: 19 years old, single, worker, executed on September 19, 1973, in Santiago. He remained in the status of forcibly disappeared until 1992. Luis Alberto Trecanao Mora on a list of 30 people who had been executed, interred, and cremated at the General Cemetery of Santiago between September 1973 and March 1974, a circumstance that was effectively verified by this Corporation.

Luis Trecanao worked at a factory located in the Mapocho sector, in Santiago. He left this place on September 17 at 12:00 PM, without returning to the boarding house where he lived. His relatives, residents of the city of Valdivia, received a letter from a fellow boarder of Luis Trecanao informing them of his disappearance, so they traveled to Santiago to search for him, without obtaining positive results.

The Superior Council, considering the era, the place, and the conditions in which he was interred, and the fact that his remains were irregularly cremated along with those of a group of people, for the majority of whom there is evidence that they were executed following detention by State agents, reached the conviction that Luis Alberto Trecanao Mora was extrajudicially executed by State agents.

Therefore, it declared him a victim of human rights violations.

Source: (Corporation)

Hundreds of bullet-ridden bodies were transferred from the morgue to the General Cemetery of Santiago in the first months of the military dictatorship. However, bureaucratic disorder, erroneous records, and inconsistencies in the archives of the Legal Medical Service (SML) and the cemetery generate doubts about the final destination of some of the victims of the dictatorship.

