Manuel Jesús Leyton Robles died at 1:25 a.m. that day, as certified by his Death Certificate. According to a report by the Director of the London Medical Center Clinic, an institution under the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), the cause of his death was asphyxia due to aspiration of vomit, secondary to cardiorespiratory arrest.

On March 24, 1977, Manuel Leyton, a member of the DINA's Lautaro Brigade, had been arrested at his home along with two other people by officers from the Motor Vehicle Search and Seizure Section of the Carabineros Radio Patrol Prefecture, during an investigation into the theft of a car.

At the time of the arrest, the Carabineros had confirmed that Manuel Robles was in possession of two vehicles that did not belong to him, one of which appeared in their files registered to the forcibly disappeared person Daniel Palma Robledo.

On March 25, 1977, the Carabineros, noting that Manuel Leyton and another of the detainees were active-duty Army personnel and that they had identified themselves as members of the DINA, informed the Ministry of National Defense that they were being held in custody for vehicle theft.

The records were sent to the Second Military Court so that the respective investigation could be initiated. Manuel Leyton was immediately summoned to testify, but the Carabineros were unable to carry out this order because, as they reported in an official letter, they were required by the Director of the DINA to hand the detainees over to DINA officials that same day.

During the morning of March 26, 1977, according to the statement made by Manuel Leyton's spouse, he arrived at their home, where he remained until the following day, when members of the DINA came to get him, this time to admit him to the London Medical Center Clinic, despite the fact that he was in normal physical condition.

When his spouse went to visit him at the clinic the following day, M. Leyton expressed concern to her about the medical examinations he was being subjected to and the amount of medication they were administering to him. In the early hours of March 29, a DINA agent went to his home to inform her of her husband's death.

On that same day, March 29, 1977, as stated in an official letter added to the Military Court's investigation, the Director of the DINA reported the death of Manuel Leyton. The letter adds that Manuel Leyton had been admitted to the London Medical Center on March 28, 1977, at 11:00 a.m., with multiple contusions, pleural effusion, and moderate dehydration, and that his health situation had worsened by noon, with his death occurring in the early hours of the 29th.

In light of this information, the investigation was dismissed.

The Report of the National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation states that Daniel Palma Robledo was declared a victim of human rights violations, as it was proven that he was arrested on August 4, 1976, on a public street by DINA agents, and that he disappeared along with his car, which was later found by the Carabineros in the possession of the DINA.

According to a former DINA agent who testified in court during another proceeding, Manuel Leyton died as a result of the application of Sarin gas, a highly poisonous element whose effects can be mistaken for a heart attack.

Considering the evidence gathered and the investigation conducted by this Corporation, the Superior Council reached the conviction that Manuel Jesús Leyton Robles was executed outside of any legal process by State agents. For this reason, he was declared a victim of human rights violations.

Source: Rettig Report, 1991

Case File 2.182-98: "Colombo Case" Episode, aggravated kidnapping of María Angélica Andreoli Bravo

4.-) Police Report No. 165 of November 15, 1993, which, in carrying out the order to investigate, concludes that the report regarding her arrest and disappearance is accurate; relatives were interviewed and Érica Henning Cepeda, Evelyn Merino Vega, Luz Arce Sandoval, and Ramón Berceló Olave were registered as witnesses.

The following are identified as perpetrators: Osvaldo Romo Mena, Basclay Zapata Reyes, Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko, Gerardo Godoy García, Ricardo Lawrence Mires, a certain Mario Leyton, and individuals known as "El Paz" and "El Fuentes."

34.-) Statement by DINA agent Luis Burgos Jofré on page 6332, who maintained that as a guard, his duties at Londres No. 38, along with Soto, Sepúlveda, Leyton, and Carrasco, involved facility security, both external and internal, as one had to go up to the roof to monitor the perimeter of the barracks.

Among the heads of the guard, I remember Pedro Araneda, Juan Duarte Gallegos, Molina Astete, Hormazabal, Guido Jara Brevis, and others I do not recall. Guard shifts were 24 hours on, 24 hours off, plus one day available at the barracks.

o.- Statement by co-defendant Orlando Torrejón Gatica, who in his interrogation states: "I spent a couple of months in these functions and was assigned, approximately in March 1974, to the Londres 38 barracks.

What happened was that Urrich and his people went to Londres 38. In this barracks were Urrich, Manuel Carevic, Vásquez Chahuán, Manuel Leyton, Heriberto Acevedo, Claudio Pacheco, nicknamed 'El Gigio,' Carlos Rinaldi Suárez, Juvenal Piña Garrido, nicknamed 'El Elefante,' among others." He adds, "I must have arrested more than one person with my team, which were not fixed, in compliance with orders from the group commander, Mr.

Urrich, alias Don Claudio. On those occasions, they were interrogated by our chiefs Urrich and Carevic. I do not remember the number of people we arrested," and that "I was at Londres 38 for about four or five months.

That is to say, more or less until August or September 1974, the date on which I was assigned only to a DINA infirmary located in Rinconada de Maipú, where the Non-Commissioned Officers School is currently located. The order was given to me by my chief Urrich, because a superior order must have reached him, since, as I was a nurse, I should go to an infirmary."

Source: Judiciary, April 10, 2015

9 agents convicted for the murder of Corporal Manuel Leyton with Sarin gas

Leyton was a DINA official, and the Carabineros police found the vehicle of a forcibly disappeared person in his home that had been reported stolen. He was arrested and, at the police station, recounted how the repressive organization operated, which cost him his life.

The Santiago Court of Appeals visiting judge, Alejandro Madrid, issued a conviction in the investigation into the homicide of Army Corporal Manuel Leyton Robles, perpetrated in March 1977.

In the resolution, he sentenced former members of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) Vianel Valdivieso Cervantes, Juan Morales Salgado, and Ricardo Lawrence Mires to 15 years in prison as perpetrators of the crime of homicide, in addition to 3 years and one day for their responsibility as perpetrators in the crime of kidnapping, plus 541 days for the crime of illicit association.

Meanwhile, agent Hernán Sovino Maturana was sentenced to 10 years and one day as an accomplice in the crime of homicide; 3 years and one day as a perpetrator in the crime of kidnapping; and 541 days for illicit association. In the case of agent Vittorio Orvietto Tiplitzky, Judge Madrid sentenced him to 5 years and one day in prison as a perpetrator of the crime of illicit association.

Agents Pedro Valdivia Soto and Gladys Calderón Carreño received 5-year prison sentences for their responsibility as accessories to the crime of homicide; meanwhile, Hernán Taricco Durán and Carlotta Bolumburu Taboada were sentenced to 3 years and one day in prison as accessories to the homicide.

Valdivia Soto and Bolumburu Taboada were granted the benefit of supervised release, and agent Taricco Durán was granted the benefit of conditional remission.

In the investigation, Judge Madrid established that "during the month of March 1977, two officials belonging to the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) proceeded, first, to steal a Renoleta vehicle belonging to the teacher Mr.

Daniel Palma Robledo – a forcibly disappeared person – and, subsequently, committed a robbery of another vehicle with similar characteristics belonging to the paint merchant Mr. Marcel Jean Duhalde Garat, whom, after stealing the vehicle in which he was traveling through the downtown area of this city, they proceeded to leave abandoned in the Las Vizcachas sector."

He tells Carabineros about DINA procedures

"Subsequently, upon becoming aware of these facts, Carabineros de Chile officials belonging to the Traffic Accident Investigation Section (SIAT), led by Lieutenant Alfonso Denecken Alberti, carried out a raid on the private home of Army Corporal Mr.

Manuel Leyton Robles, who was providing services to the DINA at that date, located on Calle Los Pioneros in the La Florida commune, a place where the two stolen vehicles were also found, proceeding to arrest the aforementioned soldier and subsequently another DINA official named Heriberto del Carmen Acevedo," the resolution specifies.

"Then the aforementioned detainees were transferred to the SIAT barracks located on Calle Rodrigo de Araya, Ñuñoa commune, where they were interrogated, with Corporal Manuel Leyton Robles pointing out various actions carried out by the DINA team to which he belonged and which was under the command of Army Captain Mr.

Germán Barriga Muñoz. Due to the above, the Director of the DINA, Colonel Mr. Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda, ordered officials under his command to go to that police station and proceed to make the pertinent arrangements to obtain the release of the detainees belonging to the organization under his command," the magistrate adds.

"As it turns out that the DINA officials deprived of liberty were accused of committing crimes and were being interrogated, the respective police reports also had to be prepared to be sent to the Army Military Prosecutor's Office; therefore, it was not possible to obtain the requested release immediately," the ruling points out.

They transfer him to the Simón Bolívar Barracks and the London Clinic

"As high authorities of the time became aware of the situation," the judge adds, "such as the Minister of National Defense, General (Ret.) Herman Brady Roche, the Prefect of Carabineros of Santiago, General Mr.

German Campos, the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, the Chief of the General Staff of the aforementioned institution, and the member of the Government Junta representing the Carabineros, General Director Mr. César Mendoza Duran, the handover of the detainees to the DINA was ordered."

