The Lautaro Brigade of the DINA was an extermination unit assembled by Manuel Contreras and directed by Army Major Juan Morales Salgado. This brigade operated from the clandestine barracks at Calle Simón Bolívar 8630.

The actions of this group of DINA agents known to date include the capture of the Communist Party leadership in 1976. The brigade operated with a contingent of more than 70 members, whose operational members carried out the gathering of information, detentions, interrogations/torture, execution, and the disappearance of the detainees' bodies.

For these purposes, they had access to a large infrastructure; in addition to the barracks themselves, they had a varied number of vehicles at their disposal, as well as access to Puma helicopters from the Army Aviation Command (CAE) that operated from Peldehue.

The members of the Lautaro Brigade came from the four branches of the Armed Forces, in addition to having some civilian agents attached to the various branches; its composition was mostly non-commissioned officers.

The fact that there were at least seven agents from the Navy in this brigade makes it clear that the institution lied when it declared that the Navy withdrew all its personnel from the DINA in 1975. Another characteristic of the Lautaro Brigade is that it had a large number of women, who, as has been discovered, were characterized by their coldness and cruelty in the face of crimes.

Several of them, due to their knowledge of medicine and nursing, cooperated in the experiments carried out in the chemical laboratory at Michael Townley's house in Lo Curro. Townley constantly attended the Calle Simón Bolívar barracks to experiment on detainees with the gas manufactured by the chemist Eugenio Berrios.

The information that has been recovered as of August 2007 appeared after the investigation of the "Calle Conferencia" case carried out by Judge Víctor Montiglio, who managed to establish the fate of a number of detainees from the Communist Party leadership, among them the general secretary of the PC in hiding, Víctor Manuel Díaz López, as well as Bernardo Araya Zuleta, María Olga Flores Barraza, Mario Zamorano Donoso, Onofre Jorge Muñoz Poutays, Uldarico Donaire Cortés, Jaime Patricio Donato Avendaño, Elisa Escobar Cepeda, Lenín Adán Díaz Silva, Eliana Espinoza Fernández, and Marta Lidia Ugarte Román. To date, it has been established that Víctor Manuel Díaz López was detained in the early hours of May 12, 1976, at the house located at Calle Bello Horizonte No. 979, in the Las Condes district, days after the detention of several PC leaders detained in the operation known as the "Ratonera" at Calle Conferencia No. 1587. Víctor Díaz was taken to the Villa Grimaldi torture center and subsequently transferred to "Casa de Piedra," another DINA torture center located in the Cajón del Maipo, a place where it is known that Augusto Pinochet allegedly visited Víctor Díaz and other PC leaders detained there. At the beginning of 1977, Manuel Contreras gave the order to Juan Morales Salgado to eliminate Víctor Díaz, and in compliance with that order, agents Sergio Escalona Acuña and Bernardo Daza Navarro took Díaz out of a cell and tied a plastic bag over his head, suffocating him, while Army Lieutenant (nurse) Gladys de las Mercedes Calderón Carreño injected him with cyanide. Subsequently, they proceeded to place the body in plastic bags, tie it up, attach a piece of rail to it, and put it into potato sacks, then tie it with wire to ensure the bindings would not open. The body was transported in vehicles to the Army regiment in Peldehue, where they had other executed victims brought from Villa Grimaldi and tied in the same way as Víctor Díaz. They loaded the bodies into the Puma helicopter of the Army Aviation Command and set off toward the coast of the Fifth Region to throw the bodies into the sea. This mode of operation by the agents of the Lautaro Brigade demonstrates the brutality and dehumanization of all its members. List of some of the agents of the Lautaro Brigade. 1 Acevedo Acevedo, Heriberto del Carmen Carabineros Non-commissioned officer (Ret.) 2 Ahumada Despouy, Joyce Ana Army Non-commissioned officer (Ret.) 3 Altamirano Sanhueza, Orlando del Tránsito Navy Non-commissioned officer (Ret.) 4 Alvarez Droguett, Victor Manuel Army Non-commissioned officer (Ret.) 5 Alvarez Vega, Hiro Army Non-commissioned officer (Ret.) 6 Arriagada Mora, Jorge Hugo FACH Civilian employee (Ret.) 7 Aspe Rojas, Celinda Angélica Navy Non-commissioned officer (Ret.) 8 Benavides Escobar, César Raúl Army General (Ret.) 9 Bermúdez Méndez, Carlos Justo Army Non-commissioned officer (Ret.) 10 Bitterlich Jaramillo, Pedro Segundo Army Non-commissioned officer (Ret.) 11 Cabezas Mardones, Eduardo Patricio FACH Non-commissioned officer (Ret.) 12 Calderón Carreño, Gladys de las Mercedes Army Officer (Ret.) and nurse 13 Castro Andrade, Sergio Hernán Carabineros Non-commissioned officer (Ret.) 14 Chaigneau Sepúlveda, Federico Humberto Army Lieutenant Colonel (Ret.) 15 Daza Navarro, Bernardo del Rosario Navy Non-commissioned officer (Ret.) 16 Díaz Radulovich, Jorge Iván FACH Non-commissioned officer (Ret.) 17 Díaz Ramírez, Guillermo Eduardo FACH Non-commissioned officer (Ret.) 18 Escalona Acuña, Sergio Orlando Navy Non-commissioned officer (Ret.) 19 Escobar Fuentes, Jorge Marcelo Army Brigadier (Ret.) 20 Ferrán Martínez, Guillermo Jesús Army Non-commissioned officer (Ret.) 21 Garea Guzmán, Eduardo Army Civilian employee (Ret.) 22 Guerrero Aguilera, Gustavo Enrique Carabineros Non-commissioned officer (Ret.) 23 Guerrero Soto, María Angélica Army Non-commissioned officer (Ret.) 24 Gutiérrez Valdés, Pedro Antonio Army Non-commissioned officer (Ret.) 25 Jaime Astorga, Rufino Eduardo Carabineros Non-commissioned officer (Ret.) 26 Jímenez Escobar, Berta Yolanda Navy Non-commissioned officer (Ret.) 27 Krassnoff Martchenko, Miguel Army Brigadier (Ret.) 28 Lagos Yañez, Luis Alberto FACH Civilian employee (Ret.) 29 Lawrence Mires, Ricardo Víctor Carabineros Lieutenant Colonel (Ret.) 30 López Tapia, Carlos José Army Colonel (Ret.) and Army Prof. 31 Magna Astudillo, Elisa del Carmen Army Officer (Ret.) 32 Manríquez Manterola, Jorge Lientur Navy Non-commissioned officer (Ret.) 33 Marcos Muñoz, Carlos Segundo Civilian attached to the Army 34 Meza Serrano, José Miguel Navy Non-commissioned officer (Ret.) 35 Montre Méndez, Manuel Antonio Carabineros Non-commissioned officer (Ret.) 36 Morales Salgado, Juan Hernán Army Colonel (Ret.) and Army Prof. 37 Navarro Navarro, Teresa del Carmen Navy Non-commissioned officer (Ret.) 38 Obreque Henríquez, Manuel Jesús Army Non-commissioned officer (Ret.) 39 Ojeda Obando, José Alfonso Carabineros Non-commissioned officer (Ret.) 40 Orellana de la Pinta, Claudio Orlando Carabineros Non-commissioned officer (Ret.) 41 Oyarce Riquelme, Eduardo Alejandro Army Non-commissioned officer (Ret.) 42 Pacheco Fernández, Claudio Enrique Carabineros Non-commissioned officer (Ret.) 43 Pichunmán Curiqueo, Jorge Segundo Carabineros Non-commissioned officer (Ret.) 44 Piña Garrido, Juvenal Alfonso Army Non-commissioned officer (Ret.) 45 Reyes Lagos, Eduardo Antonio Army Non-commissioned officer (Ret.) 46 Rinaldi Suárez, Carlos Ramón Army Non-commissioned officer (Ret.) 47 Rivas González, Adriana Elcira FACH Non-commissioned officer (Ret.) 48 Riveros Valderrama, René Miguel Army Officer (Ret.) 49 Saavedra Vásquez, Orfa Yolanda Army Non-commissioned officer (Ret.) 50 Sagardía Monje, Jorge Laureano Carabineros Non-commissioned officer (Ret.) 51 Sarmiento Sotelo, José Manuel Carabineros Non-commissioned officer (Ret.) 52 Silva Vergara, Marilin Melahani Carabineros Non-commissioned officer (Ret.) 53 Sovino Maturana, Hernán Luis Army Captain (Ret.) 54 Torrejón Gatica, Orlando Jesús Army Non-commissioned officer (Ret.) 55 Troncoso Vivallos, Emilio Hernán Carabineros Non-commissioned officer (Ret.) 56 Urrutia Acuña, Luis Arturo Carabineros Non-commissioned officer (Ret.) 57 Vacarella Gilio, Italia Donata Carabineros Non-commissioned officer (Ret.) 58 Valdebenito Araya, Héctor Manuel Carabineros Non-commissioned officer (Ret.) 59 Vilches Muñoz, Ana del Carmen FACH Civilian employee (Ret.)

Source: lanacion.cl, January 16, 2004

After five years of living as a fugitive from the law, Ricardo Lawrence Mires surrendered to justice at the offices of the Criminal Organizations Department (OS9) of the Carabineros of Chile. His surrender closes a chapter of his terrifying history, but reopens the question of how he was able to evade his pursuers for so many years and who made up the network that provided him with support.

Lawrence Mires, a former Carabineros officer, is one of the founders of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), participating in several of its hunting, torture, and extermination units and serving in at least three secret barracks, including Villa Grimaldi.

One of the crimes for which he is responsible, and which is attracting the most attention from the press at this moment, is the kidnapping, torture, and disappearance of philosophy student Alfonso Chanfreau, grandfather of Víctor Chanfreau, current spokesperson for the Coordinating Assembly of Secondary Students (ACES), an organization that leads the struggle of secondary students against the university selection system.

But the kidnapping and disappearance of the philosophy student is not the only crime associated with the figure of ‘Lieutenant Cachete grande’. He also bears responsibility for the torture and murder of the leader of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR), Lumi Videla, whose body was thrown inside the Italian Embassy in November 1974; in the disappearance of Videla's husband, Sergio Pérez; in the setup and murder of the Gallardo family in Rinconada de Maipú; and in the murder of the Chilean-Spanish international official Carmelo Soria.

The torturer is also involved in the case known as ‘Calle Conferencia’, from where Communist leaders Mario Zamorano Donoso, Jorge Muñoz Poutays, Uldarico Donaire Cortez, Jaime Donato Avendaño, Elisa Escobar Cepeda, Fernando Lara Rojas, Lenin Díaz Silva, Marcelo Concha Bascuñán, Víctor Díaz López, Eliana Espinoza Fernández, and César Cerda Cuevas were kidnapped and forcibly disappeared.

Lawrence's criminal record totals at least a hundred crimes and is a living expression of the impunity that has surrounded the serious human rights violations committed by the civil-military dictatorship.

The former Carabineros officer, after his time in the DINA, continued to rise in his institution and retired in 1990 with the rank of lieutenant colonel. In April 2001, he was detected working as an executive for a shrimp distribution company, in which he operated under the name ‘Ricardo Flores’.

Until now, the reasons that prompted him to surrender to justice, abandoning the clandestine life he led for five years, are unknown. Nor are the names of the people who colluded to protect him and cause enormous damage to the families of his victims and to Chilean society as a whole, helping such a sinister subject to evade justice, known.

Source: villagrimaldi.cl, January 28, 2020

Jorgelino Vergara, better known as “El Mocito” of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), remained silent for 30 years until the Human Rights Brigade of the Investigative Police (PDI) found his whereabouts, in the search for the material murderer of the general secretary of the Communist Party, Víctor Díaz.

In his eagerness to defend his innocence, “El Mocito” broke the pact of silence and ended up recounting the macabre episodes of which he was a witness and also a protagonist, from when he arrived at Manuel Contreras's house at age 16 to perform domestic chores and then moved to the Simón Bolívar barracks, the only extermination center of the dictatorship known until now thanks to his statements.

Jorgelino Vergara's confessions to Judge Víctor Montiglio facilitated the prosecution of 120 DINA agents in 2007, the progress of several human rights violation cases, and now cause a stir: first as part of the documentary by Marcela Said and Jean de Certeau, “El Mocito,” and then as the guiding narrative of the book “La danza de los cuervos.

El Destino final de los detenidos desaparecidos” (Ceibo Ediciones), by journalist Javier Rebolledo. In an interview with Radio Universidad de Chile, Rebolledo referred to several of the chapters of his investigation that have caused an impact in the country, both for the rawness of their narratives and for the denunciation of several facts unknown until now.

Javier, were you surprised by the interview Jorgelino gave on television? Did you discuss it? What did you think? We haven't commented on it. I finished my journalistic work with the book and that was it, but it seems it was a good interview, because they asked him the fundamental things that remain open within the book, that he could have been an agent and could have participated in crimes against people.

That was the highest moment of the interview, when they ask him three times and he answers three times the same thing he had answered in the book: “It could have happened.” It had very high moments, when he also says that he does not regret anything.

It was also hard, hard to hear him, and it generated a lot of resistance in the human rights world, perhaps with some reason. I believe that for people it was transcendental, because he is a character who, as is told in the book, in addition to having provided a lot of data, is very complex; he awakens hatred on one hand and, on the other hand, some acceptance due to his collaboration with human rights causes. “When the salaries began to be delayed, he and other civilians asked for explanations from the person in charge of the barracks' general staff.

At that time it was Old Man Sagardia. He picked up the phone in front of them and spoke with Boxer and Asper's secretary. He was telling her to please ask Don Ricardo Claro for the salaries (...) The generalized comment was that: Claro saved them with money, contributions, all the time” (Chapter VIII Crows, hawks, and eagles) One of the episodes in your book that has caused the most stir is the collaboration of the late businessman Ricardo Claro with Pinochet's secret police.

What relationship does Jorgelino establish with Claro as a financier of the DINA? He recognizes him, first, as a person who met with Manuel Contreras, who was his boss. That he was a billionaire man, whom he once saw at the Casa de Piedra, but as a person close to the family and as a financier of the DINA always.

And later, when he already works within the Lautaro Brigade, as a good waiter's assistant, he knows who pays his salary, regardless of whether he sees him. One knows who feeds them, especially a person who has had so many difficulties feeding himself and living throughout his life.

He has no doubt that Ricardo Claro is the person who pays his salary. In the book, it is explained a little later that there is another agent who also says that Claro was a financier of the DINA, as complementary data to what Jorgelino points out.

Furthermore, Jorgelino says that all the agents in the barracks knew that the businessman was the financier, because they would call the secretary on the phone to tell her to ask Ricardo Claro for the money; it was not a secret to any of those who worked there. “In the casino, they were given the order: from very early on they had to go to the municipalities of Santiago and vote YES (...) Everyone went on that occasion with their true documentation, no aliases.

Upon arriving at the first place, they entered immediately; no one asked them to get in line, nothing. The poll workers must have been aware because no one, but no one, stood in their way at that moment.

Everyone voted and left again. In the next district, they repeated the same thing…” (Chapter XXVIII The Forgetfulness) Much has also been commented on the CNI fraud in the 1980 plebiscite that “La danza de los cuervos” reveals.

How does Jorgelino Vergara recount this episode to you? Jorgelino, together with his brigade, which was no longer the Lautaro Brigade, because when the Simón Bolívar Barracks closes, the Dolphins go to the Borgoño Barracks and a large part of the Lautaro go to the Loyola Barracks and there they become CNI.

In 1980, they are given the order, by the head of the barracks, I understand it is Ernesto Ureta Perlas, to go to vote en masse in all the districts of Santiago. They vote twice; they do the whole route once before lunch, then they have lunch, and they repeat the route of all the districts of Santiago voting.

In this work, not only was this brigade where Jorgelino was; he met many other agents performing the same task. They coincided in the spaces, they crossed paths with people from other barracks. That is what one qualifies as fraud; that is why Jorgelino says that for the plebiscite he cheated, they cheated. “She was on the grill with her eyes covered by a blindfold. ‘Gigí’ was turning it, on and on; Barriga and Lawrence observing, asking questions, hitting her with everything they had at hand.

Please, kill me, she screamed. She was in pieces. That way she couldn't have her child, it wasn't going to be able to be born with the damage she had all over her body. She was sure. So, ‘please, kill me’ (...) And Barriga and Lawrence began to laugh loudly. ‘She was asking for bullshit.’ Lawrence went to a little kitchen next to the office.

And he returned with a large frying pan. He began to hit her on the head, with violence, again and again. They were turning her into mush” (Chapter XXV Asking for bullshit) When you presented the book, you commented that one of the reflections that had arisen after writing about the Simón Bolívar Barracks was that no one can withstand torture and, in that sense, there are neither heroes nor traitors.

Tell me a little about that… The human being is not made to withstand torture. Torture is designed, established to break the human being and, from that point of view, human ingenuity has been efficient; they have known how to create methods of torture that other human beings are not capable of withstanding.

In some cases, blood transfusions were performed so that the detainee would not die; we are not talking about heroic acts, where the detainee can say: “You know what? Kill me, I'm going to put a blindfold on, I'm going to smoke a cigarette, and you execute me.” It is not that; we are talking about people who torture you for a long time until reaching the point of finding your limit.

That limit, I have the impression that if it was not in all cases, it was in 99 percent of them. The human being is not made to withstand torture and it is not appropriate for any political party or anyone in the world to ask their militants and human beings to withstand something that is inhumane. “But he is not certain that that is true.

He never saw him collaborating with the DINA agents; he was always in his room, like just another prisoner. He can even say that they treated him badly. And torture, on more than one occasion (...) The two trusted men of Captain Morales, Daza and Negro Escalona, were sitting next to the corpse of the Chino.

He still had the plastic bag over his head. He was dead, totally dead. They were packing him there, inside his room. The potato sacks, the wire, and the train rail” (Chapter XXIV The major prey) From that point of view, the general secretary of the PC, Víctor Díaz, whom you point out in your investigation was the person they kept alive the longest in Simón Bolívar -6 months-, did he collaborate with the DINA?

Surely, yes. But I contextualize it from the point of view that he was the major prey, the most important man in the Communist Party. I don't know if they left him for that reason, as a symbol, because he collaborated, or perhaps the combination of all things.

But the way they torture him, the way they kill him is aberrant. People should stick with that, with the fact that he is a victim; it doesn't matter if he collaborated or didn't collaborate. Those arguments are from the DINA agents who tell many of the families “You confessed under torture” or tell them “You didn't confess, you are a hero.” One must not fall into those sayings.

The victims are the victims and the victimizers are the victimizers. What do you think about the fact that the spokesperson for the Supreme Court, Hugo Dolmetsch, referred to the revelations of El Mocito and assured that the cases are open and he could be summoned to testify?

It seems like an excellent sign to me, because we all know that at one point it was said that it was established, and Dolmetsch touched on it, that in these processes the closure of the cases was going to be rushed.

He said “nothing is going to be stopped here, the cases are not going to be closed, and it is going to continue to be investigated.” For me, that is a fundamental piece of data; it caught my attention how impressed Dolmetsch was with the testimony of El Mocito, with the revelations that this man is making; it is noticeable that it touched him.

Where do you think the success that “La danza de los cuervos” has had lies? Is the issue of human rights a wound that has not yet closed in our society, or are the revelations of the investigation very shocking?

It is a combination of all things. It is the rawest episode that we have recorded in our history, at least written and told in images in some way. It is the only extermination center known so far in Chile, the Chilean mini-Auschwitz.

On the other hand, you have the story of this other character -Jorgelino-, who is complex, ambivalent. You have the issue of fanaticism, to kill for a fanaticism and reach that point, to fall to the lowest level.

The fanaticism of the left or of some party to establish as heroes people who can withstand torture, which also causes a lot of pain. A cocktail of things that is added to a society that is wanting to listen, that is wanting to manifest itself, that is losing its fear of things, is really much more open.

All this situation occurs which, in any case, does not cease to impress me; I do not have a logical explanation to tell you why this book had the success it had; I think I will realize it over time.

Source: radio.uchile.cl, July 14, 2012

More than 400 people gathered at Av. Las Condes and Tabancura to "funa" (publicly denounce) retired Carabineros Lieutenant Colonel Ricardo Victor Lawrence Mires, one of the former DINA chiefs. The Funa march began after an emotional tribute to Carlos Cid, a member of the Funa Commission who died in a car accident a few weeks ago.

The large police presence -patrols, motorcycles, Special Forces buses, and civilian agents- was due to the fact that "high-ranking" DINA and CNI commanders live peacefully in the area, such as Gerardo Urrich Gonzalez (agent of the Metropolitan Intelligence Brigade and the Puren Brigade) and General (Ret.) Odlanier Mena Salinas (former director of the CNI).

The shrimp distributor Kamaron Bay S.A. -where Lawrence works- also maintained that "police protection." In addition, the front and an advertising light were crudely covered with cardboard, and a "closed" sign covered the door.

Inside the building, on the second floor, movements were observed. The company Kamaron Bay is located at Tabancura 1382, telephone 2170551, fax 2173223, and its current manager Rodrigo Izquierdo del Villar -who is running for director at the Club de la Unión-, is the son of Vicente Izquierdo Besa -current director of the Club- and nephew of the right-wing politician Arturo Alessandri Besa.

Other branches of the company are at Alameda 1146, sector A, Of. 602, and Pio XI 1290, in Vitacura. Neighbors -from the numerous businesses in the sector- reported that the manager and Ricardo Lawrence himself were inside from early on.

A careful performance full of feeling simulated the tortures that Lawrence inflicted on dozens of detainees by the DINA, and then his "criminal record" was read. The march continued through the quiet neighborhood, handing out flyers to businesses, motorists, neighbors, and passersby, guarded at all times by Carabineros.

Ricardo Lawrence moves in dark green Citroen vans belonging to the company, and in a white Lada of his own. He tried to open branches in Puerto Varas and Frutillar some years ago. He was seen assiduously at the Club Alemán where he did business.

He has a plot of land in Talagante, on sites granted by Carabineros, and an apartment in the Esperanza neighborhood, in Santiago Centro, among others. He distributes Ecuadorian shrimp, presenting himself in some restaurants -where they are unaware of his past in the DINA- as "Ricardo Flores," attending others linked to former companions of his old trade as a torturer.

He serves, among others, the Club de la Unión and the Club de Golf Los Leones -his best clients-, the restaurants Le Due Torri in Providencia and Santiago Centro, La Cava, El Galindo, Como Agua para Chocolate, La Muñeca Brava -of the Arquer family-, San Frutoso, Ibis -where the commanders-in-chief of the Armed Forces had lunch a few months ago-, El Otro Sitio, Ajo Verde, Venezia, Borde Río, Hotel Sheraton, Hotel Hyatt, Gioggia, Aqui esta Coco -of chef Coco Pacheco-, Paseo San Damián, Mare Nostrum, Todo Fresco, El Siciliano, El Camarón -on Gorbea street-, etc.

After the Funa, some clients in the Bellavista neighborhood, led by the restaurant El Galindo, stopped buying about twenty million pesos a month from the distributor. In the Club de la Unión, there is also commotion over the denunciation, which was broadcast by CNN, among other international media.

CRIMINAL RECORD OF A TORTURER

RICARDO Victor Lawrence Mires, known as Lieutenant "Cachete Grande" in the DINA. He was head of the Falcon group. Ricardo Lawrence Mires, alias "Roberto" or "Lieutenant Cachete grande," was an officer of the Carabineros Special Forces.

During the UP, he was part of the Mobile Group. He acted in tortures and executions at the National Stadium. He moved to the DINA, becoming head of the "Falcon" group, dependent on the "Caupolican" Brigade, performing functions in the detention and torture centers of Londres 38 ("Yucatan"), Villa Grimaldi ("Terranova"), José Domingo Cañas ("Ollagae"), and Venecia 1722 in Independencia, of which he was head, where a clinic also operated.

Lawrence helped establish the front company "Pedro Diet Lobos" that financed the DINA. He was decorated by Pinochet with the "medal of valor" for his participation in the assassination of Miguel Enríquez, in October 1974.

He was commissioner of the 1st Precinct, and in 1988, of the 3rd Precinct. In 1989 he was transferred to Los Andes, being discharged in 1990 by General (Ret.) -current UDI senator- Rodolfo Stange. Together with Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko, Lawrence is one of the most sinister characters of the DINA.

According to testimonies, his subordinates considered him cruel, as he only suspended the torture of a detainee when they suffered a cardiac arrest or fainted. Survivors remember that he put a piece of watermelon in front of a detainee who had suffered more than four hours of electric shocks.

Everyone knew that if she ingested it, it would cause her viscera to burst. Former DINA agent Luz Arce asserts that it was he who, under threat of death, forced her to collaborate. The distribution company Kamaron Bay S.A. at Tabancura 1382.

With cardboard, they crudely tried to hide its name. Lawrence is involved in the kidnapping, torture, death, and disappearance of hundreds of Chileans, among them MIR leaders Alfonso Chanfreau, detained in July 1974; the MIR militant Lumi Videla, who died due to the tortures and was then thrown at the Italian embassy; María Cristina López Stewart, MIR militant, detained in September 1974, disappeared to this day; Carmelo Soria, Spanish international official, in July 1976.

Soria's corpse was found next to his car in the El Carmen canal. Witnesses state that Lawrence mocked, saying: 'we dispatched the buddy.' He told how they had made him swallow a bottle of pisco and then 'we put him in the car and dispatched him.' In January 1975, in an operation in which the "Caupolican" and "Puren" brigades of the DINA participated, with support from FACH and Army helicopters, whose objective was to detain MIR leaders Dagoberto Pérez Vargas and Nelson Gutiérrez, the DINA assaulted a property on Venecia street and took possession of the house.

Lawrence was head of that "barracks" when, in 1977, a young mentally ill man was repeatedly raped by a DINA agent. The scandal forced the DINA to abandon that place. Currently, Ricardo Lawrence is prosecuted for the kidnapping and disappearance of the clandestine leadership of the Communist Party, in the "ratonera" on Conferencia street.

To this day, they remain disappeared, as a result of that DINA operation: Mario Zamorano Donoso, Víctor Díaz López, Jorge Muñoz Poutays, Uldarico Donaire Cortez, Elisa Escobar Cepeda, Eliana Espinoza Fernández, Fernando Lara Rojas, Jaime Donato Avendaño, Lenin Díaz Silva, César Cerda Cuevas, and Marcelo Concha Bascuñán.

Linked to that same operation are the detention and disappearance of Bernardo Araya Zuleta and María Flores Barraza, who were seen at the Venecia street barracks. For this process that Judge Juan Guzmán is substantiating, in January the Fifth Chamber of the Court of Appeals granted Ricardo Lawrence his freedom, setting a bail of one million pesos. By Arnaldo Perez Guerra

Source: elsiglo.cl, May 19, 2001

Among the accused are at least 60 new ex-agents who until now had not fallen into the nets of justice for crimes against humanity. Of the total prosecuted, all retired, 50 are from the Army and the rest from the FACh, Navy, Investigations, and Carabineros.

The most massive prosecution in the history of the trials for human rights violations was ordered yesterday by Judge Víctor Montiglio against 120 ex-agents, all from the DINA. Among the accused are nearly 60 new former repressors who until now had not been prosecuted in any trial for crimes against humanity committed during the dictatorship.

The magistrate resolved the new indictments for the crimes committed in the so-called Colombo and Condor operations and the episodes known as Calle Conferencia I and II. In these last two, in 1976, the DINA kidnapped and forcibly disappeared two complete clandestine leaderships of the then-covert Communist Party.

Although Judge Montiglio kept the information away from the press, it became known that of the 120 prosecuted, there are at least 50 who belong to the Army and the rest to the Air Force, Navy, Investigations, and Carabineros.

Among the prosecuted and already retired Army officers who carried out operational missions in the DINA, there are at least César Manríquez Bravo, Manuel Carevic Cubillos, Hernán Sovino Novoa, Humberto Chaigneau Sepúlveda, and Sergio Castillo González.

