General (Ret.) Jorge Zincke reported that Mery interrogated in Linares but did not transport people. The former Vice Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Lieutenant General (Ret.) Jorge Zincke, who is being prosecuted for the disappearance of prisoners from the Linares Artillery School, confirmed yesterday that the Director General of Investigations, Nelson Mery, operated as an interrogator of detainees at that regiment. “That is correct, he interrogated,” Zincke said briefly after being subjected to a new interrogation by the visiting judge Alejandro Solís, who on June 6th declared him indicted for the kidnapping and disappearance of José Campos Morales and Alejandro Mella Flores. Zincke also stated that Mery had nothing to do with the transport of people. At the time of the military coup in September 1973, Zincke was the head of the Department of Research and Development at the Linares Artillery School. Yesterday, lawyer Jorge Mario Saavedra, sponsor of the defamation lawsuit filed by Mery against former detainee Odette Alegría—who accused him of sexual abuse—declared to Radio Agricultura that Mery “never interrogated, he only interviewed the detainees, because he was just passing through the Artillery School.” The Director of Investigations, Nelson Mery, was also interrogated at the time by Judge Solís in the case regarding the disappeared from Linares. Given the revelations that Mery was an active man in that regiment during the first months of the military regime, the government asked him to take a vacation. In the case, Judge Solís also prosecuted Generals (Ret.) Carlos Morales Retamal and Humberto Julio Reyes. He also indicted Colonels (Ret.) Juan Morales Salgado, Félix Cabezas Salazar, and Claudio Lecaros Carrasco, as well as Non-Commissioned Officer (Ret.) Antonio Aguilar Barrientos and Investigations official (Ret.) Héctor Torres Guajardo. The other seven forcibly disappeared persons from Linares are: Rubén Bravo Bravo, Anselmo Cancino Aravena, Hernán Contreras Cabrera, María Isabel Beltrán Sánchez, Waldo Villalobos Moraga, Guillermo del Canto Ramírez, and Luis Tapia Concha. According to the leader of the Association of Relatives of the Forcibly Disappeared of Linares, Zolidia Leiva, Mery personally arrested Tapia Concha, who was her husband.

Source: La Nación, July 17, 2003

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

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

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

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

These victims are included in the first lawsuit against Augusto Pinochet and other military officers (Ret.), which was filed on January 12, 1998, by Gladys Marín. The plaintiff lawyer, Eduardo Contreras, highlighted that “this shows that we can continue to achieve truth and justice, unlike what the UDI wants.” Contreras also underscored “the courage and ethical standing of Judge Guzmán, who, without recusing himself from the case, prosecuted a relative of his so directly.” Indeed, Carlos López Tapia, a cousin of Judge Guzmán, was the head of the Villa Grimaldi clandestine center in 1976, the place where the PC detainees were taken and disappeared. López also participated in the Caravan of Death during its first tour through the south and, according to his own statements in the proceedings, attended the extrajudicial execution of the MIR leader in 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 we judges are human beings.” Four Others Meanwhile, Judge Jorge Zepeda subjected Army officer (Ret.) Claudio Lecaros Canales, Non-Commissioned Officer (Ret.) José Muñoz Pozo, and Carabineros Non-Commissioned Officer (Ret.) Omar Mella Lillo to prosecution. The indictment was issued for their roles 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 (Ret.) Guillermo Gómez Aguilar as the author of the kidnapping of Gabriel Marfull González. He was arrested on September 13, 1973, and taken to the El Bosque Air Base. There he was executed and his body was transported to Cuesta Barriga, where it was abandoned. In both cases, lawyer Nelson Caucoto of Fasic acts as plaintiff representing the families, and he valued the investigation conducted so far by the two magistrates yesterday.

THE FALL OF THE PC

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

In December of the same year, the DINA struck again, and this time its agents arrested members of a new PC leadership, in what is known as the “case of the thirteen.” In this second wave of repression, Waldo Pizarro, husband of Sola Sierra and father of the current president of the AFDD, Lorena Pizarro, fell.

Source: lanacion.cl, June 3, 2003

Judge rejects applying amnesty and accuses two former uniformed officers

Judge Jorge Zepeda issued accusations against Army officer Claudio Lecaros Carrasco and Carabineros Non-Commissioned Officer José Basilio Muñoz Pozo as authors of two kidnappings with disappearance and one kidnapping with homicide.

The special judge Jorge Zepeda dismissed the application of the Amnesty Law and the statute of limitations in the process he is substantiating for two kidnappings with disappearance and one kidnapping with homicide recorded on September 16, 1973, in the town of Melozal, inside San Javier, in the Seventh Region.

The magistrate issued accusations against Army officer Claudio Lecaros Carrasco and Carabineros Non-Commissioned Officer José Basilio Muñoz Pozo as authors of the aforementioned crimes. The cases refer to the aggravated kidnappings of Vidal Riquelme Ibáñez and Cesáreo Soto, who presented themselves voluntarily on September 15, 1973, at the El Melozal Carabineros station, from where they were transported by military personnel from the Linares Artillery School.

On the night of September 16, both were taken to the Loncomilla bridge sector, where they were last seen. Meanwhile, Rubén Antonio Acevedo Gutiérrez, who followed the same path as the other two detainees, was found with three bullet holes and a wound in his leg.

The lawyer for the Social Assistance and Christian Churches Foundation (Fasic), Nelson Caucoto, described the magistrate's decision as of “extraordinary importance,” since “the non-application of amnesty and the statute of limitations not only derives from the permanent nature of the crime of kidnapping, but there are other foundations derived from International Law, which likewise prevent the application of that regulation of exemption from criminal responsibility.” The jurist explained that the cases of forcibly disappeared persons remain outside the scope of amnesty and the statute of limitations. “Also excluded are those executed or crimes of homicide, when these are inserted within the framework of a brutal and systematic political repression, such as the one that occurred in Chile, since in that context, all those crimes acquire the quality of Crimes against International Law, whether they are war crimes or crimes against humanity,” he stated. The jurist maintained that “it is an advance that the appropriate terminology is used as Judge Zepeda does, calling these crimes Crimes Against Humanity. It is also significant that for him there are no proper or improper amnesties, and that he refuses to classify them as homicides when the bodies have not been found.” In the opinion of the plaintiff lawyer, “this resolution is one more sign that our judges are beginning to move directly through International Law as other countries do, resorting to that law that the world community has given itself to resolve this type of crime.” “We are facing a resolution that places us in full modernity and that incorporates the legal baggage used in all countries on earth, of which Chile cannot be an exception,” he pointed out. Once the investigation was concluded, the magistrate issued an accusation against the former military officers and dismissed the request of the defense of the accused, who had proposed a preliminary and special pronouncement consisting of the request for the application of amnesty and the statute of limitations. Judge's arguments 1.- Regarding the aggravated kidnappings of Vidal Riquelme and Cesáreo Soto, these are permanent crimes, so as long as it is not known what ultimately happened to them, it is not possible to apply the amnesty of Decree Law 2191. 2.- It is not possible to accept, as the defenses of the accused assert, that despite the victims' bodies not having been found, their homicides can be presumed; because it has not been proven that the alleged deaths actually occurred, and even less that they were caused by the action of the accused, which could only be determined after their remains had been found, their identification supported, and the causes of death established through sufficient technical reports. 3.- Based on the same reasoning, the exceptions of amnesty and the statute of limitations are rejected. The commission of those crimes of aggravated kidnapping has not yet ceased, and to this day the victims are disappeared, which prevents, given the continuity of the crimes, determining if they fall within the period of amnesty, as well as starting the corresponding count from when they ceased to be committed, to determine the statute of limitations of the action. 4.- Regarding the aggravated homicide of Rubén Antonio Acevedo Gutiérrez and the aggravated kidnapping of Cesáreo Soto and Vidal Riquelme, it is verified that normatively we are in the presence in these cases of what human legal conscience has come to call crimes against humanity. 5.- Indeed, there are presumptions in all those crimes of the responsibility of State agents, who acted moved by reasons of political persecution, forming part of a generalized and systematic attack against the civilian population, of which the victims were a part. The realization of incriminating types for harmful conduct against humanity is generated from subparagraph c) of Article 6 of the “Charter of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg,” which defines Crimes against humanity, namely: murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war, or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where they were perpetrated. 6.- Furthermore, the dogmatic body of knowledge inherited from Nuremberg in this matter leads to the 1949 Geneva Conventions on humanitarian law, ratified by Chile in 1951 and which constitute the law of the Republic. 7.- The creation of a conventional obligation for the member states of the United Nations to adopt legal measures in an effort to abolish the statute of limitations for this type of crime is provided by the Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity, adopted in 1968. 8.- Crimes against humanity committed in both times of war and peace are imprescriptible. 9.- That imprescriptibility of Crimes Against Humanity currently arises as a category of a norm of General International Law (Ius Cogens). 10.- Regarding the mandatory nature of the “ius Cogens” norm regarding the aforementioned imprescriptibility, in our legal system it is the Constitution that recognizes it in Article 5, second paragraph, and allows the possibility of incorporating it. 11.- Consequently, there is a prevalence of the international norm of General International Law which determines that amnesty and statute of limitations laws invoked as a preliminary and special pronouncement in this Case are incompatible with it, because this is determined by international law validly incorporated into the national legal system.

Source: El Mostrador, November 25, 2004

Judge refuses to grant amnesty for a homicide

Judge Jorge Zepeda refused to apply amnesty and the statute of limitations to the crime of homicide in the case of the executed political peasant Rubén Acevedo Gutiérrez, whose body was buried by his family in September 1973, reasoning that the crime of homicide, like that of kidnapping, are crimes against humanity that cannot be amnestied nor do they prescribe, as established by international human rights legislation.

The magistrate's resolution corresponds to a formal accusation ruling against the accused Claudio Lecaros, Army Colonel (Ret.) and former director of the Linares Artillery School, and Carabineros Non-Commissioned Officer (Ret.) José Muñoz Pozo.

Judge Zepeda's decision was described by human rights lawyers as of “enormous relevance” because it becomes, after the recent ruling of the Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court, the first to establish that, even when the victim's body has been found or returned, the crime of homicide is not subject to amnesty nor does it prescribe because it is a crime against humanity.

In addition, Judge Zepeda applied the same criterion to the crime of kidnapping and disappearance of the peasants Vidal Riquelme and Cesáreo Soto. The three victims were peasant union leaders and their disappearances and death occurred on September 15, 1973.

Lawyer Sergio Corbalán told La Nación that “the resolution is very relevant, because it goes in the direction of resolving the crimes of homicide and kidnapping in Chile, in accordance with the law of international law.” In his document, Zepeda says, “regarding homicide and kidnapping, both correspond to what human legal norms and conscience have called crimes against humanity.”

Source: La Nación, November 26, 2004

Five military officers and two detectives prosecuted for kidnappings in Linares

Visiting Judge Alejandro Solís prosecuted five retired members of the Army and two former detectives as authors of the aggravated kidnapping of three MIR militants and one union leader, who were last seen alive at the Linares Artillery School between September 12, 1973, and January 2, 1974.

The ruling becomes an expansion of the resolution he issued on July 6, 2003, on which occasion he indicted six former uniformed officers for other cases of forcibly disappeared persons contained in the same episode.

The magistrate decided to indict Colonel (Ret.) Gabriel del Río Espinoza, who was the commander of the aforementioned facility and—at the same time—regional intendant at the time; Colonel (Ret.) Claudio Abdón Lecaros Carrasco; former Investigations commissioner Héctor Torres Guajardo; Sergeant Major (Ret.) Antonio Aguilar Barrientos; and Investigations commissioner (Ret.) Nelson Volta Rosas, in the capacity of authors of the crime of aggravated kidnapping of Guillermo del Canto Ramírez, a MIR leader.

According to the investigation substantiated by Solís, at 00:30 hours on January 2, 1974, Del Canto was arrested while he was with his spouse, Marianela Méndez Soto, at the home of his cousin Félix Ignacio Valenzuela Ferrer, located at Calle Santa Clara No. 560 in the La Cisterna commune.

Indeed, several officials who claimed to belong to the Linares city Regiment entered the place and arrested Del Canto Ramírez and his cousin, because he was an “accessory after the fact”—as the captors stated.

Both detainees were taken in a truck to the Military School of Santiago, where they were interrogated. The next morning, Valenzuela Ferrer was released, while Guillermo del Canto was transported to the Linares Artillery Regiment, where he remained detained for a few days, being interrogated and tortured, to subsequently, on an undetermined date, be taken to the Tejas Verdes prisoner camp in San Antonio, where his trail was lost until today.

Three other victims On the other hand, Judge Solís prosecuted General (Ret.) Carlos Edmundo Morales Retamal, at the time director of the Linares Artillery School, in his capacity as author of the crime of aggravated kidnapping against the university student and former MIR militant María Isabel Beltrán Sánchez, committed starting on September 18, 1973.

He also prosecuted former Investigations commissioner Héctor Armando Torres Guajardo and Sergeant Major (Ret.) Antonio Aguilar Barrientos as authors of the crime of aggravated kidnapping against former MIR militant Héctor Hernán Contreras Cabrera, committed starting on December 8, 1973.

Finally, the judge indicted Colonel (Ret.) Juan Hernán Morales Salgado in his capacity as author of the crime of aggravated kidnapping in the person of José Alfonso Saavedra Betancourt, a former union leader of the Celco company, perpetrated starting on September 12, 1973.

The magistrate granted provisional release to all the accused, and only in the case of Morales Salgado, who is being charged in this case for the first time, was the benefit granted with consultation to the Court of Appeals.

The First Chamber of the appellate court confirmed the release of the former military officer this Tuesday, with the favorable votes of judges Juan Cristóbal Mera and Amanda Valdovinos, in addition to the participating lawyer Benito Mauriz.

Mery's companions In the prosecution, which consists of more than 60 pages, Judge Solís left recorded the various allusions that exist in these cases regarding the participation of the former director of Investigations in the arrest of these opponents of the military regime.