As part of the investigation “Executions in Chile September-December 1973: The bureaucratic circuit of death” , ArchivosChile reviewed and compared the documentary records of the Legal Medical Service (SML) and the General Cemetery of Santiago regarding the trajectory of the victims of political repression in the first months of the military dictatorship, from the moment they entered the morgue until their final destination. [1] The archives of the two institutions differ regarding the dates those bodies left the morgue, who transferred them to the cemetery, whether they actually entered the premises, and where they were buried, or if they were incinerated without the knowledge of their families. According to the cemetery's archives, only a fraction of the bodies sent from the morgue to the graveyard appear to have arrived, and furthermore, on dates different from those indicated in the SML books. In many cases, their dates and places of burial did not correspond to reality. A large part of those who died from gunshot wounds buried in Patio 29 were already identified when they arrived from the morgue. Dozens more supposedly ended up in the crematorium, some “incinerated as indigents,” as the cemetery books note, which in many cases turned out to be false. According to SML records, between September 11 and December 31, 1973, more than 1,130 deceased persons left for the General Cemetery; of these, around 690 had died from gunshot wounds. However, many of them do not appear to have arrived at the cemetery, and it is unclear what happened to them: Were they cremated in total secrecy, as has been rumored for years? Were they moved to another location and made to disappear? Were they buried as John Does (NN) in Patio 29 without it being recorded? Or were they buried in niches or graves and no one at the cemetery bothered to note it? Military intervention of the Cemetery General Cemetery of Santiago (Photo: A&D Fotografía) The first victims of political repression began to arrive at the General Cemetery on September 14. By then, there was already a delegate of the Military Junta acting as director, a civilian with the surname Avendaño, according to a staff member who provided technical services at that time. [2] The director until that point was quickly removed from his position. The day after the coup, this staff member recounts, Avendaño gathered all the personnel in a sports complex near the cemetery and harangued them about their future work. “He told us that now we had to work. It didn't last more than five minutes. He was arrogant, and he took charge of the cemetery for about a year,” recounts the staff member, who was present. From then on and in a staggered manner, a dozen staff members were detained from the cemetery and taken to an unknown location. Most returned to their duties weeks later, but physically and psychologically in very poor condition, the staff member recalls. Although they did not tell details of their detention, most said they had been at the Colina air base. Among those detained was the person in charge of the crematorium at that time, who declined an interview with ArchivosChile. [3] That September 14, when the first gunshot victims began to arrive at the cemetery, 71 people were buried, among them the first eight victims of human rights violations: one was the 16-year-old adolescent, Tabitha García Gutiérrez. [4] The eight were buried in niches purchased by their families or in family graves, as recorded in the Location Book of the General Cemetery. [5] The following day, the number of gunshot victims arriving at the cemetery doubled. That September 15, the victims were buried in Patio 29, a common, temporary courtyard that had begun to be used that same year to bury people not claimed by their families, unidentified deceased, and indigents. A large part of the gunshot victims who were officially registered in the Location Book ended up in Patio 29, even though they were already identified when they arrived from the morgue. Among the victims buried in Patio 29 on September 15, 1973, according to cemetery records, were Sergio Aedo Guerrero, Luis Barrera Torres, Miguel Cisternas Bocaz, and Carlos Durán Durán. The bodies were required to arrive with a burial permit issued by the Civil Registry Service office inside the morgue. That authorization included the cause of death and was based on the autopsy protocol. With the death registration number, the deceased were noted in the Location Book, which, among other things, indicated the date and place of burial. However, the General Cemetery books from that era do not reflect the true number of deceased who arrived, nor the precise date of their burial and the real final destination that many of them had. According to María Luisa Sepúlveda, former Executive Vice President of the Valech Commission, what often failed was the protocol for the safeguarding of bodies from their arrival at the morgue until their transfer to the cemetery. Sepúlveda explains that the testimonies of cemetery staff contained in the judicial investigation into Patio 29 in the nineties confirmed that “sometimes they had to assemble the coffins right there in the morgue. The gravediggers would take the body, put it in a coffin, and then fill out a sheet. I mean, I don't think those men were told to mix up the bodies, but they were given no instructions on how to maintain the chain of custody.” Disappeared along the way A vehicle waits outside the Santiago morgue. (Photo: Marcelo Montecino) From the Santiago morgue, 223 bodies left for the cemetery in September, 315 in October, 104 in November, and 44 in December. However, although the General Cemetery's Location Book records the entry of an increasing number of victims of repression throughout September and October 1973, and many fewer in November and December, it does not reflect the number of bodies supposedly leaving the morgue for the cemetery. By way of example, between September 15 and 19, the transfer from the morgue to the cemetery of 73 gunshot victims was recorded. However, the General Cemetery records the entry of only 61 in that same period. The staff did not note burials in the Location Book in order of arrival, but at the end of the day, which may explain the disorder and omissions in the records, in a context not only of fear and a certain chaos, but also of a greater workload. This book records the burial place of the deceased by day and in alphabetical order, based on the burial permits. On some of its pages, after the alphabetical list of people and their burial places, more names were noted, without any order, which implies that the burial permits arrived after the burial. Starting in October—the month in which the most gunshot victims were transferred to the cemetery, according to SML records—the notation of gunshot deaths in the General Cemetery decreased noticeably. It is striking that there are practically no unidentified persons (“NN”) noted in the Location Book during the month of September 1973, even though about 29 unidentified persons left the morgue that month. In October, the SML transferred 60 unidentified bodies to the General Cemetery, but at this location, the entry of only a few, in isolation, is recorded. According to the cemetery's archives, on two occasions large groups of unidentified victims entered, but those dates do not coincide with the date of departure of unidentified persons from the morgue in October. According to SML records, on October 3, 1973, alone, 19 NN, dead from gunshot wounds, left for the cemetery. On October 10, another 7 left. However, their arrival does not appear recorded in the cemetery books on those dates. Instead, according to the cemetery books, on October 12, 34 “Unknowns” or “NN” entered; all, except two, had died from gunshot wounds. All of them were buried in Patio 29. Two of those “NN” were subsequently identified, according to a notation made in 1993 in the same Location Book: Jorge Ávila Pizarro and Justo Joaquín Mendoza Santibáñez. However, according to the SML, the body of Mendoza Santibáñez had been withdrawn from the morgue by his mother nine days earlier. And Ávila Pizarro appears leaving the SML eight days earlier. On October 22, another 10 “Unknowns” or “NN” with the cause of death as gunshot wound entered, who were also buried in Patio 29. One of them was noted as “Bones.” “Incinerated as indigents” It has been impossible to confirm if some of the bodies that appear leaving the morgue but are not in the cemetery records ended up cremated without the authorization or knowledge of the families. ArchivosChile tried several times to interview the person in charge of the crematorium at the time, but he refused. However, both the SML and the General Cemetery documented the supposed cremation of people who never were. According to the SML record, more than 40 bodies—almost all dead from gunshot wounds—were sent to the