The latter is one of the former repressive agents who continue to receive a monthly salary from the Army, rehired as a civilian employee, according to the report "The DINA on fees" published in the latest edition of La Nación Domingo.

This time, Minister Montiglio included among the prosecuted several former agents who stood guard at the clandestine detention centers, but who were also operational agents in the transfer of prisoners for their extermination and disappearance.

Even quite a few of them were part of the DINA's operational brigades, detaining opponents and participating in the torture or beatings. Judge Montiglio explained this massive indictment yesterday, stating that it is because "here we are investigating everyone who has had participation in the (DINA) barracks." The magistrate also ordered the preventive arrest of a large part of the prosecuted, and for those for whom he did not decree it, it is explained because they are already indicted for other cases and in a situation of provisional freedom, waiting for sentencing.

Operation Condor, or Plan Condor, was a coordination of the intelligence services of the Southern Cone to repress and eliminate left-wing militants, and it was born in Santiago on November 28, 1975. Attending that meeting, in which the constitution act was formed, were for Chile the head of the DINA, Colonel Manuel Contreras; for Argentina, Navy Captain Jorge Casas; for Bolivia, Army Major Carlos Mena; for Uruguay, Army Colonel Jorge A.

Pons; and for Paraguay, Army Colonel Benito Güanes Serrano. Operation Colombo was a setup prepared by the dictatorship between the end of 1974 and 1975, to make Chilean society and foreign countries that were already complaining about the repression after the 1973 military coup believe that the forcibly disappeared were a lie of "international Marxism." To do this, they invented that 119 Chileans who were claimed as disappeared had died in Argentina and Brazil, facing each other due to political quarrels or in exchanges of fire with the police or military forces of those countries.

THE CONFERENCIA CASE

It became known as Calle Conferencia, according to the name of the Santiago street with the number 1587 where the first detentions occurred, the episode for which the DINA kidnapped and forcibly disappeared in May 1976 the first clandestine leadership of the Communist Party.

Among them fell Víctor Díaz López, general secretary of the PC in hiding, as well as Jorge Muñoz Poutays, Mario Zamorano Donoso, Uldarico Donaire Cortez, and Jaime Donato Avendaño. The chapter known as Conferencia II is also called "The case of the 13," for the kidnapping and disappearance of 11 members of the second clandestine leadership of the PC along with two MIR militants, which occurred between November 29 and December 20, 1976.

The judicial investigation established that both the members of the first and the second leadership of the PC were detained by members of the Lautaro Brigade of the DINA, commanded by Army Captain Juan Morales Salgado, and by the members of two operational groups led by Ricardo Lawrence and Germán Barriga, captain of Carabineros and Army, respectively.

Santiago Araya Cabrera (MIR) was detained on November 29, 1976. On December 13, PC leader Luis Lazo San Martín was arrested. Two days later, Horacio Cepeda Marinkovich, Lincoyán Yalú Berríos, Fernando Navarro Allendes, Fernando Ortiz Letelier, Héctor Véliz Ramírez, Reinalda Pereira Plaza, and Waldo Pizarro Molina were kidnapped.

On December 9, Armando Portilla was detained, ending the operation on December 18 with Lisandro Cruz Díaz and Carlos Durán González (MIR), and on the 20th of that month, with the kidnapping of Edras Pinto Arroyo.

Only in 2007 was the hell that the detainees lived through judicially known, because no prisoner came out alive from the Simón Bolívar barracks of the Lautaro Brigade. Regarding the fate of the leaders, the testimony of Carabineros (Ret.) non-commissioned officer Raúl Valdebenito Araya was decisive in opening the case.

According to him, during those days, "three or four" detainees, all members of the PC, were taken to the barracks gym to be interrogated. He does not remember if it was that day or the next that he saw the people "already bagged," alluding to the fact that they had been eliminated and put inside potato sacks. Valdebenito himself was in charge of leading the convoy of cars to the Cuesta Barr

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

Commuting the sentences of prisoners who meet the requirements amidst COVID-19, a petition in the Constitutional Court to declare the law "discriminatory"—presented by right-wing senators—and the possibility that criminals against humanity might be moved to house arrest citing "humanitarian reasons," are part of the plot that strained relations between the government and the ruling coalition during the past week.

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

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

The regulation was rejected by some deputies from the ruling coalition itself, who later, led by Senator Francisco Chahuán, presented a petition to the Constitutional Court, considering Article 15 of the bill discriminatory for not incorporating prisoners currently serving their sentences at the Punta Peuco prison.

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

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

The pushback from human rights families: This situation generated rejection among various human rights groups that were opposed to these inmates accessing this intra-prison benefit. This time, the president of the Association of Political Executions, Alicia Lira, delivered a letter to President Sebastián Piñera, with various signatures, demonstrating the rejection of this eventual scenario.

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

On the other hand, Human Rights groups also called for the rejection of the humanitarian bill, which would allow Punta Peuco inmates to access prison benefits following the health emergency. They categorically reject the humanitarian bill, which seeks to allow elderly adults with terminal illnesses, including those sentenced for human rights cases, to access the benefit of serving total house arrest.

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

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

For her part, the President of the Association of Families of the Forcibly Disappeared, Lorena Pizarro, accused them of taking advantage of the pandemic to try to release Punta Peuco inmates. "It is one thing to have different political positions, but it is another thing to relativize state terrorism.

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

Meanwhile, the lawyer representing various individuals convicted of human rights cases, Maximiliano Murath, stated that the country must look after the health of all elderly people who are deprived of liberty, regardless of the crime they have committed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: cambio21.cl, April 15, 2020

At noon on Saturday, April 28, more than three hundred people gathered in the small square located at the corner of Avenida Las Condes and Tabancura to "funa" (publicly denounce) one of the high-ranking DINA chiefs.

From early on, Carabineros patrols and motorcycles were circulating in the sector, along with two buses with Special Forces personnel, while they took special care with the shrimp distributor "Kamaron Bay," which, in addition to police protection, covered with crude cardboard the signs that indicated its name and address and an advertising billboard that was on the sidewalk.

Apparently, they had already been alerted by their employee of the possible visit.

Before starting the march, a tribute was held for the young Carlos Cid, a militant of the Surda and member of the Comisión FUNA, who died in a car accident a few days earlier. With the strength and joy of his memory, the hundreds of young people headed to Tabancura 1382, taking over the street and then following along a wide sidewalk to avoid problems with the Carabineros.

In front of Kamaron Bay, which sported a "closed" sign, its first floor completely unoccupied and while some eyes spied from behind blinds on the second floor, a performance simulating torture was carried out, a leader of the former political prisoners spoke, and Lawrence Mires' criminal record was read.

Then, the sector was toured, handing out flyers to neighbors and motorists, to return to the place when the owners of the distributor had already installed their vehicles and finally return, to the rhythm of "ole ola," to the small square to end this first funa in the heart of the upper-class neighborhood.

ONE OF THE MOST SINISTER

Along with Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko, Ricardo Lawrence Mires is one of the most sinister characters of Manuel Contreras' DINA. The now shrimp distributor "Ricardo Flores" was known in the DINA as "Lieutenant Cachete Grande" when he served as head of the Halcón Group.

As a Carabineros officer, during the government of the Unidad Popular, he was part of the Mobile Group. Already with the rank of lieutenant, in 1974, he was one of the founders of the DINA, performing functions in the torture centers of Londres 38, Villa Grimaldi, José Domingo Cañas, and Venecia, of which he was the chief.

His own subordinates considered him cruel, as he only suspended the torture of a detainee when they suffered a heart attack or fainted. Survivors remember that to a detainee, who had suffered more than four hours of electric shocks, he placed a juicy piece of watermelon in front of her.

Everyone knew that if the woman ingested it, it would cause her viscera to burst. In her testimony, the former agent Luz Arce asserts that it was he who, under threat of death, forced her to collaborate.

He is involved in the kidnapping, torture, death, and disappearance of hundreds of Chileans, among them Alfonso Chanfreau Oyarce, a MIR militant and Philosophy professor, 23 years old, married and father of a daughter, detained in his home on July 30, 1974, and still disappeared.

In José Domingo Cañas, the detainee Lumi Videla Moya, a MIR militant, 26-year-old Philosophy student, married and mother of Dago Perez Videla (a member of Gondwana), was in the charge of Miguel Krassnoff, Ricardo Lawrence, and Marcelo Moren Brito. She died due to the torture and was later thrown into the Italian Embassy. Her partner, Sergio Pérez, is disappeared.

In the same cell as Lumi was the young María Cristina López Stewart, a history pedagogy student and MIR militant. She was 21 years old when she was detained on September 22, 1974. María Cristina is disappeared.

On July 15, 1976, Carmelo Soria, a Chilean-Spanish international official, was detained by DINA agents. The next day, his corpse was found next to his car in the El Carmen canal, in Santiago. Witnesses state that "Ricardo Lawrence arrived one day to visit Wenderoth.

He entered mocking and saying: 'we dispatched the compadre.' He pointed out that they had put an entire bottle of pisco into that person and then 'we put him in the car and we dispatched him.' Lawrence added that someone got in next to the detainee in the car and when it reached a certain speed, the companion jumped out and the car continued on its way until it crashed or went off a cliff."

In January 1975, a massive operation took place in which the Caupolicán and Purén Groups participated with air support from Aviation and Army helicopters. The objective was to detain Dagoberto Pérez Vargas, who lived on Venecia street, next to Nelson Gutiérrez; both were MIR leaders.

The house was at the 1,700 block between Freirina and Quezada Acharán. The operation failed, but the DINA took possession of the property. Ricardo Lawrence was the chief of that barracks when, in 1977, a young neighbor of the sector who was mentally ill was repeatedly raped by a DINA agent. The scandal forced them to abandon the place.

Lawrence Mires is currently being prosecuted for the kidnapping and disappearance of the leadership of the Communist Party that was detained in the operation known as "the Calle Conferencia mousetrap." As a result of that operation, Mario Zamorano Donoso, Jorge Muñoz Poutays, Uldarico Donaire Cortez, Jaime Donato Avendaño, Elisa Escobar Cepeda, Fernando Lara Rojas, Lenin Díaz Silva, Marcelo Concha Bascuñán, Víctor Díaz López, Eliana Espinoza Fernández, and César Cerda Cuevas are disappeared.

Also linked to this operation is the detention and disappearance of Bernardo Araya Zuleta and María Flores Barraza, who were seen at the Venecia barracks.

A few years ago, the former agent Ingrid Olderock, also from the Carabineros, accused Lawrence of an attempt on her life.

Ricardo Víctor Lawrence Mires, whose identity card is 5.392.869-2 and who also appears involved in the constitution of the DINA front company Pedro Diet Lobos, was a commissioner of the Third Police Station of Santiago in 1988 and in 1989 was transferred to Los Andes.

He retired in 1990 with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and today works at the shrimp distribution company "Kamaron Bay," where he uses the alias "Ricardo Flores" in his contact with owners of numerous restaurants in Santiago.

THE CLIENTS OF "RICARDO FLORES"

Ricardo Lawrence uses the alias "Ricardo Flores" in his work as a distributor of shrimp to the best restaurants in Santiago. Under this name, he serves, among others, the Club de la Unión, the Club de Golf at Presidente Riesco 3700, the Bali Hai at Colón 5146, Le Due Torri in Providencia (Isidora Goyenechea 2908) and Santiago Centro, Alfa at Manuel Montt 1526, Mar Verde at Hermanos Cabot 7058, Ají Verde at Constitución 284, Eladio at Pío Nono 251, Venezzia at Pío Nono 200, Rib's at Vitacura 9875, Gatsby in Providencia 1984, Borde Río at Monseñor Escribá de Balaguer 6400, the Sheraton and Hyatt hotels, the Gioggia, Aquí está Coco, San Frutoso, El Otro Sitio at Antonia Lope de Bello 53, Paseo San Damián at Las Condes 11271, Mariscogar at Dr. Roberto del Río 1654, Océano at Los Militares 5225 office 1904, Picoroco at Ernesto Pinto Lagarrigue 123, Mare Nostrum at La Concepción 281, and Todo Fresco at Antonia Lope de Bello 61.

Kamaron Bay, owned by Rodrigo Izquierdo del Villar, also has other branches in Santiago, at Alameda 1146 office 12 and at Pío XI 1290, and in Puerto Varas.

One of the first reactions from his clients came from a group of restaurants in the Bellavista neighborhood, led by Galindo, which stopped buying from the distributor an amount close to 20 million pesos per month.

(Comisión Funa)

Source: Funa, April 28, 2001

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 victims' families, will address a legislative proposal that would attempt to put an end to the trials against military personnel 30 years after the military coup occurred.

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

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 Poniente, the DINA set up a mousetrap to capture the PC leadership.

These victims are included in the first lawsuit against Augusto Pinochet and other military personnel (R), which Gladys Marín presented 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 recusing himself from the case, prosecuted such a direct relative of his."

Indeed, Carlos López Tapia, Judge Guzmán's cousin, was the chief of the clandestine Villa Grimaldi center in 1976, the place where the PC detainees were taken and disappeared. López also integrated the Caravan of Death on its first tour of the south and, according to his own statements in the process, attended the extrajudicial execution of the MIR leader in the area of the foothills of the current Tenth Region, José Liendo Vera, better known as "Commander Pepe," on the night of October 3, 1973, in Valdivia.

Yesterday, Guzmán admitted that the measure "was difficult, because judges are human beings."

Four Others Meanwhile, Judge Jorge Zepeda subjected Army officer (R) Claudio Lecaros Canales, non-commissioned officer (R) José Muñoz Pozo, and Carabineros non-commissioned officer (R) Omar Mella Lillo to the process. 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 the current 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, Judge Daniel Calvo prosecuted FACH Colonel (R) 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 Fasic lawyer Nelson Caucoto acts as plaintiff representing the families, who yesterday valued the investigation instructed until now by the two magistrates.

THE FALL OF THE PC

On Calle Conferencia, located in the western area of the Santiago commune, the DINA set up a "mousetrap" 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, Waldo Pizarro, husband of Sola Sierra and father of the current president of the AFDD, Lorena Pizarro, fell.

Source: La Nación, June 3, 2003

Calle Conferencia: Military confess to crime of PC leader Víctor Díaz

Visiting Judge Víctor Montiglio prosecuted seven former uniformed officers for the kidnapping and homicide of the father of AFDD leader Viviana Díaz.

Seven former uniformed officers were prosecuted this Friday for their responsibility in the kidnapping of former communist leader Víctor Díaz Osorio, father of the leader of the Association of Families of the Forcibly Disappeared (AFDD), Viviana Díaz.

The decision was adopted by the visiting judge of the Calle Conferencia case, Víctor Montiglio, after the defendants confessed their participation in the kidnapping and subsequent homicide of the member of the Communist Party (PC) leadership.

The resolution affects Colonel Juan Morales Salgado, officer Guillermo Ferrán Martínez, Lieutenant Gladys Calderón, and non-commissioned officer Eliana Magna Astudillo, all retired from the Army.

Also indicted by the magistrate were former Carabineros Lieutenant Ricardo Lawrence, and retired sailors Sergio Escobar and Bernardo Daza Navarro.

All the accused will continue in prison in different military units, to which they had been admitted in the middle of this week by order of Judge Montiglio.

Within the framework of this investigation, Lawrence had acknowledged that Díaz was visited by the deceased former dictator Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, while the former remained reclined in a detention center known as "the stone house" in the Cajón del Maipo.

The Calle Conferencia case refers to the operation in which the repressive organs of the military regime dismantled the PC leadership, which operated in clandestinity.

In the action carried out in the first days of May 1976, engineer Jorge Muñoz—then husband of the deceased communist leader Gladys Marín—, Mario Zamorano, Uldarico Donaire, Jaime Donato, and Díaz were detained, who have remained disappeared since then.

Source: El Mostrador, January 26, 2007

For illicit association, homicide, and kidnapping: Doctors and former military prosecuted for crime of DINA agent Manuel Leyton

Judge Madrid indicted thirteen people, among them doctors Horacio Taricco, Pedro Valdivia, Osvaldo Leyton, Vittorio Orvietto, and nurse Eliana Bolumburu, revealing the dark activities of health professionals at the service of the dictatorship. The ruling, which El Mostrador.cl accessed exclusively, accredited that Leyton's death was associated with sarin gas.

The not insignificant number of 35 prosecutions against 13 people—among whom four doctors and one nurse stand out—was issued by Judge Alejandro Madrid Crohare, in the process he is substantiating for the homicide and kidnapping of former DINA agent Manuel Jesús Leyton, who died in March 1977 due to the application of torture and sarin gas at the London clinic of the repressive organization.

This is the first time that a magistrate has managed to identify the organization of the facility that the dissolved National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) used to apply torments and poisons to opponents of the dictatorship, as well as who were part of the medical and auxiliary personnel who helped carry out these practices.

El Mostrador.cl accessed a full copy of the prosecution issued by Madrid, through a high-level judicial source.

The indictments issued by Madrid are divided into the crimes of illicit association, qualified homicide, and illicit association, and affect 13 people who had different participations in the investigated events.

For illicit association, in the capacity of co-authors, doctors Hernán Horacio Taricco Lavín, Pedro Samuel Valdivia Soto, Osvaldo Eugenio Leyton Bahamondes, Vittorio Orvietto Tiplitzky, and the head nurse of the London clinic, Eliana Carlota Bolumburu Tabeada, were prosecuted.

The latter is a cousin of Ana María Borumburu, who worked at the Catholic University, close to doctors Hermal Rosemberg and Sergio González Bombardiere, who performed the unauthorized autopsy on former President Eduardo Frei.

Under the same charges, the minister prosecuted former military personnel Ricardo Víctor Lawrence Mires, Vianel Valdivieso Cervantes, Hernán Luís Sovino Maturana (head of security at the clinic), non-commissioned officer major (R) Santiago Alfredo Matteo Galleguillos; Colonel (R) Juan Morales Salgado (recently prosecuted in the Prats case); Army commander (R) and member of the Lautaro brigade of the DINA Federico Humberto Chaigneau Sepúlveda (prosecuted in the Conferencia case); Army Lieutenant Gladys de las Mercedes Calderón Carreño (also indicted in Conferencia), known in the DINA for her cruelty, as she was the one who injected cyanide into the detainees; and the civilian employee Lorenzo Omar Toro Olivares.

According to the magistrate's resolution, the co-authors of the qualified homicide, that is, those who participated directly in Leyton's death, were doctor Taricco Lavín and former uniformed officers Lawrence Mires, Vianel Valdivieso Cervantes, and Morales Salgado. Their accomplices, meanwhile, were Sovino Maturana and Toro Olivares.

The concealers of the homicide, according to the prosecution, are doctors Leyton Bahamondes, Valdivia Soto, nurse Bolumburu Taboada, and former uniformed officers Matteo Galleguillos, Chaigneau Sepúlveda, and Lieutenant Calderón Carreño.

Finally, as co-authors of kidnapping, doctors Taricco Lavín, Leyton Bahamondes, nurse Bolumburu Taboada, and former military personnel Lawrence Mires, Vianel Valdivieso, Sovino Maturana, Morales Salgado, and Toro Olivares were prosecuted.

Lying papers Madrid did not spare details in his investigation and also indicted doctor Leyton Bahamondes and nurse Bolumburu Taboada as co-authors of falsification of a public document.

The latter were the ones who prepared the documentation so that Leyton's death appeared associated with a heart attack caused by an illness, and not by the effects of the application of sarin gas.

In fact, in the resolution issued by Madrid, it is accredited that the directors of the Legal Medical Service (SML) of the time were pressured to change the clinical history and the causes of death.

These prosecutions are added to those issued on Monday by the same judge against the former Army auditor general Fernando Torres Silva and his right-hand man, Colonel (R) of justice Enrique Ibarra Chamorro, within the framework of the investigation into the kidnapping and homicide of former DINA agent Eugenio Berríos.

The history that Madrid accredited

The death of Corporal Leyton Robles is what could be called a mafia vendetta for those who betray the code of silence. And for the former director of the DINA, Manuel Contreras, the word betrayal was simply an unpronounceable term.

The history accredited by the judge is that Leyton Robles, together with other agents, were looking for spare parts to repair a Renault 4 with which the DINA worked. However, the funds that the repressive organization had were already meager and, therefore, the vehicle could not be fixed.

The corporal decided to solve the issue himself; he stole a car similar to the Frenchman Marcel Duhalde's. The European citizen reported the fact to the Carabineros, whose personnel detained Leyton Robles and agent Heriberto Acevedo and took them to a police station.

Between tugs-of-war between the DINA and the uniformed police, it reached the point where the unit was surrounded by personnel from the organization headed by Manuel Contreras.

However, Leyton had already revealed in the interrogation that the vehicle in question belonged to a forcibly disappeared person and that they were thrown into the sea, as a way of making the police see that their detention was almost a matter of national security.

The corporal was finally released. But the DINA detained him again at the Simón Bolívar facility. Days later, he died of a mysterious heart attack, when he was only 24 years old.

After Leyton's death, the DINA's iron circle was present at the scene: Vianel Valdivieso and the then-major Morales Salgado. They took the corpse. More than 20 years have passed since then.

Source: El Mostrador, July 24, 2007

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

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

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

It is the most numerous resolution issued among the nearly 400 human rights violation cases being instructed 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 prosecuted before in any case. Also declared defendants were 23 Army non-commissioned officers (R), of whom at least 50 percent appear for the first time in this type of case.

Among these non-commissioned officers is Juvenal Piña, alias "El Elefante," a former agent of the Lautaro Brigade, who was the one who suffocated the communist leader in clandestinity (1976), Víctor Díaz, with a plastic bag on his head, before they injected him with cyanide.

In addition, the magistrate indicted 40 former Carabineros officers and non-commissioned officers, among whom are Ricardo Lawrence, Heriberto Acevedo, Claudio Pacheco, and José Mora, all former members of the same Brigade. Among the prosecuted 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, the prosecuted continued to be detained to be interned in different places, such as the Military Police Battalion of Peñalolén.

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 montage 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 for settling scores due to internal quarrels. However, that also turned out to be a montage.

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 Ultimas Noticias, and La Segunda reproduced the montage of the intelligence services. The headline of the evening newspaper that reported "Exterminated like rats: 59 Chilean MIR members fall in military operation in Argentina" remained 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 light in Buenos Aires to this operation.

According to the former civilian agent Enrique Arancibia Clavel, convicted in Buenos Aires for the crime of General Carlos Prats and his wife, it was Iturriaga who at the beginning of 1975 met with him 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 montage.

List of prosecuted

Army (all retired)

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

Suicided); Juvenal Piña Garrido (non-commissioned officer. “El Elefante”); Juan Suárez Delgado (civilian); Nelson Paz Bustamante (non-commissioned officer); José Aravena Ruiz (non-commissioned officer); Luis Torres Méndez (non-commissioned officer); Raúl Soto Pérez (non-commissioned officer); Jorge Andrade Gómez (non-commissioned officer); Juan Escobar Valenzuela (non-commissioned officer); Rolando Concha Rodríguez (non-commissioned officer); Gustavo Apablaza Meneses (non-commissioned officer); Hiro Alvarez Vega (non-commissioned officer); Víctor Alvarez Droguett (non-commissioned officer); Jorge Venegas Silva (non-commissioned officer); Carlos Rinaldi Suazo (non-commissioned officer); Carlos Letelier Verdugo (non-commissioned officer); Reinaldo Concha Orellana (non-commissioned officer); Máximo Aliaga Soto (non-commissioned officer); Hugo Clavería Leiva (non-commissioned officer); Samuel Fuenzalida Devia (non-commissioned officer)

Investigations Juan Urbina Cáceres; Hugo Hernández; Manuel Rivas Díaz

Magistrate Leopoldo Llanos indicted former DINA agents Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda, Marcelo Moren Brito, Rolf Wenderoth Pozo, Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko, and Basclay Zapata Reyes as authors of the homicides of Pedro Cortés Jelves and Manuel Reyes Garrido, and also prosecuted former DINA agent Ricardo Lawrence Mires as an accessory.

According to the investigation, Reyes Garrido and Cortés Jelves were victims of a staged operation carried out by the DINA to make it appear as though a total of 6 individuals linked to the MIR and the Communist Party, who had been detained and tortured at the Villa Grimaldi detention center, had died in a confrontation.

As stated in the ruling, Manuel Lautaro Reyes Garrido, a member of the MIR, and Pedro Blas Cortés Jelves, a member of the Communist Party, were executed on November 19, 1975. The events began on November 17, 1975, when a confrontation occurred on Calle Biobío in which a military officer and MIR member Roberto Gallardo Moreno were killed.

The following day, November 18, all members of the Gallardo family were arrested at their homes and taken to the Investigations Headquarters on Calle General Mackenna, where they were interrogated and tortured.

"In the early hours of November 19, some of the family members were released, with the exception of Alberto Recaredo Gallardo Pacheco, Catalina Ester Gallardo Moreno, and Mónica del Carmen Pacheco Sánchez, who were placed at the disposal of the DINA and transferred to the Villa Grimaldi facility," the ruling states.

The resolution adds: "In the early hours of November 19, Ester Torres was arrested along with three of her sons, Renato, Mauricio, and Francisco Javier Ganga, by DINA agents who were searching for her eldest son, Luis Andrés Ganga.

They were taken to Villa Grimaldi; after being tortured and interrogated, information was obtained regarding the whereabouts of Luis Andrés, who was apprehended moments later and taken to that facility, where he was tortured.

Witnesses who were detained at Villa Grimaldi declare that this was the worst of all nights, describing a great movement of cars, hearing agents asking for water and hot oil, and the cries of lament from those being tortured. The next day, several corpses were observed lying on the ground in the courtyard, and two women, Catalina and Mónica, were seen in a room in very poor physical condition."

That same day, the bodies of Mónica Pacheco Sánchez, Catalina Gallardo Moreno, Alberto Gallardo Pacheco, Luis Andrés Gangas Torres, Pedro Blas Cortés Jeldres, and Manuel Lautaro Reyes Garrido "were transported from Villa Grimaldi by DINA personnel under the command of Army Captain Germán Barriga Muñoz and Carabineros Captain Ricardo Lawrence Mires to the site known as Rinconada de Maipú, with the purpose of simulating a confrontation between these detainees and DINA personnel."

On the afternoon of November 19, a government press release reported "a confrontation" in the hills of Rinconada de Maipú, in which "Alberto Recaredo Gallardo Pacheco, Catalina Ester Gallardo Moreno, Mónica del Carmen Pacheco Sánchez, Luis Andrés Ganga, and two other men" had allegedly died.

The false information was addressed by the media of the time, which reported it on front pages and in television news broadcasts as factual events. The written press of the era and the news programs of TVN and Canal 13 reported on this fabrication.

In the case of television, the coverage had consequences at the professional level, as the Regional Tribunal of Ethics and Discipline (TRED) of the Metropolitan Council (Santiago) of the Journalists' Association determined at the time to suspend Julio López Blanco, Claudio Sánchez Venegas, Vicente Pérez Zurita, and Manfredo Mayol Durán for one year, with public censure, for collaborating with the dictatorship from their positions at Televisión Nacional (TVN) and Canal 13 (at that time, the Television Corporation of the Pontificia Universidad Católica).

HISTORICAL FABRICATION

The statement issued by official bodies read verbatim: "(...) Today, November 19, at 12:00 hours, in the hills of Rinconada de Maipú, a violent shootout lasting more than thirty minutes occurred between DINA and Investigations forces and a group of extremists who were heavily armed and barricaded on that hill. 6 extremists resulted dead, with one of them fleeing.

At the same time, two intelligence and security service officials were wounded, with one diagnosed as seriously injured and the other less seriously. It has been possible to reach the following conclusions: the dead extremists are Mónica Pacheco Sánchez, alias 'Myriam', of the MIR... married to Roberto Gallardo Moreno, alias 'Juan', of the MIR, who was killed in the shootout recorded at School No. 51 last Monday.