In fact, several witnesses point to him as part of the group of agents that arrested María Isabel Beltrán. Likewise, one of the detectives who served at the Artillery School, Armando Torres Guajardo, maintained that in that unit “there was a Security Department, in charge of Captain Lecaros, and it had other officials, such as Nelson Mery, under the command of Jorge Zincke.

He participated in the interrogations, and regarding María Isabel Beltrán, a MIR militant arrested in Santiago, he witnessed about 3 interrogations led by Captain Lecaros, who, to intimidate her, beat her on the back with a rubber ‘churro’ (baton).” Meanwhile, one of the survivors of the Linares Artillery School, Osvaldo Efraín Salazar Saavedra, who was arrested on December 19, 1973, by a platoon of military personnel and detectives who took him to the Military School and then transferred him to the Linares Artillery School, states that Nelson Mery participated in that group.

For his part, the former director of the civil police, who left his post due to his alleged link to human rights violations, declared in the proceedings that “on September 12, 1973, being a detective, he was designated as a liaison officer at the Linares Artillery School, and on one occasion they called him from the ‘Intelligence Office’ and Aguilar asked him if he knew Patricia Contreras, whom he knew because he was a friend of her sister, Elena.” “He answered yes, and they ordered him to go to Santiago because she was allegedly involved in hiding weapons in Panimávida.

They arrived at a house on Calle Cienfuegos in a military jeep, in charge of Captain Humberto Julio; Sergeant Aguilar and Detective Volta also went; they arrested her and took her to the Military School; the next day, on the way back, he got out of the jeep and looked into the truck she was in and also found María Isabel Beltrán, who was arrested by the military personnel,” he added. “He always believed that María Isabel Beltrán was a military intelligence target, as Colonel Morales Retamal stated in writing, who points out that she belonged to a MIR cell, maintained extremist activities in Parral, and was involved in the infiltration of people into the Armed Forces, the main charge for which she was arrested,” Mery assured the tribunal.

Source: elmostrador.cl, April 19, 2006

Solís issues 10-year and one-day sentences for disappearance of MIR militant

The magistrate's ruling for the kidnapping of Guillermo del Canto affected two officers and one sergeant of the Army, all retired, in addition to a former Investigations commissioner. Visiting Judge Alejandro Solís Muñoz issued his 15th conviction for human rights violations that occurred during the military regime since he inherited part of the cases investigated by former judge Juan Guzmán Tapia against Augusto Pinochet.

Solís sentenced General (Ret.) Gabriel del Río, Captain (Ret.) Claudio Lecaros Carrasco, and former Sergeant Antonio Aguilar Barrientos, all from the Army, and former Investigations commissioner Héctor Torres Guajardo to 10 years and one day in prison for the kidnapping of MIR militant Guillermo del Canto Ramírez, which occurred in January 1974.

Former detective Nelson Volta Rozas was sentenced to five years and one day in prison as an accomplice. In May 2006, visiting judge Víctor Montiglio Rezzio had favored General (Ret.) Del Río with the application of the 1978 Amnesty Decree Law for the crimes of the so-called Caravan of Death in the city of San Javier, Maule Region, so this is the first sentence affecting the military officer who was intendant in the first days of the regime.

Meanwhile, the rest of the convicted already face sentences of suspended prison for the torture that took place inside the Linares Artillery School between 1973 and 1974, in a case investigated by the visiting judge of the Talca Court of Appeals, Víctor Stenger Larenas.

Guillermo del Canto Ramírez was 30 years old at the time of his arrest and was the regional secretary of the MIR for Linares-Maule, therefore a member of the Central Committee of the leftist party. Since November 1973, he had been intensely sought by members of the Military Intelligence Service (SIM) in the area where he was also an official of the Agrarian Reform Corporation (CORA).

Despite the intense search in the Maule Region, Del Canto Ramírez had managed to leave for Santiago to take refuge in the house of some cousins located at Calle Santa Clara 560, La Cisterna, where he was captured in the early hours of January 2, 1974.

The military personnel broke into the home and took Del Canto Ramírez and his wife, Marianela Méndez Soto, to transport him to the Military School and the Linares Artillery School, from where the agricultural technician's whereabouts were lost.

Judge Alejandro Solís is the judge who has issued the most convictions in human rights violation cases since October 14, 2002, when the Supreme Court decided to divide the more than 200 lawsuits processed by former judge Juan Guzmán Tapia.

On that occasion, in addition to Solís, judges Jorge Zepeda Arancibia and Daniel Calvo Flores were appointed, the latter of whom was later replaced by Joaquín Billard Acuña, while Guzmán remained only with the processes called Caravan of Death, Operation Colombo, Operation Condor I and II, and Calle Conferencia, which he processed until his retirement in March 2005 without issuing convictions.

Source: elmostrador.cl, June 4, 2007

Human rights: Supreme Court applies statute of limitations and acquits retired colonel of charges

Ruling benefited Claudio Lecaros Carrasco, who had been convicted for the homicide of three peasants from San Javier. In a ruling that could set a precedent for future Supreme Court decisions on human rights, the Second Chamber of the highest court applied the statute of limitations and acquitted retired Army Colonel Claudio Lecaros Carrasco of charges, who had been convicted for the aggravated homicides of three peasants that occurred in September 1973.

After analyzing the facts, the Criminal Chamber accepted as proven that the victims—Vidal Riquelme Ibáñez, Cesario Soto González, and Rubén Acevedo Gutiérrez—were murdered by a military patrol, but unlike previous rulings in the same process, it considered that there were various well-founded presumptions to establish the homicide of Vidal Riquelme, even though his body was never found after being thrown into the Loncomilla River, in the Maule Region.

With the date of death established, the statute of limitations can begin to be counted, unlike what happens with aggravated kidnappings, in which the Supreme Court has established that the crime remains ongoing if the victim's death is not confirmed.

That reasoning gave rise to the majority vote of judges Nibaldo Segura, Rubén Ballesteros, and lawyer José Fernández to dismiss the application of the Geneva Conventions—which prevent the prescription of crimes against humanity—on the grounds that when the events occurred, there was no state of internal war in Chile.

Along with this, they rejected applying the Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations because “it has not been signed or approved by Chile to date.” Judges Jaime Rodríguez and Hugo Dolmestch were against that position.

In the first instance, special judge Jorge Zepeda imposed three three-year sentences on Lecaros, one for the kidnapping of Riquelme and two for the homicides of the other two peasants. Upon reviewing the case, the Santiago Court sentenced Lecaros to a single sentence of 5 years for the three crimes.

In another resolution known yesterday, the same Criminal Chamber—but with judge Alberto Chaigneau in place of lawyer Fernández—dismissed the statute of limitations and convicted seven former agents of the so-called Joint Command for the aggravated homicide of Communist Party leader Carlos Contreras Maluje, which occurred on November 2, 1976.

By 4 votes to 1, the tribunal imposed 3 years and 1 day on agents Freddy Ruiz Bunger, Juan Saavedra Loyola, and Daniel Giumpert, who, however, were granted supervised release. To international justice The Supreme Court's resolution in the Vidal Riquelme case caused great bewilderment among the plaintiff lawyers. “This resolution is shameful.

Recently, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, in the Almonacid case, prohibited the Chilean State from continuing to act in this way, and they simply ignore it,” said lawyer Boris Paredes of the Ministry of the Interior's Human Rights Program.

Along with this, he considered it serious that a participating lawyer appointed by the Executive appeared in the majority vote. “Someone has to answer for this,” he said, while announcing that a group of professionals will report the case to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

Source: El Mercurio, November 14, 2007

Human Rights Rulings Shake the Penal Chamber

One day apart, the court issued different resolutions regarding the application of international treaties. The absence of Justice Alberto Chaigneau in one of these cases was decisive in the reversal. The possible arrival of the new Supreme Court Justice Carlos Künsemüller provides partial reassurance to human rights lawyers.

The imminent departure of Justice Alberto Chaigneau from the Supreme Court, when he turns 75 on January 1st, will leave the Penal Chamber without its leadership for sanctioning cases of human rights violations, once again opening the possibility that statutes of limitation and amnesty will be applied to perpetrators.

This was demonstrated by the absence of the Supreme Court Justice during the hearing of the cassation appeals for three homicides at the Puente Loncomilla in September 1973.

One of those convicted as a perpetrator, the then-Army captain and governor of San Javier, Claudio Lecaros, was exempted from responsibility. By a vote of three to two, the thesis of the statute of limitations prevailed.

Justice Chaigneau was replaced in the hearings by the acting lawyer José Fernández Richard, who drafted the ruling that acquitted the former military officer.

The acquittal caused an uproar among human rights lawyers, especially because the following day, with Chaigneau present in the Penal Chamber, the situation changed and the criteria of applying international treaties to sanction the perpetrators of the homicide of the communist militant Carlos Contreras Maluje was resumed.

The detention and death of Contreras Maluje in 1976, who threw himself under a bus to try to escape his captors from the Comando Conjunto, was classified as a crime against humanity. However, the perpetrators (former FACH officers) were given sentences of less than three years and one day because the "half-prescription" (partial statute of limitations) was applied to them.

Although the Penal Chamber returned to the criteria of sanctioning human rights violations, the plaintiff lawyer Nelson Caucoto expresses his concern regarding the erratic path adopted by the judicial body.

Caucoto believed that a path had already been built in human rights cases and that this route was consolidated so as not to apply amnesty or statutes of limitation to the perpetrators of the crimes.

In his view, this was demonstrated by previous sentences of the Penal Chamber in which International Law was undoubtedly imposed, he says, thus making the path to justice expeditious without the obstacles of amnesty and statutes of limitation that prevailed in another era of the Chilean courts of justice.

However, he warns with dismay that the path he believed was built and consolidated rests on a precarious foundation, only with majority votes, but not with the unanimity of the members of the Penal Chamber, which Justice Chaigneau is preparing to leave.

"How is jurisprudence built with such precariousness?" asks Caucoto, who also questions the lack of certainty and legal security given the disparity of criteria in the highest court.

Meanwhile, criminal lawyer Vivian Bullemore points out that there is a legal provision that allows for recourse to the full Supreme Court when contradictory rulings occur.

However, it is estimated that this would be a double-edged sword for both sides if it establishes a criterion forever.

Crossed Votes

The ruling for the three homicides at the Puente Loncomilla, issued on the 12th of this month and which acquits Claudio Lecaros, had as majority votes the justices Nibaldo Segura and Rubén Ballesteros, and the acting lawyer José Fernández Richard.

The majority's criterion was to accept the statute of limitations in favor of the former military officer, by dismissing the application of the Geneva Conventions, regarding the common third article, provided for the case of "armed conflict not of an international character."

In the opinion of the three high magistrates, the state of internal commotion established by Decree Law number 5 of 1973 does not meet the criteria outlined by international regulations to consider an internal armed conflict as existing.

In favor of sanctioning Lecaros, meanwhile, and in the dissent, were justices Jaime Rodríguez Espoz, who admits full validity to the Geneva Conventions, and Hugo Dolmestch, who considered that compensation for the victims' families should have been accepted.

However, in the conviction ruling the following day, in the case of Contreras Maluje, Justice Ballesteros, the drafter of the sentence, aligned himself in favor of the application of the Geneva Conventions.

"The examination of the regulations issued after September 11, 1973, as well as the context in which the events subsequent to said date took place, allow these sentencers to conclude that at the time the events that gave rise to the present investigation occurred, the national territory was in reality and legally in a state of internal war.

Sufficient reason to have it established that in Chile there existed an 'armed conflict not of an international character,' in the terms of common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions..."," Ballesteros maintained.

One day apart, these conventions apply and do not apply in Chile.

Likewise, Justice Rodríguez Espoz supported the thesis of the Geneva Conventions in both rulings, but in the Contreras Maluje case, he was with the majority to apply the partial statute of limitations in favor of those convicted.

"This is very bad for the prestige of the Penal Chamber of the Supreme Court," emphasizes Caucoto, who only foresees new convictions for the State of Chile in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, just as happened when the death of the teacher Luis Almonacid was amnestied, due to the failure to comply with international obligations with the sentences of the highest court.

The contradictions did not go unnoticed among other Supreme Court justices, who even conveyed their concern to former minister Enrique Cury, a prominent criminal lawyer who anticipated the possible installation of a working group to reach a common criterion.

Carlos Künsemüller, the replacement

The departure of Justice Alberto Chaigneau, current president of the Penal Chamber of the Supreme Court, will leave a vacancy there that requires an expert replacement in criminal matters. The nomination from the Executive and the subsequent ratification in the Senate of the prominent criminal lawyer Carlos Künsemüller Loebenfelder, who served until his appointment last August as an acting lawyer of the Supreme Court, was intended for this purpose.

He is currently in the Civil Chamber of the highest court.

Thus, it is considered that Künsemüller is the natural successor to Chaigneau in the Penal Chamber, not only because of his knowledge in criminal matters, but also because of his criteria on human rights.

Although there are not many rulings known to him in such cases, a sentence signed last year by the then-acting lawyer of the Supreme Court is remembered, leaving without effect the application of the amnesty decree law that had annulled the prosecution of five former DINA agents for the kidnapping of the MIR militant Jacqueline Binfa, in Villa Grimaldi.

For this reason, he is considered completely opposed to the application of amnesty in cases of human rights violations. He would only eventually admit the statute of limitations, it was commented in the Palace of Courts, if the certain date of the victim's death were known.

In judicial spheres, it is admitted that so far, the only one who has shown interest in occupying the vacancy that Chaigneau will leave is Künsemüller, and it is not foreseen that another Supreme Court justice could reach the Penal Chamber.

The possible candidates for that seat could have been justices Sergio Muñoz and Milton Juica. However, both would be affected by an inability to hear cases in which the Public Prosecutor's Office intervenes, since both have daughters who work in that department.

The new president of the Penal Chamber of the Supreme Court, replacing Chaigneau, would be Justice Nibaldo Segura, who is in favor of applying the statute of limitations in cases of homicides committed after September 11, 1973.

