and the arrest warrants issued by the French government for the 14 accused remain in force.

Source: Radio Universidad de Chile, December 20, 2010

HR: New indictments against the incarcerated DINA leadership

Minister Solís's ruling corresponds to the cases of aggravated kidnapping of Juan Aniceto Meneses Reyes, Eduardo Zúñiga Zúñiga, and Carlos Terán de la Jara. Investigating judge Alejandro Solís issued 3 new indictments against the leadership of the dissolved DINA in investigations into cases of forcibly disappeared persons, which occurred starting in 1974 during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

In his resolution, the magistrate ordered the entry into pretrial detention of all those indicted, considering them a "danger to society," despite the fact that they are already behind bars serving sentences for other human rights violations.

For the aggravated kidnapping of Juan Aniceto Meneses Reyes, which occurred starting on August 3, 1974, the magistrate indicted the former director of the DINA, Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda, along with former agents Miguel Krassnoff Martchentko, Marcelo Moren Brito, Basclay Zapata Reyes, Gerardo Godoy García, and Maximiliano Ferrer Lima.

Regarding the kidnapping of Eduardo Zúñiga Zúñiga, which occurred starting on August 23, 1974, Contreras, Krassnoff, Moren Brito, and Zapata were indicted. For the case of Carlos Terán de la Jara, which occurred starting on December 11, 1974, minister Solís indicted Contreras, Krassnoff, Moren Brito, Zapata, and Rolf Wenderoth Pozo.

Source: La Nación, March 16, 2011

Former DINA agents convicted for kidnapping during the dictatorship

The Santiago Court of Appeals issued a second-instance sentence against the former head of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), retired General Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda, and other former agents of the repressive organization, for the aggravated kidnapping of Mireya de Lourdes Pérez Vargas, which occurred starting on February 24, 1976, in the Metropolitan Region.

In a unanimous ruling, the ministers of the Second Chamber of the appellate court, Emilio Elgueta, María Rosa Kittsteiner, and Patricia González (substitute), confirmed the ruling of minister Alejandro Solís.

The harshest sentences are against Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko and Basclay Zapata, who must serve 15 years in prison for the crime of aggravated kidnapping. Contreras, meanwhile, was sentenced to 3 years in prison without benefits, while Carlos López Tapia and José Fuentes Torre received the same penalty, with the benefit of conditional remission.

Mireya Pérez was a militant of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR). She was wounded in a confrontation, after which she was taken to Villa Grimaldi, where she was killed, as established by the Rettig Commission report.

Source: La Nación, May 11, 2011

French justice system sentences former DINA members to life imprisonment in symbolic ruling

A delegation from the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) will notify the director of the dissolved DINA, retired General Manuel Contreras, and his subordinates Pedro Espinoza, Marcelo Moren Brito, and Miguel Krassnoff, at 11:00 a.m. this Thursday at the Cordillera Prison of the sentences imposed on them by the French justice system for the crimes against four Chilean-French citizens.

The trial in absentia, given the refusal of the Chilean justice system to extradite the 13 Chileans and one Argentine guilty of kidnapping, torture, and disappearances in Chile of Jorge Klein, Etienne Pesle, and Alfonso Chanfreau, and in Argentina of Jean Yves Claudet between 1973 and 1975, ended with an unprecedented action by the French magistrates.

At the Paris Court—presided over by judge Hervé Stephan—Contreras and his lieutenant Pedro Espinoza Bravo received the maximum penalty, and the rest of those indicted for the crimes of "kidnapping accompanied by torture and acts of barbarism" received extensive prison sentences.

Although the former agents of the dissolved DINA will not serve the sentences, since almost all of them are incarcerated or have pending trials in Chile, the relatives of the victims expressed satisfaction with the ruling.

The files were investigated during 12 years of instruction, in addition to another three of trials. Of the rest of the accused, three received 30-year sentences, six received 25, one received 20, and the remaining one received a 15-year sentence.

The case began in 1998, when General Pinochet was arrested in London on an international arrest warrant issued by the Spanish magistrate Baltasar Garzón. In addition to the cases of Contreras and Espinoza Bravo, the strongest sentences were for retired General Herman Julio Brady, to 30 years in prison, the same as retired colonels Marcelo Luis Moren Brito and Miguel Krasnoff Martchenko.

Argentine Colonel José Osvaldo Riveiro was sentenced to 25 years in prison, the same as the recently deceased Enrique Arancibia Clavel, General Raúl Iturriaga, Colonel Gerardo Godoy García, General Luis Ramírez Pineda, and non-commissioned officer Basclay Zapata Reyes.

