Address: Población El Tejar, Calle Muñoz Olave No. 571, Chillán Marital Status: Single Occupation: Mechanic Political Affiliation: Member of the Partido Nacional Date of Detention: November 5, 1973

Luis Guillermo Wall Cartes, single, a mechanic and member of the Partido Nacional, was detained on November 5, 1973, at approximately 11:30 PM at the home of his friends and neighbors, Oscar Enrique Fetis Sabelle and Sergio Iván Fetis Valenzuela, in the Población El Tejar in Chillán, whom he had gone to visit.

He was talking and playing cards in the dining room with Oscar Fetis when a pair of Carabineros arrived, apparently belonging to the Chillán Viejo Police Station, asking for Sergio Fetis. Sergio was already in bed; they made him get up and informed him that he was being taken into custody.

His cousin and brother-in-law, Oscar, asked the police officers for the respective arrest warrant and the reasons for the arrest, which they refused to provide. Given this situation, he asked for authorization to accompany his relative along with Luis Wall, which was granted.

The three left the house with the Carabineros and walked through the alleyway to the corner of Calle Central and 1 Poniente in the same neighborhood, where several vehicles used by the patrol were parked. All three were placed into a green van belonging to the SAG (Agricultural and Livestock Service). From that moment on, all three have remained in the status of forcibly disappeared.

The detention was carried out in the presence of María Edimia Fetis Valenzuela, wife of Oscar Fetis and sister of Sergio. She undertook various efforts to try to locate their whereabouts; among other things, she went to the Regiment where she was able to see the van used in the detention, but the participation of military personnel in the event was denied to her.

Luis Wall's family members also went to various detention centers in Chillán and other locations; they even traveled to Concepción without obtaining any information that would allow for the location of the affected party or the others detained on the same occasion.

It should be noted that on the same day, November 5, 1973, Tomás Enrique Ramírez Orellana, who lived in the same Población El Tejar, was also detained and remains a forcibly disappeared person to this day.

JUDICIAL AND/OR ADMINISTRATIVE ACTIONS

In case file 42.748, initiated on December 14, 1973, in the 2nd Criminal Court for the alleged disappearance of Oscar Fetis, Luis Wall is also mentioned as one of the others detained on the same occasion.

This case was temporarily dismissed on February 14, 1974, but was reopened by order of the Court of Appeals a few days later, as it was considered that the investigation was incomplete. The new proceedings ordered included Luis Wall; thus, the Chillán Police Station reported having no record of the detention of any of the three, and the 6th Suburban Police Station provided the same information.

In compliance with the order to investigate, officers from the Investigations Police conducted the corresponding inquiries at police stations and outposts, the Public Jail, hospitals, and the Legal Medical Institute without obtaining any information about the detainees.

The complainant, the spouse of Oscar Fetis, and the mother of Luis Wall appeared before the Court and ratified the facts as related. Two Carabineros officers allegedly involved in the detention also testified, but both denied their participation.

On April 26, 1974, the Judge declared the summary closed and temporarily dismissed the case, resolutions that were approved by the Court of Appeals on May 13, 1974.

On November 10, 1978, the mother of the affected party, María Elba Cartes Flores, filed a writ of amparo (habeas corpus), file 104.938, before the Chillán Court of Appeals, citing the words of the Minister of the Interior at the time, Sergio Fernández, who stated: "Whatever the concrete truth may be at the date of disappearance in each situation, it can be investigated by the Courts of Justice."

The Chillán Court of Appeals sent an official letter to the Military Prosecutor's Office of Ñuble to that effect, with the latter responding that the affected party was not prosecuted nor was there an arrest warrant against him.

Similar responses were provided by the 6th Police Station of Chillán and the city's prison; however, regarding Sergio Fetis, the Prison Warden reported that he had entered that facility on September 21, 1973, and was released on the 24th of the same month due to lack of evidence.

The Ministry of the Interior reported that none of the three had any warrant against them, nor was there any record that the Security Services had carried out operations against them.

On November 24, 1978, the Court denied the amparo and ordered the records to be sent to the Criminal Judge on duty for the investigation of the facts.

On November 28, the summary investigation for alleged disappearance, file 10.909, was initiated in the First Court of Chillán. The First and Second Courts were requested to report if there were any records of a case for the alleged disappearance of the affected party starting from November 5, 1973, which was answered negatively by both.

The complainant and the mother of Luis Wall appeared before the Court, as did the domestic worker who worked at the Fetis family home on the date the detention occurred; both related the facts in a manner similar to what was expressed in the writ of amparo without adding new information.

Once these proceedings were concluded, on January 11, 1978, Judge Guillermo Cocio Paredes issued a temporary dismissal of the case on the grounds that the commission of the crime was not fully justified, a resolution that was approved on February 8 by the Chillán Court of Appeals.