Source: El Mercurio, November 17, 2007

Supreme Court issues first final conviction in the Caravan of Death case

The highest court ordered six years of imprisonment for retired General Sergio Arellano Stark for the qualified homicide of four young militants of the Partido Socialista, in the so-called "San Javier episode," one of the stops the military entourage made at the end of 1973 to accelerate trials and executions of detractors of the military regime.

The Second Chamber of the Supreme Court sentenced retired Army General Sergio Arellano Stark to six years of imprisonment, without the possibility of obtaining benefits, for the qualified homicides of Teófilo Arce Toloza, José Sepúlveda Baeza, Leopoldo González Norambuena, and Segundo Sandoval Gómez in the investigation of the San Javier episode of the case known as the Caravan of Death.

The decision was adopted in a split ruling by justices Jaime Rodríguez, Rubén Ballesteros, Hugo Dolmestch, Carlos Künsemüller, and the acting lawyer Juan Carlos Cárcamo, after accepting a cassation appeal filed against the ruling of the Santiago Court of Appeals.

The same sentence was received by retired officer Carlos Romero Muñoz, who at the time of the events held the rank of major and served as the military prosecutor of Linares.

Also convicted, to four years in prison with the benefit of supervised release, were José Parada Muñoz and Julio Barrios Espinace.

Meanwhile, the highest court acquitted Claudio Lecaros Carrasco and Gabriel del Río Espinoza.

State Reparation

Likewise, the ruling determines that the State must pay 80 million pesos to each of the two plaintiffs who acted in the process as compensation for moral damages.

In the criminal aspect, the sentence was adopted with the dissenting vote of Justice Rubén Ballesteros, who was in favor of applying the statute of limitations to the criminal action; while in the civil aspect, the sentence was determined with the decision against justices Ballesteros and Jaime Rodríguez, who were in favor of accepting the exception of incompetence.

This is the thirty-seventh conviction of the Supreme Court in human rights cases since 2005 and the tenth so far in 2008.

Amnesty

The visiting judge of the Caravan case, Víctor Montiglio, had acquitted the defendants in May 2006, after applying the Amnesty Decree Law in force since 1978.

However, the Ninth Chamber of the Santiago Court of Appeals revoked the ruling last year and decided to convict them for the crime of qualified homicide.

The San Javier Episode

In the San Javier episode of the Caravan of Death, recorded on October 2, 1973, four young militants of the Partido Socialista met their death in that city, having been detained by members of the San Javier Investigations police and sent to the city's public jail.

Teófilo Arce Tolosa (26) and Mauricio González Norambuena (20) worked at the Corporación de Reforma Agraria (CORA), José Sepúlveda Baeza (22) was a university student, and Segundo Sandoval Gómez (19) was a high school student.

All of them had been involved in an incident on September 11, 1973, in which they were pursued by Carabineros officials and civilians in the area, managing to escape the shots of their pursuers.

According to the official version given to the press and included in the Rettig Report, the detainees were being taken to a "reconstruction of the scene" and attempted to seize the weapons from their guards and escape.

According to the court, the young men were executed by State agents, outside of any legal procedure, and the version of the attempted escape is impossible to accept.

It argues, for example, that it is inconsistent to state that on the day of the events the four were taken from the jail and brought to a reconstruction of the scene, to a place located between the Artillery Regiment and the Polygon, in circumstances where this place is not on the road to San Javier, the place where the events actually occurred.

Furthermore, the heavy guard under which the detainees were transported during the period makes it unlikely that, being subdued and unarmed, they would attempt to seize weapons from military personnel, whose physical, numerical, and logistical superiority is evident.

Finally, it points out that it is inexplicable that to avoid an attempted escape, had one existed, the death of all the prisoners would have been caused under the described conditions.

Source: El Mostrador, October 15, 2008

Talca Court of Appeals issues human rights conviction

The Third Chamber of the Talca Court of Appeals issued a second-instance sentence this Tuesday for the illegal and arbitrary detention of the Linares farmer Miguel Antonio Figueroa Mercado, an event that occurred in September 1973, near the Peñuelas estate in the commune of Villa Alegre, Maule Region.

In a unanimous ruling, justices Hernán González García and Víctor Stenger Larenas determined to apply a sentence of 541 days of imprisonment for Claudio Abdón Lecaros Pozo.

The Maule appellate court granted the benefit of conditional remission of the sentence, which is why Lecaros Pozo must submit to the supervision of the Gendarmería for the duration of the sentence.

In July 2008, the visiting judge Juana Venegas determined the acquittal of the convicted person, applying the figure of the statute of limitations for the criminal action.

Source: lanacion.cl, April 21, 2009

Talca Court of Appeals convicts former Army colonel for 1973 crime

The Second Chamber of the Talca Court of Appeals sentenced former Army colonel Claudio Lecaros to five years in prison for the qualified homicide of the peasant and Partido Socialista militant Gerardo Antonio Encina, which occurred on October 2, 1973, local press reports.

The ruling maintains that the murder occurred while the country was "in a state of war" after the military uprising of the dictator Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), so the Geneva Conventions, which classify the crime as one against humanity, can be applied.

The Court also confirmed the acquittal of Carabineros (militarized police) officer Rolando Rivera in the case, considering that he did not participate in the crime against the socialist militant.

In August 2008, the visiting judge Juana Venegas determined the acquittal of the two prosecuted officials in the first instance.

However, the case reached the Talca Court of Appeals, 258 kilometers south of Santiago, where the events occurred, after the Ministry of the Interior appealed the judge's ruling.

Source: El Mostrador, July 11, 2009

Talca Court: Former Army colonel sentenced to 5 years in prison

The officer was declared guilty of the crime against a PS leader in 1973.

The Second Chamber of the Talca Court of Appeals (VII Region) sentenced, in a split ruling, former Army colonel of the Linares province Claudio Lecaros Pozo to 5 years of imprisonment without benefits, for the qualified homicide of the peasant and PS militant Gerardo Antonio Encina Pérez, which occurred in Talca on October 2, 1973.

The ruling maintains that the murder of Encina Pérez occurred while "the country was in a state of war, with the norms contained in the Geneva Conventions being applicable, constituting a crime against humanity." The Maule court also confirmed the acquittal of retired Carabineros officer Rolando Rivera Tucas in the case, considering that he did not participate in the crime against the socialist militant.

In August 2008, the visiting judge Juana Venegas had determined the acquittal of both prosecuted officials in the first instance. However, the case reached the Talca court after the Ministry of the Interior filed an appeal.

Source: El Mercurio, July 11, 2009

Sentence for the Miguel Antonio Figueroa Mercado Case

On May 18, 2010, the Most Excellent Supreme Court, in case Roll No. 3.022-2009 (Roll No. 47.205, of the San Javier Criminal Court), accepted the cassation appeal in substance filed by the Human Rights Program, invalidating the sentence of April 17, 2009, which legally classified the criminal act as constituting a crime of illegal detention, instead of classifying it as a crime of qualified kidnapping.

In a replacement sentence, the Supreme Court revokes the appealed sentence of July 18, 2008, insofar as it accepted the exception of the statute of limitations for the criminal action, acquitting the accused, and instead decides that it is rejected and, therefore, CLAUDIO ABDÓN LECAROS CARRASCO is convicted for his responsibility as the perpetrator of the crime of qualified kidnapping of MIGUEL ANTONIO FIGUEROA MERCADO, committed in September 1973, to 3 years of minor imprisonment in its medium degree and legal accessories, with the benefit of conditional remission of the sentence.

The Second Penal Chamber of the highest court was presided over by Justice Nibaldo Segura P., Rubén Ballesteros C., Hugo Dolmestch U., Carlos Kunsemuller L., and the acting lawyer Domingo Hernández E.

Source: ddhh.gov.cl, May 2010

Five military personnel involved in human rights violations will serve their sentences in freedom

The Supreme Court acquitted a retired military officer and allowed five others to serve sentences of between three and five years in prison under supervised release as perpetrators of the disappearance of nine opponents during the military dictatorship, judicial sources reported this Thursday.

With this final ruling, the high court has issued a total of one hundred conviction sentences and twelve other acquittals in cases of human rights violations during the regime of Augusto Pinochet since 2005.

In this case, the Supreme Court reduced the sentences decreed by Judge Alejandro Solís in a 2008 ruling, in which he set fifteen years and one day in prison for five of the defendants, and ten years and one day in prison for the sixth former military officer prosecuted.

With this final ruling, retired General Juan Morales Salgado and former colonel Claudio Lecaros Carrasco were sentenced to five years in prison with the benefit of supervised release for the disappearance of five of the young opponents.

The same sentence was given to retired non-commissioned officer Antonio Aguilar Barrientos, for four qualified kidnappings, and retired colonel Félix Cabezas Salazar, for three disappearances.

Meanwhile, for one qualified kidnapping, the undersecretary of Foreign Affairs during the military regime, retired general Humberto Julio Reyes, received 3 years of imprisonment with the benefit of conditional remission, similar to supervised release.

In contrast, retired general Gabriel del Río Espinoza was acquitted of his responsibility as the perpetrator of five disappearances.

The victims of the so-called "Linares" process are Arturo Riveros Blanco, Jaime Torres Salazar, Jorge Yáñez Olave, José Saavedra Betancourt, Gabriel Campos Morales, María Isabel Beltrán Sánchez, Anselmo Cansino Aravena, Héctor Contreras Cabrera, and Alejandro Mella Flores.

Most of the victims, aged between 19 and 26, lived in the towns of Linares and Constitución, and were militants of the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR).

The young people were detained by the police days after the military coup of September 11, 1973, and were subsequently transferred to the Linares Artillery School and the General Bari Shooting Range, from where their location was lost.

Regarding the reduction of sentences and the application of benefits, the president of the Association of Families of the Forcibly Disappeared, Lorena Pizarro, considered today that these measures reflect a Judiciary that "benefits criminals and leaves victims in absolute helplessness."

Pizarro explained that a majority group of judges "believe in this reconciliatory vision that is ultimately impunity, with which they try to leave victims and perpetrators happy," while others even prefer to apply the statute of limitations in these crimes.

In contrast, the director of the National Institute of Human Rights, Lorena Fríes, defended that "in Chile, justice is slow, but it arrives."

"Judges in Chile have a clear mandate of when they can acquit and when they can convict," and also of when they can grant certain benefits, she indicated.

According to the head of the Institute, "acquittals often have to do with the lack of information, which does not allow for the accreditation of the criminal responsibility of the Armed Forces officials who participated."

Source: El Mostrador, April 28, 2011

State must pay millionaire compensation to those tortured at the Linares Artillery School

The Supreme Court ratified the sentence that ordered the State to pay $40,000,000 to Belarmino Sepúlveda Bueno, Pedro Sancho Barros, José Cifuentes Arcoverde, and Luis Zurita Figueroa, political prisoners who were subjected to torture at the Linares Artillery School during 1973 and 1974.

In a unanimous ruling, the Second Chamber of the highest court ratified the appealed resolution that convicted the State of Chile, after assigning responsibility for the events to members of the Army.

The first ruling of the Linares Court of Letters, ratified by the Court, also sentenced Nelson Volta Rozas to fourteen sentences of 61 days of imprisonment; Héctor Armando Torres Guajardo to six sentences of 61 days of imprisonment; Claudio Abdon Lecaros Carrasco to two sentences of 61 days; and Antonio Aguilar Barrientos to four sentences of 61 days of imprisonment, after being recognized as responsible for the crime of applying torture to prisoners of the Linares Artillery School between 1973 and 1974.

Source: biobio.cl, July 25, 2016

Human Rights: final conviction for defendants in the "Linares" episode

With sentences ranging from 3 to 5 years of imprisonment and one acquittal, the Supreme Court issued a final sentence in the investigation into the qualified kidnappings that occurred between September and December 1973, in the city of Linares, Maule Region.

The ruling against six agents of the dictatorship corresponds to the so-called "Linares episode," whose victims were Arturo Enrique Riveros Blanco, Jaime Bernardo Torres Salazar, Jorge Bernabé Yáñez Olave, José Saavedra Betancourt, José Gabriel Campos Morales, Anselmo Antonio Cancino Aravena, Alejandro Robinson Mella Flores, María Isabel Beltrán Sánchez, and Héctor Hernán Contreras Cabrera.

The ruling had a split vote among the justices of the Second Chamber of the highest court, Nibaldo Segura, Jaime Rodríguez, Rubén Ballesteros, Hugo Dolmestch, and Carlos Künsemüller, who determined the following sentences:

• Juan Hernán Morales Salgado: 5 years of imprisonment for his responsibility as the perpetrator of the kidnappings of Arturo Enrique Riveros Blanco, Jaime Bernardo Torres Salazar, Jorge Bernabé Yáñez Olave, José Saavedra Betancourt, and José Gabriel Campos Morales. He was granted the benefit of supervised release.
• Claudio Abdón Lecaros Carrasco: 5 years of imprisonment for his responsibility as the perpetrator of the qualified kidnappings of María Isabel Beltrán Sánchez, Anselmo Antonio Cancino Aravena, José Gabriel Campos Morales, Héctor Hernán Contreras Cabrera, and Robinson Mella. He was granted the benefit of supervised release.
• Antonio Aguilar Barrientos: 5 years of imprisonment for his responsibility as the perpetrator of the qualified kidnappings of María Isabel Beltrán Sánchez, Anselmo Antonio Cancino Aravena, Hernán Contreras Cabrera, and Alejandro Robinson Mella Flores. He was granted the benefit of supervised release.
• Félix Renato Cabezas Salazar: 5 years of imprisonment for his responsibility in the qualified kidnappings of Anselmo Antonio Cancino Aravena, José Gabriel Campos Morales, and Alejandro Robinson Mella Flores. He was granted the benefit of supervised release.
• Humberto Lautaro Julio Reyes: 3 years of imprisonment for his responsibility in the qualified kidnapping of María Isabel Beltrán Sánchez. He was granted the benefit of conditional remission.
• Gabriel Del Río Espinoza: acquitted of his responsibility as the perpetrator of the kidnappings of María Isabel Beltrán Sánchez, Anselmo Antonio Cancino Aravena, José Gabriel Campos Morales, Héctor Hernán Contreras Cabrera, and Alejandro Robinson Mella Flores, due to lack of participation.