"Once the release of the detainees was obtained, Corporal Manuel Leyton Robles was transferred to the Simón Bolívar street barracks under the charge of Army Major Juan Morales Salgado and, subsequently, taken to the London Clinic, located on Calle Almirante Barroso in this city, where he remained deprived of his liberty, permanently guarded and interrogated about the statements he made while he was detained at the aforementioned police station, through which he had indicated the fate suffered by some of the detainees who were in the barracks located on Calle Simón Bolívar in this city," the ruling states.

"After remaining for several days in the aforementioned conditions, the named Leyton suffered a cardiorespiratory arrest and, for that reason, was transferred to a unit of the aforementioned clinic, being attended to by doctors and nurses of that establishment, dying on the 29th day of March 1977," it specifies.

Expert reports conclude that he was murdered with Sarin gas

"After his death occurred, DINA officials proceeded to communicate the above to the deceased's relatives, so that they could proceed to remove the body, and while the wake was being verified at his private home, by order of the National Director of the aforementioned organization, the body was removed to be transferred to the Legal Medical Institute, where, after a meeting was held between a DINA officer and the Director of that Institute, the latter was told of the need for no difficulty to occur that could incriminate the directors of the aforementioned organization, proceeding to carry out the indicated procedure, specifying the cause of death as aspiration of gastric content," states Judge Madrid.

"The cause indicated lately constitutes only a symptom produced by the cessation of an individual's vital functions, as indicated by Dr. José Belleti on page 2,303; the fact of the victim's death, according to the evidence flowing from the investigation, could only have been produced by the inoculation of a toxic substance, as pointed out as one of the feasible possibilities by the forensic autopsy added on page 1,087, performed by Dr.

Tomás Tobar Pinochet, and since the presence of the chemical agent called Sarin gas could not be determined in the aforementioned expert report, for the reasons stated above, it is also not possible to determine that it was not used and, on the contrary, the elements of judgment analyzed in the first foundation allow us to conclude that his death could only have been produced by the inoculation of the aforementioned chemical element," the judicial sentence concludes.

Source: villagrimaldi.cl, October 26, 2015

The mysterious lost files of Manuel Contreras

Declassified documents, press reports, and statements indicate that Contreras's archive is somewhere, perhaps in the south of Chile.

With his death, Manuel Contreras took with him the key to a series of enigmas that still surround the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) and that, in one way or another, could have served to solve cases of human rights violations that are still pending.

Perhaps the main one of these enigmas is the location of the DINA archives. In addition to the safe with documentation that Contreras kept in his office at the DINA's Belgrano barracks, the former PS militant and later agent of Pinochet's secret police, Luz Arce, recounts in her book El Infierno (The Hell) that there was an archive called "LIDES," an acronym that is actually very simple: "LIsta de DESaparecidos" (List of the Disappeared).

Certainly, a few years ago, during the time of the Valech Report, Contreras handed over a list with about 500 names and the alleged locations of the bodies, but, as was proven, many of the details were false.

The true "LIDES" is not known to be anywhere, but its destination is quite logical: "I believe that Manuel Contreras took that information with him when he handed over command of the CNI," Luz Arce opined in her biography, in which she would add a key piece of information: the person who managed "LIDES" for Contreras was a non-commissioned officer he trusted absolutely, Manuel Lucero Lobos.

However, it is impossible to know anything more about it, because in a statement given in 2004 to visiting judge Jorge Zepeda, Arce recounts that Lucero "died mysteriously," the same thing that happened to several members of the DINA, such as agent Miguel Ángel Becerra, who tried to defect from Colonia Dignidad, where he was being held, and like the DINA corporal Manuel Leyton, both murdered with Sarin gas.

The bundles

In 1978, when the dictatorship was under strong pressure from the United States to extradite those involved in the crime of Orlando Letelier in Washington (starting with Contreras), a curious note appeared in the evening newspaper La Segunda, directed at that time by Hermógenes Pérez de Arce.

According to a declassified cable from the United States Department of State (DE), said newspaper reported that in April of that year, Contreras had sent 12 containers "of documents" by ship from Punta Arenas. In a subsequent note, on November 10, La Segunda reported on three other packages that had been sent by Contreras to Europe, between May 22 and 25.

According to what the newspaper reported, the CIA had found out about it and had passed the information to the FBI, which supposedly intercepted the packages in New York, making copies of some of the documents.

After the publication, the American cable continues, Manuel Contreras's lawyer, Sergio Miranda Carrington, came out to deny La Segunda, asserting that although the former DINA chief had been in Punta Arenas in April 1978, he had only done so to greet his old friend Pedro Espinoza, who at that time resided there and whose head was also being demanded by the White House.

Despite the denial, the newspaper persisted in its version, stating that its sources had even specified that the documents sent in May referred to the Letelier case. According to this version, the packages had been loaded onto a Braniff flight, bound for Germany with a stopover in New York. Still based on the same source, La Segunda stated that the packages were somewhere in Europe.

The cable was signed by George Landau, the then U.S. ambassador to Chile. He commented at the end that he had no information on the veracity of this information and even asked if the United States Department of Justice could shed any light on the matter.

To finish, he said that the friendship between Manuel Contreras and Hermógenes Pérez de Arce was well known (which the latter has denied in recent days) and for that reason, he speculated that "it may be that Contreras is spreading these stories to disconcert Pinochet and other government leaders."

In this regard, journalist Manuel Salazar specifies in his book Contreras, historia de un intocable (Contreras, history of an untouchable) that on April 20, 1978, the German ship Badenstein had set sail from Punta Arenas, carrying on board 23 suitcases with DINA documents, shipped by General Manuel Contreras, all of which were destined for the port of Hamburg.

According to Salazar, this occurred only 12 days after Michael Townley was abruptly extradited to the U.S. for the Letelier crime. He specifies in the same book that "other mysterious bundles were sent via Lufthansa destined for New York-Frankfurt," adding that "subsequent versions indicated that the cargo that was on Lufthansa was transferred to Braniff and intercepted in New York by the FBI.

Nothing has been known about its content."

It has often been speculated that the final destination of the files was Siegburg, the small city where the headquarters of Colonia Dignidad operated in Germany, a country that Contreras had already visited between 1975 and 1976 together with arms dealer Gerhard Mertins, a former SS officer, an intimate friend of Paul Schäfer and creator of the "circles of friends of Colonia Dignidad," the neo-Nazi enclave that Contreras used as one of his axes in the commission of human rights violations.

Contreras's tentacles

For the Americans, the matter of Contreras's secret files was something much more concrete than an alleged disinformation maneuver, as Landau speculated, since a secret document from that country indicates that the bundles existed and that there were two copies of them, in addition to the original.

It is a cable belonging to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the intelligence organ of the Department of Defense, which generally possessed very accurate information, given the sources of information it maintained within various armies, including the Chilean one.

The text, titled "Contreras's tentacles," apparently consisted of six pages, but after being declassified, only three remained (two and a half, actually, since the first page of the document is almost completely crossed out). The date of the text would be January 1, 1989.

The report indicates that "retired Chilean General Manuel Contreras, former director of the DINA and a key figure in the Letelier-Moffit assassination, has taken extreme precautions to protect President Pinochet from direct involvement in the decision-making/authorization process of that assassination. (Crossed out).

All government files relating to the Letelier-Moffit assassination in Washington, in 1976, as well as those of the homicide of Pinochet's predecessor as Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Carlos Prats and his wife, in Buenos Aires; and the attack against the life of regime opponent Bernardo Leighton, in Rome, in 1975, were removed by Contreras from the DINA files."

Likewise, the CIA report states that "in addition to internal DINA documents, the files include all files/meetings at the ministerial and National Security Council level regarding the three incidents."

According to the author of the report, "Contreras made two copies of each document, sending one to Germany and another to Paraguay, to be kept in safes, while the remaining material he retains stored under his control, in the south of Chile."

The Germans

Were they referring to Colonia Dignidad? It is the most likely, given Contreras's closeness to Paul Schäfer and the gigantic extension of the colony's main estate in Parral (17,000 hectares), in which the remains of the approximately 30 political prisoners that various colonists acknowledge were murdered there have not yet been found (they were allegedly cremated and thrown into the Perquilauquén River in the 80s), nor other evidence, because as the ruling for illicit association handed down last year against Manuel Contreras and the leaders of Dignidad pointed out, inside that enclosure and "in order to hide the criminal activities, the superior of the villa and his closest collaborators proceeded to hide all traces of the victims on the property, hide the weapons, and bury several vehicles that disappeared along with them."

It is worth remembering that in 2005, when Schäfer's arsenal was found, both in Parral and in the facility they possess in Bulnes, the boxes containing the 45,000 files that Judge Jorge Zepeda declassified last year were also found.

Along with those documents, which were prepared by Gerd Seewald, head of intelligence for the colony, and shared with the head of the DINA's Southern Regional Brigade, Fernando Gómez Segovia, hundreds of empty folders and envelopes were found, with references to other files that have never been found.