Source: (Corporation Report)

It was 30 minutes before midnight on November 6, 1973. In the Población El Tejar, in the commune of Chillán, Luis Wall Cartes (21), a young mechanic from a rural family linked to the Partido Nacional, had just finished playing a few rounds of cards at the home of his friends and neighbors Óscar Fetis Sabelle (35) and Sergio Fetis Valenzuela (27).

With a curfew that in those days began at 9:00 PM, and on nights when the dictatorship's intelligence services could burst into any home, a couple of knocks on the door left them in silence. It was a pair of Carabineros. "We have come to look for Sergio Fetis," they said without further words. Fetis was a member of the Radical Party and an employee of the Agricultural and Livestock Service (SAG).

Immediately, his cousin Óscar, who also worked at the SAG, asked for a judicial warrant or the reasons for the detention. The Carabineros only remained silent.

But when he asked if he and his friend Luis Wall could accompany Sergio to ensure everything was alright, the police said yes.

"My brother was not detained because they wanted to detain him. He accompanied his friends to try to help them, to tell his version, that he knew them," recalls Leopoldo Wall (69), one of the 18 siblings of the Wall Cartes family.

Leopoldo Wall Otárola, the father of the family, was an active member of the Partido Nacional in Chillán, a right-wing political group opposed to the UP that supported the Coup d'État.

Luis Wall Cartes accompanied a friend who was being detained. Despite his family being from the Partido Nacional, his body never reappeared.

After taking them out of the house, Luis Wall and his two friends were loaded into an SAG truck and taken to an unknown location. The next day, the truck was seen inside the Army regiment in Chillán.

"Around 11 in the morning, they called me because my mom was at the guard post. 'Memo has disappeared,' she told me. I immediately took charge of looking inside, of moving the contacts I had with the officers, who were my close friends," recalls Leopoldo, who at that time was an Army corporal in the same regiment.

Using those ties, he checked the guard logs, visited the police stations, and searched the banks of the nearest rivers. "I think we had hope for a week. As a soldier, and because of what was being lived through in those days, I realized that my brother was not going to appear, at least not alive," he relates with sorrow, the sixth of the Wall Cartes siblings.

His mother, on the other hand, never stopped looking out the window, hoping to see her son Luis return.

According to the conclusions reached in 1991 by the report of the National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation, also known as the Rettig Report, Luis Wall and his two friends were victims of forced disappearance committed by State agents.

To this day, they are part of the 1,092 forcibly disappeared persons during the dictatorship.

SEARCH AND RESIGNATION

In the town of Portezuelo, about 34 kilometers from Chillán, in the Ñuble Region, Luis Wall Cartes and his 17 siblings grew up in the midst of farm work. "My dad had his own land and there were vines; in one patch or another, lentils and peas were planted," relates Leopoldo Wall.

It was in that same place where his family had to live through the hardest years of the Unidad Popular government. "Since my dad was from the Partido Nacional, they would yell 'old momio!' [a derogatory term for right-wingers] at him.

Sometimes people would pass by with pitchforks, hoes, and shotguns outside the house, yelling. That scared us," asserts Leopoldo. "But what worried us most was that you had to belong to a party to be sold a chicken. And when we went to buy, they would tell us, 'No, the chickens are gone, go eat shit, you momios!'" he adds.

By 1973, his family had left the countryside and emigrated to Chillán. At 19, Leopoldo had entered to perform his military service, while his brother Luis—later disappeared—worked as a car mechanic. "My dad was a lifelong member of the Partido Nacional, but my brother did not participate in party activities.

I never saw him in a riot, nor throwing stones at the Carabineros, nor yelling things at people," he affirms. Leopoldo does not know why his brother appears in the reports as a party member, although there is no doubt that the whole family was right-wing.

When the detention and disappearance of his brother occurred in November 1973, the man relates that "I found it very unjust, because I imagined that if they didn't have that small respect for the people who belong to the institution... where they told us it was a war, that we had to be good and obedient soldiers, and that they would detain your brother without a justified cause, it was like I lost my military vocation."

Although his mother filed a complaint for alleged disappearance in December 1973 and a writ of amparo in November 1978, both cases were dismissed. Leopoldo Wall, for his part, began to inquire about what happened to his brother within the military institution.

When he realized that his questions were beginning to make people uncomfortable and annoyed, he requested a transfer to Visviri, in the north, later resigning from the Army in 1978, with his brother's disappearance weighing on him.

In 2009, a new investigation was opened in Chillán. Among all the proceedings carried out, Leopoldo had a confrontation with the two accused Carabineros officers, whom he knew from his years as an active member of the Army.