In the civil aspect, the claim for compensation for damages filed against the State of Chile was rejected due to the absolute incompetence of the court.

In the criminal aspect, the sentence was adopted with the dissenting vote of justices Segura and Ballesteros, who were in favor of accepting the cause of the statute of limitations for the criminal action.

Meanwhile, in the civil aspect, the decision was adopted with the dissenting vote of justices Dolmestch and Künsemüller, who were in favor of accepting the claims.

With this conviction, 100 conviction sentences in human rights violation cases have been completed, issued by the Supreme Court since 2005. In the same period, 112 sentences have been issued, with the remaining corresponding to acquittals.

Source: lanacion.cl, April 28, 2011

Relatives of the forcibly disappeared do not rule out resorting to the International Human Rights Court for the "Linares Episode" ruling

"Although the Judiciary is independent of the Government, with connections, things are often achieved, even impunity," said spokesperson Juana Soto.

The leaders of the Association of Families of the Forcibly Disappeared of Linares did not rule out resorting to the International Court of that instance, with the aim of denouncing the final ruling of the Supreme Court for the disappearance of militants and left-wing sympathizers during the government of Augusto Pinochet.

The spokesperson for said entity, Juana Soto, indicated that "we are very disappointed to learn of the resolution of the justice system, and although we highlight the meticulous work of Justice Solís, who we believe got to the bottom of the investigation, we do not think the same of the judges."

Soto harshly criticized the position of President Piñera's government, in the sense that "we are in a right-wing government and for that same reason what else could we expect from a subject as delicate as Human Rights; on the other hand, today, although the Judiciary is independent of the Government, with connections, things are often achieved, even impunity."

On the other hand, the daughter of María Isabel Beltrán, whose case is one of the most emblematic in the southern Maule region, Tamara Callejas, said: "There is a bias of impunity in these decisions, my hope remains alive to know what really happened to my mother, but I believe that just as there are people who I am sure have collaborated in these houses that Justice Solís investigated, I cannot rule out that there are those who did not tell everything they know."

In a split ruling, the justices of the Second Chamber of the highest court determined to acquit Gabriel Del Río Espinoza due to his lack of responsibility; while they ordered 5 years of imprisonment for their responsibility as perpetrators of kidnappings and granted the benefit of supervised release to Juan Hernán Morales Salgado; Claudio Abdón Lecaros Carrasco; Antonio Aguilar Barrientos; Félix Renato Cabezas Salazar; and three years of imprisonment with the benefit of conditional remission to Humberto Lautaro Julio Reyes.

It must be remembered that the Supreme Court issued a final sentence in the investigation into the qualified kidnappings of Arturo Enrique Riveros Blanco, Jaime Bernardo Torres Salazar, Jorge Bernabé Yáñez Olave, José Saavedra Betancourt, José Gabriel Campos Morales, Anselmo Antonio Cancino Aravena, Alejandro Robinson Mella Flores, María Isabel Beltrán Sánchez, and Héctor Hernán Contreras Cabrera, which occurred starting in September and December 1973, in the city of Linares.

Source: La Tercera, May 2, 2011

Relatives of the forcibly disappeared do not rule out resorting to the International Human Rights Court for the "Linares Episode" ruling

The leaders of the Association of Families of the Forcibly Disappeared of Linares did not rule out resorting to the International Court of that instance, with the aim of denouncing the final ruling of the Supreme Court for the disappearance of militants and left-wing sympathizers during the government of Augusto Pinochet.

The spokesperson for said entity, Juana Soto, indicated that "we are very disappointed to learn of the resolution of the justice system, and although we highlight the meticulous work of Justice Solís, who we believe got to the bottom of the investigation, we do not think the same of the judges."

Soto harshly criticized the position of President Piñera's government, in the sense that "we are in a right-wing government and for that same reason what else could we expect from a subject as delicate as Human Rights; on the other hand, today, although the Judiciary is independent of the Government, with connections, things are often achieved, even impunity."

On the other hand, the daughter of María Isabel Beltrán, whose case is one of the most emblematic in the southern Maule region, Tamara Callejas, said: "There is a bias of impunity in these decisions, my hope remains alive to know what really happened to my mother, but I believe that just as there are people who I am sure have collaborated in these houses that Justice Solís investigated, I cannot rule out that there are those who did not tell everything they know."

In a split ruling, the justices of the Second Chamber of the highest court determined to acquit Gabriel Del Río Espinoza due to his lack of responsibility; while they ordered 5 years of imprisonment for their responsibility as perpetrators of kidnappings and granted the benefit of supervised release to Juan Hernán Morales Salgado; Claudio Abdón Lecaros Carrasco; Antonio Aguilar Barrientos; Félix Renato Cabezas Salazar; and three years of imprisonment with the benefit of conditional remission to Humberto Lautaro Julio Reyes.

It must be remembered that the Supreme Court issued a final sentence in the investigation into the qualified kidnappings of Arturo Enrique Riveros Blanco, Jaime Bernardo Torres Salazar, Jorge Bernabé Yáñez Olave, José Saavedra Betancourt, José Gabriel Campos Morales, Anselmo Antonio Cancino Aravena, Alejandro Robinson Mella Flores, María Isabel Beltrán Sánchez, and Héctor Hernán Contreras Cabrera, which occurred starting in September and December 1973, in the city of Linares.

Source: latercera.cl, May 2, 2011

Operation "Television Removal"

The “Retiro de Televisores” (Television Removal) operation was the solution Augusto Pinochet provided to cover up the massacres that occurred throughout Chile following the coup d'état.

This cruel decision was made by him and the Military Junta after the discovery of the bodies of 11 peasants and 4 youths from Isla de Maipo in the ovens of Lonquén. It was the second-to-last day of November 1978, when horror emerged from abandoned lime kilns in the town of Lonquén, a few kilometers from Santiago.

The report had reached the Vicaría de la Solidaridad from a peasant who was digging in the earth, searching for his forcibly disappeared son. At first, it was a secret known only to Cardinal Silva Enríquez, the Vicar of Solidarity Cristián Precht, and a small group of collaborators from the Vicaría de la Solidaridad; later, it became a stark reality regarding the fate of 15 detained individuals who had been missing until that moment.

The news of this discovery unsettled Pinochet; it was not on his agenda. He was clear that the disappeared had not escaped the country, nor were they traveling the world discrediting the military dictatorship.

He knew that behind every forcibly disappeared person was his own hand, so he called an emergency meeting of the Military Junta to seek a quick solution and prevent potential accidental discoveries of burials across the country.

It was a hot summer for the dictatorship. The discovery of clandestinely buried bodies and their rapid dissemination in the international press, added to the strong pressures from the U.S. government to extradite Manuel Contreras and Pedro Espinoza for the terrorist attack in Washington against Orlando Letelier, further weakening his position on the international stage at a time when he was facing a serious border crisis with Argentina.

That year, pressures from the White House regarding the Washington attack had forced Pinochet to make the decision to end the DINA, but he could not remain without an intelligence service that served his interests.

Thus, on August 12, he promulgated two Decree Laws: 1876, which ended the DINA, and 1878, which created the Central Nacional de Informaciones (CNI). To ensure everything was in order, he promoted Manuel Contreras to General of the Republic, fulfilling the requirements demanded by the position of director of the nascent CNI.

U.S. pressures continued, as did the investigations, which led Pinochet to decide to retire his loyal servant and seek a general who would provide guarantees to him and the Americans. The chosen one was retired General Odlanier Mena.

Odlanier Mena was a man of Military Intelligence who had retired after intense fights with the director of the DINA, Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda. Pinochet, to reassure him, had given him the position of ambassador to Uruguay—a not insignificant post for a retired general, as it was close to home and there were no conflicts or shocks with the civil-military dictatorship of José María Bordaberry, an ally of the Chilean military dictatorship.

On November 3, 1977, Contreras was called to retirement and replaced by General Odlanier Mena. The change was not easy. Contreras had accumulated much power and influence over his people, who, thanks to the prevailing impunity, had earned a reputation for being unscrupulous among their peers. Mena was reluctant when requested for the position and expressed this to Pinochet.

The most compelling argument was that he could not assume it because he was a retired general, and the law created expressly stated that its director must be a general in active service. Pinochet, demonstrating his power, replied that there were no problems, that he would immediately order a change stating that the director could be a general in active service or retired.

He was in the midst of this in December 1978, when he went to Pinochet's office to have several documents signed. At the entrance, he came face-to-face with General Mendoza, who was leaving the office very disturbed.

They did not have time to greet each other; he only heard, “Odlanier, we are discussing the Lonquén discovery and the enormous public commotion this fact has produced in the country. I have been ordered to present a detailed report because I myself was unaware of this situation.”

Surprised, he opened the door slightly and saw Admiral Merino, General Leigh, and Pinochet arguing. At that moment, an aide-de-camp had him enter. They greeted him without paying much attention to his presence and continued making comments, analyzing possible scenarios, and seeking ways to cover up the crimes.

Mena listened attentively from a corner of the table. At some point, the idea arose of using the institutions to carry out “the search for clandestine cemeteries throughout the country” in order to erase all traces of criminal activity. The idea contained a terrifying vision; it was a double crime: after death, disappearance.

The Operation

Despite the detailed description Mena gave to the justice system regarding that meeting, he replied that he had no further information about the fate of the idea of searching for “clandestine cemeteries.” It was Minister Juan Guzmán who managed to clarify the course that meeting took and how the removal of graves had been ordered through “Operation Retiro de Televisores.”

In 2004, Judge Guzmán and the Fifth Department of the Investigative Police received the testimony of an intelligence non-commissioned officer who indicated having received an A-1 category cryptogram—a nomenclature that determines the level of urgency and secrecy of the mission—while he was at the Húsares Regiment in Angol in 1979.

The uninterrupted account detailed data and situations that spoke to the context of the era and began to give substance to a series of gaps that had remained after the opening of graves in Liquiñe and other parts of the country.

According to his statement, due to the category of the cryptogram, he had run to the decoding machine to decipher it. When he was able to read it, seeing that it came from General Pinochet himself, he immediately took it to the regiment commander's office.

He was so impressed that he did not forget its text, and as if he were reading it for the first time, he told the Judge that it “ordered the exhumation of all bodies of political prisoners executed within the regiment's jurisdiction and to make them disappear.”

The text of the cryptogram added that if any body were found after that cleanup operation in the area, the officers in charge of the mission would be retired.

Mulchén Massacre

The order began to be executed at the Húsares Regiment, but its commander remembered that the massacre of 18 peasants near the Termas de Pemehue was not in his jurisdiction and called the No. 17 Reinforced Mountain Infantry Regiment of Los Ángeles to communicate the order they had received.

The next day, three non-commissioned officers from Department II of the III Army Division, based in Concepción, arrived at the No. 1 Mountain Infantry Regiment. All had completed courses at the School of the Americas and had specialties in counterinsurgency warfare.

They organized an eight-person team made up of officers and non-commissioned officers who headed to the Termas de Pemehue area. They went in two vehicles, equipped with pickaxes, shovels, crowbars, and black bags.

They had previously established contact with a relative of a soldier to guide them to the place where the bodies were supposed to be. The task was easy; the damp earth allowed them to reach the bodies, which were only 50 centimeters deep.

Some still had the remains of their humble clothes, which were torn apart as they were pulled out, leaving small traces of the crime in the pieces of fabric and buttons that remained in the earth. In total, 12 bodies were exhumed.

The bags were loaded into the vehicles and they headed toward Concepción. The place chosen to end the task was a brick kiln of Department II. One by one, they threw the bodies in to be incinerated, just as the Nazis had done during World War II.

Among the accounts is a reference to an officer who commented to them, while they were digging in the earth in search of the bodies, that he had learned to incinerate corpses in a course he had taken in Germany.

He gave them gruesome details, such as that a large grill had to be prepared to place the bodies on and that abundant firewood should be lit under it, adding petroleum continuously. He advised them that they had to be burned until they turned to ashes.

The Mulchén massacre occurred between October 5, 6, and 7, 1973, at the El Morro, Carmen y Maitenes, and Pemehue estates. At dusk on October 5, 1973, the patrol arrived at the Los Morros estate. They brought a list with the names of peasants.

They called them out loud, and they surrendered without complaint: Juan de Dios Laubra Brevis, 26; Domingo Antonio Sepúlveda Castillo, 29; José Edmundo Vidal Aedo, 20; Celsio Nicasio Vivanco Carrasco, 26; and José Florencio Yáñez Durán, 34.

All were tied with wire, beaten, tortured, and taken to the banks of the Renaico River to be executed. The next day, they went up to the Carmen y Maitenes estate looking for 8 peasants: Miguel del Carmen Albornoz Acuña, 20; Daniel Alfonso Albornoz González, 28; Alejandro Albornoz González, 48; José Guillermo Albornoz González, 32; Luis Alberto Godoy Sandoval, 23; Manuel Florencio Rubilar Gutiérrez, 25; José Liborio Rubilar Gutiérrez, 28; and José Lorenzo Rubilar Gutiérrez, 33.

All were taken to the main house. There, they were subjected to violent beatings until, amidst mockery and laughter, Lieutenant Concha Maturana made them play "Roman circus," where they would beat each other and the losers would fall under the bullets. Seven were coldly executed, forced to dig their own graves and lie face down inside them to be shot in the back.

The only one who was not executed that day was José Guillermo Albornoz González, whom they tied to a farm wagon. The last stop was at the Pemehue estate. There, they took from their homes Felidor Exequiel Albornoz González, 33; Alberto Albornoz González, 41; José Fernando Gutiérrez Ascencio, 25; Jerónimo Humberto Sandoval Medina, 22; and Juan de Dios Roa Riquelme, 35.

Here they repeated the same sadism they had displayed at the Carmen y Maitenes estate. The next morning, Army Sergeant Luis Díaz Quintana realized that José Guillermo Albornoz González was still tied to the wagon. He approached and saw that he was alive, despite his bleeding wounds, fractured jaw, having not eaten for two days, swollen from the sleet that had fallen, and without water.