Several of them, according to various testimonies, such as that of former colonist Franz Bäar, were burned in the brick factory around 1997, but it is difficult for them to have eliminated all of them, and, especially, for them to have gotten rid of the most sensitive information.

In this regard, lawyer Hernán Fernández, who began to pursue Schäfer judicially in 1996, points out that it is very likely that Contreras left all or part of his files in the hands of Dignidad, because "what has been found so far is an infinitesimal and very partial part of the information that Colonia Dignidad stored for decades and in the midst of a time when there was an extremely close association between Contreras and Schäfer."

Source: elmostrador.cl, August 9, 2015

Treachery, brutality, and horror. That is what the name Osvaldo Romo evokes. He died in 2007, imprisoned at Punta Peuco, plagued by diabetes, heart problems, and his history of crimes within the DINA. He left behind several open judicial proceedings and a cardboard box containing 48 notebooks in which he recorded his memories, ghosts, and obsessions.

Since 2012, these texts have been under the custody of the Corporación Parque por la Paz Villa Grimaldi. Because Romo engaged in falsehoods and inaccuracies, incorporated graphic details of torture, and utilized a narrative in which he appeared to be blameless, access to the texts is restricted to prevent the dissemination of information that could re-victimize.

For the same reason, although CIPER viewed the more than 2,500 pages, it will not publish them. Nevertheless, the notebooks have value: they show in detail the complex system of terror of the dictatorship. Fifty years after the coup, that is what this article captures.

“Do you know? I am doing this because I want to tell everyone today that all of this is due to a request from a young man who was a hardened fighter (sic), who was a visitor to my house for years. I must add and also say that he was a very studious young man, a good student (…)”

“I remember that one day I arrived and, upon entering the DINA barracks, a guard who was not a regular, a ‘pelao’ who came on certain days, told me that a young individual had arrived shot and mortally wounded from the clinic where they took the detainees, the Santa Lucía.

That he wanted to see me and talk to me. I went inside and there was a guard watching the wounded detainee, in front of the ‘parrilla’ (grill) room. He was on a low stretcher, at the entrance of the barracks of the famous and sad Villa Grimaldi (…) he had been shot by personnel from the Águila team, all Carabineros officers (…) I remember it was he who made this request to me, dying and with tears in his eyes.

He said to me: ‘Negro, try to write all this down so it is not forgotten. You can do it, my old friend, because you like to write. Do it, my dear old friend, how all of this happened, how it occurred; write it as it is, please. I remember when you wrote about the Colo Colo of 1941, which was an undefeated champion.’”

“I remember that this was before they killed him inside Villa Grimaldi. These were the last days when the sector chief was Mr. César Manríquez Bravo, who shortly after gave the order to Army Corporal Mr.

Mario Leyton Roble, who was from the Ferrocarrileros Regiment of Puente Alto, to eliminate that young man who was from the MIR. Also detained that day were Mrs. Amanda (sic) Jeria and her daughter, Michelle Bachelet Jeria.”

Osvaldo Romo Mena, the torturer, the traitor who switched sides and became one of the most brutal executors of the horrors of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, writes this by hand with a black ballpoint pen in a university notebook, mixing fantasies and real data, while spending his days in the Punta Peuco prison.

It is February 2003, months away from the 30th anniversary of the Coup d’État, or at least that is the date he noted on the inside of the cover. The account is titled “I think it is good to remember, because this is reliving it.”

There, he also recounts very briefly that in ’73 he was living a quiet and happy life with his wife and five children in the Población La Faena, across from Lo Hermida, in Peñalolén. Although he says that “everything was a response of ‘there isn’t any,’ nothing to eat,” he asserts that it was enough for him to “live much better than normal.” And that September 11 of that year was a sad day.

That a couple of weeks later he was arrested and taken to different places, that he was tortured, and that he remained there until December. That in May ’74 he began working with the Army at the request of Lieutenant Colonel Roger Vergara Campos, then director of the Intelligence School.

That he worked quietly, “very compartmentalized and also stealthy,” gathering data on everything he knew and understood about the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR).

He was an informant, a snitch.

In his notebooks, he claims he had a supposed informant and that in May ’74, when this person was arrested at the Londres 38 barracks, he arrived at the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional, the DINA. He recounts that on that day, in early 1975, he was ambushed by the Águila team, an operational group of the DINA in charge of then-Carabineros Captain Ricardo Lawrence Mires, also known as “Cachete Grande.” Internally, that group was called “Los Gordos.”

The account is just one of many that Osvaldo “el Guatón” Romo wrote in 48 notebooks, some incomplete or with only a few pages, as a form of memoir. He did so in the final years he spent in prison, until his death in the Penitentiary Hospital on the dawn of July 4, 2007, due to heart failure and diabetes.

Like his corpse, which no one claimed, the files were left piled up in the cardboard box along with other documents in the office of former judge Alejandro Solís, who was investigating human rights violation cases that occurred at Villa Grimaldi.

The contents of the box were known among court clerks as “the junk of Guatón Romo,” and that is how a CIPER report, the first about the notebooks in 2012, presented them. That same year, the writings were entirely loaned by the Judiciary to the Corporación Parque por la Paz Villa Grimaldi for their safekeeping and protection.

The corporation established a protocol for consulting the texts, because their content can cause the re-victimization of the families of those murdered, because the notebooks contain unverified data, inaccuracies, and falsehoods, and because their author relates the events almost as a spectator who dissociates himself from his responsibility in the crimes.

For the same reason, CIPER, although it had access to these files, did not incorporate them into the “Papers of the Dictatorship” document search platform. However, Romo’s notebooks have journalistic and public interest value: they constitute an account of the interior of the complex repressive system, where torture and the forced disappearance of victims were used systematically, financed by the dictatorship.

There are more than 2,500 handwritten pages, filled with spelling errors and almost without the use of periods or commas, taking advantage of every space on the paper. His writing is very detailed but tangled, erratic; he goes back and forth again and again over the same ideas, with several historical errors and inaccuracies, as if Romo’s thoughts and memories were rushing out in a torrent, trying to organize themselves into a coherent and convenient narrative about himself and the role he played in history.

Of course, a history in which he appears to have no blame at all.

Since they do not contain information on the whereabouts of the forcibly disappeared, the notebooks and other writings were judicially dismissed. However, the information they contain allows for the reconstruction of the ghosts and obsessions that haunted Romo in his head until his death.

He writes to a reader who does not exist, sometimes addressing his own victims or those he informed on, not so much to ask for their forgiveness but, rather, for their understanding.

He compiles again and again the lists of the members of the MIR he betrayed and helped to capture, torture, and forcibly disappear. He tells of his relationships with some of them before the coup and builds profiles for each one, highlighting their militant value, like a soldier—which he never was—who praises the bravery and integrity of his adversaries after the battle.

He refers to them as “my children” or “my boys,” as “good elements” who “unfortunately” were massacred. He also sketches one by one the stories—according to him, the “true” ones—of the 119 murdered individuals whose deaths were attempted to be covered up with Operation Colombo.

Regarding his companions in the DINA, he describes in detail roles and chains of command for the different operational groups that functioned in the barracks of Villa Grimaldi, Londres 38, and Venda Sexy.

He himself was part of the Halcón I group, under the command of Brigadier Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko (although Romo never makes this explicit). He informs on everyone, speaking of “them” as a capricious group that sought to demonstrate its superiority through revenge and cruelty, even specifying cases of torture, but never placing himself actively there, as if he had been nothing more than a spectator.

Furthermore: he defines them as “muscle-headed lunatics.”

Regarding his own responsibilities and actions, he is clear in saying that they are lies and blasphemies, and his self-perception could be summarized with the title that opens the account in another of his notebooks: “Gentlemen, I am not a torturer nor a pariah nor a leper, I am a patriot in my own way.”

ROMO ACCORDING TO ROMO

Although there are versions that say Romo was already an infiltrator and a traitor before the Coup d’État, there is no proof of that. What is known is that, when that day arrived, “el Guatón” was already a recognized leftist community leader in Lo Hermida, in what was at that time still Ñuñoa (today Peñalolén).

He was a militant in the Unión Socialista Popular (USOPO), of which he was even a candidate for deputy in the parliamentary elections of March of that year. With less than 1%, he was the least voted on his ballot. He worked at the plant that Madeco had in San Miguel. He was 35 years old, had been married for 13 years, and the youngest of his five children was just a few months old.

In his writings, he extols himself as the leader of a land seizure that mobilized some 650 families, and he does so in the third person: “Everyone carried the anxieties and the heart and had the confidence that the person guiding them was Romo.

There was at the time a security with this name that was a fairly good guarantee. People trusted him because he put it all on the line; he had managed to take a number of [people] without homes to Lo Arrieta, La Faena, and the upper and lower parts of Lo Hermida.”

He took over streets together with the residents, broke into the Municipality of Ñuñoa, and even intervened in acts where President Eduardo Frei Montalva was present, always in a conspicuous manner. All of that gave him visibility in the late ’60s and in the years of the Unidad Popular (UP), which allowed him to establish close contacts with MIR leaders.