Catalina Gallardo Moreno of the MIR... Manuel Lautaro Reyes Garrido, belonging to the MIR, Alberto Gallardo Pacheco belonging to the MIR, Luis Andrés Gangas Torres, alias 'Jaime' or 'Lucho Cárcamo' of the MIR, and Pedro Blas Cortés Jeldes of the Communist Party, alias 'Marcos'."

"In reality, a 'fabrication' was carried out to prevent its discovery, intended to conceal the facts that actually occurred: the torture and deaths of defenseless victims and the means used to commit them.

Furthermore, there was personal favoring, due to knowledge of the circumstances of the illicit acts, to achieve impunity for the perpetrators, who were members of the DINA," the judicial document states.

Source: La Nación, June 6, 2014

Former DINA agents sentenced for the application of torture to 37 victims of Villa Grimaldi

Visiting Judge Leopoldo Llanos sentenced former members of the repressive group Juan Manuel Guillermo Contreras Sepúlveda, Pedro Octavio Espinoza Bravo, Marcelo Luis Moren Brito, Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko, Rolf Gonzalo Wenderoth Pozo, Fernando Eduardo Lauriani Maturana, Gerardo Ernesto Godoy García, Francisco Maximiliano Ferrer Lima, and Ricardo Lawrence Mires to single, effective prison terms of 7 years; meanwhile, Basclay Humberto Zapata Reyes and Orlando Manzo Durán must serve 5 years and one day in prison, without benefits.

The extraordinary visiting judge of the Santiago Court of Appeals for human rights violation cases, Leopoldo Llanos Sagristá, issued a first-instance sentence in the investigation into the application of torment (torture) to 37 victims in the case titled: “Villa Grimaldi”, episode “María Cristina Chacaltana and others”, who were detained and transferred to the clandestine facility in 1975.

In the resolution, issued this past Monday, January 12, Judge Llanos sentenced the former DINA agents as authors: Juan Manuel Guillermo Contreras Sepúlveda, Pedro Octavio Espinoza Bravo, Marcelo Luis Moren Brito, Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko, Rolf Gonzalo Wenderoth Pozo, Fernando Eduardo Lauriani Maturana, Gerardo Ernesto Godoy García, Francisco Maximiliano Ferrer Lima, and Ricardo Lawrence Mires, to single, effective prison terms of 7 years; meanwhile, Basclay Humberto Zapata Reyes and Orlando Manzo Durán must serve 5 years and one day in prison, without benefits.

Regarding civil matters, Judge Leopoldo Llanos accepted, “with costs, the lawsuits filed by 36 of the plaintiffs against the Chilean State, ordering it to pay each of them compensation for damages, for moral injury, amounting to the sum of 50 million pesos.”

Likewise, he ordered “Juan Manuel Guillermo Contreras Sepúlveda and Marcelo Luis Manuel Moren Brito to pay, jointly and severally with the State, 50 million pesos to each of the 23 plaintiffs who requested it; and Pedro Octavio Espinoza Bravo, Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko, Basclay Humberto Zapata Reyes, Fernando Eduardo Lauriani Maturana, Gerardo Ernesto Godoy García, Ricardo Lawrence Mires, Orlando Manzo Durán, Rolf Gonzalo Wenderoth Pozo, and Francisco Ferrer to pay the same amount to 21 plaintiffs.”

Source: El Mostrador, January 16, 2015

Miguel Angel Acuña Castillo: The disappearance of the 19-year-old at Londres 38

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 judge 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 member of the Revolutionary Left Movement (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 individuals and fell to the ground.

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

Judge Crisosto determined that the DINA agents “transferred him to the clandestine detention facility known as ‘Yucatán’ or ‘Londres 38’.”

Acuña Castillo belonged to the secondary student structure of the MIR’s Political-Military Group 3 (GPM3), an organization that grouped militants from the eastern zone 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, and he remains disappeared to this date,” the first-instance ruling states.

Laughing at Londres 38 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 process. She heard the detainees being called for roll call twice a day.

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 the Liceo Manuel de Salas and 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 the nose and the cheekbones of the blindfold.

Chacaltana noted that he met Castillo in 1971, when both were secondary students. Both coincided in meetings that took place at the time between members of the FER, the judicial ruling notes. He remembers “Miguel Ángel as a young man of great leadership capacity and great 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 remained lying on the floor. “At that moment, I did not address Miguel Ángel,” on the contrary, he pretended not to notice his presence. “The next day, when the mattresses on which we detainees lay were removed and replaced by chairs, I sat down, and on one side I observed that they were still sitting.

It struck me that both were talking and laughing, which made me think that they were unaware of the magnitude of what awaited them. Miguel Ángel approached me at Londres 38, saying ‘I know you’.”

His mother learned 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 among the detainees was “Pampino,” 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 the fact that ‘El Pampino’ showed signs of mistreatment, he 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 learned of the problem she had with a disappeared son.

Given this, my grandmother had her come 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, including Miguel Angel, Judge Crisosto incorporated statements from Osvaldo Romo, who stated that among other tortures, detainees were subjected to “the dry submarine, which was blocking their breathing with a plastic bag placed over their heads; the detainees’ 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 with magnets, although common electric current was also applied, which would burn those people, a procedure in which many people died.”

Eugenio Fieldhouse Chávez maintains that as an official of the Investigations 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 information sought was obtained, were the ones in charge of making them disappear, upon orders from DINA superiors.

The name of Miguel Ángel Acuña Castillo appeared among the 119 Chileans of Operation Colombo, on a list disseminated in the national press, after it appeared in publications that were printed 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.

He also sentenced 10 years of major imprisonment in its minimum degree to 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 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 to 4 years of minor imprisonment in its maximum degree.

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 torturers: who they are and where they are: What the Valech Report does not say

"I was raped, they applied electricity to me, they burned me with cigarettes, they gave me 'hickeys,' they put rats on me. I think I was in Venda Sexy (a secret DINA facility), they tied me to a stretcher where trained dogs raped me.

I was always taped, then a blindfold, and then a hood. They laughed, they offered us food and gave us orange peels. They woke us up at night to make us lose our sense of time." (Testimony of a 16-year-old girl, kidnapped in the Metropolitan Region, who was later expelled from the country without her family.)

The horror became present for all Chileans. Some will continue to say it is a lie, that the survivors "were paid to speak against the Armed Forces," or ultimately that "they deserved it." But the country has already learned the truth, and even a model-host wants to "know the names of the torturers." That is the idea of this special: to provide a part of the truth that does not have to wait 50 years to be known.

That is one of the many criticisms made of the Report on Political Imprisonment and Torture presented by Ricardo Lagos on the night of Sunday, November 28, through a pre-recorded speech for the national network broadcast before the news segments of the television channels began.

Alone, without victims or relatives to look in the eye, the President of the Republic fulfilled the ritual of informing his fellow citizens. There was no symbolic delivery of the text, no possibility of asking questions, no recognition of the motives that led so many men and women to torture their compatriots, no accurate criticism, no names of victims or victimizers, and the information was not handed over to the Justice system, as had been done after the Rettig Report and even the Dialogue Table.

Reactions from hatred

Appointed senators and former uniformed officers reacted by dismissing their participation in the crimes. Former Admiral Jorge Martínez Bush demanded a "full stop" to end the "lies" against his institution.

The other former admiral, Jorge Arancibia, flatly denied the possibility of "decommissioning" the La Esmeralda, "which can only be decommissioned in combat," and threatened: "I cannot commit, nor can anyone else, that something will never happen again if I do not know what originates it." Many insisted on Hermógenes Pérez de Arce's thesis regarding the baseless slanders against the uniformed officers and the "military government," repeated by retired generals and admirals.

Appointed senator and former commander-in-chief of the FACH (Air Force), Ramón Vega, supported the official statement of his institution and added: "We are lamenting the consequences today and we are investigating them, but a plan for torture, at least I never heard of it; it was never analyzed, nor in the War Academy, nor in the Aviation School, nor in any instruction school was the word 'torture' ever heard."

Senators Rodolfo Stange and Fernando Cordero, former general directors of the Carabineros, did not accept institutional responsibility for the tortures and asserted that "there are no reasons for the uniformed police to apologize."

Stange criticized the report on torture "because it borders on the unconstitutional, calling into question the institutions and not the individuals. I participated in the government junta, but I do not make a mea culpa because I do not feel responsible for any extreme situation as is being indicated in Bishop Valech's commission," he noted.

Cordero, for his part, said that one would have to "complete the third leg of the table, because at this moment the table is lame; one must make a mea culpa for what was produced before September 11, '73, which was the cause of all the situations that occurred subsequently."

The current General Director, Alberto Cienfuegos, also appeared distant from the possibility of apologizing or institutionally assuming responsibility, although he should answer about what his role was, starting March 25, 1974, when as a lieutenant he was appointed on a service commission to serve as Head of the Information Office of the National Executive Secretariat for Detainees, remembered by many people by its acronym: SENDET.

The UDI, National Renewal, and Lavín opted to downplay the profile, to appear in deep shock, even asserting that their participation in the dictatorship was, precisely, to prevent more abuses from being committed and to open the way to democracy.

No one believed them. Sergio Fernández continued trying to dismiss his participation in human rights violations, but his cabinet colleague Mónica Madariaga asserted that in the clandestine torture centers, the agents knew him as "the car’e jote." Soon he will have to begin continuous visits to courts, along with Sergio Onofre Jarpa, Sergio Diez, Ambrosio Rodríguez, among so many others, to answer so many questions that arise about their responsibilities as civil authorities.

A new avalanche of lawsuits for torture, like those already presented by hundreds of former political prisoners, is announced after the delivery of the report. Fernández Fernández will have to answer, for example, for why he denied the existence of Villa Grimaldi to the Justice system, as demonstrated by the classified official letter in which he responds on May 18, 1978, to the question from the Third Criminal Court of Greater Magnitude of Santiago.

Demands from organizations

The coalition of organizations of former political prisoners reacted in unison (see page 2), and the groups of relatives of the victims joined the denunciation. The Communist Party announced new lawsuits and added that "the main reparation the country expected is the one that relates to this being proportional to the damage caused.

This implies truth and full justice for all victims. We demand that for the sake of those principles, the Report be made public in its entirety; that the names of the torturers be handed over to the courts of justice and all judicial processes that are required be initiated; that their files be declassified immediately and not in 50 years; that all those responsible for torture and abuse be immediately removed from the armed and police forces; that the military doctrine whose matrix is established by North American imperialism, and in which Chilean military and police cadres are and have been systematically instructed to repress their own people, be ended."

The issue of monetary reparation was not the center of the controversy, except for Ricardo Lagos's attempt to blackmail the tortured with the threat of having to take money from social programs to pay them compensation.

From CODEPU, another demand was made: "Just as new deadlines are going to be opened to reconsider the status of victims for people who did not qualify, we propose that because it is a crime against humanity, there cannot be an exclusionary deadline for qualification.

In this sense, the State must open a new deadline for new presentations by people who, for various reasons, did not attend the initial call, especially when the Report itself indicates that the testimonies collected 'only represent a partial sample of the total universe of people affected by such human rights violations during the military regime'."

Thus, neither the mea culpa that some media outlets, such as Canal 13, tried to make, nor the "astonishment" of some dictatorship officials like Jorge Hevia, have managed to remove the main issue from the center: in Chile, there was torture.

Torture was systematic and organized, supported by the entire infrastructure of the State turned into a terrorist one; hundreds of men and women were trained to subject other men and women to the most terrible humiliations.

The use of rats and dogs to sexually assault prisoners, electricity in the most delicate corners of their bodies, mock executions, the abstinence from food for long periods, and many other aberrations were committed against those they considered "enemies," "humanoids" in the words of one of the members of the Military Junta.

The other thing that has been clear is that the survivors have had the courage and dignity to recount what they suffered, to transform it into hope and the desire to continue insisting on the need to transform this country, to continue fighting to make the dreams of those who could not come to give their testimony a reality: the executed and the forcibly disappeared.

DINA: Pinochet's hand

"I always complied (...) in accordance with the orders that the President of the Republic gave me. Only he, as the Superior Authority of the DINA, could dispose and order the missions to be executed, and always, in my capacity as Delegate of the President and Executive Director of the DINA, I strictly complied with what was ordered." (Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda, director of the DINA).

In the trials against the DINA, looking at the list of those indicted and convicted, it would seem that the only ones who formed it were a few commanders led by their director Juan Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda, alias "Mamo" and "Mojón." Pedro Octavio Espinoza Bravo, alias "Don Rodrigo"; Raúl Eduardo Iturriaga Neumann, alias "Don Elías" and "Luis Gutiérrez"; Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko, alias "caballo loco"; and the operatives Gerardo Godoy García, Basclay Zapata Reyes, and Osvaldo Romo Mena always appear.

But the torturers were many more.

Caupolicán Brigade

Major Marcelo Luis Manuel Moren Brito, Head of the Caupolicán Brigade. Alias "coronta," "ronco," and "oso." Lieutenant Colonel Vianel Valdivieso Cervantes, alias "Víctor." Head of the Psychological Operations Department.

He maintained contact with journalists who performed services for the DINA, such as Roberto Araya, Julio López Blanco, Claudio Sánchez, Pablo Honorato, Ricardo Coya, and Beatriz Undurraga, and the publicist Manfredo Mayol. He retired in 1987 and set up a private company in Temuco.

Commander Sergio José Peñaloza Marusic, operative agent.

Commander Alejandro Paulino Campos Rehbein, alias "Antolín." ID 3.704.573-K. Operative agent. Later he joined the Sub-directorate of Foreign Intelligence. Captain Francisco Maximiliano Ferrer Lima. Alias "Max Lenoux." Head of the clandestine torture center known as José Domingo Cañas, replacing Ciro Torré.

Partner of "Pedro Diet Lobos" and instructor at the National Intelligence School, teaching courses on "secret service and observation." He continued his work in the CNI and remained in active service at least until the early 90s with the rank of colonel.

Lieutenant Fernando Eduardo Laureani Maturana, alias "Lieutenant Pablo." Agent of the Caupolicán Brigade and head of the Aguila group, known as "the guatones." Until the early 90s, he remained in active service, with the rank of colonel, as Chief of Staff of the 3rd Army Division in Concepción.

Carabineros Lieutenant Jaime Gustavo López Abarca, agent of Londres 38 and Cuatro Alamos. ID 1.822.793-2. Involved in the disappearance of María Cecilia Labrín Sazo. Carabineros Corporal Emilio Hernán Troncoso Vivallos.

ID 4.236.940-3. Involved in the disappearances of Juan Bautista and Washington Maturana Pérez, Mario Juica Vega, Gabriel Castillo, and Daniel Palma Robledo. Carabineros Corporal Heriberto del Carmen Acevedo Acevedo.

Army Lieutenant Jorge Claudio Andrade Gómez, ID 5.293.833-3. In the first days of the coup, he participated in the massacre of the Panguipulli logging complex. He acted under the direct command of Krassnoff at the Terranova barracks (Villa Grimaldi).

In August 1979, already in the CNI, he participated in the application of the tortures that caused the death of teacher Federico Alvarez Santibáñez. In 1991, he was a major in the Metropolitan General Garrison and a member of the DINE.

Carabineros Corporal José Aravena Ruiz, alias "muñeca del diablo" and "cucharita," the latter nickname given to him by prisoners because he used to hit their knuckles with a spoon after torture. He was "funado" (publicly exposed) in December 1999 at his house at Alfonso Leng 5569-0, in the Villa Santa Elena de Macul, a site he abandoned shortly after.

Army conscript Samuel Enrique Fuenzalida Devia, alias "gato." Emilio Iribarren Ledermann, alias "Joel." He went from being a MIR militant to a DINA agent. Leonardo Alberto Schneider Jordán, alias "Barba." He went from being a MIR militant to an agent, first of the Joint Command and then of the DINA. These days he is being prosecuted in several cases of torture and disappearances.

Carabineros Captain Egladio Salgado Torres, agent assigned to the Belgrano General Headquarters, but also with operative functions in kidnappings and tortures at Villa Grimaldi. In 1980, he returned to his institution, joining the DICAR.

He retired with the rank of colonel. Sergio Bernardino Ortega Parada, alias "gil culiao." Commander Sergio José Peñaloza Marusic. ID 4.782.486-9. DINA operative agent until its dissolution.

Carabineros Corporal José Avelino Yévenes Vergara, alias "Quico" or "Daniel Cáceres." Member of the Halcón II group, with duties as a torturer at Londres 38, José Domingo Cañas, and Villa Grimaldi. At the end of the DINA, he went to the CNI and then to the DINE. He was "funado" at his house at Calle B 5266, Villa San Luis de Macul, Peñalolén commune.

Purén Brigade Army Captain Alfonso Faúndez Norambuena, Head of the Purén Brigade. ID 5.454.077-1. On September 11, he was serving at the San Bernardo Infantry School, participating in the executions and disappearances in Paine and Cerro Chena. He continued his work in the CNI. After the end of the dictatorship, he settled in Talca, where he has a company that provides forage and grain to the Army.

Army Colonel Manuel Andrés Carevic Cubillos, alias "Raúl" and "Claudio." Second in command of the Purén Brigade. He continued his work in the CNI and, in 1989, was appointed Plaza Chief in the district of La Pintana, Puente Alto, Pirque, and San José de Maipú. Until the early 90s, he was part of the DINE with the rank of colonel.

Carabineros Major Eduardo Víctor Espinoza Paiella. ID 3.662.969-K. Agent of the Economy Department. He retired along with Manuel Contreras. Carabineros Captain Germán Jorge Barriga Muñoz, alias "Don Jaime." ID 5.060.938-3.

Member of the Purén Brigade and later of the CNI. With the rank of colonel, Barriga was performing duties in the National Mobilization Directorate in 1991. He was "funado" at his residence at Irarrázaval 2061, apartment 105, a place he abandoned hastily. Today he is head of security for Lider supermarkets.

Lieutenant Manuel Abraham Vásquez Chahuán, alias "Lieutenant Manuel." ID 5.090.309-K. Responsible for the disappearances and executions in Paine and Cerro Chena. He continued in the CNI and in 1989 was appointed commander of the Logistics Battalion of Concepción.

Army Corporal Basclay Humberto Zapata Reyes,

alias "el troglo." Known for being very cruel in tortures and raping detained women. Prosecuted for multiple cases of disappearance, executions, and torture. Until the early 90s, he remained as an instructor at the "Daniel Rebolledo" Non-Commissioned Officers School and with operative duties in the DINE.

Carabineros Officer Gerardo Urrich González, alias "mano negra." Instructor at Tejas Verdes. Responsible for a series of executions in the sector known as Barrancas, today mostly the Pudahuel commune. He was "funado" at his office of "Servicios de Seguridad Alcázar," located at Ahumada 236, office 408.

Army Lieutenant Manuel Jorge Provis Carrasco. As a member of the San Bernardo Infantry School, he participated in the crimes of Paine and Cerro Chena. He continued in repressive tasks and was commander of the CNI barracks on Calle Borgoño, participating in Operation Albania.

At the end of 1989, he returned from a professional trip he made to Israel. Until 1991, he was a lieutenant colonel in the Army Intelligence Brigade.

Army Lieutenant Marco Antonio Sáez Saavedra. ID 5.795.624-0. Specialist in the repression of the Communist Party and Socialist Party. In 1991, he was a lieutenant colonel and performed his duties in the Army Operations Directorate. Brother-in-law of CNI Major Joaquín Molina, assassinated by Manuel Contreras Valdebenito.

Army Lieutenant Manuel Rolando Mosqueira Jarpa. Detective Manuel Gregorio Chirinos Ramírez. Detective Jorge Lander Cabezas. Detective Francisco Aladino Caamaño Díaz. Detective Arturo Patricio Vargas Cid. Investigations Inspector Juan Saldías Valdés, alias "Harry el sucio." Investigations Inspector Risiere del Prado Altes España, alias "Pedro."

Other commanders and agents

Army Lieutenant Colonel Jerónimo Luzberto Pantoja Hernández, Subdirector of the DINA and the CNI. ID 2.095.044-7. Responsible for the Chihuío massacre as vice-commander of the Maturana Regiment of Valdivia. In 1990, he was arrested for his participation in the illegal financial firm known as "La Cutufa."

Army Lieutenant Colonel Alberto Elissalde Muller, Head of the Economy Department. ID 3.118.465-7. As head of the Personnel Sub-directorate, he paid the agents' salaries through the front companies "Villar y Reyes" and "Elissalde y Poblete." At least until the late 90s, he lived on one of his extensive properties in the southern part of the country.

Major Carlos Rafael Parera Silva, Alias "Luis Gutiérrez," ID 3.090.193-2. Head of the Foreign Department (successor to Iturriaga Neumann). In 1973, he was Second Commander of the Black Berets in Peldehue.

When the DINA was dissolved, he rejoined the Army and was assigned as Commander of the Dolores Regiment, Director of the Paratroopers and Special Forces School, and in 1985, military attaché in France. In the government of Patricio Aylwin, he was Military Attaché at the Chilean embassy in South Africa.

Andrés Terrise Castro. Agent of the Psychological Operations Department, where he performed functions of covering up crimes and preparing propaganda campaigns. He continued in the CNI and the DINE as a civil agent. Today he appears as a businessman of an

Baeza Cruces and the assassination of Alfonso Carreño Díaz in 1974. Other torturers of the Comando Conjunto Miguel Angel Perucca López, FACH reservist. Víctor Misael Robles Mella, retired FACH officer.

Luis Eduardo Rojas Campillay, FACH official. Patricio Eugenio Saavedra Rojas, retired FACH commander. Ramón Eduardo Valenzuela Cuevas, 5.934.129-4. Alberto Roque Badilla Grillo, I.D. 5.164.080-2. Tito Alejandro Figarí Verdugo, I.D. 6.693.227-3.

Angel Gabriel Valdivia Pérez, I.D. 3.277.893-3. Lénin Figueroa Sánchez, I.D. 4.633.329-2. Enrique Augusto Werner Haase, 4.086.322-2. Santiago Segundo San Martín Riquelme, I.D. 4.530.448-5. Angel Segundo Valdivia Pérez, I.D. 3.996.083-4.

José Florentino Fuentes Castro, I.D. 5.340.552-5. Francisco Hidalgo García, 2.633.797-6. Francisco Segundo Illanes Miranda, I.D. 4.294.918-3. Ernesto Arturo Lobos Gálvez, I.D. 5.082.345-8. Jorge Aníbal Osses Novoa, I.D. 4.818.025-6.

The doctors: Breaking the Hippocratic Oath "I swear by Apollo the Physician and Asclepius and Hygeia and Panacea and all the gods and goddesses, making them my witnesses, that I will fulfill this oath according to my power and discernment...

I will follow that system of regimen which, according to my ability and judgment, I consider for the benefit of my patients, and abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous. I will give no deadly medicine to any one if asked, nor suggest any such counsel; and in like manner I will not give to a woman a pessary to produce abortion.

With purity and with holiness I will pass my life and practice my Art... Now, if I carry out this oath, and break it not, may I gain for ever reputation among all men for my life and for my art; but if I break it and forswear myself, may the opposite befall me..." Part of the Hippocratic Oath Darwin Arriagada.

Physician, leader of the Medical Association of Chile in 1973. He was appointed by the Military Junta as Director General of Health. He participated in the plan to administer drugs in food to murder political prisoners.

He turned in numerous leftist doctors, more than 30 of whom were murdered. Camilo Azar Saba. CNI doctor. He was suspended for six months from the Medical Association for his participation in torture applied to prisoners in CNI barracks.

Implicated in the Federico Alvarez Santibáñez case. Guillermo Aranda. Doctor from Punta Arenas, cardiologist. He applied his knowledge to the torture of prisoners in this city. Alejandro Babaich Schmith.

Director of the "Cirujano Guzmán" Hospital in Punta Arenas. Advisor on torture against political prisoners. Gregorio Burgos. Doctor at the Los Angeles Regiment. He advised DINA agents on how to torture without the detainee losing consciousness.

Víctor Carcuro Correa. CNI doctor. This doctor was suspended from his rights in the Medical Association for his participation in the torture that culminated in the death of the transport worker Mario Fernández López, in La Serena, in October 1984.

Raúl Díaz Doll. Doctor, official of the General Directorate of the National Health Service. He was a member of the military commission that investigated the political affiliation of doctors. He organized the snitching system in the service and personally participated in the interrogations of detained and tortured doctors.

Guido Mario Félix Díaz Paci. Army and CNI doctor. A military health officer of the Army who participated in the events that culminated in the death of the transport worker Mario Fernández López, in La Serena.

The causes of Fernández López's death were the torture suffered in the CNI barracks of that city in October 1984. When Mario Fernández had to be transferred to the La Serena Hospital, Díaz Paci lied to the doctors on duty at the Hospital, claiming that the detainee came from a Carabineros station and not from the CNI, requesting that the doctors hide the detainee's condition.

Once Fernández passed away, the doctor and CNI agent tried to get the physician who had performed emergency surgery on the victim to falsify the death diagnosis, hiding the true reasons for the death. For all these reasons, Guido Díaz Paci was expelled from the Medical Association.

In 1974, he participated in the exhumation of the body of María Avalos, murdered along with her husband, Bernardo Lejdermann, in December 1973 by a patrol from the Arica Regiment of La Serena. In the death certificate, he claimed that the woman had blown herself up with dynamite.

José María Fuentealba Suazo. Army doctor. On October 27, 1973, José Fuentealba participated in the delegation that traveled to Río Mayo, in Argentina, to transfer 3 detainees, Juan Vera, Néstor Castillo, and José Rosendo Pérez, who had been captured by the Argentine Gendarmerie when they escaped in search of political asylum.

The delegation was led by Captain Joaquín Molina Fuenzalida (murdered by the son of Manuel Contreras) and also included a Carabineros officer named Salinas and the non-commissioned officer Evaldo Reidlich Hains.

The three prisoners were loaded into a vehicle from the Coyhaique Regional Hospital and transported toward Chile, but they never reached their destination. In April 2002, the judge of the First Criminal Court of Coyhaique, Luis Sepúlveda, indicted Fuentealba Suazo and the retired Carabineros non-commissioned officer Evaldo Reidlich Hains.

Alejandro Jorge Forero Alvarez. Cardiologist. Medical Association Registry 9580-K. Squadron Commander and doctor who was working at the time of the coup d'état at the FACH Hospital. In 1976, he served as a second soldier at the El Bosque Air Base and at the Colina Anti-Aircraft Artillery Regiment.

In this place, he participated in the Comando Conjunto, supervising the torture and drugging the prisoners who were taken out to be forcibly disappeared. He was indicted by Judge Carlos Cerda during the dictatorship.

Recently, he has been summoned again in new trials regarding the Comando Conjunto. Werner Gálvez. Pediatrician, Colonel of Health in Iquique. At the beginning of the military regime, he applied intravenous injections of sodium pentothal, alternating with biological serum, during interrogations in this city.

Fernando Jara de la Maza. Traumatologist in Valdivia. In the days following the military coup, he participated directly in the application of torture to detainees. Manfred Jurgensen Caesar. CNI doctor.

This doctor, who was also a CNI agent, was expelled from the Medical Association for his participation in torture applied to prisoners in clandestine barracks of this repressive organization. Implicated in the death of Federico Alvarez Santibáñez.

Luis Losada Fuenzalida. CNI doctor. He was also expelled from the Medical Association for his participation in the torture that culminated in the death of the teacher Federico Álvarez Santibáñez. One hour before the death of Álvarez Santibáñez, who was tortured in August 1979 for seven days in secret CNI barracks in Santiago, he signed a report indicating that the teacher was in good physical condition.

Minoletti. Carabineros doctor, Concepción province. He advised the torturers of Fuerte Borgoño and issued death certificates for natural causes to cover up the crimes. Vittorio Orvieto Teplizky. Army doctor.

He performed collaborative functions in the torture committed at the Tejas Verdes Prisoner Camp Number Two. He also participated in the DINA Health Brigade as director of the Santa Lucía Clinic. América González Figueroa.