Together with Carabineros officer Jacobo del Carmen Ortiz Palma, they took him to the banks of the Renaico River and murdered him. As in all the massacres that occurred in rural areas, terror took hold of the community; the law of the strongest was imposed, and the victims' relatives were left exposed to arbitrariness.

Some managed to bury their dead; others did not dare to look for the bodies for fear. Hindered by the fear inspired by the estate owners, they did not dare to rescue the bodies, nor did they think that the malice would go so far as to eliminate any trace of their relatives' lives.

The people responsible for these atrocious crimes are the Mulchén Carabineros lieutenant, Jorge Maturana Concha, and Carabineros officers Osvaldo Díaz Díaz, alias “Alicate,” and Héctor Guzmán Saldaña. Along with them, several civilians participated, among whom are Romualdo Guzmán Saavedra, Francisco Urrizola Elías, Ramón Elías Abella, Aquiles Guzmán Fritz, Carlos Lehman, and a sergeant from the No. 17 Reinforced Mountain Regiment.

Buin Regiment

Just as in the Húsares Regiment of Angol, in December 1978, Department II of the Buin Regiment received an encrypted message from the Commander-in-Chief.

More than 20 years later, Lieutenant Pedro Andrés Rodríguez Bustos declared before Judge Juan Guzmán that the message was signed by Augusto Pinochet and had precise orders “to gather the officers and non-commissioned officers who had been serving in those units between the years 1973 and 1974.

Said meeting should try to obtain from that personnel the information they had regarding the whereabouts of the bodies of people executed and buried inside military units or, in this specific case, in the Peldehue military field, considering that this field was going to transfer part of its land to the Compañía Minera Andina and, for that same reason, it had to be known if there were clandestine burials on said land, since if so, the exact locations were required to proceed with the exhumation and elimination of the corpses.”

Later, he would ratify his statements, noting that the order came from the Second Army Division, led by General Enrique Morel Donoso, and that it was sent to all garrisons in the country. He detailed the way in which the information was handed over by those who knew about the burials of political executions, and he emphasized the secret nature of the entire process, mentioning two officers who presented themselves to provide information to Commander Mario Navarrete Barriga: Juan Ibáñez and Jorge Aguilar.

Despite the conclusiveness of his statement, it was dismissed at the time because it was considered that it could be an intelligence operation. Only in 2004 would it be concluded that “Operation Retiro de Televisores” was a decision thought out and decided at the highest levels with the aim of hiding the massacres after the 1973 coup d'état.

Fuerte Arteaga

In 1999, while Augusto Pinochet was detained in London, the government of Eduardo Frei called on different sectors to participate in a Dialogue Table that would allow for the collection of information on the fate of the victims of the military regime who were forcibly disappeared.

Human rights lawyers, representatives of the Armed Forces and Order, representatives of the different religions existing in the country, academics, and government representatives participated in it.

The organizations of relatives of the forcibly disappeared and human rights organizations refused to participate, considering that this instance was a lifeline for Augusto Pinochet. The work ended on June 13, 2000, with the delivery of the document of the agreements reached to President Ricardo Lagos.

In it, the human rights violations that occurred during the military dictatorship were recognized by all who participated in the Table; an absolute rejection of the use of violence as a method of political action was established, as well as a commitment as a society to generate the conditions that would lead to reconciliation, thereby facilitating the delivery of information on the fate of the forcibly disappeared.

In January 2001, the Armed Forces delivered a report that provided data on the fate of 200 forcibly disappeared persons supposedly thrown into the sea, rivers, or the high mountain range. Of them, 180 appeared with names, surnames, and the date of their death.

President Lagos was given a report that contained 45 cases of forcibly disappeared persons whose data contained coordinates and maps of their location, which led to the presumption that those remains would be found quickly.

This complex situation caused public commotion, as it was an acknowledgment of the existence of information on the fate of the forcibly disappeared within the Armed Forces; to this was added the anxiety of many relatives who hoped to have answers about their loved ones.

Faced with this situation, the president of the Supreme Court, Hernán Álvarez, decided to appoint visiting ministers to clarify the fate of the forcibly disappeared.

In this framework, Judge Amanda Valdovinos was appointed to investigate the information on the existence of a cavern with 20 skulls of forcibly disappeared persons at Fuerte Arteaga and areas adjacent to the property surrounding this military facility.

The accounts that emerged spoke of exhumations and transfers of remains to the slopes of the El Talhuenal mountain range. There, the minister centered her investigative work, together with a team of forensic anthropologists.

The information that mentioned the “corner of the deceased” recurrently to refer to a specific area of the military facility, where remains taken from other places had been buried, led her to determine that not all the exhumed remains had been thrown into the sea, and she reported this to the Supreme Court.

In March of that same year, the investigations on the grounds of Fuerte Arteaga in Peldehue yielded results. In the Quebrada de los Ratones, the remains of Luis Rivera Matus were found, a communist union leader detained outside the Chilectra building on November 6, 1975, by men in civilian clothes who belonged to the Comando Conjunto Antisubversivo.

His name appeared in the Armed Forces' report as having been thrown into the sea off the coast of the central zone. This meant a new discredit for the Armed Forces; they were pointed out for delivering a list loaded with inaccuracies, causing new wounds among the relatives of the forcibly disappeared.

The minister's findings gave rise to more information that ended with the prosecutions of Air Force generals (ret.) Freddy Ruiz Bunger and Carlos Madrid Hayden, Army major (ret.) Álvaro Corbalán Castilla, and DINE (Army Intelligence Directorate) officer (ret.) Sergio López Díaz.

In 2004, the Minister of the Court of Appeals with special dedication to human rights cases, Joaquín Billard, sentenced General (ret.) Freddy Ruiz Bunger and Carlos Madrid Hayden to 600 days in prison as accessories to qualified kidnapping in the case of Luis Rivera Matus.

He sentenced Army major (ret.) Álvaro Corbalán Castilla and Army Intelligence officer (ret.) Sergio López Díaz to 10 years in prison as perpetrators of the qualified kidnapping of Luis Rivera Matus. Three years later, the Supreme Court reduced the sentences, leaving only Álvaro Corbalán Castilla with an effective prison sentence.

La Moneda

Four months after the search began at Fuerte Arteaga, the investigations began to reveal what had happened more than twenty-five years earlier with those detained on September 11, 1973, at La Moneda.

A large pit was excavated in the northern area of the field zone, and more than 500 bone pieces were recovered, which corresponded to fragments of limbs, teeth, pieces of skull, and other parts of human bodies, in addition to war material and pieces of clothing.

Among these remains was the last piece of history of 12 of the 20 people detained on September 11, 1973, at La Moneda. Judge Valdovinos issued a conclusive report to the Supreme Court.

In it, she spoke of the violence and irrationality that had dominated these deaths. She indicated that, upon observing the remains found in the area of the pit, one could “categorically conclude the use of explosives of the grenade type to destroy the bodies,” due to the bone fragments that had remained embedded in the the walls of the pit.

He also referred to the heavy machinery tracks found during the exhumation of the bodies.

In June 2002, the Supreme Court decided to restructure investigations into human rights violation cases and appointed Judge Juan Carlos Urrutia, of the Fifth Criminal Court, to be in charge of the Fuerte Arteaga case.

The investigation into illegal exhumation began based on the bone fragments found. One of the key witnesses in this investigation was non-commissioned officer Eliseo Cornejo Escobar, who participated in the executions of the detainees from La Moneda and, five years later, guided the search during the excavations to exhume the remains as part of "Operation Retiro de Televisores" (Operation Television Removal).

On that December 23, 1978, the supervision of the work was in the hands of the commander of the Tacna Regiment, Hernán Canales Varas. According to the accounts, it was around 10:00 a.m. when Eliseo Cornejo marked the exact spot where the detainees had been buried on September 13, 1973.

A mechanical shovel began to dig into the dry well until it reached a depth of six meters, where an iron bar appeared, which Cornejo immediately identified. The shovel began to work slowly until the first body appeared.

The bodies were almost intact, thanks to the clay soil that prevented the penetration of oxygen and the subsequent process of organic decomposition. The bodies were removed manually so they would not fall apart; despite this, small fragments remained in the earth, as if refusing to disappear entirely. They then removed the remains and loaded them onto a Unimog truck.

In total, there were 12 sacks, and all were transported to a parking area in front of the San Martín highway. Around 10:00 p.m., the Army Aviation Command helicopter arrived, under the command of then-Colonel Fernando Darrigrandi.

It was piloted by Emilio de la Mahotiere González, Luis Felipe Polanco, and Antonio Palomo Contreras, the same trio that flew the Puma helicopter in the Caravan of Death. The aircraft landed near where the sacks were; they were quickly loaded, and the helicopter departed.

As in previous cases, "Operation Retiro de Televisores" had been carried out silently and in a timely manner. The order from the Commander-in-Chief of the Army had been fulfilled.

It was the execution of one crime to cover up another, which had begun on September 12, 1973, with the arrival of Pedro Espinoza at the Tacna Regiment. The Intelligence officer carried an envelope containing precise orders from the Army General Command to the commander of the Tacna Regiment, Luis Ramírez Pineda.

In them, the people detained at La Moneda were sentenced to death, and it was ordered that they be transferred to Peldehue to carry out the order. Ramírez Pineda had given orders to apply maximum brutality against the detainees who arrived that afternoon of September 11. In those bound and exhausted men, he deposited all his hatred against the Marxists.

There were 49 detainees; the following day, it was ordered to release 17 officials from the Investigations police, and others were separated, reducing the La Moneda group to 21 people. On the 13th, first thing in the morning, a truck was parked in front of the barracks where the prisoners were held.

List in hand, they were taken out of the stables, tied with wire, and violently thrown into the truck. Among the 21 were Jaime Barrios Meza, Sergio Contreras, Daniel Escobar Cruz, Enrique Huerta Corvalán, Claudio Jimeno Grendi, Jorge Klein Pipper, Oscar Lagos Ríos, Juan Montiglio Murúa, Enrique Paris Roa, Eduardo Paredes Barrientos, Julio Moreno Pulgar, Héctor Pincheira Núñez, Arsenio Poupin Oissel, Julio Tapia Martínez, Héctor Urrutia Molina, Oscar Valladares Caroca, Juan Vargas Contreras, Luis Rodríguez Riquelme, José Freire Medina, and Luis Avilés Jofré, who had arrived at the La Moneda Palace to support the government.

The truck headed north, guarded by military vehicles and followed by the watchful gaze of then-Colonel Pedro Espinoza Bravo, who was traveling in one of the column's vehicles. Espinoza was a high-ranking Army Intelligence officer whose role in the post-coup repression was decisive.

He was in charge of supervising the main extermination operations committed throughout the country, by order of the Intelligence General Staff. Upon arrival, they went immediately to a dry well next to a building. There, they set up a machine gun operated by Lieutenant Jorge Herrera López and began to bring the detainees down, calling them by their names.

Without complaint and looking straight ahead, the 21 men faced death standing at the edge of the pit. They faced the muffled sounds of the bullets that echoed in the solitude of the hills alone. When the last detainee fell, the order was given to throw grenades so that the walls of the pit would collapse, thus covering up the crime.

The process The case has had a long journey through the justice system. From the time Judge Amanda Valdovinos began the investigation into illegal burials to the present, the investigation has been in the hands of the judge of the Fifth Criminal Court, Juan Carlos Urrutia; Court of Appeals Minister Alejandro Madrid Crohare; Special Minister for human rights cases Juan Fuentes Belmar; and it is currently in the hands of Court of Appeals Minister Miguel Vásquez Plaza.

Of the 21 victims, only 11 forcibly disappeared persons have been identified through the work of identifying remains and genetic analyses carried out by the University of North Texas Laboratory in the United States, which included forensic examinations of the victims' bone samples and comparative tests on blood samples donated by their families.

Currently, General (ret.) Luis Ramírez Pineda is being prosecuted as the perpetrator of the qualified homicide of 11 people detained at La Moneda on September 11, 1973, and transferred to the Tacna Regiment, where he was commander.

An extension of the extradition is also being processed in the Argentine justice system, because it was initially requested on charges of the qualified kidnapping of 11 people, and he is currently being prosecuted for qualified homicide; since the legal classification has changed, it is necessary to request a change in the extradition from the country granting it.

The resolution affected eight other retired members of the Army who confessed to having participated in the kidnappings of Jaime Barrios Meza, Daniel Escobar Cruz, Enrique Huerta Corvalán, Claudio Jimeno Grendi, Oscar Lagos Ríos, Juan Montiglio Murúa, Julio Moreno Pulgar, Arsenio Poupin Oissel, Julio Tapia Martínez, Oscar Valladares Caroca, and Juan Vargas Contreras.

The eight prosecuted as perpetrators of the crime of qualified kidnapping were Army Colonel (ret.) Servando Maureira Roa, Army Major (ret.) Jorge Iván Herrera López, Army Brigadier (ret.) Pedro Octavio Espinoza Bravo, and Army non-commissioned officers (ret.) Eliseo Antonio Cornejo Escobedo, Jorge Ismael Gamboa Álvarez, Teobaldo Segundo Mendoza Vicencio, Juan de la Cruz Riquelme Silva, and Bernardo Eusebio Soto Segura.

Linares Artillery School

The same secret document that circulated through the barracks at the beginning of 1979 reached the Linares Artillery School. Without hesitation, the director of the Linares Artillery School, Lieutenant Colonel Patricio Gualda Tiffani, ordered the formation of a special team to exhume the bodies and placed Captain Mario Gianotti Hidalgo in charge of this mission.

He chose two officers, including Lieutenant Hernán Véjar Sinning, and two non-commissioned officers to carry out the mission. They were joined by an Intelligence non-commissioned officer from the Army's III Division who had arrived with two other members of that department to supervise the fulfillment of the order.

Equipped with shovels and pickaxes, they dug in different places inside the Regiment, finally finding two bodies that were unclothed. After putting them in bags, they kept them safe inside the Regiment and left for the city of Constitución to search for a clandestine burial site located in a cave at the mouth of the Maule River.