He wrote about this in a notebook in which he details his participation in the first Congress of Revolutionary Camps, held in the Población La Bandera at the end of January 1969. “I was never a ‘mirista,’ but I was very good friends with everyone due to community political matters,” he wrote.

And on another page he added: “I remember that I always told them that the MIR would lead the government to the precipice.”

He says that in his last assembly with the residents, on September 9, ’73, he anticipated that a military coup was coming, although “I couldn’t tell them everything that would come, out of respect for the people. That day I went home and it was a sad night for me. After the 11th, I never went back to that place.”

15 days passed and he was arrested, according to what he himself wrote, supposedly informed on by a member of the Christians for Socialism movement. He remembers that a Military Institutes commando, under the command of the director of the Army Non-Commissioned Officers School, Julio Canessa, came to look for him at his house after he had attended the television program Los Guantes de Oro, which was recorded in a gym next to Plaza Ñuñoa.

They took him in a truck to the Military School. “I must say that in that place I spent the saddest days of my life,” he wrote.

Four days—he relates—they kept him without food. Daily they subjected him to interrogations, until one day they put him on a green bus headed for the Central Barracks of the Investigative Police, where he asserts he was tortured systematically.

He described it as follows: “In this place I suffered the most horrible baseness that the human body could receive. They stripped me, sat me on a chair that was fixed to the floor, they applied current.”

What does not add up in his account is that the supposed motive for his arrest was a pending order prior to the coup, for insults and contempt toward President Allende during an act at the General Cemetery in August of the previous year, when he took the microphone in protest over the murder of a young resident.

He himself writes that it seemed “curious” to him. According to his version, he would have spent the following four months in the underground dungeon known as “La Patilla” and was only released two days before Christmas, helped by an Army colonel who contacted him with another military officer assigned as an intervener for Industrias Madeco, where Romo returned to work to take charge of property security, that is, to avoid “thefts, robberies, espionage, sabotage, and contingent politics” at the company.

A few months later came the definitive step to place himself on the other side.

“Believe me that all of this for me was quite ugly and difficult, but I had to make a determination. I decided because all of this reached me at a difficult stage that was the end of a series of things that were developing. (…) One day in March 1974, the colonel of the Air Force Intelligence Service (SIFA), Horacio Oteíza, who at the moment was at the War Academy (AGA) in Las Condes, came to the door of the company to talk to me.

I met him on the trip to the south of Chile in 1971, accompanying the ‘chacal del Caribe’ who was Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz, when he was visiting the country at the beginning of President Allende’s government. (…) Today I remember that on that trip he always talked to me and asked me about everything that was the scheme of the MIR.

That day he talked to me about a little bit of everything, and suddenly he told me that the political prisoners from Dawson Island had arrived and that he needed to ‘frame’ (create an organizational chart with names and positions) specifically, because he didn’t know some of them.”

That is how Osvaldo Romo explains his first contact to collaborate with the dictatorship’s repressive agencies. Two days later, he relates, he went to the AGA and did what was asked of him: to recognize and inform. He was already on the other side; he was already a snitch.

15 days later, Lieutenant Colonel Roger Vergara Campos, head of the Army Intelligence School, whom he had also met some time before, came to look for him at his work. He asked him to accompany him to the Military Hospital. Once there, they went up to the third floor and, according to Romo, there were about ten officers waiting for him to identify a man they had wounded by gunfire on a stretcher.

“When I saw who it was, I had to tell them the truth, and I realized that they didn’t know the MIR. Everyone asked me in chorus who the wounded man was, but I answered them and told them that it is not who you think, because you want and think that it is Miguel Enríquez Espinoza.

It is not Miguel, but I can tell you that it is the ‘Coño’ Aguilar, the head of the Central Forces (of the MIR); his name is Arturo Vilavella Araujo, he is an engineer, but one must go with great care because he has very close family ties with the Spanish Embassy.

At that moment I spoke with Colonel Vergara, but I managed to hear what everyone said in chorus: this is the man who has to be working with us.”

He says he started at the Army War Academy, going every day after his shift at Madeco. They would pick him up and drop him off. He had an isolated room for himself, where with the help of a “young man and a lady” he would have reconstructed the political charts of the MIR.

In mid-May ’74, Vergara spoke with him and gave him instructions: to go on a certain day at 9:30 outside the Almacenes París store in the center, to shine his shoes (they had to be black), and wear ‘bizcocho’ type socks.

A man would approach him and say “good morning.” He was to follow him. And so he did when the time came. He says it was May 18. They crossed the Alameda, passed by the San Francisco Church, and entered through Londres street.

Romo knew the place, since there, at Londres 38, there had previously been a headquarters of the Socialist Party, now in the hands of the regime, converted into a secret center of detention, torture, and extermination: the Yucatán Barracks. Once inside, he met then-Lieutenant Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko, head of one of the four operational groups of the Caupolicán Brigade.

Two days passed and Romo formally joined the DINA, which was under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Manuel “Mamo” Contreras and the direct control of Pinochet. He joined Krassnoff’s group. And only then, according to his version, did the hunt begin.

HUNTING THE MIR

“Now I want to refer to what the MIR was. In general, it was a group of idealistic young people who had copied something from Chilean politics and sought the way to advance without compromising, because it is popular justice for all the people of Chile. They began by educating the people and very well; they had personnel who were political educators of extraordinary quality.”

The above is just one of the hundreds of references that Romo makes to the MIR in his writings. There are pages and pages filled with annotations, files, lists, stories, anecdotes, and memories that demonstrate the level of obsession he felt for the subversive group. A strange mixture of admiration, affection, and respect, with resentment, rage, and contempt.

For him, the fall of Allende and the UP had two great culprits, and he details this in one of the notebooks in which he refers to several events prior to the Coup. On one hand, he placed the radicalized socialists who joined Arnoldo Camú and other leaders to follow the guerrilla path of Che Guevara and the Bolivian National Liberation Army (ELN), the so-called “Elenos”; and on the other, the “miristas.” He blames them for “errors after errors” that “harmed Allende’s government.” He also mentions the “misdeeds that were committed by the men who were trusted by the government.” He refers to acts of corruption, sabotage, attacks, and political delinquency that occurred at the beginning of the ’70s. To the trips to Cuba to be trained and bring the revolution to Chile, to the guerrilla schools installed in Guayacán (Cajón del Maipo) and Chaihuín (Valdivia), to the murder of military personnel and Carabineros, to the theft and entry of weaponry from abroad, and even to the supposed Plan Zeta. But he explicitly clarifies that, for him, the socialists or the communists were not a priority. His role in the DINA was—he writes—only one: the “framing” of the MIR.

There are several notebooks in which Romo attempts to reconstruct the history of the MIR from its beginnings in Concepción in the mid-’60s and, incidentally, that of its paramilitary groups and main leaders, whom he claims to have known very closely.

About who they were, their relationships, and their process of search and annihilation. In some he says he participated, in others he did not. Of Luciano Cruz Aguayo, co-founder of the MIR who died in 1971, he says they met constantly to talk on a bench in the Parque Forestal.

He also wrote a biography of Juan Bautista van Schouwen, the “Baucha,” arrested in December ’73 and “lost until today”; another of Edgardo “Pollo” Enríquez; of Humberto Sotomayor; of Andrés Pascal Allende; of Arturo Vilavella; of Sybila Arredondo, and several more.

Of Miguel Enríquez, founder and first secretary-general of the paramilitary group, he writes from his beginnings in the Movimiento Universitario de Izquierda (MUI). He relates that when he was a student he had “many beautiful women from very good families” who pursued him for “his good elegant posture, also for his intellectual formation of a well-born man.” He says that the journalist Manuela Gumucio was his friend, partner, and his love.

He says of him that he was a “very calculating element” and meticulous, orderly, and stealthy; “a handsome man of the good kind who truly felt what he said.”

Romo relates an episode that supposedly occurred in May ’74: when he was still at the War Academy, shortly after becoming a civilian agent of the DINA, they entrusted him to meet personally with Enríquez, one of the men most wanted by the dictatorship, to ask him to lay down his arms and leave the country.

He asserts that the meeting was in a confessional of the La Gratitud Nacional Church. Enríquez, he says, refused. Romo says he returned and immediately reported it to Colonel Vergara: “I did this with pain and sorrow (…). I have to say that I remained uneasy, because I sensed that many people would have to die after that conversation.”

His role would be to identify those people, locate them, and ensure they were eliminated.

*

Romo says that he had a Carabineros corporal assigned as a driver in the DINA and that, at the beginning, he would pick him up every day in a Chevrolet C-10 pickup truck of a different color. And that his first day, May 20, 1974, also took him to his first operation.

The place: Maipú. The target: Álvaro Vallejos Villagrán, the “Loro Matías,” a 25-year-old medical student, MIR militant, married with one child. The leadership, he relates, wanted to “talk” to him.

Of course, he does not point out what is known today to have really happened: that they locked up and tortured “Loro Matías,” that they also took his wife, blindfolded her, insulted and threatened her to pressure him.