Hired during the dictatorship to perform functions at the Legal Medical Service, where she falsified information regarding the causes of death of some political executions victims. Among the cases in which she is implicated are the death due to torture of Carlos Godoy Echegoyen, which she made appear as "sudden death"; the murder of Cecilia Magni Camino, claiming she had drowned and hiding the traces of torture on her body; and the crime of the DC student leader Mario Martínez, who appeared on the coast of Rocas de Santo Domingo after being kidnapped in Santiago.

Another "service to the fatherland" was her participation in the examinations that culminated in the fraud regarding Pinochet's dementia. In the final period, while still at the Legal Medical Service, she was appointed head of the Department of Thanatology and acting director of the service.

On December 21, 2000, shortly after her responsibility in the mistaken delivery of the bodies of three young men burned inside the San Miguel Prison was proven, she received a merit annotation in her service record signed by the Minister of Justice José Antonio Gómez, a Radical Party militant.

Jorge León Alessandrini. Dentist, civil agent of the DINE, implicated in the assassination of the union leader Tucapel Jiménez Alfaro. Osvaldo Leyton Bahamondes. DINA doctor. Implicated in the death by torture of Manuel Leyton Robles, a DINA agent who was murdered by his "colleagues" after being publicly involved in the theft of a Renault 4, a job commissioned by his superior Germán Barriga Muñoz.

Doctor Leyton Bahamondes signed a certificate in which the agent appears as having died due to an epileptic seizure and cardiac arrhythmia at Almirante Barroso 76, the location of the clandestine London clinic.

Bernardo Pulto. Radiologist in Melipilla. Together with the military prosecutor of Melipilla, he personally took part in the torture sessions of prisoners. Luis Hernán Santibáñez Santelices. DINA doctor.

Member of the Health Brigade that operated at the London Clinic (Almirante Barroso). Implicated in the disappearance of Juan Elías Cortés. Hernán Horacio Taricco Lavín. DINA doctor. Head of the Health Brigade that operated at the London Clinic.

Implicated in the death of DINA agent Manuel Jesús Leyton Robles. Hernán Twane. Psychologist who administered Sodium Pentothal to prisoners so they could be interrogated by the Investigations Service. He maintains a shared office in the vicinity of the Diego Portales building.

Werner Zanghellini Martínez. Director of the Santa Lucía Clinic between 1975 and 1976. He is accused by survivors of Villa Grimaldi of having injected the rabies virus into Jorge Fuentes Alarcón, a forcibly disappeared person.

He was "funado" (publicly denounced) at his private clinic at Galvarino Gallardo 1983, Providencia, and the following day he moved to a nearby office belonging to a relative. Sergio Marcelo Virgilio Bocaz.

Doctor of the DINA Health Brigade, with duties at the clandestine Santa Lucía clinic, who continued working at the CNI Logistics Command. Marcia Merino says she saw him in advertisements for coffee and financial companies.

DINA Health Brigade. Composed, among others, by doctors Vittorio Orvietto, Werner Zanghellini, Hernán Taricco, Nader Nasser, Osvaldo Eugenio Leyton Bahamondez, Rodrigo Vélez, Samuel Valdivia Soto, Luis Hernán Santibáñez Santelices, Eduardo Contreras Balcarce, the gynecologist Juan Pablo Figueroa Yáñez, the otolaryngologist Eugenio Fantuzzi Alliende, the psychiatrist Roberto Lailhacar Chávez, the dentist Sergio Roberto Muñoz Bonta, and the nurse María Eliana Bolumburú Taboada.

Another doctor, of whom only the surname is known, is the psychologist Bassaure. Their current addresses H. Darwin Arraigada Loyola, General medicine. Attends at Santa María 217, office 34, Independencia commune.

Phone 7372626. Eugenio Fantuzzi Alliende, Otolaryngologist. Chief Doctor of the Otolaryngology Service of the Clínica Dávila, located at Avenida Recoleta 464, Santiago. Private practice at Luis Thayer Ojeda Norte 073, office 606, Providencia.

Phone 233 7524. Fax 234 1740. Juan Pablo Figueroa Yáñez, Gynecologist and Obstetrician. Attends from Monday to Friday at the Clínica Arauco, located at Parque Arauco. Avenida Kennedy 5413-B. Phone 2990299.

His last known address is Américo Vespucio Norte 1303, apartment 71, Vitacura. Phone 2069147. Werner Zanghellini Martínez, Cardiologist. Last known address: Galvarino Gallardo 1983, Providencia. Now attends without advertising in a relative's office, in the same commune.

Sergio Marcelo Virgilio Bocaz, General medicine. Still in service at the Félix Bulnes Hospital, located at Leoncio Fernández 2655, Quinta Normal, Santiago. His last known address is Tupungato 10.279, Vitacura.

Phone 2154768. Hernán Horacio Taricco Lavín, Pediatrician. Attends Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, from 12:00 to 14:30, at the Maipú Military Medical Center, located at Avenida Ramón Freire No. 6097, Villa Militar Oeste, Paradero 3 1/2 de Pajaritos, Estación Central Commune.

Phones: 450 8564, 450 8565, 450 8566. Fax: 450 8563. His last known address is at Tabancura 1278, phones 2433425 and 2433444. Sergio Roberto Muñoz Bonta, Dentist. Attends the public at the Barros Luco-Trudeau Hospital and at the "San Lucas" dental medical office at José Domingo Santa María 1338.

Phones 7377674 and 7379978. Roberto Lailhacar Chávez, Psychiatrist. Former president of the Chilean Society of Sexology and Sexual Education. Attends at Obispo Salas 290, Office 168. Phone 2239405. His last known address is Los Ranchos 8763, Vitacura, phone 3262178.

Manfred Jurgensen Caesar, General medicine. Works at the Military Hospital of Santiago. Private practice at Hernando de Aguirre 194, office 301. Alejandro Forero Alvarez, Cardiologist. Works at the INDISA Clinic, Avenida Santa María 1810, phone 2254555.

Private practice at Apoquindo 6275, office 116. His last known address is Camino La Brisa 14.199-2, Lo Barnechea. Phone 2161253. Medical Association Registry 9580-K. Guido Díaz Paci, Pediatrician. Attends at the Infantry Regiment No. 21 "Arica" of the Second Army Division based in La Serena, under the command of Brigadier General José Gabriel Gaete Paredes.

Maintains a private practice in this city. Camilo Azar Saba, Traumatologist. Since August 1, 2003, he attends at Integramedica Alto Las Condes, located at Avenida Kennedy 9001, 7th floor, Mall Alto Las Condes.

Phones: 6366666, 6796500, 6796566, and 6796567. Assistant: Fabiola Banda, phone 6796576. His last known address is Echeñique 8801-B (interior). Phones 3265277 – 3265294. Vitorio Orvieto Tiplizki, Ophthalmologist.

Attends at the Integramedica centers in Maipú, Av. Pajaritos 1605, phone 6366500, and at the Plaza Oeste center, located at Américo Vespucio 1501, Cerrillos, phone 6367200. Luis Santibáñez Santelices, Bronchopulmonary specialist.

Attends at Integramedica Las Condes, located at the Alto Las Condes mall, Av. Kennedy 9001, third floor. Phone 6796500. The "female ladder" of torture Along with the consummate torturers, among the cruelest agents in the torture room appear the women who placed themselves at the service of terror.

A very significant number were in administrative roles that allowed the repressive apparatus to function, but there were also those in direct operational roles, in kidnappings, torture, executions, and the disappearance of prisoners.

This is a sample. The important case of the kidnapping of Miguel Angel Sandoval joins the one known as "the 119," due to the number of those who were attempted to be made to appear as dead in internal fights in Argentina in the so-called "Operation Colombo." Witnesses to Sandoval's kidnapping report having seen him at Villa Grimaldi until February 10, 1975, the day he was taken out along with María Isabel Joui Petersen, María Teresa Eltit Contreras, Renato Sepúlveda Guajardo, Jorge Herrera Jofré, and Claudio Silva Peralta, all of whom were forcibly disappeared.

The testimony of María Isabel Matamala provides another detail: she was detained by Osvaldo Romo and taken to Villa Grimaldi, tortured for 15 days by Romo and Basclay Zapata, and interrogated by Moren, Krassnoff, Laureani, Ricardo Lawrence, Ferrer, and a woman nicknamed "the commander," whose name was Rosa Humilde Ramos.

The DINA torturers Survivor María Salinas Farfán points out that she saw many detainees who are now forcibly disappeared and that, among the agents, she can recognize Romo, Laureani, Krassnoff, Moren Brito, Luz Arce, Marcia Merino, and Alicia Gómez (María Alicia Uribe Gómez), "la Carola." Osvaldo Romo acknowledges that among the torturers at Villa Grimaldi were César Manríquez, Wenderot, and Palmira Almuna.

Basclay Zapata, alias "el Troglo," declares that "in 1975 he married Teresa Osorio Navarro, also an official of the organization" and that he would go out with Luz Arce to "scout" in a vehicle through the streets of Santiago.

Teresa Osorio says she "entered as a civil employee of the Navy in 1974, being assigned to work in the DINA, at the Villa Grimaldi barracks, as Krassnoff's secretary. She knew that the DINA agents were divided into groups, called ‘Halcón’, ‘Purén’, ‘Aguila’, and others, with the set of these being called ‘Caupolicán’.

She reiterates her statements in a confrontation with Eugenio Fieldhouse (also an agent), insisting that she did not go out to detain people." Fieldhouse, coming from the Investigations service, admits that among the agents at Villa Grimaldi were Teresa Osorio, Rosa Humilde Ramos, and Palmira Almuna.

Meanwhile, survivor Raúl Flores Castillo relates that he was detained "by armed subjects, one of whom identified himself as Osvaldo Romo; they put him in a vehicle in which there were more people, a woman they called ‘la negra’ (Teresa Osorio) and a subject they called ‘el Troglo’." Although many of the women who belonged to the DINA performed administrative duties, there exists a team that has been classified by survivors as "the most sadistic and cruel." Among them stood out the Carabineros sub-lieutenant Ingrid Felicitas Olderock Oelckers, who was an instructor of torturers as early as the initial school in Tejas Verdes. As a member of the Purén Brigade, she was a trainer of the dogs used in the sexual abuse committed against men and women at the secret barracks "Venda Sexy." Also a Carabineros sub-lieutenant, Palmira Isabel Almuna Guzmán, alias "la Pepa," was a member of the Purén Brigade and a torturer at José Domingo Cañas under the orders of Ciro Torré Sáez; subsequently, she worked under the orders of Pedro Espinoza Bravo. She was in charge of selecting and instructing future agents, who were infiltrated as frivolous and pretty women in various areas of national political relevance. She moved to the CNI and in 1985 returned to the Carabineros, serving in a juvenile correctional center in Iquique with the rank of commander of the female ladder. She was denounced at her home at Luis Beltrán 1000, in Pudahuel, on May 31, 2003, after which she has not been seen in the neighborhood again; she likely lives in Iquique. Nélida Gutiérrez Rivera was the private secretary and lover of Manuel Contreras. After the arrest of her boss, she continued as his part-time secretary in the offices he had on Ricardo Lyon street; the rest of the time she dedicated to her Boutique "Mané" (Manuel and Nélida) in the Lyon and Providencia spiral mall. Although the role played by Viviana Pincetti Barra, who appears receiving salaries from the DINA and is the daughter of Osvaldo Pincetti Gac, alias "charla," is not known with certainty, her father took her on "visits" to Villa Grimaldi and other barracks of the repressive organization. Varied testimonies speak of the terrible role played by Marcia Alejandra Evelyn Merino Vega, alias "la flaca Alejandra," as an agent after being a militant of the MIR. These days she lives in an insular area of Chile, from which she travels to Santiago to provide statements in the various trials against the DINA. Another woman turned agent was Luz Arce Sandoval, who went from being a PS militant to the DINA. Survivors remember her present at torture sessions at Villa Grimaldi, Londres 38, and Cuatro Alamos. She continued her work in the CNI and in 1990 made herself available to the courts to testify in cases of the forcibly disappeared. Today she lives outside of Chile and returns circumstantially to provide data in judicial proceedings. María Alicia Uribe Gómez, alias "Carola," from a MIR militant became a DINA agent, then CNI, and after 1990 was integrated into the DINE. Together with other collaborators, they carried out true "fashion shows" with the clothing of female prisoners murdered in the DINA barracks. She was seen at Villa Grimaldi, Cuatro Alamos, and José Domingo Cañas. As "the commander" was known Rosa Humilde Ramos Hernández, a torturer at José Domingo Cañas and Villa Grimaldi and a member of the Aguila Group of the Caupolicán Brigade. Her memory is indelible among survivors due to her masculine appearance and the sadism she applied in torture. Also cruel is María Teresa Osorio, alias "Soledad" or "la negra," wife of Basclay Zapata. In the Purén Brigade, dedicated to the repression of the PS, the PC, and the DC, the detective Ximena San Juan, Elsa del Tránsito Lagos Salazar, Francisca del Carmen Cerda Galleguillos, and Nancy Edulia Vásquez Torrejón, alias "Pelusa," appear with functions. In the Halcón II Group of the Caupolicán Brigade, a group that participated in the confrontation with Miguel Enríquez, was María Gabriela Ordenes, alias "Marisol," who was seen present at torture sessions. Agents in administrative functions were Mirtha Espinoza Caamaño, DINA secretary, who worked under the command of Augusto Deitchler in the Sub-directorate of Internal Intelligence. María Gabriela Coll Webar, secretary of the General Headquarters staff. Marta Smock Teixido, secretary of the General Headquarters staff in the Sub-directorate of Economic Intelligence. Sandra Montecinos Sepúlveda, secretary of the General Headquarters staff. Eliana Quilodrán, alias "Ely," an agent of the Operations Directorate who acted under the command of Pedro Espinoza Bravo in the Education and Informatics section. Teresa Aburto, secretary of the C-2 Section, who continued working in the CNI and then in the DINE. Enriqueta Salazar Contreras, secretary of the Sub-directorate of Internal Intelligence with direct duties with Rolf Wenderoth and who would later be integrated into the Carabineros. Maribel Maringue Moya, secretary to the Sub-director after Wenderoth's departure, who subsequently continued performing functions in the CNI directorate. Also appearing are Ana María Rubio de la Cruz, alias "Carmen Gutiérrez," Army non-commissioned officer and secretary of the Sub-directorate of External Intelligence, implicated in the assassination of General Carlos Prats and his wife. María Eliana Moncada Prieto, secretary of the Sub-directorate of External Intelligence, who later joined the Counterintelligence Department. Sara Aguila Márquez, social worker of the Personnel Sub-directorate. Carmen Avila Ferrada, secretary to Arturo Ureta Siré in the Sub-directorate of External Intelligence, subsequently moved to hold the same position in the CNI, under the command of Colonel Suau. Alejandra Damián Serrano, who used the alias "Roxana," was Michel Townley's secretary. The nurse María Eliana Bolumburú Taboada (Bolumburó according to the list of "Elissalde and Poblete") was part of the DINA Health Brigade, working in clandestine clinics alongside several doctors who advised on torture. The last information on her whereabouts placed her working at a pharmaceutical company on Ejército street and living in a villa in Maipú. The girl of the Comando Conjunto It seems that the only woman in the Comando Conjunto is the famous Pochi, who was seen dressed in a school uniform asking for people who would later be kidnapped. She was also active in the torture inflicted on dozens of prisoners in the clandestine torture centers known as Nido 20 and Nido 18. Viviana Lucinda Ugarte Sandoval, was a retired FACH soldier, with assignment to the DIFA and the Comando Conjunto. Wife of General Patricio Campos Montecinos, Director General of Civil Aeronautics until the denunciation made by the newspaper La Nación. Indicted during the dictatorship by Judge Cerda as the author of criminal illicit association and an accomplice in the disappearance of Reinalda Pereira and Edrás Pinto, she was amnestied by Judge Manuel Silva Ibáñez. These days she continues to be implicated in the trials being held against the Comando Conjunto. By Julio Oliva García

Source: elsiglo.cl, December 10, 2004

Ricardo Lawrence Mires, convicted of multiple human rights violations during the dictatorship, turns himself in

Ricardo Lawrence Mires, a former agent of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), turned himself in this Friday to the OS-9 of the Carabineros, after remaining a fugitive for five years. The former Carabineros commander is convicted of various crimes against humanity during the military dictatorship, among them, the disappearance of Víctor Chanfreau, and the homicide of Alejandro de la Barra and Ana María Puga, militants of the MIR. "I have come to turn myself in," were reportedly the words of Lawrence Mires upon arriving at the OS-9 in Ñuñoa.

This same afternoon, Minister Jaime Balmaceda ordered Lawrence to serve a sentence of 10 years and one day for the disappearance of Miguel Acuña Castillo, a MIR militant detained on July 8, 1974. The former uniformed officer is now in the Colina 1 Prison.

Source: radio.uchile.cl, January 10, 2020

DINA torturer Ricardo Víctor Lawrence Mires exposed

More than 400 people gathered on Saturday, April 28, at Av. Las Condes and Tabancura to "funa" (publicly denounce) retired Lieutenant Colonel Ricardo Víctor Lawrence Mires (identity card 5.392.869-2), one of the DINA chiefs.

The Funa march began after an emotional tribute to Carlos Cid, a member of the Funa Commission who died in a car accident a few weeks ago. The large police presence—patrols, motorcycles, Special Forces buses, and plainclothes agents—was due to the fact that "high commands" of the DINA and CNI live peacefully in the sector, such as Gerardo Urrich González (agent of the Metropolitan Intelligence Brigade and the Purén Brigade) and retired General Odlanier Mena Salinas (Director of the CNI).

The shrimp distributor "Kamaron Bay S.A."—where Lawrence "works"—also maintained that "police protection"; furthermore, the front and an advertising light were crudely covered with cardboard, and a "closed" sign covered the door.

Inside the property, the company "Kamaron Bay" is located at Tabancura 1382, phone 2170551, fax 2173223, and its current manager Rodrigo Izquierdo del Villar—who is running for director at the Club de la Unión—is the son of Vicente Izquierdo Besa—current director of the latter—and nephew of the right-wing politician Arturo Alessandri Besa.

Other branches of the company are at Alameda 1146, sector A, Of. 602 and Pío XI 1290, in Vitacura. Neighbors—from the numerous businesses in the sector—reported that the manager and Lawrence himself were inside from early on.

A careful performance full of feeling simulated the torture that Lawrence inflicted on dozens of detainees, then the "criminal record" was read. The march continued through the quiet neighborhood, handing out flyers to businesses, motorists, neighbors, and passersby, guarded at all times by the Carabineros.

Lawrence travels in dark green Citröen vans belonging to the company, and in a white Lada he owns. He tried to open a branch in Puerto Varas and Frutillar a few years ago. He was seen assiduously at the German Club where he did "business." He has a plot of land in Talagante, on sites granted by the Carabineros, and an apartment in the Esperanza neighborhood, in Santiago Centro, among others.

He distributes Ecuadorian shrimp, presenting himself in some restaurants—where they are unaware of his past in the DINA—as "Ricardo Flores," attending to others linked to former "colleagues of his old trade." He serves, among others, the Club de la Unión and Club de Golf Los Leones—his best clients—Le Due Torri in Providencia and Santiago Centro, La Cava, El Galindo, Como Agua para Chocolate, La Muñeca Brava—of the Arqueros family—San Frutoso, Ibis—where the Commanders-in-Chief "dined" a few months ago—El Otro Sitio, Ají Verde, Venezia, Borde Río, Hotel Sheraton, Hotel Hyatt, Gioggia, Aquí está Coco—of the chef "Coco" Pacheco. After the Funa, some "clients" in the Bellavista neighborhood, led by the El Galindo restaurant, stopped buying from the distributor about 20 million pesos per month. At the Club de la Unión, there is also commotion over the denunciation, which was broadcast by CNN, among other international media.

THE CRIMINAL RECORD OF A TORTURER

Lawrence Mires, alias "Roberto" or "Lieutenant Big Cheeks," was an officer of the Carabineros Special Forces and during the Popular Unity (UP) government he was part of the Mobile Group. He acted in torture and executions at the National Stadium.

He moved to the DINA, becoming head of the "Halcón" group, dependent on the "Caupolicán" Brigade, exercising functions in the detention and torture centers of Londres 38 ("Yucatán"), Villa Grimaldi ("Terranova"), José Domingo Cañas ("Ollagüe"), and Venecia 1722 in Independencia, of which he was head, and where a clinic also operated.

Lawrence helped establish the front company "Pedro Diet Lobos" that financed the DINA. He was decorated by the dictator Pinochet with the "medal of valor" for his participation in the assassination of Miguel Enríquez, in October 1974.

He was Commissioner of the 1st Precinct, and in 1988, of the 3rd Precinct. In 1989 he was transferred to Los Andes, being discharged in 1990 by retired General—current UDI senator—Rodolfo Stange. Along with Krassnoff Martchenko, Lawrence is one of the most sinister characters of the DINA.

According to testimonies, "his subordinates considered him cruel, as he only suspended the torture of a detainee when they suffered a cardiac arrest or fainted. Survivors remember that to a detainee who had suffered more than four hours of electric shocks, he put a piece of watermelon in front of her.

Everyone knew that if she ingested it, it would cause her viscera to burst." The former DINA agent Luz Arce asserts that it was he who, under threat of death, "forced her to collaborate." Lawrence is involved in the kidnapping, torture, death, and disappearance of hundreds of Chileans, among them the MIR leader Alfonso Chanfreau (23), detained in July 1974; the MIR militant Lumi Videla (26), who died due to torture and was then thrown into the Italian Embassy; María Cristina López Stewart (21), MIR militant, detained in September 1974, disappeared to this day; Carmelo Soria, a Spanish international official, in July 1976. Soria's corpse was found next to his car in the El Carmen canal. Witnesses state that "Lawrence came to visit Wenderoth. He entered mocking and saying: 'we dispatched the compadre.' He pointed out that they had forced an entire bottle of pisco down him and then 'we put him in the car and dispatched him.' He added that someone got in next to the detainee in the car and when it reached a certain speed the companion jumped out and the car continued on its way until it crashed and went over a cliff."

VENECIA AND CONFERENCIA

In January 1975, in an operation in which "Caupolicán" and "Purén" participated, with support from FACH and Army helicopters, whose objective was to detain the MIR leaders Dagoberto Pérez Vargas and Nelson Gutiérrez, the DINA took possession of the property on Venecia street.

Lawrence was head of that "barracks" when, in 1977, a young mentally ill man was repeatedly raped by a DINA agent. The "scandal" forced the DINA to abandon that place. Currently, Ricardo Lawrence is indicted for the kidnapping and disappearance of the clandestine leadership of the Communist Party, detained in the "mousetrap" on Conferencia street.

To this day, they remain disappeared, as a result of this DINA operation: Mario Zamorano Donoso, Víctor Díaz López, Jorge Muñoz Poutays, Uldarico Donaire Cortez, Elisa Escobar Cepeda, Eliana Espinoza Fernández, Fernando Lara Rojas, Jaime Donato Avendaño, Lenín Díaz Silva, César Cerda Cuevas, and Marcelo Concha Bascuñan.

Linked to this operation is the detention and disappearance of Bernardo Araya Zuleta and María Flores Barraza, who were seen at the Venecia "barracks." For this process, which Judge Guzmán is substantiating, in January the Fifth Chamber of the Court of Appeals granted Lawrence freedom, setting bail at one million pesos.

IZQUIERDO VILLAR

The Izquierdo family's shrimp. After the Funa of the former DINA agent, Ricardo Víctor Lawrence Mires (Lieutenant "Big Cheeks"), at the shrimp distribution company Kamaron Bay S.A.—owned by the Izquierdo family—some "funeros" were the target of threatening emails and phone calls: "You have done a lot of harm...

Now it is our turn," says one of the messages signed with an acrostic of names forming the acronym "DINA." It is not the first time the "Funa Commission" has received threats. In May 2000, they were sent after the "funa" of former DINA agent Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko, current manager of the Military Hotel, located at Avenida Providencia 219, and recently indicted by Judge Guzmán in the "Villa Grimaldi" case for his responsibility in eleven kidnappings, one homicide, and "illicit association." The threats are not suspicious because former DINA members, especially from the Metropolitan Intelligence Brigade (BIM), remain in "contact," even leading a "social life," visiting each other on plots of land they own on the outskirts of the city. Ricardo Lawrence himself has one in Talagante, on land granted by the Carabineros, where,

From the childhood of Jorgelino Vergara to his time at the only known extermination barracks in Chile and his subsequent life as an outcast, journalist Javier Rebolledo reveals the most violent episode recorded in our history.

Based on the testimonies of other former agents in the judicial case and the photographic memory of “El mocito” (The Little Servant), he shows us, from the inside, the years when the DINA wielded absolute power and how the largest prosecution in human rights cases came about: dozens of former agents never before named in any case.

In 2007, Jorgelino Vergara, “El mocito,” the protagonist of the documentary by Marcela Said and Jean de Certeau, revealed to the justice system the existence of the only barracks known to date where people were systematically exterminated.

Until then, the Simón Bolívar barracks was a kind of legend, and the Lautaro Brigade—a group of DINA agents whose function was to provide security for its director, Manuel Contreras—was undoubtedly the dictatorship’s best-kept secret. “The agents of the Lautaro Brigade were the worst of the worst.

Jorgelino’s testimony illustrates what happened to many people in Chile, but it is very possible that there were many other extermination groups during the dictatorship,” explains Rebolledo, in whose book Vergara decided to talk about everything.

One of the rawest episodes of La Danza de los Cuervos (The Dance of the Ravens) features the then-Army lieutenants Armando Fernández Larios (who lives in the US, protected after collaborating in the clarification of the crime of Orlando Letelier) and Juan Chiminelli Fullerton (prosecuted for the Caravan of Death, also free).

Not once, but three times, Jorgelino recalled hearing heartbreaking screams during a dawn in August 1976, when the barracks was already empty, inhabited only by the guard and him, as he slept there. Seconds later, Fernández Larios knocked on the glass of his room for him to get up and clean the human devastation he had left behind.

Outside, in the darkness, were the destroyed bodies of the detainees, and Fernández Larios together with Chiminelli, with bloodied corvos (knives) in their hands, with the typical gestures of a cocaine user.

In the middle of the night, they would choose a detainee, take them out of the dungeon, naked and blindfolded, and lead them to a wall. They would stab them right there. With a hose, a broom, and rags, Jorgelino had to return everything to normal.

The blood, the viscera scattered on the floor—he could never forget them. And neither could he forget the faces of the detainees. Certainly, these are not the only horrors remembered in the book. There are also the episodes featuring “Doctor” Osvaldo Pincetti, known to the detainees of Villa Grimaldi as Doctor Torment, a hypnotist who, before the dictatorship, had a radio program in La Serena specializing in spiritualism.

Jorgelino would bring coffee to Pincetti in his office inside the barracks. On several occasions, he saw the detainees half-gone, drugged. “Doctor Torment” would lay them back on a stretcher, semi-seated, to interrogate them while they looked at themselves in a mirror placed on the ceiling.

He would stick a needle into their arm, from which a tube hung. Thus, the detainee would see in the mirror how their blood fell to the floor, growing into an increasingly copious puddle, while being interrogated.

The prisoners were left psychologically shattered, believing they were bleeding to death, but el mocito says he was able to see the trick: another tube connected to a blood bag hidden under the stretcher.

Otherwise, they would have died right there. But beyond the excesses and practices of “Doctor Torment,” there was a standard procedure within the barracks, no less cruel and recognized by Jorgelino and the other Lautaro agents: detention, dungeon (changing rooms), and at the end of the hallway, torture with electricity on an iron cot, that technological innovation known as the parrilla (grill).

After extracting the information, transcribing it onto sheets, and preparing reports, the detainee was eliminated in the manner determined by the agents. Many times they were killed by beatings, kicks, or with sticks used to flatten earth, tied up in the barracks gym, or suffocated with plastic bags over their heads.

Then, an injection of five milligrams of pentothal administered by nurse Calderón to ensure death. Once dead and before being “packaged,” a blowtorch was used on the face and fingerprints. Not infrequently, dental fillings were stolen.