The constant rising of the river and the tides had changed the appearance of the terrain somewhat, so it was difficult for them to find the exact spot. Finally, they found three skulls, concluding that it was the place they were looking for.

They dug them up, put them in bags, and returned to the Artillery School. With the first stage of the mission accomplished, they went to look for a metal drum, put oil in it, then put the five bodies inside, doused them with oil again, and set them on fire. The remains of the five forcibly disappeared persons were turned into ashes, and the double crime was completed.

In April 2003, Minister Alejandro Solís had begun investigations in the area of the General Bari Polygon, where, according to information provided by a former conscript, there had been a mass grave with the bodies of the forcibly disappeared persons from the area.

The efforts did not yield results, and only some traces of possible burials were found at the site. In 2008, the Minister of the Santiago Court of Appeals, Alejandro Solís, issued a sentence and set penalties of 15 years and one day for five defendants, and 10 years and one day for a sixth defendant for the disappearances of María Isabel Beltrán Sánchez, José Gabriel Campos Morales, Anselmo Cancino Aravena, Héctor Hernán Contreras Cabrera, Alejandro Róbinson Mella Flores, Arturo Enrique Riveros Blanco, Jaime Bernardo Torres Salazar, José Alfonso Saavedra Betancourt, and Jorge Bernabé Yáñez Olave, detained between September 1973 and February 1974.

On April 27, 2011, the Supreme Court reduced the sentences handed down by Minister Solís, acquitting General (ret.) Gabriel del Río Espinoza, who had been convicted for the disappearance of five people, and sentencing Army Colonel (ret.) Juan Hernán Morales Salgado and Army Lieutenant Colonel Claudio Abdón Lecaros Carrasco to five years and one day in prison with the benefit of supervised release for the disappearance of María Isabel Beltrán, José Gabriel Campos, Anselmo Antonio Cancino, and Alejandro Róbinson Mella.

Army non-commissioned officer (ret.) Antonio Aguilar Barrientos was sentenced to five years and one day in prison with the benefit of supervised release for four counts of qualified kidnapping, and Army Colonel (ret.) Antonio Cabezas Salazar for three counts of qualified kidnapping.

General (ret.) Humberto Lautaro Julio Reyes, who was Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs during the military dictatorship, was sentenced to three years in prison with the benefit of conditional remission, remaining on supervised release.

This was one of the most compelling pieces of evidence available to demonstrate that Pinochet was aware of the atrocities that occurred during his mandate. No one creates such a perverse mechanism to hide crimes unless they are directly involved.

Chihuío On October 9, 1973, the locals of Chihuío thought the worst of the period had passed. The arrests of workers in Neltume and the violence that the Llifén police had unleashed among the peasants of Chabranco, Arquilme, and Curriñe had spread like wildfire.

That day, a patrol consisting of 90 well-armed and equipped soldiers in seven vehicles set out for the Andean foothills, where only poor workers of the Panguipulli Lumber Company lived. They were from the No. 2 Cazadores Armored Cavalry Regiment of Valdivia, commanded by General (ret.) Santiago Sinclair, who later became a member of the Military Junta and a designated senator at the beginning of the transition to democracy.

In charge was Squadron Commander Luis Osorio Gardasanich, and officers Patricio Keller, Lautaro Ortega, Marcos Rodríguez Olivares, and Luis Rodríguez Rogorrichi. Lieutenant Cristián Labbé Galilea was in charge of the special unit.

The patrol toured the towns and hamlets of the area, read lists of names, and proceeded to arrest them. The owner of the Chihuío estate, Américo González Torres, participated actively and enthusiastically in this journey of death.

Without any shame, they asked the locals for wires and ox teams to drag the vehicles that had gotten stuck in the mud. At the Curriñe administration office of the Panguipulli Lumber Complex, they tortured some detainees, while a patrol went up to arrest workers at the Folilco sawmill. Their last stop was in Chabranco, where they arrested the last workers.

With their cargo, they left for the main house of the Chihuío estate, where they brutalized the workers. According to testimony received by the Rettig Report, at first glance, there were no bullet impacts, but signs of cuts, throat-slitting, dismemberment of limbs, and other traces of torture impossible to describe.

The next morning, a local saw some bodies covered with branches and logs, recognizing some of the victims as workers from the area. The corpses remained in the open for about 15 days and were then buried.

There were 17 workers from the area: Carlos Maximiliano Acuña Inostroza, José Orlando Barriga Soto, José Rosamel Cortés Díaz, Rubén Neftalí Durán Zúñiga, Luis Arnaldo Ferrada Sandoval, Eliecer Sigisfredo Freire Caamaño, Narciso Segundo García Cancino, Juan Walter González Delgado, Daniel Méndez Méndez, Sebastián Mora Osses, Pedro Segundo Pedreros Ferreira, Rosendo Rebolledo Méndez, Ricardo Segundo Ruiz Rodríguez, Carlos Vicente Salinas Flores, Manuel Jesús Sepúlveda Rebolledo, Rubén Vargas Quezada, and the minor Fernando Adrián Mora Gutiérrez, who, upon helping to pull a military vehicle out of the mud, saw that his father was among the detainees and asked the soldiers where they were taking him. They replied that if he wanted to go with his father, he should get into the vehicle, and so he did.

At the end of 1978, a military operation returned to Chihuío and exhumed the bodies of the 17 peasants to throw them into the sea. The pit with the bone remains from the exhumation was found on June 17, 1990, by a group of relatives and friends of forcibly disappeared persons.

In the first days of July 2011, the director of the Legal Medical Institute, Patricio Bustos, announced the names of the first five people identified: Carlos Maximiliano Acuña Inostroza, 46 years old at the time of his death, agricultural worker; Luis Arnaldo Ferrada Sandoval, 42 years old at the time of his death, agricultural worker; Daniel Méndez Méndez, 42 years old, agricultural worker and peasant leader; Ricardo Segundo Ruiz Rodríguez, [age missing], factory manager and member of the Socialist Party; and Manuel Jesús Sepúlveda Rebolledo, 28 years old, lumber worker.

On July 15, the director of the Valdivia Legal Medical Service, Patricia Benhe, handed over the few bone remains to the families so they could bury them.

The identifications were made with the fragments found in the clandestine pit, where the bodies were thrown and later removed to be thrown into the sea, as part of the so-called "Operation Retiro de Televisores."

In January 2011, the Supreme Court sentenced Army Colonel (ret.) Luis Osorio Gardasanich to 10 years and one day as the perpetrator of the crime of qualified homicide of 17 people, including a minor. Carabineros officer (ret.) Luis Eduardo Osses Chavarría was sentenced to 3 years and one day in prison for his role as an accomplice in 4 kidnappings.

Civilian Bruno Esteban Obando Cárdenas was acquitted for having no participation in the events.

General Santiago Sinclair, who gave the orders, was acquitted. Meanwhile, Colonel (ret.) Jerónimo Pantoja Henríquez died before the Supreme Court's sentence. The 17 workers belonged to the Esperanza del Obrero Peasant Union of the Panguipulli Lumber Complex. Most were evangelical believers who had organized to participate in building a more just life.

Cuesta Barriga Enrique Erasmo Sandoval Arancibia was an army lieutenant when he was called to the DINA in 1976. Although he does not say much about his role in the repressive organization that year, he hints at his time at the Intelligence School in Rinconada de Maipú, which served to instruct Argentine, Uruguayan, and Chilean agents.

He also claims to have been part of the security for the VI OAS General Assembly held in Santiago, which Henry Kissinger attended.

In a disorganized manner, he says that at the end of 1976, he became part of the Caupolicán Brigade, which was under the command of Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko, assigned to the Cóndor group. He claims not to remember names, nor the activity he carried out; he only remembers that he spoke a lot with the former MIR member who collaborated with the DINA, named "Joel," Emilio Iribarren.

But "Pete el Negro," as he was known in the DINA, had a whole criminal history behind his apparent innocence before the courts. After the coup d'état and the indiscriminate repression, this man murdered the boy Carlos Fariña with a shot in the back and burned the corpse.

In the 80s, he participated in the murder of Lisandro Sandoval. In 1978, he joined the Red Brigade of the National Intelligence Center (CNI), in charge of the repression against the MIR. During his time there, he reported directly to Álvaro Corbalán.

He remembers that at the beginning of 1979, Jerónimo Pantoja, deputy director of the CNI, received information that a rabbit hunter had discovered an abandoned mine with bodies in Cuesta Barriga, and the information had been given to the Vicariate of Solidarity.

Faced with the alarm, Pantoja sent him to check the place, "which was a mine shaft, and I verified that it was true. It was full of rodents, bats, putrefied remains, and there was a smell consistent with the remains. This smell would have alerted and disturbed the hunter's dogs, and that is how he would have arrived at the place."

With a photograph in hand, Lieutenant Sandoval arrived before Pantoja, who ordered him not to dynamite the mine and ordered him to use acid. Given the difficulty he had due to his ignorance of the use of chemicals, he called General Odlanier Mena at his vacation home in Mehuín to inform him of the situation.

The delicate information caused Mena to suspend his vacation, return to Santiago, and take charge of the removal of the bodies.

For this, he entrusted Sandoval with removing the bodies with a trusted team. "My team was made up of 9 people, and we went to the mine for three days." He claims to have no idea how many bodies there were, but estimates there were about 20, which were put into 50 potato sacks.

Some of the bodies were skeletonized; others still retained soft tissue. When they finished removing the bodies, they took some dogs, killed them, and threw them inside to justify the presence of bones.

Then they loaded the sacks onto a truck and took them to the Malloco plot that had belonged to the Political Commission of the MIR. Finally, the remains were transported to Peldehue and possibly thrown into the sea.

Operation Retiro de Televisores covered the entire national territory and is the clearest example of the policy of concealment of human rights violations that prevailed during the military dictatorship.

Source: elmostrador.cl, September 2013

Operation "Retiro de Televisores": Pinochet gave the order

Harassed by the traces of his thefts, Pinochet is living through decisive moments in the courts. Added to the investigation into his crimes are the investigation into the Riggs Bank accounts, the new indictment of his son, and the confession of some perpetrators of illegal exhumations who accuse him of being the one who directly gave the order to permanently make the bodies of the murdered prisoners disappear.

This operation is what the dictator, in an encrypted message, called "Retiro de Televisores" (Removal of Television Sets).

At the end of 1978, while serving as a lieutenant in the Intelligence Section II of the Buin Regiment, Captain (Ret.) Pedro Andrés Rodríguez Bustos received a coded order from the Army General Command, which in turn was sent to all garrisons and divisions in the country. 21 years later, in 1999, he testified before Judge Juan Guzmán Tapia that this coded message was signed by Augusto Pinochet Ugarte and gave peremptory orders "to gather the officers and non-commissioned officers who had been serving in those units between the years 1973 and 1974.

Said meeting was to attempt to obtain from this personnel the information they had regarding the whereabouts of the bodies of people executed and buried inside military units or, in this specific case, in the Peldehue military camp, given that this camp was going to transfer part of its land to the Compañía Minera Andina and, for that same reason, it had to be known if there were clandestine burials on said land, since if so, the exact locations were required to proceed with the exhumation and elimination of the corpses."

Although this information crossed the walls of the courts, many interested voices were raised to discredit Rodríguez Bustos's statement, even from official sources that spoke of an "intelligence operation," which undermined the credibility of the former uniformed officer.

The weight of the facts

However, Captain Rodríguez would insist, and other testimonies would come to support his account. At the beginning of July 2004, he would ratify his statements, starting with his personal history: "I entered the Military School in 1967, graduating as a second lieutenant in 1972, serving in different units of the country, among which I can highlight the Motorized Artillery Regiment No. 2 ‘Arica’, garrisoned in La Serena, the Military School, the Infantry Regiment No. 1 ‘Buin’, the General Headquarters of the Second Division, and the Infantry Regiment No. 4 ‘Rancagua’, garrisoned in the city of Arica.

I point out that, after having provided reinforcement services in the Buin Regiment between 1974 and 1975, I fulfilled functions as an Instructor Officer at the Military School, and I must add that in 1976 I was assigned to the Buin Regiment, where I began to fulfill functions in Section II, Intelligence, and I must point out that in 1978 a command order was received, issued by the Second Army Division, whose commander at that date was General Enrique Morel Donoso.

Said order had as a reference the order from the Army General Command and was sent to all garrisons and divisions in the country." The order issued, which aimed not to repeat the "embarrassment" of Lonquén, would become known as "Operation Removal of Television Sets."

In another part of his statement, Officer Rodríguez points out that "this meeting—which brought together those who had participated in executions and clandestine burials—was general for these people, but the regiment commanders had to receive the information individually from those who were going to provide it.

That is how it happened in the Buin Regiment, and the commander of the time, Colonel Mario Navarrete Barriga, today a retired general, received in his private office the personnel who had to provide some type of information, since at that date there was only one officer who had been there during those years.

That information was kept secret, just like the classification that the order emanating from the higher echelon had. I must point out that, in my capacity as an Intelligence Officer assigned during those years to Section II of the Buin regiment, with the rank of lieutenant, I remember that among the non-commissioned officers who appeared before the commander to provide the information they possessed, I can mention two officials who worked under my command: Juan Ibáñez and Jorge Aguilar, and I must add that to date I do not know which other non-commissioned officers assigned to the Buin were the ones who appeared before the commander to provide information.

I must point out that, in coordination meetings between intelligence officers and the commander of the special Intelligence detachment of the II Division, we were informed that the information sent to the division and the Santiago military garrison would always be secret, but nevertheless, having already made a survey of the places where bodies were located, these were to be exhumed by personnel from the Puente Alto Engineer Regiment with the support of personnel from the Aviation Command, for their disappearance.

It also transpired in those meetings that some human remains were going to be moved within the same Peldehue military camp, from their original grave to other places.

Regarding the compliance with this order at the national level, I must point out that regarding what happened with bodies buried in provincial military units, I must assume that the procedure was the same as that applied in Santiago, both to obtain information from the personnel and to proceed with the location and exhumation of the bodies."