In a rare event, the Paris public prosecutor, Francois Falletti, defended the legitimacy of carrying out this trial in France, 37 years after the reported events. "It is necessary to remember: this trial is indispensable (...) and must send a clear message" because similar crimes "must give rise to demands before the justice system, at any time and place," stated Falletti.

Source: El Mercurio, October 10, 2011

Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko, The "Cossack" who was cruel to the MIR

The Human Rights Observatory of the Diego Portales University provided the details of the convictions weighing against Army Brigadier (R) Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko (65), a former member of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) who will be honored this Monday in Providencia.

The academic entity also provided a "profile" of this agent considered key in the structure of that repressive apparatus during the first years of the military regime. After the dissolution of the DINA, Krassnoff joined the ranks of the National Intelligence Center (CNI), which also fulfilled the same function.

Krassnoff, the Observatory highlights, is one of the agents of the repression who has accumulated the most judicial convictions in recent years, surpassed only by Manuel Contreras and Pedro Espinoza, the top leaders of the DINA.

It adds that among the most reprehensible crimes attributed to him are the disappearances of the Spanish priest Antonio Llidó and Diana Arón, a young journalist who, despite her advanced pregnancy, was taken from a hospital bed, tortured, and murdered with the direct participation of Krassnoff.

ALLENDE, VÍCTOR JARA, AND MIGUEL ENRÍQUEZ

Other human rights defense entities highlight that Krassnoff participated in the assault on the home of former President Salvador Allende in Tomás Moro on the day of the military coup, when he was a lieutenant.

In addition, he allegedly played a direct role in the murder of singer-songwriter Víctor Jara at the Chile Stadium and in the death of Miguel Enríquez, founder of the MIR, in 1974. For this action, he received a decoration from Pinochet.

Precisely, Krassnoff was the intelligence officer of the Águila Brigade in charge of the repression of the MIR, based in Villa Grimaldi. He also passed through the torture centers of Simón Bolívar, José Domingo Cañas, and Londres 38.

He felt attracted to politics and wanted, together with the director of the DINA, Manuel Contreras, to consolidate a large social base of support for General Pinochet. After his departure from the CNI in the early 80s, Krassnoff continued his military career until reaching the rank of brigadier in 1998.

That year, after the Army General Command informed him that he would not be nominated for general, Krassnoff submitted his resignation from the Army, but was rehired as manager of the Military Hotel located in Providencia on Manuel Montt.

He was in that position when the proceedings against him began, starting in 2001. Currently, he is incarcerated in the Cordillera prison, located inside the Telecommunications Regiment, in the commune of Peñalolén. Krassnoff was born in Austria on February 15, 1946, and is the grandson and son of high-ranking Cossack officers executed in the former Soviet Union, whose bodies were never found.

THE MAJORITY OF HIS VICTIMS WERE FROM THE MIR

Until July 2011, Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko had 20 final convictions (ratified by the Supreme Court), with sentences totaling more than 120 years in prison. However, six of these sentences included the benefit of supervised release.

The vast majority of the convictions are for the crime of aggravated kidnapping, that is, the detention and disappearance of people. Only one of the sentences is for aggravated homicide. The victim was the MIR militant Lumi Videla, whose body was thrown into the Italian embassy. Precisely, almost all of Krassnoff's victims belonged to the MIR. The list of final convictions is as follows:

• 11/17/2004: Ten years and 1 day in prison as the perpetrator of the aggravated kidnapping of Miguel Ángel Sandoval Rodríguez (MIR).
• 05/30/2006: Fifteen years for the aggravated kidnapping of Diana Frida Arón Svigilsky (journalist, MIR, she was seven months pregnant).
• 05/28/2007: Five years and 1 day as the perpetrator of the aggravated kidnapping of Dagoberto San Martín Vergara (MIR).
• 05/10/2007: Ten years for the aggravated kidnappings of Hernán Galo González Inostroza, Maria Elena González Inostroza (sister of the former), Elsa Victoria Leuthner Muñoz, and Ricardo Troncoso Muñoz (all from the MIR).
• 06/27/2007: Five years and 1 day for the aggravated kidnapping of Manuel Edgardo del Carmen Cortez Joo (MIR).
• 12/24/2008: 540 days, with conditional remission, as an accomplice to the aggravated kidnappings of Carmen Díaz and Eugenio Montti (both from the MIR).
• 10/29/2008: Three years as a co-perpetrator of the aggravated kidnapping of Ofelio de la Cruz Lazo Lazo (PS).
• 01/27/2009: Five years with the benefit of supervised release for the aggravated kidnapping of Sergio Humberto Lagos Marín (MIR).
• 04/15/2009: Four years, with the benefit of supervised release, as the perpetrator of the aggravated kidnapping of Julio Fidel Flores Pérez (MIR).
• 07/20/2009: Ten years and 1 day for the aggravated kidnapping of Jorge Humberto D'Orival Briceño (MIR).
• 08/13/2009: Five years and 1 day as the perpetrator of the aggravated kidnapping of Luis Gregorio Muñoz Rodríguez (MIR).
• 09/07/2009: Ten years and 1 day as the perpetrator of the aggravated homicide of Lumi Videla Moya and 5 years as the perpetrator of the aggravated kidnapping of Sergio Pérez Molina (husband of the former, both from the MIR).
• 09/29/2009: Four years, with the benefit of supervised release, as the perpetrator of the aggravated kidnappings of Cecilia Bojanic Abad (4 months pregnant) and Flavio Oyarzún Soto (husband of the former, both from the MIR).
• 12/03/2009: Ten years and 1 day for the aggravated kidnapping of María Teresa Bustillos Cereceda (MIR).
• 01/20/2010: Five years and 1 day as the perpetrator of the aggravated kidnapping of Álvaro Miguel Barrios Duque (MIR).
• 01/25/2010: Three years and 1 day, with the benefit of supervised release, as the perpetrator of the aggravated kidnapping of Marcelo Eduardo Salinas Eytel (MIR).
• 08/30/2010: Five years as the perpetrator of the aggravated kidnapping of Antonio Llidó Mengual, with the benefit of supervised release (Spanish priest, member of the Christians for Socialism Group, assistant to the MIR).
• 10/27/2010: Five years and 1 day, without benefits, as the perpetrator of the aggravated kidnapping of Sebastián Montecinos Alfaro (Socialist Party).
• 12/20/2010: Five years and 1 day for the aggravated kidnappings of Fernando Silva Camus and Claudio Silva Peralta (father and son, respectively, both from the MIR).
• 12/21/2010: Five years and 1 day as the perpetrator of the aggravated kidnapping of Sergio Riffo Ramos (MIR).

Krassnoff also has 3 second-instance convictions and 1 first-instance conviction, but he is also accused in 7 cases and indicted in another 46, among them the Calle Conferencia case, for the detention and complete disappearance of the central committee of the Communist Party in 1976.

Source: La Nación, November 18, 2011

The shadow of Miguel Krassnoff, torturer and murderer

In the shadows of fear, there are always darker shadows, like the mouths of ancient nights, that pierce your throat with such fury that you cannot scream. And they tear your soul while you try to flee along the tracks of silence.

But silence is an accomplice to the shadows, and through its folds move the torturers, hidden as cowards hide, crouching as cowards crouch, dressed as officers of the Chilean army, like Miguel Krassnoff, torturer and murderer.

Colonel Krassnoff was from the DINA, the dictatorship's secret police, just like Cristián Labbé, mayor of the commune of Providencia in Santiago, who pays him homage at the launch of the book titled "Miguel Krassnoff, prisoner for serving Chile." Thus, almost four decades after the military coup, Labbé, who without any shame has proclaimed himself the champion and symbol of the Rule of Law in our country, honors a murderer for services to the Fatherland.

In the perverse logic of Labbé and all those who participate in the homage, Chile is served by torturing, murdering, raping, and making thousands of Chileans disappear. It is the world upside down: the supposed defenders of the Rule of Law overthrew the legitimate government of Salvador Allende, established a terrorist dictatorship, and systematically violated human rights.

Now, they invoke the shadows of fear again to try to rewrite a history that is already narrated with anguish and pain, but with immeasurable courage, by the victims of the repression. And there were many victims of Krassnoff in the Detention and Extermination Centers of Londres 38, Villa Grimaldi, José Domingo Cañas, and Simón Bolívar, and for that reason, he has been sentenced to more than 140 years in prison for repeated kidnappings and disappearances.

The horrors experienced by the prisoners were the product of the action of Krassnoff and others like him who reveled in the suffering of defenseless people to an unspeakable degree. It did not matter if they were young or old, children or pregnant women.

A survivor of Villa Grimaldi relates that they beat him "brutally using fists, feet, and a blunt object for several minutes in front of my mother and my wife. My mother was taken aside and the beating continued on my wife.

Angered by our silence... he ordered 'To the grill!'... they took me out to a patio where they left me lying down while they made me listen to the screams of my companion who they were torturing in an adjoining room.