Thus, the inner workings of the only extermination center known to date are revealed, a narrative built entirely on the statements of Jorgelino Vergara and the confessions that the agents themselves—all prosecuted but free—made to the Minister of the Court of Appeals, Víctor Montiglio, for the Calle Conferencia case, which investigates the disappearance of three clandestine leaderships of the Communist Party between May and December 1976.

The Little Servant and I

The first time Javier Rebolledo heard of the Lautaro Brigade was at the beginning of 2007, after accessing the police statement of Jorgelino and those of other self-confessed former agents. He published it together with his colleague Jorge Escalante in the newspaper La Nación.

In May of that year, he set off with his video camera to number 8630 on Calle Simón Bolívar, in the commune of La Reina, where relatives of the forcibly disappeared were holding a vigil. It was the back gate of a high school.

There, he captured the moment when a neighbor approached the organizers to tell them they were wrong, that the Simón Bolívar barracks was at 8800, where a condominium stands today. A week later, Rebolledo returned to the place and rang a couple of intercoms to speak with some residents.

The condominium was called the “condemonium.” At night, screams were heard; during the day, inanimate, detained people were seen. Many neighbors left. A possibility that none—or perhaps only one, the journalist would learn over the years—of the political prisoners who passed through the double gate of the old plot of land had.

That same year, shortly after Jorgelino was released for being a minor at the time of the testified crimes, the journalist traveled to the interior of Curicó with filmmakers Marcela Said and Jean De Certeau, who wanted to make a documentary based on the unique vision of a former agent of the dictatorship.

As a researcher and assistant director of the award-winning documentary El mocito, he met Jorgelino face-to-face and, together with the filmmakers, earned his trust. It was five years of research and 30 hours of interviews with Jorgelino in different parts of Ñuñoa.

The confession Jorgelino made about the crimes of the Lautaro Brigade did not come from spontaneous repentance. At the end of 2006, agent Jorge Díaz Radulovic told PDI (Investigations Police) agents investigating Calle Conferencia that the murderer of the general secretary of the PC, Víctor Díaz López, was a certain Jorge Vergara.

He did not suspect that by uttering these words, he had brought his own conviction with them. The police then began the search for many Jorges Vergara. They even interrogated the former Colo-Colo leader.

Finally, in January 2007, they arrived in the interior of Curicó, near Lake Vichuquén. Jorgelino was dedicated to logging. With an extensive scar on his forehead, the only visible mark of his past, he lived precariously but quietly with his wife in a cabin. “I have been waiting for you for a long time,” he told the PDI agents and left with them to testify in Curicó.

After testifying for nearly eight hours, his statements proved so significant that Minister Montiglio, in charge of Calle Conferencia, suspended his vacation in the Fifth Region and ordered him to be transferred immediately to Santiago so he could say it face-to-face.

Stealthily, in less than 3 months, the PDI arrested a large part of those involved and kept them incommunicado. In the initial confrontations with “El mocito,” almost everyone denied it, but two recognized him: the colonel in charge of the Lautaro Brigade, Juan Morales Salgado, and a subordinate of his, Jorge Pichunman.

It was enough. For his part, Jorgelino recognized each of the agents by name, surname, and alias.

The Friends of “Mamo”

Part of Jorgelino’s life became known after the premiere of the documentary El mocito (2011). In June 1974, at 15 years old, fatherless and in a situation of poverty, he arrived from the vicinity of Curicó to serve food at the house of the head of the DINA, Manuel “Mamo” Contreras.

The person responsible was his brother José Vicente, who worked for the retired general Galvarino Mandujano, a close friend of “Mamo.” The book details how, with a white jacket and a black bowtie tied around his neck, he lived the intimacy of an unconventional family.

Over time, he earned the affection of everyone, especially “Aunt Maruja” (María Teresa Valdebenito, ex-wife of Manuel Contreras). They took him to vacation at the exclusive resort of Rocas de Santo Domingo.

During those years, he made breakfast, bought the newspaper, took the dog Kazán for a walk, carried the briefcase and the submachine gun of the clan leader, learned martial arts, the use of long and short weapons, and, little by little, began to feel the need to be much more useful to his boss.

In the home of the DINA director, he saw agent Michael Townley for the first time, then simply “the gringo” to him. He was in charge of the house’s technology, radio systems, and closed-line telephone, with direct communication to his units and to Pinochet.

Sometimes he saw him teaching English to Alejandra, the second youngest of the Contreras clan. He was also a witness to the visit of important personalities to the house located at Antonio Varas and Pocuro.

That same year, he served drinks to Juan María Bordaberry, the Uruguayan dictator and collaborator in the mass crimes labeled as “Operation Colombo” and “Operation Condor.” But it was more common to see other members of the intelligence service, such as Alejandro Burgos De Beer, Miguel Krassnoff, Marcelo Moren Brito, Pedro Espinoza, and Juan Morales Salgado—the head of the Lautaro Brigade, then in charge of his personal guard—drinking with their families.

Pinochet? For Contreras’s birthday in May 1976, Jorgelino says that two bodyguards appeared in a Ford Mercury sent as a gift by the Captain General himself. They wrapped it with an immense gift ribbon.

When “Mamo” arrived, however, he did not give it much importance. He did not smile and only said something like “damn,” recalls el mocito. Then he read the card on the windshield and went up to his bedroom.

The whole family traveled in that car to Colonia Dignidad. Jorgelino went with the bodyguards in a caravan. He remembers the colonists as having “crazy faces,” and even for him and Contreras’s agents, that place was strange.

There, they killed time playing carioca. His relationship with “Mamo’s” security had tightened. In the book, and according to Jorgelino, “El Viejo Valde” (Héctor Valdebenito Araya) used to say that “over there, the detainees went to sleep with the fish, but without organs.” And “Negro” Ortega thought they took the parts to Belgium.

But back then, Jorgelino was more worried about looking like Bruce Lee, making the pisco punch that “Mamo” drank well, and the martial arts and shooting classes that the family gave him. The 15-year-old boy wanted to become a soldier, a professional, one day.

Today, Jorgelino says he did not come to feel love for the family, but he did feel admiration for the colonel. By that point (between 1974 and 1976), as Lautaro did with Pedro de Valdivia, el mocito had earned his boss’s trust to the point that he was not only known as “the favorite of ‘Mamo’ Contreras,” but the latter would recommend him for a new mission: to be part of the Lautaro Brigade.

Javier Rebolledo points out that “it is likely that ‘Mamo’ Contreras did not expect that the greatest testimony of the DINA would come from his own house many years later.” His mission would be to make coffee, then guard duty, and take care of the detainees with the group of agents most trusted by the DINA director.

Excited, Jorgelino packed his bags and left for the headquarters. Pedro Espinoza received him and wrote down his new name for his agent ID: Alejandro Dal Pozzo Ferretti. From there, by car to Simón Bolívar 8800.

Guinea Pigs

It was June 1976, and despite his youth, Jorgelino quickly understood that Simón Bolívar was an extermination center. On average, no detainee lasted more than a week. Whoever entered there could only leave with a rail tied to their body with wire, wrapped in a polyethylene bag and a potato sack, to then be left in the trunk of a car heading to the Peldehue military training camp and air base.

From there, to the sea. Another destination was the pits of Cuesta Barriga. “The detainees came from other barracks to receive practical torture sessions and also the ‘last squeeze of the lemon,’ or to serve the agents to get a little pleasure.

I don’t understand what it can have to do with an interrogation with electricity to hit a woman who was five months pregnant on the head with a frying pan, as happened with Reinalda Pereira,” says Rebolledo.

He refers to the episode told by Vergara for the book. Pereira, recently detained by the Lautaro Brigade, was brutally interrogated by Ricardo Lawrence, Germán Barriga, and nurse Gladys Calderón. The woman, Jorgelino recalls, begged them to kill her.

Instead, Lawrence went to look for a frying pan and hit her until he destroyed it. At the same time, Barriga carried out mock executions with an empty pistol against the woman’s temple. Barriga committed suicide in 2005.

He never acknowledged his crimes. He claimed that they would not let him live, harassing him for non-existent crimes. Today, he is almost a martyr for the fanatics of the dictatorship. El mocito was also a witness to the inhuman final days of Daniel Palma.

The communist leader was caught in August 1976, and despite his advanced age, agents Héctor Valdebenito, Manuel Obreque, Eduardo Oyarce, Bernardo Daza, and Juvenal Piña applied the Gigí (a machine that generates electricity with a crank) to his genitals and under his tongue, as they used to do with everyone.

The last time Jorgelino saw him was in the gym, sitting in a chair, handcuffed and beaten by several agents with a stick used to compact earth. El mocito says that he would fall, they would pick him up, and “they would hit him again.” With broken bones, he agonized all night until death.

In another episode, el mocito recalled—and later several of his former colleagues at the Simón Bolívar barracks also did—that one day in 1976, a car entered with two blindfolded detainees, guarded by three agents.

They were foreigners. He never knew if they were two Peruvians or a Peruvian and a Bolivian. What he is sure of is that they were guinea pigs. According to his account, as soon as they set foot outside the car, they began to be interrogated and beaten by Barriga, Lawrence, and Morales, who with his heels kicked the first one who fell against the gravel.

The worst was yet to come. In less than two weeks, Contreras, Townley, and Chiminelli arrived. In the mess hall, they waited for the arrival of the two handcuffed and blindfolded prisoners. El mocito made coffee, and the test began.

The colonel took into his hands the new device invented by “The Gringo,” a mini Gigí that fired an electric dart activated by remote control. They fell to the floor in convulsions. Later, Contreras and Townley would return with a toy from the chemist Eugenio Berríos.

The foreigners were against the wall of the bachelor pavilion where Jorgelino slept. The bomb expert, wearing a kind of astronaut helmet, says in the book, took out a small tube with sarin gas and fired the spray into the nose of one of them.

He died instantly. The second one, nervous about his fate, had to be held by agents Emilio Troncoso and Jorge Díaz Radulovic, “El Gitano,” so that the murderer of General Prats could fire. In doing so, he accidentally sprayed “El Gitano” as well, who fell convulsing.

Another agent left to look for milk until they stabilized him. The foreigners were left lying in the gym to be “packaged.” “Tests with guinea pigs, I had only heard of that in Nazi concentration camps,” Rebolledo warns, “the same as killing detainees with sticks, with poles for flattening earth.

In the time I spent investigating human rights cases, I did not know of anything more brutal than this; it is the lowest point of the dictatorship.” The barracks operated systematically, enforcing its golden rule: extermination.

But every rule has an exception. Apart from those who survived the lethal injection—Ángel Guerrero Carrillo, a 24-year-old MIR militant who was still breathing when agent Bernardo Daza broke his neck at Cuesta Barriga, and Marta Ugarte, strangled by agent Emilio Troncoso in an Army Aviation Command helicopter before throwing her into the sea off Los Molles—in the domains of Captain Juan Morales Salgado, it is believed there was only one person who managed to get out alive.

Jorgelino says in the book that it was a 25-year-old young man. They had already beaten him quite a bit when they decided to take him to the parking lot to force alcohol into him. Totally drunk, they put him in a car and invited Jorgelino to go for a ride. “El mocito” says they took the highway and stopped near Graneros; “El Gitano” opened the door and with a kick left him lying on the shoulder of the road.

He could have been the son of someone influential.

Heroes Do Not Exist

The origin of the Simón Bolívar barracks is the Lautaro Brigade. The unit was created in April 1974 to perform “intelligence” and security duties for the DINA director. It was in charge of Captain Juan Morales Salgado, seconded by Lieutenant Armando Fernández Larios.

At the beginning of 1975, when the brigade reached twenty agents, they were moved to the plot of land in La Reina. Some time later, they numbered about thirty. Between May and June 1976, Morales was ordered to receive the Delfín Brigade, led by Germán Barriga, an Army captain, and seconded by Ricardo Lawrence, a Carabineros lieutenant.

They came from Villa Grimaldi with an apple crate loaded with pentothal injections (truth serum) and a group of about twenty agents, all experts in detention and torture. About 80 Communist Party militants passed through the extermination center, including three of its complete clandestine leaderships. “And probably about 100 or 150 people who we don’t know who they are,” estimates the book’s author. “They could be from other parties, people without militancy.

Jorgelino says that the agents commented on the bad luck of many to have fallen into their hands,” he adds. “When it comes to systematic and brutal torture, heroes do not exist,” says Rebolledo in the book.

The phrase is in a chapter called La espiral (The Spiral), which puts into context a key problem in the clarification of human rights violations. “A taboo that has compromised the organizations and parties of the left in Chile and the world: the collaboration of detained militants to suspend or mitigate the inhuman torments to which they were subjected,” he wrote.

This was the case of Víctor Díaz, undersecretary of the Communist Party, who arrived at Simón Bolívar from Villa Grimaldi in May 1976. Although the prisoners had their hours numbered, the militant, of advanced age at the time, spent seven months in a center where they usually lasted a maximum of two weeks, and according to history, the same months in which three complete leaderships fell into clandestinity. “Chino” Díaz was “the biggest catch.” As agent Ricardo Lawrence testified in 2007, Díaz, along with two other leaders, were taken to the Casa de Piedra in Cajón del Maipo, confiscated from the former director of the newspaper El Clarín, Darío Sainte Marie. They were with Contreras and Morales when Pinochet entered. He spoke mainly with Díaz, “who pointed out to him that attacking the Communist Party was like taking water from the sea with a bucket.” While he was in Villa Grimaldi, the head of the Delfín Brigade’s general staff, Alfonso Ojeda Obando, declared that Víctor Díaz told him he would collaborate because all his comrades were falling and he had nothing else to do. Jorgelino remembers him well. According to his account, they had mutual respect, and for that reason, he would bring him water in a plastic birthday cup. And he would thank him with a little tap on his hand, crouching down by the hatch. The last time he saw him alive was Christmas 1976. He already had dinner served for the guards when his comrades left for “Mamo’s” house. El mocito says he passed by the dungeons carrying his rifle, opened Díaz’s door, and took him to the mess hall. He was weak. After taking off his handcuffs, they ate dinner without saying a word. Between Christmas and New Year, Jorgelino saw nurse Calderón leave Díaz’s cell with her kit of death. By that point, Jorgelino was already doing guard duty, had a service weapon, and was collaborating in the “packaging” of the victims. Juan Morales told Jorgelino that they needed him inside. There, he saw agents Daza and Escalona next to the corpse with a plastic bag over its head. Although after turning 18, Jorgelino’s memory “begins to fail,” this memory triggered the fall of the Lautaro Brigade. On January 22, 2007, Juan Morales acknowledged Manuel Contreras’s order to eliminate Díaz. That same day, his subordinate Guillermo Ferrán confirmed it, and days later, Jorge Pichunman provided new information: the one who suffocated Díaz was Juvenal Piña, who on February 27 would confess to the crime in the midst of tears. Later, other agents acknowledged the murders committed there, and they could no longer agree. The 30-year pact of silence had been broken definitively.

The Money of Claro and the Surveillance of Artists and Soccer Players

The confessions of Jorgelino Vergara during the interviews for La Danza de los Cuervos do not only reach the military world. One of the important names mentioned is that of Ricardo Claro, a businessman of recognized admiration for the dictatorship and whose collaboration with the regime would not have been limited to being coordinator of the General Assembly of the Organization of American States.

He would also have been a financier of the DINA. According to Jorgelino in the book—testimony used by journalist Javier Rebolledo in a report for The Clinic a few years ago—he was a witness to a meeting at the Casa de Piedra in Cajón del Maipo between Manuel Contreras and Ricardo Claro, who arrived escorted by five DINA agents.

Agent Eduardo Cabezas Mardones confessed a few years ago to Minister Montiglio that he was a witness to another meeting—“purely economic”—at the Enoteca on Cerro San Cristóbal, where Arturo Ramírez Labbé, an Air Force officer in charge of seeking financing, was also present.

In the chapter titled “Someone has to pay,” it is explained how Claro paid the DINA’s remunerations through the front companies Boxer and Asper Limitada. Jorgelino says that when salaries were delayed, the person in charge of the general staff, “Viejo” Sagardía, would call the company’s secretary on the phone and tell her to please ask Mr.

Ricardo Claro for the salaries. He did it in front of everyone. Other information provided by el mocito has to do with the surveillance of opposition artists. In 1977, with the Communist Party very battered and, therefore, less activity within the barracks, Jorgelino began to take on intelligence tasks, infiltrating folk music clubs (peñas) and obtaining information on people from the Civil Registry.

Among those he remembers are actor Héctor Noguera, actress Schlomit Baytelman, and singer Fernando Ubiergo. On his list of suspects were also soccer players Carlos Caszely and Leonardo “Pollo” Véliz. Jorgelino remembers how they told him about the procedure of the Comando de Vengadores de Mártires (Command of Avengers of Martyrs)—formed in 1980 to avenge the murder of Army Captain Roger Vergara at the hands of the MIR—to set fire to the restaurant Campo Lindo, owned by the stars of the Chilean national team.

La danza de los cuervos / el destino final de los detenidos desaparecidos (The Dance of the Ravens / The Final Destination of the Forcibly Disappeared) Javier Ignacio Rebolledo June 2012, 277 pages.

Source: theclinic.cl, July 3, 2012

53 Former Repressors Sentenced in Chile for Death of Communists

A judge in Chile sentenced 53 former agents of the repressive police of dictator Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) for their participation in the kidnapping and disappearance of seven communist leaders and for the murder of the then-general secretary of the Communist Party, Víctor Díaz, the judiciary reported on Monday.

According to the authorities, agents of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) set up a “mousetrap” inside a house where they knew a meeting of high-ranking communist leaders would take place and arrested them over several days as they arrived.

The captives were taken to the fearsome secret detention barracks of Villa Grimaldi, known for torturing prisoners, which included rape, the application of electric current, and hanging. Víctor Díaz managed to remain in hiding from the very day of the military coup in September 1973 until he was arrested on May 12, 1976.

He was in the hands of the DINA for eight months until they decided he had no more information to provide and he was suffocated with a plastic bag and thrown into the sea, said Minister Vázquez. The practice of throwing murdered opponents into the sea was recorded from the beginning of 1974 until 1978.

Former agent Ricardo Víctor Lawrence Mires was sentenced to 20 years in prison for eight kidnappings and 15 years as a co-author of the murder of Díaz, who was arrested on May 12, 1976, said a report by Minister Miguel Vázquez.

For his part, Juan Hernán Morales Salgado must serve sentences of 8 years and an additional 15 years in prison as a co-author of the kidnapping of Díaz and for his subsequent murder. Two other former agents must serve 20 years in prison for the qualified kidnapping of the group of communist leaders.

The crime of qualified kidnapping has been used by judges for about 18 years to refer to kidnapping followed by disappearance. Thirteen former agents were sentenced to 13 years in prison as co-authors of the qualified kidnapping of the eight detainees.

The rest were sentenced to terms ranging from 17 to 3 years in prison. The sentences can be appealed to the Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court. The judge relates that the DINA enabled a large house in the middle-class neighborhood of Ñuñoa, which functioned as an extermination barracks.

It is known that there were no survivors from the Simón Bolívar prison. The dictatorship left 40,018 victims, including 3,190 murdered. The rest survived torture and political imprisonment.

Source: apnews.com, December 3, 2018

Bautista Van Schouwen The Search

The cloak of silence cast by the dictatorship over the detention of two important MIR militants was no coincidence; it corresponded to a new method of operation for the repression, a policy directed from General Pinochet’s Command Post on the 22nd floor of the Diego Portales building. It was the concealment of detentions that would lead to the disappearance of Van Schouwen.

At the end of December, the leadership of the MIR was desperately seeking news about what had happened at the Los Capuchinos parish. Miguel Enríquez entrusted the mission to a former seminarian of the Sacred Family Congregation and party militant, Germán Cortez [1], to communicate with Bishop Fernando Ariztía [2] so that he could inquire about what had occurred at the Los Capuchinos parish.

Bishop Ariztía, attending to the request made by Germán Cortez, went to speak with the priests who were at the convent, expecting their cooperation given the situation the country was experiencing. The superiors of the Capuchin congregation had made a decision: to forget what had happened, and the Bishop’s visit would be of no use.

The only information Bishop Ariztía received was that there were indeed two people staying at the parish temporarily and that they had been detained by police and military personnel along with Father Enrique White, who at that moment was out of the country.

The Capuchin congregation had constructed an official story, denying even to another priest the information they possessed at that time: that Van Schouwen and Munita had been murdered before the eyes of Father White.

"El Gato" Valenzuela, known for his ability to move through the world of the underground, also scoured Santiago in search of information about the fate of the two disappeared militants without much luck; it was only known that they had been detained and that they were possibly in some clandestine detention site, but he did not know what the new locations designated for the captivity of prisoners were.

The question for the leaders of the MIR was: what could be done to make the dictatorship acknowledge the detention of Van Schouwen and Munita? Or at least to make some statement that would make it clear they were being held in one of the sites known until that moment as Centers for Detainees under State of Siege.

Miguel turned to the few contacts that remained in the Armed Forces without receiving any answers. The discussion within the MIR was how to convey that information to the base members who were in the underground, living in difficult conditions, without demoralizing them.

The MIR’s foreign commission, which was in charge of Edgardo Enríquez, had devised a strategy that might shed some light on the fate of his friend and leader Bautista Van Schouwen, or at least he thought that a strong campaign abroad would save his life, not knowing that nothing he did would have the result he expected; he was already dead, and neither the dictatorship nor its executioners would ever acknowledge his murder.

The search for Patricio Munita Castillo.

Lucía Castillo and her family had celebrated the end of Salvador Allende’s government on September 11. As soon as they heard about the bombing of the La Moneda Presidential Palace, they uncorked bottles of champagne and toasted to the new government that had saved them from chaos and the Marxist yoke.

In October, when life was smiling upon them, the Munita Castillo family decided it was time to travel to the United States, and they did so on a military plane directly to Washington. Grateful to the new government and their friends who had facilitated the transfer, they carried a shipment of the “White Book” [3] to the Chilean embassy in the American capital so that it could be distributed among Republicans and friends of the dictatorship in the United States.

They felt it was the best way to cooperate because, through that publication, the truth about this new Chile being born would be known, and thus the image of the Junta could be improved and the pressure of international demands regarding the accusations of human rights violations being made against them could be lowered.

She never imagined that two and a half months later her son would be one more victim of the military dictatorship.

On December 24, Lucía Castillo stepped off the plane, happy to be home again; she was loaded with gifts she had bought in Panama for her children. The first thing she noticed upon leaving customs was the absence of Patricio, who had expressly asked her, in his last letter, not to fail to arrive by that date because he wanted to celebrate his last Christmas as a bachelor with the family.

The illusion of having her children at dinner did not let her see the desperation on her eldest son’s face.

That night was tense for Patricio’s siblings, because Lucía did not stop asking the reason for her son Patricio’s absence, and they did not dare tell her the truth.

“—He had called us on the phone, along with my other children, for our wedding anniversary on December 8. He told us that the only thing he wanted was for us to let him know when we arrived so he could pick us up at the airport.” “We arrived on December 24 in the morning; that’s when I noticed the boy wasn’t there, all my other children were there and he wasn’t.

“I ask my children: ‘Where is Pato?’ They tell me—to avoid shocking me, they had agreed to tell me—that he was at his girlfriend’s parents’ farm in the south. And the girlfriend was disappeared.

“My eldest son, meanwhile, was looking for him everywhere, in the morgue... The Director of Investigations, who was my uncle, was also making arrangements and helping as he could. “They hid from me that Pato was disappeared, and I arrived in a hurry to set up the nativity scene; besides, we came with all the gifts because we had passed through Panama and bought so many things.

I, with all that, so foolish, didn’t realize. I was ignorant of everything, that’s why I thought that Pato, who was so friendly, was going to come from the farm directly for the party. I had a small worry; I thought it was strange that he hadn’t called me when he wanted us to arrive to spend Christmas together.

“I had his little gift for him; he had asked me for a fur hat for the winter because he had sinusitis.

“After Christmas, on Christmas night, I remember, I remember that every time the door rang I imagined it was Pato, I thought the boy was going to arrive... For me, he will always be a boy.” [4]

Four days later, on December 28, while the family was preparing to celebrate the New Year, Lucía Castillo learned of her son’s disappearance and her tragedy began.

It was the Day of the Innocents in 1973, and at the house on Brown Norte No. 875, near four in the afternoon, the phone rang; it was the wife of the Brazilian ambassador interrupting the family nap. Lucía answered the phone and “Kika” told her she was calling to invite them to celebrate the New Year with the family at the embassy.

Enthusiastic about the idea of being surrounded by friends on that date, Lucía’s response was quick; she said yes but decided to consult with her husband, who was by her side listening to the conversation.

She would never forget her husband’s anguished voice, nor his desperate response. “Don’t you know the boy is disappeared!” referring to Patricio.

Lucía Castillo collapsed onto the bed; on the other side of the phone, she could hear the voice of her friend asking what had happened. She could barely give an answer, only managing to say, “I’ll call you later, Pato, my boy has disappeared.”

While she was in the United States, she had read hundreds of times that bodies were appearing on the banks of the Mapocho River in Santiago; she had also heard about the disappeared, but how could she believe the Marxists and their propaganda?

“—In October we left for the United States—my husband and I. Then we began to read in the newspapers that there were forcibly disappeared people in Chile, but it was something foreign to our lives, that’s how we saw it.

We thought they were revolutionaries who were attacking the military, or things like that, who deserved for that to happen to them, that they had probably fallen in a confrontation.

“I had seen so many things about the disappeared, ‘died in a confrontation,’ so many things in the newspaper and I unable to believe it, I couldn’t believe it.

“We had our eyes totally bandaged.” [5]

However, that reality was installed in her own family, in her home, and the pain for the death of her young son would never disappear.

When Lucía hung up the phone, she felt her body weigh her down and that her legs would not hold her; desperate, she began to cry. She didn’t want to know about anyone; she couldn’t understand what had happened around her, that everything was falling apart.

At times she thought that Patricio was at his girlfriend’s parents’ place in the south, since Gabriela was not appearing either and no one knew about her. Her son was part of a respectable family with wealthy parents and connections in the highest social and military circles; her son was good, he had studied in Catholic schools, he couldn’t disappear overnight, there must be some mistake.

A few minutes after hanging up the phone, Kika arrived to offer her personal help and that of her embassy, which had strong ties to the Chilean dictatorship. Thus began the chain of relationships for her family to manage to find Patricio Munita’s body.

Lucía Castillo did not leave a single door unknocked; she went to all the places where they told her there were detainees, to the clinics, hospitals, police stations.

What she did not know was that nothing she did would make her son appear alive and that the fur hat bought with such affection would remain unused forever. The days that followed were intense and painful for the Munita Castillo family, and the pilgrimage began.

“—We went everywhere. We went to Tejas Verdes, to the Psychiatric Hospital, because they told us they had sedated the crazy people with injections and that there was a courtyard for detainees. We went to all the detention centers, police stations, Carabineros. Ugh! We went everywhere.

“We also went to Barrancas, to the Red Cross. I went to the Estadio Chile wearing a Red Cross apron that they lent me. Later, a member of the Red Cross accompanied me to Tejas Verdes to leave my son’s photograph.

This person was even denounced by the head of the Red Cross at Tejas Verdes, to whom my friend gave Pato’s photo so she could ask among the prisoners if they had seen him or not. She was called by the Ministry of Defense to explain why she was asking about my son.” [6] Meanwhile, the Civil Registry and Identification Service already knew to whom the fingerprints from autopsy protocols 3950 and 3951 belonged, and on January 3, 1974, the General Cemetery was informed by phone that the fingerprints of the NN dead person registered in autopsy 3951 belonged to Bautista Van Schouwen; later they would be informed by written official letter No. 62577 [7]. However, neither did the Director of the Cemetery make the correction to have a name put on the grave, nor did the Identification Service ever inform Bautista Van Schouwen’s relatives that their son’s remains were buried in Patio 29; what is more, on the tomb labeled No. 2335, the name of the body that lay in it was never written, while the Munita Castillo family would take another month and a half to find Patricio Munita’s remains. Thus, the complicity of state services to make people disappear was conspired.