Indeed, after the information was collected, using as a public pretext that the sale of Peldehue land to the Minera Andina company was being negotiated, it was ordered that it was essential to clear a strip of land that ran to the south of the property, which was called "Cajón de los Ratones." For this reason, it became necessary to move graves to the north of Peldehue, towards the Las Tórtolas hill.

The removal of bodies took place on December 23, 1978, the day a team of uniformed officers proceeded with the exhumations using a backhoe to begin the sinister work, and then they took on the task with picks and shovels for many hours.

The person leading the search and excavation was Non-Commissioned Officer Eliseo Cornejo Escobar, one of those who had participated in the 1973 machine-gunnings. The supervision had been left in the hands of Commander Hernán Canales Varas.

The bodies, mostly intact thanks to the preservation naturally provided by the soil of the area, were put one by one into potato sacks, transported to a Unimog-type truck, and loaded onto an Army Puma helicopter. The final destination of those executed from La Moneda would be out at sea.

The moving of graves would be verified by Judge Amanda Valdovinos, who discovered the remains of Juan Luis Rivera Matus, whom the "Dialogue Table" had claimed was thrown into the sea. A few months later came another surprise: in a large grave inside Fort Arteaga, more than 500 bone pieces were found, including skull fragments, limbs, and teeth, which would correspond to part of the detainees from La Moneda.

Along with the human remains were remains of grenades and bullets. Everything indicated that, after being shot a few days after the military coup, the prisoners had been thrown into the grave and blown up.

Throughout Chile

The latest investigations carried out in Cuesta Barriga by Judge Héctor Carreño resulted in the discovery of teeth and small vertebrae, presumably belonging to part of the clandestine leadership of the Communist Party kidnapped at the end of 1976. The fact that larger bones could not be found was proof that the corpses had also been removed here.

After years of forced silence, the testimonies of locals who claim to have seen Army trucks transporting bodies in 1987 gained strength again.

In Calama, the investigation by Judge Juan Guzmán allowed for the identification of the remains of Carlos Berger and Domingo Mamani. The fragments found provide evidence of removals. In Pisagua, there is confirmation that there were indeed removals of bodies and that they were destroyed.

In Chihuío, the 18 people who were executed and buried in October 1973 would be removed five years later, when a military patrol arrived in the sector to dig up the bodies, without their final destination being known to this day.

In 1990, the visiting judge Nibaldo Segura arrived at the site and was able to establish that there were indeed highly fragmented bone remains left after the removal of the remains, which were symbolically buried in the Valdivia cemetery.

In November 1979, the Vicar of Solidarity, Ignacio Ortúzar, gave Judge Humberto Espejo, who was investigating the detention of six peasants from Paine, information regarding mass and irregular burials in Patio 29 of the General Cemetery, in 200 graves with identified corpses and N.N. (unidentified).

Among the bodies buried with identification were several detainees from Paine who had passed through Cerro Chena.

The court verified the existence of dozens of graves with more than one person buried, as well as the existence of more than 100 with N.N. annotations. At the end of 1979, Judge Espejo communicated to the director of the Cemetery the prohibition of incinerating, exhuming, or moving the remains of people buried without identification.

At the beginning of the 80s, Cemetery workers reported that the bodies were being taken; finally, only 78 people could be identified out of a total that could have reached more than 200.

A former agent of the Army Intelligence Directorate (DINE), interviewed by Qué Pasa under the alias "don Eduardo," asserts that the illegal exhumations continued until very late in the dictatorial regime.

That is how in 1986, faced with the pressures exerted by the Catholic Church and the difficult political landscape being faced, "since there was certainty that there were places with graves containing remains of forcibly disappeared persons in Peldehue," he states, "the task was entrusted to specialized intelligence units so that exhumations would be produced with the reserved support of the Army Aviation Command.

The work was carried out with speed and secrecy, but it was not without difficulties. The ground was very hard and stony and, although the bodies were buried at a shallow depth—between 50 centimeters and one meter underground—it was necessary to bring heavy machinery from the Engineer Command that was located in Santiago to remove the earth.

This process lasted about a month. As the removals of corpses progressed, they were stored in thick black polyethylene bags and arranged to one side of the grave, to then be loaded into a Puma helicopter, which took off towards the coast located between Quintero and Valparaíso.

The aircraft's crew was composed of two pilot officers, two mechanic non-commissioned officers, and one telecommunications operator. The bags with the bodies were mixed with stones to make them heavier.

They were thrown into the sea from a medium altitude, as it was believed that at the moment of falling, the polyethylene could break and disperse its contents into the sea. Everything was done in absolute secrecy."

Non-Commissioned Officer Balboa Ortega

Ratifying the statements of Pedro Rodríguez Bustos, the testimony of Juan Carlos Balboa Ortega appears, retired as a first sergeant of the Army, who points out that "in March 1979 I applied and was accepted into an intelligence assistant course taught by the Intelligence School located in Nos, graduating at the end of August of that year.

Upon arriving at my unit, the Armored Cavalry Regiment No. 3, 'Húsares de Angol', I was assigned to Intelligence Section II, the regiment commander at that time being Colonel Patricio Escudero Troncoso.

At the end of 1979, a secret cryptogram with the designation A-1, which indicates maximum urgency, was received in the unit, coming from the Army Commander-in-Chief, Captain General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, addressed to all military units in the country.

In summary, this document informed that all unit commanders would be administratively responsible for the appearance of bodies of political executions in their jurisdiction, for which reason it ordered all corresponding measures to be taken to prevent third parties from finding the burial sites of each military jurisdiction.

This document was received, initialed by the section chief, and delivered personally to Colonel Patricio Escudero. I clearly remember having read this cryptogram and having commented on it with the other members of the section, among them non-commissioned officers Rebolledo, Cáceres, and Castro.

A-1 classified cryptograms can be received at any time of the day and arrive at the regiment's Telecommunications Section, which delivers them to Section II. The official of this Section who receives them has one hour to decrypt them and deliver them to the commander.

Subsequently, in the month of March of each year, they proceed to their incineration along with all documents received up to December 31."

Non-commissioned officer Balboa points out that "in January 1980 I was on vacation at a farm near Mulchén, where I had the opportunity to learn that a group of people from that place had been murdered in a place that corresponded to the jurisdiction of my regiment.

Upon returning from my legal leave, I communicated this situation to Commander Escudero, who ordered me to go look for the cryptogram that gave instructions on this subject and that reported that regiment commanders in whose jurisdiction bodies of political executions were found would be retired.

I found it and gave it to the commander, who called the commander of the Los Angeles regiment, pointing out to him that there was a jurisdictional problem, since the background of political executions by personnel of that military unit was known. Because of the above, the commander of the Los Angeles regiment requested that I report immediately to his unit.

In Los Angeles, I met with the commander of the Reinforced Mountain Infantry Regiment No. 17, who contacted me with the head of Section II of his unit to organize the trip. The next day we left in two vehicles, a pickup truck and a station wagon, without military identifications and in civilian clothes.

Along the Curaco road, we headed towards the El Amargo sector, where Non-Commissioned Officer Paredes (see box), assigned to Department II of the III Army Division of Concepción, spoke with a local about the burials in the sector.

The first place we visited was in the El Amargo sector, on the side of the road on the north bank of the Renaico River. Since it did not correspond to my jurisdiction, I pointed it out, and about eight or nine officials crossed the river.

About three hours later they returned carrying seven or eight potato sacks, each with a body. Then we went about ten kilometers to the east, where another four bodies were dug up and loaded into the pickup truck, just like the first ones.

The Los Angeles group was under the orders of the lieutenant head of Section II, despite which the operational command was held by Non-Commissioned Officer Paredes from Concepción, who directed the work while the officer gave his approval."

On the same subject, the former director of the CNI, Odlanier Mena Salinas, publicly admitted at the end of 2000 that "the discovery of bodies in Lonquén produced a serious internal social commotion. The country was in the preliminaries of a near-war with Argentina.

One of the fundamental elements was the cohesion of the internal front, that is, that people were convinced that the country was right to go to war and that they supported their Armed Forces. It could be inferred that if new 'Lonquéns' appeared, the internal front would be damaged.

For this reason, the commanders-in-chief decided that the units, not the CNI, should make a survey of the possible illegal cemeteries that existed in each zone."

Mena tries to rule out the participation of the CNI, but all the indications point to the fact that they worked in conjunction with the Army's intelligence sections to avoid "new Lonquéns" and, in this way, maintain "the cohesion of the internal front." Thus, the only solution was to obey Pinochet's order and "remove the television sets."

Nazi practices

In Auschwitz, an average of 24,000 murders per day was reached using the method of collective gas chambers, to then apply incineration in scientifically planned crematoria as a way to ensure the elimination of the corpses.

There were 46 furnace niches, each with a capacity for between three and five people. The incineration lasted half an hour, and for cleaning, one hour per day was used. When these furnaces could not keep up, in August 1944, six huge pits were dug and some previous ones made in the adjacent forest were reopened.

The pits had channels on one side to collect the boiling human fat, which would serve to maintain their operation along with the application of oil and alcohol, since a strong and permanent fire was needed.

After lighting the furnaces with coke at the beginning of the day until they reached the appropriate temperature, they barely required a little more fuel to function.

Non-commissioned officer Juan Carlos Balboa points out in part of his testimony regarding the final destination of the exhumed bodies that he is unaware of what happened, "however, I remember that Non-Commissioned Officer Paredes commented that he had taken an intelligence course in Germany, where he had learned to incinerate corpses; he even said that one had to have a large grill, put the bodies on top, and start the fire with firewood and kerosene, fuel that had to continue being added to the fire every so often until achieving that they were completely turned into ashes."

Department II of Intelligence of the Los Angeles Regiment had a brick furnace with a chimney. The bodies of a dozen executed people from the area were thrown there.

Those who know the "final destination"

At the Linares Artillery School, at the time of the illegal exhumations, Lieutenant Colonel Patricio Gualda Tiffani was in command, who from 1985 to 1988 would be the last appointed rector of the University of Santiago (USACH).

Gualda gave Captain Mario Gianotti Hidalgo the order to form a team of diggers, according to him after receiving the information about the "removal of television sets" from his second-in-command, Deputy Director Ricardo Gaete Villaseñor. One of the members of the special team was Lieutenant Hernán Véjar Sinning.

The perpetrators of the disappearance of six prisoners in Linares, prosecuted by Judge Alejandro Solís, are the former vice-commander-in-chief of the Army Jorge Zincke Quiroz; the former director of the Linares Artillery School and former commander of the Metropolitan Region Army Garrison, Major General Carlos Morales Retamal; General (Ret.) and former Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs of the military regime, Humberto Julio; and retired colonels Juan Morales and Félix Cabezas.

For this case, the former director of Investigations, Nelson Mery, was summoned to testify, who after September 1973 was assigned to the Linares Artillery School as a liaison officer with the then-director of the unit, Colonel Gabriel del Río.

In the case of the Peldehue diggings, Judge Juan Carlos Urrutia maintains prosecutions against five uniformed officers, among whom stands out the commander of the Tacna Regiment in 1978, Colonel Hernán Ricardo Canales Varas.

The other implicated parties are the intelligence chief of the time, Luis Antonio Fuenzalida Rojas, and non-commissioned officers Eliseo Cornejo Escobedo, José Canario Santibáñez, and Darío Gutiérrez de la Torre.

Previously, the same judge had prosecuted, as perpetrators of the kidnapping of 12 prisoners from La Moneda, nine other uniformed officers, among whom are General Luis Joaquín Ramírez Pineda and Brigadier Pedro Espinoza Bravo, who allegedly supervised the machine-gunning and clandestine burial of the executed.

Varas, meanwhile, is the one who appears commanding the exhumation and removal operation of the bodies, which were bagged and loaded onto a Unimog truck, to then be taken to the helicopter that would transport them to their "final destination." Pinochet's "favorites" to pilot these helicopters were the same ones who participated in the Caravan of Death: Antonio Palomo Contreras, Emilio de la Mahotiere González, and Luis Felipe Polanco.

In the case of Pisagua, the same individuals who are being prosecuted for the kidnappings and executions must have information regarding what happened to some of the bodies that have still not been found.

Among them appears the father-in-law of the current Commander-in-Chief of the Army, the former vice-commander Carlos Forestier, along with Pedro Espinoza Bravo and the non-commissioned officer Miguel Aguirre.

Source: elsiglo.cl, August 13, 2004

Ruling by the Talca Court increases sentences for retired Army officer for illegal detentions in San Javier

The Talca Court of Appeals sentenced retired Army officer Claudio Lecaros Carrasco to two 800-day prison terms, with the benefit of conditional remission, for his responsibility in the illegal detention of Juan de la Cruz Arellano Gómez and Mario González Albornoz.

These crimes were perpetrated in October 1973 in the city of San Javier. In a unanimous ruling (case file 71-2017), the Second Chamber of the appellate court—composed of ministers Rodrigo Biel, Ricardo Riquelme, and lawyer (ad hoc) Diego Palomo—increased the 541-day prison sentences previously issued by the visiting judge Hernán González García.

In the civil aspect, the convicted individual and the State were ordered to pay a total compensation of $150,000,000 (one hundred and fifty million pesos) to the relatives of González Albornoz. During the investigation phase of the case, Judge Hernán González established that: "on October 17, 1973, Juan de la Cruz Arellano Gómez was detained at his home in the El Cajón plot, El Morro sector, on the San Javier-Constitución road, by military and Carabineros personnel, who removed him from his house, took him to a nearby location, shot him with a firearm, and killed him; the cause of his death was a pulmonary infarction caused by at least one bullet." In the case of Mario González Albornoz, it was proven that: "on September 11, 1973, a group of Chilean Army personnel from the Linares Artillery Regiment moved to the commune of San Javier under the instruction of Gabriel del Río Espinoza, Commander of said military unit. This battalion was led by Captain Claudio Lecaros Carrasco, who was also accompanied by retired Chilean Army officers: Luis Campusano Detmer, Fernando José Molina Meyohas, and Oscar Javier Hernández Contreras, among others. Indeed, Claudio Lecaros Carrasco assumed the Governorship of the Department of San Javier, exercising military, administrative, and political command of the area. In this context, on October 18, 1973, under the express instruction of Claudio Lecaros Carrasco, a patrol composed of three soldiers and one Carabinero—including Carabinero Rodolfo Moreno Parra and Army non-commissioned officer José Muñoz Pozo—went to the El Sauce estate, located 20 kilometers from San Javier, with the objective of detaining Mr. Mario González Albornoz at his home and subsequently executing him."