After half an hour of keeping me listening to the torments of my wife, during which they threatened me to avoid her suffering... they forcibly undressed me, introduced me into a room with two-story metal cots, tied me to one of them, connected cables and electrodes made with hooks and metal keys to my feet, hands, nose, eyes, gums, anus, penis, and testicles, and began to apply electric shocks produced by a hand-cranked dynamo..." I was not tortured by Krassnoff, but by others like him, so I know the same silences and the same shadows, the same screams, and the immense loneliness of being naked, blindfolded, and tied face to face with no one. Because they hide in the fissures of the shadows to hit you or apply electricity, for they do not have the courage to look you in the eyes. It is not out of shame, but out of cowardice; it is not out of remorse, but out of pusillanimity that they avert their gaze and hide behind the metal of their rifles. And thus, blow after blow, scream after scream, faint after faint, tear after tear, the eternity of torture is built. But do not think that I have nightmares about you; do not think you are so important. No, on the contrary, we know that by remembering what happened, we are gradually reconstituting our memory and that of all those who did not survive. This is indeed a homage to those who truly served Chile with their sacrifice, perhaps part of a guerrilla of memory against the war of silence and lies imposed by the dictatorship, and which today the nostalgics of horror try to reissue. In the shadows of fear, there are always darker shadows, but do not think that I have nightmares about you, because I am sure that the day you die, all the tortured of Chile will appear to you to simply look at you for the first time without blindfolds, without hoods, simply look at you. And all the disappeared of Chile will appear to you to tell you in an oceanic voice that there will never be forgiveness or forgetting, and in that fierce instant, you will know what we lived through, but without the need to even touch you for a moment.

Source: PiensaChile, November 20, 2011

The list of those tortured by Krassnoff and the 'funa' organized against him

It is a group of survivors of the military dictatorship's prisons who decided to denounce the former DINA agent as their torturer. Among the names, Gabriel Salazar Vergara, National History Prize winner; Patricio Bustos Streeter, director of the Legal Medical Service; and Marcia Scantlebury Elizalde, member of the TVN board of directors, stand out.

Likewise, various Human Rights groups are expected to hold a protest in front of the Club Providencia. At 7:00 p.m. today, inside the Club Providencia, about 200 people are expected to attend the controversial homage to the former Army brigadier and DINA agent, Miguel Krassnoff, who is currently serving a 144-year prison sentence for multiple crimes against humanity committed during the dictatorship.

The event was authorized by the mayor of that commune, Cristián Labbé. Its organizers hoped to count on the presence of the President of the Republic, Sebastián Piñera, who responded—through a letter signed by his presidential advisor, Andrea Ojeda—the following: "He has expressly requested that we convey his congratulations and his best wishes for success, as well as his affectionate greeting to those who attend this homage." The "congratulations" coming from La Moneda were clarified later by Government spokesperson Andrés Chadwick, and had the immediate consequence of Ojeda's resignation.

Although the Executive excused itself by pointing out that the error came from the official for using an "automated response," the pressure and criticism led the head of state himself to condemn human rights violations through his Twitter account.

Far from calming the waters, the mayor of Providencia expressed his "astonishment" at the stir "caused by an event like this, which consists of nothing but the exercise of freedom of thought and expression." While the controversy grew, the justice system issued a new indictment against Krassnoff.

Judge Madrid, who is investigating the so-called "Operation Colombo" case, estimated that the former brigadier is responsible for the crimes of Washington Cid Urrutia, detained on December 8, 1974; Rodrigo Ugas Morales, detained on February 7, 1975; and Juan Carlos Perelman Ide, disappeared since February 20, 1975.

And a criminal complaint was filed against Labbé for "apology for violence" at the Santiago Centro prosecutor's office. "Krassnoff tortured me" Since November 17, a list titled "Krassnoff tortured me" has been circulating on social networks.

It is a group of survivors of the dictatorship's prisons who decided to denounce the former DINA agent as their torturer. Among the names, Gabriel Salazar Vergara, National History Prize winner; Patricio Bustos Streeter, Director of the Legal Medical Institute; and Marcia Scantlebury Elizalde, member of the TVN board of directors, stand out.

Labbé's invitation Likewise, various Human Rights groups are expected to carry out a "funa" (public protest) in front of the Club Providencia.

List of those Tortured by Krassnoff

Gabriel Salazar Vergara, National History Prize winner. Erika Hennings Cepeda Patricio Bustos Streeter, Doctor, Director of the Legal Medical Institute Cecilia Bottai Monreal, Dentist Carmen Bottai Monreal Patricio Reyes Sutherland Pedro Alejandro Matta Lemoine Nubia Becker Eguiluz Dagoberto Trincado Olivera Hernán Brain Pizarro Elba Duarte Valle Sara De Witt Jorquera Lelia Pérez Valdés Gladys Díaz Armijo Beatriz Bataszew Contreras Claudio Cabello Jorge Véliz Nieves Ayress Moreno Ingrid Heitmann Gigliotto Maritza Villegas Arteaga Sonia Valenzuela Cristina Zamora Ana María Arenas Romero Bernardita Núñez Rivera María Cristina Zamora Eguiluz Mariluz Lagos Alejandro Núñez Soto Osvaldo Torres Gutiérrez Jorge Amaro Toledo Beatriz Miranda Oyarzún Mario Francisco Venegas Jara Sheila Cassidy, Doctor (English nationality) Heraldo Povea Pacci, Doctor Cristina Godoy Hinojosa Boris Lagunas León Nelson Fernández Sepúlveda Miguel Ángel Rebolledo González Domingo Cadin Cruces Osvaldo Andrade Lara María Isabel Romero Méndez Roberto D’Orival Briceño Nelson Viveros Lagos Víctor Hugo Miranda Núñez Marcia Scantlebury Elizalde, Director of TVN María Isabel Matamala Vivaldi Luis Fuentes Urra Raimundo Elgueta Pinto, Economist Mirtha Compagnet Godoy Cristián Mallol Comandari, Mathematician Ángeles Álvarez