The secret investigation of General Baeza

Army General Baeza, a well-known army officer seasoned in intelligence tasks, had been chosen by General Pinochet himself to assume the position of Interim Director of the Investigative Police on September 12; his appointment appears in the Confidential official letter No. 1 of the Government Junta.

“—On the night of September 11, I was left with the second seniority in the Army in Santiago, because I was the fourth seniority in the entire army. First was General Pinochet, then came General Urbina, then General Torres de la Cruz, and then came me.

“But General Urbina was sent on an inspection in the south, in those days, and General Manuel Torres was the commander of the Punta Arenas Division. In other words, after General Pinochet, on September 11, came me.

“I stayed at the Ministry making contact and coordinating many things with General Pinochet. Then General Bonilla, who had moved with other people and General Pinochet to another place, called me at night after everything had happened, including the suicide of President Allende.

Bonilla told me that night by phone, ‘A cabinet was organized, you are named Minister.’ I accepted, but the next day things changed.

“The next day Pinochet asked me to take charge of Investigations. Well, General Pinochet and I knew each other very well because we had been lieutenants together; I was an instructor lieutenant at the Military School and he was also a lieutenant at the Military School.

Later we took the course at the Colonel rank; he had entered the school two years before me. He was from the class of ’36 and I was from ’38, but in the end, they join together and many officers are eliminated and few reach Colonel, so they join from different courses.

“General Pinochet arrived on the morning of the 12th at the Ministry of National Defense, where I was talking with Admiral Carvajal of the National Defense General Staff. I was also with another Artillery General, General Nuño, and also the Deputy Director of National Defense, the Aviation General, General Nicanor Díaz.

“We were all gathered, talking about all the problems that were being produced or had been produced the day before, and General Pinochet arrived—as I just said—and said, ‘There is a serious problem: Investigations, and we must designate a person to be responsible.’

“General Nuño said: ‘Here is Baeza.’” [8]

The mission entrusted to Baeza by the coup-plotting Government Junta consisted of purging the institution that had been created in 1933 during the government of Arturo Alessandri as a political police force to provide information to governments in the face of possible situations that would destabilize the institutional order.

The coup-plotting officers and Pinochet did not look favorably upon the only armed service that had maintained loyalty to President Allende until the very last moment. Pinochet had information that from the roofs of the Investigations Barracks they had fired against planes and helicopters during the attacks on the Ministries and La Moneda, that furthermore, in the La Moneda Palace, the detectives had accompanied President Allende while he was being surrounded and that they had resisted until the end; additionally, Investigations had sufficient information about the seditious activities of the right and proof of their participation in the murders of General Schneider and Captain Araya. But that was not the only thing that mattered to Pinochet; the institution also had information about the left-wing political groups that it had accumulated through the department known as “the guatones of the PP” (Political Police), and among those groups was the MIR; therefore, within it was a capital that the military did not have: information to dismantle the sectors that worked in the underground.

There was no Ministry for Baeza; General Pinochet had changed his mind and accepted General Nuño’s suggestion. In that way, he got rid of the general most appreciated by the United States Department of State, who had been involved from its beginnings in the coup conspiracy and who had emotional ties with the Christian Democrats and the political right [9].

In short, he could be a shadow to his aspirations of being a “great dictator.”

Baeza’s first task was to stifle the detectives’ resistance to the military intervention represented by him. It was not an easy task to assume the direction of an armed institution that felt intervened by the enemy that had detained and tortured beloved members of its ranks.

That is why, rather than purging, what Baeza did was lower the institution’s profile in matters of political repression, to carry out subtle repression without large deployments of forces. Then he sought a way to sophisticate the methods used in interrogations to diminish the risks of death for the detainees, sending some detectives to specialize in torture techniques to France, Spain, England, Switzerland, and the United States [10].

In the first days of December, Baeza noticed that something strange was happening in the high spheres of the junta; his instinct as an Intelligence man did not deceive him. During those days, he received a written request from the Presidency of the Government Junta, that is, from Pinochet, where they demanded that he assign a group of men from his institution to the DINA [11] on a service commission.

Thus, his suspicion was confirmed, and he learned for the first time of the existence of this operational body that was commanded by the President of the Government Junta himself. Without further ado, he sent 23 men from his institution who came to depend on the then-Colonel Manuel Contreras.

In December, he was also visited by a distant nephew, Jorge Munita, accompanied by a friend, to ask for help because his younger brother, Patricio, had been missing since mid-December. The general told him that he could not investigate because he did not have an order from the courts, but that he would do everything possible to find out what had happened to him.

Among his nephew’s accounts, he told him that during the days Patricio had disappeared, he was in the company of Van Schouwen, a leader of the MIR.

The next morning, Baeza, very complicated by the family request, decided to assign a detective to investigate the fate of Patricio Munita. Segismundo Pavez Toledo was an old detective of the Political Police; his specialty was the revolutionary left-wing parties, which he knew perfectly well since the mid-sixties; that was the reason that induced Baeza to assign him to a special case.

He was the ideal man; he knew how these left-wing groups moved and he had to have the sharpness not to compromise the institution and its director in the investigation.

Segismundo Pavez entered General Baeza’s office without knowing what his task was. They greeted each other, and the Director asked him to sit down and began to give him what he would call “a confidential task” that he had to carry out in secret without linking the institution, and the reports he should deliver to no one but him. [12]

He said: “It is a family matter, so I expect daily reports. I don’t want you to deliver them in writing; I want them verbal. In case the volume of information is very high, you deliver it to me by means of memos and without copies. Is that clear, inspector?”

As was customary at the time, Segismundo Pavez did not ask anything else; he only referred to the first source of information that Baeza gave him: Patricio Munita’s parents, Lucía Castillo and Jorge Munita.

He headed to the family residence on Brown Norte near Irarrázabal. There he introduced himself as a detective sent by General Baeza. The desperate parents let him into the house and gave him the scarce information they had; they showed him a family photograph where Patricio appeared, his height, and physical marks.

They also gave him the description of his girlfriend and information about an old Citroneta that was his property.

The first clear reference where he could follow a lead was the old Citroneta. He deduced that the Citroneta must already be in the Carabineros’ files where, indeed, a traffic law violation was registered. The lead took him to the upper Arrayán to a plot of land where a hippie community in which Brons lived was hiding from the barbarity.

Before Inspector Pavez arrived at Brons, the DINA had detained him. The second lead was to look for Gabriela Rozas, who at that point was in the Buen Pastor women’s prison. The meeting was brief and traumatic.

When the detective introduced himself and showed the Investigations badge to the young woman, she began to scream desperately; the detective was surprised, not knowing what to do; quickly the mother superior of the Buen Pastor was called to calm Gabriela. Gabriela had lived through the worst moments of her life; she was very thin as a result of the intense torture she had experienced.

She did not contribute much to the investigation; she only recounted her transfer to a place in the center of Santiago, Londres 38, and the interrogations, torture, and humiliations. She also spoke of her transfer in a closed refrigerator-type truck to a place on the coast near a river—Tejas Verdes.

The aftermath of what she had lived through had destroyed her, and although she was in psychiatric treatment, she could not give a coherent account of what the fate of her boyfriend could be.

That scarce information led him to another detainee in the same place, Ana María Moreira; she could not contribute much either because she did not understand the reason for her detention; she sensed that it had something to do with Father White. But she could not give information out of fear.

Meanwhile, Patricio Munita’s mother, Lucía Castillo, continued her pilgrimage from one office to another in the Diego Portales building, where a group of her friends belonging to the diplomatic corps accredited in Santiago had passed a photograph to a colonel named Moreno.

She remembers that one day, between so much going up and down the Diego Portales Building, she met her old friend, Pedro Ewing, who at the time was Minister Secretary of Government, to whom she had done the favor of taking the bundles with the White Book to Washington.

In the hallway, she talked with him and told him the reason for the visit. There was no response, not even a grimace on the General’s face that revealed the possibility of help. Ewing came from an old family of coup-plotting military men.

His father, the high-ranking officer Alfredo Ewing, had sadly gone down in history on September 11, 1924, after belonging to the group of officers who overthrew Arturo Alessandri Rodríguez via a coup d’état.

Lucía began to see that her world was shrinking, and she tried to resign herself by thinking that nothing serious could have happened to her son because there was no arrest warrant against him, and no news had appeared in the newspapers that spoke of his capture.

The month of January 1974 passed slowly for the Munita Castillo family; the investigations in charge of Detective Pavez did not yield new clues about the fate suffered by their son, and despite the fact that the family had offered money for any data that would provide a trace of what happened to Patricio, they had not had the expected success.

General Baeza already assumed what the fate suffered by his nephew could be; he intuited it from the beginning due to the information that he had disappeared with a high-ranking left-wing leader; furthermore, to that information is added the knowledge of the emergence of the DINA and the powers that this new repressive apparatus wields, but he prefers to wait for the final result of the detective in charge of the investigation.

Detective Pavez stealthily follows the last steps of Patricio Munita and heads to the Capuchin congregation. There he learns that in mid-December it was raided and a priest was taken from inside, who during those days was outside of Santiago, accompanied by two young men who correspond to the descriptions of Patricio Munita and Bautista Van Schouwen.

They do not give him any other information that leads him to the organization that carries out the detentions to continue investigating. However, he suspects that due to the time elapsed and the silence about the detentions, the possibility of finding the detainees alive is scarce.

“—It was terrible. I remember one time the parents of this young man—Patricio Munita—came to my house and spent almost four hours begging me to tell them what had happened to their son, if they had thrown him into the sea, or if they had burned him.

The lady begged me to make a sign with my hand to know if her son was dead or not, and I couldn’t tell her anything because General Baeza had instructed me not to tell anyone about the investigation I was doing.

That time was so terrible that my wife, may she rest in peace, locked herself in to cry; she felt the mother’s pain and couldn’t stand it; later she got angry with me because I didn’t give any information to the parents of this kid. But I couldn’t; I had to take care of my job.” [13]

The last step of Detective Pavez’s investigation was to go to the Legal Medical Service. He arrived there on a hot morning at the beginning of February; he knew that the first thing he had to do was look in the entry book.

Without identifying himself, he asked them to show him the book that corresponded to the date on which Patricio Munita had supposedly disappeared. He was surprised to see the enormous list of dead people who had arrived during those days; he searched by the data he had of height, one meter eighty and above, and there he found only three bodies, two of them male who had appeared dead near Macul.

As the two bodies appeared as NN, he asked them to provide him with the autopsies to see if either of the two matched the physical descriptions of the body he was looking for. It was impossible for him to obtain them; the DINA had made them disappear; that was informed to him personally by the Director of the Legal Medical Service, Dr.

Alfredo Vargas. Pavez communicated to General Baeza that he had to speak with the director of the Legal Medical Service because he had more information. General Baeza did so, and in a few days, he confirmed the assumption that his nephew was dead. He also learned that the DINA had had his body buried along with Van Schouwen’s and that it had taken the autopsies to make them disappear.

It became clear to Baeza the danger of this new intelligence service that operates without any rules and that is directed by a Colonel who bypasses the military hierarchy, answering to only one man, who was his former classmate from the Military School, Augusto Pinochet. That is why he decides to keep his information secret and not communicate it to his cousin Lucía.

“—I always thought there should be an organization that worked with information, to inform the government in case there were strikes that affected the country, or subversion. But the problem with the DINA was that it could not only do that, but it fulfilled operational functions without having preparation for that... that was serious.”

You knew the then-Colonel Contreras. What did you think of him?

“—Yes, I knew him before the 11th and he seemed like just another soldier. But later he transformed into a God; he depended only on the President and only to him did he have to render accounts.

“Several generals had problems with him. I locked myself in Investigations. ‘I have nothing to do with the DINA. I didn’t mix with the DINA, I didn’t cooperate with the DINA, I had nothing to do with the DINA.’”

How did you see the DINA’s performance?

“—I didn’t like the procedures. Several times I arrived tied up by Mr. Contreras to General Pinochet to complain about these procedures where Investigations was involved.

“Eh, since I didn’t agree with many things... nor did I know what they were doing, I never wanted to mix with the DINA or act in cooperation with the DINA. Let them do what the Law or the authorization they have orders them. Anyway, I don’t know.

“The thing is that this organization was of an executive nature at the same time; for me, that was the error.”

Why?

“—This organization should have been of an informative nature and not executive.

“That is to say, if they had discovered some person who had committed some crime, they had to have handed them over to justice, be it military or civil, or handed the information to the government. If it was repressive, repressive to what extent, they had to hand over those who had committed the crimes to the courts. But not take justice into their own hands.” [14]

February arrives quickly and there is still no acknowledgment of the detention at the Los Capuchinos Parish. Bautista’s family is also aware that their son has been detained, and in the last days of December, they had decided to turn to Aviation General Gabriel Van Schouwen, Bautista’s direct uncle, so that he would intercede in the high military circles to have them inform about the place where his nephew is being held or that his detention be officially acknowledged.

General Van Schouwen’s response was always evasive. His first response to Bautista’s father and his brother was “that they were at a date too close to Christmas to ask those types of questions because people were worried about other matters and not that.” A year later, in 1974, before the same request, General Van Schouwen responded to his brother “that there was no arrest warrant from any branch of the armed forces against his nephew Bautista Van Schouwen.”

In short, the high-ranking officer of the Armed Forces, General Gabriel Van Schouwen, never had the will to do anything that would allow him to find answers about what happened to his nephew; unlike General Baeza, who managed to find out exactly what had happened to Patricio Munita, his nephew—even though he did not inform the family of the result of his investigation—violating, even, the attributions of his service that prevented him from investigating without a judicial order.

Carlota Vassey, Bautista Van Schouwen’s mother, has spent years seeking truth and justice for her son. For years she traveled the world seeking help from governments and organizations that would pressure the dictatorship to say where her son was. And it is still hard for her to accept the disappearance of her son:

“—I cannot say what the disappearance of my son meant for me. He was a very good son; I know all mothers say the same thing, but I have three children and all three are good, but Bautista was complete. He was gentlemanly, attentive, studious, handsome. My son was very beautiful.

“I still remember that on December 21 we learned that Bautista had been detained. We were at the plot of land in Monteaguila with my husband; I remember it was at the end of December. My son Jorge arrived in the morning and went for a walk with my husband through the field.

I thought he just wanted to talk, and Bautista, my husband, liked to walk through our field. But no, Jorge was very anguished because he didn’t know anything about his brother, and there he told him about our son. They didn’t want me to know because nothing was known yet. Later they told me.

“Jorge, my son, had also been detained and was under house arrest; that is, he couldn’t leave Santiago, but he was so worried about his brother that he violated the prohibition to leave and traveled so that we could start doing something.

That same day my husband Carlos and I traveled to Santiago and began this via crucis of looking for him where they told us. If they told us there were detainees in such a place, we went there. We spent entire days waiting for news or going through offices.

“We only started the procedures for the writ of amparo before the justice system in February, because before we thought it would be worse and maybe he would appear in some prison at some moment. Even in the 3rd edition of La Hora on January 12, 1974, a statement from the Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs appeared referring to the news cables that arrived from outside, about my son being detained and subjected to torture, where he answered that ‘the charges of torture are unfounded rumors from the cable,’ which took for granted that he was indeed imprisoned somewhere.

“When it appeared in El Mercurio (August 21, 1974) that Bauchi had been detained, we put the plot of land up for sale, thinking that we were going to rescue him in very poor health and for that we were going to need money for him to recover. But we never found him.”

The doubts within the MIR about Bauchi’s detention had already vanished at the beginning of February; they know he fell into the hands of some repressive organization, but that is all the information they possess.

They also know that he has not given any information to his captors because no structure linked to him has fallen yet. Miguel Enríquez, attempting [15] not to demoralize the militancy, begins to plan a strategy: to emit information abroad so that it would bounce through press agencies that Bautista would be alive in a military prison and that he would be heroically resisting the ferocious torture.

Thus, he would kill two birds with one stone: on one hand, he would force the dictatorship to acknowledge his detention, which would attempt through denials to disqualify the information and would begin to give clues about the possible places where Bauchi could be detained; once the place of his captivity was known, they would attempt a rescue with specialized cadres, but it would also serve to raise the morale of the MIR militants who see in Van Schouwen a very beloved leader whose example is worthy of imitation.

It is thus that only in June 1974, in the Document “Let’s Strengthen Our Party!!”, “The Recent Blows, Some Lessons and the Organization of the Leadership,” from the Political Commission to the Central Committee, the MIR militancy in the underground is informed that Bautista Van Schouwen has been detained.

“Our party has enriched the history of the Chilean workers’ and revolutionary movement by delivering numerous martyrs who heroically, under savage torture, let themselves be torn apart and mutilated before saying anything.

In the first place, our comrade Bautista Van Schouwen, who was tortured bloodily for weeks and months without saying anything, responding to the torture, as comrades who were being tortured in adjacent rooms testify, with insults to the torturers and with shouts of certainty in the victory of the workers’ and peasants’ revolution, and we still do not know for sure if he is alive or dead.

Before his heroism, not only revolutionaries, workers, and peoples of the world, the left and Chilean revolutionaries bow today, but even his torturers and leaders of the gorilla-like regime.” [16]

It is undoubted that these words written by Miguel Enríquez to his militancy, which is seriously besieged and living in difficult conditions in the underground, have the sense of strengthening morale and reversing the hard blow it has received at the hands of both the SIFA, which has detained a large part of the Central Committee and the Regional leaders who were recomposing the MIR that had been diluted in the regions as a product of the strong repression in the first days of the coup d’état, and the DINA, which begins to strike hard in Santiago at the structures that remain reorganizing the resistance to the dictatorship.

James’s corpse appears

It is February and the Munita Castillo family is gathered at the house on Brown Norte. It is near ten at night when the phone rings. Lucía starts; she thinks of her son Patricio and she is not wrong. A male voice says to her:

“Mrs. Lucía?” [17]

“Yes,” she answers nervously.

“I am calling about your son Patricio Munita. Go tomorrow to the morgue and look for number 3950.”

Desperate, she asks him, “Who am I speaking with?” A deep silence, and the call was cut off.

Lucía Castillo never imagined that the search for her son would provide the clue that later would allow it to be known that in Patio 29 bodies of people murdered by the dictatorship were buried and that, thanks to her, some bodies could be rescued and it could be known what happened to Bautista Van Schouwen.

The next day the Munita Castillo family got up early to go ask for information at the morgue about the dead person whose autopsy protocol was 3950. It was the first disappointment; the filing place for autopsy 3950 was empty, and 3951, which was next to it, was not there either. The rest of the file looked almost complete.

Desperate, they went to ask for an interview with the director of the Legal Medical Institute. For several days they waited for him to attend to them, and the answer was always the same: “Come back tomorrow.”

Annoyed and increasingly anguished to know what autopsy 3950 was about, they went to the Diego Portales building to talk with an Army Prosecutor in time of war named Saavedra. They waited nervously for a while for him to attend to them; then the secretary kindly had them enter the prosecutor’s office. They greeted each other and began the account of the reason that led them to him.

Surprised, the Prosecutor tells them not to worry, that their problem will be solved. He takes the phone and dials the number of the Legal Medical Institute, asks to speak with the director; they respond that he is not there at the moment.

Saavedra, annoyed, replies: “Tell your boss that I want autopsy No. 3950 by tomorrow at 11 AM, or else at noon I will send an armed military Jeep and then we’ll see.”

After that call, he assures them that the next day they should go look for the autopsy to know who it is about.

That same night, Military Prosecutor Saavedra calls the Munita Castillo family and tells them that he regrets not being able to help them, that please do not go to his office the next morning because the promise he had made to them he cannot fulfill.

Without further ado, he tells them that he has been informed by the director of the Legal Medical Institute that those autopsies were withdrawn by the DINA.

“—I cannot do anything; they have a lot of power.” The officer’s voice sounds fearful and saddened.

The Munita family, without wanting to, learns that there exists an organization called DINA and the enormous power it has. That even an officer of such high rank as Prosecutor Saavedra is left without authority before its actions; even less will their friends be able to do anything.

The anguish in the house on Brown Norte increases. Their friends within the dictatorship are of no use to them

The house located at Irán 3037, on the corner of Los Plátanos, in the Macul district of the capital, has a special history. At the time of the coup d'état, it was owned by a family, one of whose members, Luis Gonzalo Muñoz Muñoz, was a militant of the Communist Party.

The brutal repression unleashed starting in September 1973, with murders, torture, and disappearances as part of daily life that threatened members of the Chilean left, prompted the Muñoz family to leave the country for a time in search of safety. They then decided to put the property up for rent through a real estate agent.

The large corner house, two stories high, with a large patio, and enclosed by a high wall and metal gate, located in a residential area, was rented by Carabineros Lieutenant Miguel Eugenio Hernández Oyarzo, who was a member of the recently created National Intelligence Directorate (DINA).

Initially, the property served as a dormitory for DINA agents who were members of the Carabineros Corps on "detached duty" at the dictatorship's main repressive agency.

However, as a result of the intensification of political repression, starting in late August 1974, the house at Irán 3037 was transformed into a center for torture and the disappearance of persons, joining the DINA torture centers that were already operating in Santiago during that period, namely: Londres 38 (Cuartel Yucatán) in downtown Santiago, José Domingo Cañas 1367 (Cuartel Ollagüe) in the Ñuñoa district, and José Arrieta 8200, known as Villa Grimaldi (and in DINA lexicon, Cuartel Terranova) in the current Peñalolén district.

Prior to August 1974, the Venda Sexy was occupied on an exceptional basis.

One of those occasions was July 26, 1974, when the priest Mariano Puga, parish priest of the Cristo Liberador Church in Villa Francia, was detained by the DINA, taken to the facility, and subjected to torture, abuse, and humiliating and degrading treatment while being interrogated regarding three members of the Villa Francia Christian Community: Enrique Toro, Eduardo Lara, and José Villagra.

All of those named above, with the exception of the priest Mariano Puga, remain forcibly disappeared. José Villagra Astudillo was a municipal worker and a militant of the Communist Party, a militancy he shared with Eduardo Lara Petrovich, who worked at the IRT industry.

Both had been detained on July 15; prior to them, on the 10th of the same month, the Vice President of the Railway Workers' Union, Enrique Toro Romero, had been detained, who, like the others, was a militant of the Communist Party and part of the Villa Francia Christian Community.

It is striking how dark and difficult it has been to compile information about the "Venda Sexy." To begin with, most of the agents who operated from there, members of the DINA's Águila Group, admit to having been part of the agency and also admit to having "performed duties" in some of the other torture centers already mentioned.

However, when the subject of the Venda Sexy arises, they deny ever having been in that facility. It is as if, for the DINA agents themselves, having been at the Venda Sexy is a motive for shame and opprobrium.

Furthermore, the name "Venda Sexy" is due to the way the facility has been identified by surviving male and female prisoners, upon noting that a significant portion of the torture applied there had a sexual connotation. To this day, we do not know the code name the DINA used to identify the facility.

One of the Carabineros officers, Lieutenant Ingrid Olderock Bernhardt, a police dog trainer before the coup d'état, dedicated part of her skills to training a German Shepherd, which she named "Volodia" (alluding to a senator and also a high-ranking leader of the Communist Party before the coup), to rape detained women who were forced to assume a position that facilitated penetration by the animal.

It was also frequent to use Coca-Cola bottles, broomsticks, and hoses to be inserted through the anus of some prisoners, or through the vagina in the case of women.

The above was in addition to torture "commonly used" in other DINA facilities during the period: application of electricity (the "parrilla"), hanging, burns, beatings, the "telephone," immersion of prisoners' heads in decomposing liquids ("wet submarine"), pau de arara, drowning prisoners by placing a hood over their heads and sealing it hermetically around the neck ("dry submarine"), and mock executions.

The Venda Sexy was under the command of the then-Carabineros Captain (and today a retired Carabineros Colonel, currently a fugitive) Ricardo Víctor Lawrence Mires. This officer, known within the DINA as "Cachete Grande," shows a distinguished "service record": member of the DINA instructors for the preparation of agents in Rocas de Santo Domingo in late 1973; later an operative agent at Londres 38, also in the same role at José Domingo Cañas, Barracks Commander at the Venda Sexy, Group Commander at Villa Grimaldi, and second-in-command at the extermination house at Calle Simón Bolívar 8630, La Reina district.

Other agents linked to the Venda Sexy were Captain Ciro Ernesto Torré Sáez, and Lieutenants Gerardo Ernesto Godoy García ("Cachete Chico"), Ingrid Felicitas Olderock Bernhardt, Miguel Eugenio Hernández Oyarzo ("Columbo"), Sergeant Heriberto del Carmen Acevedo Acevedo, Corporal 1st Class Emilio Hernán Troncoso Vivallos, Corporal José Aravena Ruiz ("Muñeca del Diablo"), Non-commissioned officers Gino Fritz Esparza, Pedro René Alfaro Fernández, Emilio Marín Huincaleo ("Caballo Justiciero"), Manuel Clavijo Vera ("Alfaro"), Tulio Pereira Pereira, José Avelino Yévenes Vergara ("Quico Yévenes"), Osvaldo Pulgar Gallardo ("Negro Paz"), and Rosa Humilde Ramos Hernández, all members of the Carabineros de Chile, plus detectives Manuel Rivas Orellana ("El Papi") and Fernando Cruzat Aguirre.

The Venda Sexy operated intensely between late August 1974 until December 26 of the same year, the day the remaining prisoners in the facility were transferred to Villa Grimaldi. Subsequently, it was used sporadically until 1977.

During the most intense period, more than one hundred and fifty male and female prisoners were kidnapped by the DINA and taken to the facility. More than a third of them were murdered or forcibly disappeared, which gives a proportion of victims with a cause of death much higher than in the rest of the torture centers of the time, where the proportion of deaths does not rise above ten percent of the total number of prisoners.

Also, of the total number of prisoners taken to the Venda Sexy, nearly forty percent were women, which reveals a disproportionate ratio in relation to the other DINA facilities, where the norm was approximately twenty percent women within the total number of prisoners.

Another characteristic that "distinguishes" the Venda Sexy from the other DINA facilities was its way of operating: the torture center functioned "during office hours," meaning that at five in the afternoon (approximately) it stopped operating as such (the torturers and officers went home) and DINA non-commissioned officers and guards were left in charge of the facility until the following morning when it went back into operation.

At these times (outside of "office hours"), it was frequent for female prisoners to be taken from their cells to be taken to other rooms within the same house to be raped.

It was precisely at the Venda Sexy where the participation of women in the anti-dictatorial resistance struggle is most clearly made explicit. The Venda Sexy was a torture center specialized in the repression of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR), from where the DINA's Águila Group, composed almost exclusively of Carabineros, operated.

Most (though not exclusively) of the male and female prisoners taken there were linked to the MIR.

The detainees were transported to the facility in the typical 1974 model Chevrolet C-10 pickup trucks of various colors used by the DINA. After passing through the entrance gate and once in the house's patio, the detainees were taken out of the vehicle with their eyes hidden under large sunglasses, which helped to hide the blindfold that covered their eyes from the very moment of their detention.

The residents of the neighboring house, from the second floor of which it was possible to observe the patio of the Venda Sexy, state that they did not realize what was really happening because most of the time it was women with sunglasses who got out of the trucks, and shortly after they entered the house, rock music was generally heard at high volume, which made them think that parties were being held in that house at different times of the day.

The loud music referred to was the method used by the DINA in that particular facility, a neighborhood house, to disguise and mask the screams, wails, and crying of the tortured people.

The last time there is evidence of the use of the facility was in May 1977, when a group of people linked to the Cardjin Foundation of the Archbishopric of Santiago, including several militants of the Christian Democratic Party, were kidnapped and taken to the Venda Sexy.

These people were falsely accused of the kidnapping of the minor Carlos Veloso Reidenbach (16 years old and raped by his captors, DINA agents); one of the detainees, Jorge Andrés Troncoso Aguirre, a militant of the Communist Party, died under torture.