They were Patricio Marabolí Orellana, who in 1973 was a lieutenant and part of the Military Intelligence Service (SIM), an organization prior to the creation of the DINA that was in charge of detention, interrogations, and torture after the Coup.

There was also Juan Francisco Opazo Guerrero, who was a corporal in the days following September 11. Sitting face to face, Leopoldo poured out the memories of everything he saw while being part of the Army.

"I told them to their face, 'You, my Colonel Marabolí, I called you the mangy dog. I saw you torture in Guard Post 2 of the Chillán Regiment. You kicked a man who was missing part of his leg, and the old man used a wooden prosthetic; you kicked him and threw him into a hole. Yes or no?'" narrates Leopoldo, raising his voice.

"And you," I said to Opazo, "a boy of about 25, white, curly hair, they put him naked on a metal sheet and tied copper wires to his hands, and with a machine, with a battery, they gave him current, and he was smoking on the metal, tell me that isn't so! I saw you, I was there! I was the relief corporal for that sector," he relates about the confrontation.

The accused denied having detained Luis Wall and his friends. Although a judge with exclusive dedication and the Chillán Court of Appeals acquitted Patricio Marabolí, in September 2015, the Supreme Court sentenced him to serve five years and one day in prison as the author of the crime of qualified kidnapping. Opazo passed away a couple of months earlier, without being convicted for this case.

"What bothers me is that no one from human rights ever went to talk to my mother, and not a finger was moved to seek justice for my brother and to locate him. I am certain that this was because my family was recognized as being from the Partido Nacional," claims Luis Wall's brother.

Today, the roles have crossed for Leopoldo Wall: he has been interrogated on several occasions for allegedly having been part of human rights violations committed while he was in the Army. The man categorically denies the accusations.

But at the same time, he asserts: "If they had told me, 'You have to go to this address and detain those people,' I..." (he stands at attention as in a military salute position)... "in the institution, the word 'no' does not exist. Absolute obedience. Because in times of war, as Pinochet said, a 'no' meant death."

FATAL DELAY AT THE SODA FOUNTAIN

Long work days and the occasional time to relax at a soda fountain meant that Benjamín Videla Ovalle (28), an auditor accountant, would arrive home late. And it seems that would happen again on October 6, 1973, when just three days earlier, the start time of the curfew had been delayed from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM.

Near the deadline, from a place located at Vicuña Mackenna and Avenida Matta, in the commune of Santiago, Videla left to wait for a bus, when a Carabineros patrol took him into custody along with other people who were in the same situation.

In his wallet, Benjamín Videla carried what he thought was almost a lifesaver: his Partido Nacional membership card.

"I once told him, 'Hey, be careful, the curfew will catch you and they will take you.' 'No,' he told me, 'don't worry, nothing will happen to me,' he replied. I told him, 'The thing is, they won't know what party you are from when they take you,'" says Guadalupe Mundaca Tirapegui, who at that time was Videla's wife.

The woman remembers that her husband went to party meetings and was an opponent of Salvador Allende's government. "When the Coup happened, he said it was a pity that these events had occurred, but that now the country was going to be cleaned up," affirms Mundaca.

From what has been reconstructed today, it is known that Videla was first taken to the Orfeón de Carabineros facility and then to the Fourth Police Station, also located in Santiago.

Guadalupe Mundaca arrived there the next day in search of her husband. "A lieutenant received me and told me he was not detained. I remember there was a box full of identity cards and I didn't find his," the woman relates.

Already desperate, in the following days, she visited the Santiago morgue every other day. "It was horrible; one had to pass by to see the corpses like that, from the side, because it was full. The one I believe was my husband arrived on November 27; he came naked, with his head destroyed, but I was not capable of recognizing him," adds Videla's widow.

Days later, she returned with the hope of finding matches with her husband's characteristics. But he had already been buried, in what would later be known as the Patio 29 case of the General Cemetery.

"I wrote letters, I interviewed the General Director of Carabineros, César Mendoza (a member of the Military Junta), but they denied it. They told me they had never detained him, that he was not anywhere," narrates Mundaca.

But as the days passed, her search attempts turned into harassment and threats. "They threatened me a lot over the phone. They told me pure obscenities, that they were going to kill me, that the only thing I was looking for was death, but I never knew who it was.

The harassment lasted a long time. I was 24 years old, I was alone in Santiago with my son, so I went back to Angol, my town," she relates today over the phone.

Already in democracy, in September 1991, 107 graves from Patio 29 were exhumed, from which 125 sets of remains were extracted.

It took 19 more years for Minister Alejandro Solís to confirm to Guadalupe Mundaca in February 2010 that her husband's remains had been identified.

Although an investigation was initiated in 1991... [extract].

Source: nuevopoder.cl 3/9/2023