He was detained in July 1974 in the commune of Macul. Numerous witnesses saw him at the torture and extermination center of Londres 38. He is one of the victims of "Operation Colombo." The justice system sentenced 78 former DINA agents for this crime against humanity.

The minister of the Santiago Court of Appeals, Hernán Crisosto, issued a first-instance sentence for the kidnapping and disappearance of Miguel Angel Acuña Castillo.

The magistrate established that the young man, a militant of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR), was detained in the vicinity of his home located at Pasaje Talca No. 2033 in the commune of Macul by State agents belonging to the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), among them Osvaldo Romo Mena, alias "el Guatón Romo."

His sister, Rosa Acuña Castillo, declared that her father tried to climb onto the back of the covered pickup truck at the moment they were taking him away, but he was struck in the mouth by one of the subjects, falling to the ground.

A week after the kidnapping, Romo went to their home again and told her that her brother was in good condition along with Héctor Garay Hermosilla, who is also disappeared. Both were members of the Revolutionary Student Front (FER) at Liceo 7 in Ñuñoa.

Judge Crisosto determined that the DINA agents "transferred him to the clandestine detention center known as 'Yucatán' or 'Londres 38'."

Acuña Castillo belonged to the secondary student structure of the MIR's Military Political Group 3 (GPM3), an organization that grouped militants from the eastern part of the capital and was led by Agustín Reyes González, whose trail was lost forever at Londres 38.

There, he "remained without contact with the outside world, blindfolded and tied up, being continuously subjected to interrogations under torture by DINA agents," and the last time he was seen alive "occurred on an undetermined day in the month of July or August 1974, remaining disappeared to this date," the first-instance ruling states.

They laughed at Londres 38 along with Héctor Garay Hermosilla

At the "Yucatán" barracks, he was seen by Erika Hennings, who was detained on July 30, 1974. "I can say that he was very young, I think they called him 'El Pampa'," she asserted during the proceedings.

She heard them take roll call twice a day for the detainees. On July 31, 1974, she heard the name Miguel Angel Acuña Castillo, who answered "present." Later, she did not hear him called again. "They took them out of Londres 38, just like other detainees, among whom she remembers María Inés Alvarado," a 21-year-old forcibly disappeared person.

Hugo Chacaltana Silva, detained on May 4, 1974, a former student of Liceo Manuel de Salas and a member of the Revolutionary Student Front (FER), also saw him at Londres 38. He recounted that in the early hours of July 8 to 9, 1974, Miguel Angel Acuña arrived along with Héctor Garay Hermosilla, whom they called "Titín"; he was able to see them through a gap that formed between his nose and cheekbones from the blindfold.

Chacaltana noted that he met Castillo in 1971, when both were secondary students. Both coincided in meetings held at the time between members of the FER, the judicial ruling states. He remembers "Miguel Ángel as a young man of great leadership capacity and much physical resistance."

He stopped seeing him on September 11, 1973. He met him again at Londres 38. He arrived along with Héctor Garay to the same room where he was lying on the floor. "At that moment, I did not address Miguel Ángel"; on the contrary, he pretended to be unaware of his presence. "The next day, when the mattresses on which we detainees lay were removed and replaced by chairs, I sat down and, to one side, I observed that they were still sitting.

It caught his attention that both were talking and laughing, which made him think that they were unaware of the magnitude of what awaited them. Miguel Ángel approached him at Londres 38, saying, 'I know you'."

His mother found out at the hair salon that her son was at Londres 38

León Gómez, detained on July 15, 1974, and transferred to Londres 38, saw Miguel Angel along with Héctor Garay, whom he knew. Someone commented to him that "Pampino" was among the detainees, which he corroborated upon hearing him "with his typical jokes that he made to the guards, as if giving the impression that what was happening in the place had no importance.

Even Titín and Pampino would drive the guards crazy. They were very irreverent."