That they raided his house and stole everything that had any value. That they kept him kidnapped for two months at Londres 38 and that on July 29, 1974, they took him back to his parents’ house to let him enjoy a freedom that lasted barely a quarter of an hour.

That another vehicle arrived to pick him up and they took him away again, now destined for Cuatro Álamos and then to Colonia Dignidad, and that after that no one ever saw him again.

In his notebooks, Romo presents a sweetened version that hides and distorts his participation in the detention, torture, and disappearance of Vallejos. An account that strikes again at the family that still does not know what the fate of the young student was:

“His house (Álvaro Vallejos’) was in a military housing project, because he was the son of an Army non-commissioned officer who worked at the Ministry of Defense. He had to be brought in without a scandal. (…) The curious thing was that upon arriving at the character’s house, he was my friend, the famous ‘Loro Matías,’ one of the most complete elements of the MIR that I knew, secretary-general of organization of the Santiago regional. (…) I remember that upon entering the house, we greeted each other with a hug. –How are you, Vicho, how are you?

Your family, your children? –he said to me. –And you, how is it going, old León? –I replied, but then I said to him– Now, do you know why I am here? It turns out that the boss wants to talk to you. –Sure, I’m coming right now.

He said goodbye to his sister after telling her ‘look who is coming to get me.’ We left and we came along talking about a little bit of everything, but when we passed in front of the Ministry of Defense, he asked me if we weren’t going there.

I told him no, that we were going to the DINA barracks. He was not blindfolded or handcuffed, because he suffered from a bone problem. I must say that he was graduating as a doctor that year. Arriving at the barracks [Londres 38], he was taken to the boss, who was Army Major Marcelo Moren Brito.”

There the account cuts off.

*

The next to fall was Jorge Arturo Grez Aburto, the “Conejo Grez.” He was a leather artisan and was 28 years old. Romo says he knew him quite well. He claims to be unaware of who kidnapped him and speculates on possible destinations.

He says he did not see him in DINA barracks, although there are testimonies that place him at Londres 38 and the Estadio Chile. There are still no clues to his whereabouts.

Neither are there any for Agustín Reyes González; for Carlos Cubillos Gálvez; nor for Eduardo Ziede Gómez, Jorge Espinoza Méndez, Artemio Gutiérrez Ávila, Pedro Poblete Córdova, and so many others mentioned in Romo’s writings.

In another notebook, he refers to 10 cases of people who were detained and then disappeared; “a joint crime,” he called it. Some, like Juan Bautista van Schouwen and Patricio Munita Castillo, had already been eliminated at the end of ’73, when he was still being held in La Patilla, the basement of the PDI Central Barracks.

But others did fall due to his “framing” work, and there was a special cruelty toward those who had some type of kinship with the world of the Armed Forces.

Jaqueline Binfa Contreras was a university student, a MIR militant, and had worked with Romo on the community front. They arrested her in August ’74 and they met again at Londres 38. Although the former DINA agent says she was the daughter of an Army general, that is not factual: her father was a merchant who died when she was a child.

After that, she disappeared. The same fate befell David Silberman Gurovich, a communist and former general manager of Cobre Chuqui, who had been imprisoned since September ’73, prosecuted and sentenced by a War Council. The DINA forged documents to take him out of the Penitentiary, take him to the José Domingo Cañas and Cuatro Álamos barracks, and then make him disappear.

Also on that list are Miguel Ángel Sandoval, the “Pablito” of the MIR, former bodyguard of President Allende, who according to Romo was the nephew of an Army general; Jorge “el Trosko” Fuentes Alarcón, who was taken prisoner in Paraguay at the beginning of ’75 and then brought back to Chile and handed over to the DINA; and, among others, Alan Bruce Catalán, a rifleman of the central forces of the MIR.

He had already been detained in ’73, and later, according to Romo, his uncle, the head of the Caupolicán Brigade, Marcelo Moren Brito, had told him that if he fell again “he was a dead man.”

On February 13, 1975, it was Moren Brito himself who captured him, took him to Villa Grimaldi, tortured him, and he was never heard from again.

“SOME TRUTH ABOUT THE 119”

It is July 1975. During the last year, Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship has made more than 270 people disappear, mainly from the MIR. The “framing” work that Osvaldo “el Guatón” Romo has done for the DINA has been key to this.

But the reports of systematic human rights violations are growing both in Chile and abroad, international pressure is increasing; something had to be done, and the path chosen was to deceive and manipulate, to apply the techniques of psychological warfare to clean up the image through propaganda and setups in order to hide the dead and disappeared of the repression.

An investigation by Anfibia Chile and the Universidad Alberto Hurtado revealed that behind that strategy was the mind of the director of the regime’s Public Affairs office, Álvaro Puga, in conjunction with the DINA of “Mamo” Contreras. And the product of that is what would later be known as Operation Colombo or the Case of the 119.

Press points were set up with MIR leaders who declared themselves defeated and asked their comrades to lay down their arms, of course, forced under torture. They invented publications of supposed magazines in Brazil and Argentina that carried, in their only editions, reports denouncing the death of Chilean extremists, men and women, in clashes in the mountains. 59 would have fallen in combat “with forces of the Argentine government in Salta,” while another 60 would have been annihilated by their own comrades-in-arms.

The main Chilean media replicated the information, leaving forever in the national imagination the disastrous headline of La Segunda: “Exterminated like rats.”

Shortly after, on October 5, 1975, a group of DINA agents, among whom were Moren Brito, Krassnoff, and Romo, arrived in three vehicles at the safe house in San Miguel where Miguel Enríquez, his pregnant partner Carmen Castillo, and the MIR leaders Humberto Sotomayor and José Bordaz were.

A contingent of Carabineros also arrived by land and air. It was an ambush that soon ended in disaster. Enríquez, the founder and main leader of the MIR, was shot to death. Castillo was wounded by shrapnel from a grenade. The other two managed to flee over the roofs.

The operation was so important that even Contreras arrived. Romo wrote in his notebooks that he confirmed to him that it was Enríquez. And then he dedicates words to the main leader of the MIR:

“Well, Miguel, you fought like a brave man, but yesterday when I saw you on Avenida Grecia with Obispo Orrego, where the gas station is, I found that you were not well, because you didn’t miss at all; where you set your eye you set the bullet. But now it was different, old friend. It’s a pity that the others left you abandoned to your fate,” he wrote.

After that blow, another came on October 16, when the DINA found a plot of land in Malloco where the clandestine leadership of the MIR was. There was a new clash in which the leader Dagoberto Pérez Vargas and the domestic worker who had nothing to do with politics or subversion, Enriqueta Reyes Valerio, died.

Romo asserts that he left the DINA that same day, that he took his family, his things, and left the country. He says he did not run away and that he left “through the front door” of the Pudahuel airport, that he took a Lan Chile plane and went to Rio de Janeiro.

But the truth is that he entered there with a false name and papers and remained clandestine. Osvaldo Andrés Henríquez Mena, he would be called from then on. His wife would no longer be Raquel González, but Raquel Rojas.

And his five children would keep their first names, but they would no longer be the Romo González, but the Henríquez Rojas family. And that was how they lost track of them for the next 17 years.

With the return of democracy, judicial investigations began to open and move to pursue the horrors and human rights abuses, and in that context, Romo’s began to be one of the most demanded names among the criminals of the dictatorship.

Judge Dobra Lusic, who was investigating the forced disappearance of the “mirista” Alfonso Chanfreau Oyarce—one of the 119—found Romo’s whereabouts in Mogi Guaçu, a city located northeast of Sao Paulo. In 1992, the magistrate managed to have the former agent extradited and return to Chile to face justice from a cell in the Colina Prison.

And then he went back to doing what he had always done and was good at: informing on his own.

*

Although it was not immediate, over time, Osvaldo Romo began to talk. First, it was in 1995, when he gave a controversial interview to Univisión from prison, in which he recognized and detailed the ways in which he applied torture.

He said that “he would do it again the same and worse,” that he would not leave “a single bird alive, everyone to the cage”; that the Chilean sea was not a sea for throwing corpses because of how torrential and violent it was, that it was better to throw them “into the crater of a volcano”; and that he had not raped or killed anyone, although perhaps he had Dagoberto Pérez that last day he was in the DINA, since everyone was shooting and he was closer.

Romo felt rage against the military, as they had left him alone. He already had a 10-year sentence for the kidnapping of the “mirista” Manuel Cortez Joo and another of five years and one day for that of Ofelio Lazo, both, like Chanfreau and several others, included in the list of the 119.

And he was being prosecuted for several other cases. His diabetes and his heart failure were worsening and he did not want to die in prison. So he decided to collaborate with justice and became a key piece for the judicial pursuit of the DINA leadership.

Just as he once “framed” the members of the MIR, at the end of the ’90s he began to provide positions, roles, dates, places, and facts in his judicial statements. He explained the entire operational structure of the repressive apparatus and its actions both at Londres 38 and at Villa Grimaldi and Venda Sexy.