General Cemetery crematorium; except in two cases, they were transferred directly by the service and not by their relatives. This is the case, for example, of 12 victims [6] listed as forcibly disappeared in the Rettig Report. All of them were killed between September and October 1973 and, according to the SML books, their remains were transferred by the service itself to the General Cemetery. Four of them, according to the SML, went directly to the crematorium: Carlos Guzmán Altamirano, Carlos Gutiérrez Benavides, José Pavez Espinoza, and Nelson Muñoz Torres. However, as was discovered years later, several of them were actually buried in Patio 29, just like the Bolivian Donato Quispe Choque. According to the SML, Quispe had been transferred directly to the crematorium, even though his remains were positively identified in 2010 as those of the person buried in grave 2707 of Patio 29 along with an NN. Carlos Guzmán and Nelson Muñoz appear in the General Cemetery records as buried in graves 2710 and 2708, respectively, of Patio 29, and not cremated. Furthermore, in 2009, the identity of Nelson Muñoz Torres was confirmed as part of Judge Alejandro Solís's investigation into Patio 29. José Pavez Espinoza remains disappeared. His name appeared until 1981 as buried in grave 2705 of Patio 29 along with another victim: Oscar Marambio Araya, whose identity was also confirmed by the Legal Medical Service in 2011. In a dozen other cases, the General Cemetery recorded the incineration of people who do not even correspond to the same ones the SML noted as sent to the crematorium. One of them is Luis Curivil Pranamil, who died on September 13 and was sent to the cemetery on October 3. The cemetery archives indicate that he was “incinerated as an indigent” 15 days later. Others include Desiderio Espinoza Ruiz, Rene Lizama Trafilaf, Luis Alberto Ross Hernández, and José Miguel Farías Padilla, who also appear leaving the morgue on October 3 to be buried, but who in the cemetery records appear as cremated on October 18. And there is the case of Gabriel Panes Muñoz, whose body, according to the SML record, was withdrawn by his “employer,” Jaime Pérez Benkis, and taken to the General Cemetery. He arrived at the cemetery that same day, according to the Location Book, but his burial permit clearly denies that his employer had taken him to be buried. The burial permit indicates: “Incinerated without the corresponding resolution of the V Health Zone of Santiago because it is a special case in the sense that the body was sent directly by the IML as an indigent.” Another victim registered in the General Cemetery books erroneously as “incinerated as an indigent” was the socialist lawyer Arnoldo Camú Veloso, an advisor to President Salvador Allende. Camú was killed during his arrest on September 24 and transferred from the Posta Central to the morgue . Dr. Tomás Tobar Pinochet performed one of the most complete autopsies of those times , and he was still in the morgue when the Civil Registry confirmed his identity on September 28 through his fingerprints. According to SML records, it was Camú's father who withdrew him from the morgue and took him to the General Cemetery on October 11. However, the story is different. Camú was transferred by staff from the morgue itself to the cemetery. More than two weeks had passed since his death and his family still did not know his whereabouts, his widow, Celsa Parrau, stated to ArchivosChile. Parrau had gone to the morgue several times to see the lists hanging outside with the names of the deceased, but Arnoldo Camú never appeared on them. At the end of September, she entered. “What I saw inside was appalling. Bodies piled up, some corpses in rows, others piled on top of others. It was shocking. Many bodies were cut by machine-gun fire, with broken heads. I went in, but I turned back; I couldn't keep looking,” Parrau recalls. One day, a friend who was helping her with the search called her to tell her that her husband was in the morgue, and that they were about to transfer him to the cemetery. Parrau's father and a brother of Camú left immediately for the cemetery, but it was too late. Only the next day could they exhume him from Patio 29, where he was never recorded. “My father exhumed him and told me that in the niche he was with two other corpses. There were three in total. They exhumed him and cremated him immediately. Two days later I went to look for the ashes,” Parrau recounts. [7] But at the cemetery, the Location Book indicates that Camú's body arrived a week later, on October 18, was cremated, and his ashes remained in the crematorium oven. The burial permit that accompanied the body indicates: “Deceased sent without next of kin directly from the Legal Medical Institute. Incinerated as an indigent. Ashes in crematorium oven.” LUIS ALBERTO TRECANAO MORA had a similar trajectory, having died on September 19 and been found in the Mapocho River. He appears being transferred to the cemetery on October 3 by the SML. However, his entry into the cemetery appears with a different date—October 18—and his burial permit is similar to Camú's: “Sent without next of kin directly by the IML. Incinerated as an indigent. Ashes in crematorium oven.” Patio 29 During 1973, 1,479 people were buried in Patio 29, which had 1,421 graves. After the military coup, according to the official burial records in Patio 29 obtained by ArchivosChile, 58 people were buried two to a single grave. The majority were concentrated in graves 2687 to 2727. [8] ( Patio 29 Grave Cadastre ) Patio 29 of the General Cemetery. (Photo: National Monuments Council) When, by judicial order, the unidentified bodies (NN) were exhumed from 107 graves in Patio 29 in September 1991, 124 corpses were found, as recorded in an official letter from the Operations Department of the General Cemetery . [9] However, both relatives of the victims and the cemetery staff themselves assert that in some cases up to three bodies were buried together. “In general, they came one person to a coffin, but we also saw three bodies arrive in one coffin when they were unloaded from the trucks that came from the morgue,” says a cemetery staff member from that time who did not want to be identified. “Obviously they couldn't be covered, because the bodies didn't fit. They came with large holes in their backs from the bullets. We saw a pregnant woman. I saw a child. Most came naked. They buried them just like that in Patio 29. We were left sick. Those images stayed on our retinas.” In numerous cases, people who had been fully identified in the morgue were buried in Patio 29, after their fingerprints had been checked against the samples archived in the Civil Registry. “When a new review of the identifications confirmed by the Civil Registry of the time was carried out in the early nineties, the conclusion was reached that many victims who had been transferred to the General Cemetery were identified. Many relatives found out at that moment. And that was recorded by the cemetery. Other families never found out,” the SML forensic anthropologist, Marisol Intriago, stated to ArchivosChile. On October 12, for example, nine identified people entered and were buried in Patio 29, among them, Donato Quispe, executed on September 22. The Civil Registry had confirmed his identity two days later , and according to the morgue record, he had been transferred by the SML itself to the cemetery on October 3. His entry was recorded there nine days later. On October 22, the burial of another 18 gunshot victims who entered with their identities confirmed by the Civil Registry was documented. All of them, except two, were buried in Patio 29. Among them was the former Army Black Beret and MIR militant, Oscar Delgado Marín, executed on October 5. According to SML records, he had spent almost two weeks in the morgue before Dr. José Luis Vásquez performed an autopsy on him. In it, the pathologist left a record of the cause of his death : “complicated thoracic gunshot wound” and the location: National Stadium. Oscar Delgado was sent directly to the cemetery by the IML on October 12 with his identity confirmed by the Civil Registry Service . At the cemetery, he appears arriving 10 days later. He was buried with his full name in grave 2654 of Patio 29. However, his family did not find out about his death until 20 years later, when a relative went to the Vicariate of Solidarity, as his cousin, Silvia Delgado, recounted to this author. They had lost track of him after the 1973 Fiestas Patrias and never found out about his detention and death at the National Stadium. Only then did Delgado's family discover that there was a death certificate and learn the cause and place of death and burial, but it was already impossible to recover his remains: they had been exhumed and incinerated in November 1981, just like dozens of identified victims whose whereabouts no one yet knew. [10]