David Cuevas Sharon, detained on May 4, 1974, also testified to having seen him. "Despite showing signs of mistreatment, 'El Pampino' appeared to have great presence of mind; he was very physically strong." He shared space with him for at least five days.

When Cuevas was released, Acuña Castillo remained a prisoner. His maternal grandmother had a hair salon in Ñuñoa, and one of her clients was Miguel Angel's mother. In a conversation, "she found out about the problem she had with a disappeared son.

Given this, my grandmother had her go to the hair salon, where she met Pampino's mother and told her what she knew about him, specifically the place where he had been imprisoned with him."

Regarding the torments applied to the detainees at Londres 38, among them Miguel Angel, Minister Crisosto incorporated statements from Osvaldo Romo, who stated that among other tortures, detainees were subjected to "the dry submarine, which was covering the detainees' breathing with a plastic bag placed on their heads; their eyes would look like 'fried eggs,' and blood would come out of their noses and eardrums.

After the interrogations and duress, the detainees would be exhausted."

Another former agent, Samuel Fuenzalida Devia, specified in this regard that "the general treatment of the prisoners was to keep them blindfolded, they were not allowed to wash, there were no beds for them to sleep on, the food was scarce, and they were subjected to intense interrogations in which electricity was applied, especially to the genitals and breasts.

Another form of torture consisted of keeping the detainees sitting in chairs, tied by their feet and hands, while current was applied to them with magnets, although common electric current was also applied, which burned those people, a procedure in which many people died."

Eugenio Fieldhouse Chávez maintains that as an official of the Investigative Police, in mid-June 1974, he was assigned to that repressive agency and indicated that the same DINA agents who intervened in the detention and interrogation of the detainees, once the sought-after information was obtained, were the ones in charge of making them disappear, following an order from DINA superiors.

The name of Miguel Ángel Acuña Castillo appeared among the 119 Chileans of Operation Colombo, in a list disseminated in the national press, after appearing in publications that appeared only once in Brazil and Argentina, "in which it was reported that Miguel Ángel Acuña Castillo had died in Argentina, along with 58 other people belonging to the MIR, due to internal disputes."

The sentences

"The publications that declared the victim Acuña Castillo dead had their origin in disinformation maneuvers carried out by DINA agents abroad," determined Judge Crisosto, who sentenced 78 former DINA agents for his disappearance.

The magistrate issued a sentence of 13 years of major imprisonment in its medium degree to Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda; César Manríquez Bravo; Pedro Espinoza; Marcelo Luis Moren Brito; Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko; and Raúl Iturriaga Neumann.

Likewise, he sentenced to 10 years of major imprisonment in its minimum degree Gerardo Ernesto Urrich González; Gerardo Ernesto Godoy García; Ricardo Víctor Lawrence Mires; Ciro Ernesto Torré Sáez; Sergio Hernán Castillo González; Manuel Andrés Carevic Cubillos; José Nelson Fuentealba Saldías; Basclay Humberto Zapata Reyes; José Enrique Fuentes Torres; José Mario Friz Esparza; Julio José Hoyos Zegarra; Nelson Alberto Paz Bustamante; Claudio Orlando Orellana de la Pinta; Enrique Tránsito Gutiérrez Rubilar; Gustavo Galvarino Caruman Soto; Hiro Álvarez Vega; José Alfonso Ojeda Obando; Luis Salvador Villarroel Gutiérrez; Olegario Enrique González Moreno; Orlando Jesús Torrejón Gatica; Rudeslindo Urrutia Jorquera; Alfredo Orlando Moya Tejeda; Carlos Alfonso Sáez Sanhueza; Fernando Enrique Guerra Guajardo; Hernán Patricio Valenzuela Salas; Hugo Rubén Delgado Carrasco; Juan Alfredo Villanueva Alvear; Juan Evaristo Duarte Gallegos; Lautaro Eugenio Díaz Espinoza; Leónides Emiliano Méndez Moreno; Pedro Ariel Araneda Araneda; Rafael De Jesús Riveros Frost; Víctor Manuel Molina Astete; Manuel Rivas Díaz; Hugo del Tránsito Hernández Valle; Juan Ángel Urbina Cáceres; Risiere del Prado Altez España; Hermon Helec Alfaro Mundaca; and Raúl Juan Rodríguez Ponte.