Of the brigades, operational groups, and commands. And all of that he began to pour also into his notebooks when in 2000 he was transferred to the Punta Peuco prison.

“Faced with so much trouble and damage, I want to leave on paper everything that was or is a deception about this that was planned, organized, and sinisterly finished off by people who were owners of doing and des...” to do, that they were a danger to do and to demonstrate that they were superior to all ranks, eliminating people who were detained in the hands of the intelligence services throughout Chile,” he wrote.

He adds that he now believes it was all a “crude and clumsy revenge” and that “they, those of the DINA, were eliminating them one by one,” that they were more vicious with detainees who were relatives of uniformed personnel, and that it was a “whim they took on as a mission.”

Regarding the Case of the 119, he attempted to reconstruct one by one the stories of the forcibly disappeared persons that the DINA tried to hide with the setup of Operation Colombo: “All of this did not exist, it is a farce, a lie.

I do dare to say that they (the DINA) may have taken their lives (the 119), eliminating a portion in the mountains, but I want to say that these 119 were detained in the most different DINA barracks and at different times.”

But in the end, in Romo’s notebooks, the authors of the horror are always “they.” Despite the dozens of testimonies that place him in kidnappings and torture, after that 1995 interview with Univisión, he never again explicitly acknowledged his role in the crimes.

In his writings, he only accepts that he carried out “political framing.” He says that all the accusations against him are nothing more than “villainies, people who say such dirty things about people because you have to throw shit at the one who has fallen.” And that judges, journalists, and victims alike want to harm him.

He maintains that the accusations were due to orders from the party, from the MIR, even though that organization was already completely dismantled, and that it was “a tactic born of socialism.” And he maintained that delusion until the day he died.

Source: ciperchile.cl, August 27, 2023

Dictatorship Papers: The 26 doctors and five nurses who served in the DINA clinics

The personnel who worked in the clinics created by the DINA—Santa Lucía, London, and El Golf—appear in a judicial branch that remains archived. There are only five doctors convicted in proceedings for crimes committed by the repressive agency.

According to the investigation by Judge Alejandro Solís, some doctors monitored detainees while they were being tortured. CIPER accessed judicial documents with testimonies from clinic workers regarding the role of the professionals.

In that review, we counted at least 31 people (26 doctors and five nurses) who worked in the clinics. Not all participated in torture, but none deny having placed themselves at the service of the DINA. Seven continue to practice, and three are awaiting rulings from the Supreme Court.

On June 1, 2007, a retired Carabineros officer and former agent of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), the repressive agency of the first years of the dictatorship, appeared before a judge. He was questioned about the murder of Corporal Manuel Leyton Robles, which occurred in 1977, whom the DINA eliminated at the London Clinic.

Leyton had in his possession a car reported stolen—it had belonged to a forcibly disappeared person—and for that reason, he was arrested by Carabineros. At the police station, he explained what he did for a living and mentioned the illegal detentions carried out by the dictatorship’s agents.

He was released. But, for the DINA leadership, he had spoken more than was advisable. They took him for a medical check-up at the London Clinic—one of the three healthcare facilities created by the DINA—where, despite his good physical condition, he suffered a fatal cardiorespiratory arrest.

The interrogation of the former agent, whose identity CIPER keeps confidential, led to a detailed description of the three DINA clinics: Santa Lucía, London, and El Golf. At this point, the justice system has established that the security agency recruited a group of doctors who helped the DINA with the monitoring, resuscitation, and, in some cases, even the homicide of detainees.

The former agent declared that when there was a detainee in a barracks who could no longer provide information, the doctors fulfilled a role: “A DINA doctor was called, who would go and attend to the detainee.

I don’t remember who they were, but they were from the clinic (Santa Lucía). These doctors were there for that; it was their function and what that healthcare center was created for,” he stated.

Journalistic efforts to reveal the functioning of what the press called the DINA’s “sanitary brigade” have not been few. Chilevisión did so in 2014, when it confronted six doctors who are on the payroll of the professionals who provided these services and revealed their workplaces: among them, the ophthalmologist Vittorio Orvieto Tiplitzky, the otolaryngologist Eugenio Fantuzzi Alliende, and the late Manfred Jürgensen Caesar.

Years earlier, the journalist Mónica González, founder of CIPER, had already published the existence of these healthcare centers in reports that contained a list of doctors from the London Clinic. And for his book “El despertar de los Cuervos” (The Awakening of the Crows), the journalist Javier Rebolledo accessed the statements made by the health personnel of these clinics in the investigation by Minister Alejandro Solís, a file that is archived.

CIPER was able to review those and other testimonies that shaped this article and confirmed that at least seven doctors continue to practice in the private sector. For this report, the seven were contacted in order to incorporate their versions, but only one doctor agreed to have her testimony published.

DOCTORS INVESTIGATED BY JUDGE SOLÍS

The list of 31 professionals compiled by CIPER only includes those who were part of the clinics investigated by Judge Alejandro Solís. Of them, only five have been convicted in human rights cases. That list includes the late Manfred Jürgensen, brother of the former constitutional convention member Harry Jürgensen (RN), who was sentenced to eight years of major imprisonment as an accomplice to the qualified homicide of the teacher and MIR militant, Federico Álvarez Santibáñez.

Three others are awaiting the Supreme Court’s ruling.

The statements to which CIPER had access, with accusations and accounts of torture, were provided, for the most part, by former workers of the clinics. Some of those files were integrated into “Dictatorship Papers,” a platform with more than 4,000 documents online developed by CIPER with the collaboration of the CIP-UDP (see the “Dictatorship Papers” platform here).

In those records, the sensitive data of the victims and the clinic workers who filed the complaints were redacted.

According to the judicial investigation, at least 13 doctors had graduated from the Universidad de Chile. It is not strange. At that time, the FACH colonel, Dámaso González Espinosa, who led the dental area of the Santa Lucía Clinic, worked as a professor at that university and was in charge of recruiting part of the personnel. This was pointed out to CIPER by some of the doctors contacted.

In the statements, three people in charge of these establishments are mentioned: the FACH cardiologist, Werner Zanghellini Martínez, the pediatrician Hernán Horacio Taricco Lavín, and the nurse Eliana Carlota Bolumburú Toboada.

Last March, the Supreme Court sentenced Werner Zanghellini to a prison term for the first time. The other two are prosecuted and have a sentence ratified by the Santiago Court of Appeals in the investigation into the homicide of Corporal Leyton, a case that must be reviewed by the Supreme Court.

A retired Carabineros sergeant testified that it was at the Santa Lucía Clinic where he saw the most agents with prisoners: “Indeed, I saw people arrive at that facility, who apparently had just been detained by agents; they were treated, but immediately they were transferred by the same agents who had brought them.” A nurse who worked at the place declared that “the doctors of the Santa Lucía Clinic were frequently requested at Villa Grimaldi to examine the detainees, and they were always accompanied by a nurse.” The villa was a secret DINA barracks where detainees were tortured and murdered. “In my case, I remember having talked to the detainees that the doctor examined, encouraging them to cooperate with the information that was requested of them,” the same statement continues.

The healthcare centers were supposedly created to attend to civilian agents and their families, who did not have coverage in the Armed Forces hospitals. Indeed, medical and dental care was also provided there.

A statement from the dentist Pablo César Oyanguren Plaza asserted that at the London Clinic “even President Pinochet was attended to on some occasion.” Other accounts say that Manuel Contreras did so as well.

The statement of a retired Army non-commissioned officer who was a nurse at the Santa Lucía Clinic is chilling: “It was known that at Villa Grimaldi, cars were driven over the bodies of the detainees and that sometimes they went too far and they arrived at Santa Lucía (clinic) dying.

When there was no remedy, they had to be put to death with pentothal. I don’t know what happened to the detainees to whom pentothal was applied, but it was rumored that there was another brigade that took charge of them to throw them into the sea.”

MISS ELIANA

“There was a code at the Santa Lucía Clinic, which was a warning: ‘package coming.’ It meant that a detainee was coming and one understood that one should not get involved. They would take them into a room and then they would administer something to them, and later the patient would come out deceased.

I heard from conversations of these doctors and Miss Eliana, that they administered eight milligrams of pentothal, which caused an arrhythmia followed by a cardiorespiratory arrest, dying in the clinic. And around midnight, they would take them out ‘camouflaged,’ covered with a blanket.”

The previous paragraph is part of the extrajudicial statement of a former DINA employee, dated June 29, 2005. His testimony is one of the most detailed within Minister Solís’s investigation. The person he calls “Miss Eliana” is the nurse Eliana Carlota Bolumburú Taboada.

At the Santa Lucía Clinic, she held the position of head of nurses, even over those with military rank. Upon reviewing the statements of the judicial process, it is clear that she played a fundamental role in that facility, even though her name does not resonate with the same impact as that of other professionals who provided service to the repressive apparatuses.

In 2015, Eliana Bolumburú was sentenced, in the first instance, to three years and one day, in addition to the disqualification from the profession, as an accessory to the homicide of Corporal Manuel Leyton.

