Retired Army General Santiago Sinclair was detained for 48 hours in the Caravan of Death case, along with other retired uniformed officers, for his participation in the homicide of 12 people in Valdivia.

Sinclair was Vice Commander-in-Chief of the Army, and the justice system hopes that geriatric or biological impunity will not be a reason for criminals who wore uniforms to remain without prison sentences.

Retired General Santiago Sinclair was detained and accused of participating in the murder of 12 people in Valdivia within the framework of the Caravan of Death between October 3 and 4, 1973. Along with him, three other former uniformed officers were also arrested for the same crime: Juan Carlos Michelsen, José Feliú Madinagoitía, and Mario Manterola Garrido, all of whom were colonels and majors; however, the detention of Hugo Guerra Jorquera, also a retired military officer, remained pending.

All five of the aforementioned former military officers are near or over eighty years old. The judges determined that biological or geriatric impunity has no legal basis if those involved committed crimes against humanity.

This is similar to the Nazis who participated in "cleansings" and the slaughter of dozens of people during the Second World War. Just last week, a 94-year-old Nazi was detained and imprisoned.

The slaughter of twelve peasants

Judge Patricia González Quiroz indicted and ordered the pretrial detention of the former Vice Commander-in-Chief of the Army, former member of the Military Junta, and former appointed senator, retired General Santiago Arturo Ariel de Jesús Sinclair Oyaneder, as the perpetrator of 12 counts of qualified homicide.

Sinclair remained imprisoned at the Military Police Battalion in the commune of Peñalolén while awaiting a decision from the Santiago Court of Appeals on whether he should continue in pretrial detention or be granted release. This Saturday, he was released on a 200,000 peso bail, but the trial will continue and he will have to testify again regarding the crimes.

At the time the events took place, Santiago Sinclair, who was a colonel and commander of the No. 2 Cazadores Cavalry Regiment of Valdivia and the second-highest military authority in the area, was part of a supposed War Council in which 12 peasants and militants of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR) were sentenced to death.

They were falsely accused of "assaulting" the Neltume Carabineros station, in the foothills east of Valdivia, on the night of September 12, 1973.

Previously, Sinclair was investigated by Judge Juan Guzmán in 1998, at which time the retired general stated: "I remember the War Council that was held regarding Liendo and another, a well-known subject with the surname Krauss, along with other people whom I do not identify (...) Once the arguments were finished, we voted.

The vote was placed in a box and the president of the Council conducted the count."

The fateful Caravan of Death squadron arrived in the city of Valdivia on October 3, 1973, and was received by the Commander-in-Chief of the IV Army Division based in Valdivia, General Hugo Bravo Muñoz, and Colonel Sinclair, who ordered their subordinates to search for and arrest these 12 people.

The judicial resolution ratifies the twelve executions ordered by Sinclair

"On October 3, 1973, a 'Puma' helicopter landed in Valdivia with a group of military personnel under the command of the then-Army General, Sergio Víctor Arellano Stark, delegated by the person who was Commander-in-Chief of the Army at the time, Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, for the purpose of carrying out coordination tasks regarding institutional criteria for internal government and judicial procedures, or to review and accelerate the proceedings; That, as a result of the arrival of the aforementioned military personnel, on October 4, 1973, it was ordered that Rudemir Saavedra Bahamondez, Víctor Eugenio Rudolph Reyes, Víctor Segundo Valeriano Saavedra Muñoz, Santiago Segundo García Morales, Luis Mario Valenzuela Ferrada, Sergio Jaime Bravo Aguilera, Luis Hernán Pezo Jara, Víctor Fernando Krauss Iturra, Pedro Purísimo Barría Ordoñez, Enrique Del Carmen Guzmán Soto, and José René Barrientos Warner be removed from the Valdivia Public Prison and taken to the Llancahue military property, specifically to the shooting range of the Valdivia Military Garrison, where they were executed by firing squad as a result of a sentence pronounced in a supposed War Council, the materiality of which does not exist," the ruling states.