[1] ArchivosChile was not permitted to copy or photograph the archival documentation of the General Cemetery of Santiago. It was not possible to systematically track the bodies that left the IML because they were recorded at the cemetery with burial permit numbers and not with the protocol numbers used in the morgue, and the data for each person who entered the cemetery is spread across three different series of books. [2] This staff member, who still works at the General Cemetery, requested that his name be withheld. [3] Except for the staff member cited above, no other General Cemetery staff member who can testify to the events that occurred in 1973 agreed to be interviewed by ArchivosChile. During much of 2011, ArchivosChile repeatedly tried to arrange an interview with the Director of the General Cemetery, Mr. Tulio Guevara, or for him to answer a questionnaire, but received no response. [4] The other seven were Carlos Héctor Rojas González, Pedro Raúl Poklepovic Braun, Francisco Luis Opazo Larraín, Irma María Cristina De los Mozos Corvalán, José Fernando Fuentes Segovia, Domingo Elías Santos Muñoz, and Marcos Aurelio Vega Penjean. [5] The Location Book, July 1 to December 31, 1973, of the General Cemetery of Santiago consulted for this investigation includes the following data: Date of burial, civil registry number, Civil Registry district, full name of the deceased, age, cause of death, classification, and place of burial. Only its consultation was permitted, not reproduction or copying. [6] Carlos Guzmán Altamirano, Hugo Arredondo Sánchez, Luis Gutiérrez Merino, Carlos Gutiérrez Benavides, José Pavez Espinoza, Nelson Muñoz Torres, Jorge Riquelme Guzmán, José Manuel González González, Salustio Herrera Riveros, José Santos Ramírez Ramírez, Luis Hernández Alvarez, and Miguel Ángel Núñez Valenzuela. [7] Arnoldo Camú's remains were transferred in 1996 to the Memorial of the General Cemetery. [8] The Historical Heritage Commission of the National Monuments Council prepared this cadastre based on official documentation from the General Cemetery as part of the investigation prior to the declaration of Patio 29 as a Historical Monument in 2006. [9] The remains were sent to the Legal Medical Service for identification. The identities of 96 of them were confirmed in 1995 and the remains delivered to their families; however, later, errors were found in the identification of at least 48 of them. Currently, work is underway on the re-identification of all the bodies, with the identity of 45 having been confirmed so far. [10] An order from the Third Military Prosecutor's Office of July 1981 expressly prohibited the incineration, exhumation, or transfer of the NN bodies buried in Patio 29, but that order was not fully complied with.