But the court decided to grant her the benefit of intensive supervised release for the same period. That sentence was ratified in 2020 by the Santiago Court of Appeals and is currently awaiting the Supreme Court’s ruling.

The statements of other former clinic workers assert that Bolumburú was aware of the treatment the DINA gave to the detainees. There are testimonies that point to her as being knowledgeable and cooperative in the interrogations and the use of pentothal, an anesthetic known as “the truth serum,” because, when administered in low doses, it causes patients to enter a state of drowsiness in which they can continue answering questions.

The application of pentothal has not been proven by the justice system, and the former nurse is only prosecuted in the investigation into the homicide of Corporal Leyton.

In a police statement from June 2005, a nurse recalled the moment he met Bolumburú when she was arriving in an ambulance from the London Clinic along with a patient on a stretcher. “The one I recognized immediately, it was Army Corporal Manuel Leyton Robles,” the nurse asserted.

He also added that, upon returning to the clinic at night, he found a lady at the entrance crying: “And I asked her what was happening to her, stating that her husband had died of a heart attack, finding out that it was Corporal Manuel Leyton.”

More than one former official of the Santa Lucía Clinic pointed to Bolumburú as one of the people who controlled the medical staff. In the statements, it is also said that she did the same, for a short period, at the London. “Due to her position, she was aware of everything that happened there,” a former Army nurse pointed out.

Another former worker recounted that on one occasion he accompanied Bolumburú to Villa Grimaldi and that she “connected directly and knew the bosses. I was able to see the interrogation rooms through this nurse who had direct access to these facilities.”

In 2005, a retired Army non-commissioned officer declared before the PDI of Valdivia that there were doctors from Santa Lucía involved “secretly in acts of death of detainees.” He gave three names: Dr. Werner Zanghellini, the anesthesiologist Osvaldo Leyton, and the nurse Bolumburú Taboada.

Two years later, the non-commissioned officer met with Bolumburú in a confrontation. The nurse was categorical: “I was in charge of buying and supplying the medications that were for the treatment of the personnel.

I never knew about pentothal (…). Regarding the fact that there were doctors involved in acts of death in the clinic, it is a slander; I don’t know what could have motivated him to say such a lie,” she emphasized.

The first time Eliana Bolumburú declared, according to the records of this file, was on June 17, 2003, at the Interpol National Central Bureau. At that time, she maintained that there were no irregular situations in the DINA clinics. In 2005, she declared: “Detained persons were never attended to. Furthermore, I must assure that I did not know of other DINA detention centers.”

In 2006, her version changed. This time she confessed to having known about detainees at the Santa Lucía Clinic. According to her new account, Marcelo Moren, a former DINA agent who died in 2015 while serving a sentence of more than 300 years, arrived at the healthcare facility once.

On that occasion, Bolumburú recounted, Moren appeared along with agent Osvaldo Pincetti. They were asking for a detainee: “I knew there was a person who was in a bed on the second floor; I presume it was a political detainee, but I did not know this person’s name, although I saw that she had her wrists burned,” the nurse said.

Eliana Bolumburú worked at the Santa Lucía Clinic and then at the London. She retired in mid-1977, a period in which she married the officer and DINA agent, Hugo “Cacho” Acevedo Godoy, one of the men closest to the head of the repressive agency, Manuel Contreras.

Eliana Bolumburú was contacted by CIPER last Monday, August 28, but she did not respond to the messages. Through her lawyer, Hernán Aladín, she initially indicated that she could attend to our inquiries on Thursday, August 31.

But that same day, her lawyer explained that, for health reasons, she would not be able to answer our questions until after September 20. CIPER had already delayed the publication of this article in view of the possibility of meeting with her, but it was not possible to agree on an interview before the closing of this article.

DR. TARICCO

A surgeon with a specialty in pediatrics. His residence in Lo Barnechea, a property that according to the Internal Revenue Service has a fiscal appraisal of more than $672 million, appears in the name of Inversiones Santo Domingo.

That company—established in 2013 and composed of the doctor and his family—is also the owner of the car that was parked at his home when CIPER tried to contact him, a 2022 Mercedes Benz.

In 2014, the Canal 13 program “En su propia Trampa” (In His Own Trap) confronted him for offering a fake laser treatment in his private practice “Red Médica Tabancura” that promised to cure psychiatric disorders, as well as addictions such as smoking and alcoholism.

Like Bolumburú, in 2015 Taricco Lavín was convicted in the first instance in the case of Corporal Leyton. The court sentenced him to three years and one day as an accessory to the homicide, but granted him conditional remission.

In 2020, the Court of Appeals reduced that sentence to 541 days, without ruling on the disqualification from the profession. The doctor filed an appeal for cassation: he alleges that he did not participate in the events. He is awaiting the Supreme Court’s ruling.

Taricco Lavín signed the report where it was asserted that the cause of Leyton’s death had been asphyxia, due to aspiration of vomit, with a cardiorespiratory arrest. But, in a police statement, the former DINA agent, Michael Townley, related that he received the order “to provide (sarin) gas to eliminate Corporal Leyton and that the material author who applied the sarin was an Army lieutenant.”

In June 2003, Taricco denied his participation in the false report: “I never held the position of director of the London Clinic. Regarding the report that I have just read, which has my signature, it is a technical report, which for a specific situation and for being a health officer, I was asked to put the signature line as director, a position I did not have.”

Another doctor from the clinic, Luis Hernán Santibáñez Santelices, one of those who examined the Army non-commissioned officer, declared that he saw Taricco Lavín “preparing a report for the Legal Medical Service, of a patient who had died, not knowing more details, since I did not ask nor did they comment to me what had happened to the patient I had attended to previously.”

Furthermore, in the judicial file, there are several statements that point to Taricco as one of the heads of the London Clinic. In 2003, the nurse Bolumburú asserted that “Dr. Taricco replaced Dr. Zanghellini when he was absent from his position as general director.”

Through his lawyer, Leonardo Battaglia, Dr. Hernán Taricco declined to answer CIPER’s questions.

DR. LEYTON

On June 27, 2003, Osvaldo Leyton declared that it was due to an offer that he arrived at the Santa Lucía Clinic in 1974. He mentioned that, arriving at the address that had been indicated to him, he found out “that it was a DINA barracks and not the Air Force. In this place, they asked me if I was willing to work for them, which I accepted due to economic needs.”

In July 2005, the anesthesiologist declared at the Interpol facilities. There, he asserted that he did have knowledge that on occasions DINA agents arrived with detainees: “Indeed, I had to go on several occasions to the detention centers like Villa Grimaldi and Cuatro Álamos.” Leyton was pointed out in the statement of an Army nurse as part of the doctors involved in episodes that ended with the death of detainees.

However, Leyton Bahamondes does not have convictions, although in 2007 he was prosecuted for the death of Corporal Manuel Leyton.

For this investigation, the anesthesiologist was contacted by CIPER at his private practice in Providencia, but he declined to respond.

Leyton Bahamondes also declared before the police on November 17, 2006. On that occasion, they questioned him about Corporal Leyton’s clinical record. It was in his handwriting. “I have no explanation for why my handwriting appears in the part that refers to the care provided during the day; speculating a little, it may be that if I did it, it was due to an order that necessarily must have come from the medical leadership, which in that period corresponded, apparently, to Dr.

Taricco or to a superior military authority.”

Santiago Alfredo Matteo Galleguillos

He worked as an Army nurse at the Santa Lucía Clinic, and several of those who testified remember him for a single detail: the lie detector. On November 10, 2005, a nurse declared: “Both Osvaldo Leyton and Zanghellini were cardiologists, and the latter used a so-called PC1 or PC2, which was a lie detector, which acted advised by the nurse Santiago Matteo, who handled this equipment and which was kept in a small office at the London.”

Santiago Matteo Galleguillos was also prosecuted in the investigation into the murder of Corporal Leyton for allegedly covering up the homicide. But his participation could not be proven, and he was acquitted by the Santiago Court of Appeals in 2020.

In 2010, Matteo Galleguillos gave an extrajudicial statement. On that occasion, he said that he had traveled to Miami along with Dr. Zanghellini in 1975 to a course on the use of the lie detector or polygraph.

But, he added that he had never used that machine. An Army nurse said that in the same clinic there was equipment that interrogated detainees with a lie detector that was handled—as he related—by the older nurses, Matteo Galleguillos and Lorenzo Toro Olivares.

VISITS TO DETENTION CENTERS

Among the doctors who have been convicted for crimes related to the DINA is the former director of the Santa Lucía Clinic, the cardiologist Werner Zanghellini, sentenced to 10 years and one day in an investigation into the qualified kidnapping of two people, in the framework of Operation Colombo.

Also the ophthalmologist Vittorio Orvieto, sentenced in several cases related to the Tejas Verdes prisoner camp. The same happened with Manfred Jürgensen, who died after being captured in Argentina.

Jürgensen was a fugitive from justice after being sentenced by the Supreme Court, in January of this year, to eight years of imprisonment as an accomplice to the qualified homicide of the teacher and MIR militant, Federico Álvarez Santibáñez.