Source: adprensa.cl, July 25, 2018

Talca Court increases sentences for retired Army officer for illegal detentions in San Javier in 1973

In a unanimous ruling, the Talca Court of Appeals sentenced retired Army officer Claudio Lecaros Carrasco to two 800-day prison terms, with the benefit of conditional remission, for his responsibility in the illegal detention of Juan de la Cruz Arellano Gómez and Mario González Albornoz, crimes perpetrated in October 1973 in the city of San Javier.

In the civil aspect, the convicted individual and the State were ordered to pay a total compensation of $150,000,000 to the relatives of González Albornoz. During the investigation phase of the case, Judge Hernán González established that on October 17, 1973, Juan de la Cruz Arellano Gómez was detained at his home in the El Cajón plot, El Morro sector, on the San Javier-Constitución road, by military and Carabineros personnel, who removed him from his house, took him to a nearby location, shot him with a firearm, and killed him; the cause of his death was a pulmonary infarction caused by at least one bullet. In the case of Mario González Albornoz, it was proven that on September 11, 1973, a group of Chilean Army personnel from the Linares Artillery Regiment moved to the commune of San Javier under the instruction of Gabriel del Río Espinoza, Commander of said military unit. This battalion was led by Captain Claudio Lecaros Carrasco, who was also accompanied by retired Chilean Army officers: Luis Campusano Detmer, Fernando José Molina Meyohas, and Oscar Javier Hernández Contreras, among others. Indeed, Claudio Lecaros Carrasco assumed the Governorship of the Department of San Javier, exercising military, administrative, and political command of the area. In this context, on October 18, 1973, under the express instruction of Claudio Lecaros Carrasco, a patrol composed of three soldiers and one Carabinero—including Carabinero Rodolfo Moreno Parra and Army non-commissioned officer José Muñoz Pozo—went to the El Sauce estate, located 20 kilometers from San Javier, with the objective of detaining Mr. Mario González Albornoz at his home and subsequently executing him.

Source: poderjudicial.cl, July 25, 2018

A Pinochet supporter leads the Supreme Court

Chilean human rights organizations opposed the appointment of Rubén Ballesteros as president of the highest court of justice. They recall that the judge applied the Amnesty Law in favor of the military.

Relations between the Judiciary and the government of Sebastián Piñera are not going through a good moment. For this reason, the vote that would determine the new president of the Chilean Supreme Court captured everyone's attention.

When it became known that Rubén Ballesteros was the frontrunner to lead the highest court, human rights associations opposed him due to a curriculum vitae that brought to mind some nefarious chapters in the country's recent history.

However, after midday, the ministers of the Court elected this University of Chile lawyer with nearly 40 years of experience as their new leader. A surprise for some, rage for others. Among the latter, the Association of Relatives of the Forcibly Disappeared, which arrived at the Courts to protest.

Ballesteros' career began to be stained gray when he showed himself in favor of the statute of limitations in human rights cases, his participation in the War Councils of Valdivia (as a legal member of the first councils of the military dictatorship), or his vote against stripping Pinochet of his parliamentary immunity.

Already in 2005, when he was appointed minister of the Supreme Court, then-president Ricardo Lagos received criticism, especially from the Socialist Party, for the support the new member of the highest court had given to the application of the Amnesty Law in human rights cases.

Four years earlier, Ballesteros had been in favor of releasing Luis Osvaldo García, the only civilian prosecuted in the Caravan of Death case, a military operation that murdered various leaders close to President Salvador Allende in 1973 in different cities across the country.

One of the latest conflicts occurred in 2007, when a commission including Ballesteros reclassified the crime of kidnapping three forcibly disappeared persons to that of qualified homicide. Since the latter crime was not subject to the theory of the non-applicability of the statute of limitations for crimes against humanity, the ministers decreed the statute of limitations and acquitted retired Captain Claudio Lecaros Carrasco of criminal responsibility, the Chilean press recalled yesterday.

In his first speech as president of the Supreme Court, the lawyer countered the demonstrations against him. "Man is a victim of his circumstances, and in the era you point to, judges lived in another system; they did not live as they do now, in a democratic system.

In all nations that have had situations like the one the country experienced, the judiciary had the same problems." The press went further and asked him about his actions in the numerous human rights violation cases that are still open. "I suppose it should not affect me personally, nor the human rights groups," he replied.

Asked about the relationship he will maintain with the government, Ballesteros dodged the question and maintained that "we will have a two-year period to talk about those issues and others." In recent months, La Moneda and the Supreme Court have had a series of public disagreements regarding the functions each body has in the so-called "fight against crime." In a recent interview, cited yesterday by El Mostrador, the current president of the Supreme Court, Milton Juica, stated that the pressure the Judiciary is currently experiencing from the government is "greater than in the era of the return to democracy." In the same media outlet, lawyer and political scientist Santiago Escobar describes Ballesteros as a pleasant person to those who know him, with a profile of a "negotiator, capable of listening, sensitive to the internal balances of his institution, and also to social issues," according to a human rights lawyer. "Unfortunately, he is also an anti-communist fanatic with a bad cause: the innocence of Augusto Pinochet and the application of the Amnesty Law for the military involved in crimes against humanity," he adds. Aside from voting in favor in the Caravan of Death case, in June 2000, he also did so in the Prats-Cuthbert-1 case, a request made by Argentine judge María Servini de Cubría in October 2002; the Calle Conferencia case in September 2003; the Operation Condor case in July 2004; the Prats-Cuthbert-2 case; and the Riggs-SII case of August 2005, which had to do with Pinochet's illicit funds. To finish this curriculum, it must be mentioned that he opposed Augusto Pinochet being investigated for the crimes of perjury or false testimony in his 1989 Sworn Statement of Assets; forgery, malicious use, and theft of public documents; forgery of Ministry of Defense certificates; obstruction of justice; and fraud through the concealment of assets and money laundering, having in all cases as a central argument "health reasons" to avoid investigating the Chilean dictator. According to Santiago Escobar, in the archives of the former Vicariate of Solidarity, there is data on five case files that ended with Ballesteros' signature as president of the court between 1973 and 1976. One of them sentenced eight people for the crime of "treason to the fatherland through conspiracy, in a frustrated degree"; the main defendant was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, and four others, as accomplices, to seven years. All were accused of attempting to organize guerrilla groups to assault military outposts and barracks and allow the invasion of forces from Argentina in the Los Lagos region. And the list continues. Meanwhile, Ballesteros assured that "all users of the Judiciary, all people who have concerns through some type of organization, can have the full assurance that the presidency will never be for me an instrument of denial or anything of the sort regarding the rights of all citizens of the country, including organizations of great national and international merit in human rights matters."

Source: pagina12.com.ar, December 20, 2011

First Stop of the Caravan of Death. San Javier. October 2, 1973.

The history of the episode that started the Caravan of Death

On September 11, 1973, a farmer and deputy of the National Party intercepted Carabineros corporals Francisco Venegas and Enrique Vega on a street in San Javier. The parliamentarian for the province of Linares denounced the four young socialists, officials of the Agrarian Reform Corporation (CORA), as dangerous Marxists and reported that they were fleeing in a jeep.

The San Javier Carabineros were already under military intervention. In command of the personnel was Army Captain Claudio Lecaros Carrasco of the Linares Artillery School. The corporals set off in a vehicle after the four young men.

They had taken food from the provincial governor's office and were heading somewhere. The deputy and another merchant from the city of San Javier, a certain "Pollo," went ahead in a pickup truck. Suddenly, the police braked before a cloud of dust on the road and heard shots.

Neither they nor the vehicle were hit by a bullet. Analyzing the situation later, the police concluded that the shots were likely fired by the parliamentarian and his companion at the boys, since upon examining the jeep in which the four socialists were traveling, they found no weapons and realized that, when they were fleeing through the alleys of a neighborhood, they were not carrying weapons either.

Finally, they lost sight of them. But the story was already fabricated. At the first police station in San Javier, Captain Lecaros accused the young men of attacking the police with gunfire, and the latter agreed to the setup.

Hours later, three of the CORA officials were detained at their homes in San Javier, and the fourth was arrested when he presented himself voluntarily to Lecaros to hand over his position as head of the local CORA.

Officially, it was said that a case had been opened against them for attacking the police, and Leopoldo González Norambuena, 20; Segundo Sandoval Gómez, 19; José Sepúlveda Baeza, 22; and Teófilo Arce Toloza, 26, were confined in the Linares prison.

The young men later told their families that they were hopeful they would not be convicted, given that there was no material evidence of their alleged shots at the Carabineros.

THE DEPARTURE

At dusk on September 30, 1973, the Linares Artillery School had an unforgettable visit. It was the Caravan of Death. Its commander, General Sergio Arellano, carried a safe-conduct signed by dictator Augusto Pinochet naming him his "Delegate Officer." The mission was covered up to "accelerate the proceedings" of the prisoners in each city where the squadron arrived. "How many dead do you already have in the zone!" Arellano demanded dryly of the regiment commander, Colonel Gabriel del Río Espinoza, who froze and took a moment to react. "No more and no less than there have to be, we have ten or twelve, my general," he replied.

Arellano looked at him and snapped

"They are very few, Colonel, very few." Del Río did not contain his rage, and despite having a lower rank and "El Lobo" (as he called himself) being a general and an officer delegated by Pinochet himself, he retorted: "Well, then tell me, you, how many dead are there supposed to be, my general?" "El Lobo," according to what his aide, then-Lieutenant Juan Chiminelli, told the Rettig Commission, did not answer Del Río and turned around, leaving the commander's office.

From then on, what happened in every city occurred. Linares would become the first crime ordered by the Caravan of Death. The first howl of "El Lobo." Arellano met with the military prosecutor of the Artillery School, Captain Carlos Romero Muñoz, and reviewed the list of detainees and the status of the cases.

Then he decided who should die. "Execute without trial," recalls the then-head of intelligence of the Cazadores de Valdivia regiment, Lieutenant Patricio Kellet, who heard Arellano say it when he passed through there, and he declared this on May 9, 2003, in the Caravan case.

Also present at Arellano's meeting with Prosecutor Romero was the second-in-command of the Artillery School, Lieutenant Colonel Félix Cabezas Salazar. From that moment on, Romero, Lecaros, and Cabezas, who supported Arellano's actions according to the judicial investigation, turned against Colonel Del Río and considered him a traitor.

Despite the shouting match between Arellano and Del Río, according to the latter, that night "El Lobo" and his men were honored with a dinner at the Artillery School's officers' mess. That night, the caravan stayed in Linares and left the next day for Concepción.

But Arellano returned to Linares on Tuesday, October 2, to finish the task and verify that it was carried out. Those marked to die were the four socialist boys.

"RUN!"

That Tuesday morning, they took the four young men out of prison via official letter No. 1129 signed by an officer of the Artillery School and took them to that regiment. Arellano's Puma helicopter landed there again that day.

Around four in the afternoon, they took the young socialists out of the School and led them away. Everything was decided and planned by Prosecutor Romero. Non-commissioned officer Julio Barros drove the truck with the four prisoners about three kilometers to the General Bari shooting range.

Barros, nicknamed "El Tomate," had a reputation for being tough on detainees, as recognized by other non-commissioned officers in the case. When "El Tomate" arrived with the young men at the location previously indicated by Prosecutor Romero, he found that the prosecutor, Lieutenant Mario Cazenave Pontanilla, and non-commissioned officer José Parada Muñoz were already there.

At a signal from Romero, Barros took down the socialists, who were not tied up or blindfolded. Everything happened quickly. "El Tomate" shouted at the boys: "Run, you shits!" They ran, and Captain Romero gave the order: "Fire!" "That was when Captain Romero, Lieutenant Cazenave, Sergeant Barros, and I fired," declared non-commissioned officer Parada to the officials of the Special Affairs and Human Rights Brigade of the Investigations Police and to Judge Juan Guzmán, in late 2004 and on February 3, respectively.

The boys died immediately, struck by bursts from SIG rifles. The men loaded the bodies back onto the truck, and Captain Romero ordered them to be taken to the morgue. "The young men were given the opportunity to run, and the reaction was to shoot them when they were running.

That was the way it occurred to me to comply with the instruction I was given. This solution seemed less painful for the young men and also more plausible for the community," declared Captain Romero Muñoz on February 12, 2003, in the case.

Romero blamed Del Río for ordering him to kill the young men. But Del Río denies it. However, even though neither Romero nor Cabezas have said so far that the order was given by Arellano, and he does not admit it, the investigation establishes that Arellano was the mastermind of these crimes, as happened in every city he passed through, and for that reason, Judge Guzmán prosecuted him as the author of the four kidnappings with homicide.

He also prosecuted Del Río, Lecaros, Romero, Cazenave, and Barros. The official version of this crime was the one almost always used by Arellano and his squadron: that the detainees tried to escape when they were being taken to a "reconstruction of the scene." This is how the press loyal to the regime reported the event. "You have to tell the truth because we are men of honor," Arellano told Del Río when they were confronted by Judge Juan Guzmán in 2004. "You have a problem of conscience, and it must be serious," Arellano insisted.

But Del Río confronted him. Just as his own man in the caravan, retired Colonel Sergio Arredondo, had done before, tired of Arellano blaming him, Moren Brito, and Fernández Larios for acting on their own by killing people. "But if we went to the executions, I knew it because my General Arellano told me," Arredondo said, raising his voice.

Source: Caravana de la muerte: el primer aullido del lobo; February 13, 2005; by Jorge Escalante; La Nación

Source: http://caravanadelamuerte.blogspot.com, October 7, 2016