As accomplices to the kidnapping and disappearance of the 19-year-old, he sentenced to 4 years of minor imprisonment in its maximum degree Luis Eduardo Mora Cerda; José Jaime Mora Diocares; Camilo Torres Negrier; Carlos Justo Bermúdez Méndez; Claudio Enrique Pacheco Fernández; Fernando Adrián Roa Montaña; Gerardo Meza Acuña; Héctor Raúl Valdebenito Araya; Jaime Humberto Paris Ramos; Jorge Laureano Sagardia Monje; José Dorohi Hormazabal Rodríguez; José Manuel Sarmiento Sotelo; José Stalin Muñoz Leal; Juvenal Alfonso Piña Garrido; Luis René Torres Méndez; Manuel Antonio Montre Méndez; Máximo Ramón Aliaga Soto; Moisés Paulino Campos Figueroa; Nelson Aquiles Ortiz Vignolo; Nelson Eduardo Iturriaga Cortes; Pedro Segundo Bitterlich Jaramillo; Reinaldo Alfonso Concha Orellana; Sergio Hernán Castro Andrade; Víctor Manuel de la Cruz San Martin Jiménez; Gustavo Humberto Apablaza Meneses; Héctor Carlos Díaz Cabezas; Jorge Antonio Lepileo Barrios; Oscar Belarmino La Flor Flores; Rufino Espinoza Espinoza; Roberto Hernán Rodríguez Manquel; Víctor Manuel Álvarez Droguett; Héctor Manuel Lira Aravena; and Sergio Iván Díaz Lara.

Regarding Víctor Manuel De la Cruz San Martín Jiménez, due to having fallen into dementia, the fulfillment of the sentence is suspended, and he must, in due course, be handed over under custody bail to a family member.

Source: Villa Grimaldi.cl, February 3, 2015

The Supreme Court upheld the appeal in cassation filed by the plaintiffs and, in a replacement judgment, increased the sentences of three agents of the dissolved National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) for their responsibility in the consummated crime of qualified homicide of Eulogio del Carmen Fritz Monsalvez.

The crime was committed in February 1975 in the Estación Central commune of Santiago, the city where the militant of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) was living in hiding while carrying out resistance activities against the dictatorship.

Eulogio Fritz Monsalvez, 30 years old, was a mining technician, originally from the Coronel commune and a member of the MIR's Concepción Regional branch, but after the coup, due to the repressive situations occurring in the Concepción region, he moved to the capital to continue his political work.

On February 21, 1975, Eulogio, known in the Concepción area and within the MIR as "Duro Pablo," went to a clandestine meeting with another militant he trusted who was also in hiding in Santiago. The meeting was arranged in the vicinity of the Estación Central railway station in the central sector of the capital city.

However, that individual and other members of the clandestine organization who knew him had been detained by the DINA and contributed to the repressive entity preparing an ambush to eliminate "Duro Pablo."

In the judicial investigation, substantiated by Justice Mario Carroza, he established the sequence of events that ended with the assassination of Eulogio Fritz and the subsequent disappearance of his mortal remains.

In a first-instance ruling issued in June 2017, Carroza sentenced former army officer Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko and former non-commissioned officer Basclay Zapata Reyes to 7 years in prison; meanwhile, agents José Enrique Fuentes Torres and Teresa del Carmen Osorio Navarro were sentenced to 4 years with the benefit of supervised release.

Later, in March 2019, the Fifth Chamber of the Santiago Court of Appeals ratified this sentence with the exception that it increased Krassnoff's sentence to 10 years in prison, maintaining the resolution regarding Fuentes Torres and Teresa Osorio. By then, Basclay Zapata had already died in prison while serving sentences for countless other crimes against humanity.

On this occasion, the Supreme Court, in a ruling issued this March 24 (case file 10.662-2019), the Second Chamber of the highest court—composed of justices Haroldo Brito, Manuel Antonio Valderrama, Leopoldo Llanos, Rodrigo Biel, and Miguel Vázquez—upheld the appeal in cassation filed by the plaintiffs challenging the Court of Appeals' ruling and, in a replacement judgment, sentenced Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko to 15 years and one day in prison as the perpetrator of the crime.

Meanwhile, José Enrique Fuentes Torres and Teresa Osorio Navarro must serve 5 years and one day in prison as accomplices to this crime. All those convicted must serve effective prison time, without benefits.

In the judgment, the Second Criminal Chamber established an error of law in the resolution issued by the Santiago Court of Appeals by classifying the crime as simple homicide rather than qualified homicide.

In this regard, the ruling points out: "That, on the other hand, it is useful to keep in mind that in order to be in the presence of the qualifying circumstance of treachery (alevosía), what is relevant is that at the moment of committing the act, the perpetrator is at no risk to himself, since what is decisive is the taking advantage of or the creation of a state of defenselessness in the victim.

That is to say, we must be in the presence of a state devoid of any defense that has been generated or taken advantage of by the accused in order to avoid any risk to their person, it not being sufficient that said advantageous situation has been produced by simple chance," the ruling maintains.