Source: archivochile.com undated

, which was produced by the Association of Relatives of Political Executions Victims (AFEP) with the support of the Ministry of Cultures, Arts, and Heritage, through the Culture, Memory, and Human Rights Unit, and the Human Rights Chair of the University of Chile.

The publication, based mainly on the Report of the National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation (1991) and the Report of the National Commission for Reparation and Reconciliation (1996), seeks to reconstruct in a comprehensive and careful way each of the lives and stories of the victims.

During the investigation, access was gained to the archive of the Association of Relatives of Political Executions Victims, where documents that families have preserved through the years are kept. Illustrations by Álvaro Gómez were also included.

The creation process was a complex challenge that involved combining delicacy, respect, and methodological rigor to state in this work a painful and inescapable truth.

Source: cultura.gob.cl 4/23/2023

TRECANAO MORA LUIS ALBERTO

Luis Alberto Trecanao Mora died that day at 7:30 AM, at the Vivaceta bridge of the Mapocho River, in Santiago, due to “cranial-encephalic constriction,” according to the Medical Death Certificate of the Legal Medical Institute.

He remained disappeared until 1992, when his relatives found out through the press that his name appeared on a list of 30 people who had been executed, interred, and cremated at the General Cemetery of Santiago between September 1973 and March 1974, a circumstance that was effectively verified by this Corporation.

Luis Trecanao worked at a factory located in the Mapocho sector, in Santiago. He left this place on September 17 at 12:00 PM, without returning to the boarding house where he lived. His relatives, residents of the city of Valdivia, received a letter from a fellow boarder of Luis Trecanao informing them of his disappearance, so they traveled to Santiago to search for him, without obtaining positive results.

The Superior Council, considering the era, the place, and the conditions in which he was interred, and the fact that his remains were irregularly cremated along with those of a group of people, for the majority of whom there is evidence that they were executed following detention by State agents, reached the conviction that Luis Alberto Trecanao Mora was extrajudicially executed by State agents.

Therefore, it declared him a victim of human rights violations.

Source: interactivos.museodelamemoria.cl undated