For the case of Gregorio Liendo Vera, it was determined:

"As a result of the arrival of the aforementioned military personnel, it was ordered that Gregorio José Liendo Vera, an agronomy student, militant of the MIR (Movement of the Revolutionary Left), and leader of the Revolutionary Peasant Movement, be removed from the Valdivia Public Prison and taken to the Llancahue military property, specifically to the shooting range of the Valdivia Military Garrison, where he was executed by firing squad as a result of a sentence issued in a supposed War Council, the materiality of which does not exist."

Almost all of the victims were workers at the Panguipulli Forestry and Lumber Complex, who on the night of September 12, 1973, demonstrated in front of the Neltume station, asking the Carabineros not to join the military coup and to surrender their weapons.

It was reported there that the station was "assaulted" by the MIR members, resulting in injuries to the four Carabineros who remained inside, which proved to be false according to the investigation. Likewise, the inquiries confirmed the falsehood of the damage reported to the structure of the barracks, as reported by the Human Rights Program of the Ministry of the Interior.

The 12 peasants were executed inside the Llancahue military property. Liendo Vera was murdered on the night of October 3, 1973, and the other 11 were murdered at dusk the following day.

Judge Patricia González established that the crimes were planned by Sinclair, retired General Sergio Arellano Stark (declared unfit to stand trial due to senile dementia), and Hugo Bravo (already deceased).

The Minister of Justice, José Antonio Gómez, when asked about Sinclair's detention, stated, "Justice is slow but it arrives, and if there is an investigation of that nature in human rights matters and today that detention exists, it will be the courts that determine what the responsibility is."

To this, the Secretary of State added that "the progress being made in the courts is important so that the truth can be known. The specific case will be resolved by the corresponding institutions and the plaintiff lawyers," and that these are "events from many years ago where we all want there to be truth and justice."

In these types of situations, it is now common for the justice system, due to the advanced age of the accused, to allow them to receive some type of benefit where they can serve their sentences at home or in a special prison for former agents of the dictatorship, or they even appeal to the "half-prescription" (statute of limitations reduction), whatever allows them to reduce the length of their sentence.

In an interview with Cambio21, the president of the Association of Families of Political Executions (AFEP), Alicia Lira, when asked about this detention, stated that "for us, the detention of Santiago Sinclair, which has to do with the Caravan of Death and the 12 murdered in Valdivia, is a very important step forward. Furthermore, Sinclair is involved in other cases."

"It is a joy that one of the important figures who remained in impunity, who was a member of the Military Junta and held various positions in the repression of state terrorism in our country, has been detained," mentioned Lira.

Regarding what they expect from the justice system, the president of AFEP expressed, "The only thing we ask is that Sinclair does not receive a remitted sentence and actually goes to prison, but rather that the sentence corresponds to the gravity of the crimes, because there were 12 people whose lives he took.

We want a mechanism to be sought so that judges do not grant remitted sentences or apply the half-prescription."

Regarding what has changed in the justice system to manage to catch those who were in impunity for so long, the lawyer for the Human Rights Program of the Ministry of the Interior, Rodrigo Lledó, declared that "today we understand that we are in a different scenario, that there have been several Concertación governments, there was a center-right government, and we are discussing a new Constitution, and these human rights cases must advance because that is what international law, in which our country is inserted, provides."

In relation to where the former officers should serve their sentences and what happens with some of the guarantees they have when they are sentenced, Lledó said, "Evidently, we are not satisfied with that, because we do everything possible to ensure that justice is served, and when the moment comes to serve the sentence, it is done in conditions of privilege, and that is not appropriate because we are in a country that must respect equality before the law."

The lawyer for the case, Tomás Pascual, also referred to this, explaining that "today we have a response from the justice system saying that these Valdivia officers had, and there are well-founded presumptions that, through the use of a series of means, they allowed 12 people to be summarily executed on October 3 and 4, 1973."

Regarding the possibility of Santiago Sinclair serving a sentence, the lawyer said, "One of the elements inherent to crimes against humanity is that these people could not be prosecuted for a long period of time; therefore, to take advantage of that—of their age—so that they cannot be exposed to any penalty would be doubly unjust."

Finally, regarding the progress in the Caravan of Death case, Pascual mentioned, "In the short term, we will request the closure of the investigation in order to indict the accused and have them sentenced according to the merits of the process as a vindication of the 12 executed in Valdivia and their families after 41 years, because that is how we can begin to reach the truth."

Source: Cambio21, February 09, 2015