The resolution adds: "That, from what has been stated above, it is manifest that in this case the requirements demanded to configure the qualifying circumstance of treachery, in its modality of acting safely, are met, insofar as it was held as established that the accused acted, taking advantage of the helpless situation of the victim—who was on a public thoroughfare to meet someone he trusted—, prevailing themselves of their greater numerical superiority and the power of the weapons they carried, one of them shooting the victim in a burst from behind at a moment when he was attempting to flee, while the other agents provided cover for the first, thereby injuring a vital area of the victim's body, without the offended party being in a condition to react to defend himself or thwart the action and, therefore, without any danger to the perpetrators."

"That, consequently, the injuries caused to the victim, when he was attempting to flee, as a result of a burst of gunfire fired against him from behind by Basclay Zapata Reyes [deceased], while Teresa del Carmen Osorio Navarro and José Enrique Fuentes Torres provided him with cover, necessarily imply the taking advantage by the sentenced parties of the disadvantageous position in which the offended party was, which was created by the perpetrators in order to avoid any risk to their person, circumstances that were known and consented to by the agents, lead to the necessary conclusion that the acts attributed to the accused are constitutive of the crime of qualified homicide—committed by treachery—and not of the illicit act of simple homicide as the second-instance judges erroneously determined," the chamber concludes.

"That, under the conditions described, it appears that the second-instance judges, by revoking the first-instance ruling that sentenced Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko as the perpetrator of the crime of qualified homicide of Eulogio Fritz Monsalvez and Teresa del Carmen Osorio Navarro and José Enrique Fuentes Torres as accomplices to the same illicit act, establishing, to the contrary, that said illicit act was rather constitutive of a crime of simple homicide, incurred in an error of law that substantially influences the dispositive part of the sentence, since by not correctly classifying the facts, it meant that the convicted parties were imposed a lesser sentence than that provided for in the law, which is why the appeal in cassation filed by the Human Rights Program, the AFEP, and the plaintiffs in this section will be upheld," it concludes.

Executed from behind

In the first-instance judgment, Justice Mario Carroza established the following facts: 1°. That Eulogio del Carmen Fritz Monsalvez, known as "Duro Pablo" and also as "Víctor Hugo," was a militant of the Revolutionary Left Movement, and was 30 years old on that date, February 21, 1975, having remained in hiding since September 11, 1973, as he was intensely sought by security agents, without this being an obstacle to the fulfillment of the obligations that the movement demanded of him and to which he had committed himself; 2°.

That, such being the case, on that occasion he decided to leave his temporary residence in the El Bosque commune and headed to the Estación Central sector with the purpose of meeting another militant on Bascuñán street.

However, agents of the DINA's Caupolicán Group, particularly the Halcón group, which was in charge of the repression of the MIR at that time, warned of the situation by information gathered under duress from another militant of the same movement, arrived at the meeting place accompanied by other militants, Claudio Alfredo Zaror Zaror and José Hernán Carrasco Vásquez, to verify his identity; 3°.

That the victim Eulogio Fritz Monsalvez was at the meeting place when the agents arrived and, upon noticing their presence, decided to flee and ran along the public thoroughfare, for which he was followed by his captors, among them agent Basclay Zapata Reyes, who, armed with a long-range firearm, fired a burst at him from behind, one of the bullets impacting his body and causing a thoraco-cardio-pulmonary wound with an exit wound, which is what finally caused his death due to acute anemia; 4°.

That the aforementioned action of the security agents is witnessed by the detainee Zaror Zaror and by Carrasco Vásquez, and in it, in addition to Basclay Zapata, agents Teresa del Carmen Osorio Navarro and José Enrique Fuentes Torres participated, who were his companions in the vehicle driven by the perpetrator of the shot; 5°.

That given the way in which the events unfolded and the prior planning of his detention by the agents of the operational group led by the then-Army officer Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko, it is estimated that the death of the victim could have been avoided, given the means and personnel deployed for the operation. 6°.

That the National Intelligence Directorate, DINA, was an organization in charge of political repression against opponents of the Military Government in the year 1975, which had its own means, financing, and an organized structure, directed by its National Director, Juan Manuel Guillermo Contreras Sepúlveda, currently deceased.

In the Metropolitan Region, for operational aspects, it relied on the Metropolitan Intelligence Brigade, which was in charge of an Army officer, and acted with two groups, one of them being the so-called Caupolicán, which was under the command of Marcelo Moren Brito, also deceased, and which had two groups of agents, Halcón and Águila, the former, which is the one that participates in these events, had two teams and was commanded by Lieutenant Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko, being part of its members, the agent who shot the victim, Basclay Humberto Zapata Reyes, and those who provided him with cover, Teresa del Carmen Osorio Navarro and José Enrique Fuentes Torres, known as "Cara de Santo."

Source: resumen.cl, March 26, 2022