Along with him, the rheumatologist Luis Alberto Losada was sentenced, in the capacity of accessory, to two years of imprisonment, with the benefit of conditional remission. Both assisted Álvarez Santibáñez at the Cuartel Borgoño, near the Mapocho Station.

The nurse Orlando Jesús Torrejón Gatica is convicted in multiple cases associated with victims of Operation Colombo and in the process for the murder of the teacher Marta Ugarte Román.

Orlando Torrejón Gatica appears described in the statements of other former workers of the DINA clinics. A nurse declared that “the term ‘package’ refers to the detainees who were dead; generally, it was said ‘package out,’ and those who constantly spoke with that term were Torrejón or Muñoz.” A retired Carabineros sergeant who worked as a nurse pointed out that “the care for the detainees was carried out by specific personnel for them; for example, I remember Orlando Torrejón.”

To those names is added, but only convicted in the first instance as an accessory in the case of Corporal Leyton, the surgeon Pedro Valdivia Soto. Like Bolumburú and Taricco, Valdivia is awaiting the Supreme Court’s ruling.

In the files, there are also statements that accuse other doctors of having gone to detention centers. In 2005, a former worker of these clinics claimed to have accompanied the doctors Sergio Virgilio Bocaz, Enrique Silva Peralta, Christian Emhart Araya, Eugenio Fantuzzi Alliende, and Luis Cárcamo Díaz. “I must point out that several of these were recently graduated doctors,” he asserted.

Of that list, Luis Felipe Cárcamo Díaz, an otolaryngologist, is the only one who continues in functions: he does so in his private practice in Temuco. Through a person who works there, Cárcamo declined to answer inquiries for this article.

Among the doctors who continue to practice is also Luis Santibáñez Santelices, who currently attends at Integramédica. Santibáñez declared in the Leyton case and, apart from detailing that he attended to the deceased non-commissioned officer, he pointed out: “I started working in the summer of 1977, at the request of Dr.

Werner Zanghellini, also an Air Force doctor. The reason was that it was intended to implement an Intensive Care Unit in it, since some attacks against the DINA and military authorities were presumed. I lasted a short time; almost at the end of March of that same year, I presented my resignation, not reaching three months of practice at the London Clinic.

I remember that the director on that date was Horacio Taricco Lavín.”

Contacted by CIPER, Santibáñez refused to attend to inquiries about his participation in the London Clinic.

Camilo Azar Saba is one of the doctors who reviewed the injuries of the teacher and MIR militant, Federico Álvarez Santibáñez. This is what he pointed out before the justice system: “By order of General Mena, I had to recertify the injuries presented by two people who had been detained by Carabineros and then transferred to the CNI (…) One of these people subsequently died at the Posta Central, a teacher named Federico Álvarez Santibáñez.”

Dr. Jorge Manlio Fantini Valenzuela appears in a statement given by a civilian former employee of the DINA: “He was the one who had to be most attentive when operations and detentions were carried out. He liked to be linked.” In 1982, Fantini married the nurse Isabel Margarita Jarpa Riveros, who provided services at the London Clinic.

THE GYNECOLOGISTS

One of the branches that guided the investigation into the DINA clinics was the alleged abortion due to the torture suffered by a detainee who had arrived at the Santa Lucía Clinic eight months pregnant.

In a police report, the testimony of a prisoner who in 1975 was detained by the DINA is recorded. According to her account, she was held in Colonia Dignidad and Villa Grimaldi. The report maintains that “it was at Villa Grimaldi where she could see a detainee in poor physical condition due to the torture received, and who came from a clinic located near the Cerro Santa Lucía, where they had murdered her eight-month-old son, when he was in her womb.”

According to the statements reviewed by CIPER, on repeated occasions, the doctors and nurses were interrogated about the passage of a pregnant woman through the Santa Lucía Clinic. The Ministry of the Interior, a plaintiff in the case, requested Minister Solís to officially ask the Vicaría de la Solidaridad to remit the background information of three women who had given birth while they were detained by the DINA.

On July 6, 2009, Solís granted the request.

Two gynecologists passed through the Santa Lucía Clinic: Juan Pablo Figueroa Yáñez and Eduardo Francisco Contreras Valcarce. It was the former who once declared that he remembered an occasion in which they requested him to attend to a pregnant detainee: “To that request, I refused to perform the auscultation on the pregnant woman, and subsequently, they requested it as a personal favor, agreeing to examine her, not finding problems in her pregnancy.

I remember that while I was performing said examination, Mr. Marcelo Moren Brito was present.” Figueroa said he did not remember that woman’s name.

Eduardo Francisco Contreras Valcarce died in 2016. According to a statement by Dr. Eugenio Fantuzzi Alliende, Contreras Valcarce arrived at the clinic like other classmates of his promotion, by offer of Zanghellini.

His name is often confused with that of his brother, Enrique Eduardo Contreras Valcarce, a surgeon. But while the former provided services in DINA clinics, the latter suffered the repression of the “Caravana de la Muerte” (Caravan of Death) and, according to his relatives’ version, was even a prisoner in a facility in the north.

OTHER DOCTORS MENTIONED

In the investigation, a series of doctors, dentists, and health personnel who were part of the Santa Lucía Clinic are pointed out. According to the files, they were hired on a fee basis, mostly recently graduated from the university.

The accounts of witnesses coincide that on the first floor was the dental clinic and that on the third was concentrated the medical corps destined to keep alive detainees who had been tortured.

The dentists on the first floor assert that they never saw detained patients and that they did not know about abortions. The head of that department was the dentist Dámaso Luis Augusto González, who still attends his practice in Providencia.

According to what other doctors from DINA clinics explained, it was he who recruited students from the Universidad de Chile—where he taught classes—to join the Santa Lucía Clinic. And, as stated in the file, on occasions he was left in charge of the clinic.

CIPER communicated with the doctor’s practice. His secretary indicated that he was out of Santiago and that she would give him our message. At the closing of this report, there was no response.

Sergio Muñoz Bonta is also pointed out as a dental surgeon who had leadership at the London Clinic. A nurse declared: “Dr. Sergio Muñoz Bonta, who was an odontologist who came from the War Academy, was brought by Colonel (Manuel) Contreras for the London Clinic.” Muñoz Bonta died in 2005.

The dentists Carlos Rodolfo Ullrich Dunner and Milena Cecilia Zulic Lolic declared in 2010 that they worked at the Santa Lucía Clinic. Ullrich did so in the rest of the clinics set up by the DINA and until the return to democracy in 1989.

Only blocks away, in Las Condes, both currently have their dental practices, and both denied before the justice system having seen or attended to tortured patients.

Zulic—who was married to Ullrich—told CIPER that she has a clear conscience: “I never had nor have anything to hide (…). I worked at the clinic. I was recently graduated and was looking for a job. I was a super good student and was not of the left.

I have never been a member of a party, but I feel like a free thinker, but I was not at all in agreement with what was happening at that moment (the Unidad Popular). But, independent of the political thing, it was never told to us that it was to work for the DINA nor that there were going to be detainees and things, nothing.

When they contacted me, they told me it was to attend to the children of officials.” She says that they paid her well, that she was there for several months, and that, when she was already working in that place, she found out that it was related to the DINA.

Asked by CIPER if she left that job due to ethical objections, after finding out that the DINA was behind the clinic, she responded: “No, because I at that time was a bird (naive) (…). There I didn’t know anything about what was happening.”

Mario Augusto Hernández Cáceres is another doctor mentioned in the file who denies having participated in acts linked to human rights violations. He gave an extrajudicial statement in 2010. That same year, the odontologist Gonzalo Luarte Romo pointed out before the justice system having worked only for the London Clinic and that he also did not see or know anything.

He died on July 10 of this year.

In the team of dentists, Pablo César Oyanguren Plaza also appeared, who was a professor at the Universidad Mayor until 2019. In the process, he said that it was Dámaso González who recruited him. He also declared that he was part of the CNI clinic, that they gave him an identity card with the name Cicerón Videla to vote in the 1988 Plebiscite, and a card that was used as a “line breaker.”

The list of mentions also includes doctors of other specialties: the psychiatrist Roberto Emilio Lailhacar Chávez. He declared in 2010 that he was only at the El Golf Clinic, but that he provided services to the DINA from before: “I entered the DINA as a civilian employee (…).

Probably during the year 1973.” Furthermore, he explained that he worked with Lucía Hiriart when Augusto Pinochet was still in power. He asserted that he never attended to wounded people nor participated in interrogations. Consulted by CIPER, he declined to refer to the detail of what he witnessed and did in the DINA clinic.

The cardiologist Sergio Pliscoff Marovich worked at the London and El Golf clinics. He declared in 2010 and pointed out that he never visited detained people: “I lack all types of information,” he said. He died in 2016.

(*) Valentina Valenzuela and Soledad López Figueroa collaborated on this report. () The background information presented in this article includes ongoing judicial processes, so the people mentioned should not be considered guilty until the justice system issues a final sentence.

Source: ciper.cl, September 1, 2023