The legal owner, Luis Muñoz Muñoz, horrified upon learning of the use to which the family home had been put, sold it in 1981. It was acquired by the neighboring family who tried to rent it out by the room to students from the provinces who came to Santiago for academic purposes; however, when the student tenants learned the history of the house, they quickly looked for another place to move.

The business did not work under these conditions. A final attempt was the installation of a kindergarten on the property, an attempt that also failed for the same reasons already stated; the parents of the enrolled children, upon learning of the history of the house, quickly moved their children to other places with a better reputation.

Finally, the house was acquired by an industrial businessman who lived there with his family for several years.

The sale of the property earlier this year to a real estate company, despite having been declared a National Monument years ago, raises fears that another place of Memory will be destroyed and eliminated.

This already happened with the house at José Domingo Cañas 1367 during the government of Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle, which was still standing and for sale at that time, and despite a group of political prisoners having gone to request the intervention of the Ministry of National Assets for its protection and purchase, it was finally acquired by the Rochet toy factory, which proceeded to its complete demolition.

Today, the site of José Domingo Cañas is a symbolic Site of Memory where there are monuments, paintings, and sculptures, but the house, which would have been an invaluable and irreplaceable place as a legacy of historical memory, disappeared due to the disinterest and inertia of one of the Concertación governments.

It is to be hoped that the current government will react to protect one of the few sites of memory where the architecture of the former DINA facility remains with few modifications. If it does not, another Site of Memory will be lost, and one more step will be taken in the invisibilization of women in the anti-dictatorial resistance struggle.

By Pedro Alejandro Matta

Source: colegiodearqueologos.cl, August 16, 2019

39 former DINA agents sentenced for Operation Colombo

In a ruling known this Tuesday, the Santiago Court of Appeals sentenced 39 former agents of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) for their responsibility in the crime of aggravated kidnapping of the secondary student leader Héctor Marcial Garay Hermosilla.

The kidnapping was perpetrated on July 8, 1974, in the Ñuñoa district, and the victim was forcibly disappeared in the framework of the so-called Operation Colombo.

Garay Hermosilla was a 19-year-old student leader, a militant of the MIR, who was detained by DINA agents in the vicinity of his home. He was taken by his captors to the secret facility of Londres 38, from where his trail is lost.

You can also read: 36 former DINA agents sentenced for crimes against communist leaders

In the ruling (case file 174-2016), the Second Chamber of the capital's appellate court—composed of ministers María Soledad Melo, Rafael Andrade, and the acting lawyer María Cecilia Ramírez—sentenced former army officers César Raúl Manríquez Bravo, Pedro Octavio Espinoza Bravo, Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko, Raúl Eduardo Iturriaga Neumann, Gerardo Ernesto Urrich González, Sergio Hernán Castillo González, Manuel Andrés Carevic Cubillos, former Carabineros officers Gerardo Ernesto Godoy García, Ricardo Víctor Lawrence Mires, Ciro Ernesto Torré Sáez, and former agents Nelson Alberto Paz Bustamante, Rudeslindo Urrutia Jorquera, Pedro Ariel Araneda Araneda, Víctor Manuel Molina Astete, Máximo Ramón Aliaga Soto, Manuel de la Cruz Rivas Díaz, Risiere del Prado Altez España, Raúl Juan Rodríguez Ponte, Hermon Helec Alfaro Mundaca, Hugo del Tránsito Hernández Valle, Enrique Tránsito Gutiérrez Rubilar, José Alfonso Ojeda Obando, Fernando Enrique Guerra Guajardo, Juan Evaristo Duarte Gallegos to 10 years and one day in prison, as authors of the crime.

The Court reduced the sentence of Manríquez Bravo, Espinoza Bravo, Krassnoff Martchenko, and Iturriaga Neumann, who had been sentenced to 13 years in prison in the first instance.

Meanwhile, former agents Hiro Álvarez Vega, Olegario Enrique González Moreno, Hernán Patricio Valenzuela Salas, Juan Alfredo Villanueva Alvear, Lautaro Eugenio Díaz Espinoza, Leonidas Emiliano Méndez Moreno, Rafael de Jesús Riveros Frost, Gustavo Humberto Apablaza Meneses, Héctor Carlos Díaz Cabezas, Jorge Antonio Lepileo Barrios, Óscar Belarmino La Flor Flores, Rufino Espinoza Espinoza, Víctor Manuel Álvarez Droguett, Sergio Iván Díaz Lara, Roberto Hernán Rodríguez Manquel were sentenced to 4 years in prison, with the benefit of supervised release, as accomplices to the illicit act.

In August 2015, the first-instance ruling had been issued by judge Hernán Crisosto Greisse. In the current resolution of the Court, the criminals Marcelo Morén Brito, Sergio Hernán Castillo González, Basclay Zapata Reyes, Juan Ángel Urbina Cáceres, José Mario Friz Esparza, Gustavo Galvarino Carumán Soto, José Nelson Fuentealba Saldías, Claudio Orlando Orellana de la Pinta, Manuel Antonio Montré Méndez, Hugo Rubén Delgado Carrasco, Héctor Manuel Lira Aravena, and Víctor Manuel San Martín Jiménez were acquitted due to their deaths, which occurred between that ruling and the date of the hearing of the case.

The name of Héctor Marcial Garay Hermosilla appeared on a list of 119 people, published in the national press after it appeared on a list published in the Argentine magazine LEA, dated July 15, 1975, in which it was intended to make it believed that Héctor Marcial Garay Hermosilla had died in Argentina, along with 59 other people belonging to the MIR, due to internal quarrels that arose among those members.

The publications that declared the victim Garay Hermosilla and all 119 people dead had their origin in disinformation maneuvers carried out by DINA agents abroad.

Source: resumen.cl, June 5, 2020

When murderers walk the streets

The fugitive Daniel Cancino changed his physical appearance. He was photographed at ATMs. Ricardo Lawrence was also detected in the Metropolitan Region, while Rubén Fiedler reportedly left the country. They are being intensely sought by the PDI. Villa Grimaldi described the fact as a "mockery" and rejected the impunity they enjoy.

The Villa Grimaldi Peace Park Corporation denounced "as a mockery to the families of the forcibly disappeared and executed during the dictatorship, that two agents of the former National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), sentenced by the Supreme Court, are fugitives and are walking around Santiago."

Sources linked to the investigation informed www.villagrimaldi.cl that the fugitive Daniel Cancino Varas was detected in several places in the capital, with a different appearance (see attached photograph). This was the moment he went to ATMs.

Cancino, a former member of the Investigative Police, is sentenced to 10 years and one day in prison by the Supreme Court for the forced disappearance of 8 people from the former Villa Grimaldi torture and extermination center after being detained in 1975 in the Fifth Region.

For this same case, Rubén Fiedler Alvarado, a former Army officer, is sentenced to 5 years and one day in prison, who reportedly left the country.

Meanwhile, Ricardo Víctor Lawrence Mires, a former Carabineros officer, was sentenced by the Supreme Court on April 30 for the disappearance of Alfonso Chanfreau Oyarce from Londres 38 in 1974. Lawrence reportedly changed his "look" and uses a Mexican-style mustache. He obtains money at ATMs in Santiago.

Another fugitive sentenced by the country's highest court is Walter Klug Rivera, sentenced to 10 years and 1 day in prison for the disappearances and aggravated homicides of 23 workers from the El Toro and El Abanico hydroelectric plants in 1973.

On the other hand, Adriana Elcira Rivas González, accused of the disappearance of the General Secretary of the Communist Party, Víctor Díaz, fled the country and is in Australia, after receiving the benefit of conditional release with a national travel ban.

"The Villa Grimaldi Peace Park Corporation categorically rejects the impunity that these perpetrators of crimes against humanity enjoy today," it stated in a press release.

"These criminals cannot remain on conditional release until they are sentenced by the Supreme Court. We request the Executive and Judicial branches to have them sent to high-security prisons once the first-instance sentences are issued, as they are a danger to society," the entity pointed out.

"The fact of allowing them freedom until they are sentenced by the highest court has allowed them to enjoy impunity," concluded the statement from the entity that brings together families of 222 forcibly disappeared and political execution victims and survivors of political imprisonment and torture.

Source: infogate.cl, July 16, 2015

Operation Colombo: Justice sentences former DINA agents for the kidnapping of María Andreoli Bravo

The Santiago Court of Appeals sentenced four former members of the defunct National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) for the aggravated kidnapping of the secretary and nutrition and dietetics student María Angélica Andreoli Bravo, perpetrated starting in August 1974 in the framework of the so-called "Operation Colombo."

In a unanimous ruling, the Sixth Chamber of the appellate court—composed of ministers Marisol Rojas, Elsa Barrientos, and the acting lawyer Héctor Mery—sentenced agents Pedro Octavio Espinoza Bravo, Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko, and Raúl Eduardo Iturriaga Neumann to 13 years in prison, as authors of the crime. Meanwhile, César Manríquez Bravo must serve 10 years in prison as an author.

In the case of the agents: 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, 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 Carumán 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, 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, Manuel Rivas Díaz, Juan Ángel Urbina Cáceres, Risiere del Prado Altez España, Raúl Juan Rodríguez Ponte, Hermon Helec Alfaro Mundaca, Osvaldo Pulgar Gallardo, 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, Máximo Ramón Aliaga Soto, 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, Sergio Iván Díaz Lara, Víctor Manuel Álvarez Droguett, Carlos López Inostroza, and Roberto Hernán Rodríguez Manquel, they were acquitted of the charges.

In the investigation stage of the case, the visiting judge Hernán Crisosto Greisse established that: "in the afternoon of August 6, 1974, María Angélica Andreoli Bravo, a militant of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR), was detained at her home located at Bilbao N° 5989 in the Las Condes district, Santiago, by agents belonging to the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), who put her in the back of a pickup truck and transported her to the clandestine detention facility called 'Yucatán' or 'Londres 38', located at that address in the city of Santiago, which was guarded by armed guards and to which only DINA agents had access.

That the victim Andreoli Bravo, during her stay at the Londres 38 barracks, remained without contact with the outside, blindfolded and tied up, being continuously subjected to interrogations under torture by DINA agents who operated in said barracks, regarding her party activities and the name and address of her political group companions in order to proceed with the detention of its members, being seen also subjected to interrogations under torture at the DINA barracks called Villa Grimaldi.

That the last time the victim Andreoli Bravo was seen alive occurred on an undetermined day in the month of August or September 1974, and she remains disappeared to this date.

That the name of María Angélica Andreoli Bravo appeared on a list of 119 people, published in the national press after it appeared on a list published in the magazine Novo O’ Día of Curitiba, Brazil, dated June 25, 1975, in which it was reported that María Angélica Andreoli Bravo had died in Argentina, along with 58 other people belonging to the MIR, due to internal quarrels that arose among those members.

That the publications that declared the victim Andreoli Bravo dead had their origin in disinformation maneuvers carried out by DINA agents abroad."

Source: adprensa.cl, December 26, 2017

35 Pinochet-era agents sentenced for the disappearance of Reinalda Pereira

The Minister of the Santiago Court, Miguel Vázquez Plaza, confirmed this week the sentencing of 35 former members of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) for the aggravated kidnapping of Reinalda Pereira in 1976, who at that time was five months pregnant.

As reported by the Chilean media El Desconcierto, agents Pedro Octavio Espinoza Bravo, Juan Hernán Morales Salgado, and Ricardo Víctor Lawrence Mires were sentenced as authors of the crime to a 10-year prison term. 18 other implicated individuals were sentenced to seven years in prison, and 14 more individuals will serve four years in prison as accomplices.

Reinalda Pereira was 29 years old when she was kidnapped by Pinochet-era forces. She was a communist militant and worked as a medical technologist. In 1973, she was expelled for political reasons from the Sótero del Río Hospital, where she performed the aforementioned profession.

In December 1976, two men forced her into a car on the same day that several Communist Party militants were detained. Pereira was taken to the Army Railway Regiment while her husband, Maximiliano Santelices (also a communist militant), remained imprisoned at the National Stadium.

The Chilean Ministry of the Interior disseminated the false version that the detainee had fled to Argentina, crossing on foot through the Los Libertadores pass. Subsequently, the Third Criminal Court of Santiago opened an investigation that lasted more than 13 years.

In 1998, the former president of the Communist Party of Chile, Gladys Marín, filed a complaint that reopened the Pereira case along with that of 13 other disappeared communist militants. The former DINA agent Jorgelino Vergara Bravo, alias "el mocito," gave details to the justice system about the torture the military inflicted on Pereira.

In February 2007, Maximiliano Santelices died of cancer without ever knowing what happened to his wife, or if she managed to give birth to their child.

Source: carasycaretas.com.uy, October 20, 2017

Operation Colombo: 28 former DINA agents sentenced for aggravated kidnapping

The Santiago Court of Appeals sentenced 28 former agents of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) as authors of the crime of aggravated kidnapping of Teobaldo Antonio Tello Garrido, which was perpetrated on August 22, 1974, in the framework of the so-called Operation Colombo.

In a unanimous ruling, the Eighth Chamber of the appellate court sentenced César Manríquez Bravo, Pedro Octavio Espinoza Bravo, Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko, and Raúl Eduardo Iturriaga Neumann to 13 years in prison.

Meanwhile, Manuel Andrés Carevic Cubillos, Ricardo Víctor Lawrence Mires, Ciro Ernesto Torré Sáez, Gerardo Ernesto Godoy García, Nelson Alberto Paz Bustamante, Claudio Enrique Pacheco Fernández, Hermón Helec Alfaro Mundaca, José Ojeda Obando, Rosa Humilde Ramos Hernández, José Abel Aravena Ruiz, Teresa del Carmen Osorio Navarro, Pedro René Alfaro Fernández, Luis René Torres Méndez, Rodolfo Valentino Concha Rodríguez, Juan Ángel Urbina Cáceres, Jerónimo del Carmen Neira Méndez, Silvio Antonio Concha González, Palmira Isabel Almuna Guzmán, Leonidas Emiliano Méndez, Luis Rigoberto Videla Inzunza, Julio José Hoyos Zegarra, and Gerardo Ernesto Urrich González must serve 10 years in prison.

In the case of Víctor Manuel Álvarez Droguett and Samuel Enrique Fuenzalida Devia, they must serve 4 years and 541 days in prison, respectively.

"That the present case originated to investigate the circumstances of the forced disappearance of Teobaldo Antonio Tello Garrido, after having been detained by State agents belonging to the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) on August 22, 1974, and kept in the detention centers 'Ollagüe', 'Villa Grimaldi', and 'Cuatro Álamos', facilities that were guarded by armed guards.

Where Teobaldo Tello was the object of torture caused by agents of that agency, his whereabouts subsequently remaining unknown to this day," the ruling maintains.

The resolution adds that the crime constitutes a crime against humanity, "since aggravated kidnappings—termed by International Human Rights Law as 'forced disappearances'—are part of a generalized and systematic attack against a specific group of the civilian population, formed, in this case, by members and adherents of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR), a condition that the victim had at that time."

In the civil aspect, the sentence ordering the State to pay $80 million to the victim's family was confirmed.

Source: primeranota.cl, September 3, 2019

Justice prosecutes former members of the dissolved DINA for aggravated kidnapping of a PC militant

The presiding judge Leopoldo Llanos prosecuted this Tuesday the former members of the dissolved DINA for the aggravated kidnapping of the communist militant Marcelo Concha Bascuñán, an agricultural engineer, who was a detained-disappeared person since May 10, 1976, and who was seen at Villa Grimaldi.

In this way, the judge indicted: Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda, Juan Morales Salgado, Pedro Espinoza Bravo, Marcelo Moren Brito, Carlos López Tapia, Rolf Wenderoth Pozo, and Ricardo Lawrence Mires. The magistrate ordered the arrest and preventive detention of the prosecuted individuals who were free on bail in other cases, and others serving sentences at the Punta Peuco Penitentiary Center.

Source: theclinic.cl, October 30, 2013

Santiago Court sentences 17 former DINA agents for the aggravated kidnapping of Rodrigo Ugas Morales

The appellate court sentenced as authors of the crime: Pedro Espinoza Bravo, Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko, and Raúl Iturriaga Neumann to 13 years in prison; meanwhile, Rolf Wenderoth Pozo, Francisco Ferrer Lima, Ricardo Lawrence Mires, Ciro Torré Sáez, and Raúl Rodriguez Ponte, who must serve a punishment of 10 years and one day in prison.

In a unanimous ruling, the Santiago Court of Appeals sentenced 17 agents of the defunct National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) for their responsibility in the crime of aggravated kidnapping of Rodrigo Eduardo Ugás Morales, an illicit act committed starting February 7, 1975, in the framework of the so-called "Operation Colombo."

The appellate court sentenced as authors of the crime: Pedro Espinoza Bravo, Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko, and Raúl Iturriaga Neumann to 13 years in prison; meanwhile, Rolf Wenderoth Pozo, Francisco Ferrer Lima, Ricardo Lawrence Mires, Ciro Torré Sáez, and Raúl Rodriguez Ponte, who must serve a punishment of 10 years and one day in prison; agents Teresa Osorio Navarro and Osvaldo Pulgar Gallardo must serve 5 years and one day, and Samuel Fuenzalida Devia 541 days.

Likewise, the appellate court sentenced Rosa Ramos Hernández, José Abel Aravena Ruiz, Heriberto del Carmen Acevedo, Rodolfo Concha Rodríguez, Silvio Concha González, and Roberto Hernán Rodríguez Manquel to 3 years and one day in prison, for their responsibility as accomplices.

In the investigation stage of the case, the extraordinary visiting judge Hernán Crisosto Greisse established the following facts:

In the afternoon of February 7, 1975, members of the DINA detained Rodrigo Eduardo Ugas Morales, a militant of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR), on a public street in the Estación Central sector in Santiago, and transported him to the clandestine DINA detention facility called 'Cuartel Terranova' or 'Villa Grimaldi', located at Lo Arrieta N° 8200, in the La Reina district, which was guarded by armed guards and to which only DINA agents had access; That the victim Ugas Morales, during his stay at the Villa Grimaldi barracks, remained without contact with the outside, blindfolded and tied up, being continuously subjected to interrogations under torture by DINA agents who operated in said barracks with the purpose of obtaining information regarding members of the MIR, to proceed with the detention of the members of that organization;

That the last time the victim Ugas Morales was seen by other detainees occurred on an undetermined day in late February 1975, and he remains disappeared to this date;

That the name of Rodrigo Eduardo Ugas Morales appeared on a list of 119 people, published in the national press after it appeared on a list published in the Argentine magazine 'LEA', dated July 15, 1975, in which it was reported that Rodrigo Eduardo Ugas Morales had died in Argentina, along with 59 other people belonging to the MIR, due to internal quarrels that arose among those members;

That the publications that declared the victim Ugas Morales dead had their origin in disinformation maneuvers carried out by DINA agents abroad.

In the civil aspect, the State of Chile was ordered to pay a total compensation of $240,000,000 to the victim's spouse and children.

Source: diarioconstitucional.cl, April 23, 2020

Former DINA agents and health professionals sentenced for the homicide of an Army corporal in 1977

The Santiago Court of Appeals sentenced former agents of the Intelligence Directorate (DINA) and health professionals for the homicide of the Army corporal and also DINA member, Manuel Leyton Robles, an event that occurred in 1977.

The court, through a unanimous ruling, confirmed the sentence issued by visiting judge Alejandro Madrid regarding the crime of homicide, while simultaneously revoking the parts related to the crimes of kidnapping and illicit association.

Therefore, former DINA agents Vianel Valdivieso Cervantes and Ricardo Lawrence Mires, the latter linked to the disappearance of Alfonso Chanfreau and recently surrendered to justice, must serve 10 years and one day in prison as co-authors of the homicide.

Meanwhile, Juan Morales Salgado must serve a sentence of 5 years and one day in prison as an accomplice.

Likewise, doctor Pedro Samuel Valdivia Soto and nurse Gladys de las Mercedes Calderón Carreño were sentenced to 3 years and one day, but were granted the benefit of supervised release for that period.

For his part, doctor Hernán Horacio Taricco Lavín must serve the commuted sentence of 541 days in prison. All the aforementioned health personnel were sentenced as accessories to the crime.

In the same vein, Vittorio Orvieto Tiplitzky, Hernán Sovino Maturana, Juan Morales Salgado, Ricardo Lawrence Mires, and Vianel Valdivieso Cervantes were acquitted of the crimes of illicit association and kidnapping, as the facts of the accusation that identified them as authors were not established.

The ruling points out that "the same happens partially with the qualification of the same, constitutive, in the opinion of this Court, of the crime of aggravated homicide provided for and punished in article 391 N° 1, circumstances first and fifth of the Penal Code, disagreeing with the qualification of the crimes of illicit association and kidnapping for the reasons that will be extensively expressed in this sentence."

"The mere presence of the indicated individuals, with the common decision to execute typical acts against the same legal interests, implies a plurality of authors or participants in the common criminal acts, but which does not have to mean the application of a criminal plan to be developed in accordance with requirements or standards such as those of a criminal organization or association," the text points out.

According to the document, the above "prevents noticing, in the case at hand, the presence of such requirements that would allow sustaining the figure of illicit association, the mere convergence of actions that, when concatenated, lead to an end, not even clear to all those who intervene in it, being insufficient for this purpose."

Source: biobiochile.cl, January 27, 2020

CUT and victims' families repudiate judicial ruling granting supervised release to 9 former DINA agents and acquitting 8 others

"Aberrant and devastating."

That is how the victims' families described the ruling of the Fourth Chamber of the Appellate Court of the Santiago Court of Appeals, which ordered the reduction of the sentences of 17 former agents of the National Intelligence Directorate (the brutal DINA) involved—as authors or accomplices—in the case labeled as "aggravated kidnapping" of 16 people and one homicide, acts perpetrated in 1976 at the sinister Simón Bolívar barracks.

In the press release from the Judiciary, which reports on the ruling adopted last Thursday, April 9, it is stated:

"...the Fourth Chamber of the appellate court—composed of ministers Juan Cristóbal Mera, Mireya López, and the acting lawyer Cristián Lepín—sentenced agents Ricardo Lawrence Mires and Jorge Andrade Gómez to sentences of 3 years and one day in prison, for their responsibility in the 16 cases of aggravated kidnapping, plus 541 days in prison, with the benefit of supervised release, for their responsibility in the crime of simple homicide.

Meanwhile, Juan Morales Salgado, Ciro Torré Sáez, Sergio Orlando Escalona Acuña, Juvenal Piña Garrido, Jorge Díaz Radulovich, Gustavo Guerrero Aguilera, and Gladys Calderón Carreño were sentenced to 3 years and one day in prison, with the benefit of supervised release, as authors of the crime of aggravated kidnapping." And regarding:

"Agents Pedro Espinoza Bravo, Rolf Wenderoth Pozo, Pedro Bitterlich Jaramillo, Claudio Enrique Pacheco Fernández, Orlando Jesús Torrejón Gatica, Orlando Altamirano Sanhueza, Carlos Eusebio López Inostroza, and Hermon Helec Alfaro Mundaca were acquitted.

The Santiago Court reduced the sentence by accepting the figure of partial statute of limitations in the case of aggravated kidnappings and reclassifying aggravated homicide to simple homicide."

Through a public letter, the families of: Luis Emilio Recabarren González, Manuel Guillermo Recabarren González, Rosa Mena Alvarado, Manuel Segundo Recabarren Rojas, Clara Canteros Torres, Alejandro Rodríguez Urzúa, Daniel Palma Robledo, Carlos Godoy Lagarrigue, Iván Insunza Bascu

The minister for extraordinary cases of human rights violations at the Santiago Court of Appeals, Miguel Vázquez Plaza, issued a first-instance sentence in the investigation into the kidnapping and qualified homicide of teacher Marta Lidia Ugarte Román, whose body was found on La Ballena beach, in the Los Molles sector, on September 12, 1976.

In the resolution (case file 2182-1998), Minister Vázquez issued convictions against the following 28 state agents for their responsibility in the crimes perpetrated between August and September 1976. Most of those convicted were agents and high-ranking officials of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), and the others were members of the Army Aviation Command, the organization responsible for the execution of the so-called "death flights."

Carlos José Leonardo López Tapia, former Army colonel and head of the Villa Grimaldi torture center at the time of the events, was sentenced to 12 years in prison, in addition to the legal accessory penalties of absolute perpetual disqualification from public office and political rights, and absolute disqualification from professional practice for the duration of the sentence; and to the payment of court costs, as the perpetrator of the crime of qualified homicide.

Ricardo Víctor Lawrence Mires, former Carabineros lieutenant colonel and head of the Águila Group of the DINA's Caupolicán Brigade (currently a fugitive from justice), was sentenced to 12 years in prison, in addition to the legal accessory penalties of absolute perpetual disqualification from public office and political rights, and absolute disqualification from professional practice for the duration of the sentence; and to the payment of court costs, as the perpetrator of the crime of qualified homicide.

He must also serve 4 years in prison as the perpetrator of the crime of simple kidnapping.

Carlos Oscar Gregorio Evaristo Mardones Díaz, former Army colonel and head of the aviation command that carried out the "death flights," was sentenced to 8 years in prison, in addition to the legal accessory penalties of absolute perpetual disqualification from public office and political rights, and absolute disqualification from professional practice for the duration of the sentence; and to the payment of court costs, as an accomplice to the crime of qualified homicide.

Antonio Palomo Contreras, former Army brigadier, and Luis Felipe Polanco Gallardo, former Army major, members of the aviation command, were both sentenced to 5 years in prison, in addition to the legal accessory penalties of absolute perpetual disqualification from public office and political rights, and absolute disqualification from professional practice for the duration of the sentence; and to the payment of court costs, as accessories to the crime of qualified homicide.

Pedro Octavio Espinoza Bravo, former Army brigadier, imprisoned in Punta Peuco for numerous other convictions for crimes against humanity, was sentenced to 4 years in prison, in addition to the legal accessory penalties of absolute perpetual disqualification from political rights and absolute disqualification from public office for the duration of the sentence; and to the payment of court costs, as the perpetrator of the crime of simple kidnapping.

Heriberto del Carmen Acevedo and Claudio Enrique Pacheco Fernández, former Carabineros non-commissioned officers, were both sentenced to 10 years and one day in prison, in addition to the legal accessory penalties of absolute perpetual disqualification from public office and political rights, and absolute disqualification from professional practice for the duration of the sentence; and to the payment of court costs, as co-perpetrators of the crime of qualified homicide.

Additionally, they must serve 2 years in prison as perpetrators of the crime of simple kidnapping.

Emilio Hernán Troncoso Vivallos, former Carabineros non-commissioned officer, was sentenced to 5 years and one day in prison, in addition to the legal accessory penalties of absolute perpetual disqualification from public office and political rights, and absolute disqualification from professional practice for the duration of the sentence; and to the payment of court costs, as a co-perpetrator of the crime of qualified homicide.

Additionally, one year in prison as the perpetrator of the crime of simple kidnapping.

Meanwhile, agents Eugenio Jesús Fieldhouse Chávez, Pedro Mora Villanueva, José Alfonso Ojeda Obando, Juvenal Alfonso Piña Garrido, Víctor Manuel Álvarez Droguett, José Mario Friz Esparza, Pedro Segundo Bitterlich Jaramillo, Orlando del Tránsito Altamirano Sanhueza, Eduardo Patricio Cabezas Mardones, Jorge Iván Díaz Radulovich, Guillermo Eduardo Díaz Ramírez, Orlando Jesús Torrejón Gatica, Carlos Enrique Miranda Mesa, and Carlos Eusebio López Inostroza were sentenced to one year in prison, in addition to the legal accessory penalties of suspension from public office for the duration of the sentence; and to the payment of court costs, as co-perpetrators of the crime of simple kidnapping.

Furthermore, agents José Javier Soto Torres, Jerónimo del Carmen Neira Méndez, Roberto Hernán Rodríguez Manquel, Leónidas Emiliano Méndez Moreno, and José Domingo Seco Alarcón were sentenced to 61 days in prison, in addition to the legal accessory penalties of suspension from public office for the duration of the sentence; and to the payment of court costs, as accomplices to the crime of simple kidnapping.

Meanwhile, agents Jorge Segundo Madariaga Acevedo, José Nelson Fuentealba Saldías, Hugo Hernán Clavería Leiva, Raúl Alberto Soto Pérez, and Juan Carlos Escobar Valenzuela were acquitted due to a lack of participation in the events.

During the investigation stage, Minister Vázquez managed to establish the following facts:

1.- That Marta Lidia Ugarte Román was a militant of the Communist Party of Chile and a member of the Central Committee of that organization, working in the Party's organization during 1976.

2.- That, as a consequence of the military coup of September 11, 1973, she went into hiding because she was sought by intelligence services, living with Elvira Solari Ahumada at the address Callejón Lo Ovalle No. 908 in the commune of La Cisterna, where she had been residing since the aforementioned month of September 1973 for security reasons, given her political militancy.

3.- That, on August 9, 1976, Marta Ugarte Román left the Callejón Lo Ovalle residence around 3:00 PM, heading to the office of Dr. Iván Insunza, located on Vicuña Mackenna, to treat an infection in her leg resulting from a dog bite.

On the way, she met Héctor Acela (now deceased), with whom she walked along Avenida Vicuña Mackenna toward Avenida Matta. He warned her that something strange was happening in the area and that it seemed to be under surveillance, but she insisted on continuing her journey, unaware that Dr. Iván Insunza had already been detained by intelligence services.

4.- That agents of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), belonging to the Purén Brigade, whose immediate objective was the tracking, location, and detention of Communist Party militants, proceeded to arrest her without any warrant at Dr.

Insunza's office, as he had been previously detained for his communist affiliation and the office was being monitored by security agencies. She was then taken to the organization's clandestine detention center, known as Villa Grimaldi or Terranova, where she was kept deprived of liberty, interrogated, and subjected to physical duress, being recognized and identified by other detainees who were in the same place at that time.

5.- That the political authorities of the time, belonging to the Ministry of the Interior and the DINA itself, officially denied the detention of Marta Ugarte Román and any knowledge of her whereabouts.

6.- That, while deprived of liberty, she was taken out into the street by agents in order to identify other militants and supporters of the Communist Party, being seen in one of these operations at a residence on Calle Constitución in the commune of Santiago, where party meetings were held.

7.- That, approximately on September 9, 1976, Marta Ugarte Román was transported along with other detainees from the Villa Grimaldi facility to the town of Peldehue by DINA operational agents, where she was killed.

Her body was covered with a sack and tied with wire around her neck, then loaded onto a Puma helicopter of the Army Aviation Command, whose crew consisted of a pilot, co-pilot, a flight mechanic, and a DINA operational agent. The aircraft took off toward the coast, flew out to sea, and then dropped her body into the high seas from a high altitude.

8.- That, on September 12, 1976, on La Ballena beach in the town of Los Molles, the body of Marta Lidia Ugarte Román was found lifeless by Marcel Dupré David, presenting only a piece of cloth and a piece of wire tied around her neck, which had been severed, with clear signs of having been subjected to physical duress; she also showed signs of needle marks on her arms.

The body was taken to the hospital in La Ligua and then to the Legal Medical Service in Santiago for the corresponding autopsies. The first report, dated September 14, 1976, concluded a violent death under homicidal circumstances, where the direct cause of death was polytraumatism and luxofracture of the spine on September 9, 1976; the second expert report, dated October 22, 1976, concluded that the cause of death was thoraco-abdomino-pelvic trauma, and an expansion dated February 22, 2010, determined that the final event leading to her death was asphyxiation by strangulation with wire.

9.- That the Army Aviation Command had its operations center at the Tobalaba airfield, among others, for the flight of Puma helicopters, which had greater flight and transport capacity, and for whose deployment authorization from the highest Army authorities was required, as it was necessary to assign at least the pilots, co-pilots, and mechanics who were to form the flight crew in advance.

These aircraft were used institutionally and regularly, in conjunction with the DINA, for several years to dispose of the bodies of people detained in the various detention centers of said organization, who were taken directly to the Tobalaba airfield or taken to the Peldehue Regiment, to then take flight to the high seas, where they were thrown into the ocean.

Source: resumen.cl, July 1, 2016

18 former dictatorship agents convicted for the murder of teacher Marta Ugarte

"It was sufficiently proven that state agents acted with the precise objective of detaining the victim, without a prior warrant and exclusively for political reasons, the act being executed in the context of a policy of repression and disappearance of a person for their thinking, with the state authority refusing to provide any information regarding the detention and the destination of that person, which is an attack against the human person," the judicial decision argues.

This Monday, the decision of the Supreme Court was made official, confirming the conviction of 18 former dictatorship agents for the kidnapping and murder in 1976 of the PC militant teacher, Marta Ugarte Román, following the rejection of the cassation appeals filed against the previous ruling, reports the Judiciary.

In the sentence, the Second Chamber of the high court ruled out any error of law in the conviction of Ricardo Lawrence Mires, Heriberto del Carmen Acevedo, and Claudio Pacheco Fernández to 15 years in prison as perpetrators of qualified homicide and 10 years in prison as perpetrators of qualified kidnapping.

Regarding Pedro Espinoza Bravo, José Ojeda Obando, Juvenal Piña Garrido, Víctor Manuel Álvarez Droguett, Orlando Altamirano Sanhueza, Guillermo Díaz Ramírez, Jorge Díaz Radulovich, Orlando Torrejón Gatica, Carlos Miranda Mesa, and Carlos López Inostroza, they received a sentence of 10 years in prison as perpetrators of qualified kidnapping.

For his part, Carlos Mardones Díaz was sentenced to eight years in prison as an accomplice, while Luis Polanco Gallardo was sentenced to five years in prison as an accessory to qualified homicide.

Leónidas Méndez Romero and José Seco Alarcón must serve a sentence of five years in prison as accomplices to qualified kidnapping, and Emilio Troncoso Vivallos was sentenced to four years in prison as an accomplice to qualified kidnapping.

Details of the ruling

The sentence ended by ruling out any error of law in the decision that established that Marta Ugarte Román was detained and murdered for political reasons, specifically for her militancy in the Communist Party.

"It concerns the detention of a person and subsequent homicide, whose motivations were of a political nature, for the sole circumstance of belonging to a political conglomerate that had been decided to be combated drastically, by state agents in an organization—the National Intelligence Directorate—that had an entire structure, specifically for the persecution, location, and detention of Communist Party members and, in their case, making them disappear, as they were treated as enemies of the country," the court's decision argues.

And it subsequently adds that "it was sufficiently proven that state agents acted with the precise objective of detaining the victim, without a prior warrant and exclusively for political reasons, the act being executed in the context of a policy of repression and disappearance of a person for their thinking, with the state authority refusing to provide any information regarding the detention and the destination of that person, which is an attack against the human person."

In parallel, the national justice system established that the partial statute of limitations does not apply to reduce the sentence as it is a crime against humanity.

The case Regarding the case, the site Memoria Viva details that on August 9, 1976, DINA agents detained Marta Ugarte. According to the account of witnesses, the teacher was detained at Villa Grimaldi, where she subsequently died as a consequence of the torture she received.

After the crime, those responsible threw her into the sea, where she was found semi-naked and inside a sack tied to her neck with a wire, on September 9 of that year on La Ballena beach, in Los Molles.

The autopsy report confirms that while alive, Ugarte suffered a luxofracture of the spine, thoraco-abdominal trauma with multiple rib fractures, rupture and bursting of the liver and spleen, dislocation of both shoulders and hip, and a double fracture in the right forearm. Her date of death corresponds to September 9 of that year.

Source: eldesconcierto.cl, November 29, 2021

Santiago Court confirms ruling convicting 30 DINA agents for the qualified kidnapping of a pregnant young woman

The appellate court confirmed the sentence that convicted 30 agents of the defunct National Intelligence Directorate for their responsibility in the crime of qualified kidnapping of Reinalda del Carmen Pereira Plaza.

A 29-year-old woman, five months pregnant, who was detained on December 15, 1976, in the current commune of Macul and taken to the clandestine detention barracks located at Calle Simón Bolívar No. 8800, commune of La Reina, from where her trail is lost.

The Santiago Court of Appeals confirmed the sentence that convicted 30 agents of the defunct National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) for their responsibility in the crime of qualified kidnapping of Reinalda del Carmen Pereira Plaza.

A 29-year-old woman, five months pregnant, who was detained on December 15, 1976, in the current commune of Macul and taken to the clandestine detention barracks located at Calle Simón Bolívar No. 8800, commune of La Reina, from where her trail is lost.

In the sentence (case file 3.023-2019), the Sixth Chamber of the appellate court—composed of ministers María Rosa Kittsteiner, María Paula Merino, and Paula Rodríguez—ratified the sentence that convicted Pedro Espinoza Bravo, Juan Morales Salgado, and Ricardo Lawrence Mires to 10 years in prison as perpetrators of the crime.

Meanwhile, as co-perpetrators, Gladys Calderón Carreño, Juvenal Piña Garrido, Héctor Valdebenito Araya, Sergio Escalona Acuña, Jorge Manríquez Manterola, María Angélica Guerrero Soto, Orfa Saavedra Vásquez, Elisa Magna Astudillo, Heriberto del Carmen Acevedo, Claudio Pacheco Fernández, Emilio Troncoso Vivallos, Teresa Navarro Navarro, José Manuel Sarmiento Sotelo, Gustavo Guerrero Aguilera, and Jorge Arriagada Mora must serve 7 years in prison.

In the case of José Alfonso Ojeda Obando, José Miguel Meza Serrano, Jorge Iván Díaz Radulovich, Jorge Segundo Pichunmán Curiqueo, Sergio Hernán Castro Andrade, Carlos Enrique Miranda Mesa, Víctor Manuel Álvarez Droguett, Orlando del Tránsito Altamirano Sanhueza, Guillermo Eduardo Díaz Ramírez, Bertha Yolanda del Carmen Jiménez Escobar, Carlos Eusebio López Inostroza, and Joyce Ana Ahumada Despouy, they must serve sentences of 4 years as accomplices.

The appellate court adopted the background information that allowed the visiting minister Miguel Vázquez Plaza to establish the responsibility and participation of the then-state agents convicted in the kidnapping and disappearance of the medical technologist.

"That, in this course, the reasoning in the sentence under review is shared, for the purpose of establishing the participation of those convicted, insofar as the evidentiary background outlined in the sentence under appeal, in the fourteenth grounds against Espinoza Bravo, seventeenth against Morales Salgado, twentieth against Lawrence Mires, twenty-ninth against Calderón Carreño, thirty-second against Piña Garrido, forty-first against Valdebenito Araya, forty-fourth against Escalona Acuña, forty-seventh against Manríquez Manterola, sixty-fifth against Saavedra Vásquez, sixty-eighth against Magna Astudillo, seventy-first against Oyarce Riquelme, seventy-fourth against Acevedo, seventy-seventh against Pacheco Fernández, eightieth against Troncoso Vivallos, eighty-sixth against Navarro Navarro, ninety-fifth against Sarmiento Sotelo, one hundred and seventh against Guerrero Aguilera, and one hundred and twenty-second against Arriagada Mora, constitute a set of judicial presumptions which, given their multiplicity, gravity, precision, and concordance, and for meeting the legal requirements provided for in Article 488 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, allow for the accreditation of the participation that, as co-perpetrators, in the terms provided for in Article 15 No. 1 of the Penal Code, is attributed to them, in accordance with the reasoning in the fifteenth, eighteenth, twenty-first, thirtieth, thirty-third, forty-second, forty-fifth, forty-eighth, sixty-sixth, sixty-ninth against Magna Astudillo, seventy-second, seventy-fifth, seventy-seventh, eighty-first, eighty-seventh, ninety-fifth, one hundred and seventh, and one hundred and twenty-third grounds respectively, and which is complemented by the reasoning in the one hundred and seventy-third, one hundred and seventy-eighth, one hundred and eighty-second, one hundred and eighty-sixth, one hundred and eighty-ninth, one hundred and ninety-fifth, one hundred and ninety-seventh, two hundred and third, two hundred and sixth, and two hundred and tenth foundations," it is detailed.

The resolution adds that: "On this point, it should be specified that the participation as a co-perpetrator attributed to Juan Morales Salgado fits fully into the provisions of Article 15 No. 1 of the Penal Code, since he acted under the direct orders of Manuel Contreras and was in charge of the Simón Bolívar barracks at the time of the events, corresponding to him in that capacity to coordinate the operational work of the brigades that acted under his command, especially in relation to the dismantling of the Communist Party, assigning personnel under his charge for this purpose, directing the investigation work, and receiving the corresponding reports, arranging for the entry and retention of detainees in the unit, as well as the interrogations and torture to which they were subjected and, in their case, their death and disappearance, establishing that he was present during the interrogation and torture of the victim of these proceedings, which determines that he intervened in an immediate and direct manner in the events, so his conduct implies a functional contribution to the global result, maintaining, together with the other perpetrators, the co-dominion of the act."

"For its part, the attribution of responsibility as a co-perpetrator, in the terms provided for in Article 15 No. 1 of the Penal Code, which is imputed to the accused María Angélica Guerrero Soto, is established by virtue of her confession in accordance with the provisions of Article 482 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, which is corroborated by the merit of the background information indicated in the fifty-seventh foundation of the appealed sentence, to which is added the reasoning in the one hundred and ninety-third motivation," the ruling adds.

"That, in the same sense—it continues—, it adheres to what is indicated in the sentence under study, insofar as the indications indicated in the thirty-fifth grounds against Ojeda Obando, fiftieth against Meza Serrano, fifty-third against Lagos Yáñez, fifty-ninth against Díaz Radulovich, sixty-second against Pichunmán Curiqueo, eighty-third against Castro Andrade, ninety-eighth against Miranda Mesa, one hundred and first against Álvarez Droguett, one hundred and fourth against Altamirano Sanhueza, one hundred and thirteenth against Díaz Ramírez, one hundred and twenty-fifth against Jiménez Escobar, one hundred and thirty-fourth against López Inostroza, and one hundred and forty-third against Ahumada Despouy, gather the necessary strength to configure judicial presumptions, which, given their multiplicity, gravity, precision, and concordance, allow for the accreditation of the participation attributed to them as accomplices, in accordance with the provisions of Article 16 of the Penal Code, according to the reasoning in the thirty-sixth, fifty-first, fifty-fourth, sixtieth, sixty-third, eighty-fourth, ninety-ninth, one hundred and second, one hundred and fifth, one hundred and fourteenth, one hundred and twenty-sixth, one hundred and thirty-fifth, and one hundred and forty-fourth foundations, respectively, to which are added the one hundred and seventy-first, one hundred and seventy-ninth, one hundred and eighty-seventh, one hundred and ninety-eighth, two hundredth, two hundred and fourth, and two hundred and eighth reasonings of the ruling."

For the appellate court, in this case: "(...) as indicated, it has been sufficiently demonstrated that all the defendants were part of an organized structure under subordination and dependency, in which those who exercised management duties and operational personnel coexisted, dedicated both to investigation and to the detention, custody, interrogation, torture, and, in their case, death and disappearance of the detainees, in which one observes, on the one hand, the division of roles typical of co-perpetration, since all of them made a functional contribution to the execution of the crime, each of them having the co-dominion of the act and, on the other, a facilitation of the means with which the crime is committed, thus cooperating in the act of another, by prior or simultaneous acts, which is what characterizes complicity."

"In that understanding, contrary to what the defenses indicate in the courtroom in support of their appeals, it is convenient to specify that the convicted are not punished merely for belonging to the institution, but for the conduct displayed by each one in relation to the events that concern the victim of these records, Ms.

Reinalda Pereira Plaza, which also leads to ruling out the intervention of those accused with respect to whom, despite having been established that they were part of the same institution and performed functions in the property located at Simón Bolívar No. 8.800 in La Reina, their punishable participation in any of the forms provided for by law has not been proven." It concludes.

Detention and disappearance

In the appealed ruling, visiting minister Miguel Vázquez Plaza established the following facts:

a) That the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), on an unspecified date, but during the first semester of 1976, occupied and enabled a property at Calle Simón Bolívar No. 8800, commune of La Reina, consisting of a country house, which was conditioned for its purpose of confinement.

It had a single access gate, a guard booth to its right where the door guard was kept, a house at the back, a baby soccer field, parking lots, and on the left side of the property a kind of gymnasium where there was a canteen, kitchen, and some dressing rooms and bathrooms, which were conditioned to be used as dungeons, a property in which the Lautaro brigade under the command of Major Juan Morales Salgado operated and which was occupied as a secret and clandestine place of confinement; people were brought to said facility as detainees, to be interrogated under the use of various techniques of physical duress, especially regarding those who had or had had political militancy adhering to the Communist Party.

b) That likewise, in the second semester of 1976, the DINA groups under the command of officers Germán Barriga and Ricardo Lawrence moved to said facility, together with their operational agents, who were fundamentally concerned with investigating, locating, raiding, persecuting, repressing, and dismantling the members of the Communist Party, especially its leadership, for which provisional dependencies were enabled for their installation; consisting of offices, a gymnasium, and dressing rooms that were confinement dungeons, where interrogations and torture were carried out, using duress with various methods.

c) That Reinalda del Carmen Pereira Plaza, pregnant with her first child, 5 months into her pregnancy, medical technologist and communist militant, who worked sheltering people and as a liaison between Eliana Ahumada and Fernando Navarro, although also related to the communist militant Fernando Ortiz, was detained at 29 years of age, approximately at 8:30 PM, while waiting for public transport, by security agents on December 15, 1976, at the corner of Calle Exequiel Fernández and Rodrigo de Araya, commune of Ñuñoa, currently the commune of Macul.

The agents who detained her were traveling in two Peugeot brand cars; one of them with license plate HLN-55, from which a subject got out who took her violently; upon her screaming for help, a second subject got out with whom she was subdued by force and taken inside the vehicle.

The detention was materialized in the presence of witnesses who were in the various surrounding commercial premises, who report that once the victim was subdued and the detention materialized, the car headed north along Rodrigo de Araya.

d) That Reinalda del Carmen Pereira Plaza was taken to the secret detention barracks Simón Bolívar, where she was seen together with other detainees who, in turn, had been detained by the same brigades under the same operational policy between December 13 and 15, 1976; that is, Héctor Véliz Ramírez, Fernando Navarro Allendes, Lincoyán Yalu Berríos Cataldo, Juan Fernando Ortiz Letelier, and Horacio Cepeda Marincovich.

In this place, Reinalda was severely beaten, tortured, illegitimately coerced, and then made to disappear, without any news of her whereabouts to date.

e) That the Chilean government of the time, given the search efforts carried out by her relatives, reported that the affected person had registered an exit "on foot" through the Chile-Argentina border crossing Los Libertadores, on December 21, 1976, an official version that was judicially established as false, as stated in the process held in view, case file Rol 2-77, in which it was verified that the route sheet that recorded said circumstances had been falsified.

f) That the victim of these records was detained on public roads just like thirteen other people in similar circumstances; eleven belonging to the Communist Party and two to the MIR and, where the information provided by the Military Government was similar and erroneous, demonstrating a large-scale operation that obeyed a policy of investigation, persecution, and dismantling of the Communist Party and not an isolated event.

g) That all the people mentioned above, including the victim, were detained to be interrogated and tortured by reason of their political militancy and, in order to obtain information about their party activities and the identification of other members of the Communist Party in hiding; duress that did not cease until the required information was obtained or until the victims became unconscious.

Source: pjud.cl, March 4, 2022

Criminal Ricardo Lawrence Mires, former DINA high-ranking official, dies

Yesterday, the death of the criminal imprisoned in the Colina 1 prison, former Carabineros officer and former high-ranking official of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), Ricardo Víctor Lawrence Mires, sentenced to life imprisonment for dozens of cases for crimes against humanity, was made public. By Darío Núñez

The former DINA high-ranking official was part of the repressive organization from the beginning of the extermination apparatus created by Pinochet and his right-hand man, Manuel Contreras. The then-Carabineros lieutenant began his criminal activities in the so-called Cuartel Uno, which operated in the basements of the Plaza de la Constitución itself, then continued in functions in the secret barracks installed at Londres 38.

From this facility, already forming part of the DINA's Caupolicán Brigade, under the assumed name of "Julio Goren" and the alias of "Cachete Grande," he continued at Villa Grimaldi where he took charge of the Águila Group or "Los Guatones" of the aforementioned repressive brigade.

In these facilities and criminal functions, Lawrence Mires concentrated his repression actions on the militants of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) who tried to oppose the dictatorship and organize resistance to the regime, being directly responsible for the kidnapping and disappearance of hundreds of forcibly disappeared people.

Later, Lawrence Mires's repressive group had its extermination objectives expanded, unleashing repression on the militants of the Communist Party who operated in hiding. In 1976, he moved with his operational group to the Simón Bolívar Barracks, where dozens of crimes against people of that political group were committed, who were detained and subsequently disappeared.

Lawrence Mires's repressive actions continued later at the Venecia barracks and the Malloco barracks, always in charge of the Águila group, expanded and transformed into the Delfín group commanded by the former Army officer, Germán Jorge Barriga Muñoz, who committed suicide in 2005 to escape the action of justice.

The criminal Ricardo Lawrence Mires was serving a sentence in more than 35 cases of crimes against humanity, which totaled more than 400 years in prison. However, and given the slowness of judicial cases for human rights reasons, it was only in 2014 that some of the cases began to close with final sentences.

From that same moment, the criminal declared himself a fugitive from justice, receiving a salary from the State due to his status as a former Carabineros officer (with the rank of retired lieutenant colonel), making use of perks, but a fugitive from justice so as not to comply with court resolutions.

This subject maintained his unusual status as a fugitive until January 2020, the date on which he turned himself in to be able to continue with his health treatments. The criminal's death occurred in a hospital facility where he had been transferred from the penitentiary prison, as Lawrence Mires suffered from a terminal illness.

That is to say, he did not manage to serve even three years of effective prison. To the 35 final convictions, another 11 cases that are still in the investigation stage are added, another 74 that already had first-instance sentences, and another 25 with second-instance sentences, which accumulate in the Courts of Tribunals without any sense of timeliness or respect for the duty that justice is supposed to have, producing effects of impunity for these criminals against humanity.

Source: resumen.cl, December 2, 2022

These are the 17 DINA agents benefited by the Santiago Court of Appeals in the case of the disappearance of 17 communist leaders in

Among those implicated in the crime is the former Army brigadier, Pedro Espinoza, deputy director of Augusto Pinochet's repression agency in the 70s. On the list appear agents linked to the Lautaro Brigade, one of the most feared of the time.

Indignation was caused in some people by the ruling of the Santiago Court of Appeals that acquitted and reduced the sentence of 17 former agents of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) of the dictatorship, which operated between 1973 and 1977.

Specifically, the instance composed of ministers Juan Cristóbal Mera Muñoz, Mireya López Miranda, and the integrating lawyer Cristián Lepín Molina, acquitted seven DINA agents for the case of the disappearance of 16 people and the murder of a 17th, events that occurred in 1976, who were last seen at the Villa Grimaldi detention center.

The victims are the following militants and leaders of the Communist Party: Luis Emilio Recabarren González, Manuel Guillermo Recabarren González, Nalvia Mena Alvarado, Manuel Segundo Recabarren Rojas, Clara Canteros Torres, Alejandro Rodríguez Urzúa, Daniel Palma Robledo, Carlos Enrique Godoy Lagarrigue, Iván Sergio Insunza Bascuñán, José Eduardo Santander Miranda, Mario Jesús Juica Vega, Víctor Hugo Morales Mazuela, Carlos Mario Vizcarra Cofré, Miguel Nazal Quiroz, Juan Aurelio Villarroel Zárate, Julio Roberto Vega Vega, and Eduardo Canteros Prado (the only one not disappeared).

In view of this controversy, INTERFERENCIA investigated the criminal curriculum of these state agents who at the time were part of the torture, disappearance, and homicide machine, which systematically violated human rights fundamentally in the 70s. Most of those benefited are involved in other cases of similar characteristics, so they will continue in prison.

The acquitted 1. Pedro Espinoza Bravo. Former Army brigadier and former deputy director of DINA. He was convicted for the murder of former foreign minister Orlando Letelier, the former commander-in-chief of the Army, General Carlos Prats, and the Spanish diplomat Carmelo Soria.

He was part of the Caravan of Death and the material author of the murders of American journalists Charles Horman Lazar and Frank Randall Teruggi Bombatch. He also received convictions in France for "kidnapping accompanied by torture and acts of barbarism," in the cases of French citizens Jorge Klein, Etienne Pesle, Alfonso Chanfreau, and Jean Yves Claudet.

The Santiago Court of Appeals acquitted Espinoza exclusively of the crimes committed at the detention and torture center, Villa Grimaldi. "There is no evidence that he led any brigade that operated in Villa Grimaldi, much less the Delfín group, during the year 1976, which is what matters for these purposes," the ruling reads.

Specifically, he is exempted from responsibility in the kidnapping and disappearance of 17 victims, carried out through the so-called Delfín group in 1976.

2. Rolf Wenderoth Pozo. Former Army colonel and deputy director of Internal Intelligence of DINA. He was part of the Mulchén Brigade, known for the use of sarin gas in several murders and for being responsible for the murder of Carmelo Soria.

Wenderoth was the liaison agent for Luz Arce, a member of President Salvador Allende's GAP, who was turned during torture to become a DINA agent, and was part of the teams in charge of the Villa Grimaldi and Belgrano detention and torture centers.

3. Hermón Alfaro Mundaca. Former PDI commissioner, DINA agent. He was part of Villa Grimaldi from 1975 and was prosecuted along with 97 other agents for the disappearance of 41 people, in the context of the Operation Colombo Case and the Case of the 119, an information intoxication operation of the dictatorship in collusion with El Mercurio and La Tercera, to hide disappearances.

To this case corresponds the famous headline of La Segunda of July 24: "Exterminated like rats."

4. Pedro Bitterlich Jaramillo. Former Army non-commissioned officer, DINA agent. He was part of the Lautaro Brigade, which—among other criminal missions—was in charge of the Death Flights, through which DINA disposed of the bodies of its victims using Army Puma helicopters.

To this operation corresponds the case of Marta Lidia Ugarte Román, a victim of a death flight, but whose body was returned by the sea, a case for which Bitterlich was convicted as one of the perpetrators of qualified kidnapping, along with Pedro Espinoza and several other agents.

He was also implicated in the cases known as Operation Colombo, Calle Conferencia I and II (destined for the extermination of the Communist Party leadership), and Operation Condor (in which the repressive agencies of several Southern Cone dictatorships colluded to commit and cover up crimes beyond their borders).

5. Claudio Pacheco Fernández. Former Carabineros non-commissioned officer, DINA agent. He was also part of the Lautaro Brigade. He was implicated in Operation Colombo.

6. Orlando Torrejón Gatica. Former Army non-commissioned officer, DINA and CNI agent. He was part of the Lautaro Brigade and became part of the Green and Blue Brigades of the CNI, the repressive organization that continued DINA. He was prosecuted in the Calle Conferencia II case.

7. Orlando Altamirano Sanhueza. Former Navy non-commissioned officer, DINA agent. He was also part of the Lautaro Brigade.

8. Carlos López Inostroza. DINA agent. Implicated in the Calle Conferencia I cases and in that of Marta Ugarte.

Those who received a sentence reduction 9. Ricardo Lawrence Mires. Former Carabineros lieutenant colonel, DINA agent. According to Memoria Viva, he is one of the main and cruelest torturers of the agency, having been the one who coerced Luz Arce before her conversion.

He was assigned to the Londres 38, José Domingo Cañas, and Villa Grimaldi torture centers. Lawrence is known lately for having been a fugitive and being one of the most wanted by the PDI for the murder of Alfonso Chanfreau, having turned himself in to the Carabineros OS-9 last January 10.

10. Jorge Andrade Gómez. Former Army lieutenant colonel,